The House on the Moor. Mrs. Oliphant
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two beneficent fairies unknown to that lowering face. Good health and much exercise kept the colour on his cheeks and the light in his eye—against his will, one was tempted to suppose. He was short-sighted, and contracted his eyes in his gaze out, till the eyelids hung in heavy folds over the stormy stare which he sent across the moor—and querulous lines of discontent puckered the full youthful lips, which were made for a sweeter expression. Weariness, disgust, the smouldering rage of one oppressed, was in his face. He was not only in unnatural circumstances, but somebody had injured him: he carried his head with all the loftiness and superiority of a conscious victim; but it was evident that the sentiment of wrong—just or unjust—poisoned and embittered all his life.
“Rain!” he exclaimed, jerking the word out as if he threw something at fate. “My luck!—not so much as the chance of a run on the moor!”
“Are you tired of your German already, Horace?” asked Susan, as he came to the fire to make a last attempt upon its life—lifting up her contented woman’s face, not without the shadow of a smile upon it, to her restless brother.
“Tired? D’ye think I’m a child or a girl like you? Do you think I can spend my days over German exercises? What’s the good of it? Have I a chance of ever using that or any other language, unless, perhaps, as a beggar? Pshaw!—look after your work, and don’t aggravate me.”
“But it would please papa,” said Susan, with some timidity, as if this was rather a doubtful argument; “and then, perhaps he might be persuaded to do what you wish, Horace, if you tried to please him.”
“To please papa,” said her brother, imitating her words with contemptuous mockery, “is an inducement indeed. To please him! Why should I please him, I should like to know? What has he ever done for me? At least, I shan’t cheat him with a false submission. I’d rather chuck the lot of them into the fire, than have him suppose that I read German, or anything else, for his sake!”
“But oh, Horace, you would make me so unhappy!” said Susan, with a little unconscious gesture of entreaty, letting her work fall, and clasping her hands as she looked up in his face.
“I suppose so,” said the young man, with perfect indifference.
“And you don’t care?” cried his sister, moved to a momentary overflow of those sudden tears of mortification and injured affection which women weep over such cool, conscious, voluntary disregard. “I would do anything in the world for you, but you don’t mind how I feel; and yet there are only two of us in the world.”
“So much the better,” said Horace, throwing himself down in a chair before the fire; “and as for those vain professions, what is the use of them, I should like to know? What could you do for me, if you were ever so anxious? Anything in the world, in our circumstances, means simply nothing, Susan. Oh! for heaven’s sake, don’t cry!—you’re a good girl, and sew on my buttons—but what, in the name of fortune, could you do? You know as well as I that it is only a fashion of words——”
“I did not mean it so,” cried Susan, quickly—but stopping as suddenly, cast a hurried, painful look at him, and dried her tears with a hasty hand—the look which natural Truth casts upon that cruel, reasonable fool, Wisdom, whom she cannot contest, yet knows in the wrong. A little indignation burning up upon her ingenuous cheek helped the hurried hand to dry the tears, and she returned to her work with a little tremble of haste, such as a discussion with her brother very frequently threw Susan into. She did not pretend to argue with him: she was not clever, but his philosophy filled her with impatience. She “could not bear it.” She felt inclined to get up and seize hold of him, and try physical measures to shake this arrogant pretence of truth out of him; for Susan, though she could not argue, was not without a temper and opinion of her own.
Silence ensued. Susan made nervous haste with her needlework, and stumbled over it in her little flutter of vexation; but Horace was too much absorbed to notice this girlish show of feeling. When he had rocked in his chair a little, placing one foot on the side of the old-fashioned grate, he suddenly sprang up and thrust away his seat. “By George!” cried Horace—but not as that exclamation is usually uttered, “I’ve not got a friend in the world!—there isn’t a man in existence, so far as I know, that will do anything for me!”
“Oh, Horace!” said Susan, “think how much better off you are than some people. Don’t always make the worst of everything! Think of poor Roger Musgrave at Tillington, who has neither father nor home—his godfather dead without making any provision for him, and nothing to do and nobody to look to, poor fellow—and breaking his heart for grief besides, and Peggy says will either ’list or die!”
“And a very good alternative too,” said Horace; “he’s very well off for a poor milk-and-water nobody—free! and able to ’list if he likes, or die if he likes, without any one troubling their head about the matter. As to home and father, I heartily wish he had my share of these precious commodities. Do you think anywhere else a man like me would sell his soul for a bed and a dinner? There! there! hold your tongue, or talk of what you understand.”
“What do I understand, I wonder,” cried Susan, “sewing on your worship’s buttons? A man like you!—you are only nineteen after all, when the truth is told.”
“I am man enough to make my own way,” said the youth, angrily; “it is not a question of years or days, if indeed you were able to judge of it at all, which you are not.”
“If I were so very certain of my own strength,” cried Susan, following up her advantage, “I’d run away, if I did not care for home, or father, or—or anybody. If I did not mind about duty or affection, or such trifles, I’d go and make my own way, and not talk of it—I would! I know something, though I’m not so wise as you. I think it’s shocking to talk discontent for ever, and gloom at everything. Why don’t you go away? Think of the great people in books, that go to London with sixpence in their pockets, and turn out great merchants—or with a tragedy, and turn out Dr. Johnson. Think of Chatterton, whom you were reading of. You are better off a great deal than he!”
“Chatterton was a fool,” said Horace. “I promise you I’ll wait for the tide, and not shoot myself when it’s in the flow. I am much obliged for your advice. I’ve neither a tragedy nor a sixpence that I can call my own—but some of these days I’ll go.”
Pronouncing these words with slow and formal emphasis, as if he meant something dreadful, Horace marched solemnly to his German exercise, and sat down to it once more. The evening grew darker round the two; by degrees Susan’s head drooped down on her needlework, till you could see that she had been seized by a womanish panic, and was secretly putting up the linen on her knee to wipe her wet eyes. This terror and compunction worked its way silently as the early wintry night came on. By-and-by, through the quietness, which was broken only by Horace’s pen, the ashes from the grate, and a slow patter outside of the wet which dropped from the eaves, there broke a little hurried, suppressed sob. Then Susan’s white work, more distinct than herself in the twilight, went down suddenly upon the floor, and a darkling figure glided round to Horace’s side. “Oh, don’t think of it any more!” cried Susan; “it was only my ill-temper. Oh, Horace, never mind me!—don’t think of it again.”
“Think of what?” said Horace, peevishly; “what on earth do you mean, thrusting your arms about me? I did not ask to be petted, did I?—what do you mean?”
“Oh, Horace—what we were saying,” said his sister, with humility.
“What were we saying? Can I remember all the nonsense you talk?” cried the young man, shaking off her arms with impatience—“can’t you keep to your own business, and let me alone? Oh, you wanted me to be Whittington and the cat, didn’t you?—thank you, that’s not my vocation. Isn’t it bad enough I must stand your sauciness, without standing your repentance—oh, for mercy’s sake, go away!”
Susan went away without another word, gathered her work into her big work-bag, and went out of the room, not without making it sufficiently audible that she had closed the door.
“He’s a coward!