CHAPTER XIII.
THE SETTLEMENT.
Laura had been married three weeks and a day, and the new year was just three weeks old. It was a very ailing and ungenial year in this infantine stage of its existence. There had been hardly a day of pleasant weather since its birth, nothing but rain and sleet, and damp raw cold, and morning mists and evening fogs. It was not a good, honest, old-fashioned winter, such as we read of in story books, and enjoy about once in a decade. It was simply obnoxious, ill-conditioned weather, characteristic of no particular season.
It was just a day after the anniversary of Jasper Treverton’s death, and Tom Sampson was meditating in a lazy, comfortable way, on his former client, as he sat by the office fire sipping his tea, which he had desired to be brought to him in his den, as he was so terribly busy. He had not dipped a pen in the ink yet, and it was half-past nine o’clock; but it was not for Eliza Sampson to know this. She was always taught to believe that when her brother spent his evenings in the office he was working severely—‘double tides,’ he called it. If she came in to look at him she found him scratching away violently with a quill that tore shrieking along the paper, like an express train rushing through a village station; and it was not for her to know that Thomas snatched up his pen and put on this appearance of industry when he heard her gentle footfall at his door. Domestic life is made up of such small secrets.
To-night Tom Sampson was in a particularly lazy humour. He was getting a rich man, not by large earnings, but by small expenditure, and life, which is an insoluble problem for many, was as easy for him as one of those nine elementary axioms in Euclid that seem too foolishly obvious to engage the reasoning power of the smallest schoolboy, such as—‘if equals be taken from equals, the remainders are equal,’ and so on. Tom was thinking that he ought to be thinking about marrying. He was not in love, and never had been since he exchanged his schoolboy jacket for a tail-coat; but he told himself that the time had come when he might prudently allow himself to fall in love. He would love not too well, but wisely.
‘Lizzie is a good girl, and she knows my ways,’ he said to himself, ‘but she’s getting old maidish, and that’s a fault which will grow upon her. Yes, decidedly, it is time I thought of a wife. A man’s choice is confoundedly limited in such a hole as this. I don’t want to marry a farmer’s daughter, though I might get a fine healthy young woman, and a tidy little bit of money, if I could please myself among the agricultural class; but Tom Sampson has his failings, and pride is one of ’em. I should like my wife to be a cut above me. There’s Celia Clare, now. She’s more the kind of thing I should fancy; plump and pretty, with nice, lively ways. I’ve had a little too much of the sentimental from poor Lizzie. Yes, I might do worse than marry Celia. And I think she likes me.’
Mr. Sampson’s meditations were interrupted at this point by the sound of a footstep on the sloshy gravel walk outside his office door. There was a half-glass door opening into the garden, as well as the door opening from the passage, which was the formal approach for Mr. Sampson’s clients. Only his intimates entered by the garden door, and he was unable to imagine who his late visitor could be.
‘Ten o’clock,’ he said to himself. ‘It must be something particular. Old Pulsby has got another attack of gout in the stomach, perhaps, and wants to alter his will. He always alters his will when he gets a sharp attack. The pain makes him so savage that it’s a relief to him to disinherit somebody.’
Mr. Sampson speculated thus as he undrew the bolt and opened the glass door. The man who stood before him was no messenger from old Pulsby, but John Treverton, clad in a white mackintosh, from which the water ran in little rills.
‘Is it yourself or your ghost?’ asked Sampson, falling back to let his client enter.