Can You Forgive Her? (80 page)

Mr Gogram came and was closeted with the
Squire, and the doctor also came. The doctor saw Kate, and, shaking his head, told her that her grandfather was sinking lower and lower every hour. It would be infinitely better for him if he would take that port wine at four doses in the day, or even at two, instead of taking it all together. Kate promised to try again, but stated her conviction that the trial would be useless. The doctor, when
pressed on the matter, said that his patient might probably live a week, not improbably a fortnight, – perhaps a month, if he would be obedient, – and so forth. Gogram went away without seeing Kate; and Kate, who looked upon a will as an awful and somewhat tedious ceremony, was in doubt whether her grandfather would live to complete any new operation. But, in truth, the will had been made and signed
and witnessed, – the parish clerk and one of the tenants having been had up into the room as witnesses. Kate knew that the man had been there, but still did not think that a new will had been perfected.

That evening when it was dusk the Squire came into the dining-room, having been shuffling about the grand sweep before the house for a quarter of an hour. The day was cold and the wind bleak,
but still he would go out, and Kate had wrapped him up carefully in mufflers and great-coats. Now he came in to what he called dinner, and Kate sat down with him. He had drank no wine that day, although she had brought it to him twice during the morning. Now he attempted to swallow a little soup, but failed; and after that, while Kate was eating her bit of chicken, had the decanter put before him.
‘I can’t eat, and I suppose it won’t hurt
you if I take my wine at once,’ he said. It went against the grain with him, even yet, that he could not wait till the cloth was gone from the table, but his impatience for the only sustenance that he could take was too much for him.

‘But you should eat something, sir; will you have a bit of toast to sop in your wine?’

The word ‘sop’ was badly chosen,
and made the old Squire angry. ‘Sopped toast! why am I to spoil the only thing I can enjoy?’

‘But the wine would do you more good if you would take something with it.’

‘Good! Nothing will do me any good any more. As for eating, you know I can’t eat. What’s the use of bothering me?’ Then he filled his second glass, and paused awhile before he put it to his lips. He never exceeded four glasses,
but the four he was determined that he would have, as long as he could lift them to his mouth.

Kate finished, or pretended to finish, her dinner within five minutes, in order that the table might be made to look comfortable for him. Then she poked the fire, and brushed up the hearth, and closed the old curtains with her own hands, moving about silently. As she moved his eye followed her, and
when she came behind his chair, and pushed the decanter a little more within his reach, he put out his rough, hairy hand, and laid it upon one of hers which she had rested on the table, with a tenderness that was unusual with him. ‘You are a good girl, Kate. I wish you had been a boy that’s all.’

‘If I had, I shouldn’t, perhaps, have been here to take care of you,’ she said, smiling.

‘No; you’d
have been like your brother, no doubt. Not that I think there could have been two so bad as he is.’

‘Oh, grandfather, if he has offended you, you should try to forgive him.’

‘Try to forgive him! How often have I forgiven him without any trying? Why did he come down here the other day, and insult me for the last time? Why didn’t he keep away, as I had bidden him?’

‘But you gave him leave to
see you, sir.’

‘I didn’t give him leave to treat me like that. Never mind; he will find that, old as I am, I can punish an insult’

‘You haven’t done anything, sir, to injure him?’ said Kate.

‘I have made another will, that’s all. Do you suppose I had that man here all the way from Fenrith for nothing?’

‘But it isn’t done yet?’

‘I tell you it is done. If I left him the whole property it would
be gone in two years’ time. What’s the use of doing it?’

‘But for his life, sir! You had promised him that he should have it for his life.’

‘How dare you tell me that? I never promised him. As my heir, he would have had it all, if he would have behaved himself with common decency. Even though I disliked him, as I always have done, he should have had it.’

‘And you have taken it from him altogether?’

‘I shall answer no questions about it, Kate.’ Then a fit of coughing came upon him, his four glasses of wine having been all taken, and there was no further talk about business. During the evening Kate read a chapter of the Bible out loud. But the Squire was very impatient under the reading, and positively refused permission for a second. ‘There isn’t any good in so much of it all at once,’ he
said, using almost exactly the same words which Kate had used to him about the port wine. There may have been good produced by the small quantity to which he listened, as there is good from the physic which children take with wry faces, most unwillingly. Who can say?

For many weeks past Kate had begged her uncle to allow the clergyman of Vavasor to come to him; but he had positively declined.
The vicar was a young man to whom the living had lately been given by the Chancellor, and he had commenced his career by giving Instant offence to the Squire. This vicar’s predecessor had been an old man, almost as old as the Squire himself, and had held the living for forty years. He had been a Westmoreland man, had read the prayers and preached his one Sunday sermon in a Westmoreland dialect, getting
through the whole operation rather within an hour and a quarter. He had troubled none of his parishioners by much advice, and had been meek and obedient to the
Squire. Knowing the country well, and being used to its habits, he had lived, and been charitable too, on the proceeds of his living, which had never reached two hundred a year. But the new comer was a close-fisted man, with higher ideas
of personal comfort, who found it necessary to make every penny go as far as possible, who made up in preaching for what he could not give away in charity; who established an afternoon service, and who had rebuked the Squire for saying that the doing so was trash and nonsense. Since that the Squire had never been inside the church, except on the occasion of Christmas-day. For this, indeed, the state
of his health gave ample excuse; but he had positively refused to see the vicar, though that gentleman had assiduously called, and had at last desired the servant to tell the clergyman not to come again unless he were sent for. Kate’s task was, therefore, difficult, both as regarded the temporal and spiritual wants of her grandfather.

When the reading was finished, the old man dozed in his chair
for half an hour. He would not go up to bed before the enjoyment of that luxury. He was daily implored to do so, because that sleep in the chair interfered so fatally with his chance of sleeping in bed. But sleep in his chair he would and did. Then he woke, and after a fit of coughing, was induced, with much ill-humour, to go up to his room. Kate had never seen him so weak. He was hardly able,
even with her assistance and that of the old servant, to get up the broad stairs. But there was still some power left to him for violence of language after he got to his room, and he rated Kate and the old woman loudly, because his slippers were not in the proper place. ‘Grandfather,’ said Kate, ‘would you like me to stay in the room with you tonight?’ He rated her again for this proposition, and
then, with assistance from the nurse, he was gotten into bed and was left alone.

After that Kate went to her own room and wrote her letters. The first she wrote was to her aunt Greenow. That was easily enough written. To Mrs Greenow it was not necessary that she should say anything about money. She simply stated her belief that her grandfather’s last day was near at hand, and begged her aunt
to come and pay a last visit to the old man. ‘It will be a great comfort to me in my distress,’ she said;‘and it will be a satisfaction
to you to have seen your father again.’ She knew that her aunt would come, and that task was soon done.

But her letter to her brother was much more difficult. What should she tell him, and what should she not tell him? She began by describing her grandfather’s
state, and by saying to him, as she had done to Mrs Greenow, that she believed the old man’s hours were well-nigh come to a close. She told him that she had asked her aunt to come to her; ‘not,’ she said, ‘that I think her coming will be of material service, but I feel the loneliness of the house will be too much for me at such a time. I must leave it for you to decide,’ she said, ‘whether you had
better be here. If anything should happen,’ – people when writing such letters are always afraid to speak of death by its proper name, – ‘I will send you a message, and no doubt you would come at once.’ Then came the question of the will. Had it not occurred to her that her own interests were involved she would have said nothing on the subject; but she feared her brother, – feared even his misconstruction
of her motives, even though she was willing to sacrifice so much on his behalf, – and therefore she resolved to tell him all that she knew. He might turn upon her hereafter if she did not do so, and accuse her of a silence which had been prejudicial to him.

So she told it all, and the letter became long in the telling. ‘I write with a heavy heart,’ she said, ‘because I know it will be a great
blow to you. He gave me to understand that in this will he left everything away from you. I cannot declare that he said so directly. Indeed I cannot remember his words; but that was the impression he left on me. The day before he had asked me what I should do if he gave me the estate; but of course I treated that as a joke. I have no idea what he put into his will. I have not even attempted to guess.
But now I have told you all that I know.’ The letter was a very long one, and was not finished till late; but when it was completed she had the two taken out into the kitchen, as the boy was to start with them before daylight.

Early on the next morning she crept silently into her grandfather’s room, as was her habit; but he was apparently sleeping, and then she crept back again. The old servant
told her that the Squire
had been awake at four, and at five, and at six, and had called for her. Then he had seemed to go to sleep. Four or five times in the course of the morning Kate went into the room, but her grandfather did not notice her. At last she feared he might already have passed away, and she put her hand upon his shoulder, and down his arm. He then gently touched her hand with his,
showing her plainly that he was not only alive, but conscious. She then offered him food, – the thin porridge, – which he was wont to take, and the medicine. She offered him some wine too, but he would take nothing.

At twelve o’clock a letter was brought to her, which had come by the post She saw that it was from Alice, and opening it found that it was very long. At that moment she could not
read it, but she saw words in it that made her wish to know its contents as quickly as possible. But she could not leave her grandfather then. At two o’clock the doctor came to him, and remained there till the dusk of the evening had commenced. At eight o’clock the old man was dead.

P
OOR
Kate’s condition at the old Hall on that night was very sad. The presence of death is always a source of sorrow, even though the circumstances of the case are of a kind to create no agony of grief. The old man who had just passed away upstairs was fully due to go. He had lived his span all out, and had himself known that to the was the one thing left
for him to do. Kate also had expected his death, and had felt that the time had come in which it would be foolish even to wish that it should be arrested. But death close to one is always sad as it is solemn.

And she was quite alone at Vavasor Hall. She had no acquaintance within some miles of her. From the young vicar, though she herself had not quarrelled with him, she could receive no comfort,
as she hardly knew him; nor was she of a temperament which
would dispose her to turn to a clergyman at such a time for comfort, unless to one who might have been an old friend. Her aunt and brother would probably both come to her; but they could hardly be with her for a day or two, and during that day or two it would be needful that orders should be given which it is disagreeable for a woman to
have to give. The servants, moreover, in the house were hardly fit to assist her much. There was an old butler, or footman, who had lived at the Hall for more than fifty years, but he was crippled with rheumatism, and so laden with maladies, that he rarely crept out of his own room. He was simply an additional burden on the others. There was a boy who had lately done all the work which the other
should have done, and ever so much more beside. There is no knowing how much work such a boy will do when properly drilled, and he was now Kate’s best minister in her distress. There was the old nurse, – but she had been simply good for nursing, and there were two rough Westmoreland girls who called themselves cook and housemaid.

On that first evening, – the very day on which her grandfather
had died, – Kate would have been more comfortable had she really found something that she could do. But there was in truth nothing. She hovered for an hour or two in and out of the room, conscious of the letter which she had in her pocket, and very desirous in heart of reading it, but restrained by a feeling that at such a moment she ought to think only of the dead. In this she was wrong. Let the
living think of the dead, when their thoughts will travel that way whether the thinker wish it or no. Grief taken up because grief is supposed to be proper, is only one degree better than pretended grief. When one sees it, one cannot but think of the lady who asked her friend, in confidence, whether hot roast fowl and bread-sauce were compatible with the earliest state of weeds; or of that other lady,
– a royal lady she, – who was much comforted in the tedium of her trouble when assured by one of the lords about the Court that piquet was mourning.

It was late at night, near eleven, before Kate took out her letter and read it. As something of my story hangs upon it, I will give it at length, though it was a long letter. It had been written with great struggles, and with many tears, and Kate,
as she read it to
the end, almost forgot that her grandfather was lying dead in the room above her.