Children of destiny

by Molly Elliot Seawell

Skelton had all along spoken in a quiet, conventional tone, but at this he uttered a slight exclamation, and ground his teeth with silent fury. The boy’s obstinacy was intolerable to a man accustomed to make his will the law. Of course, he could do as he pleased about it; he could prove the whole thing to-morrow morning, if he liked, but he did not want to be opposed by the person he wished to benefit; and besides, he loved the boy well, and contradiction from him was therefore doubly hard.

Lewis got up to go out. As he passed, rather a grim smile came into Skelton’s face. He saw his own look of firm determination upon the boy’s thin-lipped, eloquent mouth, and in his dark eyes. Lewis was growing more like him every day. Poor little fool! Talk about proving himself to be the son of that lanky, loose-jointed Thomas Pryor! It was ridiculous.

CHAPTER XIX.

Skelton had cold fits and hot fits as regarded Sylvia. At first he considered his cold fit as his abnormal condition, and the hot fit as an agreeable form of insanity. But he soon changed his opinion. He was beginning, late in life, to live through what other men are generally done with by that time. In Sylvia’s society he felt always an exquisite sense of well-being that he could not remember ever to have felt before with any human being except in a certain way with Lewis. When the boy had been younger Skelton recalled, that to watch him at play, or at his work, had always given him strange delight—a delight unique of its kind, and more nearly resembling happiness than anything he had ever known. But looking back calmly upon his life, he could not remember that he had ever known apart from Sylvia and Lewis that joyous sense of existence which is happiness. He remembered that in his early days he had felt a sense of triumph when the public—his public—caught at the idea of his future greatness. He knew well enough a certain refined and elevated pleasure in purely intellectual pursuits. But happiness is the child of the affections, and Skelton’s affections had fared rather badly. He recollected his early passion for Elizabeth Armistead with hatred. She had given him fierce joys and sharp pain, but that was far removed from happiness. His marriage had been from a curious mixture of motives, and he dared not admit to himself how little love had had to do with it; he had felt tenderness and extreme gratitude to his wife, but happiness had still eluded him. Now, however, he realised with keen pleasure that, after all, he was not done with life and youth—he had not yet come down to the dregs and heel taps of existence. He had sounded all the depths and shoals of a life of pleasure and of a life of intellect, and he was tired of both. True it was, that books still had a fatal fascination for him; that passion for reading and for making his mind drunk at the fountain of other men’s knowledge was ineradicable. But he had at last come to crave something else. Like all men who lead a one-sided life with a two-sided nature, he was seized with a profound disgust, and would have welcomed almost any change. Never had he understood the futility of a normal human being trying to live on ideas alone until he returned to Deerchase. As soon as he had eliminated everything from his life except books and intellectual effort, he began to find books more of an anodyne and work more of a hopeless effort than ever. When he was quite ready for his life work, when he had prepared himself, his house, his tools, in perfection for that work, a deadly paralysis had seized upon him, a frightful fear of failure. Then, following this, he suddenly found an unsuspected source of pleasure—the society of a woman. He could have as much or as little of that society as he wanted, even if he married her, for it is the privilege of the rich to have privacy and independence in every relation of life. It was true he would have to give up much money, which most men are unequal to parting with, to marry her. But he would give it up to Lewis, a creature intensely loved. Still, it would be a curtailment of his power, for money is power.

At first the consequences seemed enormous; but they assumed much smaller proportions as he investigated them. He would not be able to buy thousands of books, as he had done, but he suspected, with a kind of shame, that he had too many books already. He would no longer be able to leave orders in blank with the great collectors in London, and Paris, and Rome to buy him rare editions, but he remembered with disgust that these orders had been carried out rather with a view of getting his money than to increasing the value of his collection. He had caught two of his agents in the act of palming off spurious volumes upon him, and had informed them of his discovery and had given them no more orders. As for buying pictures and bric-a-brac, that taste was not then developed in this country. Hundreds of ways of spending money, well known in the latter half of the nineteenth century, were quite unknown in the first half. Skelton found that in giving up his wife’s fortune he was giving up much in the abstract and but little in the concrete. And then came his interview with Lewis.

The boy’s unhappy face, though, haunted him. Skelton had not once seen him smile since that night of the ball. He went about solemnly, his black eyes, that were usually full of light, sombre and distressed, and Service was never allowed out of his sight. He kept closely to Deerchase, and did not even go to Belfield until Sylvia wrote him a note gently chiding him. As for Sylvia, whatever she felt for Skelton, she had adopted the general belief that he would never marry at all. She felt a kind of resentment towards him, for, after comparing him with the other men she knew, she acknowledged promptly to herself that she could never marry any of those other men. Skelton had done her that ill turn; he had shown her so conclusively the charm of a man with every advantage of birth, breeding, intellect, knowledge of the world, and, above all, his subtile personal charm, that other men wearied her. Even Blair, who found women usually responsive to him, discovered that Sylvia was rather bored with him. She had tasted of the tree of knowledge, and was neither better nor happier for it. She was acute enough to see that her society gave Skelton more pleasure than any other woman’s, but then that was easily understood. Provincials are generally uninterestingly alike. Sylvia Shapleigh happened to be a little different from the rest. In her own family she was singularly lonely. Her father was the conventional good father, and both of her parents were proud of her. But she was a being different from any in their experience. Old Tom Shapleigh boasted of her spirit, and said he believed Sylvia was waiting to marry the President of the United States; but he was vexed that she was getting out of her twenties so fast without making a good match, and every offer she had always provoked a quarrel between father and daughter. Mrs. Shapleigh considered that Sylvia’s obstinacy in that respect was expressly meant as a defiance of maternal authority, and continually reproached her that she would yet bring her mother’s grey hairs with sorrow to the grave because she wouldn’t accept any offer made to her.

Lewis Pryor was not more lonely than Sylvia Shapleigh, although, womanlike, she showed more fortitude and was more uncomplaining about it. But on account of that solitariness common to both of them, the imaginative woman and the half-developed boy had a sympathy for each other—an odd, sweet community of thought. Sylvia had heard all the talk floating about the county regarding Lewis Pryor, and had observed the coldness with which the world, which smiled so benignly on Skelton, frowned on the innocent boy; but, more just as well as more generous than the sodden world, his misfortune was only another reason why she should be kind to him.

The summer passed slowly to most of them: to Blair, impatiently awaiting news from England; to his wife, vexed with him for his action; to Sylvia, who began to feel a painful sense of disappointment and narrowness and emptiness in existence; to Lewis, prematurely burdened with the problems of life; to all, except Skelton. Indeed, time had a way of flying frightfully fast with him, and he barely recovered the shock and surprise of one birthday before another was precipitated on him. And yet he was going about that book as if the ages were his! He had quite given up his racing affairs to Miles Lightfoot, and was apparently devoting himself to some abstruse studies in his library. So he was—but Sylvia Shapleigh was the subject.

Although a very arrogant and confident man, Skelton was too clear-headed not to consider the possibility that Sylvia might not marry him, but it was always difficult for him to comprehend that he could not have his own way about anything he desired.

He meant, however, to be very prudent. He would bring all of his finesse and worldly wisdom to bear, and he would not be outwitted by any woman. So thought Samson of old.