Chapter XII: Son and Heir

Meanwhile there had been changes at Kincorth, such changes as the birth of a son and the management of a careful and educated woman were likely to produce; but the greatest change of all had perhaps been that wrought in Mrs. Drewitt herself, who, looking back twelve months, could not help marvelling if the Agnes Drewitt who sat nursing her child in her bedroom at Kincorth were the same with the new-made wife who had wept bitter tears in that self-same chamber, who had grieved over Maxwell, who had wanted to keep him in the house at any sacrifice, at any cost.

Since those early days, Mrs. Drewitt had grown very jealous for her son’s inheritance, very watchful over the interests of her baby. Maxwell had opened her eyes and taught her to discern between good and evil; and with all a woman’s quickness of perception she had seen that there would be war between her children and the children of the elder brother; that Maxwell wanted the estate, and was resolved some day to have it.

“But he shan’t, darling, shall he?” and Mrs. Drewitt kissed every one of her son’s toes in succession as though he had been a pope.

There is no accounting for tastes, or otherwise one might wonder at the fancy mothers have for this form of refreshment. Pink and plump and pretty the creature’s toes looked peeping from under the long white robe, but there was no earthly reason why she should have kissed them for all that.

She did perform the ceremony, nevertheless, rapturously, and then she lifted her eyes and looked out over the waving woods and the sunny fields that went sloping towards the sea.

It was a fair property. I have said what Maxwell thought of it as he stood gazing up at Kincorth on the summer’s afternoon when you, dear reader, were introduced to him, and it was perhaps natural that Mrs. Drewitt longed a little greedily to secure it for her boy.

Women nursing babies are all alike. They think nothing good enough for the new king, and they expect every created being to fall down and adore the autocrat as they do.

Women whose children are growing up get, as a rule, more sensible and fairer dealing year by year. They see their white crows throwing out black feathers, they begin to understand that other people have children too, and that the meadow-lands of existence cannot be kept clear so that their young lambs may browse over them undisturbed.

But a baby!—there is so much left to the imagination about a baby. It may grow up to be as handsome as Apollo, as wise as Solomon, as eloquent as Demosthenes, as just as Aristides, as holy as George Herbert.

It is so delightful to be able to sit in the sunlight, as Mrs. Drewitt was doing, nursing a two months’ old monarch, and picture for him a reign long, glorious, and triumphant. If mothers did not mercifully forget these dreams, how could they ever live and face the downfall of all these airy castles? How could they bear to see their sons and daughters grow up, not as the polished corners of the temple, but sometimes no better than other folks’ sons and daughters—oftentimes much worse?

A baby!—a monarch, a pope, a little god, a lord mayor for a year and a day, and then another lord mayor rides in gilded coach to fortune, and inhabits his brother’s grand chateaux en Espagne.

The king is dead, long live the king! and autocrat No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, as the case may be, appears on the daïs for the household generally to bow down before and worship.

A baby!—well, well, Maxwell Drewitt had been a baby once, and perhaps his mother dreamed such dreams for him as Mrs. Drewitt of Kincorth was doing for her baby now.

There are some things in nature which we shall never understand on this side eternity, and one of them, I think, is, why having a child born to her should make a woman unjust for the time being.

I know there will be an outcry of indignation at this assertion; but it is true for all that. Beyond her baby, a woman has at first no sympathy. Nay, I go further, and say she has no liking save for those who serve, honour, and obey her Moloch.

There are men who are worse than women in this matter, but not many, thank God! If there were, the shop of the world might be shut up, and human nature would have to retire from business altogether.

Her baby!—there came a day when Mrs. Drewitt turned from her first allegiance and worshipped another baby. All her life long she was somewhat of an idolater, and her gods did nothing for her, as is the way with the gods we rear for ourselves—only brought trouble and sorrow to that gentle breast.

But sitting in the sunshine, kissing the fat toes of her first-born, Mrs. Drewitt was happy, and she was all the happier perhaps because she felt no sorrow for the man whom the birth of her son cut out from Kincorth for ever.

If we exhaust the matter, the young mother thought in her heart it ought to be a pleasure for Maxwell to stand out of the way of the new king’s progress; and as she felt sure it was no pleasure to him to do anything of the kind, she began to entertain a very sincere dislike for her husband’s nephew.

Holding her baby from her at arms’ length—laughing when it laughed, clasping it to her heart, touching its little fingers, its little hands, its meaningless face, with a delight ever strange and ever new—something even in that happy moment came over Mrs. Drewitt that made the tears start into her eyes, and caused her face to change and sadden under the sunlight.

She was sorry that she did not feel sorry for Maxwell, that she did not like him, that she was not so glad to see him as formerly, that she could not care for Susan and Wilhelmina. She had resolved to do her duty, and this was the end of it. Human nature is stronger than duty, and it was impossible for Mrs. Drewitt to help her feelings. The child she had brought into this world was nearer to her than any other person’s children could be.

It was natural she should long to secure Kincorth for the baby—that she should dislike any one who seemed to stand in antagonism to her son.

The child had changed her, and it was the consciousness of this change having taken place that made Mrs. Drewitt’s eyes fill full of tears.

As for Mr. Drewitt, he had received the new arrival just as such a man usually does receive such donations—ecstatically!

To have heard him talk, any stranger might have thought that Mr. Drewitt only held the property in trust until his son should come of age. If his bailiff spoke to him about cutting down a tree, he hesitated. He would grant no lease for more than seven years.

The expenses must be curtailed, the household expenditure retrenched. His agent must see that the rents were paid more punctually. When Brian came of age it would not do for him to find the tenants all in arrear. He trusted those girls would marry, or that if they did not, Maxwell would have them to live with him. “I must try to make him an allowance for their maintenance till they all come of age, when I can perhaps manage to settle a certain sum on each,” said Mr. Drewitt to his wife. “I should not like Brian to marry one of them, and if they grow up together who knows what might happen?”

Who indeed? but meantime the state of mind in which Mr. Drewitt went about the house, and walked round the shrubberies, and exchanged greetings with his friends, and answered the congratulations of his acquaintances, was involved and ridiculous beyond description.

“It is a far cry to Loch Awe,” Maxwell observed drily, when Wilhelmina told him, with shrieks of laughter, how her uncle was doing everything with an eye to the pleasure and advancement of the young heir. “What kind of a creature is it?”

“What kind of creatures are all babies?” inquired Miss Susan Drewitt, scornfully. “Though to be sure, to hear the way they go on about it, anybody might imagine it was not a baby at all, but an angel. Nannie says it is like its papa, and the doctor says it is like its mamma; but for my part, I think it is a cross between a star-fish and a lobster.”

“You really ought to be in the house with uncle,” remarked Wilhelmina. “He won’t let a window be open for fear of the brat catching cold. He won’t let any stranger touch it for fear the said stranger should have any dreadful and communicable disease. He was going to put Mr. Murphy out of the hall-door, the other day, because the poor man said, after uncle had quite worn him out, ‘Tut, tut, tut, Mr. Drewitt, the egg is all very well, but it is not worth the cackling you make over it.’ I really thought I would have died, Maxwell. I had to put the whole of my pocket-handkerchief into my mouth, or I should have laughed outright.

“‘Sir!’ says my uncle, and he drew himself up like a grenadier.

“‘You need not be offended, Mr. Drewitt,’ says Murphy. I do love that man, it is so hard to put him out of countenance. ‘A hen with only one chicken always makes ten times the fuss she would if she had a good clutch to go about with; and by the time you have a dozen, I’m thinking you won’t be caring so much whether a few of them should catch some infection or not. Excuse a jest, sir, it is only my way. The baby is a fine baby. I don’t know that ever I saw a handsomer.’

“And as he said that he looked over at me, and you know, Maxwell, what his looks are.”

“He is an impudent scoundrel,” remarked her brother. “If I hear of him looking at you at all, I will wring his neck for him—and glad of the excuse too,” added Maxwell, _sotto voce_.

“You never saw a man make such an idiot of himself in your life,” said Susan, laying a true Hibernian emphasis on the last word in her sentence. “He ought to build a little chapel and have a shrine made, and let people only look at the brat from a distance. And that reminds me, Maxwell—do you know Kathie has never gone back to school yet? She is not well enough to go, Sheen says, and my uncle wanted her to keep away from the heir, seeming to think it might be something of consumption, and that the young gentleman would take it from her.”

“And Kathie cried, till I told her she was a greater idiot than uncle and a bigger baby than the heir,” put in Wilhelmina. “Mrs. Drewitt would not listen to such nonsense, though; she said Kathie should be with her and Brian if she liked. That is one thing I will say for Mrs. Drewitt—that she is good to Kathie. Give the devil his due, her own mother could not be better to her.”

“But do you think Kathie ill, seriously ill, I mean?” asked Maxwell: if the young man had ever loved any of his own flesh and blood, it was Kathie, and he put the question anxiously.

“Well, you know she never was strong—she was always, as Nannie says, the ‘crowl’ among us,” answered Wilhelmina, who looked both strong and handsome, and had a rich colour in her cheeks with walking to Headlands Cottage; “she ought not to have gone to school, and it was not with Mrs. Drewitt’s good will she went, but you and uncle would have it. You know it was your doing, Maxwell, and she got a cold, and the cold got worse, and you should see for yourself how she looks.”

“What are they doing for her?” he inquired.

“Dr. Sheen has sent her some medicine, and Mrs. Drewitt tries to coax her to eat,” Wilhelmina replied; while Susan added—

“I think they have an idea of sending her abroad. I am sure I heard some one talk of letting her spend the winter with the Dyaks, if money for her travelling expenses could be raised.”

Then Maxwell Drewitt rose up, walked across the room, took a cigar out of a paper lying on the table, lit it, and began to smoke. When he had puffed away for a little time he said—

“Kathie shall not go to the Dyaks. I won’t have my sister eating the bread of a dependent in the house of any of Mr. Drewitt’s relations. If she needs a milder climate I will find somebody to take charge of her, and I will find the money too, which the great people up at Kincorth seem to think a thing so devilishly hard to raise.”

“That’s right, Maxwell. Go it,” exclaimed Wilhelmina, clapping her hands. “Send us all abroad, and come yourself—we’d make our fortunes at _rouge-et-noir_. Wouldn’t it be capital sport?”

“You seem to think so, at any rate,” remarked Susan, shortly.

“And you—ten thousand pardons. I forgot. You would not like to leave——”

“Whom?” asked Maxwell, as his sister stopped abruptly.

“The baby, I suppose,” laughed Wilhelmina; whereupon Maxwell made some remark about the baby which did not sound like a blessing.

“What the deuce is their fancy for calling the young beggar Brian?” he inquired. “Is it Brian Boroïhme they have gone back to, or is it some of her people, or what?”

“There was a good Drewitt once,” answered Wilhelmina; “at least, so tradition says, though I believe there is not a syllable of truth in the story. There was a good Drewitt once—good and wise, and his name was Brian. There is a long rigmarole about him on some old stone in the abbey, and Nannie told Mrs. Drewitt a great history about what grand people the Drewitts were in his day, and about what a pious man he was, and how he repaired the abbey, and how he planted that huge yew-tree in the churchyard, and that hollow ash, and that rotten beech on the lawn at Kincorth. And Nannie told her, too, how a child always strains after the person it is called after, and how luck follows names, and worked her up to such a pitch finally, that nothing would do her but the young gentleman must be called Brian—and accordingly Brian he is—Brian Archibald. It is not an easy name to make fun out of; so all I can do is to call him Brin Baldy. It’s a pretty conceit, is not it? as Lady Emmeline would say, and it has the great advantage of being unintelligible. I have ventured to talk about Brin Baldy to Susan before uncle, and he had not the remotest idea of whom I was talking.”

“I shall come up to see Kathie,” said Maxwell, when his sister stopped—a little irrelevantly it is true, but still in consequence of some train of thought he had been pursuing during her sentence.

“I am sure _we_ ought to be grateful,” remarked Susan. “Get up and make a courtesy, Willy.”

Which Willy accordingly did, observing, at the same time, she thought somebody ought to come and see Kathie, and rouse her up.

“Talk about peaches! You should have seen the peaches the Countess gave me the other day to take home to Kathie,” she went on; “they were as big—oh! as big as Susan’s head—four times as big as any I ever saw grow at Kincorth, and do you think she would touch them?—not a bit of it.

“‘You little ungrateful wretch!’ I said, ‘and I have brought them all the way from Laddenwell home for you, and it was as much as I could do to keep from eating them on the road. You _shall_ take them!’

“So she took one, and tried to swallow it, but she did not like peaches, she told me.

“‘Will you have grapes, then?’ I asked her, but she would not have grapes. At last I worried out of her what she could eat, and what do you think it was, Maxwell? I will give you six guesses.”

“Don’t be childish, Willy; go on.”

“Crabs!” exclaimed that young lady. “Now you know crabs are things uncle can’t bear the sight of, and that he thinks nobody else ought to be able to bear the sight of either; so I had to get one smuggled up for her. But when it came, would she touch it? I don’t know what to do with Kathie,” finished Wilhelmina, in despair.

“She ought to take a good canter every day of her life,” said Susan, “and keep out of the nursery. There is nothing the matter with Kathie except the mopes.”

“Do you know what your mother died of, Susan?” asked Maxwell, a little sternly.

“She died when Kathie was born. I suppose it was of that,” answered Miss Drewitt.

“She would not have died of that if she had not been in a decline beforehand,” said Maxwell; “and from what you say, I’m afraid it is consumption Kathie has got. I will come up and see her,” he repeated. “I will walk back with you.”

When Maxwell passed through Duranmore, on his way from Kincorth to Eversbeg, he stopped at Dr. Sheen’s, and not finding that gentleman at home, spoke to Mr. Murphy about his sister’s health.

“Had not you better step round when the doctor is within?” asked the assistant.

“I have got something else to do than dance up and down from Eversbeg here, after him or anybody else,” answered Maxwell, with that graciousness of manner which distinguished his treatment of any one he considered beneath him in station.

“It is not my place to talk about Doctor Sheen’s patients,” persisted Mr. Murphy.

“What the devil is the use of your getting on in this way to me? She is my sister, and I must know, and I will know, what is the matter with her.”

“And how should I know what is the matter with her?” demanded the other. “Sure we never know for certain what is wrong with man, woman, or child, unless we open them, and I suppose you don’t want me to do that?”

“Will you tell me, as far as you do know, what ails my sister, or not? If you do not choose to do so, I must take her to somebody who will.”

“I would rather you would ask Dr. Sheen. I am only his assistant, and I have not had his experience; and to be plain, the doctor and I don’t agree about the case. Ask him; or if you like, I will tell him to write to you.”

“I want your opinion,” persisted Maxwell. “All you say I shall consider as spoken to me confidentially, if you wish, only tell me exactly what you think is wrong with Kathleen.”

“I do believe you are fond of her,” said Mr. Murphy, with a vague wonder in his voice.

“What the deuce is it to you whether I am or not? Tell me your opinion, without beating about the bush any longer.”

“Do you want me to tell you the truth or a lie?”

“I want the truth, whatever the truth may be,” was the answer.

“Because,” went on Mr. Murphy, “there’s many a one says he wants to hear the truth, and then is angry at the man who tells it to him.”

“Whatever you think, out with it,” exclaimed Maxwell, impatiently.

“Your sister is very far from strong.”

“I can see that without the help of any doctor’s eyes,” answered the young man; “but is she likely to get worse? Will the medicine she is taking cure her?”

“Doctor Sheen thinks it will,” was the reply.

“But what do you think, Mr. Murphy?”

“I consider Miss Kathie to be in a very bad way,” said the assistant.

“Will it be life or death?” asked Maxwell.

“Don’t ask me. What is the use of it? Sure you know yourself.”

For a minute there was silence—for a minute the thought of the only enemy that in youth a man like Maxwell Drewitt is afraid to face cowed him. Then he said:

“Would a warmer climate, Mr. Murphy——”

“Save her, I suppose you mean. You can try it.”

Slowly and reluctantly, Maxwell turned to go.

“One thing more, Mr. Murphy,” he said. “Was the cold she caught at school the cause of this?”

“If she had not caught a cold there she would have caught it some place else,” was the answer. “You can’t keep a person shut up in a band-box for ever; and the fire was always ready laid in her, to be kindled some chilly winter’s morning. But people invariably like to attribute disease to accident: they think if they could guard themselves against that they would be immortal,” added Mr. Murphy.

Maxwell went out into the air. He walked home round by Eversbeg Head, from whence he had a view over the wide Atlantic, looking under the summer’s sky like a glassy lake. He saw the ships going past with their white sails shining and glistening in the sun; he beheld the ocean at peace with man—the land kissed softly and gently by the waves; he saw his own fields looking rich and cultivated, in the warm glow of the afternoon light;—but there was a sorrow in his heart, the memory of which the peaceful scene could not chase away.

Many a feeling which passes through our breasts to-day we forget to-morrow; we fear, and with a new sunrise the dread is gone. We settle down to think: something comes to prevent our doing so, and the impression made, fades away and is forgotten.

Could Maxwell Drewitt have stereotyped in his memory all the feelings which saddened him when he stood, that day, looking out over the great Atlantic, I think—I believe—he would have gone through the rest of his life a better man.

But as it was, they were merely as words spoken to the air—as letters traced on the sand.

The next wind of passion bore them far beyond his reach and his recollection; the next wave of life, rushing up on the shore of his existence, obliterated their meaning.

Life and death, friends—life and death!—are these two not ever walking through this world hand in hand together?

The tide that brings a fresh soul into existence on its flow, bears a pale corpse out to the great sea as it ebbs.

There was a child born—there was a girl dying: there was a son and heir, over whose birth exulting parents rejoiced—there was an orphan waiting to rejoin her father and mother also.

There was life in the boy, who crowed and shrieked in the nursery: there was death in Kathleen, who walked about the grounds and through the rooms at Kincorth—who had learned her last lessons, who was never to go back to school any more—who was never to have lovers, never to be married—never to be anything except a slight, dark-eyed, loveable, delicate girl—who cooed and fondled the baby as long as she had strength to do it, and who delighted in the newcomer, even although he did cut Maxwell out from the property.

“And Maxwell was always kinder to me than he was to anybody,” sighed Kathie to Mrs. Drewitt; “I wish he was out of that cottage—I wish he was back at Kincorth!”

But when her wish was fulfilled, when Maxwell did return to Kincorth, I think it was best for Kathleen that she could not see him there—that she had then been sleeping for twenty years in Eversbeg Abbey, away from all the sinful jealousies and wicked passions which make the world so often seem only like a battle-field, where man stands up to war against man.