in the persons of his handsome, manly-looking sons.
Frank had been a difficulty from childhood. He had not been more spoilt than most boys are, though certainly his invalid mother had been most indulgent; but there was a moral bias by nature in his disposition, which somehow seemed to make him, just as he was apparently going straight for a certain goal, turn right off in a very unpleasantly-rounded curve.
Quite early in his youth he had to be recalled, to save expulsion from a certain school, on account of his heading a series of raids upon various orchards, and in defiance of divers corrections on the principal’s part.
He had to return home from his two next schools for various offences against their rules, and finally his college career came to an end with rustication.
Frank laughed, and said that he did not know how it was. One thing, he said, was evident: he was not cut out for the church, and he would not go back to college when the term of his rustication was at an end.
A clerkship was obtained for him then, through great interest, in the Treasury, and here for three or four years he got along pretty well, the confinement not being great, and the number of friends he met with being of a character to suit his taste.
There were bounds, though, even in those days, to the limits accorded to a gentlemanly clerk of good birth, and when Frank took to absenting himself from the office for a week at a time, matters became serious.
For the first time or two the plea of illness was accepted, but when another absence occurred, also from illness, and Mr. Frank Mallow was seen by his superiors riding a showy-looking hack in the park, and was known to have given a bachelors’ party in the same week, to which several fellow-clerks were invited, it became necessary to hint to the peccant youth that the next time he was unwell, a certificate to that effect would be necessary from some well-known medical man.
Frank was ill again, so he sent in word to the office, and stayed away for another week, after which, on presenting himself, he received a warning—one which he bore in mind for a couple of months, and then his head must have once more been very bad, for there was a fresh absence, and this endured so long that Frank’s seat in the Treasury knew him no more.
“Well, it don’t matter, mother,” he said. “It was a wretched set-out, and I was sick of the eternal copying.”
“But it was such a pity, dear,” his mother said, in a tone of remonstrance.
“Pity? Stuff! Eighty pounds a year, and a rise of ten pounds annually! Not bricklayer’s wages, and all the time people think it’s such a tremendous thing to be a Treasury clerk.”
“Poor papa is so vexed and grieved, for he took such pains to get you the appointment.”
“Then poor papa must get pleased again,” said the young man, petulantly. “I cannot, and I will not, stand a clerk’s desk. I’d sooner enlist.”
“Frank!” cried his mother, reproachfully.
“Well, I declare I would, mother,” he said, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and walking up and down the room.
“To find freedom?” said his mother, with a smile.
“Oh! I dare say there would be discipline to attend to, and officers to obey; but there would be some change. I should not have to be tied down to a wretched writing-table, copy, copy, copy, the whole day long.”
“Change?” said Mrs. Mallow, and she gazed wistfully in her son’s face.
“Yes, of course; one must have some excitement.”
He stood gazing out of the window, and did not notice the strange despairing look in his mother’s eyes, one which seemed to tell of her own weary hours—weary years, passed upon that couch, with no hope of change save that of some day sinking into the eternal rest. It was evident that she was contrasting the selfishness of her son and his position with her own, and she sighed as she closed her eyes and lay there in silence for a time, uttering no reproach.
Then came the day when the Rector was goaded almost to madness by the young man’s follies, and the reports constantly reaching his ears of Frank’s exploits at the principal hotel in billiard-playing and various unsavoury pursuits with one or other of the young farmers round. Reports these that lost nothing doubtless in the telling, and which never failed to reach the Rector in a way that seemed to suggest that he was answerable for his son’s misdoings.
Then followed other troubles, culminating in an affray with the keepers, an affair which, from the family friendship with old Lord Artingale, could easily have been hushed up; but the Rector jumped at the opportunity he found in his son’s dread and evident anxiety to get away from the neighbourhood, so quite in a hurry Frank was shipped off to New Zealand.
And there was peace at the Rectory? Nothing of the kind. There was the misery of hearing endless little stories of Frank’s “carryings on,” as they were termed; some bill was constantly being brought to the house, with a request that the Rector would pay it, and, to hide his son’s disgrace, this he sometimes did. But the annoyance was none the less, and the Rector used to declare plaintively to his wife that if it were not for Julia and Cynthia he would run right away.
“And for me, Eli,” said the suffering woman, with a smile.
“And for you, dear,” he said, tenderly, and there was peace until some new peccadillo of the eldest son was discovered.
Then to the Rector’s dismay he found that Cyril—his mother’s darling—seemed to have taken a leaf out of his brother’s book. If the younger brother’s career had been to run upon a tram-line laid down by his elder brother, he could not have followed in the course more truly, and just as the Rector was beginning to feel calmed down and happy in the society of his two pretty daughters, troubles concerning Cyril kept cropping up.
“Nice chaps for a parson’s sons,” said Jabez Fullerton, the principal draper at Lawford, who could afford to speak out, as Mrs. Mallow and her daughters sent to Swan and Edgar’s for everything. And he did speak out; for, as deacon at his chapel and occasional preacher, he never lost an opportunity of saying a few words by way of practice.
“Nice chaps for a parson’s sons! This is the sort of stuff they send to college, and then send back to teach us, in their surplices which we have to pay for the washing of, though we never go to church. Nice fellows they’ll be to preach sermons—out of books too—read ’em. We at chapel never read our sermons, eh?”
There was a murmur of acquiescence here, and Mr. Jabez Fullerton felt happy.
Not that the Rev. Eli Mallow had thought of making his sons clergymen after testing them for a short time. Cyril had, like his brother, been to college, and with a view to his succeeding to the living of Lawford, but, as in the case of Frank, the Rector soon gave him up in despair.
Matters grew worse; then worse still. Expostulation, prayer, anger, all were tried in vain, and, having to bear the trouble to a great extent in silence, so as to hide it from the sick mother, who idolised Cyril, the Rector was at times almost beside himself.
At last there came a crash, and the Rector determined to get this son away before something worse should result.
Emigration was being much talked of just then, and plenty of young men were going out to the various colonies to commence life as squatters both
