CHAPTER III.
THE CALLING IN LIFE CHOSEN.
As Eveline had said, what seemed an accident determined Mark’s choice of an occupation. A cousin of his mother’s came to spend a few days at the rectory. He had recently lost a very promising son, and was much softened and saddened by his trouble, and in his saddened mood his thoughts turned to his cousin James, whom he remembered a bright and cheery lad, very much his own junior. He knew that there were two lads at Rosenhurst, one the son of his cousin James, the other of his widowed cousin Margaret, and he thought with interest of him who bore his own name, and wondered whether he in any way resembled his lost Edward—whether he was a true Echlin, like his father, earnest, teachable, and faithful.
Miles Echlin was the head of a publishing house, holding a high position in London, and by the death of his son, not only he himself but the business had experienced an irreparable loss. He wanted comfort, he wanted help, and in this saddened mood he came down to Rosenhurst Rectory. Lady Elgitha, fully alive to the fact that many sons of noble houses were at the present time engaged in commerce, was at some trouble to be civil to him, and schooled her son to proper behaviour; but outward civility did not impose on the keen-sighted man of business, and before he had been twelve hours at the rectory he was convinced that Gilbert was indolent, opinionated, and selfish.
Margaret and her children came to dinner, and there was much pleasant chat among the elders about the days when they had been children, and when Miles had thought it a great treat to spend the holidays with his uncle at Westborough, but he had little opportunity then for making acquaintance with Mark and Eveline; but when next morning he walked over with the rector to the cottage, Miles felt at once the calm and restful sense of home, where all the members were in harmony, and where the grave, handsome face looking down from the wall seemed to his mind, saddened by recent sorrow, to promise him sympathy. He had known Michael Fenner very slightly, being at the time of Margaret’s marriage already much immersed in business, but a glance at the picture of her husband, and at Margaret’s own composed and gentle face, assured him that she would listen, not only with patience, but with true interest, to what he should tell her about his son, and so it came about that during his stay at Rosenhurst he spent most of his time at the cottage, and talked much with and of Mark.
At the end of four days he returned to town, and in less than a fortnight there came a letter from him inviting Mark to come and stay with him in town, and offering him a share in his business if he would devote himself to the study of it.
It was not without hesitation that Mark acceded to the proposal; either of the callings he had been meditating on would, he thought, have been more to his taste, but in either he would have been a comparatively poor man, unable to do much for his mother and sister, and he could not flatter himself that in either he was much wanted. Here there was a place left vacant which he might fill, a positive call from a weary heart which he might comfort.
His mother was slow to give her opinion in the matter; it was too easy, too pleasant for her to have her son occupied in work which would not take him very far away, which would not overtax his energies; she could hardly believe that it would be desirable for his highest interests; she feared lest James and Elgitha might be vexed that the offer had not been made first to Gilbert. Of course Miles was a sort of tradesman, and Elgitha could scarcely be supposed to admire trade; still she might have liked Gilbert to have been first consulted.
She took the letter up to the rectory, and laid it before her brother. The rector read it carefully, and returned it to her with a sigh and a smile.
“I suppose Mark will go,” he said.
“He has not made up his mind yet,” said Margaret.
“Does he dislike the idea of desk work?”
“I don’t think he ever thought of disliking it. If he were to be a teacher or a clergyman he would have a great deal of desk work, wouldn’t he?”
“Certainly, and promotion is so slow; unless he happened to possess the gift of oratory, he might be a curate at forty.”
“I fancy he thought rather of being a teacher.”
“Very hard work; breaking stones on the road is play to it,” said the gentle rector, who had no talent for teaching, though he had a very pretty talent for preaching. “It seems a pity that he should not close with Miles’ offer; Mark would be a treasure to him.”
“You think he would?”
“Can you doubt it? Don’t you know what he is to you and to me? On all grounds I think he should accept it, if he has no personal dislike to the arrangement. At all events he should go and try.”
So Mark went, and Gilbert, with many a shrug, pronounced him a lucky fellow, and promised to come and dine with him.
The rector took occasion, on Mark’s departure, to speak to his son as to his own path in life.
“Mark has made his start in life, Gilbert. Don’t you think it would be advisable for you to make up your mind as to what you will do?”
“Yes, sir, I suppose it would; but it is so hard to make up one’s mind when one has no special vocation. Mark’s a lucky fellow; his mind was made up for him.”
“I have very good reason to think that if you had had Mark’s aptitude, the offer would have been made to you.”
“It is a pity I hadn’t; but I don’t suppose it’s a man’s fault not caring for things. It must be a great bore to you, sir, to have a son like me, who doesn’t care for any of the things you care for. I don’t suppose two men were ever more unlike.”
“I don’t ask you to consider what I should like you to do; that, perhaps, would be unfair; but only to see that, taking your own view, what you are doing will not pay. If I were to die, there would not be more than enough for your mother and sister.”
“So you have told me before; so the mother has told me. It is unfortunate that I have no taste for anything. I don’t find that I care about doing the same thing for two days together.”
“Does it never occur to you that there is such a thing as duty?”
“A very useful dissyllable, no doubt, sir, and telling in a song; but it is very much gone out of fashion nowadays, with the Church Catechism, high pews, and church clerks. No one considers that he ought to be ‘content with that state of life,’ etc.”
“Gilbert,” said Mr. Echlin, more sternly than he had ever spoken to his son, “if you do not woo duty as a mistress, she will drive you as a taskmistress. The man who has no love of duty had better never have been born. He has no high aims, no ennobling thoughts. Do not, I beseech you, give me the misery of knowing that my only son is an idle man.”
“Do not distress yourself, father. I suppose I shall drop into something before long. There can be no hurry. If you had ten children it would be another matter. There’s Elgitha; she has energy enough, and cares about lots of things. If you would send her to Girton, sir, I feel sure she’d take a double first, and like it.”
“She might do very much worse, I believe,” said Mr. Echlin, turning away. He went into his study with a sore heart to write his Sunday sermon on the beauty of holiness, and Gilbert found half an hour’s amusement in teasing his sister’s canaries.
It was not long before Mark Fenner’s start in life brought changes to Rosenhurst. The more Miles Echlin knew him, the better he liked him. Mark possessed one of those strong natures that rests in itself, never impatient to thrust itself forward, and never much occupied with a consideration of its own wants or pleasures. Accepting in the fullest and heartiest sense all the duties that were comprehended in the partnership offered him by his mother’s cousin, and loving them because they were duties, he set himself with all his heart to master the technicalities of the business, and entered into the enthusiasms of the old publisher with all a young man’s energy.
“It was a lucky thing, sir, that visit to Rosenhurst,” said Evans, Mr. Echlin’s head clerk and factotum, when Mark had been some six months in London. “Mr. Fenner is a born publisher. He takes to the printer’s ink as a babe to its mother’s milk. As things have turned out, it really seems quite providential.”
“I am glad you think so, Evans; it is my own opinion exactly. I hope the lad is satisfied. How those dear ladies at the cottage must miss him!”
When Mr. Echlin left his office after this conversation, he took his leisurely way to Manchester-square. It had always been a principle with him to live within an easy walk of his business, having early imbibed a taste for that most healthy of all exercises, and having found that there was no better time for thinking over business. Indeed, for many years he had never embarked upon an undertaking until he had turned it over in his mind during two or three days’ walk to and fro.
As he strolled home that evening it was June, and the whole earth was singing with gladness. The City’s great heart was throbbing with welcome to the sweet summer, and stretching out eager hands for the fruits and flowers of the country. Roses and strawberries lay in tempting proximity in the shops, women’s clothes fluttered airily in the breeze, and young men skimmed cheerily along, taking note of the luncheon-bars where American drinks were for sale, while elderly men looked fresh and rosy in light trousers, light hats, and light waistcoats.
As Mr. Echlin walked on, nodding to an acquaintance here, exchanging a word or two there, his mind was pursuing some such train of thought as this:—How fine the weather was; it was a pleasure to breathe. This time last year Edward had been by his side; it was on the 18th of June; he remembered it because he had made a little excuse for the extravagance, saying that we ought not to forget the anniversary of Waterloo; and they had stopped to buy the first basket of strawberries. How little had either of them thought that the course of their quiet life would so soon be broken! It was a dismal thing to think that he had let him go to Rome at that time of the year. But then he seemed so strong; nothing ever ailed him. Dr. Dickenson said, indeed, that he had no reserve force—weak vital energy, like his dear mother. To wish him “good-bye” for a six weeks’ holiday, and never to see him alive again! Well, well, it was sad. Such a son, too, and with all his future so easy before him! Well, well, it wouldn’t be so very long that he would have to survive him; he was almost sixty; it could not be so very long. And now he had Mark Fenner. Strange that all the time Edward was with him he had never thought of going down to Rosenhurst to see James and poor Margaret. And then his thoughts carried him to the little cottage at the rectory gate, where the two women lived who must miss their good son and brother so much, and who must be so much missed by him.
Thus meditating, he reached his own door, which he opened, according to his custom, with a latchkey, and passed down the cool passage into the large, cool, but rather sombre dining-room.
The table was laid for two, the silver and glass shining on the white damask, while the old butler stood with his smile of welcome by the shining mahogany sideboard, whereon was displayed the usual row of bottles—port, sherry, and claret, with a dessert of early strawberries and biscuits. It was all very comfortable, but just a trifle dreary; so, at least, Miles thought it must be to the young man who was now knocking at the door, who was to use the second knife and fork and be his companion all the evening.
At the cottage at Rosenhurst what would the young man’s mother and sister be doing now? Perhaps sitting down to their modest meal, waited on by the little country damsel with round eyes and rosy cheeks; perhaps going through the more stately but rather dismal ceremonial of “dining at the rectory.”
All the evening, while they dined, read the papers, and, later on, in deference to the beauty of the night, strolled through the quiet streets towards the Regent’s Park, and saw the moon hanging like a silver disc in the sky—while Mark, following his lead, discoursed of the lovely woods of Sunbridge, of the hedges fragrant with wild roses and honeysuckle, of the sweet, pure air, of his mother and her garden, of his sister singing in the twilight to the old piano—there always lay the thought suggested to him by the words of Evans in the afternoon, “As things have turned out, it really seems quite providential.” Mark Fenner was already much more to him than he could ever have hoped from one who was not his own son; he was doing his work with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his strength, accepting it as the business of his life. But might not he for his part—he, Miles Echlin—do something on his side also to make the lad’s life brighter—to make the house in Manchester-square, now for nearly thirty years his home, a little more cheery and a little more homelike to the boy who had grown up in the little cottage at the rectory gate at Rosenhurst?
If there is much cause of lamentation at the overcrowded dwellings of the poor, something might also be said plaintive and touching about the desolation of the houses of the wealthy—of the rich carpets so seldom trodden, the couches on which no limbs ever find repose, the mirrors reflecting nothing but each other, of the soft beds which are never pressed, and all the elaborate machinery of modern life gathered into chamber after chamber, and never used. Extremes meet, and the rich man in the desolation of his empty chambers may be as much in need of pity as the poor man crowded out of his one apartment by the superabundance of his domestic ties.
The house which Miles Echlin called home consisted of suites of reception-rooms furnished in the costliest taste of thirty years ago, when Mrs. Echlin was alive, and Edward, a bright boy of three, was making sunshine in the house, while there was a possibility of sons and daughters yet to come; but the cheery little wife, for whose sake and by whose direction the furnishing had been done, took a cold—a mere nothing, it seemed—and passed almost suddenly out of the life so full of hope and happiness for her, just as a bright flame which makes the whole room glad is blown out by a puff of wind coming one knows not whence. Then Miles, saddened and sobered, went about his work, caring little for the large house, only seeing that it was properly cleaned and aired, walking methodically through the great rooms, and coming at last to live in two of them, his dining-room and a small sleeping room, which had been his dressing-room while his wife was alive. A few friends came to see him at intervals, and there were some to whom the silent house was a home whenever they came to town; but Miles had no heart for company. When Edward should be grown up would be time enough; the boy should marry, and then the house would once again echo with laughter and song; he should make his own choice—it would be sure to be a worthy one, and they would find a corner for the old man, and not think him in the way. Edward grew up, and was all that his father wished him to be; then came the second bitter disappointment, and the big house was more empty and silent than ever.
On that June evening, as he strolled with Mark through the quiet streets, and glanced up at the lighted windows in the houses of his neighbours, at the groups of people, old and young, on the high balconies, and caught the waves of laughter or song, the silence, the darkness of the house into which they introduced themselves by a latchkey, seemed almost unendurable. The gas was turned low in the dining-room; the portrait of Mrs. Echlin looked thin and spectral; the plate and glass on the sideboard suggested anything but good cheer, looking rather like mummies from which the life has long since departed. Mark turned up the gas, and they saw that it wanted five minutes to ten. What a long evening it had been. Mark was tired, and thought, if Mr. Echlin didn’t mind, he would go to bed; he said something in apology about country habits; he did not say that he was up every morning before six practising certain technicalities which were necessary for the carrying on the business; nor did he complain of the heat and closeness of the office, though both were trying to a country lad.
Mr. Echlin wished him “good-night” kindly, but rather like one in a dream, and when the butler came in at eleven, according to custom, with his master’s candle, and to carry up the plate, he still sat in the same chair, but he was leaning back with a satisfied look; the inkstand and blotting-pad were on the table, and a sealed letter lay before him.
“Are you ready for your candle, sir?” said Martin, taking all in at a glance.
“Yes, quite,” replied the master, rising briskly from his chair. “Good-night, Martin; fine weather for the country.”
“Splendid for the crops, sir,” said Martin, a cockney to the backbone, who was imbued with the idea that the more the sun blazed the better the corn grew; but as he turned out the gas the old man wondered to whom his master had been writing, a wonder which was not relieved in the morning, as was generally the case on the rare occasions when Mr. Echlin wrote a letter at home, by his being requested to post it, for his master brought the letter down with him, laid it on the mantelpiece with the direction downwards, and carried it out in his own hand when he went to business, all which unusual proceedings served to fix Martin’s attention on the letter, and to impress him with the idea that it must be a document of much importance.
(To be concluded.)