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Squire Petrick's Lady
Thomas Hardy
Folk who are at all acquainted with the traditions of Stapleford Park will
not need to be told that in the middle of the last century it was owned by that
trump of mortgagees, Timothy Petrick, whose skill in gaining possession of fair
estates by granting sums of money on their title-deeds has seldom if ever been
equaled in our part of England. Timothy was a lawyer by profession, and agent to
several noblemen, by which means his special line of business became opened to
him by a sort of revelation. It is said that a relative of his, a very deep
thinker, who afterwards had the misfortune to be transported for life for
mistaken notions on the singing of a will, taught him considerable legal lore,
which he creditably resolved never to throw away for the benefit of other
people, but to reserve it entirely for his own.
However, I have nothing in particular to say about his early and active
days, but rather of the time when, an old man, he had become the owner of vast
estates by the means I have signified-among them the great manor of Stapleford,
on which he lived, in the splendid old mansion now pulled down; likewise estates
at Marlott, estates near Sherton Abbas, nearly all the borough of Millpool, and
many properties near Ivell. Indeed, I can't call to mind half his landed
possessions, and I don't know that it matters much at this time of day, seeing
that he's been dead and gone many years. It is said that when he bought an
estate he would not decide to pay the price till he had walked over every single
acre with his own two feet, and prodded the soil at every point with his own
spud, to test its quality, which, if we regard the extent of his properties,
must have been a stiff business for him.
At the time I am speaking of he was a man over eighty, and his son was
dead; but he had two grandsons, the eldest of whom, his namesake, was married,
and was shortly expecting issue. Just then the grandfather was taken ill, for
death, as it seemed, considering his age. By his will the old man had created an
entail (as I believe the lawyers call it), devising the whole of the estates to
his elder grandson and his issue male, failing which, to his younger grandson
and his issue male, failing which, to remoter relatives, who need not be
mentioned now.
While old Timothy Petrick was lying ill, his elder grandson's wife,
Annetta, gave birth to her expected child, who, as fortune would have it, was a
son. Timothy, her husband, though sprung of a scheming family, was no great
schemer himself; he was the single one of the Petricks then living whose heart
had ever been greatly moved by sentiments which did not run in the groove of
ambition; and on this account he had not married well, as the saying is, his
wife having been the daughter of a family of no better beginnings than his own;
that is to say, her father was a country townsman of the professional class. But
she was a very pretty woman, by all accounts, and her husband had seen, courted,
and married her in a high tide of infatuation, after a very short acquaintance,
and with very little knowledge of her heart's history. He had never found reason
to regret his choice as yet, and his anxiety for her recovery was great.
She was supposed to be out of danger, and herself and the child progressing
well, when there was a change for the worse, and she sank so rapidly that she
was soon given over. When she felt that she was about to leave him, annetta sent
for her husband, and, on his speedy entry and assurance that they were alone,
she made him solemnly vow to give the child every care in any circumstances that
might arise, if it should please Heaven to take her. This, of course, he readily
promised. Then, after some hesitation, she told him that she could not die with
a falsehood upon her soul, and dire deceit in her life; she must make a terrible
confession to him before her lips were sealed forever. She thereupon related an
incident concerning the baby's parentage which was not as he supposed.
Timothy Petrick, though a quick-feeling man, was not of a sort to show
nerves outwardly; and he bore himself as heroically as he possibly could do in
this trying moment of his life. That same night his wife died; and while she lay
dead, and before her funeral, he hastened to the bedside of his sick
grandfather, and revealed to him all that had happened-the baby's birth, his
wife's confession, and her death, beseeching the aged man, as he loved him, to
bestir himself now, at the eleventh hour, and alter his will so as to dish the
intruder. Old Timothy, seeing matters in the same light as his grandson,
required no urging against allowing anything to stand in the way of legitimate
inheritance; he executed another will, limiting the entail to Timothy, his
grandson, for life, and his male heirs thereafter to be born; after them to his
other grandson, Edward, and Edward's heirs. Thus the newly born infant, who had
been the center of so many hopes, was cut off and scorned as none of the
elect.
The old mortgage lived but a short time after this, the excitement of the
discovery having told upon him considerably, and he was gathered to his fathers
like the most charitable man in his neighborhood. Both wife and grandparent
being buried, Timothy settled down to his usual life as well as he was able,
mentally satisfied that he had, by prompt action, defeated consequences of the
consequences of such dire domestic treachery as had been shown towards him, and
resolving to marry a second time as soon as he could satisfy himself in the
choice of a wife.
But men do not always know themselves. The imbittered state of Timothy
Petrick's mind bred in him by degrees such a hatred and mistrust of womankind
that though several specimens of high attractiveness came under his eyes, he
could not bring himself to the point of proposing marriage. He dreaded to take
up the position of husband a second time, discerning a trap in every petticoat,
and a Slough of Despond in possible heirs. "What has happened once, when all
seemed so fair, may happen again," he said to himself. "I'll risk my name no
more." So he abstained from marriage, and overcame his wish for a lineal
descendant to follow him in the ownership of Stapleford.
Timothy had scarcely noticed the unfortunate child that his wife had borne,
after arranging for a meager fulfilment of his promise to her to take care of
the boy, by having him brought up in his house. Occasionally, remembering his
promise, he went and glanced at the child, saw that he was doing well, gave a
few special directions, and again went his solitary way. Thus he and the child
lived on in the Stapleford mansion-house till two or three years has passed by.
One day he was walking in the garden, and by some accident left his snuff-box on
a bench. When he came back to find it he saw the little boy standing there; he
had escaped his nurse, and was making a plaything of the box, in spite of the
convulsive sneezings which the game brought in its train. Then the man with the
incrusted heart became interested in the little fellow's persistence in his play
under such discomforts; he looked in the child's face, saw there his wife's
countenance, though he did not see his own, and fell into thought on the
piteousness of childhood-particularly of despised and rejected childhood, like
this before him.
From that hour, try as he would to counteract the feeling, the human
necessity to love something or other got the better of what he had called his
wisdom, and shaped itself in a tender anxiety for the youngster Rupert. This
name had been given him by his dying mother when, at her request, the child was
baptized in her chamber, lest he should not survive for public baptism; and her
husband had never thought of it as a name of any significance till, about this
time, he learned by accident that it was the name of the young Marquis of
Christminster, son of the Duke of Southwesterland, for whom Annetta had
cherished warm feelings before her marriage. Recollecting some wandering phrases
in his wife's last words, which he had not understood at the time, he perceived
at last that this was the person to whom she had alluded when affording him a
clew to little Rupert's history.
He would sit in silence for hours with the child, being no great speaker at
the best of times; but the boy, on his part, was too ready with his tongue for
any break in discourse to arise because Timothy Petrick had nothing to say.
After idling away his mornings in this manner, Petrick would go to his own room
and swear in long, loud whispers, and walk up and down, calling himself the most
ridiculous dolt that ever lived, and declaring that he would never go near the
little fellow again; to which resolve he would adhere for the space, perhaps, of
a day. Such cases are happily not new to human nature, but there never was a
case in which a man more completely befooled his former self than in this.
As the child grew up, Timothy's attachment to him grew deeper, till Rupert
became almost the sole object for which he lived. There had been enough of the
family ambition latent in him for Timothy Petrick to feel a little envy when,
some time before this date, his brother Edward had been accepted by the
Honorable Harriet Mountclere, daughter of the second viscount of that name and
title; but having discovered, as I have before stated, the paternity of his boy
Rupert to lurk in even a higher stratum of society, those envious feelings
speedily dispersed. Indeed, the more he reflected thereon, after his brother's
aristocratic marriage, the more content did he became. His late wife took softer
outline in his memory, as he thought of the lofty taste she had displayed,
though only a plain burgher's daughter, and the justification for his weakness
in loving the child-the justification that he had longed for-was afforded now in
the knowledge that the boy was by nature, if not by name, a representative of
one of the noblest houses in England.
"She was a woman of grand instincts, after all," he said to himself,
proudly. "To fix her choice upon the immediate successor in that ducal line-it
was finely conceived! Had he been of low blood like myself or my relations she
would scarce have deserved the harsh measure that I have dealt out to her and
her offspring. How much less, then, when such groveling tastes were farthest
from her soul! The man Annetta loved was noble, and my boy is noble in spite of
me."
The after-clap was inevitable, and it soon came. "So far," he reasoned,
"from cutting off his child from inheritance of my estates, as I have done, I
should have rejoiced in the possession of him! He is of pure stock on one side
at least, while in the ordinary run of affairs he would have been a commoner to
the bone."
Being a man, whatever his faults, of good old beliefs in the divinity of
kings and those about 'em, the more he overhauled the case in this light the
more strongly did his poor wife's conduct in improving the blood and breed of
the Petrick family win his heart. He considered what ugly, idle, hard-drinking
scamps many of his own relations had been; the miserable scriveners, usurers,
and pawnbrokers that he had numbered among his forefathers, and the probability
that some of their bad qualities would have come out in a merely corporeal
child, to give him sorrow in his old age, turn his black hairs gray, his gray
hairs white, cut down every stick of timber, and Heaven knows what all, had he
not, like a skilful gardener, minded his grafting and changed the sort; till at
length this right-minded man fell down on his knees every night and morning and
thanked God that he was not as other meanly descended fathers in such
matters.
It was in the peculiar disposition of the Petrick family that the
satisfaction which ultimately settled in Timothy's breast found nourishment. The
Petricks had adored the nobility, and plucked them at the same time. That
excellent man Izaak Walton's feelings about fish were much akin to those of old
Timothy Petrick, and of his descendants in a lesser degree, concerning the
landed aristocracy. To torture and to love simultaneously is a proceeding
strange to reason, but possible to practise, as these instances show.
Hence, when Timothy's brother Edward said slightingly one day that
Timothy's son was well enough, but that he had nothing but shops and offices in
his backward perspective, while his own children, should he have any, would be
far different, in possessing such a mother as the Honorable Harriet, Timothy
felt a bound of triumph within him at the power he possessed of contradicting
that statement if he chose.
So much was he interested in his boy in this new aspect that he now began
to read up chronicles of the illustrious house ennobled as the Dukes of
Southwesterland, from their very beginning in the glories of the Restoration of
the blessed Charles till the year of his own time. He mentally noted their gifts
from royalty, grants of lands, purchases, intermarriages, plantings, and
buildings; more particularly their political and military achievements, which
had been great, and their performances in arts and letters, which had been by no
means contemptible. He studied prints of the portraits of that family, and then,
like a chemist watching a crystallization, began to examine young Rupert's face
for the unfolding of those historic curves and shades that the painters Vandyke
and Lely had perpetuated on canvas.
When the boy reached the most fascinating age of childhood, and his shouts
of laughter rang through Stapleford House from end to end, the remorse that
oppressed Timothy Petrick knew no bounds. Of all people in the world this Rupert
was the one on whom he could have wished the estates to devolve; yet Rupert, by
Timothy's own desperate strategy at the time of his birth, had been ousted from
all inheritance of them; and, since he did not mean to remarry, the manors would
pass to his brother and his brother's children, who would be nothing to him,
whose boasted pedigree on one side would be nothing to his Rupert's.
Had he only left the first will of his grandfather alone!
His mind ran on the wills continually, both of which were in existence, and
the first, the canceled one, in his own possession. Night after night, when the
servants were all abed, and the click of safety-locks sounded as loud as a
crash, he looked at that first will, and wished it had been the second and not
the first.
The crisis came at last. One night, after having enjoyed the boy's company
for hours, he could no longer bear that his beloved Rupert should be
dispossessed, and he committed the felonious deed of altering the date of the
earlier will to a fortnight later, which made its execution appear subsequent to
the date of the second will already proved. He then boldly propounded the first
will as the second.
His brother Edward submitted to what appeared to be not only injontestible
fact, but a far more likely disposition of old Timothy's procerty; for, like
many others, he had been much surprised at the limitptions defined in the other
will, having no clew to their cause. He aoined his brother Timothy in setting
aside the hitherto accepted document, and matters went on in their usual course,
there being no dispositions in the substituted will differing from those in the
other, except such as related to a future which had not yet arrived.
The years moved on. Rupert had not yet revealed the anxiously expected
historic lineaments which should foreshadow the political abilities of the ducal
family aforesaid, when it happened on a certain day that Timothy Petrick made
the acquaintance of a well-known physician of Budmouth, who had been the medical
adviser and friend of the late Mrs. Petrick's family for many years, though
after Annetta's marriage, and consequent removal to Stapleford, he had seen no
more of her, the neighboring practitioner who attended the Petricks having then
become her doctor as a matter of course. Timothy was impressed by the insight
and knowledge disclosed in the conversation of the Budmouth physician, and the
acquaintance ripening to intimacy, the physician alluded to a form of
hallucination to which Annetta's mother and grandmother had been subject-that of
believing in certain dreams as realities. He delicately inquired if Timothy had
ever noticed anything of the sort in his wife during her lifetime; he, the
physician, had fancied that he discerned germs of the same peculiarity in
Annetta when he attended her in her girlhood. One explanation begat another,
till the dumbfounded Timothy Petrick was persuaded in his own mind that
Annetta's confession to him had been based on a delusion.
"You look down in the mouth!" said the doctor, pausing.
"A bit unmanned. 'Tis unexpected-like," sighed Timothy.
But he could hardly believe it possible; and, thinking it best to be frank
with the doctor, told him the whole story which, till now, he had never related
to living man, save his dying grandfather. To his surprise, the physician
informed him that such a form of delusion was precisely what he would have
expected from Annetta's antecedents at such a physical crisis in her life.
Petrick prosecuted his inquiries elsewhere; and the upshot of his labors
was, briefly, that a comparison of dates and places showed irrefutably that his
poor wife's assertion could not possibly have foundation in fact. The young
Marquis of her tender passion-a highly moral and brightminded nobleman-had gone
abroad the year before Annetta's, marriage, and had not returned until after her
death. The young girl's love for him had been a delicate ideal dream-no
more.
Timothy went home, and the boy ran out to meet him; whereupon a strangely
dismal feeling of discontent took possession of his soul. After all, then, there
was nothing but plebeian blood in the veins of the heir to his name and estates;
he was not to be succeeded by a noble-natured line. To be sure, Rupert was his
son; but that glory and halo he believed him to have inherited from the ages,
outshining that of his brother's children, had departed from Rupert's brow
forever; he could no longer read history in the boy's face and centuries of
domination in his eyes.
His manner towards his son grew colder and colder from that day forward;
and it was with bitterness of heart that he discerned the characteristic
features of the Petricks unfolding themselves by degrees. Instead of the elegant
knife-edged nose, so typical of the Dukes of Southwesterland, there began to
appear on his face the broad nostril and hollow bridge of his grandfather
Timothy. No illustrious line of politicians was promised a continuator in that
graying blue eye, for it was acquiring the expression of the orb of a
particularly objectionable cousin of his own; and, instead of the mouth-curves
which had thrilled Parliamentary audiences in speeches now bound in calf in
every well-ordered library, there was the bull-lip of that very uncle of his who
had had the misfortune with the signature of a gentleman's will, and had been
transported for life in consequence.
To think how he himself, too, had sinned in this same matter of a will for
this mere fleshly reproduction of a wretched old uncle whose very name he wished
to forget! The boy's Christian name, even, was an imposture and an irony, for it
implied hereditary force and brilliancy to which he plainly would never attain!
The consolation of real sonship was always left him certainly; but he could not
help groaning to himself, "Why cannot a son be one's own and somebody else's
likewise?"
The Marquis was shortly afterwards in the neighborhood of Stapleford, and
Timothy Petrick met him, and eyed his noble countenance admiringly. The next
day, when Petrick was in his study, somebody knocked at the door.
"Who's there?"
"Rupert."
"I'll Rupert thee, you young impostor! Say, only a poor common-place
Petrick!" his father grunted. "Why didn't you have a voice like the Marquis I
saw yesterday?" he continued, as the lad came in. "Why haven't you his looks,
and a way of commanding as if you'd done it for centuries-hey?"
"Why? How can you expect it, father, when I'm not related to him?"
"Ugh! Then you ought to be!" growled his father. |
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发表于 2016-7-10 11:23:06