CHANDLER AND CHANDLER. (continued 2)

The news came out to us in a lump. Tom Chandler was taken into partnership and was to marry Emma. We wished them good luck. She was not to leave her home, for her father would not spare her: she and Tom were to live with him.

“I had to do it, you know, Squire,” said old Paul, meeting the Squire one day. “Only children are apt to be wilful. Not that I ever found Emma so. Had I not allowed it, I expect she’d have dutifully saddled herself, an old maid, upon me for life.”

“She could not have chosen better,” cried the Squire, warmly. “If there’s one young fellow I respect above another, it’s Tom Chandler. He is good to the back-bone.”

“He wouldn’t have got her if he were not; you may rely upon that,” concluded old Paul, emphatically.

So the wedding took place at Islip in the autumn, and old Paul gave Tom a month’s holiday, and told him he had better take Emma to Paris; as they both seemed, by what he could gather, red-hot to see it.

Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle, came down the rain, dropping with monotonous patter on the decaying leaves that strewed the garden. Not the trim well-kept garden it used to be, but showing signs of neglect. What with the long grass, and the leaves, and the sloppy roads, and the November skies, nothing could well look more dreary than the world looked to-day, as seen from the windows of North Villa.

Time had gone on, another year, bringing its events and its changes; as time always does bring. The chief change, as connected with this little record, lay in Valentine Chandler. He had gone to the dogs. That was Islip’s expression for it, not mine. A baby had come to Tom and Emma.

Little by little, step by step, Valentine had gone down lower and lower. Some people, who are given to bad habits, make spasmodic efforts to reform; but, so far as Islip could see, Valentine never made any. He passed more time at the Bell, or at less respectable public-houses, and drank deeper: and at last neglected his business almost entirely. Enervated and good for nothing, he would lie in bed till twelve o’clock in the day. To keep on the office seemed only a farce. Its profits were not enough to pay for its one solitary clerk. Valentine was then pulled up by an illness, which confined him to his bed, and left him in a shaky state. The practice had quite gone then, and the clerk had gone; and Valentine knew that, even though he had had sufficient energy left to try to bring them back, no clients would have returned to him.

He was going to emigrate to Canada. His friends hoped he would be steady there, and redeem the past: he gave fair promises of it. George Chandler (Tom’s brother, who was doing very well there now, with a large farm about him, and a wife and children) had undertaken to receive Valentine and help him to employment. So he would have to begin life over again.

It was all so much gall and bitterness to his mother and sisters, and had been for a long while. The tears were dropping through the fingers of Mrs. Chandler now, as she leaned on her hand and watched the dreary rain on the window-panes. With all his faults, she had so loved Valentine. She loved him still, above all the trouble he had brought; and it seemed, this afternoon, just as though her heart would break.

When the business fell off, of course her income fell off also. Valentine was to have paid her a third of the profits, but if he did not make any profits, he could not pay her any. She had the private income, two hundred a-year, which Jacob had secured to her: but what was that for a family accustomed to live in the fashion? There is an old saying that necessity has no law: and Mrs. Jacob Chandler and her daughters had proved its truth. One of the girls had gone out as a governess; one was on a prolonged visit to her aunt Cramp; and Julietta and her mother were to move into a smaller house at Christmas. The practice and the other business, once Valentine’s, and his father’s before him, had all gone over to the other firm, Paul and Chandler.

“I’m sure I don’t know what Georgiana means by writing home for money amidst all our troubles!” cried Mrs. Chandler, fretfully. “She has fifteen pounds a-year salary, and she must make that do.”

“She says her last quarter’s money is all spent, and she can’t possibly manage without a new mantle for Sunday,” returned Julietta.

“I can’t supply it; you know I can’t. I am not able to pay my own way now. Let her write to Mrs. Cramp.”

“It would be of no use, mamma. Aunt Mary Ann will never help us to clothes. She says we have had too many of them.”

“Well, I don’t want to be worried with these matters: it’s enough for me to think of poor Valentine’s things. Only two days now before he starts. And what wretched weather it is!”

“Valentine says he shall not take much luggage with him. He saw me counting his shirts, and he said they were too many by half.”

“And who will supply him with shirts out there, do you suppose?” demanded Mrs. Chandler. “You talk nothing but nonsense, Julietta. Where is Valentine? He ought to be here, with all this packing to do. He must have been gone out these two hours.”

“He said he had business at Islip.”

Mrs. Chandler looked gloomy at the answer. She hated the very name of Islip: partly because they held no longer any part in the place, partly because the Bell was in it.

But Valentine had not gone to the Bell this time. His visit was to his cousin Tom; and his errand was to beg of Tom to give or lend him a fifty-pound note before sailing.

“I shall have next to nothing in my pocket, Tom, when I land,” he urged, as the two sat together in Tom’s private room. “If I get on over there, I will pay you back. If I don’t—well, perhaps you won’t grudge having helped me for the last time.”

For a moment Tom did not answer. He sat before his desk-table, Valentine near him: just as Valentine had one day sat at his desk in his private room, and Tom had been the petitioner, not so many years gone by. Valentine looked upon the silence as an ill-omen.

“You have all the business that once was mine in your fingers now, Tom. It has left me for you.”

“But not by any wish or seeking of mine, Valentine; you know that,” spoke Tom readily, turning his honest eyes and kindly face on the fallen man. “I wish you were in your office still. There’s plenty of work for both of us.”

“Well, I am not in it; and you have got it all. You might lend me such a poor little sum as fifty pounds.”

“Of course I mean to lend it: but I was thinking. Look here, Valentine. I will not give it you now; you cannot want it before sailing: and you might lose it on board,” he added laughing. “You shall carry with you an order upon my brother George for one hundred pounds.”

“Will George pay it?”

“I will take care of that. He shall receive a letter from me by the same mail that takes you out. Stay, Valentine. I will give you the order now.”

He wrote what was necessary, sealed it up, and handed it over. Valentine thanked him.

“How is Emma?” he asked as he rose. “And the boy?”

“Quite well, thank you: both. Will you not go in and see them?”

“I think not. You can say good-bye for me. I don’t much care to trouble people.”

“God bless you, Valentine,” said Tom, clasping his hand. “You will begin life anew over there, and may have a happy one yet. One of these days you will be coming back to us, a prosperous man.”

Valentine went trudging home through the rain, miserable and dispirited, and found a visitor had arrived—Mrs. Cramp. His mother and sister were upstairs then, busy over his trunks; so Mrs. Cramp had him all to herself. She had liked Valentine very much. When he went wrong, it put her out frightfully, and since then she had not spared him: which of course put out Valentine.

“Yes, it will be a change,” he acknowledged, in reply to a remark of hers. “A flourishing solicitor here, and a servant there. For that’s what I shall be over yonder, I conclude; I can’t expect to be my own master. You don’t know how good the business was, Aunt Mary Ann, at the time my father died. If I could only have kept it!”

“You could not expect to keep it,” said Mrs. Cramp, who sat facing him, her bonnet tilted back from her red and comely face, her purple stuff gown pulled up above her boots.

“I should have kept it, but for now and then taking a little drop too much,” confessed poor Valentine: who was deeper in the dumps that day than he had ever been before.

“I don’t know that,” said Mrs. Cramp. “The business was a usurped one.”

“A what?” said Valentine.

“There is an overruling Power above us, you know,” she went on. “I am quite sure, Valentine—I have learnt it by experience—that injustice never answers in the long run. It may seem to succeed for a time; but it does not last: it cannot and it does not. If a man rears himself on another’s downfall, causing himself that downfall that he may rise, his prosperity rests on no sure foundation. In some way or other the past comes home to him; and he suffers for it, if not in his own person, in that of his children. Ill-gotten riches bring a curse, never a blessing.”

“What a growler you are, Aunt Mary Ann!”

“I don’t mean it for growling, Valentine. It is true.”

“It’s not true.”

“Not true! The longer I live the more examples I see of it. A man treads another down that he may rise himself: and there he stands high and flourishing. But wait a few years, and look then. He is gone. Gone, and no trace of his prosperity left. And when I mark that, I recall that verse in the Psalms of David: ‘I went by, and lo, he was gone: I sought him, but his place was nowhere to be found.’ That verse is a true type of real life, Valentine.”

“I don’t believe it,” cried Valentine. “And where’s the good of having the Psalms at your finger-ends?”

“You do believe it. Why, Valentine, take your own case. Was there ever a closer exemplification? Tom was injured; put down; I may say, crushed by you and your father. Yes, crushed: crushed out of his rights. His father made the business; and the half of it, at any rate, ought to have been Tom’s. Instead of that, your father deposed him and usurped it. He repented when he was dying, and charged you to remedy the wrong. But you did not; you usurped it. And what has it ended in?”

“Ended in?” cried Valentine vacantly.

“You are—as you are; ruined in character, in purse, in reputation; and Tom is respected and flourishing. The business has left you and gone to him; not through any seeking of his, but through your own doings entirely; the very self-same business that his father made has in the natural course of time and events gone back to him—and he is not thirty yet. It is retribution, nephew. Justice has been righting herself; and man could neither stay nor hinder it.”

“What nonsense!” debated Valentine testily. “Suppose I had been steady: would the business have left me for Tom then?”

“Yes. In some inscrutable way, that we see not, it would. I am sure of it. You would no more have been allowed to triumph to the end on your ill-gotten gains, than I could stand if I went out and perched myself on yonder weathercock,” affirmed Mrs. Cramp, growing warm. “Your father kept his place, it is true; but what a miserable man he always was, and without any ostensible cause.”

“I wonder you don’t set up for a parson, Aunt Mary Ann! This is as good as a sermon.”

“Then carry the sermon in your memory through life, Valentine. Our doings, whether they be good or ill, bring back their fruits. In some wonderful manner that we cannot understand, events are always shaping onwards their own true ends, their appointed destiny, and working out the will of Heaven.”

That’s all. And the Squire seemed to take a leaf out of Mrs. Cramp’s book. For ever so long afterwards, he would tell us to read a lesson from the history of the Chandlers, and to remember that none can deal unjustly in the sight of God without having to account for it sooner or later.