Morrison was evidently much relieved that Miss Dynevor should have some relative to advise with, since he did not like the responsibility of her renunciation, though owning that it was the only thing that could save her uncle from disgraceful ruin, and perhaps from prosecution; whereas now the gratitude and forbearance of the creditors were secured, and he hoped that Mr. Dynevor might be set free from the numerous English involvements, without sacrificing his remaining property in Peru. The lawyer seemed to have no words to express to James his sense of Miss Dynevor's conduct in the matter, her promptitude and good sense having apparently struck him as much as her generosity, and there was no getting him to believe, as Clara wished, that the sacrifice was no sacrifice at all-nothing, as she said, but 'common honesty and a great riddance.' He promised to take steps in earnest for the final settlement with the creditors; and though still far from the last act, Clara began to consider of hastening her plans. It was exceedingly doubtful whether Oliver would hear of living at Dynevor Terrace, and Clara could not be separated from him; besides which, she was resolved that her brother should not be burthened, and she would give James no promises, conditional or otherwise.
Mr. Dynevor had discovered that Morrison had been in the house, and was obviously restless to know what had taken place. By-and-by he said to Jane, with an air of inquiry, 'Why does not the young man come near me?'
Mrs. Beckett was too happy to report the invitation, telling 'Master Jem' at the same time that 'he was not to rake up nothing gone and past; there was quite troubles enough for one while.' Clara thought the same, and besides was secretly sure that if he admitted that he had been wrong in part, his uncle would imagine him to mean that he had been wrong in the whole. Their instructions and precautions were trying to James, whose chaplaincy had given him more experience of the sick and the feeble than they gave him credit for; but he was patient enough to amaze Clara and pacify Jane, who ushered him into the sick-chamber. There, even in his worst days, he must have laid aside ill-feeling at the aspect of the shrunken, broken figure in the pillowed arm-chair, prematurely aged, his hair thin and white, his face shrivelled, his eyelid drooping, and mouth contracted. He was still some years under sixty; but this was the result of toil and climate-of the labour generously designed, but how conducted, how resulting?
He had not learned to put out his left hand-he only made a sharp nod, as James, with tender and humble respect, approached, feeling that, how his grandmother was gone, this frail old man, his father's brother, was the last who claimed by right his filial love and gratitude. How different from the rancour and animosity with which he had met his former advances!
He ventured gently on kindly hopes that his uncle was better, and they were not ill taken, though not without fretfulness. Presently Oliver said, 'Come to look after your sister? that's right-good girl, good girl!'
'That she is!' exclaimed James, heartily.
'Too hasty! too great hurry,' resumed Oliver; 'she had better have waited, saved the old place,-never mind what became of the old man, one-half dead already.'
'She would not have been a Clara good for much, if she had treated you after that fashion, sir,' said James, smiling.
He gave his accustomed snort. 'The mischief a girl let alone can do in three days, when once she's of age, and one can't stop her! Women ought never to come of age, ain't fit for it, undo all the work of my lifetime with a stroke of her pen!'
'For your sake, sir!'
'Pshaw! Pity but she'd been safe married-tied it up well with settlements then out of her power. Can't think what that young Fitzjocelyn was after-it ain't the old affair. Ponsonby writes me that things are to be settled as soon as Ward comes back.'
'Indeed!'
'Aye, good sort of fellow-no harm to have him in our concerns-I hope he'll look into the accounts, and find what Robson is at. After all, I shall soon be out there myself, and make Master Robson look about him. Mad to allow myself to stay-but I'll wait no longer. Morrison may put the fellows off'-I'll give him a hint; we'll save the place, after all, when I once get out to Lima. If only I knew what to do with that girl!'
James could not look at him without a conviction that he would never recover the use of his hand and foot; but this was no time to discourage his spirits, and the answer was-'My sister's natural home would be with me.'
'Ha! the child would like it, I suppose. I'd make a handsome allowance for her. I shall manage that when my affairs are in my own hands; but I may as well write to the mountains as to Ponsonby. Aye, aye! Clara might go to you. She'll have enough any way to be quite worth young Fitzjocelyn's while, you may tell him. That mine in the San Benito would retrieve all, and I'll not forget. Pray, how many children have you by this time?'
'Four little girls, sir,' said James, restraining the feeling which was rising in the contact with his uncle, revealing that both were still the same men.
'Hm! No time lost, however! Well, we shall see! Any way, an allowance for Clara's board won't hurt. What's your notion?'
James's notion was profound pity for the poor old man. 'Indeed, sir,' he said, 'Clara is sure to be welcome. All we wish is, that you would kindly bring her to us at once. Perhaps you would find the baths of service; we would do our utmost to make you comfortable, and we are not inhabiting half the house, so that there would be ample space to keep the children from inconveniencing you.'
'Clara is set on it, I'll warrant.'
'Clara waits to be guided by your wishes; but my wife and I should esteem it as the greatest favour you could do us.'
'Ha! we'll see what I can manage. I must see Morrison'-and he fell into meditation, presently breaking from it to say fretfully, 'I say, Roland, would you reach me that tumbler?'
Never had James thought to be grateful for that name! He would gladly have been Roland Dynevor for the rest of his days, if he could have left behind him the transgressions of James Frost! But the poor man's shattered thoughts had been too long on the stretch; and, without further ceremony, Jane came in and dismissed his nephew.
Clara hardly trusted her ears when she was told shortly after, by her uncle, that they were to go to Northwold. Roland wished it; and, poor fellow! the board and lodging were a great object to him. He seemed to have come to his senses now it was too late; and if Clara wished it, and did not think it dull, there she might stay while he himself was gone to Lima.
'A great object the other way,' Clara had nearly cried, in her indignation that James could not be supposed disinterested in an invitation to an old man, who probably was destitute.
Brother and uncle appeared to have left her out of the consultation; but she was resolved not to let him be a burthen on those who had so little already, and she called her old friend Jane to take counsel with her, whether it would not be doing them an injury to carry him thither at all. So much of Jane's heart as was not at Cheveleigh was at Dynevor Terrace, and her answer was decided.
'To be sure, Miss Clara, nothing couldn't be more natural.'
'Nothing, indeed, but I can't put them to trouble and expense.'
'I'll warrant,' said Jane, 'that I'll make whatever they have go twice as far as Charlotte ever will. Why, you know I keeps myself; and for the rest, it will be a mere saving to have me in the kitchen! There's no air so good for Master Oliver.'
'I see you mean to go, Jane,' said Clara. 'Now, I have to look out for myself.'
'Bless me, Miss Clara, don't you do nothing in a hurry. Go home quiet and look about you.'
Jane had begun to call Northwold home; and, in spite of her mournings over the old place, Clara thought she had never been so happy there as in her present dominion over Master Oliver, and her prospects of her saucepans and verbenas at No. 5.
Poor Oliver! what a scanty measure of happiness had his lifelong exertions produced! Many a human sacrifice has been made to a grim and hollow idol, failing his devotees in time of extremity. Had it not been thus with Oliver Dynevor's self-devotion to the honour of his family?
CHAPTER XIX. FAREWELL
TO GREATNESS.
Soon from the halls my fathers reared Their scutcheons must descend. Scott
Mr. Holdsworth contrived to set James at liberty for a fortnight, and he was thus enabled to watch over the negotiation, and expedite matters for the removal. The result was, that the resignation of the estate, furniture, and of Clara's jewels, honourably cleared off the debts contracted in poor Mr. Dynevor's eagerness to reinstate the family in all its pristine grandeur, and left him totally dependent on whatever might be rescued in Peru. He believed this to be considerable, but the brother and sister founded little hopes on the chance; as, whatever there might be, had been entangled in the Equatorial Company, and nothing could be less comprehensible than Mr. Robson's statements.
Clara retained her own seventy pounds per annum, which, thrown into the common stock, would, James assured her, satisfy him, in a pecuniary point of view, that he was doing no wrong to his children; though he added, that even if there had been nothing, he did not believe they would ever be the worse for what might be spent on their infirm old uncle.
Notice was sent to Isabel to prepare, and she made cordial reply that the two rooms on the ground-floor were being made ready for Mr. Dynevor, and Clara's own little room being set in order; Miss Mercy Faithfull helping with all her might, and little Kitty stamping about, thinking her services equally effectual.
Oliver was in haste to leave a place replete with disappointment and failure, and was so helpless and dependent as to wish for his nephew's assistance on the journey; and it was, therefore, fixed for the end of James's second week. No one called to take leave, except the Curate and good Mr. Henderson, who showed Clara much warm, kind feeling, and praised her to her brother.
She begged James to walk with her for a farewell visit to her grandmother's other old friend. Great was her enjoyment of this expedition; she said she had not had a walk worth having since she was at Aix-la-Chapelle, and liberty and companionship compensated for all the heat and dust in the dreary tract, full of uncomfortable shabby-genteel abodes, and an unpromising population.
'One cannot regret such a tenantry,' said Clara.
'Poor creatures!' said James. 'I wonder into whose hands they will fall. Your heart may be free, Clara; you have followed the clear path of duty; but it is a painful thought for me, that to strive to amend these festering evils, caused very likely by my grandfather's speculations, might have been my appointed task. I should not have had far to seek for occupation. When I was talking to the Curate yesterday, my heart smote me to think what I might have done to help him.'
'It would all have been over now.'
'It ought not. Nay, perhaps, my presence might have left my uncle free to attend to his own concerns.'
'I really believe you are going to regret the place!'
'After all, Clara, I was a Dynevor before my uncle came home. It might have been my birthright. But, as Isabel says, what we are now is far more likely to be safe for the children. I was bad enough as I was, but what should I have been as a pampered heir! Let it go.'
'Yes, let it go,' said Clara; 'it has been little but pain to me. We shall teach my poor uncle that home love is better than old family estates. I almost wish he may recover nothing in Peru, that he may learn that you receive him for his own sake.'
'That is more than I can wish,' said James. 'A hundred or two a-year would come in handily. Besides, I am afraid that Mary Ponsonby may be suffering in this crash.'
'She seems to have taken care of herself,' said Clara. 'She does not write to me, and I am almost ready to believe her father at last. I could not have thought it of her!'
'Isabel has always said it was the best thing that could happen to Louis.'
'Isabel never had any notion of Louis. I don't mean any offence, but if she had known what he was made of, she would never have had you.'
'Thank you, Clara! I always thought it an odd predilection, but no one can now esteem Fitzjocelyn more highly than ahe does.'
'Very likely; but if she thinks Louis can stand Mary's deserting him-'
'It will be great pain, no doubt; but once over, he will be free.'
'It never will be over.'
'That is young-ladyism.'
'I never was a young lady, and I know what I mean. Mary may not be all he thinks her, and she may be dull enough to let her affection wear out; but I do not believe he will ever look at any one again, as he did after Mary on your wedding-day.'
'So you forbid him to be ever happy again!'
'Not at all, only in that one way. There are many others of being happy.'
'That one way meaning marriage.'
'I mean that sort of perfect marriage that, according to the saying, is made in heaven. Whether that could have been with Mary, I do not know her well enough to guess; but I am convinced that he will always have the same kind of memory of her that a man has of a first love, or first wife.'
'It may have been a mistake to drive him into the attachment, which Isabel thinks has been favoured by absence, leaving scope for imagination; but I cannot give up the hope that his days of happiness are yet to come.'
'Nor do I give up Mary, yet,' said Clara. 'Till she announces her defection I shall not believe it, for it would be common honesty to inform poor Louis, and in that she never was deficient.'
'It is not a plant that seems to thrive on the Peruvian soil.'
'No; and I am dreadfully afraid for Tom Madison. There were hints about him in Mr. Ponsonby's letters, which make me very anxious; and from what my uncle says, it seems that there is such an atmosphere of gambling and trickery about his office, that he thinks it a matter of course that no one should be really true and honest.'
'That would be a terrible affair indeed! I don't know for which I should be most concerned, Louis or our poor little Charlotte. But after all, Clara, we have known too many falsehoods come across the Atlantic, to concern ourselves about anything without good reason.'
So they talked, enjoying the leisure the walk gave them for conversation, and then paying the painful visit, when Clara tried in vain to make it understood by the poor old lady that she was going away, and that James was her brother. They felt thankful that such decay had been spared their grandmother, and Clara sighed to think that her uncle might be on the brink of a like loss of faculties, and then felt herself more than ever bound to him.
On the way home they went together to the church, and pondered over the tombs of their ancestry,-ranging from the grim, defaced old knight, through the polished brass, the kneeling courtier, and the dishevelled Grief embracing an urn, down to the mural arch enshrining the dear revered name of Catharine, daughter of Roland, and wife of James Frost Dynevor, the last of her line whose bones would rest there. Her grave had truly been the sole possestion that her son's labours had secured for her; that grave was the only spot at Cheveleigh that claimed a pang from Clara's heart. She stood beside it with deep, fond, clinging love and reverence, but with no painful recollections to come between her and that fair, bright vision of happy old age. Alas! for the memories that her brother had sown to spring up round him now!
Apart from all these vipers of his own creating, James after all felt more in the cession of Cheveleigh than did his sister. These were days of change and of feudal feeling wearing out; but James, long as he had pretended to scorn 'being sentimental about his forefathers,' was strongly susceptible of such impressions; and he was painfully conscious of being disinherited. He might have felt thus, without any restoration or loss, as the mere effect of visiting his birthright as a stranger; but, as he received all humbly instead of proudly, the feeling did him no harm. It softened him into sympathy with his uncle, and tardy appreciation of his single-minded devotion to the estate, which he had won not for himself, but for others, only to see it first ungratefully rejected, and then snatched away. Then, with a thrill of humiliation at his own unworthiness, came the earnest prayer that it might yet be vouchsafed to him to tend the exhausted body, and train the contracted mind to dwell on that inh
eritance whence there could be no casting out.
Poor Oliver was fretful and restless, insisting on being brought down to his study to watch over the packing of his papers, and miserable at being unable to arrange them himself. Even the tenderest pity for him could not prevent him from being an exceeding trial; and James could hardly yet have endured it, but for pleasure and interest in watching his sister's lively good-humour, saucy and determined when the old man was unreasonable, and caressing and affectionate, when he was violent in his impotence; never seeming to hear, see, or regard anything unkind or unpleasant; and absolutely pleased and gratified when her uncle, in his petulance, sometimes ungraciously rejected her services in favour of those of 'Roland,' who, he took it for granted, must, as a man, have more sense. It would sometimes cross James, how would Isabel and the children fare with this ill-humour; but he had much confidence in his wife's sweet calm temper, and more in the obvious duty; and, on the whole, he believed it was better not to think about it.
The suffering that the surrender cost Oliver was only shown in this species of petty fractiousness, until the last morning, when his nephew was helping him across the hall, and Clara close at his side, he made them stand still beside one of the pillars, and groaned as he said, 'Here I waited for the carriage last time! Here I promised to get it back again!'
'I wish every one kept promises as you did,' said James, looking about for something cheerful to say.
'I had hope then,' said Oliver; and well might he feel the contrast between the youth, with such hopes, energies, and determination mighty within him, and the broken and disappointed man.
'Hope yet, and better hope!' James could not help saying.
'Not while there's such a rascal in the office at Lima,' cried Oliver, testily.
'Oh! Uncle Oliver, he did not mean that!' exclaimed Clara.
Mr. Dynevor grumbled something about parsons, which neither of them chose to hear; and Clara cut it short by saying, 'After all, Uncle Oliver, you have done it all! Dear grandmamma came back and was happy here, and that was all that signified. You never wanted it for yourself, you know, and my dear father was not here to have it. And for you, what could you have had more than your nephew and niece to- to try to be like your children! And hadn't you rather have them without purchase than with?' And as she saw him smile in answer to her bright caress, she added merrily, 'There's nothing else to pity but the fir trees and gold fish; and as they have done very happily before without the Pendragon reign, I dare any they will again; so I can't be very sorry for them!'
Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) Page 28
