“You forget yourself strangely. What have I to do with Arthur’s—with your brother’s—eccentricities? Gone, is he? And where, pray? On some self-indulgent freak or other, I suppose, to escape the sight of that poor old man’s miserable face; but what this ‘law-business,’ as you call it, has to do with the matter, is more than I either understand, or wish to have explained.”
She rose from the sofa as she spoke, but was arrested by her son’s hand laid lightly on her shoulder.
“Mother,” he said almost sternly, “for once in my life I will speak to you openly. It will be the first time and the last; for you are not one, or I am greatly mistaken, to forgive the words that I shall use. From our childhood you never, never treated us as if you loved us. As a little fellow, so little, I remember, that I could scarcely reach the table with my hand—as a small boy—troublesome, I daresay, as all young children are, but not more depraved and wicked than others—I longed—O, how I used to long!—for love and tenderness from you. When I saw other mothers kiss and pet their children, holding them upon their knees, and looking with delight and pride upon their play and laughter, I can never describe to you the bitter envy that I felt, and with what a sore, sad heart I thought upon the difference between them and me! And it was the same with all of us. We have compared notes many times since those days, and have told each other—we four children, whom my father left a legacy to you; ah, shall I ever forget his dying words?—that we only wanted love, only the common tenderness shown by all God’s creatures to their young, and that, having it, we would return it fifty, ay, a hundredfold! But—and well you know it, mother—we had it not, that love we yearned for; and failing the boon we craved, we all went”—and he smiled bitterly—“more or less, and in different ways, according to our respective powers and sexes, to the bad. There is Arthur, poor dear Atty,” and his lip quivered painfully, “gone, without a word—excepting that he confessed some things to that poor broken-hearted old man which would make your cheek, ma’am, grow red with shame, although you love him not, to hear of. It seems, he was reduced—I and some others think that the fault was not quite all his own—to do some ugly thing which, but for the law-business of which you speak so lightly, need never have been known, and—”
“Ah, I understand,” put in Lady Millicent, endeavouring to hide her confusion and annoyance under a mask of carelessness and sarcasm. “Difficulties in the way of raising money, eh? But that is over now,” she added bitterly, “and I suppose that your brother need not, as matters now stand, fly the country because he does not happen to be able to pay his bills.”
“No, ma’am, you are right there,” rejoined her son; “but, unfortunately, poor Arthur, almost maddened by grief and worry, and believing, as so many did, that the ‘high legal opinion’ (on which depended your continuance or otherwise in the disputing of my grandfather’s will) would be, when given, adverse to his interests, had not moral courage, or rather his pecuniary embarrassments were too great to admit of any longer delay; so he has gone, poor dear fellow.” And Horace drew a long troubled breath, for, like many others, he believed in the reality as well as the endurance of Arthur’s grief. “He has gone away, poor old boy, for years, he says; and—and old Dub told me this morning that Arthur was—a villain!”
He was very young, that warm-hearted Horace, whose admiration of and love for his elder brother had truly grown with his growth and strengthened with his strength. For a long hour that morning he had stoutly fought Arthur’s battles with the old man, who, embittered by misfortune, and rendered thereby callous to the feelings of others, had dilated in no measured terms on his son-in-law’s utter want of principle, his selfishness, his mendacity, and his general and irretrievable unworthiness. It was in vain that Horace endeavoured to convince the obstinate and sorely-tried millionaire—the wealthy merchant-prince, whose gold had been unavailing to purchase an hour of life for the child of his old age—that Arthur’s offences were less dark than they appeared, and that excuses might, if sought for with a will, be found even for this self-exiled sinner. To all the arguments, all the recapitulations of the affectionate brother tending to throw a light on the manifest disadvantages attendant on poor Arthur’s “raising,” “old Dub” would only shake his gray head with the mournfullest of dismal gestures, and with a “Well, well,” which betokened alike a weariness of spirit and an absence of conviction that irritated Horace, while filling his heart with a pity beyond the reach of words.
He was very young, as I before said, or not only would these things not have taken such a strong effect upon his temper and his mind, but it may be that, after the utterance of the last terrible word, he would not—an act which he was weak enough to commit—have flung himself upon a lounging-chair near him, and, burying his face in his hands, have striven hard, yet ineffectually, to conceal his emotion.
Lady Millicent meanwhile looked on in silence; but, although apparently unmoved, she was, perhaps, nearer to giving way to a burst of sorrow than she had ever been in all her life before. It had, indeed, been a shock to her to learn that one of the ugliest of accusing words had been applied by a person on whom she looked down as the dust beneath her feet, to son of hers. The sight, also, of Horace—his face buried in his hands, and the tears trickling between his clenched fingers—acted, if not upon her heart, upon her nerves; and even as the melting of the winter’s snow tears up the stones most deeply buried in the torrent’s bed, Lady Millicent, moved by those hard-wrung drops to pity and to grief, could, had she yielded to one of the best and purest impulses she had ever known, have fallen on her son’s neck and wept aloud.
For everything—turn which way she would, to the right hand or the left—everything at which she looked, whether in the past, the present, or the future, seemed against the unhappy woman who had so long hardened her heart and stiffened her neck against reproof. Her children—the sons and daughters whom, strange to say, she now, in the days of her defeat and in the hour of her humiliation discovered were of some value in her sight—became to her as instruments of punishment. It was surprising to what extent the love of power, and the dread of abdicating to another the sceptre of her rule, had blinded this woman to a sense not only of her duties, but of her affections. The hope, the aim that she had so long in view, of still retaining within her grasp the dominion that she so dearly loved, had absorbed every faculty, both of mind and heart; but when that hope had vanished, and when the purpose of her life was at an end, then—when, with the natural yearning of every woman who still retains some of the characteristics of her sex, for an object on which to expend the hopes and fears, the energies and anticipations of a still vigorous mind, she turned with almost a passionately longing heart to the children whom God had given her—they in their turn refused the tardy boon thrown faute de mieux for their acceptance.
The children of Cecil Vavasour refused—tacitly, it is true, and with the firm protest of silent apathy—the offering of a mother’s interest in their affairs, a parent’s sympathy with their sorrows. Many a year too late there sounded, for those neglected children of a good and Christian father, the cry of nature in the breast of that world-hardened and power-loving woman. They could not—could not love her. Like stunted trees, blighted by long exposure to cold winds and nipping frosts, the feeble sap within had ceased to rise, and no new shoots, no tender buds of love and tenderness, had opened beneath the warmth of maternal love, even as in the joyous spring the young leaves turn towards the sun their grateful tribute.