"FRED," said Mr. Rayburn to his only son, a well-grown handsome lad of seventeen or thereabouts, "don't you think we should be much more comfortable if we had a—if this house had a mistress?"
The speaker was a man of about sixty, but looked so fresh and hearty that one might easily have concluded him to be much younger. The room in which he and his son were sitting was a long, low one, well lighted by three bay windows all on the same side; and though not a pretty room, it used at one time to look homelike and comfortable. The room was the same, and the furniture was the same, but the comfort and the homelike look had vanished.
Ten years before the day on which Mr. Rayburn made this remark to his son, comfort had departed on the death of Mrs. Rayburn, his wife and Fred's mother.
Mr. Rayburn was the manager of Messrs. Hopper and Mason's great brewery in a town called Hemsborough, in the northern part of Staffordshire. He had filled this very responsible post for many years, inhabiting the comfortable apartments over the great gateway of the brewery. He was a very matter-of-fact man, without much sentiment about him, and on getting his good appointment he had married, choosing his wife carefully, with a view to being made comfortable and leading a peaceable life. And his quiet, docile wife had never, in all her uneventful life, had an idea beyond her simple round of womanly duties, which she did to perfection, until her only child was about six years old, when she suddenly took a severe illness and died in a few days. They had been married for many years before Fred was born, and Mr. Rayburn had no idea how to manage the child; so he sent him to school, and got on alone as best he could. Presently the servant trained by his wife married, and another came in her place, not trained by his wife, or, indeed, by any one else.
Still, the poor man existed somehow, nor did any idea of a change suggest itself to him until Fred left school, and got a clerkship in the counting-house, living of course with his father. Judith Ames, the servant, greatly resented the additional trouble thus given her: particularly was she annoyed because Fred, instead of falling into the regular round of habits which his father had adopted, and which made him "such a quiet, dependable master, for what he did one day, he did every day, and so a body knew where to have him." Instead of copying his worthy father in this, Fred ran up and down the stone stairs by which the "Gatehouse" was reached, about a dozen times every evening, and always unexpectedly. Also, he played football and cricket, according to the season; he took long walks, coming home muddy and hungry, giving endless trouble, and demanding food at inconvenient times.
Moreover, he did what his father never did. He popped into the kitchen, surprising Judith and some friends at tea, using the best china and partaking of a much daintier meal than ever found its way into the master's parlour. Fred told his father that Judith was cheating him; he complained of her dirty, untidy ways and her bad cooking, and poor Mr. Rayburn, who had long ceased to be comfortable, now found the other desire of his heart out of the question, for to live at peace was impossible to one member of a family of three when the other two were always quarrelling.
To be the son of two such prosaic people as Mr. Rayburn and his wife, Fred was rather a surprise. He was fond of poetry—even wrote something which he called by that name; he was fond of music, and played the flute a little. But quite enough too. He wished to have everything nice about him, but did not wish to take any trouble about it. He did his work as a clerk fairly well, but he did not like it, nor throw himself into it; he would have preferred to be a great painter, or a great singer, or author, or a traveller—anything, in fact, "with a little mind in it," he said to himself; and many of his poems were addressed to his mind, with which he condoled in pathetic terms. Meantime, on the whole, he enjoyed life very well; but he certainly wished Judith far away pretty frequently.
On this very day on which Mr. Rayburn asked the question about a mistress for the house, Fred and Judith had had a "row-royal" about his boots—his best, beautiful new boots, which he had not used for some days, and which he had found in the kitchen, uncleaned, and with the frying-pan standing on their toes! And the dinner had been half done, and, in fact, nothing was as it ought to be.
Now, to return to the conversation begun after dinner by Mr. Rayburn.
Fred started, and turned round to look at his father. He had been engaged in writing the word "dust" in bold, legible letters on the looking-glass over the mantelshelf, but he left the "t" uncrossed, shook the dust off his finger, and stared at his father, getting very red.