“You are wrong there, my Lord,” Alick replied; “nothing could have saved her; she was dying when she left here, and it was owing entirely to the care and skill of the London doctors she stayed with us so long. It is bad enough as it is, but we could scarcely have borne the loss had it been as you supposed.”
Which view of the case happened to be perfectly true, although Lord Kemms imagined the speaker was mistaken.
Having had a hand in damaging the Protector, his Lordship felt, naturally, anxious to prove that Company the origin of all evil.
Since, in the course of a mysterious Providence, Lally was to die, he would have felt happy to demonstrate that the Protector had, directly or indirectly, been instrumental in killing her.
Now, however, Alick Dudley cut the ground from under his feet. If Lally’s short existence had been prolonged, even for an hour, by the skill and kindness of the London doctors, it was impossible for Lord Kemms ever again to insinuate that residing in town had hastened her death.
On that score, at all events, Arthur had no reason to reproach himself, which was fortunate, since when he returned to Berrie Down after the funeral, he felt his burden was quite as heavy as he could bear.
He was pressed for money; his dreams of wealth were vanishing away like mist wreaths; his shares he feared would never return him even a quarter of the sum he had expected to make by them; the half-yearly dividend had been unsatisfactory; his directors were irritable, the shareholders discontented.
He knew he must shortly let the Hollow, in order to rid himself of farming expenses, and to provide certain funds for paying the interest of the money for which Berrie Down was already mortgaged. He had not merely lost money senselessly, but squandered it foolishly; and to a man who had for so many years of his life looked honestly after sixpences, there was something very terrible in the reflection that he had got himself into debt through unthinkingly spending sovereigns.
In addition to all these causes for regret, Arthur added that peculiarity of his own temperament, which valued whatever was lost or in jeopardy far above any secure or present possession; and the feeling that the Hollow would soon to a great extent cease to be his own property, caused him to view every tree and shrub about it, every stick and thorn, with an appreciative affection as novel as it was painful.
His love for wife, children, property, kindred lay latent until some chance circumstance accidentally revealed its existence to himself; and most probably the first time he ever really placed a proper value on Berrie Down was when he saw it in the dead of winter, its evergreens bright and glossy as ever; its lawn sloping away towards the west, the grand old trees tossing their branches in the keen north blast, all passing away from him and his; passing away from the descendants of those who had held the place for centuries.