Wilfrid Cumbermede

‘You should have your lawyer one of them.’

‘He would never leave me alone about it,’ I replied; ‘and positively I shall take no measures at present. Some day I hope to punish him for deserting me as he did.’

For I had told him how Mr Coningham had behaved.

‘Revenge, Mr Cumbermede?’

‘Not a serious one. All the punishment I hope to give him is but to show him the fact of the case, and leave him to feel as he may about it.’

‘There can’t be much harm in that.’

He reflected a few moments, and then said:

‘I will tell you what will be best. We shall go and see the book together. I will make an extract of both entries, and give a description of the state of the volume, with an account of how the second entry—or more properly the first—came to be discovered. This I shall sign in the presence of two witnesses, who need know nothing of the contents of the paper. Of that you shall yourself take charge.’

We went together to the church. The old man, after making a good many objections, was at length satisfied, and made notes for his paper. He started the question whether it would not be better to secure that volume at least under lock and key. For this I thought there was no occasion—that in fact it was safer where it was, and more certain of being forthcoming when wanted. I did suggest that the key of the church might be deposited in a place of safety; but he answered that it had been kept there ever since he came to the living forty years ago, and for how long before that he could not tell; and so a change would attract attention, and possibly make some talk in the parish, which had better be avoided.

Before the end of the week, he had his document ready. He signed it in my presence, and in that of two of his parishioners, who as witnesses appended their names and abodes. I have it now in my possession. I shall enclose it, with my great-grandfather and mother’s letters—and something besides—in the packet containing this history.

That same week Sir Giles Brotherton died.

CHAPTER LXII. A FOOLISH TRIUMPH

I should have now laid claim to my property, but for Mary. To turn Sir Geoffrey with his mother and sister out of it, would have caused me little compunction, for they would still be rich enough; I confess indeed it would have given me satisfaction. Nor could I say what real hurt of any kind it would occasion to Mary; and if I were writing for the public, instead of my one reader, I know how foolishly incredible it must appear that for her sake I should forego such claims. She would, however, I trust, have been able to believe it without the proofs which I intend to give her. The fact was simply this: I could not, even for my own sake, bear the thought of taking, in any manner or degree, a position if but apparently antagonistic to her. My enemy was her husband: he should reap the advantage of being her husband; for her sake he should for the present retain what was mine. So long as there should be no reason to fear his adopting a different policy from his father’s in respect of his tenants, I felt myself at liberty to leave things as they were; for Sir Giles had been a good landlord, and I knew the son was regarded with favour in the county. Were he to turn out unjust or oppressive, however, then duty on my part would come in. But I must also remind my reader that I had no love for affairs; that I had an income perfectly sufficient for my wants; that, both from my habits of thought and from my sufferings, my regard was upon life itself—was indeed so far from being confined to this chrysalid beginning thereof, that I had lost all interest in this world save as the porch to the house of life. And, should I ever meet her again, in any possible future of being, how much rather would I not stand before her as one who had been even Quixotic for her sake—as one who for a hair’s-breadth of her interest had felt the sacrifice of a fortune a merely natural movement of his life! She would then know not merely that I was true to her, but that I had been true in what I professed to believe when I sought her favour. And if it had been a pleasure to me—call it a weakness, and I will not oppose the impeachment;—call it self-pity, and I will confess to that as having a share in it;—but, if it had been a shadowy pleasure to me to fancy I suffered for her sake, my present resolution, while it did not add the weight of a feather to my suffering, did yet give me a similar vague satisfaction.

I must also confess to a certain satisfaction in feeling that I had power over my enemy—power of making him feel my power—power of vindicating my character against him as well, seeing one who could thus abstain from asserting his own rights could hardly have been one to invade the rights of another; but the enjoyment of this consciousness appeared to depend on my silence. If I broke that, the strength would depart from me; but while I held my peace, I held my foe in an invisible mesh. I half deluded myself into fancying that, while I kept my power over him unexercised, I retained a sort of pledge for his conduct to Mary, of which I was more than doubtful; for a man with such antecedents as his, a man who had been capable of behaving as he had behaved to Charley, was less than likely to be true to his wife: he was less than likely to treat the sister as a lady, who to the brother had been a traitorous seducer.

I have now to confess a fault as well as an imprudence—punished, I believe, in the results.

The behaviour of Mr. Coningham still rankled a little in my bosom. From Geoffrey I had never looked for anything but evil; of Mr Coningham I had expected differently, and I began to meditate the revenge of holding him up to himself: I would punish him in a manner which, with his confidence in his business faculty, he must feel: I would simply show him how the precipitation of selfish disappointment had led him astray, and frustrated his designs. For if he had given even a decent attention to the matter, he would have found in the forgery itself hints sufficient to suggest the desirableness of further investigation.

I had not, however, concluded upon anything, when one day I accidentally met him, and we had a little talk about business, for he continued to look after the rent of my field. He informed me that Sir Geoffrey Brotherton had been doing all he could to get even temporary possession of the park, as we called it; and, although I said nothing of it to Mr Coningham, my suspicion is that, had he succeeded, he would, at the risk of a law-suit, in which he would certainly have been cast, have ploughed it up. He told me, also, that Clara was in poor health; she who had looked as if no blight could ever touch her had broken down utterly. The shadow of her sorrow was plain enough on the face of her father, and his confident manner had a little yielded, although he was the old man still. His father had died a little before Sir Giles. The new baronet had not offered him the succession.

I asked him to go with me yet once more to Umberden Church—for I wanted to show him something he had over-looked in the register—not, I said, that it would be of the slightest furtherance to his former hopes. He agreed at once, already a little ashamed, perhaps, of the way in which he had abandoned me. Before we parted we made an appointment to meet at the church.

We went at once to the vestry. I took down the volume, and laid it before him. He opened it, with a curious look at me first. But the moment he lifted the cover, its condition at once attracted and as instantly riveted his attention. He gave me one glance more, in which questions and remarks and exclamations numberless lay in embryo; then turning to the book, was presently absorbed, first in reading the genuine entry, next in comparing it with the forged one.

‘Right, after all!’ he exclaimed at length.

‘In what?’ I asked.’ In dropping me without a word, as if I had been an impostor? In forgetting that you yourself had raised in me the hopes whose discomfiture you took as a personal injury?’

‘My dear sir!’ he stammered in an expostulatory tone, ‘you must make allowance. It was a tremendous disappointment to me.’

‘I cannot say I felt it quite so much myself, but at least you owed me an apology for having misled me.’

‘I had not misled you,’ he retorted angrily, pointing to the register.—‘There!’

‘You left me to find that out, though. You took no further pains in the matter.’

‘How did you find it out?’ he asked, clutching at a change in the tone of the conversation.

I said nothing of my dream, but I told him everything else concerning the discovery. When I had finished—

‘It’s all plain sailing now,’ he cried. ‘There is not an obstacle in the way. I will set the thing in motion the instant I get home.—It will be a victory worth achieving,’ he added, rubbing his hands.

‘Mr Coningham, I have not the slightest intention of moving in the matter,’ I said.

His face fell.

‘You do not mean—when you hold them in your very hands—to throw away every advantage of birth and fortune, and be a nobody in the world?’

‘Infinite advantages of the kind you mean, Mr Coningham, could make me not one whit more than I am; they might make me less.’

‘Come, come,’ he expostulated; ‘you must not allow disappointment to upset your judgment of things.’

‘My judgment of things lies deeper than any disappointment I have yet had,’ I replied. ‘My uncle’s teaching has at last begun to bear fruit in me.’

‘Your uncle was a fool!’ he exclaimed.

‘But for my uncle’s sake, I would knock you down for daring to couple such a word with him.’

He turned on me with a sneer. His eyes had receded in his head, and in his rage he grinned. The old ape-face, which had lurked in my memory ever since the time I first saw him, came out so plainly that I started: the child had read his face aright! the following judgment of the man had been wrong! the child’s fear had not imprinted a false eidolon upon the growing brain.

‘What right had, you,’ he said, ‘to bring me all this way for such tomfoolery?’

‘I told you it would not further your wishes.—But who brought me here for nothing first?’ I added, most foolishly.

‘I was myself deceived. I did not intend to deceive you.’

‘I know that. God forbid I should be unjust to you! But you have proved to me that your friendship was all a pretence; that your private ends were all your object. When you discovered that I could not serve those, you dropped me like a bit of glass you had taken for a diamond. Have you any right to grumble if I give you the discipline of a passing shame?’

‘Mr Cumbermede,’ he said, through his teeth, ‘you will repent this.’

I gave him no answer, and he left the church in haste. Having replaced the register, I was following at my leisure, when I heard sounds that made me hurry to the door. Lilith was plunging and rearing and pulling at the bridle which I had thrown over one of the spiked bars of the gate. Another moment and she must have broken loose, or dragged the gate upon her—more likely the latter, for the bridle was a new one with broad reins—when some frightful injury would in all probability have been the consequence to herself. But a word from me quieted her, and she stood till I came up. Every inch of her was trembling. I suspected at once, and in a moment discovered plainly that Mr Coningham had struck her with his whip: there was a big weal on the fine skin of her hip and across, her croup. She shrunk like a hurt child when my hand approached the injured part, but moved neither hoof nor head.

Having patted and petted and consoled her a little, I mounted and rode after Mr Coningham. Nor was it difficult to overtake him, for he was going a foot-pace. He was stooping in his saddle, and when I drew near, I saw that he was looking very pale. I did not, however, suspect that he was in pain.

‘It was a cowardly thing to strike the poor dumb animal,’ I cried.

‘You would have struck her yourself,’ he answered with a curse,’ if she had broken your leg.’

I rode nearer. I knew well enough that she would not have kicked him if he had not struck her first; and I could see that his leg was not broken; but evidently he was in great suffering.

‘I am very sorry,’ I said. Can I help you?’

‘Go to the devil!’ he groaned.

I am ashamed to say the answer made me so angry that I spoke the truth.