Маргарет Олифант
Old Mr. Tredgold
“Probably I should,” said Dr. Burnet, “but perhaps, if the lady happened to have any money–”
“Don’t take one without,” the old man interrupted.
“I should be considered a fortune-hunter, and I shouldn’t like that.”
“Oh, you!” said Mr. Tredgold, “you don’t count—that’s another pair of shoes altogether. As for your young Fortescue, I should just like to see him fork out, down upon the table, thousand for thousand. If he can do that, he’s the man for me.”
“‘You don’t count!’ What did the old beggar mean by that?” Dr. Burnet asked himself as he took the reins out of Jim’s hand and drove away. Was it contempt, meaning that the doctor was totally out of the question? or was it by any possibility an encouragement with the signification that he as a privileged person might be permitted to come in on different grounds? In another man’s case Dr. Burnet would have rejected the latter hypothesis with scorn, but in his own he was not so sure. What was the meaning of that sudden softening of tone, the suggestion, “You, now, doctor, why don’t you get married?” almost in the same breath with his denunciation of any imaginary pretender? Why was he (Burnet) so distinctly put in a different category? He rejected the idea that this could mean anything favourable to himself, and then he took it back again and caressed it, and began to think it possible. You don’t count. Why shouldn’t he count? He was not a spendthrift like Charlie Somers; he was not all but bankrupt; on the contrary, he was well-to-do and had expectations. He was in a better position than the young military swells whom Mr. Tredgold denounced; he was far better off than the Rector. Why shouldn’t he count? unless it was meant that the rule about those pounds on the table, &c., did not count where he was concerned, that he was to be reckoned with from a different point of view. The reader may think this was great folly on Dr. Burnet’s part, but when you turn over anything a hundred times in your mind it is sure to take new aspects not seen at first. And then Mr. Tredgold’s words appeared to the doctor’s intelligence quite capable of a special interpretation. He was, as a matter of fact, a much more important person to Mr. Tredgold than any fashionable young swell who might demand Katherine in marriage. He, the doctor, held in his hands, in a measure, the thread of life and death. Old Tredgold’s life had not a very enjoyable aspect to the rest of the world, but he liked it, and did not want it to be shortened by a day. And the doctor had great power over that. The old man believed in him thoroughly—almost believed that so long as he was there there was no reason why he should die. Was not that an excellent reason for almost believing, certainly for allowing, that he might want to make so important a person a member of his family on terms very different from those which applied to other people, who could have no effect upon his life and comfort at all? “You don’t count!” Dr. Burnet had quite convinced himself that this really meant all that he could wish it to mean before he returned from his morning round. He took up the question à plusieurs reprises; after every visit working out again and again the same line of argument: You don’t count; I look to you to keep me in health, to prolong my life, to relieve me when I am in any pain, and build me up when I get low, as you have done for all these years; you don’t count as the strangers do, you have something to put down on the table opposite my gold—your skill, your science, your art of prolonging life. To a man like you things are dealt out by another measure. Was it very foolish, very ridiculous, almost childish of Dr. Burnet? Perhaps it was, but he did not see it in that light.
He passed the Rector as he returned home, very late for his hurried luncheon as doctors usually are, and he smiled with a mixed sense of ridicule and compassion at the handsome clergyman, who had not yet recovered his complacency or got over that rending asunder of his amour propre. Poor old fellow! But it was very absurd of him to think that Katherine would have anything to say to him with his grown-up children. And a little while after, as he drove through the High Street, he saw young Fortescue driving into the stables at the Thatched House Hotel, evidently with the intention of putting up there.
“Ah!” he said to himself, “young Fortescue, another candidate!” The doctor was no wiser than other people, and did not consider that young Fortescue had been introduced for the first time to Katherine on the previous night, and could not possibly by any rule of likelihood be on his way to make proposals to her father the next morning. This dawned upon him after a while, and he laughed again aloud to the great disturbance of the mind of Jim, who could not understand why his master should laugh right out about nothing at all twice on successive days. Was it possible that much learning had made the doctor mad, or at least made him a little wrong in the head? And, indeed, excessive thinking on one subject has, we all know, a tendency that way.
CHAPTER XXX
Lady Jane gave Katherine a great deal of good advice before she allowed her to return home. They talked much of Stella, as was natural, and of the dreadful discovery it was to her to find that after all she had no power over her father, and that she must remain in India with her husband for the sake of the mere living instead of returning home in triumph as she had hoped, and going to court and having the advantage at once of her little title and of her great fortune.
“The worst is that she seems to have given up hope,” Lady Jane said. “I tell her that we all agreed we must give your father a year; but she has quite made up her mind that he never will relent at all.”
“I am afraid I am of her opinion,” said Katherine; “not while he lives. I hope indeed—that if he were ill—if he were afraid of—of anything happening–”
“And you, of course, would be there to keep him up in his good intentions, Katherine? Oh, don’t lose an opportunity! And what a good thing for you to have a sensible understanding man like Dr. Burnet to stand by you. I am quite sure he will do everything he can to bring your father to a proper frame of mind.”
“If he had anything to do with it!” said Katherine a little surprised.
“A doctor, my dear, has always a great deal to do with it. He takes the place that the priest used to take. The priest you need not send for unless you like, but the doctor you must have there. And I have known cases in which it made all the difference—with a good doctor who made a point of standing up for justice. Dr. Burnet is a man of excellent character, not to speak of his feeling for you, which I hope is apparent enough.”
“Lady Jane! I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well,” said Lady Jane with composure, “there is no accounting for the opaqueness of girls in some circumstances. You probably did not remark either, Katherine, the infatuation of that unfortunate Rector, which you should have done, my dear, and stopped him before he came the length of a proposal, which is always humiliating to a man. But I was speaking of the doctor. He takes a great interest in poor Stella; he would always stand up for her in any circumstances, and you may find him of great use with your father at any—any crisis—which let us hope, however, will not occur for many a long year.”
Lady Jane’s prayer was not, perhaps, very sincere. That old Tredgold should continue to cumber the ground for many years, and keep poor Stella out of her money, was the very reverse of her desire; but the old man was a very tough old man, and she was afraid it was very likely that it would be so.
“I think,” said Katherine with a little heat, “that it would be well that neither Dr. Burnet nor any other stranger should interfere.”
“I did not say interfere,” said Lady Jane; “everything of that kind should be done with delicacy. I only say that it will be a great thing for you to have a good kind man within reach in case of any emergency. Your father is, we all know, an old man, and one can never tell what may happen—though I think, for my part, that he is good for many years. Probably you will yourself be married long before that, which I will rejoice to see for my part. You have no relations to stand by you, no uncle, or anything of that sort? I thought not; then, my dear, I can only hope that you will find a good man–”
“Thank you for the good wish,” said Katherine with a laugh. “I find it is a good man to look after Stella’s interests rather than anything that will please me that my friends wish.”
“My dear,” said Lady Jane with a little severity, “I should not have expected such a speech from you. I have always thought a good quiet man of high principles would be far more suitable for you than anything like Charlie Somers, for example. Charlie Somers is my own relation, but I’m bound to say that if I proposed to him to secure to his sister-in-law half of his wife’s fortune I shouldn’t expect a very gracious answer. These sort of men are always so hungry for money—they have such quantities of things to do with it. A plain man with fewer needs and more consideration for others– Katherine, don’t think me interested for Stella only. You know I like her, as well as feeling partly responsible; but you also know, my dear, that of the two I always preferred you.”
“You are very kind,” said Katherine; but she was not grateful—there was no effusion in her manner. Many girls would have thrown themselves upon Lady Jane’s neck with an enthusiasm of response. But this did not occur to Katherine, nor did she feel the gratitude which she did not express.
“And I should like, I confess, to see you happily married, my dear,” said Lady Jane impressively. “I don’t think I know any girl whom I should be more glad to see settled; but don’t turn away from an honest, plain man. That is the sort of man that suits a girl like you best. You are not a butterfly, and your husband shouldn’t be of the butterfly kind. A butterfly man is a dreadful creature, Katherine, when he outgrows his season and gets old. There’s Algy Scott, for example, my own cousin, who admired you very much—you would tire of him in a week, my dear, or any of his kind; they would bore you to death in ten days.”
“I have no desire, Lady Jane, to try how long it would take to be bored to death by–”
“And you are very wise,” Lady Jane said. “Come and let’s look at the aloe and see how much it has unfolded since that night. And is it quite certain, Katherine, that you must go to-morrow? Well, you have had a very dull visit, and I have done nothing but bore you with my dull advice. But Sir John will be broken-hearted to lose you, and you will always find the warmest welcome at Steephill. Friends are friends, my dear, however dull they may be.”
Katherine went home with her whole being in a state of animation, which is always a good thing for the mind even when it is produced by disagreeable events. The spirit of men, and naturally of women also, is apt to get stagnant in an undisturbed routine, and this had been happening to her day by day in the home life which so many things had concurred to make motionless. The loss of Stella, the double break with society, in the first place on that account, in the second because of the Rector, her partial separation from Steephill on one side and from the village on the other, had been, as it were, so many breakages of existence to Katherine, who had not sufficient initiative or sufficient position to make any centre for herself. Now the ice that had been gathered over her was broken in a multitude of pieces, if not very agreeably, yet with advantage to her mind. Katherine reflected with no small sense of contrariety and injustice of the continued comparison with Stella which apparently was to weigh down all her life. Lady Jane had invited her, not for her own attractiveness—though she did not doubt that Lady Jane’s real sentiment at bottom was, as she said, one of partiality for Katherine—but to be put into the way she should go in respect to Stella and kept up to her duty. That Stella should not suffer, that she should eventually be secured in her fortune, that was the object of all her friends. It was because he would be favourable to Stella that Lady Jane had thrust Dr. Burnet upon her, indicating him almost by name, forcing her, as it were, into his arms. Did Dr. Burnet in the same way consider that he was acting in Stella’s interests when he made himself agreeable to her sister? Katherine’s heart—a little wounded, sore, mortified in pride and generosity (as if she required to be pushed on, to be excited and pricked up into action for Stella!)—seemed for a moment half disposed to throw itself on the other side, to call back the Rector, who would probably think it right that Stella should be punished for her disobedience, or to set up an immovable front as an unmarried woman, adopting that rôle which has become so common now-a-days. She would, she felt, have nobody recommended to her for her husband whose chief characteristic was that he would take care of Stella. It was an insult to herself. She would marry nobody at second-hand on Stella’s account. Better, far better, marry nobody at all, which was certainly her present inclination, and so be free to do for Stella, when the time came, what she had always intended, of her own accord and without intervention.
I think all the same that Lady Jane was quite right, and that the butterfly kind of man—the gallant, gay Algy or any of his fellows—would have been quite out of Katherine’s way; also that a man like Dr. Burnet would have been much in her way. But to Katherine these calculations seemed all, more or less, insulting. Why an elderly clergyman with a grown-up family should suppose himself to be on an equality with her, a girl of twenty-three, and entitled to make her an offer, so very much at second-hand, of his heart and home, which was too full already; and why, in default of him, a country practitioner with no particular gifts or distinction should be considered the right thing for Katherine, gave her an angry sense of antagonism to the world. This, then, was all she was supposed to be good for—the humdrum country life, the humdrum, useful wife of such a man. And that everything that was pleasant and amusing and extravagant and brilliant should go to Stella: that was the award of the world. Katherine felt very angry as she drove home. She had no inclination towards any “military swell.” She did not admire her brother-in-law nor his kind; she (on the whole) liked Dr. Burnet, and had a great respect for his profession and his much-occupied, laborious, honourable life. But to have herself set down beforehand as a fit mate only for the doctor or the clergyman, this was what annoyed the visionary young person, whose dreams had never been reduced to anything material, except perhaps that vague figure of James Stanford, who was nobody, and whom she scarcely knew!
Yet all this shaking up did Katherine good. If she had been more pleasantly moved she would perhaps scarcely have been so effectually startled out of the deadening routine of her life. The process was not pleasant at all, but it made her blood course more quickly through her veins, and quickened her pulses and cleared her head. She was received by her father without much emotion—with the usual chuckle and “Here you are!” which was his most affectionate greeting.
“Well, so you’ve got home,” he said. “Find home more comfortable on the whole, eh, Katie? Better fires, better cooking, more light, eh? I thought you would. These grand folks, they have to save on something; here you’re stinted in nothing. Makes a difference, I can tell you, in life.”
“I don’t think there is much stinting in anything, papa, at Steephill.”
“Not for the dinner party, perhaps. I never hold with dinner parties. They don’t suit me; sitting down to a large meal when you ought to be thinking of your bed. But Sir John puts his best foot forward, eh, for that? Saves up the grapes, I shouldn’t wonder, till they go bad, for one blow-out, instead of eating ’em when he wants ’em, like we do, every day.”
This speech restored the equilibrium of Katherine’s mind by turning the balance of wit to the other side.
“You are not at all just to Sir John, papa. You never are when you don’t know people. He is very honest and kind, and takes very little trouble about his dinner parties. They were both very kind to me.”
“Asked young Fortescue to meet you, I hear. A young fellow with a lot of poor land and no money. Meaning to try me on another tack this time, I suppose. Not if he had a hundred miles of downs, Katie; you remember that. Land’s a confounded bad investment. None of your encumbered estates for me.”
“You need not distress yourself, papa. I never spoke to Mr. Fortescue,” said Katherine.
There was a little offence in her tone. She had not forgiven Lady Jane for the fact that Mr. Fortescue, the only young man of the party, had not been allotted to her for dinner, as she felt would have been the right thing. Katherine thought him very red in the face, weatherbeaten, and dull—so far as appearances went; but she was piqued and offended at having been deprived of her rights. Did Lady Jane not think her good enough, par exemple, for young Fortescue? And her tone betrayed her, if Mr. Tredgold had taken any trouble to observe her tone.
“He need not come here to throw dust in my eyes—that’s all,” said the old man. “I want none of your landed fellows—beggars! with more to give out than they have coming in. No; the man that can put down his money on the table–”
“Don’t you think I have heard enough of your money down on the table?” said Katherine, very red and uncomfortable. “No one is likely to trouble you about me, papa, so we may leave the money alone, on the table or off it.”
“I’m not so sure about that. There’s young Fred Turny would like nothing better. And a capital fellow that. Plenty of his own, and going into all the best society, and titled ladies flinging themselves at his head. Mind you, I don’t know if you keep shilly-shallying, whether he’ll stand it long—a young fellow like that.”
“He knows very well there is no shilly-shallying about me,” said Katherine.
And she left her father’s room thinking within herself that though Lady Jane’s way of recommending a plain man was not pleasant, yet the other way was worse. Fred Turny, it was certain, would not hear of dividing his wife’s fortune with her sister, should her father’s will give it all to herself; neither would Charlie Somers, Lady Jane assured her. Would Dr. Burnet do this? Katherine, possessed for the moment of a prejudice against the doctor, doubted, though that was the ground on which he was recommended. Would any man do so? There was one man she thought (of whom she knew nothing) who would; who cared nothing about the money; whose heart had chosen herself while Stella was there in all her superior attractions. Katherine felt that this man, of whom she had seen so little, who had been out of the country for nearly four years, from whom she had never received a letter, and scarcely even could call to mind anything he had ever said to her, was the one man whom she could trust in all the world.
Dr. Burnet came that afternoon, as it was his usual day for visiting Mr. Tredgold. He was very particular in keeping to his days. It was a beautiful spring-like afternoon, and the borders round the house were full of crocuses, yellow and blue and white. The window was open in Katherine’s corner, and all the landscape outside bright with the westering light.
“What a difference,” he said, “from that snowstorm—do you remember the snowstorm? It is in this way an era for me—as, indeed, it was in the whole island. We all begin to date by it: before the snowstorm, or at the time of the snowstorm.”
“I wonder,” said Katherine, scarcely conscious of what she was saying, “why it was an era to you?”
“Ah, that I cannot tell you now. I will, perhaps, if you will let me, sometime. Come out and look at the crocuses. This is just the moment, before the sun goes down.”
“Yes, they shut when the sun goes down,” Katherine said, stepping out from the window.
The air had all the balm of spring, and the crocuses were all the colours of hope. It is delightful to come out of winter into the first gleam of the reviving year.
“We are nothing if not botanical,” said the doctor. “You remember the aloe. It is a fine thing but it is melancholy, for its blossoming is its death. It is like the old fable of the phœnix. When the new comes the old dies. And a very good thing too if we did not put our ridiculous human sentiment into everything.”
“Do you think human sentiment is ridiculous?” said Katherine, half disposed to back him up, half to argue it out.
“Of course I don’t!” said the doctor with vehemence; and then he laughed and said, “We are talking like a book. But I am glad you went to Steephill; there is not any such sentiment there.”
“Do you think, then, I am liable to be attacked by fits of sentiment? I don’t think so,” she said, and then she invited the doctor to leave the crocuses and to come in to tea.
I think it was that day that Dr. Burnet informed Katherine that her father had symptoms of illness more or less serious. He hoped that he might be able to stave off their development, and Mr. Tredgold might yet have many years of tolerable health before him. “But if I am right,” he said, “I fear he will not have the calm life he has had. He will be likely to have sudden attacks, and suffer a good deal, from time to time. I will always be at hand, of course, and ready night and day. And, as I tell you, great alleviations are possible. I quite hope there will be many intervals of comfort. But, on the other hand, a catastrophe is equally possible. If he has any affairs to attend to, it would perhaps be—a good thing—if he could be persuaded to—look after them, as a matter of prudence, without giving him any alarm.”
Such an intimation makes the heart beat of those to whom the angel of death is thus suddenly revealed hovering over their home; even when there is no special love or loss involved. The bond between Mr. Tredgold and his children was not very tender or delicate, and yet he was her father. Katherine’s heart for a moment seemed to stand still. The colour went out of her face, and the eyes which she turned with an appealing gaze to the doctor filled with tears.
“Oh, Dr. Burnet!” she said.
“Don’t be alarmed; there is nothing to call for any immediate apprehension. It is only if you want to procure any modification—any change in a will, or detail of that kind.”
“You mean about Stella,” she said. “I don’t know what he has done about Stella; he never tells me anything. Is it necessary to trouble him, doctor? If he has not changed his will it will be all right; if he has destroyed it without making another it will still be all right, for some one told me that in that case we should share alike—is that the law? Then no harm can come to Stella. Oh, that we should be discussing in this calm way what might happen—after!” Two big tears fell from Katherine’s eyes. “If the worst were to happen even,” she said; “if Stella were left out—it would still be all right, doctor, so long as I was there to see justice done.”
“Dear Katherine!” he said, just touching her hand for a moment. She scarcely perceived in her agitation that he had left out the prefix, and the look which he gave her made no impression on her preoccupied mind. “You will remember,” he said, “that I am to be called instantly if anything unusual happens, and that I shall always be ready—to do the best I can for him, and to stand by you—to the end.”
