CHAPTER XIII.—FATHER AND SON.
Sir Sykes was a weak man, and there are few readier elements of mischief than that of a weak man in a strong place—meaning thereby a position where there is authority to be abused. Some of the world’s worst tyrants have been emphatically weak, mere spiteful capricious children grown to man’s estate, and indued respectively with all the powers of the purple, the royal jika, and the triple tiara. But then the mighty system which they, unworthy, swayed, resembled some gigantic engine put into motion by the idle touch of a truant urchin’s hand, and crushing all resistance by the resistless force of its swaying levers and grinding wheels.
A Devonshire baronet, in common with baronets elsewhere, does expect to be to a certain extent the petty autocrat of his own fields and hamlets, to find that there are those who court the great man’s smile and tremble at his frown, and to hold rule within strictly constitutional limits over the dwellers on his land and the inmates of his house. The melancholy which had become a part of Sir Sykes Denzil’s inner nature, and the indolence which had gradually incrusted him, had prevented the lord of Carbery from asserting in practice the prerogatives which he knew to belong to him in theory. Thus he did not really administer patriarchal justice on his estate, as some hale landlords do. His bailiff decided which labourers should be employed, which dismissed, and what wages should be allotted to crow-boys and weeding-girls. The steward arranged as to the barns to be rebuilt, the repairs to be granted or refused, the rent of whose cottage was to be forgiven, or which arrears were to be sternly exacted. Poachers whom the head-keeper did not like, found Sir Sykes’s vicarious wrath make the parish too hot to hold them, while luckier depredators wired hares unpunished.
The part of a roi fainéant suited better with Sir Sykes Denzil’s languid habits than they did with his tolerably active mind. He was well aware that the lethargy of King Log is always supplemented by the not wholly disinterested activity of King Log’s zealous ministers, and had formed frequent resolutions as to taking into his own hands the reins of government and becoming in fact as well as in name the lord of the manor—of six manors indeed, of which Carbery was the chief. These resolutions had never been acted upon; but Sir Sykes had always been able to lay to his soul the flattering unction that it rested with him alone to choose the time for realising them.
The events of the last few weeks had given some rude shocks to the baronet’s indolent self-complacency. He had been threatened with consequences of which he, and he alone, could thoroughly comprehend the direful nature, and he had been forced to a series of compliances, each of which had degraded him in his own eyes. He had borne with the cynic effrontery of the sailor Hold. He had beneath his roof, seated at his table, in constant association with him and his, an unbidden guest. Mr Wilkins he had, through an unlucky chance, encountered, and instantly the fetters of a new vassalage appeared to be fastened on his reluctant limbs. And he owed this fresh humiliation to the misconduct of his own son!
Sir Sykes was very angry as he quitted No. 11 to seek out the chamber in which Jasper lay, so angry that his temper overmastered for the moment both the pleadings of natural affection and the instinct of caution. He laid his hand brusquely on the door of the room which had been pointed out to him as that to which Jasper had been conveyed, and was about to enter, with small regard to the nerves of the invalid within, when he felt a grasp upon his sleeve, and turned to be confronted by the wiry figure, anxious face, and bead-like black eyes of little Dr Aulfus.
‘Excuse me. Sir Sykes Denzil, unless I am very much mistaken?’ said the doctor, taking off his hat with such an air, that Sir Sykes, irritable as he was, felt compelled to acknowledge the bow. ‘Allow me to introduce myself: Dr Aulfus, Benjamin Aulfus, Ph.D., M.D., M.R.C.S. of Heidelberg, Edinburgh, and London respectively. We never chanced, before to-day, Sir Sykes, to come personally into contact, and I regret that the occasion of our first interview should be so sad a one.’
During this speech, the doctor’s eyes had taken stock as it were of Sir Sykes’s aspect, and had read the signs of anger in his knitted brows and quivering mouth as accurately as a mountain shepherd discerns the portents of the coming storm. Nor was the reason far to seek. Gossip had been busy, of course, with the private affairs of so exalted a family as that which dwelt at Carbery Chase; and Sir Sykes would have been astonished to hear at how many minor tea-tables the surgeon—for, his medical diplomas notwithstanding, Dr Aulfus was consulted nineteen times out of twenty as a general practitioner—had listened while Captain Denzil’s debts and his father’s displeasure were freely canvassed.
Of the arrival of Mr Wilkins and of the acceptances which the lawyer held, the little man of healing could of course know nothing. But he shrewdly surmised that Jasper had staked all that he could scrape together, and probably more, on the event of the desperate race which he had ridden on that day, and that his pecuniary losses had provoked the indignation of Sir Sykes, already smarting under recent sacrifices.
‘You are very good, sir; I shall see my son, and then’——