John Halifax, Gentleman Part 17

"And wherefore didst thee wish to go?"

"Wherefore?" the answer seemed hard to find. "Oh! Mr Fletcher, were you never young like me?"

My father made no reply; John gathered courage.

"It was, as I say, all my fault. It might have been wrong--I think now that it was--but the temptation was hard. My life here is dull; I long sometimes for a little amus.e.m.e.nt--a little change."

"Thee shall have it."

That voice, slow and quiet as it was, struck us both dumb.

"And how long hast thee planned this, John Halifax?"

"Not a day--not an hour! it was a sudden freak of mine." (My father shook his head with contemptuous incredulity.) "Sir!--Abel Fletcher--did I ever tell you a lie? If you will not believe me, believe your own son. Ask Phineas--No, no, ask him nothing!" And he came in great distress to the sofa where I had fallen. "Oh, Phineas!

how cruel I have been to you!"

I tried to smile at him, being past speaking--but my father put John aside.

"Young man, _I_ can take care of my son. Thee shalt not lead him into harm's way any more. Go--I have been mistaken in thee!"

If my father had gone into a pa.s.sion, had accused us, reproached us, and stormed at us with all the ill-language that men of the world use!

but that quiet, cold, irrevocable, "I have been mistaken in thee!" was ten times worse.

John lifted to him a mute look, from which all pride had ebbed away.

"I repeat, I have been mistaken in thee! Thee seemed a lad to my mind; I trusted thee. This day, by my son's wish, I meant to have bound thee 'prentice to me, and in good time to have taken thee into the business.

Now--"

There was silence. At last John muttered, in a low broken-hearted voice, "I deserve it all. I can go away. I might perhaps earn my living elsewhere; shall I?"

Abel Fletcher hesitated, looked at the poor lad before him (oh, David!

how unlike to thee), then said, "No--I do not wish that. At least, not at present."

I cried out in the joy and relief of my heart. John came over to me, and we clasped hands.

"John, you will not go?"

"No, I will stay to redeem my character with your father. Be content, Phineas--I won't part with you."

"Young man, thou must," said my father, turning round.

"But--"

"I have said it, Phineas. I accuse him of no dishonesty, no crime, but of weakly yielding, and selfishly causing another to yield, to the temptation of the world. Therefore, as my clerk I retain him; as my son's companion--never!"

We felt that "never" was irrevocable.

Yet I tried, blindly and despairingly, to wrestle with it; I might as well have flung myself against a stone wall.

John stood perfectly silent.

"Don't, Phineas," he whispered at last; "never mind me. Your father is right--at least so far as he sees. Let me go--perhaps I may come back to you some time. If not--"

I moaned out bitter words--I hardly knew what I was saying. My father took no notice of them, only went to the door and called Jael.

Then, before the woman came, I had strength enough to bid John go.

"Good-bye--don't forget me, don't!"

"I will not," he said; "and if I live we shall be friends again.

Good-bye, Phineas." He was gone.

After that day, though he kept his word, and remained in the tan-yard, and though from time to time I heard of him--always accidentally,--after that day for two long years I never once saw the face of John Halifax.

CHAPTER VII

It was the year 1800, long known in English households as "the dear year." The present generation can have no conception of what a terrible time that was--War, Famine, and Tumult stalking hand-in-hand, and no one to stay them. For between the upper and lower cla.s.ses there was a great gulf fixed; the rich ground the faces of the poor, the poor hated, yet meanly succ.u.mbed to, the rich. Neither had Christianity enough boldly to cross the line of demarcation, and prove, the humbler, that they were men,--the higher and wiser, that they were gentlemen.

These troubles, which were everywhere abroad, reached us even in our quiet town of Norton Bury. For myself, personally, they touched me not, or, at least, only kept fluttering like evil birds outside the dear home-tabernacle, where I and Patience sat, keeping our solemn counsel together--for these two years had with me been very hard.

Though I had to bear so much bodily suffering that I was seldom told of any worldly cares, still I often fancied things were going ill both within and without our doors. Jael complained in an under-key of stinted housekeeping, or boasted aloud of her own ingenuity in making ends meet: and my father's brow grew continually heavier, graver, sterner; sometimes so stern that I dared not wage, what was, openly or secretly, the quiet but incessant crusade of my existence--the bringing back of John Halifax.

He still remained my father's clerk--nay, I sometimes thought he was even advancing in duties and trusts, for I heard of his being sent long journeys up and down England to buy grain--Abel Fletcher having added to his tanning business the flour-mill hard by, whose lazy whirr was so familiar to John and me in our boyhood. But of these journeys my father never spoke; indeed, he rarely mentioned John at all. However he might employ and even trust him in business relations, I knew that in every other way he was inexorable.

And John Halifax was as inexorable as he. No under-hand or clandestine friends.h.i.+p would he admit--no, not even for my sake. I knew quite well, that until he could walk in openly, honourably, proudly, he never would re-enter my father's doors. Twice only he had written to me--on my two birthdays--my father himself giving me in silence the unsealed letters. They told me what I already was sure of--that I held, and always should hold, my steadfast place in his friends.h.i.+p. Nothing more.

One other fact I noticed: that a little lad, afterward discovered to be Jem Watkins, to whom had fallen the hard-working lot of the lost Bill, had somehow crept into our household as errand-boy, or gardener's boy; and being "cute," and a "scholard," was greatly patronized by Jael. I noticed, too, that the said Jem, whenever he came in my way, in house or garden, was the most capital "little foot-page" that ever invalid had; knowing intuitively all my needs, and serving me with an unfailing devotion, which quite surprised and puzzled me at the time.

It did not afterwards.

Summer was pa.s.sing. People began to watch with anxious looks the thin harvest-fields--as Jael often told me, when she came home from her afternoon walks. "It was piteous to see them," she said; "only July, and the quartern loaf nearly three s.h.i.+llings, and meal four s.h.i.+llings a peck."

And then she would glance at our flour-mill, where for several days a week the water-wheel was as quiet as on Sundays; for my father kept his grain locked up, waiting for what, he wisely judged, might be a worse harvest than the last. But Jael, though she said nothing, often looked at the flour-mill and shook her head. And after one market-day--when she came in rather "fl.u.s.tered," saying there had been a mob outside the mill, until "that young man Halifax" had gone out and spoken to them--she never once allowed me to take my rare walk under the trees in the Abbey-yard; nor, if she could help it, would she even let me sit watching the lazy Avon from the garden-wall.

One Sunday--it was the 1st of August, for my father had just come back from meeting, very much later than usual, and Jael said he had gone, as was his annual custom on that his wedding-day, to the Friends' burial ground in St. Mary's Lane, where, far away from her own kindred and people, my poor young mother had been laid,--on this one Sunday I began to see that things were going wrong. Abel Fletcher sat at dinner wearing the heavy, hard look which had grown upon his face not unmingled with the wrinkles planted by physical pain. For, with all his temperance, he could not quite keep down his hereditary enemy, gout; and this week it had clutched him pretty hard.

Dr. Jessop came in, and I stole away gladly enough, and sat for an hour in my old place in the garden, idly watching the stretch of meadow, pasture, and harvest land. Noticing, too, more as a pretty bit in the landscape than as a fact of vital importance, in how many places the half-ripe corn was already cut, and piled in thinly-scattered sheaves over the fields.

After the doctor left, my father sent for me and all his household: in the which, creeping humbly after the woman-kind, was now numbered the lad Jem. That Abel Fletcher was not quite himself was proved by the fact that his unlighted pipe lay on the table, and his afternoon tankard of ale sank from foam to flatness untouched.

He first addressed Jael. "Woman, was it thee who cooked the dinner to-day?"

She gave a dignified affirmative.

"Thee must give us no more such dinners. No cakes, no pastry kickshaws, and only wheaten bread enough for absolute necessity. Our neighbours shall not say that Abel Fletcher has flour in his mill, and plenty in his house, while there is famine abroad in the land. So take heed."

"I do take heed," answered Jael, staunchly. "Thee canst not say I waste a penny of thine. And for myself, do I not pity the poor? On First-day a woman cried after me about wasting good flour in starch--to-day, behold."