“Ay, ay, I was just about nineteen myself then—but no matter. You would see the propriety, my dear boy, of going up to London in the mean time, were it not that Ellen is obliged to leave us to-day; it is no arrangement of mine, I can assure you. If I thought it necessary to get either of you out of the other’s way, I certainly would pack you off, and keep Ellen with me; but the fact is, I am only joint trustee in this business: her other guardians insist on having her away to the house of one of them, to whose nomination I have been over-persuaded to consent. He is needy, and the allowance may be an object; but I would rather pay the money out of my own pocket twice told, than let her go down among them. However, it cannot be helped: she must leave us. Poor thing! with such a fortune and so many connections—keeping myself out of the question, without whose sanction, thank Heaven, they cannot marry her—there never was a more friendless dependent.”
“And has Miss Fane no brother, no father alive?” inquired I.
“Mother, sister, and brother, all the family are dead,” replied Mr Blundell, “excepting her father, who, I am sorry to say, is still alive to everything but a proper sense of his own respectability and his child’s happiness. His last instructions were dated London, but what he is doing there, or where, or how he lives, I cannot tell.”
He had now forgotten my misdemeanours in his own confidential regrets, and I had forgotten my confusion in eagerness to know something more of one who, I felt, for all the careful old gentleman’s prudent veto, was not yet quite out of my reach; although the mention of her fortune, while it made the prize (why should I be ashamed to confess it?) much more seriously valuable, had inspired me with a fear of failure proportionate to the enhanced advantages of success.
“What a pity, sir,” I said, going cunningly to work, “that testators do not attend more to the interests of their legatees in the appointment of equally careful guardians, if they think one not enough.”
“Ah, it was the doing of the law, not of her grandfather, else Fane would never have had the control of a penny of it; but had it not been for me, he would have had it all. I fought her battle stoutly though, and kept matters square enough till I was induced to consent to the admission of this other worthy, as a sort of balance-wheel to keep our ill-sorted motions from bringing everything to a stand.”
“And pray, sir,” I went on, elated with my success, “who may this vexatious umpire be?” I fairly overshot the mark.
“That’s no affair of yours, Harry, just now. Go on with your profession, get half-a-dozen years over your head, and a decent independence at least in your pocket, and then I shall be very happy indeed to put the son of an old friend in the way of a good match; but never, Harry, never let your wife have to say that she made a man of you, while you have head and hands and health to make a man of yourself.”
“Dear sir, you are quite right; and believe me, I would never dream of acting otherwise—only—had I not better see about Miss Fane’s hortus siccus, as you say she goes to-day?”