“I am going to see my father,” said Randolph; “that of course is the object of my visit; I suppose he will not refuse to keep me for a day or two. And in the mean time why should we quarrel? I only warn you that I come with my eyes open, and am not to be made a dupe of. Good-bye for the present—we shall meet no doubt at dinner the best of friends.”
Mary stood still where he left her, and watched him as he went slowly down the slope and round the corner of the house. He was shorter than John and stouter, with that amplitude of outline which a wealthy rural living and a small parish are apt to confer. A comfortable man, fond of good living, fond of his ease; yet taking the trouble to come here, for what?—to baffle some supposed wicked contrivances and plots against himself. Mary remembered that Randolph had taken the great family misfortune as a special wrong to him. How dared the evil fates to interfere with his comfort or rumour to assail his name? He had said frankly that it could be nothing to the others in comparison. And was it once more the idea that he himself was touched, which had roused him out of his comfortable rectory to come here and assert himself? But how did the arrival of John’s children affect that? Mary, in her long calm, had not entered into those speculations about the future which most people more or less think necessary when the head of the house is old. She had not asked herself what would happen when her father died, except vaguely in respect to herself, knowing that she would then in all likelihood leave the old Castle. John was the heir. Somehow or other, she did not know how, the inheritance would be taken up for him. This had been the conclusion in her mind without reason given or required. And Randolph had not come into the sphere of her imagination at all as having anything to do with it. What should he have to do with it when there was John? And even now Mary did not know and could not understand the reason of his objection to John’s children. She stood and looked after him with a dull beating of pain in her heart. And as he turned round the corner of the old house towards the door, he looked back and waved his hand. The gesture and look, she could scarcely tell why, gave her a sensation of sickening dismay and pain. She turned and went in, shutting the door in the sudden pang this gave her. And to shut the great door of the hall was the strangest thing, except in the very heart of winter. While the sun was shining and the air genial, such a thing had never happened before. It seemed in itself a portent of harm.
CHAPTER XV.
RANDOLPH.
Randolph Musgrave was a squire-parson, a class which possesses the features of two species without fully embodying either—which may be finer than either, the two halves of the joint character tempering each other—or may be a travesty of both, exaggerating their mutual defects. He was of the latter rather than of the former development. His living was small in one sense and large in another, the income being large, but the people few and very much given up to dissent, a fact which soured his character without moving him to exertion. He was not fond of exertion in any case, and it was all but hopeless in this. But not less was he daily and hourly irritated by the little Bethels and Salems, the lively Methodists, the pragmatical Baptists, who led his people away. They made him angry, for he was easily moved to anger, and they increased that tendency to listen to gossip and be moved by small matters which is one of the temptations of a rural life. He had become accustomed to make much of petty wrongs, calling them insults and crimes, and perhaps to be more disposed to petty vengeances than a man who is placed in the position of an example to others ought to be; and whereas he had always been disposed to consider himself a sacred person, above the ordinary slights of fortune, this tendency had grown and strengthened so, that every petty pin-prick was like a poisoned arrow to him. By natural laws of reverberation he heard more evil of himself, had more mishaps in the way of gossip, of receiving letters not intended for him, and otherwise surprising the sentiments of his neighbours, than almost any one else ever had—which had made him suspicious of his neighbours in the highest degree, and ready to believe every small offence a premeditated insult. This perhaps made him all the more ready to believe that his sister had conceived a villanous plan against him and his. He would not have done such a thing himself; but was not his life full of such attempts made upon him by others? everybody almost whom he encountered having one time or other conspired against his hopes or happiness. But he had always found out the plots in time. It was true that this villany might be John’s, of whom he would have believed anything; and Mary herself might be the dupe: but most likely it was Mary, who did not like him nor his wife, and who would no doubt be capable of anything to banish him finally from Penninghame, and set up there some creature of her own. This was the idea which had come into his mind, when he heard accidentally of the arrival which had made so much commotion in the north country. He had talked it over with his wife till they both saw gunpowder plots and conspiracies incalculable in it. “You had better go and see into it yourself,” Mrs. Randolph said. “I will,” was the Rector’s energetic reply. “And believe nobody, believe nothing but what you see with your own eyes.” “Never! I will put faith in nobody,” Randolph had said. And it was in this frame of mind that he had come here. He meant to believe nobody save when they warned him of plots against himself: to trust nothing save that all the world was in a league to work him harm. But for this determined pre-conclusion, he might perhaps have been less certain of his sister’s enmity to himself, and of the baseness of the deception she was practising; but he had no doubt whatever on this matter now. And he meant to expose her remorselessly. Why should he mince matters? His father was an old man and might die at any moment, and this villany ought to be exposed at once.
With these thoughts in his mind he went round to the great door. How different was the grey north-country house from anything he was used to! The thought of his snug parsonage embosomed in greenery, roses climbing to the chimney-stacks, clustering about all the windows, soft velvet lawns and strict inclosures keeping all sacred—made him shiver at sight of the irregular building, the masses of ivy fostering damp, the open approach, a common road free to everybody. If it ever was his, or rather when it was his—for these supposititious children would soon be done away with, and John, a man under the ban of the law, how could he ever appear to claim his inheritance?—when it was his, he would soon make a difference. He would bring forward the boundaries of the Chase so as to inclose the Castle. He would make the road into a stately avenue as it once was and ought to be. What did it matter who objected? He would do it; let the village burst with rage. The very idea of exasperating the village and making it own his power, made the idea all the more delightful. He would soon change all this; let it but get into his hands. In the midst of these thoughts, however, Randolph met a somewhat ludicrous rebuff from Eastwood, who opened the door suddenly and softly, as was his fashion, as if he hoped to find the visitor out in something improper. “Who shall I say, sir?” said Eastwood, deferentially. This gave Randolph a sense of the most ludicrous discomfiture; for to be asked what name is to be announced when you knock at the door of your father’s house is a curious sensation. It was nobody’s fault unless it might have been Randolph’s own, but the feeling was disagreeable. He stood for a moment dumb, staring at the questioner—then striding inside the door, pushed Eastwood out of his way. When he was within, however, somewhat conciliated by the alarmed aspect of the butler, who did not know whether to resist or what to do, he changed his mind.
“I don’t want to startle my father,” he said; “say Mr. Randolph Musgrave has arrived.”
“I beg your pardon humbly, sir,” cried Eastwood.
“No, no, it was not your fault.” Randolph replied. It was not the servant’s fault; but it was their fault who had made his home a place of disgrace, and no longer a fit home for him.
The Squire was seated among his books, feeling the drowsy influence of the afternoon. He had no Monograph to support his soul, and no better occupation than to rummage dully through the records of antiquity, cheered up and enlivened if he found something to reply to in Notes and Queries, but otherwise living a heavy kind of half-animate life. When the critiques and the letters about that Monograph had ended, what a blank there was! and no other work was at hand to make up, or to tempt him to further exertions. The corner of land that he desired to attain had been bought, and had given him pleasure; but after a while his eyes were satisfied with the contemplation, and his mind almost satisfied with the calculation, of so many additional acres added to the property. The sweetness of it lay in the thought that the property was growing, that there was sufficient elasticity in the family income to make the acquisition of even a little bit of land possible. The Squire thought this was the fruit of his own self-denial, and it gave him that glow of conscious virtue which was once supposed to be the appropriate and unfailing reward of good actions, till conscious virtue went out of fashion. This was sweet; and it was sweet to go and look at the new fields which restored the old boundary of the Penninghame estate in that direction; but such gratifications cease to be sustaining to life after a time. And Mr. Musgrave was dull sitting among his books; the sounds were in his ears which he was always hearing now—the far-off ring of voices that made him sensible of those inmates in his house whom he never noticed, who were to him as if they did not exist. When the mind is not very closely occupied, sounds thus heard in the house come strangely across the quiescent spirit of the solitary. Voices beloved are as music, are as sunshine, conveying a sense of happiness and soft exhilaration. Hearing them far off, though beyond the reach of hearing, so to speak, does not the very distant sound, the tone of love in them, make work sweet and the air warm, softening everything round the recluse? But these were not voices beloved. The old man listened to them—or rather, not permitting himself to listen, heard them acutely through the mist of a separation which he did not choose to overcome. They were like something from another world, voices in the air, inarticulate, mysterious, known yet unknown. He turned the leaves idly when these strange suggestions came to him in his solitude; he had nothing to do with them, and yet so much. This was how he was sitting, dully wistful, in that stillness of age which when it is not glad must be sad, and hearing almost, as if he were already a ghost out of his grave, the strange yet familiar stir in the unseen stairs and passages, the movements of the kindly house——
“Mr. Randolph Musgrave!” The Squire was very much startled by the name. He rose hastily, and stood leaning upon his writing-table to see who it was that followed Eastwood into the room after a minute’s interval. It seemed scarcely possible to him that it could be his son. “Randolph!” he said. The children’s voices had made him think, in spite of himself, of the time—was it centuries ago?—when there were two small things running about those old passages continually, and a beautiful young mother smiling upon them—and him. This had softened his heart, though by means which he would not have acknowledged. He looked out eagerly with a sensation of pleasure and relief for his son. He would (perhaps) take Randolph’s advice, perhaps get some enlightenment from him. But the shock set his nerves off, and made him tremulous, though it was a shock of pleasure; and it hurt his pride so to be seen trembling, that he held himself up strained and rigid against his table. “Randolph! you are a stranger indeed,” he said, and his countenance lighted up with a cloudy and tremulous smile.