Barrington. Volume 1. Lever Charles James
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