The Golden Calf Part 64

'I can't think what you can want with this low person, when Ida and I are always doing everything to amuse you,' moaned Lady Palliser.

'Ida's a darling, and you too, mother,' said the boy, putting his thin little arms round his mother's neck. He was now just able to move those poor arms, which had been so racked with pain a little while ago. 'But I get tired of everything--Shakespeare, d.i.c.kens, even. It's so long to stay in bed; and I think Jack would amuse me more than anyone, if you'd let him come.'

'He shall come, darling. Is there anything I could refuse you?' said the mother, eagerly, moved by the sight of tears in Vernon's innocent blue eyes.

'Ask him to come to tea this afternoon.'

'Yes, love; I'll go and see about it this minute.'

Lady Palliser went in quest of Ida, who was sitting in Brian's study reading, while her husband wrote, or made believe to write, at a table in the window piled with books of reference, which he consulted every now and then, lolling back in his chair and reading listlessly--altogether a mere show and pretence of study, never likely to result in anything--a weary dawdling away of the long summer morning.

To Ida, Lady Palliser explained her difficulty. A note of some kind must be written to this Cheap Jack; and the little woman did not know how to word that note.

'If I say, "Lady Palliser presents her compliments to Mr. Cheap Jack, and requests the pleasure of his company," it seems like patting myself on a level with him, don't you know. I wish you'd write for me, Ida.'

'Willingly, dear mother; but I'm afraid the man won't come. He is such a very rough diamond.'

'Oh! but surely he will be gratified at an invitation to tea!'

'I'm afraid not. But I'll write at once. Anything to please Vernon.' Ida wrote as follows:--

'Sir Vernon Palliser, who is slowly recovering from a serious illness, will be very pleased if his friend Jack will spend an hour or two with him this afternoon. Any hour convenient to Jack will be agreeable to Sir Vernon, but he would much like Jack to drink tea with him between four and five. The other members of the family will not intrude upon the sick room while Jack is there.'

'I think that will do,' said Ida; and Lady Palliser carried off the note, wondering at her stepdaughter's cleverness, yet inclined to fear that the hermit of Blackman's Hanger might be offended at being addressed as Jack, _tout court;_ and yet how could one deal ceremoniously with a man who acknowledged no surname, and was known to all the neighbourhood only as 'Cheap Jack'?

Mr. Fosbroke came for his noontide visit just after this business of the letter, and found Ida and her stepmother both with the invalid. He was told what they had done.

'Do you think he'll come?' Vernon asked, eagerly.

'I should think he would. Sir Vernon,' answered the doctor; 'for I know he takes a keen interest in your recovery. All the time you were really bad he used to hang about the Park gate every day as I went out, and stopped me to ask how you were. And he asked after you, too, Mrs.

Wendover,--seemed to be afraid your anxiety about this little man would be too much for you.'

'Remarkably polite of him,' said Ida, laughing; 'yet he treated me in the most bearish manner when I went to his cottage.'

'If he is a bear, he is a bear with gentlemanly instincts,' replied the doctor. 'Nothing could be more respectful, more delicate, than his inquiries about you; and I could see by the expression of his eyes that he really felt for you. He has very fine eyes.'

'One of the tokens of his gipsy blood, I suppose,' said Ida.

'Yes; I believe he is a gipsy. They are a keen-witted race.'

'A gipsy!--and with so much plate as there is in this house!' exclaimed Lady Palliser. 'Oh, Vernie, you ought not to have asked me to ask him!'

'Don't be afraid, mother,' said Ida; 'he shall be sharply looked after, if he does come.'

'Looked after, indeed! Why, you might give him the run of a silver mine.

What does he care for your trumpery silver spoons?' cried Vernon, contemptuously.

The invalid was doomed to disappointment. About two hours after Ida's letter had been despatched, a small boy brought Cheap Jack's reply, to the following effect:--'Jack is very sorry he cannot drink tea with his little friend--'

'Little friend, indeed! What vulgar familiarity!' exclaimed Lady Palliser.

'But he belongs to the dwellers in tents, and would be out of place in a fine house--'

'Then he _is_ a gipsy,' said Lady Palliser. 'What a luck; escape!'

'He looks forward to the pleasure of seeing Sir Vernon on the Hanger before long. Meanwhile he can only send his duty and best wishes for Sir Vernon's speedy recovery.'

'The end is a little better than the commencement,' said Lady Palliser; 'but I call it a great liberty for a Cheap Jack to talk of my son as his little friend.'

'He might have left out "little," considering that I shall be twelve next birthday,' said Vernon, with dignity. 'But I am his friend, mother; and I mean to be his friend always. And when I am grown up I shall take him to the Rocky Mountains, and we will hunt moose and things.'

Lady Palliser sighed, and hoped that this pa.s.sion for low company would pa.s.s with the other follies of childhood.

Now that all danger was past, and that Vernon was on the high-road to health, Ida spent the greater part of her time in attendance upon her husband. It was her duty, she told herself; and she who had so failed in love must needs fulfil every duty. But the performance of this simple, wifely duty of attendance on an invalid husband was fraught with pain: his temper was so irritable, his mind was so weak, his whole being so degraded and sunk by his infirmity, that the progress of his decay was, of all forms of dissolution, the most painful for the looker-on. That he was sinking into a lower depth of degradation, rather than recovering, was sadly obvious to Ida, in spite of occasional intervals of better feeling and rare flashes of his old brightness.

The case was altogether perplexing. Towler admitted that he was more puzzled than he had ever been about any patient whom he had enjoyed the honour of attending. Mr. Wendover, under his present conditions of absolute sobriety, and with youth on his side, ought to have shown a decided improvement by this time; and yet there was no substantial amelioration of his state, and his latest fit of the horrors, which occurred only a night ago, had been quite as bad as the first which Towler had witnessed.

'You do not think that he gets brandy without your knowledge?' inquired Ida, blus.h.i.+ng at the question.

'No, ma'am; I'm too careful for that. I've searched his trunks even, and every cupboard in his rooms; and I've looked behind the registers of the stoves, which are very handy places for patients hiding bottles in summer time; but there's not so much as an ounce phial. And Mr. Wendover's hardly out of my sight, except when he takes his bath, or just going in and out of his bath-room, where he keeps his pipes, as you know, ma'am.

Besides, even if he had any hiding-place for the drink, who is likely to supply him with it?'

'No; I hope there is no one,' said Ida, thoughtfully. 'I hope no one in this house would so betray my confidence.'

'I've taken stock of all the servants, ma'am, and I don't think there's one that would do it.'

Ida was of the same opinion. The servants were old servants, as loyal to the heads of the house as a highland clan to their chief.

Sunday came--a peaceful summer Sabbath--a day of suns.h.i.+ne and azure sky, and Ida, whose anxiety about Vernon had kept her away from her parish church for the last three Sundays, was able to set out upon her walk to the village with a heart quite at rest on the boy's account. Even the mother could find no excuse for staying at home with her boy, and felt that conscience and society alike required that she should a.s.sist at the service of her parish church. Vernie was convalescent, able to sit up in his bed, propped with pillows, and eat hot-house grapes, and turn over the leaves of endless volumes of _Punch_, laughing with his hearty childish laugh at Leech's jokes and the curious garments of a departed era.

'How could men wear such trousers? and how could women wear such bonnets?' he asked his mother, wonderingly contemplating fas.h.i.+onable youth as represented by the great pen-and-ink humourist.

'I don't know why we shouldn't wear them, Vernie,' said his mother, with rather an offended air; 'those spoon bonnets were very becoming. I wore one the day your pa first saw me.'

'And hoops under your gown like that?' said Vernie, pointing; 'and those funny little boots? What a guy you must have looked!'

When a boy has come to this pa.s.s he may fairly be left with servants for a couple of hours; so Lady Palliser put on her stateliest mourning--her thick corded silk, flounced with c.r.a.pe and her Mary Stuart bonnet, and went across the park, and up hill and down hill, for it was a country of hills and hollows--to the parish church of Wimperfield, a very ancient edifice, with ma.s.sive columnar piers, Norman groined roof, and walls enriched by a grand array of memorial tablets, setting forth the honours and virtues of those dead and gone landowners whose bones were mouldering in the vaults below the square oaken pews in which the living wors.h.i.+pped.

In the chancel there was the usual stately monument to some magnate of the middle ages, who was represented kneeling by his wife's side, with a graduated row of sons and daughters kneeling behind them, as if the whole family had died and petrified simultaneously, in the act of pious wors.h.i.+p.

Ida did not invite her husband to join her in her Sabbath devotions, a.s.sured that he would claim an invalid's privilege to stay at home. He had very rarely attended the parish church with his wife, affecting to despise such humdrum and conventional wors.h.i.+p. He had just that thin smattering of modern science which enables shallow youth to make a merit of disbelief in all things beyond the limit of mathematical demonstration. He had skimmed Darwin, and spoke lightly of mankind as the latest development of time and matter, and no higher a being, from a spiritual point of view, than the first worm that wriggled in its primeval slime. He had dipped into Herbert Spencer, and talked largely of G.o.d as the Unknowable; and how could the Unknowable be supposed to take pleasure in the automatic prayers of a handful of b.u.mpkins and clodhoppers met together in a mouldy old church, time out of mind the temple of superst.i.tions and ceremonies. The vast temple of the universe was Brian Walford's idea of a church; and a very fine church it is, if a man will only wors.h.i.+p faithfully therein; but the man who abandons formal prayers and set seasons of devotion with a vague idea of wors.h.i.+pping in the woodland or on the hill top, very rarely troubles himself to realise his ideal.

Brian's broadly-declared agnosticism had long been a cause of pain and grief to his wife. She had felt that this alone would have made sympathy impossible between them, had there been no other ground for difference.

She thought with a bitter sense of contrast of his cousin, who was a student and a thinker, and who yet was not ashamed to believe and to wors.h.i.+p as a little child. Surely it was not a sign of a weak intelligence for a man to believe in something better and higher than himself, when Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and Virgil could so believe. Brian Walford's idea of cleverness was to consider himself the ultimate product of incalculable antecedent time, the full-stop of creation.

Here were all the pious paris.h.i.+oners, the county families, and the country b.u.mpkins, meekly kneeling on their knees, and uplifting their voices in perfect faithfulness--not thinking very deeply of any element in the service perhaps, but honest in their reverence and their love. The old church was a pretty sight on such a summer morning--the white robes of the choristers touched with supernal radiance, the light tempered by the deep rubies and purples and ambers in windows old and new--the very irregularities and architectural anomalies of the building producing a quaintness which was more pleasing than absolute beauty.

The litany was nearly over when Ida heard a familiar step on the stone pavement of the nave. It was Brian's step; and presently he stopped at the door of the high oaken pew, opened it, and came in and seated himself-on the bench, opposite to the spot where she knelt by her step-mother's side. It was a capacious old pew, and would have held ten people. Brian kicked about the ha.s.socks, and made himself comfortable; but he did not kneel, or take any part in the service. He sat with his elbows on his knees, and his chin in his hands, staring at the floor. His presence filled Ida with anxiety. He had not risen from his bed when she left home, and Towler had given her to understand that he would not get up for some time, as he had had a very bad night. He must have risen and dressed hurriedly in order to follow her to church. His eyes had the wild look in them which she had noticed on the night when he saw visions.