 | CHAPTER VII.
A FRIENDLY WARNING. The Wetherel affair |  |
7. CHAPTER VII.
A FRIENDLY WARNING.
It was five o'clock in the afternoon when the Judge and Nestoria set out on
their progress through the sandy by ways of the shore.
The old man drove in a leisurely fashion, according to his octogenarian custom,
talking much to his beast in a remonstrative tone, using the lash rarely
and at regular intervals, as if it were a matter of stated duty, and applying it
even then in a perfunctory, ceremonial, and not altogether sincere manner.
Old Sorrel took his own gait; when admonished, he went a little slower, as if
to listen; when whipped, he whisked his tail over the spot, under a pretence of
brushing off flies; if he came within reach of a thicket, he made a bite at a tuft
of leaves, and left off trotting to munch; if he discovered a hill a quarter of a
mile ahead of him, he prepared himself for it by falling into a walk; in short,
he showed that he was a dilatory, obstinate, and self-seeking old quadruped.
“Sorrel is not even a good eye-servant,” remarked the Judge. “He
evades his due labor under my very spectacles.”
“He can go faster,” said Nestoria, remembering how Alice had got the ancient
shirk over the ground.
“He can, but why should he?” answered Mr. Wetherel. “We shall get
home to tea, and he knows it. What is time to an old man like me? Hardly
more than to an old horse like him. Time, Miss Bernard, is chiefly of value in
our youth, when we still have strength to improve it. One of the sorrowfulest
things of my present age is the thought that my days are now of less worth
than they were to my fellow creatures. The Creator is divinely right in removing
the old to make place for the young.”
“I wonder if I shall ever work,” queried Nestoria. “My father,” she
added, uttering the word in a charming tone of reverence and belief, “my
He said that you good people at home spoil missionaries' children. You
pet them and support them, he said, and so make them shamefully lazy. Now,
Mr. Wetherel, are you going to spoil me? Don't you know that I ought to be
set at work?”
“And what shall we set you at?” inquired the Judge, who was not in the
least inclined to put his shoulder to this duty, and had even dallied with a temptation
to dower the girl out of his own riches.
“Couldn't I help in a school? I might teach painting, as well as other
things. I learned to paint fans from the lady who entertained me in London.”
“Do you never mean to go back to your father?” asked the old man, who
considered missionary work the noblest labor possible to mortals.
“Oh, yes, when I am fit for it; but my education isn't completed, you
know; and my character isn't formed—so my father says. Yes, I suppose I
shall go back in a few years,” she added dreamily, while an unbidden query
came into her mind as to whether she would go with a husband, and whether
Edward Wetherel— But here she promptly cheeked her imagination; she
must not think so seriously of a man who had said so little to her that was serious;
a man, too, who might not be as good as she hoped he was; who might
even be what she called “an unbeliever.”
“And in the mean time you desire to study and also to work,” said the
Judge with an approving nod. “Very good. It must all be done. But there
is time enough. You must abide under my roof during the vacations. After
that we will see.”
“You must be sure to see,” responded Nestoria, with conscientious urgency
and woman's dependence.
“You spoke of meeting my nephew Edward,” continued the old gentleman,
whose undercurrent of thought had all the time been eddying about that
dreadful topic. “How came you to encounter him?”
Nestoria colored brilliantly; it was even a greater subject to her than to
her companion; that name of Edward was the only one that had ever made
her heart beat.
“I met him on the Atlantic steamer,” she answered, just a bit suffocated by
the explanation.
“Indeed!” exclaimed the Judge, not a little alarmed, for he knew of the
young man's pleasant ways with women. “Then you have seen much of
him?”
“Yes,” said Nestoria, happy in the recollection, and smiling back at those
pleasant hours. “He was very, very kind to me. He took me to walk every
morning and afternoon in rough weather, and it was always rough, at least
a little. I should have been much more lonesome without him.”
“I trust you saw nothing in his walk and conversation but what you
could approve,” added the old man in a tone of doubt which did not flatter
Edward.
“No.” answered Nestoria frankly and firmly. Indeed, she had seen a
great deal to approve in the said walk and conversation. Had not the young
fellow treated her with perfect politeness, and even with charming consideration
and delicacy? Notwithstanding this mysterious quarrel with his good uncle,
she found it impossible to believe that he could be very bad, or so much as
bad a little.
“I suppose he smokes still?” queried the Judge, in a tone which seemed to
to the gallows, all three doubtful statements in our day.
“Yes,” admitted Nestoria. “But is that wrong? Some of the missionaries
smoke.”
“That is possible,” groaned the venerable Puritan, unwillingly conceding
the stumbling fact, and seeking to excuse it to himself on the plea of Oriental
custom. “But at all events they don't drink ale.”
“There isn't any ale,” said Nestoria. “However, I don't suppose they
would drink it if there was any. They are all teetotallers, I believe.”
“I trust so,” fervently returned the Judge. Then he thought, in the anti-nicotine
corner of his earnest soul, What a pity they should smoke! This reflection,
however, he did not utter; he would not lead the girl to question the
goodness of her father's comrades in pious labors; he had his strenuous prejudices,
but at times he could be wisely considerate in spite of them. By the
way, it seems appropriate to relate here a story which illustrates the old man's
hatred of tobacco; a hatred so hearty that it could confound his judicial mind
and cause him to pronounce judgment without hearing evidence or argument.
In a certain grave convocation there had been a question of passing censure
upon clerical smokers; whereupon an erring brother of a scientific turn rose
to his feet and attempted to demonstrate that, under given circumstances, of
habit and constitution, a cigar or so per day would not be injurious, and consequently
not immoral; whereupon Judge Wetherel made a reply commencing
with these memorable and monumental words, more immovable than a sentence
of pyramids: “Mr. Moderator—I thank Heaven—that on this subject—
my mind is not open to conviction.”
But we must return to his catechism of Nestoria concerning Edward; he
was anxious to know how she happened to meet the young man on the Elm
City.
“It was just an accident,” she said. “He was coming up this way to a
fishing-place.”
“What fishing-place?”
“He did not tell me. Are there so many?”
The Judge was relieved; then there had been no agreement to meet again;
there was to be no correspondence; it was not a flirtation. The dove under
his roof, the innocent daughter of the “great and good” Doctor Bernard, had
not become entangled in the talons of that unclean bird of prey, his reprobate
nephew. Their companionship had been a mere transitory acquaintance, and
there was no need of asking any painfully searching questions about it, nor of
entering into monitory disclosures of the young man's character. Mr. Wetherel
was glad of it, for, like other wise and decorous men, he hated to talk of
the skeleton in his closet; and furthermore, he was conscientious as to bearing
needless evil witness, even against the ungodly. As long as there was hope
of reforming Edward he had withstood him to his face, as he expressed it in
his Biblical way; and when all such hope had died out of his heart he had resolved
to disinherit him, and that was enough. He would not, in addition, as
perse his name, unless such accusation were needful for the salvation of others.
Nestoria put his reticence to the proof. She was anxious to speak of the
quarrel, because she longed to put an end to it. At the bottom of her childlike
innocence and simplicity there was a solid foundation of moral courage, which
was made up partly of conscious rectitude of intention and partly of a beautiful
eonfidence in the goodness and kindliness of her fellow creatures. It was
islands who walk deliberately up to the feet of marvelling explorers.
“He told me,” she added in a slightly agitated voice, “why he did not come
to see you in passing. He said you were not on terms with each other.”
In spite of the temptation offered by this statement, the old man remained
firm to his abjuration of needless evil speaking.
“We have not been able to agree,” he said gravely, and with honest sorrowfulness.
“It is very sad that relatives should take such differing, such diverging
paths in life. But we have not been able to agree. May He who is
all-wise and all-pitiful have mercy upon him who is in the wrong, be it Edward
or myself!”
He said no more; the door to this subject was evidently shut upon her. She
had transmitted the young man's apology for passing his relatives by; it was
all that she had a right to do.
Thus it came about that Nestoria was left to live on in ignorance of the nature
of this quarrel, and even in uncertainty as to which of the two parties to
it was in the wrong. Both of them seemed to her altogether lovely in character,
and incapable of truly meriting the other's condemnation. Educated in a
little dovecote of piety, far withdrawn from the great world of fashion and dissipation,
and unaccustomed to see any bad people except such as wore turbans
and carried pistols in their sashes, she knew nothing of wild young men except
by insufficient report, and had no manner of skill in detecting them. She
thought that of course they carried the marks of their wickedness in their persons
and faces; that their hands were tremulous, their countenances haggard,
and their eyes sunken; that their expressions were hideous with evil passions
and with the torments of remorse.
Now no such shocking stigmata were visible in Edward Wetherel; his form
was vigorous, his skin healthfully clear, his look cultured and gentle. Evil
had not set its well-known brand upon him, and therefore in her opinion he
could not be the child of evil. The quarrel was a mystery; perhaps it was
about some matter of business, inexplicable to women; perhaps both Edward
and his uncle were in some incomprehensible way right. She could not solve
the disagreeable puzzle, and for the present she left it in the hands of Providence,
trusting that the day of unravelment would come.
“You will find our life very quiet here,” said the Judge as they drove
homeward.
And so she did, at least for a time. There was not another country residence
within miles of Sea Lodge. A so-called hotel stood near by, indeed, but
its inmates and visitors were mainly persons of the ruder if not lewder sort,
and they no more frequented the Judge's house than Canaanites of old infested
the schools of the prophets. In the neighboring city the family had few acquaintances,
and those few rarely drove out to render it visits. Sometimes
hack loads of singing or yelling revellers clattered by of nights, inciting Mr.
Wetherel to repeat Milton's verse concerning “The noisy sons of Belial, flown
with insolence and wine.” But in general Sea Lodge was a refuge of quiet,
hearing no clamor but the thump of waves on the beach, and certainly producing
no uproar of its own.
Nevertheless, Satan was prowling about, as the Judge frequently asserted;
and, such being the case, disturbances and evil adventures could not long be
kept at bay.
| CHAPTER VII.
A FRIENDLY WARNING. The Wetherel affair | |