Brownlows. Маргарет Олифант
would be hard—no doubt it would be hard, after all this interval—to give up the fortune which he had accepted with reluctance, and which had cost him, as he felt, a hundred times more trouble than it had ever given him pleasure. Now that he had begun to get a little good out of it, to think of some stealthy vagrant coming in and calling suddenly for his rights, and laying claim perhaps to all the increase which Mr. Brownlow’s careful management had made of the original, was an irritating idea. He tried to put it away, and perhaps he might have been successful in banishing it from his mind but for another circumstance that fixed it there, and gave, as it seemed, consistency and force to the thought.
The height of the day was over, and the sun was veering toward that point of the compass from which its rays shone in at John Brownlow’s windows, when he was asked if he would see a young man who came about the junior clerk’s place. Mr. Brownlow had very nearly made up his mind as to who should fill this junior clerk’s place; but he was kind-hearted, and sent no one disconsolate away if it were possible to help it. After a moment’s hesitation, he gave orders for the admission of this young man. “If he does not do for that, he may be good for something else,” was what John Brownlow said; for it was one of his crotchets, that to help men to work was better than almsgiving. The young man in question had nothing very remarkable in his appearance. He had a frank, straightforward, simple sort of air, which partly, perhaps, arose from the great defect in his face—the projection of the upper jaw, which was well garnished with large white teeth. He had, however, merry eyes, of the kind that smile without knowing it whenever they accost another countenance; but his other features were all homely—expressive, but not remarkable. He came in modestly, but he was not afraid; and he stood respectfully and listened to Mr. Brownlow, but there was no servility in his attitude. He had come about the clerk’s place, and he was quite ready to give an account of himself. His father had been a non-commissioned officer, but was dead; and his mother wanted his help badly enough.
“But you are strangers in Masterton,” said Mr. Brownlow, attracted by his frank looks. “Had you any special inducement to come here?”
“Nothing of any importance,” said the youth, and he colored a little. “The fact is, sir, my mother came of richer people than we are now, and they cast her off; and some of them once lived in Masterton. She came to see if she could hear any thing of her friends.”
“And did she?” said John Brownlow, feeling his breath come a little quick.
“They are all dead long ago,” said the young man. “We have all been born in Canada, and we never heard what had happened. Her moth—I mean her friends, are all dead, I suppose; and Masterton is just as good as any other place to make a beginning in. I should not be afraid if I could get any thing to do.”
“Clerk’s salaries are very small,” said Mr. Brownlow, without knowing what it was he said.
“Yes, but they improve,” said his visitor, cheerfully; “and I don’t mind what I do. I could make up books or do any thing at night, or even have pupils—I have done that before. But I beg your pardon for troubling you with all this. If the place is filled up—”
“Nay, stop—sit down—you interest me,” said Mr. Brownlow. “I like a young fellow who is not easily cast down. Your mother—belongs—to Masterton, I suppose,” he added, with a little hesitation; he, that gave way to no man in Dartfordshire for courage and coolness, he was afraid. He confessed it to himself, and felt all the shame of the new sensation, but it had possession of him all the same.
“She belongs to the Isle of Man,” said the young man, with his frank straightforward look and the smile in his eyes. He answered quite simply and point-blank, having no thought that there was any second meaning in his words; but it was otherwise with him who heard. John Brownlow sat silent, utterly confounded. He stared at the young stranger in a blank way, not knowing how to answer or how to conceal or account for the tremendous impression which these simple words made on him. He sat and stared, and his lower lip fell a little, and his eyes grew fixed, so that the youth was terrified, and did not know what to make of it. Of course he seized upon the usual resource of the disconcerted—“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I am afraid you are ill.”
“No, no; it is nothing,” said Mr. Brownlow. “I knew some people once who came from the Isle of Man. But that is a long time ago. I am sorry she has not found the people she sought for. But, as you say, there is nothing like work. If you can engross well—though how you should know how to engross after taking pupils and keeping books—”
“We have to do a great many things in the colony,” said his young visitor. “If a man wants to live, he must not be particular about what he does. I was two years in a lawyer’s office in Paris—”
“In Paris?” said Mr. Brownlow, with amazement.
“I mean in Paris, Canada West,” said the youth, with a touch of momentary defiance, as who would say, “and a very much better Paris than any you can boast of here.”
This little accident did so much good that it enabled Mr. Brownlow to smile, and to shake off the oppression that weighed upon him. It was a relief to be able to question the applicant as to his capabilities, while secretly and rapidly in his own mind he turned over the matter, and asked himself what he should do. Discourage the young man and direct him elsewhere, and gently push him out of Masterton—or take him in and be kind to him, and trust in Providence? The panic of the moment suggested the first course, but a better impulse followed. In the first place, it was not easy to discourage a young fellow with those sanguine brown eyes, and blood that ran so quickly in his veins; and if any danger was at hand, it was best to have it near, and be able to study it, and be warned at once how and when it might approach. All this passed rapidly, like an under-current, through John Brownlow’s mind, as he sat and asked innumerable questions about the young applicant’s capabilities and antecedents. He did it to gain time, though all young Powys thought was that he had never gone through so severe an examination. The young fellow smiled within himself at the wonderful precision and caution of the old man, with a kind of transatlantic freedom—not that he was republican, but only colonial; not irritated by his employer’s superiority, but regarding it as an affair of perhaps only a few days or years.
“I will think it over,” said Mr. Brownlow at last. “I can not decide upon any thing all at once. If you settle quietly down and get a situation, I think you may do very well here. It is not a dear place, and if your mother has friends—”
“But she has no friends now that we know of,” said the young man, with the unnecessary and persistent explanatoriness of youth.
“If she has friends here,” persisted Mr. Brownlow, “you may be sure they will turn up. Come back to me to-morrow. I will think it all over in the mean time, and give you my answer then. Powys—that is a very good name—there was a Lady Powys here some time ago, who was exceedingly good and kind to the poor. Perhaps it was she whom you sought—”
“Oh, no,” said the young man, eagerly; “it was my mother’s people—a family called—”
“I am afraid I have an engagement now,” said Mr. Brownlow; and then young Powys withdrew, with that quiet sense of shame and compunction which belongs only to his years. He, of course, as was natural, could see nothing of the tragic under-current. It appeared to him only that he was intruding his private affairs, in an unjustifiable way, on his probable patron—on the man who had been kind to him, and given him hope. “What an ass I am!” he said to himself as he went away, “as if he could take any interest in my mother’s friends.” And it troubled the youth all day to think that he had possibly wearied Mr. Brownlow by his explanations and iteration—an idea as mistaken as it was possible to conceive.
When he had left the office, the lawyer fell back in his chair, and for a long time neither moved nor spoke. Probably it was the nature of his previous reflections which gave this strange visit so overwhelming an effect. He sat in a kind of stupor, seeing before him, as it appeared in actual bodily presence, the danger which it had startled him this same morning to realize as merely possible. If it had been any other day, he might have heard, without much remarking, all those singular coincidences which now appeared so startling; but they chimed in so naturally, or rather so unnaturally, with the