“We have resolved to leave the Small House.”
“Leave the Small House!” he said, repeating her words; “and where on earth do you mean to go?”
“We think we shall go into Guestwick.”
“And why?”
“Ah, that is so hard to explain. If you would only accept the fact as I tell it to you, and not ask for the reasons which have guided me!”
“But that is out of the question, Mary. In such a matter as that I must ask your reasons; and I must tell you also that, in my opinion, you will not be doing your duty to your daughters in carrying out such an intention, unless your reasons are very strong indeed.”
“But they are very strong,” said Mrs. Dale; and then she paused.
“I cannot understand it,” said the squire. “I cannot bring myself to believe that you are really in earnest. Are you not comfortable there?”
“More comfortable than we have any right to be with our means.”
“But I thought you always did very nicely with your money. You never get into debt.”
“No; I never get into debt. It is not that, exactly. The fact is, Mr. Dale, we have no right to live there without paying rent; but we could not afford to live there if we did pay rent.”
“Who has talked about rent?” he said, jumping up from his chair. “Someone has been speaking falsehoods of me behind my back.” No gleam of the real truth had yet come to him. No idea had reached his mind that his relatives thought it necessary to leave his house in consequence of any word that he himself had spoken. He had never considered himself to have been in any special way generous to them, and would not have thought it reasonable that they should abandon the house in which they had been living, even if his anger against them had been strong and hot. “Mary,” he said, “I must insist upon getting to the bottom of this. As for your leaving the house, it is out of the question. Where can you be better off, or so well? As to going into Guestwick, what sort of life would there be for the girls? I put all that aside as out of the question; but I must know what has induced you to make such a proposition. Tell me honestly—has anyone spoken evil of me behind my back?”
Mrs. Dale had been prepared for opposition and for reproach; but there was a decision about the squire’s words, and an air of masterdom in his manner, which made her recognise more fully than she had yet done the difficulty of her position. She almost began to fear that she would lack power to carry out her purpose.
“Indeed, it is not so, Mr. Dale.”
“Then what is it?”
“I know that if I attempt to tell you, you will be vexed, and will contradict me.”
“Vexed I shall be, probably.”
“And yet I cannot help it. Indeed, I am endeavouring to do what is right by you and by the children.”
“Never mind me; your duty is to think of them.”
“Of course it is; and in doing this they most cordially agree with me.”
In using such argument as that, Mrs. Dale showed her weakness, and the squire was not slow to take advantage of it. “Your duty is to them,” he said; “but I do not mean by that that your duty is to let them act in any way that may best please them for the moment. I can understand that they should be run away with by some romantic nonsense, but I cannot understand it of you.”
“The truth is this, Mr. Dale. You think that my children owe to you that sort of obedience which is due to a parent, and as long as they remain here, accepting from your hands so large a part of their daily support, it is perhaps natural that you should think so. In this unhappy affair about Bell—”
“I have never said anything of the kind,” said the squire, interrupting her.
“No; you have not said so. And I do not wish you to think that I make any complaint. But I feel that it is so, and they feel it. And, therefore, we have made up our minds to go away.”
Mrs. Dale, as she finished, was aware that she had not told her story well, but she had acknowledged to herself that it was quite out of her power to tell it as it should be told. Her main object was to make her brother-in-law understand that she certainly would leave his house, and to make him understand this with as little pain to himself as possible. She did not in the least mind his thinking her foolish, if only she could so carry her point as to be able to tell her daughters on her return that the matter was settled. But the squire, from his words and manners, seemed indisposed to give her this privilege.
“Of all the propositions which I ever heard,” said he, “it is the most unreasonable. It amounts to this, that you are too proud to live rent-free in a house which belongs to your husband’s brother, and therefore you intend to subject yourself and your children to the great discomfort of a very straitened income. If you yourself only were concerned I should have no right to say anything; but I think myself bound to tell you that, as regards the girls, everybody that knows you will think you to have been very wrong. It is in the natural course of things that they should live in that house. The place has never been let. As far as I know, no rent has ever been paid for the house since it was built. It has always been given to some member of the family, who has been considered as having the best right to it. I have considered your footing there as firm as my own here. A quarrel between me and your children would be to me a great calamity, though, perhaps, they might be indifferent to it. But if there were such a quarrel it would afford no reason for their leaving that house. Let me beg you to think over the matter again.”
The squire could assume an air of authority on certain occasions, and he had done so now. Mrs. Dale found that she could only answer him by a simple repetition of her own intention; and, indeed, failed in making him any serviceable answer whatsoever.
“I know that you are very good to my girls,” she said.
“I will say nothing about that,” he answered; not thinking at that moment of the Small House, but of the full possession which he had desired to give to the elder of all the privileges which should belong to the mistress of Allington—thinking also of the means by which he was hoping to repair poor Lily’s shattered fortunes. What words were further said had no great significance, and Mrs. Dale got herself away, feeling that she had failed. As soon as she was gone the squire arose, and putting on his great-coat, went forth with his hat and stick to the front of the house. He went out in order that his thoughts might be more free, and that he might indulge in that solace which an injured man finds in contemplating his injury. He declared to himself that he was very hardly used—so hardly used, that he almost began to doubt himself, and his own motives. Why was it that the people around him disliked him so strongly—avoided him and thwarted him in the efforts which he made for their welfare? He offered to his nephew all the privileges of a son—much more indeed than the privileges of a son—merely asking in return that he would consent to live permanently in the house which was to be his own. But his nephew refused. “He cannot bear to live with me,” said the old man to himself sorely. He was prepared to treat his nieces with more generosity than the daughters of the House of Allington had usually received from their fathers; and they repelled his kindness, running away from him, and telling him openly that they would not be beholden to him. He walked slowly up and down the terrace, thinking of this very bitterly. He did not find in the contemplation of his grievance all that solace which a grievance usually gives, because he accused himself in his thoughts rather than others. He declared to himself that he was made to be hated, and protested to himself that it would be well that he should die and be buried out of memory, so that the remaining Dales might have a better chance of living happily; and then as he thus discussed all this within his own bosom, his thoughts were very tender, and though he was aggrieved, he was most affectionate to those who had most injured him. But it was absolutely beyond his power to reproduce outwardly, with words and outward signs, such thoughts and feelings.
It was now very nearly the end of the year, but the weather was still soft and open. The air was damp rather than cold, and the lawns and fields still retained the green tints of new vegetation. As the squire was walking on the terrace Hopkins came up to him, and touching his hat, remarked that they should have frost in a day or two.
“I suppose we shall,” said the squire.
“We must have the mason to the flues of that little grape-house, sir, before I can do any good with a fire there.”
“Which grape-house?” said the squire, crossly.
“Why, the grape-house in the other garden, sir. It ought to have been done last year by rights.” This Hopkins said to punish his master for being cross to him. On that matter of the flues of Mrs. Dale’s grape-house he had, with much consideration, spared his master during the last winter, and he felt that this ought to be remembered now. “I can’t put any fire in it, not to do any real good, till something’s done. That’s sure.”
“Then don’t put any fire in it,” said the squire.
Now the grapes in question were supposed to be peculiarly fine, and were the glory of the garden of the Small House. They were always forced, though not forced so early as those at the Great House, and Hopkins was in a state of great confusion.
“They’ll never ripen; sir; not the whole year through.”
“Then let them be unripe,” said the squire, walking about.
Hopkins did not at all understand it. The squire in his natural course was very unwilling to neglect any such matter as this, but would be specially unwilling to neglect anything touching the Small House. So Hopkins stood on the terrace, raising his hat and scratching his head. “There’s something wrong amongst them,” said he to himself, sorrowfully.
But when the squire had walked to the end of the terrace and had turned upon the path which led round the side of the house, he stopped and called to Hopkins.
“Have what is needful done to the flue,” he said.
“Yes, sir; very well, sir. It’ll only be re-setting the bricks. Nothing more ain’t needful, just this winter.”
“Have the place put in perfect order while you’re about it,” said the squire, and then he walked away.
CHAPTER XXXIX
Doctor Crofts Is Turned Out
“Have you heard the news, my dear, from the Small House?” said Mrs. Boyce to her husband, some two or three days after Mrs. Dale’s visit to the squire. It was one o’clock, and the parish pastor had come in from his ministrations to dine with his wife and children.
“What news?” said Mr. Boyce, for he had heard none.
“Mrs. Dale and the girls are going to leave the Small House; they’re going into Guestwick to live.”
“Mrs. Dale going away; nonsense!” said the vicar. “What on earth should take her into Guestwick? She doesn’t pay a shilling of rent where she is.”
“I can assure you it’s true, my dear. I was with Mrs. Hearn just now, and she had it direct from Mrs. Dale’s own lips. Mrs. Hearn said she’d never been taken so much aback in her whole life. There’s been some quarrel, you may be sure of that.”
Mr. Boyce sat silent, pulling off his dirty shoes preparatory to his dinner. Tidings so important, as touching the social life of his parish, had not come to him for many a day, and he could hardly bring himself to credit them at so short a notice.
“Mrs. Hearn says that Mrs. Dale spoke ever so firmly about it, as though determined that nothing should change her.”
“And did she say why?”
“Well, not exactly. But Mrs. Hearn said she could understand there had been words between her and the squire. It couldn’t be anything else, you know. Probably it had something to do with that man, Crosbie.”
“They’ll be very pushed about money,” said Mr. Boyce, thrusting his feet into his slippers.
“That’s just what I said to Mrs. Hearn. And those girls have never been used to anything like real economy. What’s to become of them I don’t know;” and Mrs. Boyce, as she expressed her sympathy for her dear friends, received considerable comfort from the prospect of their future poverty. It always is so, and Mrs. Boyce was not worse than her neighbours.
“You’ll find they’ll make it up before the time comes,” said Mr. Boyce, to whom the excitement of such a change in affairs was almost too good to be true.
“I am afraid not,” said Mrs. Boyce; “I’m afraid not. They are both so determined. I always thought that riding and giving the girls hats and habits was injurious. It was treating them as though they were the squire’s daughters, and they were not the squire’s daughters.”
“It was almost the same thing.”
“But now we see the difference,” said the judicious Mrs. Boyce. “I often said that dear Mrs. Dale was wrong, and it turns out that I was right. It will make no difference to me, as regards calling on them and that sort of thing.”
“Of course it won’t.”
“Not but what there must be a difference, and a very great difference too. It will be a terrible come down for poor Lily, with the loss of her fine husband and all.”
After dinner, when Mr. Boyce had again gone forth upon his labours, the same subject was discussed between Mrs. Boyce and her daughters, and the mother was very careful to teach her children that Mrs. Dale would be just as good a person as ever she had been, and quite as much a lady, even though she should live in a very dingy house at Guestwick; from which lesson the Boyce girls learned plainly that Mrs. Dale, with Bell and Lily, were about to have a fall in the world, and that they were to be treated accordingly.
From all this, it will be discovered that Mrs. Dale had not given way to the squire’s arguments, although she had found herself unable to answer them. As she had returned home she had felt herself to be almost vanquished, and had spoken to the girls with the air and tone of a woman who hardly knew in which course lay the line of her duty. But they had not seen the squire’s manner on the occasion, nor heard his words, and they could not understand that their own purpose should be abandoned because he did not like it. So they talked their mother into fresh resolves, and on the following morning she wrote a note to her brother-in-law, assuring him that she had thought much of all that he had said, but again declaring that she regarded herself as bound in duty to leave the Small House. To this he had returned no answer, and she had communicated her intention to Mrs. Hearn, thinking it better that there should be no secret in the matter.
“I am sorry to hear that your sister-in-law is going to leave us,” Mr. Boyce said to the squire that same afternoon.
“Who told you that?” asked the squire, showing by his tone that he by no means liked the topic of conversation which the parson had chosen.
“Well, I had it from Mrs. Boyce, and I think Mrs. Hearn told her.”
“I wish Mrs. Hearn would mind her own business, and not spread idle reports.”
The squire said nothing more, and Mr. Boyce felt that he had been very unjustly snubbed.
Dr. Crofts had come over and pronounced as a fact that it was scarlatina. Village apothecaries are generally wronged by the doubts which are thrown upon them, for the town doctors when they come always confirm what the village apothecaries have said.
“There can be no doubt as to its being scarlatina,” the doctor declared; “but the symptoms are all favourable.”
There was, however, much worse coming than this. Two days afterwards Lily found herself to be rather unwell. She endeavoured to keep it to herself, fearing that she should be brought under the doctor’s notice as a patient; but her efforts were unavailing, and on the following morning it was known that she had also taken the disease. Dr. Crofts declared that everything was in her favour. The weather was cold. The presence of the malady in the house had caused them all to be careful, and, moreover, good advice was at hand at once. The doctor begged Mrs. Dale not to be uneasy, but he was very eager in begging that the two sisters might not be allowed to be together. “Could you not send Bell into Guestwick—to Mrs. Eames’s?” said he. But Bell did not choose to be sent to Mrs. Eames’s, and was with great difficulty kept out of her mother’s bedroom, to which Lily as an invalid was transferred.
“If you will allow me to say so,” he said to Bell, on the second day after Lily’s complaint had declared itself, “you are wrong to stay here in the house.”
“I certainly shall not leave mamma, when she has got so much upon her hands,” said Bell.
“But if you should be taken ill she would have more on her hands,” pleaded the doctor.
“I could not do it,” Bell replied. “If I were taken over to Guestwick, I should be so uneasy that I should walk back to Allington the first moment that I could escape from the house.”
“I think your mother would be more comfortable without you.”
“And I think she would be more comfortable with me. I don’t ever like to hear of a woman running away from illness; but when a sister or a daughter does so, it is intolerable.” So Bell remained, without permission indeed to see her sister, but performing various outside administrations which were much needed.
And thus all manner of trouble came upon the inhabitants of the Small House, falling upon them as it were in a heap together. It was as yet barely two months since those terrible tidings had come respecting Crosbie; tidings which, it was felt at the time, would of themselves be sufficient to crush them; and now to that misfortune other misfortunes had been added—one quick upon the heels of another. In the teeth of the doctor’s kind prophecy Lily became very ill, and after a few days was delirious. She would talk to her mother about Crosbie, speaking of him as she used to speak in the autumn that was passed. But even in her madness she remembered that they had resolved to leave their present home; and she asked the doctor twice whether their lodgings at Guestwick were ready for them.
It was thus that Crofts first heard of their intention. Now, in these days of Lily’s worst illness, he came daily over to Allington, remaining there, on one occasion, the whole night. For all this he would take no fee—nor had he ever taken a fee from Mrs. Dale. “I wish you would not come so often,” Bell said to him one evening, as he stood with her at the drawing-room fire, after he had left the patient’s room; “you are overloading us with obligations.” On that day Lily was over the worst of the fever, and he had been able to tell Mrs. Dale that he did not think that she was now in danger.
“It will not be necessary much longer,” he said; “the worst of it is over.”
“It is such a luxury to hear you say so. I suppose we shall owe her life to you; but nevertheless—”
“Oh, no; scarlatina is not such a terrible thing now as it used to be.”
“Then why should you have devoted your time to her as you have done? It frightens me when I think of the injury we must have done you.”
“My horse has felt it more than I have,” said the doctor, laughing. “My patients at Guestwick are not so very numerous.” Then, instead of going, he sat himself down. “And it is really true,” he said, “that you are all going to leave this house?”
“Quite true. We shall do so at the end of March, if Lily is well enough to be moved.”
“Lily will be well long before that, I hope; not, indeed, that she ought to be moved out of her own rooms for many weeks to come yet.”
“Unless we are stopped by her we shall certainly go at the end of March.” Bell now had also sat down, and they both remained for some time looking at the fire in silence.
“And why is it, Bell?” he said, at last. “But I don’t know whether I have a right to ask.”
“You have a right to ask any question about us,” she said. “My uncle is very kind. He is more than kind; he is generous. But he seems to think that our living here gives him a right to interfere with mamma. We don’t like that, and, therefore, we are going.”
The doctor still sat on one side of the fire, and Bell still sat opposite to him; but the conversation did not form itself very freely between them. “It is bad news,” he said, at last.
“At any rate, when we are ill you will not have so far to come and see us.”
“Yes, I understand. That means that I am ungracious not to congratulate myself on having you all so much nearer to me; but I do not in the least. I cannot bear to think of you as living anywhere but here at Allington. Dales will be out of their place in a street at Guestwick.”
“That’s hard upon the Dales, too.”
“It is hard upon them. It’s a sort of offshoot from that very tyrannical law of
noblesse oblige.
I don’t think you ought to go away from Allington, unless the circumstances are very imperative.”
“But they are very imperative.”
“In that case, indeed!” And then again he fell into silence.
“Have you never seen that mamma is not happy here?” she said, after another pause. “For myself, I never quite understood it all before as I do now; but now I see it.”
“And I have seen it—have seen at least what you mean. She has led a life of restraint; but then, how frequently is such restraint the necessity of a life? I hardly think that your mother would move on that account.”
“No. It is on our account. But this restraint, as you call it, makes us unhappy, and she is governed by seeing that. My uncle is generous to her as regards money; but in other things—in matters of feeling—I think he has been ungenerous.”
“Bell,” said the doctor; and then he paused.
She looked up at him, but made no answer. He had always called her by her Christian name, and they two had ever regarded each other as close friends. At the present moment she had forgotten all else besides this, and yet she had infinite pleasure in sitting there and talking to him.
“I am going to ask you a question which perhaps I ought not to ask, only that I have known you so long that I almost feel that I am speaking to a sister.”
“You may ask me what you please,” said she.
“It is about your cousin Bernard.”
“About Bernard!” said Bell.
It was now dusk; and as they were sitting without other light than that of the fire, she knew that he could not discern the colour which covered her face as her cousin’s name was mentioned. But, had the light of day pervaded the whole room, I doubt whether Crofts would have seen that blush, for he kept his eyes firmly fixed upon the fire.
“Yes, about Bernard. I don’t know whether I ought to ask you.”
“I’m sure I can’t say,” said Bell; speaking words of the nature of which she was not conscious.
“There has been a rumour in Guestwick that he and you—”
“It is untrue,” said Bell; “quite untrue. If you hear it repeated, you should contradict it. I wonder why people should say such things.”
“It would have been an excellent marriage—all your friends must have approved it.”
“What do you mean, Dr. Crofts? How I do hate those words, ‘an excellent marriage’. In them is contained more of wicked worldliness than any other words that one ever hears spoken. You want me to marry my cousin simply because I should have a great house to live in, and a coach. I know that you are my friend, but I hate such friendship as that.”
“I think you misunderstand me, Bell. I mean that it would have been an excellent marriage, provided you had both loved each other.”
“No, I don’t misunderstand you. Of course it would be an excellent marriage, if we loved each other. You might say the same if I loved the butcher or the baker. What you mean is, that it makes a reason for loving him.”
“I don’t think I did mean that.”
“Then you mean nothing.”
After that, there were again some minutes of silence during which Dr. Crofts got up to go away. “You have scolded me very dreadfully,” he said, with a slight smile, “and I believe I have deserved it for interfering—”
“No; not at all for interfering.”
“But at any rate you must forgive me before I go.”
“I won’t forgive you at all, unless you repent of your sins, and alter altogether the wickedness of your mind. You will become very soon as bad as Dr. Gruffen.”
“Shall I?”
“Oh, but I will forgive you; for after all, you are the most generous man in the world.”
“Oh, yes; of course I am. Well—good-bye.”
“But, Dr. Crofts, you should not suppose others to be so much more worldly than yourself. You do not care for money so very much—”
“But I do care very much.”
“If you did, you would not come here for nothing day after day.”