So he telegraphed to Angleford—
"I am going to contest a borough. Must make provision. Shall be with you by next train."
CHAPTER IV.
FATHER AND SON.
Sydney's telegram reached Angleford at an awkward time. Things had been going from bad to worse with Mr. Campion, who had never had as much money as he needed since he paid the last accounts of the Cambridge tradesmen. In the vain hope that matters would mend by and by—though he did not form any precise idea as to how the improvement would take place—he had been meeting each engagement as it came to maturity by entering on another still more onerous. After stripping himself of all his household treasures that could be converted into money, he had pledged his insurance policy, his professional and private income, and at last even his furniture; and he was now in very deep waters.
A great change had come over him. At sixty, when Sydney took his degree, he was still handsome and upright, buoyant with hope and energy. At sixty-six he was broken, weak, and disheartened. To his wife and daughter, indeed, he was always the same cheerful, gentle, sanguine man, full of courtesy and consideration. In the village he was more beloved than ever, because there was scarcely a man or woman who was not familiar with the nature and extent of his troubles. In a country parish the affairs of the parson, especially when they do not prosper, are apt to become the affairs of the congregation as well. Who should know better than a man's butcher and baker when the supply of ready money runs short, when one month would be more convenient than another for the settlement of a bill, or when the half-year's stipend has been forestalled and appropriated long before it fell due?
However great his trouble, the rector had generally contrived to put a good face on things. He considered his difficulties as entirely the result of his own improvidence, and rejoiced to think that Sydney's position was assured, no matter what might happen to himself. Yet often in the silence of the night he would toss upon his restless bed, or vex his soul with complicated accounts in the privacy of his study, and none but the two faithful women who lived with him suspected what he suffered in his weakest moments.
He had come to lean more and more constantly on the companionship of Lettice. Mrs. Campion had never been the kind of woman to whom a man looks for strength or consolation, and when she condoled with her husband he usually felt himself twice as miserable as before. Some wives have a way of making their condolences sound like reproaches; and they may be none the less loving wives for that. Mrs. Campion sincerely loved her husband, but she never thoroughly understood him.
When the boy arrived with Sydney's telegram, Lettice intercepted him at the door. She was accustomed to keep watch over everything that entered the house, and saved her father a great deal of trouble by reading his letters, and, if need be, by answering them. What he would have done without her, he was wont to aver, nobody could tell.