“Then don’t!” said old Trevor, with a fiercer gleam in his eyes; “that’s my advice to you, Richard Ford. Don’t! I want to hear nothing of your one that has a claim. Who has any claim! not a soul in the world! Lucy’s fortune is her own—she’s obliged to nobody for it. It comes to her, not from me, that I should take upon me to pick and choose. She does not get a penny from me; all I have I’ve given to the other, and a very good nest-egg for his position in life. But Lucy’s fortune is none of my making; Lucy is Lucilla’s daughter.”
“Susan’s cousin!” said Ford, instinctively. He regretted it the next moment, but he could not withhold this protest. To think that all the money should be Lucilla’s, and none of it come to Susan, though she was Lucilla’s cousin! It is hard, it must be allowed, to see fortunes come so near, yet have no share in them. In the family, yet not yours, not the smallest bit yours, save by grace and favor of a stranger, a man who is your cousin’s husband, indeed, but has no claim otherwise to belong to the family. The Fords were not at all ungrateful to old Trevor; but still there were moments when this struck them in spite of themselves.
CHAPTER XIV.
A FALSE ALARM.
The prophets of evil were not deceived; when a kind of general impression arises in respect to an invalid that a crisis is approaching, it almost always is justified by the event. During that very night there was a sudden alarm; Mr. Trevor’s bell rang loudly, awakening all the house. Lucy flew from her room, hastily gathering her dressing-gown round her, with her light hair hanging about her shoulders, and Mrs. Ford appeared in a night-cap, which was an indecorum she recollected long afterward. The maids naturally, being less interested, were harder to rouse, and it was Mr. Ford himself who issued forth in the penetrating chill of the early morning, still quite dark and silent, not a soul astir, and buttoning himself into his warmest overcoat, went out in the cold to seek a doctor, who, for his part, was just as unwilling to be roused out of his slumbers in the middle of the night. Jock, roused by the sounds, sat up in his little bed, with wide-awake eyes, hearing the bell still jar and tinkle, and sounds of people running up-and down-stairs, which half frightened, half reassured him. To hear other people moving about is always a comfort to a child, and so was the reflection of the lamp at the gateway of the Terrace, which shone into his room and kept it light. Jock sat up and gazed with big eyes, and wondered, but was too much awed and alarmed by the nocturnal disturbance to move; and, indeed, as it turned out after, there was not much need for any one to be disturbed. Old Trevor’s explanation was that he had woke up with a loud singing in his ears and a sense of giddiness, and he could not articulate at first when, they rushed to his bedside, so that everybody believed it to be a “stroke.” But when the doctor came he declared that, though the patient’s blood was running like a river in flood, yet there was nothing very particular the matter, and that a day or two’s quiet would make him all right. Mrs. Ford, in her night-cap, remained by the newly lighted fire in Mr. Trevor’s room to take care of him, but the rest were all sent back to bed, and when the breakfast-hour arrived the patient pronounced himself as well as ever. He got up at his usual hour, and would not even allow that, as Mrs. Ford suggested, he felt “shaky.”
“Not a bit shaky,” he declared, putting out one shrunken shank to show how steadily he stood on the other; “but I thought my time was come,” he said. “I’ll allow I thought I had reached it, after looking for it so long. It was a queer feeling. I am just as well pleased to put it off a bit, though it must come soon.”
“That is true,” Ford said, shaking his head; “we must all die; but the youngest may go off before the oldest, as happens every day.”
These were the words that little Jock heard as they came into the drawing-room, the old man leaning on the arm of the other. Where was the youngest to go off to? He understood vaguely, and a momentary thrill ran through his little veins. Was it he that might “go” before his father? it was a thing which seemed to lie between the eldest and the youngest Jock’s mind was full of the plague and all its horrible details, and the wonder and mystery of thus going “off” chimed in with this gloomy yet fascinating study; the recollection of the bell tinkling through the streets, the dead-cart stopping at the door, scared yet excited him. But there was no plague, no dead-cart, no tinkling bell at Farafield. After awhile the impression died out of the child’s mind, but scarcely so quickly as it did out of the mind of his old father, who already chuckled to himself over the fright he had given the house. Mr. Trevor did justice to the people who surrounded him.
“When it really comes they will be sorry,” he said; “but it was a disappointment.”
He liked to think he had disappointed them; even in getting better, a man can not but feel that his own superior sense and strength of character have something to do with it. Another man would not have rallied, would have been capable of dying perhaps, and cutting short all the interest of his story; but not John Trevor, who knew better what he was about.
The night alarm, however, soon became known over Farafield, and many people had sufficient interest in the old man and his daughter to come or send, and make inquiries. Among these he had one visitor who amused and one who angered him. The first was a stranger, who sent up a card with the name of Mr. Frank St. Clair, and a message from Mrs. Stone, who begged to have the last news of the sufferer. “Show him up, show him up,” old Trevor said, his keen eyes twinkling with malice and humor; but when the large figure of the young barrister (for that was Mr. Frank St. Clair’s profession) entered the room, the old man was impressed, in spite of himself, by the solidity and imposing proportions of Mrs. Stone’s nephew and candidate; there was an air of respectability about him which compelled attention. He was handsome, but he was also serious, and had that air of a man who has given hostages to society, which nothing confers so surely as this tendency to a comfortable and respectable fullness of frame. Old Trevor acknowledged to himself that this was no young dandy, but a man, possibly, of weight of character as well as person; his very tendency (to speak politely) to embonpoint conciliated the old man. Schemers are seldom fat. Mr. Frank St. Clair looked respectable to the tips of his well-brushed boots, and as he looked at him, old Trevor was mollified in spite of himself.