Works of Ellen Wood, page 852
“I had great mind not to tell you at all, Hamish,” she confessed. “Papa’s temperament is nearly as sanguine as yours; and if he writes in poor spirits, saying he fears it may turn out that he is a ruined man, I know things must be very bad.”
“But why have hesitated to tell me, Ellen?”
“To save you anxiety. Don’t you see what it implies? If papa loses his property, the fortune that would have been mine sometime will be lost too.”
Had she been speaking of the probable loss of some mere trifle, he could scarcely have heard it with more equanimity. It seemed to Hamish that the future was, according to human foresight, in his own hands.
“Never mind, Ellen, we have a resource that cannot be lost. I will take care of you, Heaven aiding me; you shall have every needful and substantial good in abundance.”
“Yes, that is just it. You work too much already: you would work more then.”
Hamish laughed. “Do you know what I wish, Ellen? I wish the day were four-and-twenty hours long instead of twelve, and that I had two sets of brains and hands.”
“How are you getting on?”
“Oh, so well. It is all right, my darling. And will be.”
They were interrupted by a visitor — Mr. Roland Yorke. There had been a casual meeting once or twice, but this was the first time he had been there. They invited him to come; but Roland had the grace to be ashamed of a certain escapade of his in the days gone by, which brought disgrace for the time being on Arthur Channing, and he had rather held back from appearing. This he partially confessed.
“It would have been so different, you know, Hamish, had I returned with a few millions from Port Natal, and gone home to atone to Arthur in the face and eyes of all the town, and done honour to him for what he is, the best man living, and heaped a fortune upon him. But I have not been able to do that. I’d rather rush off again to Port Natal and its troubles, than I’d go within miles of Helstonleigh.”
“And so, to mend it, you thought you would keep miles away from me,” said Hamish, with his glad smile of welcome. “I think there’s only one person in the world would be more glad to see you than I, and that’s Arthur himself.”
“I know. I know what a good fellow you always were. But I hadn’t the face to come, you see. It was Annabel made me now.”
Suddenly shaking both their hands in the heartiest manner, with a grip that brought pain to Mrs. Channing, who wore rings, Roland fell to at the tea. Hamish, remembering his appetite of old, rang the bell for some good things to be brought in; and Roland was speedily in the midst of the most comfortable enjoyment, mentally and bodily. He gave them his own confidence without the least reserve, both as to present and past; gravely telling everything, including the nearly-embraced hot-pie scheme of commerce, which made Hamish hold his sides, and the having met Gerald at Mrs. Bede Greatorex’s party.
“I rather expect Gerald here this evening,” remarked Hamish.
“Do you?” said Roland, his mouth full of savoury pie. “He won’t be too pleased to see me; he means to cut me, I’m nearly sure. Do you see much of him, Hamish?”
Hamish explained that he did. They were both in the literary line; and Gerald had some good engagements as a reviewer.
“Where’s his wife?” asked Roland. “Yes, please, Mrs. Channing, another cup; plenty of milk and sugar.”
“In the country; somewhere in Gloucestershire. Gerald is not too communicative on that score.”
“Don’t you think, Hamish, he must have been a great duffer to go and marry before he knew how he could keep a wife?”
Hamish raised his eyebrows with the good-natured indifferent manner that Roland so well remembered in the days gone by; but answer made he none. Where Hamish Channing could not praise, he would not blame. Even by his immediate relatives Gerald’s imprudent marriage was tacitly ignored, and the Lady Augusta Yorke bad threatened to box Roland’s ears in Ireland, when he persisted in asking about it.
“I always knew Gerald would not go into the Church,” remarked Roland. “I wouldn’t; they say Tod threatened to run off to sea if they talked to him of it: somehow we boys have a prejudice against following my father’s calling. I’ll tell you a secret, Hamish: if a fellow wants to be made, to have his nonsense knocked out of him, he must go to Port Natal. Do you remember the morning you saw me decamping off for London on my way to it?”
“Don’t I,” said Hamish, his lips parting with merriment at the remembrance. “There was commotion that day at Helstonleigh, Roland; in Galloway’s office especially.”
“And dear old Arthur buried his wrongs and went to the rescue; and poor dying Jenkins got out of his bed to help. He was nothing but a calf, poor fellow, a reed in Mrs. J.’s hands, but he was good as gold. I say, she’s altered.”
“Is she?”
Roland nodded. “The going to Port Natal made me, Hamish,” he resumed; and Hamish was slightly surprised at the serious tone. “I should have been one of the idlest of the family batch but for the lesson I got read to me there. I went out to make my fortune; instead of making it, I had to battle with ill-fate, and ill-fate won the day. They call it names of course; a mistaken enterprise, a miserable failure; but it was just the best thing that could have happened for me. I was a proud, stuck-up ignoramus; I should have depended on Carrick, or anybody else, to get my living for me; but I mean now to earn it for myself.”
When Hamish went to his work later, leaving Ellen to entertain their guest, Roland followed him with his eyes.
There was a change in Hamish Channing, apparent to one even as unobservant as Roland. The face was thinner than of yore; its refined features were paler; they looked etherealized, as it seemed to Roland. The sweet-natured temperament was there still, but some of its once gay lightness had given place to thought. The very frequent mocking tone had been nearly entirely laid aside for one of loving considerateness to all.
“What are you looking at?” questioned Ellen, struck with Roland’s fixed gaze and unusual seriousness.
“At him. He is so changed.”
“Older, do you mean?”
“Law bless you, no. Of course he is older by more than seven years; but he is very young-looking still; he does not look so old as I do, and I am two years his junior. I used to think Hamish Channing the handsomest fellow living, but he was nothing then to what he is now. I hope you won’t consider it’s wrong of me to say it, Mrs. Channing, but there’s something in his face now that makes one think of Heaven.”
“Mr. Yorke!”
“There! I knew what it would be. Mr. Ollivera flies out at me when I say wrong things. Other people don’t say them. It must have been that Port Natal. I thought I was dead once, over there,” added Roland, passing on to another topic with his usual abruptness.
Ellen smiled; she had spoken in surprise only. Roland Yorke, who had brought his chair round to the fire, sat opposite to her, his elbow on his knee, his head bent forward.
“I don’t mean that it makes one think he is going to Heaven — going to die before his time; you need not be afraid, Mrs. Channing It was not that kind of thought at all; only that the angels and people about, up there, must have just such faces as Hamish’s; good, and pure, and beautiful; and just the same sweet expression, and the same loving-kindness in the tone of voice.”
Roland stopped and pulled at his dark whiskers. Mrs. Channing began to think he had also changed for the better.
“Many a one, remembering the past, would have just turned their backs upon me, Mrs. Channing. Instead of that, he is as glad to see me, and makes me as cordially welcome as if I were a lord, or a prize pig sent him at Christmas. What did I nearly die of? you ask. Well, of fever; but I got all sorts of horrid torments. I had the eye-epidemic; it’s caused by the dust, and I thought I was going blind. Then I had what they call Natal sores, a kind of boil; then I nearly had a sun-stroke; the heat’s something awful, you know. And I got the ticks everlastingly.”
“Do you mean the tic-douloureux?”
“Law bless you! A Port Natal tick is an insect. It sits on the top of the grass waiting for you to pass by and darts into your legs; and no earthly thing will get it off again, except tugging at it with tweezers. They have no wings or mouth, nothing but a pair of lancets and a kind of pipe for a body, covered with spikes. Oh, they are nice things. When I set up that store for leeches and candles and pickled pork, I used to go and get the leeches myself, to save buying; lots of them grow in the rivulets round about; but I would bring home a vast many more ticks than leeches, and that didn’t pay, you know. Where’s the little thing?”
“Nelly? She has gone to bed.”
“She is the prettiest child I ever saw.”
“She is just like her papa,” said Mrs. Channing, whose cheeks were flushing softly with pardonable love and pride at the praise of her child.
“So she is. When will his book be out?”
“Ah, I don’t know. He is getting on quickly, he tells me. I think he is a ready writer.”
“I suppose most men of genius are that,” remarked Roland. “He does not talk much about it, does he?”
“Not at all. A very little to me. These wonderful hopes and dreams that lie down deep within us, and go to make up the concealed inner life of our dearest feelings, cannot be spoken of to the world. I have none,” she added, slightly laughing; “I am more practical.”
“Hamish is so hopeful! It is his temperament.”
“Hopeful!” repeated Mrs. Channing; “indeed he is: like nothing I ever saw. You have heard of daydreams, Mr. Yorke; well, this book is his day-dream. He works at it late and early, almost night and day. I tell him sometimes he must be wearing himself out.”
“One never does really wear out from work, Mrs. Channing. I used to think I was wearing out at old Galloway’s; but I didn’t know what work was until I got to Natal. I learnt it then.”
“Did you sit up to work at nights at Port Natal?”
“Only when I had not got a bed to go to,” answered candid Roland. “Mine was not that kind of work, sitting up to burn the mid-night oil; it lay in knocking about.”
“That’s quite different.”
“What puzzles me more than anything is, that Gerald should have turned author,” resumed Roland. “Henry Ollivera was talking about genius at our place the other day. Why, according to what he described it to be, Gerald Yorke must have about as much genius as a walking gander.”
Ellen laughed. “Hamish says Gerald has no real genius,” she said. “But he has a good deal of talent. He is what may be called a dashing writer.”
“Well, I don’t know,” disputed Roland, who was hard of belief in these alleged qualities of his brother. “I remember in the old days at home, when Gerald was at the college-school, he couldn’t be got to write a letter. If Lady Augusta wanted him to write a letter to Carrick, or to George out in India, she would have to din at him for six months. He hated it like poison.”
“That may have been idleness.”
“Oh, we all went in for that,” acknowledged Roland. “I should have been a very lazy beggar to the end of time but for the emigration to Port Natal.”
CHAPTER XII.
Commotion in the Office of Greatorex and Greatorex.
THE summer sun, scorching the walls of houses and the street pavements with its heat and its glare, threw itself in great might into the offices of Greatorex and Greatorex. Josiah Hurst and Roland Yorke were at their desk, writing side by side. Jenner was at his, similarly occupied; Mr. Brown was holding a conversation in an undertone with some stranger, who had entered with him as he came in from an errand: a man of respectable, staid appearance. Something in the cut of his clothes spoke of the provinces; and Roland Yorke, who never failed to look after other people’s affairs, however pressing his own might be, decided that the stranger was a countryman, come up to see the sights of London.
“Which I can’t, except from the outside,” grumbled Roland to himself. “It’s an awful sell to have to go about with empty pockets. I wonder who the fellow is? — he has been whispering there twenty minutes if he’s been one. He looks as if he had plenty in his.”
Mr. Bede Greatorex came in and took his place at his desk. The head-clerk drew his head away from close proximity with his friend’s, and commenced work; a hint to the stranger that their gossip must be at an end.
The latter asked for a pen and ink, wrote a few words on a leaf he tore from his pocket-book, folded it in two, and gave it to Mr. Brown.
“That is my address in town,” he said. “Let me see you to-night. I leave to-morrow at mid-day.”
“Good,” replied Mr. Brown, glancing at the writing on the paper; The stranger went out, lifting his hat to the room generally, and Mr. Brown put the paper away in his pocket.
“Who was that?” asked Mr. Bede Greatorex.
“A gentleman I used to know, sir, a farmer,” was the reply. “I met him outside just now, and he came in with me. We got talking of old times.”
“Oh, I thought it was some one on business for the office,” said Mr. Bede Greatorex, half in apology for inquiring. His face looked worn as usual, his eyes bright and restless. Some of the family could remember that when the late Mrs. Greatorex had first shown symptoms of the malady that killed her, her eyes had been unnaturally bright.
The work went on. The clocks drew near to twelve, and the sun in the heavens grew fiercer. Roland began to look white and flustered. What with the work and what with the heat, he thought he might as well be roughing it at Port Natal. He was doing pretty well on the whole — for him — and did not get lectures above four times a week. To help liking Roland was impossible; with his frank manners, his free good-nature, his unsophisticated mind, and his candid revelations in regard to himself, that would now and again plunge the office into private convulsions. It was also within the range of possibility that his good connections, and the fact of his being free of the house, running up at will to pay unexpected visits to Mrs. Greatorex, had their due weight in Mr. Brown’s mind; for breaches of office etiquette were tolerated in Roland that certainly would not have been in any other clerk, whether he was a gentleman or not. Roland had chosen to constitute himself a kind of enfant de la maison; he and his brothers and sisters had been intimate with the Joliffe girls; he could remember once having nearly got up a fight with Louisa, now Mrs. Bede Greatorex; and, to make Roland understand that in running up-stairs when he chose, darting in upon Mrs. Greatorex as she sat in her boudoir or drawingroom, darting in upon Miss Channing as she gave lessons to Jane Greatorex, he was intruding where he ought not, would have been a hopeless task. Once or twice Mr. Bede Greatorex had voluntarily invited him up to luncheon or dinner; and so Roland made himself free of the house, and in a degree swayed the office.
They were very busy to-day. The work which he and Hurst and Jenner had in hand was being waited for, so that Roland had to stick to it, in spite of the relaxing heat, and fully decided he could not be worse off at Port Natal. The scratching of the pens was going on pretty equally, when Frank Greatorex came in.
“I want a cheque from you, Bede.”
“Where’s Mr. Greatorex?” returned Bede in answer; for it was to him such applications were made in general.
“Gone out.”
Bede put aside the deed he had been sedulously examining, went into his private room, and came back with his cheque-book.
“How much?” he asked of his brother, as he sat down.
“Forty-four pounds. Make it out to Sir Richard Yorke.”
With a simultaneous movement, as it seemed, two of those present raised their heads to look at Frank Greatorex: Roland Yorke and Mr. Brown. The former was no doubt attracted by the sound of his kinsman’s name; what aroused Mr. Brown’s attention did not appear, but he stared for a moment in a kind of amazement.
“Upon consideration, I don’t think I’ll take the cheque with me now; I will call for it later in the day, when I’ve been into the city,” spoke a voice at the door; and Sir Richard Yorke appeared. Bede, who was just then signing the cheque, “Greatorex and Greatorex,” finished the signature, and came forward to shake hands.
“How d’ye do, sir,” spoke up Roland.
Sir Richard’s little eyes peered out over his fat face, and he condescended to recognise his nephew by a nod. Bede Greatorex spoke a few words to the baronet, touching the matter in hand, and turned back to his desk, leaving Frank to escort the old gentleman out. Bede, about to cross the cheque, hesitated.
“Did Mr. Frank say a crossed cheque?” he asked, looking up.
“No, sir; he said simply a cheque,” said Jenner, finding nobody else answered.
“Yes,” broke out Roland, “it’s fine to be that branch of the family. Getting their cheques for forty-four pounds! I wish I could get one for fourty-for shillings.”
“Have the goodness to attend to your own business, Mr. Yorke.”
Bede Greatorex left the cheque uncrossed. In a few minutes, after putting things to rights on his desk, he gathered up his papers, including the cheque and cheque-book, and went into his room. Putting the things altogether into his desk there, — for he had an engagement at twelve, and the hour was within a minute or two of striking, — he locked it and went out by the other door, not coming into the front room again.
Now it happened that Bede Greatorex, who had expected to be absent half an hour at the longest, was unavoidably detained, so that when Sir Richard Yorke returned for his cheque it could not be given to him. Mr. Greatorex, however, was at home then, and drew out another. And the day went on.
“You must cancel that cheque, Bede,” Mr. Greatorex casually observed to his son that same evening, after office-hours. “It was very unbusiness-like to leave it locked up, when you were not sure of coming back in time to give it to Sir Richard.”
“But I thought I was sure. It does not matter.”
“If you will bring me those title-deeds of Cardwells, I’ll go over them myself quietly, and see what I can make out,” said Mr. Greatorex.
Bede crossed the passage to his private room, and unlocked his deck. The deeds Mr. Greatorex asked for were the same that he had been examining in the front office in the morning. Some flaw had been discovered in them, or was suspected, and it was likely to give the office some trouble, which would fall on Bede’s head. There they lay inside the desk, just as Bede had placed them in the morning, with the paperweight upon them; detained at Westminster until a late hour, he had not been to his desk since. Reminded by his father to destroy the cheque — useless now — Bede thought he would do it at once.
