of his father. He nodded and went, knocked at his father's door and, tamed by his sister's words, took his scolding--and it was a sharp scolding--with patience. Things were going well with the banker, he had had his usual four glasses of port, and he might not have spoken so sharply if the contrast between the idle and the industrious apprentice had not been thrust upon him that day with a force which had startled him. That little hint of a partnership had not been dropped without a pang. He was jealous for his son, and he spoke out.
"If you think," he said, tapping the ledger before him, to give point to his words, "that because you've been to Cambridge this job is below you, you're mistaken, Clement. And if you think that you can do it in your spare time, you're still more mistaken. It's no easy task, I can tell you, to make a bank and keep a bank, and manage your neighbor's money as well as your own, and if you think it is, you're wrong. To make a hundred thousand pounds is a deal harder than to make Latin verses--or to go tramping the country on a market day with your gun! That's not business! That's not business, and once for all, if you are not going to help me, I warn you that I must find someone who will! And I shall not have far to look!"
"I'm afraid, sir, that I have not got a turn for it," Clement pleaded.
"But what have you a turn for? You shoot, but I'm hanged if you bring home much game. And you fish, but I suppose you give the fish away. And you're out of town, idling and doing God knows what, three days in the week! No turn for it? No will to do it, you mean. Do you ever think," the banker continued, joining the fingers of his two hands as he sat back in his chair, and looking over them at the culprit, "where you would be and what you would be doing if I had not toiled for you? If I had not made the business at which you do not condescend to work? I had to make my own way. My grandfather was little better than a laborer, and but for what I've done you might be a clerk at a pound a week, and a bad clerk, too! Or behind a shop-counter, if you liked it better. And if things go wrong with me--for I'd have you remember that nothing in this world is quite safe--that is where you may still be! Still, my lad!"
For the first time Clement looked his father fairly in the face--and pleased him. "Well, sir," he said, "if things go wrong I hope you won't find me wanting. Nor ungrateful for what you have done for us. I know how much it is. But I'm not Bourdillon, and I've not got his head for figures."
"You've not got his application. That's the mischief! Your heart's not in it."
"Well, I don't know that it is," Clement admitted. "I suppose you couldn't----" he hesitated, a new hope kindled within him. He looked at his father doubtfully.
"Couldn't what?"
"Release me from the bank, sir? And give me a--a very small capital to----"
"To go and idle upon?" the banker exclaimed, and thumped the ledger in his indignation at an idea so preposterous. "No, by G--d, I couldn't! Pay you to go idling about the country, more like a dying duck in a thunder-storm, as I am told you do, than a man! Find you capital and see you loiter your life away with your hands in your pockets? No, I couldn't, my boy, and I would not if I could! Capital, indeed? Give you capital? For what?"
"I could take a farm," sullenly, "and I shouldn't idle. I can work hard enough when I like my work. And I know something about farming, and I believe I could make it pay."
The other gasped. To the banker, with his mind on thousands, with his plans and hopes for the future, with his golden visions of Lombard Street and financial sway, to talk of a farm and of making it pay! It seemed--it seemed worse than lunacy. His son must be out of his mind. He stared at him, honestly wondering. "A farm!" he ejaculated at last. "And make it pay? Go back to the clodhopping life your grandfather lived before you and from which I lifted you? Peddle with pennies and sell ducks and chickens in the market? Why--why, I don't know what to say to you?"
"I like an outdoor life," Clement pleaded, his face scarlet.
"Like a--like a----" Ovington could find no word to express his feelings and with an effort he swallowed them down. "Look here, Clement," he said more mildly; "what's come to you? What is it that is amiss with you? Whatever it is you must straighten it out, boy; there must be an end of this folly, for folly it is. Understand me, the day that you go out of the bank you go to stand on your own legs, without help from me. If you are prepared to do that?"
"I don't say that I could--at first."
"Then while I keep you I shall certainly do it on my own terms. So, if you please, I will hear no more of this. Go back to your desk, go back to your desk, sir, and do your duty. I sent you to Cambridge at Butler's suggestion, but I begin to fear that it was the biggest mistake of my life. I declare I never heard such nonsense except from a man in love. I suppose you are not in love, eh?"
"No!" Clement cried angrily, and he went out.
For he could not own to his father that he was in love; in love with the brown earth, the woods, and the wide straggling hedge-rows, with the whispering wind and the music of the river on the shallows, with the silence and immensity of night. Had he done so, he would have spoken a language which his father did not and could not understand. And if he had gone a step farther and told him that he felt drawn to those who plodded up and down the wide stubbles, who cut and bound the thick hedge-rows, who wrought hand in hand with Nature day in and day out, whose lives were spent in an unending struggle with the soil until at last they sank and mingled with it--if he had told him that he felt his kinship with those humble folk who had gone before him, he would only have mystified him, only have angered him the more.
Yet so it was. And he could not change himself.
He went slowly to his supper and to Betty, owning defeat; acknowledging his father's strength of purpose, acknowledging his father's right, yet vexed at his own impotence. Life pulsed strongly within him. He longed to do something. He longed to battle, the wind in his teeth and the rain in his face, with some toil, some labor that would try his strength and task his muscles, and send him home at sunset weary and satisfied. Instead he saw before him an endless succession of days spent with his head in a ledger and his heels on the bar of his stool, while the sun shone in at the windows of the bank and the flies buzzed sleepily about him; days arid and tedious, shared with no companion more interesting than Rodd, who, excellent fellow, was not amusing, or more congenial than Bourdillon, who patronized him when he was not using him. And in future he would have to be more punctual, more regular, more assiduous! It was a dreary prospect.
He ate his supper in morose silence until Betty, who had been quick to read the upshot of the interview in his face, came behind him and ruffled his hair. "Good boy!" she whispered, leaning over him. "His days shall be long in the land!"
"I wish to heaven," he answered, "they were in the land! I am sure they will be long enough in the bank!" But after that he recovered his temper.
CHAPTER IV
In remote hamlets a few churches still recall the fashion of Garthmyle. It was a wide church of two aisles having clear windows, through which a flood of cold light fell on the whitewashed walls, and on the maze of square pews, some colored drab, some a pale blue, through which narrow alleys, ending in culs-de-sac, wound at random. The Griffin memorials, though the earliest were of Tudor date, were small and mean, and the one warm scrap of color in the church was furnished by the faded red curtain which ran on iron rods round the Squire's pew and protected his head from draughts. That curtain was watched with alarm by many, for at a certain point in the service it was the Squire's wont to draw it aside, and to stand
