John Tincroft, bachelor and benedict

by George E. Sargent

Of course, when they reached the farmhouse, John was hesitatingly invited to step in and rest himself, which he did not do, however, for which Sarah was thankful, perhaps, when she found her father in one of his fits of drunken ill-humour, and ready to quarrel with anybody who came in his way. After this invitation, however, it seemed the more incumbent on the awkward youth, who had the instincts of a gentleman for all that, to step over the next morning to ask after the health and welfare of his "partner."

As the fates would have it—the expression is no doubt heathenish, as there are no such things or principles as the fates—as accident, then—and this is almost as bad, but let it pass—accidentally, then, Mark Wilson was within, and (a rare thing for him) happened to be in a good humour. He made "the gentleman from college" welcome, took him over his small farm, insisted on his staying to lunch, treated him to some home-brewed, which John thought execrable, but did not say so; and, finally, invited him to come again as often as it pleased him.

After that it did please John Tincroft to repeat his visits every day. Sometimes, he found Mark in the sulks, and sometimes he did not. Occasionally, he noticed a peculiar thickness and hesitancy in the farmer's speech (which he attributed to a severe cold in his head and throat, and John believed it); and then, on the next occasion, he seemed to have recovered from the distressing complaint.

Sometimes John—the infatuated youth—found Sarah deep in domestic duties, which never, however, prevented his obtaining a glimpse of her pretty face, and her pretty hands, which, if they were floury and pasty, he admired all the more for having been usefully employed.

Sometimes, he found the maiden free, and at liberty to receive him in the little shabbily-furnished parlour, where, seated on a high-backed slippery-seated mahogany, horse-haired chair, he could equally admire those pretty fingers, armed with a darning-needle and worsted thread, working in and out, in the intricacies of a stocking-web. At these times our hero, who was as little guilty of being a hero as the silently admired one was of the slightest approach to a heroine, enacted to perfection the part of the Laird of Dumbiedykes (if my readers have ever heard of such a personage). Who can doubt, though, that the maelstrom current was getting powerful now?

"And oh, Walter," wrote Sarah Wilson to her distant cousin and lover (I must correct the bad spelling and false English)—"oh, Walter, there is such a funny man comes hanging about here. His name is Tincroft, and he came to these parts with young Mr. Grigson from Oxford College, and he is up at the Manor House for all the long holidays. That isn't what they call it, though. I forget what the word is, but that's what it means. And father has taken a fancy to Mr. Tincroft, and brings him here every day, and sometimes twice a day, and more than that. And he takes him over the farm, and brings him in to lunch very often, and tea sometimes, and you cannot think what a stupid he is, though he is a college gentleman; and they say he is going over to India soon to hunt tigers. He hunts tigers, too! I should say he has never hunted a fox yet, nor yet a rat."
"You should only see him—Mr. Tincroft, I mean—when he comes in, and stops an hour, and sometimes more, and father isn't in the way, and poor mother is lying down, as you know she always does in the afternoon, and there's nobody but me to keep him company. You would laugh to see how he sits and stares, and looks as if he couldn't say Boo to a goose, and is ready to go into fits with our hard-bottomed chairs—I always put the hardest, knobbiest for him, dear; but he seems as if he was stuck to it with glue. You can't think what a donkey he is. But he is to be a rich man some day—so father says he says—if he can get an estate as rightfully belongs to him, only it is locked up in some London law-courts now."
"But what does this all matter to you and me, Walter, dear? Only I sometimes wish we had such a chance of an estate; wouldn't, we," etc. etc. etc.
And then the letter went on in this wise: "We don't get on any better at home, Walter. You know what father is; and poor mother gets weaker and weaker, I think. And as to the farm, it is all going to rack and ruin. Mr. Grigson came in the other day, and had high words with father about it. He said he wouldn't stand having his land kept down in such a ruination state, and that if father wouldn't farm it better, somebody else must be got to do it. And what's worse than this, he said—the squire, I mean—that he must and will have his rent paid up punctual, or he shall distrain. Now I know there has been no rent paid the last year and a half. And what is worse still, I know that father can't pay it. And the squire says that if it isn't paid up by Christmas, there shall be an end of it. Oh, Walter, what are we to do?"
Then the letter further went on: "I have not seen much of uncle Matthew and aunt and cousin lately, and don't want to. I know they are doing all they can to set you against me. And it is too bad of them, Elizabeth and all; but they shan't do it, they shan't—"

I shall spare my readers what follows. There are hundreds of such letters written every day, and will be so long as pen, ink, and paper are to be had for love or money.

Is it travelling out of the regular course of ordinary story-telling to say that Walter Wilson was not altogether pleased with the letter I have just transcribed when he received it? Lovers are naturally suspicious; and Walter did not half like the idea of a young college man from Oxford being always dangling about, and having the range of his own special preserve, as he might have said. Perhaps he was none the less displeased with the contents of the letter for its referring, in a postscript, to a certain Mary Burgess already mentioned; and in a tone of jealousy, too, which the writer had not cared to suppress.

"Sarah knows very well that Mary Burgess is nothing to me," said he bitterly to himself. "But while she keeps house for Ralph, how can I help being sometimes in her company? It is different with her and that puppy Tincroft," he added; "and I am half a mind to write and tell her so."

It would, upon the whole, have been better for Sarah to have left out that postscript, and to have filled up her sheet of letter-paper by telling how she first became acquainted with the shy and awkward collegian. At least, as it afterwards turned out, she laid herself open to additional suspicion by this reticence. We pass this matter by for the present, however.