There was no rest for John Swinton that night. After the first rush of sorrow, he began to rebel against the injustice of his Master, who seemed to heap trouble upon him with both hands, and reward his untiring efforts in the cause of good by a crushing load of worry. His was a temperament generally summed up by the world in the simple phrase, good-natured. He was soft-hearted, and weaker of spirit than he knew. Those in trouble always found in him a sympathetic listener; and the distress and poverty among his people often pained him more acutely than it did the actual sufferers born in, and inured to, hardship and privation.
His energy was tremendous where a noble end was to be achieved; but he loved the good things of life, and hated its trivial worries, the keeping of accounts, the payment of cash on the spot, and the attendance of committee meetings, where men met together to talk of doing what he could accomplish single-handed while they were deliberating. He was worldly enough to know that a great deal could be done by money, and his hand was always in his 126 pocket to help those less fortunate than himself. The influence of a wife that had no sympathy with plain, common people who wore the wrong clothes, and said the wrong things, and desired to be guided in their ridiculous, trivial affairs, had more to do with his failure than he knew.
He was always drawn between two desires, the one to be a great and beloved divine, the other to be a country gentleman, living in refinement, and in surroundings sympathetic to his emotional artistic temperament. The early promise of his youth, unfulfilled in his middle age, had disappointed him. But there was always one consolation. His son would endure no privation and limitation such as hampered a man without private means, like himself. As the heir to Herresford’s great wealth, Dick’s future prospects had seemed to be assured. But the lad himself, careless of his own interests, like his father, ran wild at an awkward period when his grandfather, breaking in mind and body, developed those eccentricities which became the marked feature of his latter days. The animosity of the old man was aroused, and once an enemy was always an enemy with him. He cared nothing for his daughter. Indeed, he cherished a positive hatred of her at times; and never lost an opportunity of humiliating the rector and making him feel that he gained 127 nothing by marrying the daughter against her father’s wishes.
It was bad enough to have troubles coming upon him in battalions without this final blow—the charge of forgery against Dick.
The wife, unable to rest, arose and paced the house in the small hours. She dreaded to ask for further particulars of the charge brought by the bank against poor Dick, for fear she should be tempted to confess to her husband that she had robbed her own father. The horrible truth stood out now in its full light, naked and terrifying. With any other father, there might have been a chance of mercy. But there was none with this one. The malevolent old miser’s nature had ever been at war with her own. From her birth, he had taunted her with being like her mother—a shallow, worthless, social creature, incapable of straight dealing and plain economy. From her childhood, she had deceived him, even in the matter of pennies. She had lied to him when she left home to elope with John Swinton; and it was only by threatening him with lawyers and a public scandal that she had been able to make him disgorge a part of the income derived from her dead mother’s fortune, which had been absorbed by the miser through a legal technicality at his wife’s death.
He would not scruple to prosecute his own child 128 for theft. He would certainly make her smart for her folly. The bad end, which he always prophesied for anyone who did not conform to his arrogant decrees, loomed imminent and forbidding. He was little better than a monster, with no more paternal instinct than the wild-cat. He would only chuckle and rub his hands in glee at the thought of her humiliation in the eyes of her friends. He might accuse the rector of complicity in her fraud. He would spread ruin around, rather than lose his dollars.
In the morning, half-an-hour after the bank opened, Mr. Barnby appeared again at the rectory, impelled by a strict sense of duty once more to enter the house of sorrow, on what was surely the most unpleasant errand ever undertaken by a man at his employer’s bidding. The news of Dick’s death had already spread over the town; and those who knew of the affair at the club dinner and the taunt of cowardice did not fail to comment on the glorious end of the brave young officer who had died a hero. A splendid coward they called him, ironically.
Mr. Barnby asked to see her ladyship, and not the rector. The recollection of John Swinton’s haggard face had kept him awake half the night. The more he thought of the forgery, the more he was inclined to believe that Mrs. Swinton could explain the 129 mystery of the checks. He knew, by referring to several banking-accounts, that she had recently been paying away large sums of money to tradesmen, and the amounts paid by Dick Swinton were not particularly large.
Mrs. Swinton stood outside the drawing-room door with her hand on her heart for a full minute, before she dared enter to meet the visitor. Then, assuming her most self-possessed manner, with a slight touch of hauteur, she advanced to greet the newcomer.
He arose awkwardly, and she gave him a distant bow.