Mrs. Eadie’s help, who was a young girl, did not live in the house, and her late arrival in the mornings was one of the grievances of the housekeeper’s life. There was nobody, therefore, but this good woman, in whom Harry had perfect confidence, to witness his worn-out condition: and by-and-by he got thawed and comfortable. Once within this legitimate shelter too, his spirits came back to him. He forgot the painful miseries he had conjured up, or, at least, he did not forget them, but they went to his father’s account to swell his wrath. There were still several hours to wait before he could see Uncle Henry, and Harry lay down upon the bed where he had slept when he was a schoolboy, and returned to common life and respectable usages through the medium of a long sleep. It was a sort of moral bath to him, restoring him to creditable ways. To think that he should have feared John Armstrong’s lantern, and hid himself from the carter with his early vegetables! But all that, and a great deal more, went to his father’s account. His rage revived as the misery of the night ended. For those latter hours he had been too much occupied by his personal feelings to dwell upon the cause of them; now that he was comfortable once more the insult and the cruelty that had been inflicted upon him came back with double force. Turned from his father’s door, the key turned upon him, the house he was born in shut up against him; himself disowned, like a beggar, left to wander where he pleased, to die on the moors, if he liked, to get his death, as Mrs. Eadie had suggested; and all this his father’s doing! Harry clenched his fist with wild excitement, with a desire for vengeance which startled himself. He thought he would almost consent to have “got his death” if Joscelyn could be tried for manslaughter. He would have almost liked to punish, to convict his father by dying, so that the whole country might have pointed at him as the man who had killed his son. But then he reflected that probably his father would not care. “But I’ll make him care,” Harry said to himself. Few people venture to express such vindictiveness; but Harry Joscelyn’s heart was full of it; it was natural to his race.
CHAPTER VII.
UNCLE HENRY.
MR. HENRY JOSCELYN came down stairs at nine o’clock to breakfast as he always did. No clock was ever more regular. He was not like the present family of Joscelyns. He had taken after his mother, who was the grandmother of Ralph Joscelyn of the White House. The family had been one of greater pretensions and more gentility in his day. The heir at that time was educated in Oxford, and the Joscelyns still belonged, though gradually falling away from it, to the higher level, and counted themselves county people. Henry had been sent off early to business; but he had never lost the sentiment which so often remains to an “old family” when more substantial possessions are gone. In the case of the present representative of the name this sentiment was mere pride with a bitter edge to it, and resentful sense of downfall; but with Mr. Henry Joscelyn it was a real consciousness of superiority to the common persons round him. Noblesse oblige: perhaps he did not understand these words in their highest sense. The noblesse was small. And the behaviour it exacted was not of a princely or magnanimous character; but still there were many things which, being a Joscelyn, he felt it incumbent upon him both to do and not to do. He would not allow himself to drop. He looked with indignation and contempt at the rudeness and roughness of his nephew’s house. Even what was best in it was, he felt, beneath him. He had never married at all, not feeling able to aspire to the only kind of wife he ever could have been content with; but to marry a parson’s daughter was an expedient Henry Joscelyn would have scorned. It would have better befitted the reigning head of so good and old a race to have followed the example of King Cophetua—a beautiful beggar-maid is a possibility always, but an insipid parson’s daughter! Mr. Henry Joscelyn had not cut his nephew—that would have been impossible too; but he looked upon him with a fierce contempt; and though he allowed Mrs. Joscelyn to be “a worthy person,” and probably quite good enough, nay, even too good, for Ralph Joscelyn as he was, still Mr. Henry could not meet her on grounds of equality—notwithstanding the fact that there was a baronet in her family, which at first had staggered him. It did not seem to him that these high claims of his were at all injured by the fact that he himself had been engaged in, and had made all his money by, trade. “I was a younger son,” he would say, with a gentle shrug of his shoulders, and his godson Harry was also a younger son. Mr. Henry believed that there was a certain amount of self-sacrifice necessary in a family. If it was a right and good thing to keep it up, then it was quite right that the younger children should have their part in sustaining its honour. Its importance, its prestige, belonged to them as well as to the heir, and it was their interest as well as their duty to make an exertion and keep it up.
His own exertions had not succeeded badly; he had been able to come back to his own county, while he was still not an old man, and to settle himself according to his pleasure. Now Mr. Henry’s opinion was that you could not live absolutely in the country unless you had “a place” in the country, and all the consequence that brings. His notions, it will be seen, were a great deal higher than his real position; he thought of the Joscelyns as if they had been a ducal house. And without “a place” he considered a country life impossible. He did not choose to live in a small house in the shadow of a great one. Had the White House really been a great ducal establishment he might have done so; but as he could not so much as look at the White House without a sense of its discrepancy with the pretensions of the family, and unlikeness to everything that the mansion of the Joscelyns ought to be; and as the society there, when there was any society, was distinctly below, not above, his own level, he did not hesitate a moment as to his place of abode. He bought a house in Wyburgh, the county town; a modest house—but he did not want very much—where he was served most comfortably and carefully by Mrs. Eadie, the most excellent of managers, with the assistance of one small aid, and compensated himself for the smallness of his establishment within doors by keeping a groom and a couple of horses, which were his personal luxuries. No horses in the country were more carefully groomed, and no groom presented a more neat and spruce appearance; and Mr. Henry still rode across country, though not with the daring which once sat so oddly on his prim little person. For he was little and light-coloured, exactly the reverse of the Joscelyns, like his mother, the small pale woman, whose over-masterfulness and tyrannical control of her sons, was said to have turned her grandson, the present man, and his father before him, to evil courses. She had wanted to make them good, to perfect their characters, whether they would or not; and the strong restraint she had exercised had made the re-action all the more vehement. So people said: except in the case of Henry, who took after his mother in every way, and had all her intolerance of useless people and indolent minds. He lived a life which was very satisfactory to himself in his little house in Wyburgh. He had besides a little bit of land in his native parish with an old house upon it, uninhabitable, but yet a creditable sort of possession in a corner of which Isaac Oliver—who was, in a very lowly manner his bailiff—lived with his family. Mr. Henry was a much respected member of the county club which had its seat in Wyburgh, and to which his nephew of the White House might have sought admittance in vain. The duke himself treated old Henry, as he was called, with the utmost condescension. His position was never contended or doubted. He was as good a gentleman as the king. He knew more about the county than anyone else did, and called cousins remotely with many of the great people, who were most courteously ready to allow the kindred so far as Mr. Henry Joscelyn went; and he was an active magistrate, and took a certain interest in the town itself, where most people believed in him, and wondered how the Joscelyns could have gone off so completely since Mr. Henry’s time—which was like the period before the deluge to the young people. And Mr. Henry was a man of the most regular habits. It might have been known what hour it was, had the town clock stopped in Wyburgh, by his appearance at the window, after he had breakfasted, with the newspaper in his hand, by the sound of his step as he went to the Club regular as the sun himself, and by his return to his dinner. These were the three departures, so to speak, of his day. In the evening he dined out sometimes, at the Rectory, at Dr. Peregrine’s, or with Mr. Despond, the solicitor: and now and then with some of the greater people about, where he drove in his own little brougham, which he kept expressly for such occasions. At other times one or two old inhabitants of the better class would drop in in the evening to make up his rubber. He looked very well after his money, and gave his neighbours excellent advice about their investments; and a more admirable member of society, a more respected townsman, could not be.
It may be supposed that to such a man, with such a life, the existence of a schoolboy under his roof had not been an unmixed pleasure. Still Mr. Henry Joscelyn was not a man to fail in his duties when they were pointed out to him. Though nobody but Mrs. Joscelyn guessed it, it was to the housekeeper that his family were indebted for Harry’s preferment. Mrs. Eadie was just then greatly in want of somebody to be kind to. Her master, though he required the most scrupulous attention, did not come within this category, and the good woman had long sighed for a bairn in the house. When Harry was in the house he did not see much of his uncle—their hours (thank heaven! Mr. Henry said, devoutly), being quite incompatible. The boy was off to school in the morning, long before Mr. Henry was up. He had his dinner in the middle of the day, when Mr. Henry was engaged in magisterial or county business, or in the Club. So they got on very well, and the old man was actually sorry when the boy set out in his turn for Liverpool to get an insight into “the business” in which his uncle had grown moderately rich; but this did not affect his methodical life, which flowed on just as before. Mr. Henry was growing old; even he himself acknowledged this, with cheerful readiness to other people, with a little impatience to himself. He spoke of his age with great equanimity in society when the subject was mooted, but he did not think of it when he could help it, nor did he like the thought. High and dry above all mortal loss and gain, quite safe from the agitations of life, very comfortable in all its circumstances, having succeeded in working out just the perfection of detail, the harmony of movement that satisfied him, it was a vexing and unpleasant reflection that this life was to be disturbed, broken in upon, brought to a conclusion by illness and death. Sometimes the thought made him almost angry. Why? He was not, to be sure, so strong as he once was, but he was strong enough for all reasonable purposes, as strong as he required to be; and he had all his wits about him. Never had he been more clear-headed; and every sort of inclination to do things that were not good for him, whether in the way of eating or drinking, or other practices of a more strictly moral or immoral character had died out of his mind. He knew how to take care of himself exactly, and he did take the greatest care of himself. Why should he die? It was an idea that annoyed him. It seemed so unnecessary: he was not weary of life, nor had he the least desire to give it up. In such circumstances there had been a lurking feeling in his mind that Providence should know how to discriminate. But there was no telling how long Providence might choose to discriminate: and this recollection was about the only disturbing influence in a life so comfortable and well proportioned, and altogether satisfactory, that there seemed no reason whatever that it should ever come to an end.
“Mr. Harry here? How did he get here at such an hour in the morning? Why, he must have started in the middle of the night.”
“I make no doubt of that,” said the housekeeper. She had brought up a second kidney, piping hot, and tender as a baby, upon a piece of toast, so crisp yet so melting, so brown and savoury, so penetrated by generous juices that it was in itself a luxury; “and for that and other things I have made him lie down upon his bed. He’s not been in a bed this night, that’s clear to see; he’s sleeping like a babe in a cradle; it does the heart good to see him.”
“I don’t think it would do my heart good,” said Mr. Henry, “the young fellow must have been up to some mischief. Did he give you any idea of what was the matter? or is it mere nonsense, perhaps a bet, or a brag, or something of that sort?”
“Mere nonsense—nay, nay, Sir, it’s not that. He’s got a look on his face—a look I have seen on your own face, Sir, when you are put out.”
“I’ve told you a hundred times, Mrs. Eadie, there is not the slightest resemblance between Mr. Harry and me.”