His heart had sickened at the prospect of the crockery business: the consignments of pots and pans; the returned empties, invoices, quarterly accounts, matchings, rivetings, dust, straw, dirt, and degradation. He could not see the nobility of labour in that dusty shop, below the level of the pavement, amid ewers and basins, teacups and beer jugs, sherries and ports. But to work in the University—hard by that great college where Bacon had worked, and Newton, and a host of the mighty dead, and where Whewell, a self-made man, was still head—to work among the sons of gentlemen, and with a view to the profession of a gentleman,—that would be labour for which to live; for which to die, if need be.
“If—if mother and me were to strain a p’int,” mused the crockery man, who was better able to afford the University for his son than many a gentleman of Dorset whose boys had to be sent there, willy nilly, “if mother and me that have worked so hard for our money was willing to spend a goodish bit of it upon sending him to college, what are we to do with him after we’ve made a fine gentleman of him? That’s where it is, you see, Mat.”
“You are not going to make a fine gentleman of him. God forbid. If he does well at Cambridge, you can make a lawyer of him. Trinity Hall is the nursery of lawyers. You can article him to me; and look you here, Jim, if I don’t have to help you pay for his education, I’ll give him his articles. There, now, what do you say to that?”
The offer was pronounced a generous one, and worthy of a blood relation; but James Dalbrook never took advantage of his kinsman’s kindness. His University career was as successful as his progress at the quaint stone grammar school, and his college friends, who were neither dukes nor marquises, but fairly sensible young men, all advised him to apply himself to the higher branch of the law. So James Dalbrook, of Trinity Hall, ate his dinners at the Temple during his last year of undergraduate life, came out seventh wrangler, was called to the Bar, and in due course wore crimson, velvet, and ermine, and became Lord Cheriton, a man whose greatness in somewise overshadowed the small provincial dignity of the house of Matthew Dalbrook, erstwhile head of the family.
The Dalbrooks, of Dorchester, had gone upon their way quietly, thriving, respected, but in no wise distinguished. Matthew, junior, had succeeded his father, Matthew, senior, and the firm in Cornhill had been Dalbrook & Son for more than thirty years; and now Theodore, the eldest of a family of five, was Son, and his grandfather, the founder of the firm, was sleeping the sleep of the just in the cemetery outside Dorchester.
Lord Cheriton was too wise a man to forget old obligations or to avoid his kindred. There was nothing to be ashamed of in his connection with a thoroughly reputable firm like Dalbrook & Son. They might be provincial, but their name was a synonym for honour and honesty. They had taken as firm root in the land as the county families whose title-deeds and leases, wills and codicils they kept. They were well-bred, well-educated, God-fearing people, with no struggling ambitions, no morbid craving to get upon a higher social level than the status to which their professional position and their means entitled them. They rode and drove good horses, kept good servants, lived in a good house, visited among the county people with moderation, but they made no pretensions to being “smart.” They offered no sacrifices of fortune or self-respect to the modern Moloch—Fashion.
There was a younger son called Harrington, destined for the Church, and with advanced views upon church architecture and music; and there were two unmarried daughters, Janet and Sophia, also with advanced views upon the woman’s rights question, and with a sovereign contempt for the standard young lady.
Theodore’s lines were marked out for him with inevitable precision. He had been taken into partnership the day he was out of his articles, and at seven-and-twenty he was his father’s right hand, and represented all that was modern and popular in the firm. He was steady as a rock, had an intellect of singular acuteness, a ready wit, and very pleasing manners. He had, above all things, the inestimable gift of an equable and happy temper. He had been everybody’s favourite from the nursery upwards, popular at school, popular at the University, popular in the local club, popular in the hunting field; and it was the prevailing opinion of Dorchester that he ought to marry an heiress and make a great position for the house of Dalbrook. Some people had gone so far as to say that he ought to marry Lord Cheriton’s daughter.
He had been made free of the great house at Cheriton from the time he was old enough to visit anywhere. His family had been bidden to all notable festivities; had been duly called upon, at not too long intervals, by Lady Cheriton. He had ridden by Juanita’s side in many a run with the South Dorset foxhounds, and had waited about with her outside many a covert. They had pic-nicked and made gipsy tea at Corfe Castle; they had rambled in the woods near Studland; they had sailed to Branksea, and, further away, to Lulworth Cove, and the romantic caves of Stare: but this had been all in frank cousinly friendship. Theodore had seen only too soon that there was no room for him in his kinswoman’s heart. He began by admiring her as the loveliest girl he had ever seen; he had ended by adoring her, and he adored her still—but with a loyal regard which accepted her position as another man’s wife; and he would have died sooner than dishonour her by one unholy thought.
It was nearly ten o’clock when he rode slowly along the avenue that led into Dorchester. The moon was shining between the overarching boughs of the sycamores. The road with that high overarching roof had a solemn look in the moonlit stillness. The Roman amphitheatre yonder, with its grassy banks rising tier above tier, shone white in the moonbeams; the old town seemed half asleep. The house in Cornhill had a very Philistine look as compared with that fine old mansion of Cheriton which was present in his mind in very vivid colours to-night, those two wandering about the old Italian garden, hand-in-hand, wedded lovers, with the lamp-lit rooms open to the soft summer night, and the long terrace and stone balustrade and moss-grown statues of nymph and goddess silvered by the moonbeams. The Cornhill house was a good old house notwithstanding, a panelled house of the Georgian era, with a wide entrance-hall, and a well-staircase with carved oak balusters and a baluster rail a foot broad. The furniture had been very little changed since the days of Theodore’s great-grandfather, for the late Mrs. Dalbrook had cherished no yearnings for modern art in the furniture line. Her gentle spirit had looked up to her husband as a leader of men, and had reverenced chairs and tables, bureaus and wardrobes that had belonged to his grandfather, as if they were made sacred by that association. And thus the good old house in the good old town had a savour of bygone generations, an old family air which the parvenu would buy for much gold if he could. True that the dining-room chairs were over-ponderous, and the dining-room pictures belonged to the obscure school of religious art in which you can only catch your saint or your martyr at one particular angle; yet the chairs were of a fine antique form, and bore the crest of the Dalbrooks on their shabby leather backs, and the pictures had a respectable brownness which might mean Holbein or Rembrandt.