While Charlie, in his sleep in the next room, laboriously struggled all night with a bloodless apparition, which smiled at him from an open doorway—fiercely fought and struggled against it—mastered it—got it down, but only to begin once more the tantalising combat. When he rose in the morning, early as usual, the youth set his teeth at the recollection, and with an attempt to give a reason for this instinctive enmity, fiercely hoped that Lord Winterbourne would try to take from his father his little inheritance. Charlie, who was by no means of a metaphysical turn, did not trouble himself at all to inquire into the grounds of his own unusual pugnacity. He “knew he owed him something,” and though my Lord Winterbourne was a viscount and an ex-minister, and Charlie only a poor man’s son and a copying-clerk, he fronted the great man’s image with indomitable confidence, and had no more doubt of his own prowess than of his entire goodwill in the matter. He did not think very much more of his opponent in this case than he did of the big folios in the office, and had as entire confidence in his own ability to bring the enemy down.
But it was something of a restless night to Papa and Mamma. They too talked in their darkened chamber, too proper and too economical to waste candlelight upon subjects so unprofitable, of old events and people half forgotten;—how the first patroness of Agnes should be the daughter of the man between whom and themselves there existed some unexplained connection of old friendship or old enmity, or both;—how circumstances beyond their guidance conspired to throw them once more in the way of persons and plans which they had heard nothing of for more than twenty years. These things were very strange and troublous events to Mr Atheling and his wife. The past, which nearer grief and closer pleasure—all their family life, full as that was of joy and sorrow—had thrown so far away and out of remembrance, came suddenly back before them in all the clearness of youthful recollection. Old feelings returned strong and fresh into their minds. They went back, and took up the thread of this history, whatever it might be, where they had dropped it twenty years ago; and with a thrill of deeper interest, wondered and inquired how this influence would affect their children. To themselves now little could happen; their old friend or their old enemy could do neither harm nor benefit to their accomplished lives—but the children!—the children, every one so young, so hopeful, and so well endowed; all so strangely brought into sudden contact, at a double point, with this one sole individual, who had power to disturb the rest of the father and the mother. They relapsed into silence suddenly, and were quieted by the thought.
“It is not our doing—it is not our seeking,” said Mr Atheling at length. “If the play wants a last act, Mary, it will not be your planning nor mine; and as for the children, they are in the hands of God.”
So in the grey imperfect dawn which lightened on the faces of the sleeping girls, whose sweet youthful rest was far too deep to be broken even by the growing light, these elder people closed their eyes, not to sleep, but to pray. If evil were about to come—if danger were lurking in the air around them—they had this only defence against it. It was not the simple faith of youth which dictated these prayers; it was a deeper and a closer urgency, which cried aloud and would not cease, but yet was solemn with the remembrance of times when God’s pleasure was not to grant them their petitions. The young ones slept in peace, but with fights and triumphs manifold in their young dreams. The father and the mother held a vigil for them, holding up holy hands for their defence and safety; and so the morning came at last, brightly, to hearts which feared no evil, or when they feared, put their apprehensions at once into the hand of God.
CHAPTER XXX.
AGNES’S FORTUNE.
The morning, like a good fairy, came kindly to these good people, increasing in the remembrance of the girls the impression of pleasure, and lessening that of disappointment. They came, after all, to be very well satisfied with their reception at Mrs Edgerley’s. And now her second and most important invitation remained to be discussed—the Willows—the pretty house at Richmond, with the river running sweetly under the shadow of its trees; the company, which was sure to include, as Mr Agar said, some people worth knowing, and which that ancient connoisseur himself did not refuse to join. Agnes and Marian looked with eager eyes on the troubled brow of Mamma; a beautiful vision of the lawn and the river, flowers and sunshine, the sweet silence of “the country,” and the unfamiliar music of running water and rustling trees, possessed the young imaginations for the time to the total disregard of all sublunary considerations. They did not think for a moment of Lord Winterbourne’s daughter, and the strange chance which could make them inmates of her house; for Lord Winterbourne himself was not a person of any importance in the estimation of the girls. But more than that, they did not even think of their wardrobe, important as that consideration was; they did not recollect how entirely unprovided they were for such a visit, nor how the family finances, strait and unelastic, could not possibly stretch to so new and great an expenditure. But all these things, which brought no cloud upon Agnes and Marian, conspired to embarrass the brow of the family mother. She thought at the same moment of Lord Winterbourne and of the brown merinos; of this strange acquaintanceship, mysterious and full of fate as it seemed; and of the little black silk cloaks which were out of fashion, and the bonnets with the faded ribbons. It was hard to deny the girls so great a pleasure; but how could it be done?
And for a day or two following the household remained in great uncertainty upon this point, and held every evening, on the engrossing subject of ways and means, a committee of the whole house. This, however, we are grieved to say, was somewhat of an unprofitable proceeding; for the best advice which Papa could give on so important a subject was, that the girls must of course have everything proper if they went. “If they went!—that is exactly the question,” said the provoked and impatient ruler of all. “But are they to go? and how are we to get everything proper for them?” To these difficult questions Mr Atheling attempted no answer. He was a wise man, and knew his own department, and prudently declined any interference in the legitimate domain of the other head of the house.
Mrs Atheling was by no means addicted to disclosing the private matters of her own family life, yet she carried this important question through the faded wallflowers to crave the counsel of Miss Willsie. Miss Willsie was not at all pleased to have such a matter submitted to her. Her supreme satisfaction would have lain in criticising, finding fault, and helping on. Now reduced to the painful alternative of giving an opinion, the old lady pronounced a vague one in general terms, to the effect that if there was one thing she hated, it was to see poor folk striving for the company of them that were in a different rank in life; but whenever this speech was made, and her conscience cleared, Miss Willsie began to inquire zealously what “the silly things had,” and what they wanted, and set about a mental turning over of her own wardrobe, where were a great many things which she had worn in her own young days, and which were “none the worse,” as she said—but they were not altogether adapted for the locality of the Willows. Miss Willsie turned them over not only in her own mind, but in her own parlour, where her next visitor found her as busy with her needle and her shears as any cottar matron ever was, and anxiously bent on the same endeavour to “make auld things look amaist as weel’s the new.” It cost Miss Willsie an immense deal of trouble, but it was not half so successful a business as the repairs of that immortal Saturday Night.
But the natural course of events, which had cleared their path for them many times before, came in once more to make matters easy. Mr Burlington, of whom nothing had been heard since the day of that eventful visit to his place—Mr Burlington, who since then had brought out a second edition of Hope Hazlewood, announced himself ready to “make a proposal” for the book. Now, there had been many and great speculations in the house on this subject of “Agnes’s fortune.” They were as good at the magnificent arithmetic of fancy as Major Pendennis was, and we will not say that, like him, they had not leaped to their thousands a-year. They had all, however, been rather prudent in committing themselves to a sum—nobody would guess positively what it was to be—but some indefinite and fabulous amount, a real fortune, floated in the minds of all: to the father and mother a substantial provision for Agnes, to the girls an inexhaustible fund of pleasure, comfort, and charity. The proposal came—it was not a fabulous and magnificent fortune, for the author of Hope Hazlewood was only Agnes Atheling, and not Arthur Pendennis. For the first moment, we are compelled to confess, they looked at each other with blank faces, entirely cast down and disappointed: it was not an inexhaustible fairy treasure—it was only a hundred and fifty pounds.
Yes, most tender-hearted reader! these were not the golden days of Sir Walter, nor was this young author a literary Joan of Arc. She got her fortune in a homely fashion like other people—at first was grievously disappointed about it—formed pugnacious resolutions, and listened to all the evil stories of the publishing ghouls with satisfaction and indignant faith. But by-and-by this angry mood softened down; by-and-by the real glory of such an unrealisable heap of money began to break upon the girls. A hundred and fifty pounds, and nothing to do with it—no arrears to pay—nothing to make up—can any one suppose a position of more perfect felicity? They came to see it bit by bit dawning upon them in gradual splendour—content blossomed into satisfaction, satisfaction unfolded into delight. And then to think of laying by such a small sum would be foolish, as the girls reasoned; so its very insignificance increased the pleasure. It was not a dull treasure, laid up in a bank, or “invested,” as Papa had solemnly proposed to invest “Agnes’s fortune;” it was a delightful little living stream of abundance, already in imagination overflowing and brightening everything. It would buy Mamma the most magnificent of brocades, and Bell and Beau such frocks as never were seen before out of fairyland. It would take them all to the Old Wood Lodge, or even to the seaside; it would light up with books and pictures, and pretty things, the respectable family face of Number Ten, Bellevue. There was no possibility of exhausting the capacities of this marvellous sum of money, which, had it been three or four times as much, as the girls discovered, could not have been half as good for present purposes. The delight of spending money was altogether new to them: they threw themselves into it with the most gleeful abandonment (in imagination), and threw away their fortune royally, and with genuine enjoyment in the process; and very few millionaires have ever found as much pleasure in the calculation of their treasures as Agnes and Marian Atheling, deciding over and over again how they were to spend it, found in this hundred and fifty pounds.