Young Musgrave

by Mrs. Oliphant

The tears sprang to Mary’s eyes. She did not say anything in the sudden shock, but looked at Randolph piteously with a silent reproach. It was the first time since the day of their arrival that any public mention had been made of the children in her father’s presence. And there was a pause which seemed to her full of fate.

“You must not look at me so,” said her brother. “I gave you fair warning. My father is not to be given up to your plots without a remonstrance at least. I believe it is a conspiracy, sir, from beginning to end. Do you intend our old family, with all the honours you are so proud of, to drop into disgrace? With the shadow of crime on it,” cried Randolph, warming into excitement; then, with a dull perception of something still more telling, his father’s weak point, “and the bar sinister of vice?” he said.

CHAPTER XVI.
DUCKS AND DRAKES.

The Squire made use of that discretion which is the better part of valour. When Randolph for the second time insisted upon coming to an understanding on family affairs, which meant deciding what was to be done on the Squire’s death, Mr. Musgrave, not knowing how else to foil his son, got up and came away. “You can settle these matters with Mary,” he said, quietly enough. It would not have been dignified to treat the suggestion in any other way. But he went out with a slight acceleration of his pulses, caused half by anger and half by the natural human thrill of feeling with which a man has his own death brought home to him. The Squire knew that there was nothing unnatural in this anticipation of his own end. He was aware that it required to be done, and the emergency prepared for; but yet it was not agreeable to him. He thought they might have awaited the event, although in another point of view it would have been imprudent to await the event. He felt that there was something undesirable, unlovely, in the idea of your children consulting over you for their own comfort “afterwards.” But then his children were no longer children whose doings touched his affections much—they were middle-aged people, as old as he was—and in fact it was important that they should come to an arrangement and settle everything. Only he could not—and this being so, would not—do it; and he said to himself that the cause of his refusal was no reluctance on his own part to consider the inevitable certainty of his own death, but only the intolerableness of the inquiry in other respects. He walked out in a little strain and excitement of feeling, though outwardly his calm was intense. He steadied himself, mind and body, by an effort, putting a smile upon his lip, and walking with a deliberate slow movement. He would have scorned himself had he showed any excitement; but strolled out with a leisurely slow step and a smile. They would talk the matter out, the two whom he had left; even though Mary’s heart would be more with him than with her brother, still she would be bound to follow Randolph’s lead. They would talk of his health, of how he was looking feeble, his age beginning to tell upon him, and how it would be very expedient to know what the conditions of his will were, and whether he had made any provision for the peculiar circumstances, or arrangement for the holding of the estate. “I ought to be the first person considered,” he thought he heard Randolph saying. Randolph had always thought himself the first person to be considered. At this penetration of his own the Squire smiled again, and walked away very steadily, very slowly, humming a bar of an old-fashioned air.

He went thus through the broken woodland towards the east, and strolled into the Chase like a man taking a walk for pleasure. The birds sang overhead, little rabbits popped out from the great tree-trunks, and a squirrel ran up one of them and across a long branch, where it sat peering at him. All was familiar, certain, well known; he had seen the same sights and heard the same sounds for the last seventy years; and the sunshine shone with the same calm assurance of shining as at other times, and all this rustling, breathing life went on as it had always gone on. There was scarcely a leaf, scarcely a moss-covered stone that did not hide or shelter something living. The air was full of life; sounds of all kinds, twitter and hum and rustle, his own step among other movements, his own shadow moving across the sunshine. And he felt well enough, not running over with health and vigour as he had sometimes felt long ago, not disposed to vault over walls and gates in that unlicensed exuberance which belongs to youth only, but well enough—quite well, in short; steady afoot, his breathing easy, his head clear, everything about him comfortable. Notwithstanding which, his children were discussing, as in reference to a quite near and probable event, what was to be done when he should die! The Squire smiled at the thought, but it was a smile which got fixed and painful on his lip, and was not spontaneous or agreeable. The amusement to be got from such an idea is not of a genial kind. He was over seventy, and he knew, who better? that threescore and ten has been set down as the limit of mortal life. No doubt he must die—every man must die. It was a thing before him not to be eluded; the darkness, indeed, was very near, according to all ordinary law; but the Squire did not feel it, was not in his soul convinced of it. He believed it, of course; all other men of his age die, and in their case the precautions of the family are prudent and natural; in his own case it is true he did not feel the necessity; but yet no doubt it must be so. He kept smiling to himself; so living as he was, and everything round, it was an odd sort of discord to think of dying. He felt a kind of blank before him, a sense of being shut in. So one feels when one walks along a bit of road surrounded with walls, a cul de sac from which there is no outlet. A sense of imprisonment is in it, of discouragement, too little air to breathe, too little space to move in—certainly a disagreeable, stifling, choking sensation. Involuntarily a sigh came from his breast; and yet he smiled persistently, feeling in himself a kind of defiance to all the world, a determination to be amused at it all, notwithstanding the sentence they were passing against him.

While the Squire continued his walk, amid the twitter of the birds and the warble and the crackle and rustle and hum in the woods, and all the sounds of living, now and then another sound struck in—a sound not necessarily near, for in that still summer air sounds travel easily—an echo of voices, now one soft cry or laugh, now a momentary babble. It struck the old man as if an independent soul had been put into the scene. He knew very well what it meant—very well—no one better. By very dint of his opposition to them he recognized the sound of the children wherever they were. They were there now, the little things whose presence had moved Randolph to this assault upon his father. They were altogether antagonistic to Randolph, or rather he to them; this gave them a curious perverse interest in their grandfather’s eyes. They offered him an outlet from his cul de sac; the pressure seemed suddenly removed which had bowed him down; in a moment he felt relieved, delivered from that sense of confinement. A new idea was like the opening of a door to the old man; he was no longer compelled to contemplate the certainty before him, but was let softly down into the pleasant region of uncertainty—the world of happy chances. The very character of the smile upon his face changed. It became more natural, more easy, although he did not know the children, nor had any intention of noticing them. But they were there, and Randolph might scheme as he liked; here was one who must bring his schemes to confusion. A vague lightening came into the Squire’s thoughts. He was reprieved, if not from the inevitable conclusion, at least from the necessity of contemplating it; and he continued his walk with a lighter heart. By and by, after a somewhat long round, and making sundry observations to himself about the state of the timber which would bear cutting, and about the birds which, without any keeper to care for them, were multiplying at their own will, and might give some sport in September, Mr. Musgrave found himself by the lake again with that fascination towards the water which is so universal. The lake gleamed through the branches, prolonging the blue of the sky, and calling him with soft plashing upon the beach, the oldest of his friends, accompaniment of so many thoughts, and of all the vicissitudes of his life. He went towards it now in the commotion of feeling which was subsiding into calm, a calm which had something of fatigue in it; for reluctant as he was to enter into the question of age and the nearly approaching conclusion, the fact of age made him easily tired with everything, and with nothing more than excitement. He was fatigued with the strain he had been put to, and had fallen into a languid state which was not unpleasant; the condition in which we are specially disposed to be easily amused if any passive amusement comes in our way.

So it happened that as he walked along the margin of the lake, with the water softly foaming over the pebbles at his feet, Mr. Musgrave’s ear was caught by a series of sharp little repetitions of sound, like a succession of small reports—one, two, three. He listened in the mild, easily-roused, and not very active curiosity of such a moment, and recognized with a smile the sound of pebbles skipping across the water; presently he saw the little missiles gleaming along from ripple to ripple, flung by a skilful but not very strong hand. The Squire did not even ask himself who it was, but went on quietly, doubting nothing. Suddenly turning round a corner upon the edge of a small bay, he saw a little figure between him and the shining water, making ducks and drakes with varying success.

The Squire’s step was inaudible on the turf, and he paused in sympathy with the play. He himself had made ducks and drakes in the Penninghame water as long as he could recollect. He had taught his little boys to do it; he could not tell how it was that this suddenly came to his mind just now—though how it should do so with Randolph, a middle-aged, calculating parson, talking about family arrangements—Pah! but even this recollection did not affect him now as it did before. Never mind Randolph. This little fellow chose the stones with judgment, and really, for such a small creature, launched them well. The Squire felt half disposed to step forward and try his skill too. When one shot failed he was half-sorry, half-inclined to chuckle as over an antagonist; and when there came a great success, a succession of six or seven reports one after another as the flat pebble skimmed over fold after fold of the water, he could not help saying, “Bravo!” in generous applause; generous, for somehow or other he felt as if he were playing on the other side. This sensation aroused him; he had not been so self-forgetting for many a day. “Bravo!” he cried, with something like glee in his voice.

The little boy turned round hastily. What a strange meeting! Oddly enough it had never occurred to the Squire to think who it was. Strangers were rife enough in these regions, and people would now and then come to Penninghame with their families—who would stray into the Chase, taking it for public property. But for the ducks and drakes which interested him, he would probably have collared the little fellow, and demanded to know what right he had to be here. He was therefore quite unprepared for the encounter, and looked with the strangest emotions of wonder and half-terror into the face which was so familiar to him, but so strange, the face of his grandson and heir. When once he had seen the child no further doubt was possible. He stared at him as if he had been a little ghost. He had not presence of mind to turn on his heel and go away at once, which would have been the only way of keeping up his former tactics; he was speechless and overpowered; and there was nobody by to spy upon him, no grown-up spectators—not even the other child to observe what he did, or listen to what he said. In this case the Squire did not feel the need to be vigilant, which in other circumstances would have given him self-command. Thus the shock and surprise, and the perfect freedom of his position, unwatched and unseen, alike broke down all his defences. After the first start he stood still and gazed at the child, who still, more frankly and with much less emotion, gazed at him.

“Who are you, sir?” the grandfather said, with a tone that was meant to be very peremptory. The jar in it was incomprehensible to Nello: but yet it gave him greater courage.