Works of Ellen Wood

by Ellen Wood

  And the winter went on, and George St. John grew weaker and weaker. Not very perceptibly so to the eyes about him; the decline was too gentle for that. In February, instead of going up to London when Parliament met, he resigned his seat, and then people grew sensible of the change in him, and wondered what was wrong with Mr. Carleton St. John. Mr. Pym came up constantly, and was more and more testy at every visit. He sent drugs; he brought other doctors with him; he met a great physician from the metropolis; but the more he did, the worse seemed to be the effect upon his patient.

  “You’d better give me up for a bad job, Pym, and leave off worrying yourself,” Mr. St. John said to him one day as they were strolling down the park together — for Mr. St. John liked to go out with the doctor when he had paid his visits. “I do you no credit.”

  “It’s because you won’t do it,” gruffly retorted the surgeon. “I order you to a warm climate, and you won’t go.”

  “No; I won’t. I am best here. Send me away to those hot places, and I should only die the sooner. Pym, dear old fellow” — and Mr. St. John put his hand into the surgeon’s— “you are feeling this for me more than I feel it for myself. I have settled my business affairs; I have settled — I humbly hope — other affairs of greater moment; and I can wait my summons tranquilly.”

  “Have you made your will?” asked Mr. Pym, after a pause, which seemed to be chiefly occupied in clearing his throat.

  “No end of weeks ago. The chief thing I had to settle was the guardianship of the children. Of Benja, I may say. George would have naturally fallen to his mother without a will.”

  “And you have left him — Benja — ?”

  “To my wife, just as I have the other. Mr. St John, of Castle Wafer, and General Carleton, are the trustees. I thought of my wife’s half-brother, Captain Darling, as one of them; but his regiment will probably be ordered abroad, and he may be away for years.”

  They walked on a few steps further in silence, to the spot that Mr. St. John called his turning-place, for it was there he generally quitted the surgeon. As they were shaking hands, Mr. Pym retained his patient’s fingers in his, and spoke.

  “Will you forgive an old man for his advice? He is double your age, and has had twenty times the experience. For acquiring good practical lessons of life, commend me to a doctor.”

  “I’ll take it,” said Mr. St. John, “in anything except quitting Alnwick.”

  “Don’t leave Benja under your wife’s charge.”

  “Why not?” came the question, after a pause of surprise.

  “I have my reasons. For one thing, she is not very strong, and the charge of the two children, with you gone, might be found a heavy task.”

  “I think that’s nonsense, Pym,” quietly replied Mr. St. John. “She has plenty of servants, and at a proper age Benja will go to school. George also. You must have some other reason.”

  “True. But I am not sure that you would like me to mention it.”

  “Mention what you will, Pym. Say anything.”

  “Has it occurred to you that it is within the range of possibility your wife may marry again?”

  “My widow may. Yes.”

  “Then, should this prove the case, and she formed new ties about her, Benja might find himself neglected. George is her own child, secure in her love, whatever betide; Benja is different. Have you provided in any way for the contingency I have mentioned?”

  “No. I have left my wife personal and resident guardian at Alnwick until Benja shall be twenty-one. At that period she must leave it, or only remain there as Benja’s guest. It is right, I believe, that it should be so. And I have a precedent in my father’s will.”

  “But his widow was your own mother.”

  Mr. St. John made no immediate reply. The distinction had probably not occurred to him.

  “Take my advice, George St. John,” said the surgeon impressively; “do not leave Benja under the charge of your wife. I would rather not discuss with you the why and the wherefore; but rely upon it some other plan will be better both for the boy and for Mrs. St. John.”

  He went away as he spoke, and George St. John turned slowly back to the Hall. The conversation recalled to his mind with vivid force the almost-forgotten words of Honour; and an uncomfortable feeling of indecision crept into it.

  Still he did not see any feasible way of altering the arrangements he had made. When he died, Alnwick Hall would be Benja’s, and must be the boy’s chief home during his minority; he could not turn his wife out of it, and he could not place any one else in it as Benja’s personal guardian. He had no means of providing a suitable residence for his widow if she left the Hall: in fact, it was only as the heir’s guardian that he could at all adequately provide for her. Neither, it must be confessed, did Mr. St. John himself see any great necessity for separating them: but he was a man amenable to counsel, open to advice, and the opinion of two friends (surely both may be called so!) so attached to him as Mr. Pym and Honour, bore weight with him. It had not been George St. John had he ignored it.

  “May God help me to do right!” he murmured, as he entered the house.

  He dwelt much upon it during the remainder of the day; he lay awake part of the night: and only when he came to a decision did he get to sleep. Early the next morning he rang for his servant; and at eight o’clock the pony-carriage conveyed him to the railway station at Alnwick to take the train. As the market people looked at him, passing them betimes in the fresh February morning, at the bright colour in his face, the wavy brown hair stirred by the gentle breeze, they said to themselves, how well Mr. Carleton St. John was looking, though thin.

  He was going over to Castle Wafer. An hour and a-quarter’s journey brought him to a certain town; there he waited twenty minutes, and took another train. Rather more than another hour and a-quarter of very quick travelling, for this last was an express, conveyed him to Lexington, and thence he took a fly to Castle Wafer.

  It was one of the most charming houses ever seen, nestling in lovely grounds, amidst rising trees of many species. A modern house, built by its present owner, Isaac St. John, who possessed a rare taste for the beautiful, and had made it exquisite. That house was his hobby in life; his care was his half-brother, Frederick St. John. The estate of Castle Wafer was the entailed inheritance of these St. Johns; and Frederick was heir presumptive: the positive heir, said the world; for it was beyond the range of probability that its present owner would ever marry.

  They were second-cousins to the St. Johns of Alnwick, and were next in succession. Of great wealth themselves, far more so than was George St. John, and of more note in the world, they were yet below him in succession to what might be called the original family property. That was not Alnwick. An old baronet of eighty-one, Sir Thomas St. John, held it; he was childless, and therefore it would come at his death to George St. John, and to George St. John’s sons after him. Had he, George St. John, also been childless, the whole, including the title, including Alnwick, would lapse to Isaac St. John.

  George St. John had nearly a two-mile drive. He noted the familiar points on the road and in the fine landscape, as they stood out in the clear but not very bright February day. The sprinkling of cottages near Castle Wafer; the solitary public-house, called the Barley Mow, with its Swinging sign-board; and the old-fashioned red-brick house, Lexington Rectory, which the wiseacres of other days had built nearly two miles from its church and Lexington proper. It stood close to the grounds of Castle Wafer; was the only house of any social standing very near to it; and as George St. John glanced at its windows as he passed, he remembered that its present possessor had received his title to orders from a church in the neighbourhood of Alnwick, of which his father was patron; but he had been a very, very little boy at the time. The house looked empty now; its windows were nearly all closed: and he supposed its incumbent, Dr. Beauclerc, Rector of Lexington and Dean of Westerbury, was away at his deanery.

  “Mr. St. John is at home?” he asked, as the woman came out to thr
ow back the lodge gates.

  “Oh yes, sir.” And indeed George St. John had little need to ask, for Mr. St. John rarely, very rarely, was away from Castle Wafer.

  A few minutes’ turning and winding, and then the front of the house burst upon George St. John’s view, and he was close upon it. The sun broke out at the moment, and he thought he had never before seen any place so beautiful; he always did think so, whenever he thus came upon Castle Wafer. The glistening white front, long rather than high, with its elaboration of ornament; the green terraces, covered with their parterres of flowers, already in bloom, and stretching beyond to the less open grounds; the low French windows, open to the breeze — never did any dwelling impart so cheerful, so attractive a look as did Castle Wafer. To a stranger, having no idea of the sort of house he was going to see, perhaps surprise would be the first feeling; for the place was as unlike a castle as any place could be. Isaac St. John said laughingly sometimes that he ought to change its appellation. There might have been a castle on the lands in the old feudal ages, but no trace remained of it: and the house, which had been pulled down to give place to this fairy edifice, had looked like a companion to the Rectory — red, gaunt, and gloomy.

  As the hall-door was thrown open, and the bright colours fell on its mosaic pavement from the stained-glass windows, gladdening the eye of George St. John, a tall, portly man, rather solemn and very respectable, not to say gentlemanly, was crossing it, and turned his head to see who the visitor might be. Mr. St. John at once stepped past the footman and greeted him. It was Mr. Brumm, Castle Wafer’s chief and most respected servant; the many years’ personal attendant, and in some respects a confidential one, of its master. George St. John held out his hand, as affable men will do by these valued servants, after years of absence.

  “How are you, Brumm? I see I have taken you by surprise.”

  “You have indeed, sir,” said Mr. Brumm, in the slow manner natural to him. “Not more so, I am sure, sir, than you will take my master. It was only this morning that he was mentioning your name.”

  “How is he now?”

  “Better, sir, than he has been. But he has suffered much of late.”

  Mr. Brumm was leading the way into an inner hall, one light and beautiful as the first, with the same soft colours thrown from its several windows. Opening a door here, he looked in and spoke.

  “A visitor, sir — Mr. Carleton St. John.”

  By a bright fire in this light and charming room — and if you object to the reiteration of the term, I can only plead in excuse that everything was light and charming at Castle Wafer — with its few fine paintings, its glittering mirrors, its luxuriant chairs and sofas, its scattered books, and its fine harmonium, sat a deformed gentleman. Not any hideous phase of deformity that repels the eye, but simply with a hump upon his back: a small hump, the result of an accident in infancy. He had a pale, wan face, with the sharp chin usually accompanying these cases; a face that insensibly attracted you by its look of suffering, and the thoughtful earnestness of its bright, clear, well-opened hazel eyes. Of nearly middle height, that hump was the only unsightly point about him; but he was a man of suffering; and he lived chiefly alone, he and his pain. His hair was dark, silken, rather scanty; but not a thread of silver could be seen in it, though he was close on his fiftieth year.

  Laying down the book he was reading, Isaac St. John rose at the mention of the name; and stepped forward in the quiet, undemonstrative way characteristic of him, a glad smile lighting up his face.

  “George! how pleased I am to see you! So you have thought of me at last?”

  “I was half ashamed to come, Mr. St. John, remembering that it is five years since I came before. But I have met Mrs. St. John repeatedly in London, and sometimes Frederick; so that I have, as it were, seen you at second-hand. I have not been well, too.”

  Suitable, perhaps, to the difference in their ages, it might be observed that while the elder man called the younger “George,” he himself was addressed as “Mr. St. John.” But Mr. St. John had been almost grown up when George was a baby, and could remember having nursed him.

  “You do not look well, George,” he said, scanning the almost transparent face before him.— “And — are you taller? You look so.”

  “That’s because I’m thinner. See!” — opening his coat—” I’m nothing but a skeleton.”

  “What is wrong?”

  “I can’t tell you. I grow thinner and thinner and weaker and weaker, and that’s about all I know. I may pick up as spring comes on, and get right again; but — it may be the other way.”.

  Isaac St. John did not answer. An unpleasant reminiscence of how this young man’s father had wasted away eight-and-twenty years ago kept him silent.

  “What will you take, George? Have you come to stay with me?”

  “I have come to stay with you two hours: I must be home again by nightfall if I can. And I won’t take anything until my business with you is over; for I confess it is my own selfish affairs that have brought me here. Let me speak to you first.”

  “As you will. I am ready.”

  “Ever ready, ever willing to help us all!” returned George St. John, warm gratitude in his tone. “It is about the guardianship that I wish to speak. I thank you for accepting it.”

  Isaac smiled. “I did not see that I could do otherwise for you.”

  “Say for my children. Well, listen to me. I have left my wife personal guardian to my children. She will reside at the Hall until Benja is of age, and they with her, subject of course to their school and college intervals. This is absolute with regard to the younger, but in regard to the elder I wish it to be dependent upon your discretion.”

  “Upon my discretion?”

  George St. John had his hands upon his knees, leaning forward in his great earnestness; he did not appear to notice the interruption.

  “I wish you (when I shall be gone, and the boys have only their mother) to take means of ascertaining from time to time that Benja is happy under his step-mother’s care, and that she is doing her part by him in kindness. Should you find occasion to doubt this, or to think from any other cause that he would be better elsewhere, remove him from her, and place him with any one you may consider suitable. I dare not say take him yourself: children are noisy, and your health is imperfect; but place him where you can be sure that he will be well done by. Will you undertake this, Mr. St. John?”

  “Why do you ask this?” was the reply of Isaac St. John. “Is it a new thought — a sudden thought?”

  “It is a new thought, imparted to me chiefly through a conversation I had yesterday with Pym, our surgeon and old friend. He does not think it well that Benja should be left under the absolute control of Mrs. St. John, as he is not her own child. He said, for one thing, that she might marry again, and Benja would be as it were isolated amidst new ties; but when I pressed him for other reasons — for I am sure he had others — he would not give them; preferred not to discuss it, he said. He was — I could see that — for having the boy entirely away from her, but that is not to be thought of. I reflected a good deal on what he said, and have come to the conclusion that it may be as well there should be some clause inserted in the will that shall take absolute power from her, and hence I come to you.”

  “Your wife is kind to the boy?” asked Mr. St. John. “Pardon me the question, George.”

  “Very much so. When George was born, she showed some jealousy of the oldest boy, but all that has passed away. Benja was nearly drowned last November, and she was quite hysterical afterwards, crying and sobbing over him like a child. The nurse, a most faithful woman, thinks, I know, with Pym, but that’s nothing.”

  “You wish me, in the event of the children being left fatherless, to ascertain whether the elder is well done by at the Hall, and is happy there. If not, I am to remove him? This is what you ask, as I understand it?”

  “Precisely so. Should you, in your judgment, deem that Benja would be better elsewhere, take him away. I shall e
ndow you with full power.”

  “But how am I to ascertain that?’

  “In any way you please. Use any means that may suggest themselves. Go over and see for yourself, or send some suitable substitute, or question Honour—”

  “Who is Honour?”

  “Benja’s nurse. She took to him when my poor Caroline died. My present wife does not seem strong; at least she has had one or two serious illnesses lately; and Pym says the care of the two boys is more than I ought to put upon her. Perhaps it would be.”

  “Why not at once leave Benja under another guardianship?”

  “I should not like to do so. The world would regard it as a slight, a tacit want of confidence in my wife: and besides, in that case I should be divided as to whether to leave the Hall as a present residence to her or to Benja. I — mark me, Mr. St. John — I place full reliance upon my wife; I believe she will do her duty by Benja, and make him happy; and in that case there is no harm done. I am only providing for a contingency.” —

  “I see. Well, I accept the charge, George, though it might be well that you should entrust it to a more active man.”

  “No, no; you and you only.”

  They continued talking together for the brief space George St. John had allotted for his stay. Little more was said on the one subject, for George quitted it somewhat abruptly, and they had other topics in common; family matters, news on either side, as is the case when relatives meet after a prolonged separation. At the appointed time he was driven back to Lexington in Mr. St. John’s carriage, took the return train, and reached Alnwick about six in the evening.

  His wife had sent the close carriage for him, fearing the night air. George St. John directed the coachman to drive round by Mr. Drake, the lawyer’s; and when that gentleman came out to him he asked him to step up to the Hall on the morrow, on a little matter of business relative to an alteration in his recently-made will.