Barrington. Volume 1

“His two ugly terriers eat just as many chickens, and never leave us an egg in the place. And now for Mr. Darby – ”

“You surely don’t think of parting with Darby, sister Dinah?”

“He shall lead the way,” replied she, in a firm and peremptory voice; “the very first of the batch! And it will, doubtless, be a great comfort to you to know that you need not distress yourself about any provision for his declining years. It is a care that he has attended to on his own part. He ‘ll go back to a very well-feathered nest, I promise you.”

Barrington sighed heavily, for he had a secret sorrow on that score. He knew, though his sister did not, that he had from year to year been borrowing every pound of Darby’s savings to pay the cost of law charges, always hoping and looking for the time when a verdict in his favor would enable him to restore the money twice told. With a very dreary sigh, then, did he here allude “to the well-feathered nest” of one he had left bare and destitute. He cleared his throat, and made an effort to avow the whole matter; but his courage failed him, and he sat mournfully shaking his head, partly in sorrow, partly in shame. His sister noticed none of these signs; she was rapidly enumerating all the reductions that could be made, – all the dependencies cut off; there were the boats, which constantly required repairs; the nets, eternally being renewed, – all to be discarded; the island, a very pretty little object in the middle of the river, need no longer be rented. “Indeed,” said she, “I don’t know why we took it, except it was to give those memorable picnics you used to have there.”

“How pleasant they were, Dinah; how delightful!” said he, totally overlooking the spirit of her remark.

“Oh! they were charming, and your own popularity was boundless; but I ‘d have you to bear in mind, brother Peter, that popularity is no more a poor man’s luxury than champagne. It is a very costly indulgence, and can rarely be had on ‘credit.’”

Miss Barrington had pared down retrenchment to the very quick. She had shown that they could live not only without boatmen, rat-catchers, gardener, and manservant, but that, as they were to give up their daily newspaper, they could dispense with a full ration of candle-light; and yet, with all these reductions, she declared that there was still another encumbrance to be pruned away, and she proudly asked her brother if he could guess what it was?

Now Barrington felt that he could not live without a certain allowance of food, nor would it be convenient, or even decent, to dispense with raiment; so he began, as a last resource, to conjecture that his sister was darkly hinting at something which might be a substitute for a home, and save house-rent; and he half testily exclaimed, “I suppose we ‘re to have a roof over us, Dinah!”

“Yes,” said she, dryly, “I never proposed we should go and live in the woods. What I meant had a reference, to Josephine – ”

Barrington’s cheek flushed deeply in an instant, and, with a voice trembling with emotion, he said, —

“If you mean, Dinah, that I’m to cut off that miserable pittance – that forty pounds a year – I give to poor George’s girl – ” He stopped, for he saw that in his sister’s face which might have appalled a bolder heart than his own; for while her eyes flashed fire, her thin lips trembled with passion; and so, in a very faltering humility, he added: “But you never meant that sister Dinah. You would be the very last in the world to do it.”

“Then why impute it to me; answer me that?” said she, crossing her hands behind her back, and staring haughtily at him.

“Just because I ‘m clean at my wits’ end, – just because I neither understand one word I hear, or what I say in reply. If you ‘ll just tell me what it is you propose, I ‘ll do my best, with God’s blessing, to follow you; but don’t ask me for advice, Dinah, and don’t fly out because I ‘m not as quick-witted and as clever as yourself.”

There was something almost so abject in his misery that she seemed touched by it, and, in a voice of a very calm and kindly meaning, she said, —

“I have been thinking a good deal over that letter of Josephine’s; she says she wants our consent to take the veil as a nun; that, by the rules of the order, when her novitiate is concluded, she must go into the world for at least some months, – a time meant to test her faithfulness to her vows, and the tranquillity with which she can renounce forever all the joys and attractions of life. We, it is true, have no means of surrounding her with such temptations; but we might try and supply their place by some less brilliant but not less attractive ones. We might offer her, what we ought to have offered her years ago, – a home! What do you say to this, Peter?”

“That I love you for it, sister Dinah, with all my heart,” said he, kissing her on each cheek; “that it makes me happier than I knew I ever was to be again.”

“Of course, to bring Josephine here, this must not be an inn, Peter.”

“Certainly not, Dinah, – certainly not. But I can think of nothing but the joy of seeing her, – poor George’s child I How I have yearned to know if she was like him, – if she had any of his ways, any traits of that quaint, dry humor he had, and, above all, of that disposition that made him so loved by every one.”

“And cheated by every one too, brother Peter; don’t forget that!”

“Who wants to think of it now?” said he, sorrowfully.

“I never reject a thought because it has unpleasant associations. It would be but a sorry asylum which only admitted the well-to-do and the happy.”

“How are we to get the dear child here, Dinah? Let us consider the matter. It is a long journey off.”

“I have thought of that too,” said she, sententiously, “but not made up my mind.”

“Let us ask M’Cormick about it, Dinah; he’s coming up this evening to play his Saturday night’s rubber with Dill. He knows the Continent well.”

“There will be another saving that I did n’t remember, Peter. The weekly bottle of whiskey, and the candles, not to speak of the four or five shillings your pleasant companions invariably carry away with them, – all may be very advantageously dispensed with.”

“When Josephine ‘s here, I ‘ll not miss it,” said he, good-humoredly. Then suddenly remembering that his sister might not deem the speech a gracious one to herself, he was about to add something; but she was gone.

CHAPTER III. OUR NEXT NEIGHBORS

Should there be amongst my readers any one whose fortune it has been in life only to associate with the amiable, the interesting, and the agreeable, all whose experiences of mankind are rose-tinted, to him I would say, Skip over two people I am now about to introduce, and take up my story at some later stage, for I desire to be truthful, and, as is the misfortune of people in my situation, I may be very disagreeable.

After all, I may have made more excuses than were needful. The persons I would present are in that large category, the commonplace, and only as uninviting and as tiresome as we may any day meet in a second-class on the railroad. Flourish, therefore, penny trumpets, and announce Major M’Cormick. The Major, so confidently referred to by Barrington in our last chapter as a high authority on matters continental, was a very shattered remnant of the unhappy Walcheren expedition. He was a small, mean-looking, narrow-faced man, with a thin, bald head, and red whiskers. He walked very lame from an injury to his hip; “his wound,” he called it, though his candor did not explain that it was incurred by being thrown down a hatchway by a brother officer in a drunken brawl. In character he was a saving, penurious creature, without one single sympathy outside his own immediate interests. When some sixteen or eighteen years before the Barringtons had settled in the neighborhood, the Major began to entertain thoughts of matrimony. Old soldiers are rather given to consider marriage as an institution especially intended to solace age and console rheumatism, and so M’Cormick debated with himself whether he had not arrived at the suitable time for this indulgence, and also whether Miss Dinah Barrington was not the individual destined to share his lot and season his gruel.

But a few years back and his ambition would as soon have aspired to an archduchess as to the sister of Barrington, of Barrington Hall, whose realms of social distinction separated them; but now, fallen from their high estate, forgotten by the world, and poor, they had come down – at least, he thought so – to a level in which there would be no presumption in his pretensions. Indeed, I half suspect that he thought there was something very high-minded and generous in his intentions with regard to them. At all events, there was a struggle of some sort in his mind which went on from year to year undecided. Now, there are men – for the most part old bachelors – to whom an unfinished project is a positive luxury, who like to add, day by day, a few threads to the web of fate, but no more. To the Major it was quite enough that “some fine day or other” – so he phrased it – he ‘d make his offer, just as he thought how, in the same propitious weather, he ‘d put a new roof on his cottage, and fill up that quarry-hole near his gate, into which he had narrowly escaped tumbling some half-dozen times. But thanks to his caution and procrastination, the roof, and the project, and the quarry-hole were exactly, or very nearly, in the same state they had been eighteen years before.

Rumor said – as rumor will always say whatever has a tinge of ill-nature in it – that Miss Barrington would have accepted him; vulgar report declared that she would “jump at the offer.” Whether this be, or not, the appropriate way of receiving a matrimonial proposal, the lady was not called upon to display her activity. He never told his love.

It is very hard to forgive that secretary, home or foreign, who in the day of his power and patronage could, but did not, make us easy for life with this mission or that com-missionership. It is not easy to believe that our uncle the bishop could not, without any undue strain upon his conscience, have made us something, albeit a clerical error, in his diocese, but infinitely more difficult is it to pardon him who, having suggested dreams of wedded happiness, still stands hesitating, doubting, and canvassing, – a timid bather, who shivers on the beach, and then puts on his clothes again.

It took a long time – it always does in such cases – ere Miss Barrington came to read this man aright. Indeed, the light of her own hopes had dazzled her, and she never saw him clearly till they were extinguished; but when the knowledge did come, it came trebled with compound interest, and she saw him in all that displayed his miserable selfishness; and although her brother, who found it hard to believe any one bad who had not been tried for a capital felony, would explain away many a meanness by saying, “It is just his way, – a way, and no more!” she spoke out fearlessly, if not very discreetly, and declared she detested him. Of course she averred it was his manners, his want of breeding, and his familiarity that displeased her. He might be an excellent creature, – perhaps he was; that was nothing to her. All his moral qualities might have an interest for his friends; she was a mere acquaintance, and was only concerned for what related to his bearing in society. Then Walcheren was positively odious to her. Some little solace she felt at the thought that the expedition was a failure and inglorious; but when she listened to the fiftieth time-told tale of fever and ague, she would sigh, not for those who suffered, but over the one that escaped. It is a great blessing to men of uneventful lives and scant imagination when there is any one incident to which memory can refer unceasingly. Like some bold headland last seen at sea, it lives in the mind throughout the voyage. Such was this ill-starred expedition to the Major. It dignified his existence to himself, though his memory never soared above the most ordinary details and vulgar incidents. Thus he would maunder on for hours, telling how the ships sailed and parted company, and joined again; how the old “Brennus” mistook a signal and put back to Hull, and how the “Sarah Reeves,” his own transport, was sent after her. Then he grew picturesque about Flushing, as first seen through the dull fogs of the Scheldt, with village spires peeping through the heavy vapor, and the strange Dutch language, with its queer names for the vegetables and fruit brought by the boats alongside.

“You won’t believe me, Miss Dinah, but, as I sit here, the peaches was like little melons, and the cherries as big as walnuts.”

“They made cherry-bounce out of them, I hope, sir,” said she, with a scornful smile.

“No, indeed, ma’am,” replied he, dull to the sarcasm; “they ate them in a kind of sauce with roast-pig, and mighty good too!”

But enough of the Major; and now a word, and only a word, for his companion, already alluded to by Barrington.

Dr. Dill had been a poor “Dispensary Doctor” for some thirty years, with a small practice, and two or three grand patrons at some miles off, who employed him for the servants, or for the children in “mild cases,” and who even extended to him a sort of contemptuous courtesy that serves to make a proud man a bear, and an humble man a sycophant.

Dill was the reverse of proud, and took to the other line with much kindliness. To have watched him in his daily round you would have said that he liked being trampled on, and actually enjoyed being crushed. He smiled so blandly, and looked so sweetly under it all, as though it was a kind of moral shampooing, from which he would come out all the fresher and more vigorous.

The world is certainly generous in its dealings with these temperaments; it indulges them to the top of their hearts, and gives them humiliations to their heart’s content. Rumor – the same wicked goddess who libelled Miss Barrington – hinted that the doctor was not, within his own walls and under his own roof, the suffering angel the world saw him, and that he occasionally did a little trampling there on his own account. However, Mrs. Dill never complained; and though the children wore a tremulous terror and submissiveness in their looks, they were only suitable family traits, which all redounded to their credit, and made them “so like the doctor.”

Such were the two worthies who slowly floated along on the current of the river of a calm summer’s evening, to visit the Barringtons. As usual, the talk was of their host. They discussed his character and his habits and his debts, and the difficulty he had in raising that little loan; and in close juxtaposition with this fact, as though pinned on the back of it, his sister’s overweening pride and pretension. It had been the Major’s threat for years that he ‘d “take her down a peg one of these days.” But either he was mercifully unwilling to perform the act, or that the suitable hour for it had not come; but there she remained, and there he left her, not taken down one inch, but loftier and haughtier than ever. As the boat rounded the point from which the cottage was visible through the trees and some of the outhouses could be descried, they reverted to the ruinous state everything was falling into. “Straw is cheap enough, anyhow,” said the Major. “He might put a new thatch on that cow-house, and I ‘m sure a brush of paint would n’t ruin any one.” Oh, my dear reader! have you not often heard – I know that I have – such comments as these, such reflections on the indolence or indifference which only needed so very little to reform, done, too, without trouble or difficulty, habits that could be corrected, evil ways reformed, and ruinous tendencies arrested, all as it were by a “rush of paint,” or something just as uncostly?

“There does n’t seem to be much doing here, Dill,” said M’Cormick, as they landed. “All the boats are drawn up ashore. And faith! I don’t wonder, that old woman is enough to frighten the fish out of the river.”

“Strangers do not always like that sort of thing,” modestly remarked the doctor, – the “always” being peculiarly marked for emphasis. “Some will say, an inn should be an inn.”

“That’s my view of it. What I say is this: I want my bit of fish, and my beefsteak, and my pint of wine, and I don’t want to know that the landlord’s grandfather entertained the king, or that his aunt was a lady-in-waiting. ‘Be’ as high as you like,’ says I, ‘but don’t make the bill so,’ – eh, Dill?” And he cackled the harsh ungenial laugh which seems the birthright of all sorry jesters; and the doctor gave a little laugh too, more from habit, however, than enjoyment.

“Do you know, Dill,” said the Major, disengaging himself from the arm which his lameness compelled him to lean on, and standing still in the pathway, – “do you know that I never reach thus far without having a sort of struggle with myself whether I won’t turn back and go home again. Can you explain that, now?”

“It is the wound, perhaps, pains you, coming up the hill.”

“It is not the wound. It’s that woman!”

“Miss Barrington?”

“Just so. I have her before me now, sitting up behind the urn there, and saying, ‘Have you had tea, Major M’Cormick?’ when she knows well she did n’t give it to me. Don’t you feel that going up to the table for your cup is for all the world like doing homage?”

“Her manners are cold, – certainly cold.”