them with a heart and a will, in the hours when he was not in their company. Yes! I call them duties, though some of them might be self-imposed and purely social; they were engagements they had entered into, either tacitly or with words, and that they fulfilled. From Mr. Hetherington, the Master of the Hounds, who was up at – no one knows what hour, to go down to the kennel and see that the men did their work well and thoroughly, to stern old Sir Lionel Playfair, the upright magistrate, the thoughtful, conscientious landlord – they did their work according to their lights; there were few laggards among those with whom Mr. Wilkins associated in the field or at the dinner-table. Mr. Ness – though as a clergyman he was not so active as he might have been – yet even Mr. Ness fagged away with his pupils and his new edition of one of the classics. Only Mr. Wilkins, dissatisfied with his position, neglected to fulfil the duties thereof. He imitated the pleasures, and longed for the fancied leisure of those about him; leisure that he imagined would be so much more valuable in the hands of a man like himself, full of intellectual tastes and accomplishments, than frittered away by dull boors of untravelled, uncultivated squires – whose company, however, be it said by the way, he never refused.
And yet daily Mr. Wilkins was sinking from the intellectually to the sensually self-indulgent man. He lay late in bed, and hated Mr. Dunster for his significant glance at the office-clock when he announced to his master that such and such a client had been waiting more than an hour to keep an appointment. “Why didn’t you see him yourself, Dunster? I’m sure you would have done quite as well as me,” Mr. Wilkins sometimes replied, partly with a view of saying something pleasant to the man whom he disliked and feared. Mr. Dunster always replied, in a meek matter-of-fact tone, “Oh, sir, they wouldn’t like to talk over their affairs with a subordinate.”
And every time he said this, or some speech of the same kind, the idea came more and more clearly into Mr. Wilkins’s head, of how pleasant it would be to himself to take Dunster into partnership, and thus throw all the responsibility of the real work and drudgery upon his clerk’s shoulders. Importunate clients, who would make appointments at unseasonable hours and would keep to them, might confide in the partner, though they would not in the clerk. The great objections to this course were, first and foremost, Mr. Wilkins’s strong dislike to Mr. Dunster – his repugnance to his company, his dress, his voice, his ways – all of which irritated his employer, till his state of feeling towards Dunster might be called antipathy; next, Mr. Wilkins was fully aware of the fact that all Mr. Dunster’s actions and words were carefully and thoughtfully prearranged to further the great unspoken desire of his life – that of being made a partner where he now was only a servant. Mr. Wilkins took a malicious pleasure in tantalizing Mr. Dunster by such speeches as the one I have just mentioned, which always seemed like an opening to the desired end, but still for a long time never led any further. Yet all the while that end was becoming more and more certain, and at last it was reached.
Mr. Dunster always suspected that the final push was given by some circumstance from without; some reprimand for neglect – some threat of withdrawal of business which his employer had received; but of this he could not be certain; all he knew was, that Mr. Wilkins proposed the partnership to him in about as ungracious a way as such an offer could be made; an ungraciousness which, after all, had so little effect on the real matter in hand, that Mr. Dunster could pass over it with a private sneer, while taking all possible advantage of the tangible benefit it was now in his power to accept.
Mr. Corbet’s attachment to Ellinor had been formally disclosed to her just before this time. He had left college, entered at the Middle Temple, and was fagging away at law, and feeling success in his own power; Ellinor was to “come out” at the next Hamley assemblies; and her lover began to be jealous of the possible admirers her striking appearance and piquant conversation might attract, and thought it a good time to make the success of his suit certain by spoken words and promises.
He needed not have alarmed himself even enough to make him take this step, if he had been capable of understanding Ellinor’s heart as fully as he did her appearance and conversation. She never missed the absence of formal words and promises. She considered herself as fully engaged to him, as much pledged to marry him and no one else, before he had asked the final question, as afterwards. She was rather surprised at the necessity for those decisive words,
“Ellinor, dearest, will you – can you marry me?” and her reply was – given with a deep blush I must record, and in a soft murmuring tone –
“Yes – oh, yes – I never thought of anything else.”
“Then I may speak to your father, may not I, darling?”
“He knows; I am sure he knows; and he likes you so much. Oh, how happy I am!”
“But still I must speak to him before I go. When can I see him, my Ellinor? I must go back to town at four o’clock.”
“I heard his voice in the stable-yard only just before you came. Let me go and find out if he is gone to the office yet.”
No! to be sure he was not gone. He was quietly smoking a cigar in his study, sitting in an easy-chair near the open window, and leisurely glancing at all the advertisements in The Times. He hated going to the office more and more since Dunster had become a partner; that fellow gave himself such airs of investigation and reprehension.
He got up, took the cigar out of his mouth, and placed a chair for Mr. Corbet, knowing well why he had thus formally prefaced his entrance into the room with a –
“Can I have a few minutes’ conversation with you, Mr. Wilkins?”
“Certainly, my dear fellow. Sit down. Will you have a cigar?”
“No! I never smoke.” Mr. Corbet despised all these kinds of indulgences, and put a little severity into his refusal, but quite unintentionally; for though he was thankful he was not as other men, he was not at all the person to trouble himself unnecessarily with their reformation.
“I want to speak to you about Ellinor. She says she thinks you must be aware of our mutual attachment.”
“Well,” said Mr. Wilkins – he had resumed his cigar, partly to conceal his agitation at what he knew was coming – “I believe I have had my suspicions. It is not very long since I was young myself.” And he sighed over the recollection of Lettice, and his fresh, hopeful youth.
“And I hope, sir, as you have been aware of it, and have never manifested any disapprobation of it, that you will not refuse your consent – a consent I now ask you for – to our marriage.”
Mr. Wilkins did not speak for a little while – a touch, a thought, a word more would have brought him to tears; for at the last he found it hard to give the consent which would part him from his only child. Suddenly he got up, and putting his hand into that of the anxious lover (for his silence had rendered Mr. Corbet anxious up to a certain point of perplexity – he could not understand the implied he would and he would not), Mr. Wilkins said,
“Yes! God bless you both! I will give her to you, some day – only it must be a long time first. And now go away – go back to her – for I can’t stand this much longer.”
Mr. Corbet returned to Ellinor. Mr. Wilkins sat down and buried his head in his hands, then went to his stable, and had Wildfire saddled for a good gallop over the country. Mr. Dunster waited for him in vain at the office, where an obstinate old country gentleman from a distant part of the shire would ignore Dunster’s existence as a partner, and pertinaciously demanded to see Mr. Wilkins on important business.
Chapter V
A few days afterwards, Ellinor’s father bethought himself that same further communication ought to take place between him and his daughter’s lover regarding the approval of the family of the latter to
