CHAPTER XI.
THOUGHTLESS WORDS
This is the last part of our history, and you must be prepared for changes, although but little time—not very much more than a year—has gone by.
Death has been busy during that period. Mrs. Peter Arkell survived her son so short a time, that it is already twelve months since she was laid in the churchyard of St. James the Less. It is a twelvemonth also since Mr. Fauntleroy died, and his daughters are the great heiresses of Westerbury.
Westerbury had need of heiresses, or something else substantial, to keep up its consequence; for it was dwindling down lower (speaking of its commercial importance) day by day. The clerical party (in contradistinction to the commercial) rose and flourished; the other fell.
Amidst those with whom it was beginning to be a struggle to keep their heads above water was Mr. Arkell. The hope that times would mend; a hope that had buoyed up for years and years other large manufacturers in Westerbury, was beginning to show itself what it really was—a delusive one. A deplorable gloom hung over the brow of Mr. Arkell, and he most bitterly repented that he had not thrown this hope to the winds long ago, and given up business before so much of his good property was sacrificed. He had in the past year made those retrenchments in his expenditure, which, in point of prudence, ought to have been made before; but his wife had set her face determinately against it, and to a peaceable-dispositioned man like Mr. Arkell, the letting the ruin come is almost preferable to the contention the change involves. Those of my readers who may have had experience of this, will know that I only state what is true. But necessity has no law: and when Mr. Arkell could no longer drain himself to meet these superfluous expenses, the change was made. The close carriage was laid down; the household was reduced to what it had been in his father's time—two maids, and a man for the horse and garden, and he admonished his wife and daughters that they must spend in dress just half what they had spent. But with all the retrenchment, Mr. Arkell saw himself slowly drifting downwards. His manufactory was still kept on; but it had been far better given up. It must surely come to it, and Travice would have to seek a different channel of obtaining a living. Not only Travice: the men who had grown old in William Arkell's service, they must be turned adrift. There's not the least doubt that this last thought helped, more than all else, to keep Mr. Arkell's decision on the balance.
And Peter Arkell? Peter was in worse plight than his cousin. As it had been all their lives, the contrast in their fortunes marked, so it was still; so it would be to the end. William still lived well, and as a gentleman; he had but lopped off superfluities; Peter was a poor, bowed, broken man, obliged to be careful how he laid out money for even the common necessaries of life. But for Mildred's never-ceasing forethought, those necessaries might not always have been bought. The death of his wife, the death of his gifted son, had told seriously upon Peter Arkell: and his health, never too good, had since been ominously breaking up.
His good and gentle daughter, Lucy, had care upon her in many ways. The little petty household economies it was necessary to practise unceasingly, wearied her spirit; the uncertainty of how they were to live, now that her father could no longer teach or write—and his learned books had brought him in a trifle from time to time—chilled her hope. Not yet had she recovered the shock, the terrible heart-blow brought to her by the death of Henry; and her mother's death had followed close upon it. It seemed to have cast a blight upon her young spirit: and there were times when Lucy, good and trusting girl though she was, felt tempted to think that God was making her path one of needless sorrow. The sad, thoughtful look was ever in her countenance now, in her sweet brown eyes; and her fair features, not strictly beautiful, but pleasant to look upon, grew more like what Mildred's were after the blight had fallen upon her. But no heart-blight had as yet come to Lucy.
One evening an old and confidential friend of Peter Arkell's dropped in to sit an hour with him. It was Mr. Palmer, the manager and cashier of the Westerbury bank, and the brother to Mr. Palmer of Heath Hall. As the two friends talked confidentially on this evening, deploring the commercial state of the city, and saying that it would never rise again from its distress, Mr. Palmer dropped a hint that the firm of George Arkell and Son had been effecting another mortgage on their property. Mr. Peter Arkell said nothing then; but Lucy, who went into the room on the departure of their guest, noticed that he remained sunk in melancholy silence; and she could not arouse him from it.
Travice Arkell came in. Travice was in the habit of coming in a great deal more than one of the ruling powers at home had any idea of. Travice would very much have liked to make Lucy his wife; but there were serious impediments in more ways than one, and he was condemned to silence, and to wait and see what an uncertain future might bring forth.
The romance that had been enacted in the early days of William Arkell and Mildred was being re-enacted now. But with a difference. For whereas William, as you have seen, forsook the companion of his boyhood, and cast his love upon a stranger, Travice's whole hopes were concentrated upon Lucy. And Lucy loved him with all the impassioned ideality of a first and powerful passion, with all the fervour of an imaginative and reticent nature. It was impossible but that each should detect, in a degree, the feelings of the other, though they might not be, and had not been, spoken of openly.
Travice reached the chess-board from a side-table where it was kept, took his seat opposite Peter, and began to set out the men. Of the same kind, considerate nature that his father was before him, he compassionated the lonely man's solitary days, and was wont to play a game at chess with him sometimes in an evening, to while away one of his weary hours. But Peter, on this night, put up his hand in token of refusal.
"Not this evening, Travice. I am not equal to it. My spirits are low."
"Do you feel ill?" asked Travice, beginning to put the pieces in the box again.
"I feel low; out of sorts. Mr. Palmer has been here talking of things, and he gives so deplorable a state of private affairs generally, consequent upon the long-continued commercial depression, that it's hard to say who's safe and whose tottering. He has especial means of ascertaining, you know, so there's no doubt he's right."
"Well, what of that?" returned Travice. "It cannot affect you; you are not in business."
"True. I was not thinking of myself."
"A game at chess will divert your thoughts."
"Not to-night, Travice; I'd rather not play to-night."
"Will you have a game, Lucy?"
She looked up from her sewing to smile a negative. "That would be leaving papa quite to his thoughts. I think we had better talk to him."
"Travice," Peter Arkell suddenly said, "I am sure this depression must seriously affect your father."
"Of course it does," was the ready answer. "He has just now had to borrow more money again."
"Then Palmer was right," thought Peter Arkell. "Will he keep on the business?" he asked aloud.
"I should not, were I in his place," said Travice. "He would have given up long ago, I believe, but for thinking what's to become of me. Of course if he does give up, I am thrown on the world, a wandering Arab."
His tone was as much one of jest as of gravity. The young do not see things in the same light as the old. To his father and to Peter Arkell, his being thrown out of the business he had embraced as his own, appeared an almost irrecoverable blight in life; to Travice himself it seemed but a very slight misfortune. The world was before him, and he had honour, education, health, and brains; surely he could win his way in it!
"It is not well to throw down one calling and take up another," observed Peter, thoughtfully. "It does not always answer."
"But if you are forced to it!" argued Travice. "There's no help for it then, and you must do the best you can."
"It is a pity but you had gone to Oxford, Travice, and entered into some profession!"
"I suppose it is, as things seem to be turning out. Thrown out of the manufactory, I should seem a sort of luckless adventurer, not knowing which way to turn to prey upon the public."
"It would be just beginning life again," said Peter, his grave tone bearing in it a sound of reproach to the lighter one.
He rose, and went to the next room—the "Peter's study" of the old days—to get something from his desk there. Travice happened to look at Lucy, and saw her eyes fixed upon him with a troubled, earnest expression. She blushed as he caught their gaze.
"What's the matter, Lucy?"
"I was wondering whatever you would do, if Mr. Arkell does give up."
"I think I should be rather glad of it? I could turn astronomer."
"Turn astronomer! But you don't really mean that, Travice?"
He laughed.
"I should mean it, but for one thing."
"What is that one thing?"
"That it might not find me in bread and cheese. Perhaps they'd make me honorary star-gazer at the observatory royal. The worst is, one must eat and drink; and the essentials necessary for that don't drop from the clouds, as the manna once did of old. Very convenient for some of us if it did."
"I wish you'd be serious," she rejoined, the momentary tears rising to her eyes. She was feeling wretchedly troubled, she could not tell why, and his light mood jarred upon her.
It changed now as he looked at her. Travice Arkell's face changed to an expression of deep, grave meaning, of troubled meaning, and he dropped his voice to a low tone as he rose and stood near Lucy, looking down upon her.
"I wish I could be serious; I have wished it, Lucy, this long while past. Other men at my age are thinking of forming those social ties that man naturally expects to form; of gathering about him a home, and a wife, and children. I must not; for what I can see at present, they must be denied to me for good and all; unless—unless–"
He broke off abruptly. Lucy, suppressing the emotion that had arisen, glanced up at him, as she waited for the conclusion. But the conclusion did not come.
"You see now, Lucy, why I cannot be serious. Perhaps you have seen why before. In the uncertain state that our business is, not knowing but the end of it may be bankruptcy–"
"Oh, Travice!" she involuntarily exclaimed, in the shock that the word brought to her.
"I do assure you it has crossed my mind now and then, that such may be the final ending. It would break my father's heart, I know, and it would half break mine for his sake; but others in the town have succumbed, who were once nearly as rich as we were, and the fate may overtake us. I wish I could be serious; serious to a purpose; but I cannot."
"I wanted to show you a prospectus, Travice, that was left here to-day," interrupted Peter Arkell, coming back to the room. "I wonder what next they'll be getting up a company over? I put it into my desk, but I can't find it. Lucy, look about for it, will you?"
She got up to obey, and Travice caught a sight of the raised face, whose blushes had been hidden from him; blushes called forth by his words and their implied meaning. She had understood it.
But she had not understood the sentence at whose conclusion Travice Arkell had broken down. "That the ties of wife and children must be denied to him for good and all, unless–"
Unless what? Unless he let them sacrifice him, would be the real answer. Unless he sacrificed himself, his dearest hopes, every better feeling that his heart possessed, at a golden shrine. But Travice Arkell would have a desperate fight first.
The Miss Fauntleroys, co-heiresses of the wealthy old lawyer—who might have died worth more but for his own entanglements in early life—had become intimate and more intimate at the house of William Arkell. Ten thousand pounds were settled on each, and there was other money to divide between them, which was not settled. How Lawyer Fauntleroy had scraped together so much, Westerbury could not imagine, considering he had been so hampered with old claims. Strapping, vulgar, good-humoured damsels, these two, as you have before heard; with as little refinement in looks, words, and manner as their father had possessed before them. Their intimacy had grown, I say, with the Arkell family. Mrs. Arkell courted them to her house; the young ladies were quite eager to frequent it without courting; and it had come to be whispered all over the gossiping town, that Mr. Arkell's son and heir might have either of them for the asking.
Perhaps not quite true this, as to the "either," perhaps yes. It was indisputable that both liked him very much; but any hope the younger might have felt disposed to cherish had long been merged in the more recognised claim to him of the elder; recognised by the young ladies only, mind you, in the right, it may be, of her seniorship. Nothing in the world could have been more satisfactory to Mrs. Arkell than this union. She overlooked their want of refinement, and their many other wants of a similar nature—of refinement, indeed, she may have deemed that Travice possessed enough for himself and for a wife too—she thought of the golden hoard in the bank, the firm securities in the three per cent consols, and she pertinaciously cherished the hope and the resolve that Barbara Fauntleroy should become Barbara Arkell.
It is well to say "pertinaciously." That Travice had set his resolve against it, she tacitly understood; and once when she went so far as to put her project before him in a cautious hint, Travice had broken out with the ungallant assertion that he would "as soon marry the deuce." But he might have to give in at last. The constant dropping of water on a stone will wear it away; and the constant, unceasing tongue of a woman has been known to break the iron walls of man's will.
Another suitor had recently sprung up for Miss Lizzie Fauntleroy. No less a personage than Benjamin Carr. The reappearance of Mr. Dundyke upon the scene of the living world had considerably astonished many people; possibly, amidst others, Ben Carr himself. In the great relief it brought to the mind of Mr. Arkell, distorted, you may remember, with a certain unpleasant doubt, he almost forgot to suspect him at all; and he buried the past in silence, and in a measure, took luckless Ben into favour again; that is, he did not forbid him his house.
Ben, in fact, had come out apparently nourishing from all past escapades suspected and unsuspected, and was residing with his father, and dressing like a gentleman. No more was heard of his wish to go abroad. Squire Carr had made him a half promise to put him into a farm; and while Ben waited for this, he paid court to Lizzie Fauntleroy. At first she laughed in his face for an old fool, next she began to giggle at his soft speeches, and now she listened to him. Ben Carr had some attraction yet, in spite of his four-and-forty years.
In the course of the following morning, Peter Arkell suddenly announced his intention of going out, to the great surprise of Lucy. It was a most unfit day, rainy, and bleak for the season; and he had not stepped over the threshold for weeks and weeks.
"Papa! You cannot go out to-day. It is not fit for you."
"Yes, I shall go. I want particularly to speak to my cousin William: you can help me thither with your arm, Lucy. Get my old cloak down, and air it at the fire; I can wrap myself in that."
Lucy ventured no further remonstrance. When her papa took a thing into his head, there was no turning him.
They started together through the bad weather to the house of William Arkell. The dear old house! where Peter had spent so many pleasant evenings in his youthful days. He crossed the yard at once to the manufactory, telling Lucy to go indoors and wait for him. William Arkell was alone in his private room, and was not a little surprised at the visit.
"Why Peter!" he exclaimed, rising from his desk, and placing an arm-chair by the fire, "What has brought you out such a day as this? Sit down."
Before Peter did so, he closed the door, so that they should be quite alone. He then turned and clasped his cousin by the hand.
"William," he began, emotion mingling with his utterance, "I have come to you, a poor unhappy man. Conscious of my want of power to do what I ought—fearing that there is less chance of my doing it, day by day."
"What do you mean?" inquired Mr. Arkell.
"Amidst the ruin that has almost universally fallen on the city, you have not escaped, I fear your property is being seriously drawn upon?"
"And, unless things mend, it will soon be drawn to an end, Peter."
"Heaven help me!" exclaimed Peter. "And to know that I am in your debt, and cannot liquidate it! It is to speak of this, that I am come out to-day."
"Nay, now you are foolish!" exclaimed Mr. Arkell. "What matters a hundred pounds or two, more or less, to me? The sum would cut but a poor figure by the side of what I am now habituated to losing. Never think of it, Peter: I never shall. Besides, you had it from me in driblets, so that I did not miss it."
"When I had used to come to you for assistance in my illnesses, for I was ashamed to draw too much upon Mildred," proceeded the poor man, "I never thought but that I should, in time, regain permanent strength, and be able to return it. I never meant to cheat you, William."
"Don't talk like that, Peter!" interrupted Mr. Arkell. "If the money were returned to me now, it would only go the way that the rest is going. I have always felt glad that it was in my power to render you assistance in your necessities: and if I stood this moment without a shilling to turn to, I should not regret it any more than I do now."
They continued in converse, but we need not follow it. Lucy meanwhile had entered the house, and went about, looking for some signs of its inhabitants. The general sitting-room was empty, and she crossed the hall and opened the door of the drawing-room. A bouncing lady in fine attire was coming forth from it, talking and laughing loudly with Mr. Arkell; it was Barbara Fauntleroy.
Shaking hands with Lucy in her good-humoured manner as she passed her, she talked and laughed her way out of the house. Lucy was in black silk and crape still; Miss Fauntleroy was in the gayest of colours; and Mrs. Peter Arkell had been dead longer than Mr. Fauntleroy. They had worn their black a twelvemonth and then quitted it. It was not fashionable to wear mourning long now, said the Miss Fauntleroys.
Charlotte Arkell, with scant ceremony, sat down to the piano, giving Lucy only a nod. Nothing could exceed the slighting contempt in which she and her sister held Lucy. They had been trained in it. And they were highly accomplished young ladies besides, had learnt everything there was to be taught, from the harp and oriental tinting, down to Spanish, German, and chenille embroidery. Lucy's education had been solid, rather than ornamental: she spoke French well, and played a little; and she was more skilled in plain sewing than in fancy. They never allowed their guarded fingers to come into contact with plain work, and had just as much idea of how anything useful was done, as of how the moon was made. So these two fine young ladies despised Lucy Arkell, after the fashion of the fine young ladies of the present day. Charlotte also was great in the consciousness of other self-importance, for she was soon to be a wife. That Captain Anderson whom you once saw at a concert, had paid a more recent visit to Westerbury; and he left it, engaged to Charlotte Arkell.
Charlotte played a few bars, and then remembered to become curious on the subject of Lucy's visit. She whirled herself round on the music stool: it had been a favourite motion of her mother's in the old days.
"What have you come for, Lucy?"
"Papa wanted to see Mr. Arkell, and I walked with him. He is gone into the manufactory."
"I thought your papa was too ill to go out."
"He is very ailing. I think he ought not to have come out on a day like this. Do not let me interrupt your practising, Charlotte."
"Practising! I have no heart to practise!" exclaimed Charlotte. "Papa is always talking in so gloomy a way. He was in here just now: I was deep in this sonata of Beethoven's, and did not hear him enter, and he began saying it would be better if I and Sophy were to accustom ourselves to spend some of our time usefully, for that he did not know how soon we might be obliged to do it. He has laid down the carriage; he has made fearful retrenchments in the household: I wonder what he would have! And as to our buying anything new, or subscribing to a concert, or anything of that sort, mamma says she cannot get the money from him. I wish I was married, and gone from Westerbury! I am thankful my future home is to be far away from it!"
"Things may brighten here," was all the consolation that Lucy could offer.
"I don't believe they ever will," returned Charlotte. "I see no hope of it. Papa looks sometimes as if his heart were breaking."
"How soon the Miss Fauntleroys have gone out of mourning!" observed Lucy.
"Oh, I don't know. They wore it twelve months; that's long enough for anything. Let me give you a caution, Lucy," added Charlotte, laughing: "don't hint at such a thing as that Barbara Fauntleroy's not immaculate perfection: it would not do in this house."
"Why?" exclaimed Lucy, wondering at her words and manner.
"She is intended for its future head, you know, when the present generation of heads shall—shall have passed away. I'm afraid that's being poetical; I didn't mean to be."
Lucy sat as one in a maze, wondering WHAT she might understand by the words. And Charlotte whirled round on her stool again to the sonata, with as little ceremony as she had whirled from it.
While Miss Fauntleroy was there, Mrs. Arkell had sent a private message to Travice that she wanted him; but Travice did not obey the summons until the young lady was gone. He came then: and Mrs. Arkell attacked him for not coming before; she was attacking him now, while Charlotte and Lucy were talking.
"Why did you not come in at once?" asked Mrs. Arkell, in the cross tone which had latterly become habitual; "Barbara Fauntleroy was here."
"That was just the reason," returned Travice, in his usual candid manner; "I waited until she should be gone."
If there was one thing that vexed Mrs. Arkell worse than the fact itself, it was the open way in which her son steadily resisted the hints to him on the subject of Miss Fauntleroy. She felt at times that she could have beaten him; she was feeling so now. Her temper turned acrid, her face flushed, her voice rose.
"Travice, if you persist in this systematic rudeness–"
"Pardon me, mother. I wish you would refrain from bringing up the subject of Miss Fauntleroy to me. I do not care to hear of her in any way; she–Who's that? Why, I do believe it's Lucy's voice!"
The colloquy with Mrs. Arkell had taken place in the hall. Travice made one bound to the drawing-room. The sudden flush on the pale face, the glad eagerness of the tone, struck dismay to the heart of Mrs. Arkell. She quickly followed him, and saw that he had taken both of Lucy's hands in greeting.
"Oh, Lucy! are you here this morning? I know you have come to stay the day! Take your things off."
Lucy laughed—and Mrs. Arkell had the pleasure of seeing that her cheeks wore an answering flush. She shook her head and drew her hands from Travice, who seemed as if he could have kept them for ever.
"Do I spend a day here so often that you think I can come for nothing else? I only came with papa, and I am going back with him soon."
But Travice pressed the point of staying. Charlotte also—feeling, perhaps, that even Lucy was a welcome break to the monotony the house had fallen into—urged it. Mrs. Arkell maintained a marked silence; and in the midst of it the two gentlemen came in. Mr. Arkell kissed Lucy, and said she had better stop.
But Peter settled it the other way. Lucy must go home with him then, he said; but if she liked to come down in the afternoon, and stay for the rest of the day, she could. It was so settled, and they took their departure. Mr. Arkell walked with Peter across the court-yard, talking. Travice, in the very face and eyes of his mother, gave his arm to Lucy.
"Why did you not stay?" he whispered, as they arrived at the gates. "Lucy, do you know that to part with you is to part with my life's sunshine?"
Mrs. Arkell was standing at the door as he turned, and beckoned to him from the distance.
"I wish to speak with you," she said, as he approached.
She led the way into the dining-room, and closed the door on them, as if for some formidable interview. Travice saw that she was in a scarcely irrepressible state of anger, and he perched himself on a vacant side-table—rather a favourite way of his. He began humming a tune; gaily, but not disrespectfully.
"What possesses you to behave in this absurd manner to Lucy Arkell?" she began, in passion.
"What have I done now?" asked Travice.
"You are continually, in some way or other, contriving to thrust that girl's company upon us! I will not permit it, Travice; I have borne with it too long. I–"
"Why, she is not here twice in a twelvemonth," interrupted Travice.
"Don't say absurd things. She is. And she is not fit society for your sisters."
"If they were only half as worthy of her society as she is superior to them, they would be very different girls from what they are," spoke Travice, with a touch of his father's old heat. "If there's one thing that Lucy is, pre-eminently, it's a gentlewoman. Her mother was one before her."
Mrs. Arkell grew nearly black in the face. While she was trying to speak, Travice went on.
"Ask my father what his opinion of Lucy is. He does not say she is here too much."
"Your father is a fool in some things, and so are you!" retorted Mrs. Arkell, a sort of scream in her voice. "How dare you oppose me in this way, Travice?"
"I am very sorry to do so," returned the young man; "and I beg your pardon if I say more than you think I ought. But I cannot join in your unjust feeling against Lucy, and I will not tolerate it. I wish you would not bring up this subject at all: it is one we never can agree upon."
"You requested me just now not to 'bring up' the subject of Miss Fauntleroy to you," said Mrs. Arkell, in a tone of irony. "How many other subjects would you be pleased to interdict?"
"I don't want to hear even the name of those Fauntleroys!" burst out Travice, losing for a moment his equanimity. "Great brazen milkmaids!"
"No! you'd rather hear Lucy's!" screamed Mrs. Arkell. "You'd–"
"Lucy! Don't name them with Lucy, my dear mother. They are not fit to tie Lucy's shoes! She has more sense of propriety in her little finger, than they have in all their great overgrown bodies!"
This was the climax. And Mrs. Arkell, suppressing the passion that shook her as she stood, spoke with that forced calmness that is worse than the loudest fury. Her face had turned white.
"Continue your familiar intercourse with that girl, if you will; but, listen!—you shall never make a wife of anyone so paltry and so pitiful! I would pray Heaven to let me follow you to your grave, Travice, rather than see you marry Lucy Arkell."
She spoke the words in her blind rage, never reflecting on their full import; never dreaming that a day was soon to come, when their memory would return to her in her extremity of vain and hopeless repentance.