“It was just then, sir, that my dear wife died, and my dear Ellen was born.”
He turned sadly around to look at his daughter. She was walking at some distance with Brent. The earnest murmur of their voices came to us through the stillness. I felt what my friend must be saying in that pleading tone.
“Everything went disastrously with me,” continued Mr. Clitheroe. “I tried to recover my fortunes, fairly and honestly, but it was too late. My creditors took the old Hall. Hugh Clitheroe in Harry the Eighth’s time built it, on land where the family had lived from before Egbert. I lost it, sir. The family came to an end with me. I found sheriff’s officers making beer rings on my old oak dining-table. The Vandykes went. Hugh of Cromwell’s days was divorced from his wife, the Beauty. I tried to keep them together; but scrubs bought them, and stuck them up in their vulgar parlors. Sorry business! Sorry business!”
“You kept a brave heart through it all.”
“Yes, until they accused me of dishonesty. That I felt bitterly. And everybody gave me the cold shoulder. I could get nothing to do. There is not much that a broken-down gentleman can do; but no one would trust me. I grew poorer than you can conceive. I lost all heart. Men are poor creatures,—as a desolate man finds.”
“Not all, I hope,” was my protest.
“Truly not all. But the friends of prosperity are birds that come to be fed, and fly away when the crumbs give out. All are not base and timeserving; but men are busy and careless, and fancy that others can always take care of themselves. I could not beg, sir; but it came near starvation to me in Christian England,—to me and my young daughter, within a year after my misfortunes. Perhaps I was over-proud or over-vain; but I grew tired of the slights of people that had known me in my better days, and now dodged me because I was shabby and poor. I wanted to get out of sight of the ungrateful, ungracious world. The blue sky grew hateful to me. I must live, or, if life was nothing to me, my daughter must not starve. I had a choice of factory or coal-mine to hide myself in. I sank into a coal-mine.”
“A strange contrast!” I said, after a pause.
“I am trying to make the whole history less dreamy. Each seems unreal,—my luxurious life at Clitheroe Hall, and my troglodyte life down in the coal-pit. Idler and slave; either extreme had its own special unhappiness and unhealthiness.”
How much wisdom there was in the weakness of the old man’s character! The more I talked with him, the more pitiable seemed his destiny. “O John Brent!” I groaned in my heart, “plead with the daughter as man never pleaded before. We must save them from the dismal fate before them. And if she cannot master her father, and you, John Brent, cannot master her, there is no hope.”