The truth, perhaps, is that the daughter's temper had not improved with her years, which my readers may reckon up with some approach to accuracy; and with the decrease of the hope which is said to have a place in every gentle bosom. Since the disappointment of that hope, of which I have told, no other admiring swain had ventured the offer of an arm in a country walk, or had breathed a sigh at the shrine of Elizabeth's beauty. Ah, well-a-day! And so the world goes round and round, and "that which hath been, is now; and that which is to be, hath already been."
There was one subject which, as I have already told, always produced discord at Low Beech Farm, when touched upon. And there was another so closely bordering upon it, that it had been almost dropped in conversation. This was the question, "What had become of Walter?" Eventually, it came to be generally concluded that Walter was dead, or something would have been heard of him. To this conclusion the old folks at Low Beech had settled down; and though the supposititious death of the first-born was felt by them as a kind of trouble, it was nevertheless borne with degree of composure which perhaps did not very much surprise those who were most intimately acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Wilson—or would not have done had they remembered that where the love of money is the supreme affection, all other natural feelings are inevitably deadened.
Of course it was very wrong in Walter not to write home in all the years of his growing prosperity in Australia. But he is not the first man, nor will he be the last, who, having, under either real or fancied grievances, hastily cut the tie which bound him to the family circle, has felt it a matter of selfish pride, or some other bad feeling, to widen the breach thus made by haughty and obstinate silence.
This, Walter had done; and now, in his sorrowful bereavement and personal affliction, he felt a strange reluctance to renew his intercourse with them.
"I daresay they think me to be dead, as I soon shall be," said he to Tincroft on the day after the conversation we have recorded in the last chapter; "and I don't know why I should disturb their thoughts."
But John wouldn't suffer the subject to drop. "You promised me you would write to them," said he, persuasively. "And I would, if I were you."
And though nothing came of it that day, nor the next, nor for many nexts, the perpetual dropping of Tincroft's soft words and hard arguments at length wore into the hard stone of his friend's unwillingness.
"I tell you what I have been thinking, Mr. Tincroft," said he, one day, as they were together. "I feel stronger now than I did, and instead of writing, I'll go and see father and the rest while I'm able; that will be better than writing."
"Perhaps it will," said John. "I am inclined to think that it only needs for you all to be brought together again to wipe out anything of the past unpleasant to think about. And writing might stir up these remembrances."
"But you must go with me, Mr. Tincroft."