Heriot's Choice: A Tale

by Rosa Nouchette Carey

Ethel's refusal of Edgar Cathcart had inflicted a deadly blow to her father's interests, and one that he was never likely to forgive, all the more that he was shrewd enough to suspect that she had not been altogether indifferent to his fascination of manner.

Now above all things he had coveted this man for his son-in-law. Broadlands and its hereditary thousands would have been no mean match for the daughter of a country squire. With Edgar Cathcart to back him he could have snapped his fingers at the few loyal voters who would have still rallied round their erring townsman, and from a hint that had been lately dropped, he knew the banker was ready at any moment to renew his offer; but Ethel had persisted in her refusal, and bitterly and loudly did her father curse the folly of a girl who could renounce such a position for a mere whim or fancy.

'If you do not love him, whom do you love?' he had said to her, and, courageous as she was, she had quailed before the sneer that had accompanied his words.

But she never guessed the thought that rose in his mind as he said them. 'She has some infatuation that makes her proof against other men's addresses,' he argued angrily with himself. 'No girl in her senses could be blind to the attraction of a man like Edgar Cathcart unless she has already given away her heart. I am not satisfied about this fellow Heriot. He comes here far too often, and she encourages him. I always thought he meant to marry Lambert's prim sister; but he is so deep there is no reading him. I shall have to pick a quarrel to get rid of him, for if he once gets an influence over Ethel, all Cathcart's chances are gone.'

Like many other narrow-minded men, Mr. Trelawny brooded over an idea until it became fixed and ineradicable. Ethel's warm reception of Dr. Heriot, and her evident pleasure in his society, were construed as so many evidences of his own sagacity and her guilt. His only child and heiress, for whom he had planned so splendid a future, intended to throw herself away on a common country practitioner; she meant to disgrace herself and him.

The wound rankled and became envenomed, steeping his whole soul in bitterness and discontent. He was a disappointed man, he told himself—disappointed in his ambition and in his domestic affections. He had loved his wife, as such men love, next to himself; he had had a certain pride in the possession of her, and though he had ever ruled her with a rod of iron, he had mingled much fondness with his rule. But she had left him, and the sons, who had been to him as the twin apples of his eyes, had gone likewise. He had groaned and humbled himself beneath that terrible stroke, and had for a little time walked softly as one who has been smitten justly; and the pathos of his self-pity had been such that others had been constrained to feel for him, though they marvelled that his daughter, with the mother's eyes, had so little power to comfort him.

There were times when he wondered also, when his veiled coldness showed rents in it, and he owned to a certain pride in her that was not devoid of tenderness.

For it was only of late that he had fallen into such carping ways, and that the real breach was apparent. It was true Ethel had her mother's eyes, but she lacked her mother's submissive gentleness; never a meek woman, she had yet to learn the softness that disarms wrath. Her open-eyed youth found flaws in everything that was not intrinsically excellent. She canvassed men and manners with the warm injudiciousness of undeveloped wisdom; acts were nothing, motives everything, and no cleanness available that had a stain on its whiteness.

In place of the plastic girlhood he expected, Mr. Trelawny found himself confronted by this daring and youthful Argus. He soon discovered Ethel's inner sympathies were in open revolt against his. It galled him, even in his pride, to see those clear, candid eyes measuring, half unconsciously and half incredulously, the narrow limits of his nature. Whatever he might seem to others, he knew his own child had weighed him in the balance of her harsh-judging youth, and found him wanting.

It was not that her manner lacked dutifulness, or that she ever failed in the outward acts of a daughter; below the surface of their mutual reserve there was, at least on Ethel's part, a deep craving for a better understanding; but even if he were secretly fond of her, there was no denying that Mr. Trelawny was uneasy in her presence; conscience often spoke to him in her indignant young voice; under those shining blue eyes ambition seemed paltry, and the stratagems and manœuvres of party spirit little better than mere truckling and the low cunning of deceit.