There was no sham about Mr. Black’s affection for London; but there was equally no question that he felt a short stay in the country might do his health much good; might clear his head, as he expressed it, and enable him on his return to town to resume work with greater energy than ever.
“Talk about a change to Hastings or Brighton,” he said to Arthur Dudley, “why, it’s nothing to this. To walk along the shore in either place, is simply walking down Regent Street, nothing else! Upon my soul, I would quite as soon take a day’s holiday in one as the other; and as for quiet, could the traffic in the City make more noise any time than that precious old sea? No; give me this solitude, this stillness, this perfect freedom, and I am content to leave watering-places to fast young women and idle men.”
And no doubt Mr. Black was sincere in this statement. Though the appointments at Berrie Down were not on that scale of magnificence which Mr. Black would have liked to see his kinsman affect, still the very absence of this magnificence tended to make the house a comfortable one at which to visit.
The furniture might be old-fashioned and the draperies faded; yet to Mr. Black there was a certain novelty in sitting down on a chair which was undoubtedly paid for, that counterbalanced, to some extent, the effect of well-worn carpets, ancient sofas, spider-legged tables, and a square six-octave piano.
Besides, the mere fact of seeing people able to do without luxuries, able to resist the lust of the eye and the pride of life, produced a salutary though vague impression on the mind of a man who had been brought up amongst a class which believes almost exclusively in externals, and pins its faith to goods and chattels, to fine feathers, to unlimited gilding, to many servants, and big houses filled with much French polish and varnish in profusion, with silk curtains and soft carpets, and pictures in heavy, costly frames.
If Arthur Dudley could afford to live in such poor style without losing caste, then what might Arthur Dudley not achieve if he were able to live in better style? A desirable connection certainly Mr. Black held that man to be, who, without any adventitious aid whatsoever, could remain a gentleman amid surroundings that “would settle me,” mentally finished the promoter.
That there was something in birth, beyond a father leaving personal and freehold property to his son—that there was something also in rank over and above houses and lands—money and more money—Mr. Black began to believe; and in the pleasant summer-time, amongst the green Hertfordshire fields, under the drooping trees, the promoter came gradually to understand something else, namely, that a woman who, like Heather, could manage to make herself and others happy, on an utterly inadequate income, might, mated to a different husband, have proved a treasure beyond all price.
Even Mrs. Ormson, he knew, could never have shed so sweet a content over any home as Heather Dudley. “I believe,” thought Mr. Black, “she would even have made that dog-kennel in Hoxton something worth looking forward to coming home to at night. She is not clever—that is, she could never fight her way in the world, nor go out into it like many women—but she is worth a barge-load of any I ever knew, for all that. By Jove! married to a clever man, would not she have made a home for him?” And then Mr. Black went on to consider, in a mournful kind of way, that let him climb to what worldly height he would, domestic comfort was a thing the future could not hold for him; that, though he might have servants and carriages, a house as fine as Lord Kemms, money at his banker’s, and an income large enough to satisfy even his most extravagant desires, he could never expect to pass through any door which might afford him admission to such a paradise as that, in and out of which Arthur Dudley passed at his own sweet pleasure, all unconscious of the blessings he enjoyed.
Never before had Mr. Black remained long enough at Berne Down to appreciate the quiet beauty of that calm home life. A hurried visit from Saturday till Monday, a scramble for trains, a hot walk to church, pressing anxieties which made the still monotony of the country almost maddening to a man whose brain was in a constant whirl of excitement; a day or two, perhaps occasionally, through the week—when picnics were planned and excursions undertaken—had formerly been Mr. Black’s experience of Berrie Down.
Most people know how wearisome and unendurable the stillness of night is when sleep refuses to close the tired eyelids, when either from pain of body, or distress of mind, the hours are passed in restlessness instead of rest. The silence of the country, its inaction, its dead-aliveness had been hitherto to Mr. Black precisely what sleepless nights prove to many a sufferer. He could not take repose out of it; and as day, with its work and its turmoil, seems preferable to the long, drawn-out darkness, through every hour of which ascends the moaning prayer, “Would to God it were morning!” so even the noise and tumult of town appeared to Mr. Black sounds to be desired in preference to the awful and fearful quiet of that still life at Berrie Down.