Scenes of Clerical Life: Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Mr. Dempster did not stay long at the Red Lion that evening. He was
summoned home to meet Mr. Armstrong, a wealthy client, and as he was kept
in consultation till a late hour, it happened that this was one of the
nights on which Mr. Dempster went to bed tolerably sober. Thus the day,
which had been one of Janets happiest, because it had been spent by her
in helping her dear old friend Mrs. Crewe, ended for her with unusual
quietude; and as a bright sunset promises a fair morning, so a calm lying
down is a good augury for a calm waking. Mr. Dempster, on the Thursday
morning, was in one of his best humours, and though perhaps some of the
good-humour might result from the prospect of a lucrative and exciting
bit of business in Mr. Armstrong's probable lawsuit, the greater part of
it was doubtless due to those stirrings of the more kindly, healthy sap
of human feeling, by which goodness tries to get the upper hand in us
whenever it seems to have the slightest chance--on Sunday mornings,
perhaps, when we are set free from the grinding hurry of the week, and
take the little three-year old on our knee at breakfast to share our egg
and muffin; in moments of trouble, when death visits our roof or illness
makes us dependent on the tending hand of a slighted wife; in quiet talks
with an aged mother, of the days when we stood at her knee with our first
picture-book, or wrote her loving letters from school. In the man whose
childhood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that can
be touched to gentle issues, and Mr. Dempster, whom you have hitherto
seen only as the orator of the Red Lion, and the drunken tyrant of a
dreary midnight home, was the first-born darling son of a fair little
mother. That mother was living still, and her own large black easy-chair,
where she sat knitting through the livelong day, was now set ready for
her at the breakfast-table, by her son's side, a sleek tortoise-shell cat
acting as provisional incumbent.

'Good morning, Mamsey! why, you're looking as fresh as a daisy this
morning. You're getting young again', said Mr. Dempster, looking up from
his newspaper when the little old lady entered. A very little old lady
she was, with a pale, scarcely wrinkled face, hair of that peculiar white
which tells that the locks have once been blond, a natty pure white cap
on her head, and a white shawl pinned over her shoulders. You saw at a
glance that she had been a mignonne blonde, strangely unlike her tall,
ugly, dingy-complexioned son; unlike her daughter-in-law, too, whose
large-featured brunette beauty seemed always thrown into higher relief by
the white presence of little Mamsey. The unlikeness between Janet and her
mother-in-law went deeper than outline and complexion, and indeed there
was little sympathy between them, for old Mrs. Dempster had not yet
learned to believe that her son, Robert, would have gone wrong if he had
married the right woman--a meek woman like herself, who would have borne
him children, and been a deft, orderly housekeeper. In spite of Janet's
tenderness and attention to her, she had had little love for her
daughter-in-law from the first, and had witnessed the sad growth of
home-misery through long years, always with a disposition to lay the
blame on the wife rather than on the husband, and to reproach Mrs. Raynor
for encouraging her daughter's faults by a too exclusive sympathy. But
old Mrs. Dempster had that rare gift of silence and passivity which often
supplies the absence of mental strength; and, whatever were her thoughts,
she said no word to aggravate the domestic discord. Patient and mute she
sat at her knitting through many a scene of quarrel and anguish;
resolutely she appeared unconscious of the sounds that reached her ears,
and the facts she divined after she had retired to her bed; mutely she
witnessed poor Janet's faults, only registering them as a balance of
excuse on the side of her son. The hard, astute, domineering attorney was
still that little old woman's pet, as he had been when she watched with
triumphant pride his first tumbling effort to march alone across the
nursery floor. 'See what a good son he is to me!' she often thought.
'Never gave me a harsh word. And so he might have been a good husband.'

O it is piteous--that sorrow of aged women! In early youth, perhaps, they
said to themselves, 'I shall be happy when I have a husband to love me
best of all'; then, when the husband was too careless, 'My child will
comfort me'; then, through the mother's watching and toil, 'My child will
repay me all when it grows up.' And at last, after the long journey of
years has been wearily travelled through, the mother's heart is weighed
down by a heavier burthen, and no hope remains but the grave.

But this morning old Mrs. Dempster sat down in her easy-chair without any
painful, suppressed remembrance of the pre-ceding night.

'I declare mammy looks younger than Mrs. Crewe, who is only sixty-five,'
said Janet. 'Mrs. Crewe will come to see you today, mammy, and tell you
all about her troubles with the Bishop and the collation. She'll bring
her knitting, and you'll have a regular gossip together.'

'The gossip will be all on one side, then, for Mrs. Crewe gets so very
deaf, I can't make her hear a word. And if I motion to her, she always
understands me wrong.'

'O, she will have so much to tell you today, you will not want to speak
yourself. You, who have patience to knit those wonderful counterpanes,
mammy, must not be impatient with dear Mrs. Crewe. Good old lady! I can't
bear her to think she's ever tiresome to people, and you know she's very
ready to fancy herself in the way. I think she would like to shrink up to
the size of a mouse, that she might run about and do people good without
their noticing her.'

'It isn't patience I want, God knows; it's lungs to speak loud enough.
But you'll be at home yourself, I suppose, this morning; and you can talk
to her for me.'

'No, mammy; I promised poor Mrs. Lowme to go and sit with her. She's
confined to her room, and both the Miss Lowmes are out; so I'm going to
read the newspaper to her and amuse her.'

'Couldn't you go another morning? As Mr. Armstrong and that other
gentleman are coming to dinner, I should think it would be better to stay
at home. Can you trust Betty to see to everything? She's new to the
place.'

'O I couldn't disappoint Mrs. Lowme; I promised her. Betty will do very
well, no fear.'

Old Mrs. Dempster was silent after this, and began to sip her tea. The
breakfast went on without further conversation for some time, Mr.
Dempster being absorbed in the papers. At length, when he was running
over the advertisements, his eye seemed to be caught by something that
suggested a new thought to him. He presently thumped the table with an
air of exultation, and, said turning to Janet,--'I've a capital idea,
Gypsy!' (that was his name for his dark-eyed wife when he was in an
extraordinarily good humour), 'and you shall help me. It's just what
you're up to.'

'What is it?' said Janet, her face beaming at the sound of the pet name,
now heard so seldom. 'Anything to do with conveyancing?'

'It's a bit of fun worth a dozen fees--a plan for raising a laugh against
Tryan and his gang of hypocrites.'

'What is it? Nothing that wants a needle and thread hope, else I must go
and tease mother.'

'No, nothing sharper than your wit--except mine. I'll tell you what it
is. We'll get up a programme of the Sunday evening lecture, like a
play-bill, you know--"Grand Performance of the celebrated Mountebank,"
and so on. We'll bring in the Tryanites--old Landor and the rest--in
appropriate characters. Proctor shall print it, and we'll circulate it in
the town. It will be a capital hit.'

'Bravo!' said Janet, clapping her hands. She would just then have
pretended to like almost anything, in her pleasure at being appealed to
by her husband, and she really did like to laugh at the Tryanites. 'We'll
set about it directly, and sketch it out before you go to the office.
I've got Tryan's sermons up-stairs, but I don't think there's anything in
them we can use. I've only just looked into them; they're not at all what
I expected--dull, stupid things--nothing of the roaring
fire-and-brimstone sort that I expected.'

'Roaring? No; Tryan's as soft as a sucking dove--one of your
honey-mouthed hypocrites. Plenty of devil and malice in him, though, I
could see that, while he was talking to the Bishop; but as smooth as a
snake outside. He's beginning a single-handed fight with me, I can
see--persuading my clients away from me. We shall see who will be the
first to cry _peccavi_. Milby will do better without Mr. Tryan than
without Robert Dempster, I fancy! and Milby shall never be flooded with
cant as long as I can raise a breakwater against it. But now, get the
breakfast things cleared away, and let us set about the play-bill. Come,
mamsey, come and have a walk with me round the garden, and let us see how
the cucumbers are getting on. I've never taken you round the garden for
an age. Come, you don't want a bonnet. It's like walking in a greenhouse
this morning.'

'But she will want a parasol,' said Janet. 'There's one on the stand
against the garden-door, Robert.'

The little old lady took her son's arm with placid pleasure. She could
barely reach it so as to rest upon it, but he inclined a little towards
her, and accommodated his heavy long-limbed steps to her feeble pace. The
cat chose to sun herself too, and walked close beside them, with tail
erect, rubbing her sleek sides against their legs,--too well fed to be
excited by the twittering birds. The garden was of the grassy, shady
kind, often seen attached to old houses in provincial towns; the
apple-trees had had time to spread their branches very wide, the shrubs
and hardy perennial plants had grown into a luxuriance that required
constant trimming to prevent them from intruding on the space for
walking. But the farther end, which united with green fields, was open
and sunny.

It was rather sad, and yet pretty, to see that little group passing out
of the shadow into the sunshine, and out of the sunshine into the shadow
again: sad, because this tenderness of the son for the mother was hardly
more than a nucleus of healthy life in an organ hardening by disease,
because the man who was linked in this way with an innocent past, had
become callous in worldliness, fevered by sensuality, enslaved by chance
impulses; pretty, because it showed how hard it is to kill the deep-down
fibrous roots of human love and goodness--how the man from whom we make
it our pride to shrink, has yet a close brotherhood with us through some
of our most sacred feelings.

As they were returning to the house, Janet met them, and said, 'Now,
Robert, the writing things are ready. I shall be clerk, and Mat Paine can
copy it out after.'

Mammy once more deposited in her arm-chair, with her knitting in her
hand, and the cat purring at her elbow, Janet seated herself at the
table, while Mr. Dempster placed himself near her, took out his
snuff-box, and plentifully suffusing himself with the inspiring powder,
began to dictate.

What he dictated, we shall see by-and-by.

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