“Yes, he’s a bad boy, Stamford, there’s no denying. But he’s my eldest son, my first child. My God! how I remember all the love and fondness poor Mary and I lavished on him—how we fretted ourselves to death when he had any childish complaint—the agony we were in when he was away from home one night, we thought he was lost. And to think he should have repaid us for all our care and love, perhaps foolish indulgence, like this—like this! It’s very bitter; it’s hard to bear. Dashed if I didn’t envy our gardener last week, whose son was apprenticed to a blacksmith! I did, by Jove! What’s all the money to us now?”
“It is hard, my dear fellow,” said Stamford, touched by his friend’s evident distress and hopeless air. “I pity you from my heart. But are things so very bad? Can nothing be done?”
“Well they might be worse. The girl’s character is good, I believe; she is a dairyman’s daughter, with no education, and that’s all the harm I know of her. She has a pretty face. Carlo met her at a roadside inn near where he was lodging. He writes over and says he was so confoundedly dull and miserable that he’d made up his mind he’d either marry the girl if she’d have him, or shoot himself. She did have him. So this is the end of all our slaving and striving for his benefit and to give him a chance of keeping in the first flight of the best society the colony could show. He goes and throws himself away like this. And we have a daughter-in-law that doesn’t know an aitch when she sees it, I suppose, and if ever she comes here, which isn’t likely, perhaps, can’t tell a finger-glass from a flower-pot.” At this dreadful picture evoked from his inner consciousness, Mr. Grandison groaned again, and made as if he could tear his hair, were such gestures of grief permissible in a member of a fashionable club.
Mr. Stamford did not really know for the moment what to say to console the unhappy father, who, unless his son had died, could hardly have been in a position of more hopeless sorrow. No doubt some fathers would have been sufficiently Spartan to have preferred an honourable death to an undesirable marriage. But, except in business matters, he was not a hard man. Stamford knew that such Lacedæmonian severity was alien to his nature. He set himself to suggest consolatory ideas as the London built phaeton drew up to the club steps.
“It’s a bad enough affair, doubtless. I won’t say I don’t think so. I should have felt all you do, in my own case.” Here Mr. Stamford inwardly scoffed at the possibility of Hubert’s acting in this manner under any possible circumstances. “But it’s no use taking too sombre a view. The girl is good looking, and honest, which is much. She will, doubtless improve with opportunities. If she has any strength of character, she will probably keep Carlo straight for the future. We have known such things happen before. It’s a desperate remedy, but occasionally efficacious.”
“Desperate! You may say so,” replied Mr. Grandison, testily. “Take the other side of the question. Suppose she turns out a flirt or a scold—or both; runs away from him, or he from her, leaving three or four half-bred brats to worry me in my old age. What then?”
With the expression of these gloomy apprehensions as to the probable matrimonial fate of the heir apparent of Chatsworth and many a fair acre of plain and woodland, the phaeton entered the massive and ornate portals of Chatsworth House, and crunched the immaculate gravel, while the lord of all sat with folded arms and darkened brow, indifferent as a captive to outer grandeur.
“Here we are! Come in Harold, old man,” he said, as the wheels almost grazed the portico. “By George, I could find it in my heart to sit down and cry on our own doorstep, but we have to live and see it out, I suppose. Didn’t you say you were going to take Laura back? Better stay and dine. Keep me company, there’s a good fellow. I’m low enough, God knows!”
Harold Stamford would have agreed to this proposal at once, so touched was he by his old friend’s woebegone appearance and desponding words, but he recalled his own engagement. This he pleaded successfully, adding, “You’ll have the whole family here on Thursday.”
“All right, if you can’t, you can’t. Here, Bateman,” he called out to the coachman who was driving away from the front, “don’t go away yet. I want you to take Mr. Stamford and his daughter home. You may as well go back to Batty’s in comfort, and this pair doesn’t get half work enough. They’ll be making a bolt of it one of these days like Carlo, if I don’t look out. Ha, ha!”