Weighed and Wanting by George MacDonald (fiction book recommendations TXT) 📕

for he had daily to endure the hardship of being at the bank by nine o'clock, and made the best of it by claiming in consequence an utter immunity from the petite norale of the breakfast-table. Never did he lose a moment in helping anybody. Even the little Saffy he allowed with perfect frigidity to stretch out a very long arm after the butter-except indeed it happened to cross his plate, when he would sharply rebuke her breach of manners. It would have been all the same if he had not been going till noon, but now he had hurry and business to rampart his laziness and selfishness withal. Mark would sooner have gone without salt to his egg than ask Corney to pass it.

This morning the pale boy sat staring at the crocuses-things like them peeping out of the spring-mould of his spirit to greet them.

"Why don't you eat your breakfast, Mark, dear?" said his mother.

"I'm not hungry, mamma," he answered.

The mother looked at him a little anxiously. He was not a very vigorous boy in corporeal matters; but, unlike his father's, his light was almost always shining, and making the faces about him shine.

After a few minutes, he said, as if unconsciously, his eyes fixed on the crocuses,

"I can't think how they come!"

"They grow!" said Saffy.

Said her father, willing to set them thinking,

"Didn't you see Hester make the paper flowers for her party?"

"Yes," replied Saffy, "but it would take such a time to make all the flowers in the world that way!"

"So it would; but if a great many angels took it in hand, I suppose they could do it."

"That can't be how!" said Saffy, laughing; "for you know they come up out of the earth, and there ain't room to cut them out there!"

"I think they must be cut out and put together before they are made!" said Mark, very slowly and thoughtfully.

The supposition was greeted with a great burst of laughter from Cornelius. In the midst of a refined family he was the one vulgar, and behaved as the blind and stupid generally behave to those who see what they cannot see. Mockery is the share they choose in the motions of the life eternal!

"Stop, stop, Cornelius!" said his father. "I suspect we have a young philosopher where you see only a silly little brother. He has, I fancy, got a glimpse of something he does not yet know how to say."

"In that case, don't you think, sir," said Cornelius, "he had better hold his tongue till he does know how to say it?"

It was not often he dared speak so to his father, but he was growing less afraid of him, though not through increase of love.

His father looked at him a moment ere he replied, and his mother looked anxiously at her husband.

"It would be better," he answered quietly, "were he not among
friends ."

The emphasis with which he spoke was lost on Cornelius.

"They take everything for clever the little idiot says!" he remarked to himself. "Nobody made anything of me when I was his age!"

The letters were brought in. Amongst them was one for Mr. Raymount with a broad black border. He looked at the postmark.

"This must be the announcement of cousin Strafford's death!" he said. "Some one told me she was not expected to live. I wonder how she has left the property!"

"You did not tell me she was ill!" said his wife.

"It went out of my head. It is so many years since I had the least communication with her, or heard anything of her! She was a strange old soul!"

"You used to be intimate with her-did you not, papa?" said Hester.

"Yes, at one time. But we differed so entirely it was impossible it should last. She would take up the oddest notions as to what I thought, and meant, and wanted to do, and then fall out upon me as advocating things I hated quite as much as she did. But that is much the way generally. People seldom know what they mean themselves, and can hardly be expected to know what other people mean. Only the amount of mental and moral force wasted on hating and talking down the non-existent is a pity."

"I can't understand why people should quarrel so about their opinions," said Mrs. Raymount.

"A great part of it comes of indignation at not being understood and another great part from despair of being understood-and that while all the time the person thus indignant and despairing takes not the smallest pains to understand the neighbor whose misunderstanding of himself makes him so sick and sore."

"What is to be done then?" asked Hester.

"Nothing," answered her father with something of a cynical smile, born of this same frustrated anxiety to impress his opinions on others.

He took up his letter, slowly broke the large black seal which adorned it, and began to read it. His wife sat looking at him, and waiting, in expectation sufficiently mild, to hear its contents.

He had scarcely read half the first page when she saw his countenance change a little, then flush a little, then grow a little fixed, and quite inscrutable. He folded the letter, laid it down by the side of his plate, and began to eat again.

"Well, dear?" said his wife.

"It is not quite what I thought," he answered, with a curious smile, and said nothing more, but ate his toast in a brooding silence. Never in the habit of making secrets, like his puny son, he had a strong dislike to showing his feelings, and from his wife even was inclined to veil them. He was besides too proud to manifest his interest in the special contents of this letter.

The poor, but, because of its hopelessness, hardly indulged ambition of Mr. Raymount's life, was to possess a portion, however small, of the earth's surface-if only an acre or two. He came of families both possessing such property, but none of it had come near him except that belonging to the cousin mentioned. He was her nearest relation, but had never had much hope of inheriting from her, and after a final quarrel put an end to their quarelling, had had none. Even for Mammon's sake Mr. Raymount was not the man to hide or mask his opinions.

He worshipped his opinions indeed as most men do Mammon. For many years in consequence there had not been the slightest communication between the cousins. But in the course of those years all the other relatives of the old lady had died, and, as the letter he now held informed him, he was after all heir to her property, a small estate in a lovely spot among the roots of the Cumberland hills. It was attended by not a few thousands in government securities.

But while Mr. Raymount was not a money-lover in any notable sense-the men are rare indeed of whom it might be said absolutely they do not love money-his delight in having land of his own was almost beyond utterance. This delight had nothing to do with the money value of the property; he scarcely thought of that: it came in large part of a new sense of room and freedom; the estate was an extension of his body and limbs-and such an extension as any lover of the picturesque would have delighted in. It made him so glad he could hardly get his toast down.

Mrs. Raymount was by this time tolerably familiar with her husband's moods, but she had never before seen him look just so, and was puzzled. The fact was he had never before had such a pleasant surprise, and sat absorbed in a foretaste of bliss, of which the ray of March sun that lighted up the delicate transparencies of the veined crocuses purple and golden, might seem the announcing angel.

Presently he rose and left the room. His wife followed him. The moment she entered his study behind him he turned and took her in his arms.

"Here's news, wifie!" he said. "You'll be just as glad of it as I am. Yrndale is ours after all!-at least so my old friend Heron says, and he ought to know! Cousin Strafford left no will. He is certain there is none. She persistently put off making one, with the full intention, he believes, that the property shall come to me, her heir at law and next of kin. He thinks she had not the heart to leave it away from her old friend. Thank God! It is a lovely place. Nothing could have happened to give me more pleassure."

"I am indeed glad, Raymount," said his wife-who called him by his family name on important occasions. "You always had a fancy for playing the squire, you know."

"A great fancy for a little room, rather," replied her husband-"not much, I fear, for the duties of a squire. I know little of them; and happily we shall not be dependent on the result of my management. There is money as well, I am glad to say-enough to keep the place up anyhow."

"It would be a poor property," replied his wife with a smile, that could not keep itself up. I have no doubt you will develop into a model farmer and landlord."

"You must take the business part-at least till Corney is fit to look after it," he returned.

But his wife's main thought was what influence would the change have on the prospects of Hester. In her heart she abjured the notion of property having anything to do with marriage-yet this was almost her first thought! Inside us are played more fantastic tricks than any we play in the face of the world.

"Are the children to be told?" she asked.

"I suppose so. It would be a shame not to let them share in our gladness. And yet one hates to think of their talking about it as children will."

"I am not afraid of the children," returned his wife. "I have but to tell them not. I am sure of Mark as if he were fifty. Saffy might forget, but Mark will keep her in mind."

When she returned to the dining-room Cornelius was gone, but the rest were still at the table. She told them that God had given them a beautiful house in the country, with hills and woods and a swift-flowing river. Saffy clapped her hands, cried, "Oh, mam mah !" and could hardly sit on her chair till she had done speaking. Mark was perfectly still, his eyes looking like ears. The moment her mother ceased, Saffy jumped down and made a rush for the door.

"Saffy, Saffy, where are you going?" cried her mother.

"To tell Sarah," answered Saffy.

"Come back, my child."

"Oh, do let me run and tell Sarah! I will come back instantly ."

"Come here," insisted the mother. "Your papa and I wish you to say nothing whatever about it to any one."

"O-oh!" returned Saffy; and both her look and her tone said, "Where is the good of it then?" as she stood by her mother's side in momentary check.

Not a word did Mark utter, but his face shone as if it had been heaven he was going to. No color, only light came to the surface of it, and broke in the loveliest smile. When