So Near Akin. A novel

Front matter

SO NEAR AKIN. a Boael. BY M. A. BENGOUGH. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. II. LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON, in ©rlrinarg to |t?cr iHajrstg i\i ©utm. 1891. (All rights reserved?! CONTENTS OF VOL. II. CHAPTER PAGE I. The Old Order changeth ... i II. At Last ... ... ... 35 III. Taking Possession ... ... 62 IV. "A Lady waiting to see you, sir" 93 V. "Twixt Cup and Lip" ... ... 122 VI. In Harness ... ... ... 155 VII. Billing and Cooing ... ... 183 VIII. Sir Henry ... ... ... 204 IX. "Our Next Merry Meeting" ... 226 X. Free and Independent ... 252 XL In Bohemia ... ... ... SO N EAR AK I N

Chapter I. The Old Order Changeth

" My dear Nephew, " The delay in answering your communication — a delay which you may perhaps have thought strange — arose not from indifference, but from a hope, happily fulfilled, of being able to write you some thing definite. " It seems a providential coincidence that, on the very afternoon on which I received your letter, I was called upon by VOL. II. a worthy and valued old friend, one whose name is as highly respected, as it is widely known, in commercial circles. In the course of conversation, Mr. Higginbotham chanced to mention that his nephew, a young man of excellent principles, but, unfortunately, delicate health, had been unexpectedly ordered abroad for the winter by his medical adviser. The young man in question has been for some years junior partner in the firm, and very active in that capacity.

His temporary absence, by throwing more work on my friend, necessitates a readjustment of business, and the engagement of extra assistance. I mentioned your case, of which the details interested him as a Christian, and your qualifications, which seemed to please him as a man of business. Your acquaintance with foreign languages he seemed to consider a great point in your favour ; on changeth. 3 the other hand, your almost total practical ignorance of business is of course against you. The upshot of the matter was that. if I did not hear to the contrary by a certain date, you might call at the offices of the firm in Leadenhall Street, on Thursday morning next, at ten punctually. I cannot, of course, promise you success, but you have my best wishes, as also those of your aunt and cousins. In any case, we shall look for your company on Christmas Day ; we shall be quite a family party, but, I trust, a temperately joyous one.

" I need only add that your resolution has been a great source of refreshment to all of us. You do not mention it, but you can scarcely fail to be meeting with discouragement, if not with persecution, in the pursuance of your resolution. Per severe, however, my young friend ; it is only what must be expected — a consola tory proof of the true nature of your action. " Remember me to your parents. The best wishes I can frame for them are not, I fear, of a nature that they can appreciate. That some day they may come to do so must be your earnest hope, as it is that of your affectionate uncle, " Thomas Paton." George folded the letter methodically, and stood for a while to think. There were things in it that did not please him ; other things which afforded him a grim amusement. He did not like the idea of being an interesting case ; liked it so little that, for a moment, he thought of throwing up the whole business.

But this was a mere transient, unregenerate impulse. It could not weigh for an instant either CIIANGETH. 5 against his hatred of his profession, or his love for Hester. His love for Hester, for of that he was now aware. It had been no sudden seizure ; he could not have told the moment of its birth. But during the few remaining weeks of her stay in London, slowly, but surely, more and more after every interview, she had been gaining possession of his heart for her throne and for her shrine. She was its queen ; yet, more, she was its saint. He venerated even more than he loved her, though, indeed, he came to love her by-and-bye with all the force of his nature — a nature not fundamentally passionate, though liable to blasts of passion, shaking, devastating, but transient, and, as it were, external to himself.

She fulfilled his ideal of womanhood. It was an ideal, like most of his, formed negatively, and hence somewhat wanting in colour and vitality. Hester "-ave it both, bringing it into the region of the positive. The woman of his dreams was not flippant ; Hester was expressly reverent, in every relation of life. Again, his " not impossible she," was not loud nor flighty, neither emancipated nor advanced, patient of restraint, guarded even in opinion. Hester was gentle in every fibre of her being, sober with a cheerful, un varying sobriety, never unduly excited nor unreasonably depressed ; she was also in finitely dutiful, dependent without weakness, deferential without servility. This, of course, is George's analysis of her character, but many lovers are much further from the truth ; it may be said that his estimate was substantially correct.

It was a recommendation to him that even her beauty did not dazzle, though the craze, once attracted, seldom failed to linger. CHANGETII. 7 He set her image now as his shield against the darts which Captain Paton had managed to insert amid the cloud of his anything but winged words. Then he prepared to inform his parents of his change of plans. The first person whom he met was his father. William Paton heard him out without remark. Then he said : " All right, my boy ; good luck go with you ! After all, you know — I don't want to say anything unpleasant — but you won't be much loss to the profession. You did your best, I'm sure, but one can't make a silk purse — you understand ? No offence, I hope ? " " Not the least," said George ; but he was offended. He had never supposed himself to be a genius ; but, just because of his intense dislike to the business, he had taken extra pains to do it conscientiously.

And when you have almost made a religious duty of an action, it is unpleasant to be told that you have been a total failure. In point of fact, he had neither been so good an actor as he himself believed, nor so bad as his father made out. The truth was that William Paton had certain very practical reasons of his own for objecting to his son's resolution. It never occurred to him to try and hinder it ; indeed, the reasons he had against it were scarcely such as he could adduce openly, and he was no diplomat. But he did dislike it, and this bit of criticism was his revenge. " Take it rather as a compliment ? Well, I wish you success ! So Thomas wrote to you ? " he continued, after a pause. Something of the old twinkle rose to his eye — a bleared sort of remi niscence of it — for there were fully ten CHANGETH. 9 years deterioration of body and soul marked on his face, when not made up for the stage.

" You don't happen to have his letter anywhere about you, that I might have a look at it ? " " I left it in my room," said George, frigidly. " Ah, well, no matter. I suppose you are going to tell your mother now. Ta ! ta ! " And he hobbled off — he suffered a good deal from gout in these days. So much for the tyrant father. His interview with his mother was less irritating, but it fell far short of the pathetic. She cried a good deal, it is true, when she came to understand that he was going away, but she made no attempt to dis suade him. He knew, of course, that she was a woman who never could grasp the meaning of any proposal till it was an accomplished fact ; still he thought she mieht have shown more reluctance. In his own room he took out the letter again, and laughed bitterly enough.

Discourage ment and persecution indeed ! He did not admit to himself that he would have found them flattering ; yet such was really the case. He was wounded, dissatisfied, angry with himself and sore with all the world. His ideas of the family were somewhat inverted. All his life he had lived in dangerous contradiction to the wholesome, if homely, proverb concerning the instruction of grandmothers ; circumstances had almost forced it on him. His mother he truly loved, indeed, if he did not greatly respect her. His father he could not be said either to love or respect ; still, he had always tried to do his duty by both parents ; at the cost of considerable personal inconvenience, he had done it. And now he was going, and nobody cared. CIIANGETH. 11 It was not, certainly, a sense of the gratitude of men that left him mournine. o The next day he presented himself at the office, with very favourable results.

He spent some time in finding a lodging in a more decorous locality, came back in the afternoon to pack up his simple belongings, and that evening made his farewells to his parents, as he wished to be settled in his new lodgings that night. At the last his mother's tears, like her kisses, gushed out with true Irish vehe mence ; but she was acting that night, and he left her with the conviction that her emotion would not interfere either with her interpretation, or with her enjoy ment, of her part. His father, standing in the passage, gave him his paternal blessing out of one of his best roles, for the benefit of the landlady, the maid-of-all-work, and the driver, who were much impressed. George was less so. He got quickly into the coach, flinging himself fiercely back into the corner to avoid seeing the admir able attitude his father was striking on the doorstep.

The driver slammed the door, and they drove off through the twilight, just as the lamp-lighter was beginning his rounds. So simply and uneffectively George Paton broke with his past. In accordance with Captain Paton's in vitation, he did make one of the family party on Christmas-day. This year, in honour of the projected alliance between the families, the Stephenses were to remain in Clapham, instead of going to the Barlings. So, on the very thres hold of his experiment, George found himself admitted to one of those family Christmases which had been his dream for years. In shady lodgings, and second rate inns ; in mornings spent in dutiful attendance at church, which, somehow, only brought him a moderate degree of consolation; amid afternoons of purposeless wanderings through empty streets ; amid evenings of rollicking festivity when times were good — evenings which had nothing; festive about them for him ; in prolonged vigils by the side of his drowsy but un agitated mother, waiting for a stumbling footstep, when times were too bad for anything but a treat to some equally im pecunious friend at the nearest public house : always he had had some such dream as this.

Now, was he satisfied ? Did he leave any successor, that one perfectly happy, shirtless man ? It must be owned that there was some thing to put up with ; it was not pleasant to be watched and guided as though he were now entering civilized society for the first time. But because he could therefore put himself, as it were, under Hester's wing, he contrived to find consolation under even this trial. And Hester was in her modest glory ; she evidently thought she had discovered if she had not actually created him. Perhaps he found the Christmas games, with which the day's festivities ended, the least sympathetic part of the proceedings. The free use made of the traditions of the mistletoe, and of the opportunities afforded by the games of forfeits, clashed somehow with his expectations. Of course he knew such things were done ; in the days when he went a gipsying he had tested their attractions for himself, that is till he got tired of them.

It had not taken long to make him that, for his want of success among the very outspoken ladies of his acquaintance had been marked. He did not understand the first elements of flirtation, and after a very short campaign, in the first effervescence of his precocious manhood, during which he had frequent occasion to recall the fable of the lap-dog and the donkey, he retired from the field, with little desire ever to return to it. He had not expected to find such things tolerated in a serious family. Yet there was actually Hester, submitting, with the prettiest blush, but quite unresentfully, to the embrace of Frank Woods, Mary Stephens' fiancie, who could not in any sense be considered a member of the family. No doubt, if George had claimed the privilege, she would have granted it with as little reluctance or emotion as in the other case.

But he was not going to profane his romance that way. No indeed ! the time when his lips should first press hers it should be with some significance, not in the carnival follies of an idiotic game. He was fast losing his serenity ; still, not to make himself ridiculous by keeping conspicuously aloof, he bestowed a salute on Susan Stephens, who was evidently considered socially a minor, and a more effusive one on Anne, who seemed to him a dazzling but recognizable importation from his own old world. She had more education, more social polish, more genius perhaps, certainly far greater beauty and grace. But fundamentally he knew her for one of the brotherhood ; he had lived too long in Bohemia not to have an instinct for a native, and here un doubtedly was one who had somehow got astray. He did not like her the better for it, but the knowledge put him very much at his ease in his intercourse with her — an intercourse in which he only condescended to be serious when he wished to be repressive.

He had, after all, one moment of ideal satisfaction that evening. It was when he was sent out, with Hester as a partner, while the rest of the party settled on a subject for ' How ? When ? and Where ? ' Greatly conscientious, Hester was not content to remain outside the door; she took him across the landing into the old school-room, and there they sat down in the darkness just informed with a hint of light from the last red embers of the dying fire. She spoke very little, and what she said was very commonplace, but it was the silence of the situation that pleased him best. The party in the drawing-room took some time over their decision ; now and then a burst of laughter reached them, when this was so Hester would echo it softly, and say they seemed very merry. To George the laughter, like the narrow shaft of light that streamed VOL. II. from the landing through the school-room door left ajar, seemed to belong to another world.

The good, the only true world was here, in the darkness, musical with silence, fragrant with an ethereal suggestion of perfume from her very presence. He was angry when the drawing-room door was burst open, and Jim Stephens yelled to them that the word was settled ; but Hester gently rallied them on the time they had taken to decide. With that evening began the happiest time of George Paton's life. He soon ceased to be a natural curiosity ; before long his antecedents even seemed to have been practically forgotten, there were times when he almost forgot them himself. When he was leaving the house, the day after Christmas, Captain Paton had invited him to make a rule of coming out to them for his Saturdays and Sundays. He put it rather infelicitously, basing the invita tion more on his nephew's temptations than on his loneliness ; but George did not refuse, and there were few fine Satur days on which he failed to appear in the afternoon, bag in hand, having walked over from his lodgings.

So that by the time spring came round he had become practically one of the family, entering unannounced and making himself at home like a son of the house. He was still with Mr. Higginbotham ; there he had gone on and prospered beyond all expectation. His principal pompously thanked Captain Paton for having recom mended a treasure. His want of practical acquaintance with business had soon been remedied, partly by unwearied application and observation, partly, as it seemed, by instinct. If, outside the ranks of Israel, such beings exist, George Paton would appear to have been a heaven-born mer chant. He loved his work. Even the comparatively mechanical work of the lower grades of clerkship was not actual drudgery to him ; it is true he was not kept long at that. His old life, to which perhaps he never gave a willing thought, had chanced to furnish him with the very equipment which was to conquer success.

In the queer shifting train of companions who had drifted into his life, and drifted out again, had been representatives of almost every nation under heaven, and George had put them all under requisition. With a natural genius, almost a passion, for languages, with the vague intention which he had always cherished of a change in his career, he had set to work to find a professor in each one of them. From sprightly French fiddlers of sanguinary political principles ; from third-rate Italian tenors, fallen local stars, shot down at last upon our not urgently artistic shores ; from German professors of occult sciences ; from Poles, Greeks, Hungarians, of no recognized vocation or discoverable antecedents ; from all these and more he had made his profit. It had been a queer way of acquiring knowledge, but it had been an effective one.

And though he had come to look back on those days almost with a shudder, it is to be hoped that he was not all ungrateful, not quite forgetful of those long-haired, shabby, oily, smoke-saturated, mysterious, but always disreputable pro fessors. He should not have been, for it was indirectly to what they had done for him that he owed the hour in which the bud of his happiness burst into fragrant bloom. It was an afternoon in spring, a day or two before Easter. Far down the sunny path in the back garden, Hester was waiting for him. In the family it had come to be con sidered that George was naturally Hester's property, by right of spiritual motherhood. It was to her share that he fell as partner in their walks, she sat by him at table, she was the first to know of his welfare or his troubles.

She was sympathizer, confidante, counsellor, and, when she thought need was, reprover. And in all this she saw no more strangeness than did the others ; time had merely accentuated her feelings towards her kinsman, it had not changed them. She had gone out this afternoon to gather violets for his room ; hearing his footsteps, she rose from stooping over the bed, and stood a moment, shielding her eyes from the sun, to see who was there. She had come out without her hat, and finding the sun stronger than she had expected, she had tied her handkerchief over her head, knotting it under her chin. She was dressed in some soft brown woollen material, which fell in simple folds to her feet, and she had stuck a few primroses into the bosom of her gown. Sober, without austerity, a charming little Puritan figure, she stood there in the sunshine, which drew out a hint of gold in the smooth band of brown hair visible beneath the white coif.

Then she came forward with a smile. " Three whole weeks since you have been near us," she said ; " but I felt sure you would come to-day. You ought to have plenty of news for us, after such a long time ; I hope you have, and that it is all good." " I have a great deal to tell you," he said, with a restrained triumph in his voice. " Shall I begin now." " Do ! " she said delightedly. " Sit down here and make it into a nice long story, fit for Saturday afternoon." They sat down together. " Am I really to make a story of it ? Well, then, listen, and don't interrupt." There was something in his tone which was new to her, a kind of playfulness carrying off subdued excitement. She folded her hands on her lap and looked up, pleasantly expectant. The warmth of the spring sunshine radiated from the sun-saturated bricks, and made a glow about them as they sat ; an early bee hummed faintly in and out of the pear-tree blooms upon the wall ; a tiny breeze, with a touch of sharpness in it still, stirred Hester's gown about her feet ; the violets in her hand gave forth occasional whiffs of sweetness.

And George began his tale. It was really as a story that he told it. He told of a changeling. How once, in a land she had never heard of, there lived a man and wife, great folks in that country, people who could trace back their ancestry there for generations, and how, sadly and strangely for the boy, their only child was a changeling. He told of the boy's lone liness, a stranger in a strange land, a land in which every man did that which was right in the sight of his eyes — and in his own eyes, as he paused a moment, there was a gleam of angry reminiscence. Then he told how the rest of the folk mocked him ; how they flaunted their lawlessness before his face, and tried to make him join in it. And he joined. But he was only the more miserable, for he had to learn now to despise himself for the same things for which he had hitherto despised them.

" Oh ! " said Hester, uncertainly, beginning at last to suspect an allegory, of whose meaning she was not sure ; " but it would have been better to try and improve them." " Perhaps ; but he was no saint, and, so far, the saints had had little to say to him. He was very much alone ; if I could only make you understand how terribly alone he was ! " There was a rising excitement in his voice ; when he saw a trouble from it re flected in her eyes, he checked it. " Don't distress yourself; the saddest part is over. For one day a dear saint did come to him. No statue stepped down from its niche, no picture smiled at him from the frescoed wall ; in the common thoroughfare, in the guise of a maiden of his own land, she came and called him. And he followed her. He left it all behind him, the noisy revelry, the glittering empti ness, and the ache at the bottom of it all, and went after her to his fatherland, a new man — or shall I say himself "— 1 r) again r " That was good," said Hester, gently, a little tremulously too ; his growing agitation affected her.

" Was it not ? Oh ! my sweet saint ! When you spoke, your voice had power to hush all the horrible haunting echoes from the old days, your touch purified, your glance uplifted. Hester! do you not understand ? You who saved me, don't let me go. Be more near, and mine for ever — saint and wife!" " Oh ! George ; you — you ought to have said all this to papa ! " But she made only a very faint and perfunctory attempt at releasing the hands which he had seized as he knelt at her feet. Fortunately George was far too much exalted to be sensible of anything ludicrous in the words, indeed he scarcely heard them. "Give me an answer, Hester. I don't deserve that you should love me ; but you, who have a heart for all creatures, surely you have one little special corner for me — your own creature. Can't you love me, Hester?"

She turned her half-averted head and the soft sweetness of her eyes upon him. " Oh ! George— but— I do ! " And then, for a few moments, she was only conscious of being very frightened ; of being caught up in some moral whirl wind, overpowered, carried away by a force which she could not resist, not unpleasing, but altogether bewildering. Afterwards she was almost surprised to find how nearly abstract this sudden rapture had been ; afterwards she remembered that though, when she came to herself, her hands were glowing with his kisses, yet he was still at her feet ; his lips had never once tried to touch hers, nor had she had to defend herself from his embrace. " But you understand, dear," she said, when he seemed able to listen to reason ; " I cannot really promise anything without my father's and mother's consent.

Every thing must depend upon that." " Yes, yes," said George, with a certain impatience. " But if I could assure you that I had it, before I ventured to ap proach you ? " Oh ! in that case — It is the case ; what then ? " " How good you are, George ! " she said admiringly. In fact no proof of personal devotion he could have given her would have pleased her so much. " Of course I am ; don't you know who was my teacher ? " " Oh ! no. But let me go now. I — I am frightened ! No, dear, I don't mean that, but you took me so by surprise, and it is all so strange and new. Oh ! George, dear, let me go to mamma ! " She was longing to be off with her strange experience, and after humbly exacting his first kiss, he let her go, and she was soon laughing and crying in her mother's arms. Meanwhile, with George, prose was fast following on the heels of poetry.

He had sat down again upon the old plank ; the violets Hester had dropped in her agitation lay scattered about the gravel, and he stooped to gather them up. Just as he had collected them he saw Captain Paton advancing towards him. " So ! " he exclaimed, as he bore down upon the lover still dazed with his dream. " So ! I see Queen Mab has been with you ! Oh, young men, young men ! " And shaking his head, with ponderous jocularity, he sat down on the bench from which George had risen. " But this," he suddenly added, " is not an occasion for jesting. Young man, it is a very serious responsibility you are taking upon your self. Do you feel equal to it ? " " Equal to it, yes ; worthy of it, no. But I hope more and more to become so." " A very proper wish ; I hope so too. Because," after a silence following this encouraging remark, " painful though the allusion is, you see you were not always what you are now.

You have a past." He said it as if the tense were only predicable of the non-respectable classes. " A past with which I have for ever broken," said George, with more self control than could have been expected — but it was for Hester's sake. " I think you know that, even while I had anything to do with it, I hated it. I had hoped that the whole tenor of my conduct, since you have known me, would have been proof sufficient of that. If not, I scarcely know what to say that could be con vincing. I can only assure you that there is nothing on earth that could induce me even to wish to go back to my old life." " Well, no one can say fairer than that. Of course the heart is deceitful ; but I may say there are not many young men whose statement, under the circumstances, I would sooner accept than yours."

George acknowledged the compliment with a bow, and some indistinct words. " And now we come to consider your present financial situation. You have still reason to consider it satisfactory ? " " The same reason I had when I wrote," said George, with a passionate aspiration for patience. " It seems certain that young Mr. Higginbotham's health will never allow him to apply himself to business again. It was settled that I should take all the overlooking and cor respondence of the foreign connection of the firm, which is important and extensive. I told you it will probably involve a certain amount of travelling, but I thought you were satisfied with the promise that I would make England my permanent head-quarters. And I thought you were satisfied with the promised salary." " Well," said the Captain, " yes.