CHAPTER I.
THE EVE OF THE TRIAL.
Within a week of Tom Bristow’s first visit to Pincote, and his introduction to the Copes, father and son, Mr. Cope, junior, found himself, much to his disgust, fairly on his way to New York. He would gladly have rebelled against the parental dictum in this matter, if he had dared to do so; but he knew of old how worse than useless it would be for him to offer the slightest opposition to his father’s wishes.
“You will go and say goodbye to Miss Culpepper as a matter of course,” said Mr. Cope to him. “But don’t grow too sentimental over the parting. Do it in an easy, smiling way, as if you were merely going out of town for a few days. Don’t make any promises—don’t talk about the future—and, above all, don’t say a word about marriage. Of course, you will have to write to her occasionally while you are away. Just a few lines, you know, to say how you are, and all that. No mawkish silly love-nonsense, but a sensible, manly letter; and be wisely reticent as to the date of your return. Very sorry, but you don’t know how much longer your business may detain you—you know the sort of thing I mean.”
When the idea had first entered Mr. Cope’s mind that it would be an excellent thing if he could only succeed in getting his son engaged to Squire Culpepper’s only child, it had not been without an ulterior eye to the fortune which that young lady would one day call her own that he had been induced to press forward the scheme to a successful issue. By marrying Miss Culpepper, his son would be enabled to take up a position in county society such as he could never hope to attain either by his own merits, which were of the most moderate kind, or from his father’s money bags alone. But dearly as Mr. Cope loved position, he loved money still better; and it was no part of his programme that his son should marry a pauper, even though that pauper could trace back her pedigree to the Conqueror. And yet, if the squire went on speculating as madly as he was evidently doing now, it seemed only too probable that pauperism, or something very much like it, would be the result, as far as Miss Culpepper was concerned. Instead of having a fortune of at least twenty thousand pounds, as she ought to have, would she come in for as many pence when the old man died? Mr. Cope groaned in spirit as he asked himself the question, and he became more determined than ever to carry out his policy of waiting and watching, before allowing the engagement of the young people to reach a point that would render a subsequent rupture impossible without open scandal—and scandal was a bugbear of which the banker stood in extreme dread.
Fortunately, perhaps, for Mr. Cope’s view, the feelings of neither of the people chiefly concerned were very deeply interested. Edward had obeyed his father in this as in everything else. He had known Jane from a child, and he liked her because she was clever and good-tempered. But she by no means realized his ideal of feminine beauty. She was too slender, too slightly formed to meet with his approval. “There’s not enough of her,” was the way he put it to himself. Miss Moggs, the confectioner’s daughter, with her ample proportions and beaming smile, was far more to his taste. Equally to his taste was the pastry dispensed by Miss Moggs’s plump fingers, of which he used to devour enormous quantities, seated on a three-legged stool in front of the counter, while chatting in a free and easy way about his horses and dogs, and the number of pigeons he had slaughtered of late. And then it was so much easier to talk to Miss Moggs than it was to talk to Jane. Miss Moggs looked up to him as to a young magnifico, and listened to his oracular utterances with becoming reverence and attention; but Jane, somehow, didn’t seem to appreciate him as he wished to be appreciated, and he never felt, quite sure that she was not laughing at him in her sleeve.
“So you are going to leave us by the eight o’clock train to-morrow, are you?” asked Jane, when he went to Pincote to say a few last words of farewell. He had sat down by her side on the sofa, and had taken her unresisting hand in his; a somewhat thin, cold little hand, that returned his pressure very faintly. How different, as he could not help saying to himself, from the warm, plump fingers of Matilda Moggs.
“Yes, I’m going by the morning train. Perhaps I shall never come back. Perhaps I shall be drowned,” he said, somewhat dolorously.
“Not you, Edward, dear. You will live to plague us all for many a year to come. I wish I could do your business, and go instead of you.”
“You don’t mean to say that you would like to cross the Atlantic, Jane?”
“I mean to say that there are few things in the world would please me better. What a fresh and glorious experience it must be to one who has never been far from home!”