The Witch's Head

BOOK I.-5

“And how do you like Kesterwick, Miss Florence?” asked Mr. Cardus, with his usual courtly smile.

“It is much what I expected—a little duller, perhaps,” she answered composedly.

“Ah, perhaps you have been accustomed to a gayer spot.”

“Yes, till my mother died we lived at Brighton; there is plenty of life there. Not that we could mix in it, we were too poor; but at any rate we could watch it.”

“Do you like life, Miss Florence?”

“Yes, we only live such a short time. I should like,” she went on, throwing her head back, and half-closing her eyes, “to see as much as I can, and to exhaust every emotion.”

“Perhaps, Miss Florence, you would find some of them rather unpleasant,” answered Mr. Cardus, with a smile.

“Possibly, but it is better to travel through a bad country than to grow in a good one.”

Mr. Cardus smiled again: the girl interested him rather.

“Do you know, Miss Ceswick,” he said, changing the subject, and addressing the stately old lady, who was sitting smoothing her laces, and looking rather aghast at her niece’s utterances, “that this young gentleman is going to college, and Jeremy, too?”

“Indeed,” said Miss Ceswick; “I hope that you will do great things there, Ernest.”

While Ernest was disclaiming any intentions of the sort, Miss Florence cut in again, raising her eyes from a deep contemplation of that young gentleman’s long shanks, which were writhing under her keen glance, and twisting themselves serpent-wise round the legs of the chair.

“I did not know,” she said, “that they took boys at college.”

Then they took their leave, and Ernest stigmatised her to Dorothy as a “beast.”

But she was at least attractive in her own peculiar fashion, and during the next year or two he got pretty intimate with her.

And so Ernest and Jeremy went up to Cambridge, but did not set the place on fire, nor were the voices of tutors loud in their praise. Jeremy, it is true, rowed one year in the ’Varsity Race, and performed prodigies of strength, and so covered himself with a sort of glory, which, personally, being of a modest mind, he did not particularly appreciate. Ernest did not even do that. But somehow, by hook or by crook, at the termination of their collegiate career, they took some sort of degree, and then departed from the shores of the Cam, on which they had spent many a jovial day—Jeremy to return to Kesterwick, and Ernest to pay several visits to college friends in town and elsewhere.

And so ended the first little round of their days.

CHAPTER V

EVA’S PROMISE.

When, on leaving Cambridge, Jeremy got back to Dum’s Ness, Mr. Cardus received him with his usual semi-contemptuous coldness, a mental attitude that often nearly drove the young fellow wild with mortification. Not that Mr. Cardus really felt any contempt for him now—he had lost all that years ago, when the boy had been so anxious to go and “earn his bread;” but he could never forgive him for being the son of his father, or conquer his inherent dislike to him. On the other hand, he certainly did not allow this to interfere with his treatment of the lad; if anything, indeed, it made him more careful. What he spent upon Ernest, the same sum he spent on Jeremy, pound for pound; but there was this difference about it—the money he spent on Ernest he gave from love, and that on Jeremy from a sense of duty.

Now, Jeremy knew all this well enough, and it made him very anxious to earn his own living, and become independent of Mr. Cardus. But it was one thing to be anxious to earn your own living, and quite another to do it, as many a poor wretch knows to his cost, and when Jeremy set his slow brain to consider how he should go about the task it quite failed to supply him with any feasible idea. And yet he did not want much; Jeremy was not of an ambitious temperament. If he could earn enough to keep a cottage over his head, and find himself in food and clothes, and powder and shot, he would be perfectly content. Indeed, there were to be only two sine qua nons in his ideal occupation: it must admit of a considerable amount of outdoor exercise, and be of such a nature as would permit him to see plenty of Ernest. Without more or less of Ernest’s company, life would not, he considered, be worth living.

For a week or more after his arrival home these perplexing reflections simmered incessantly inside Jeremy’s head, till at length, feeling that they were getting too much for him, he determined to consult his sister, which, as she had three times his brains, he would have done well to think of before.

Dolly fixed her steady blue eyes upon him and listened to his tale in silence.

“And so you see, Doll”—he always called her Doll—he ended up, “I’m in a regular fix. I don’t know what I’m fit for, unless it’s to row a boat, or let myself out to bad shots to kill their game for them. You see I must stick on to Ernest; I don’t feel somehow as though I could get along without him; if it wasn’t for that I’d emigrate. I should be just the chap to cut down big trees in Vancouver’s Island or brand bullocks,”’ he added meditatively.

“You are a great goose, Jeremy,” was his sister’s comment.

He looked up, not as in any way disputing her statement, but merely for further information.

“You are a great goose, I say. What do you suppose that I have been doing all these three years and more that you have been rowing boats and wasting time up at college? I have been thinking, Jeremy.”

“Yes, and so have I, but there is no good in thinking.”

“No, not if you stop there; but I’ve been acting too. I’ve spoken to Reginald, and made a plan, and he has accepted my plan.”

“You always were clever, Doll; you’ve got all the brains and I’ve got all the size;” and he surveyed as much as he could see of himself ruefully.

“You don’t ask what I have arranged,” she said, sharply, for in alluding to her want of stature Jeremy had touched a sore point.

“I am waiting for you to tell me.”

“Well, you are to be articled to Reginald.”

“O Lord!” groaned Jeremy, “I don’t like that at all.”

“Be quiet till I have told you. You are to be articled to Reginald, and he is to pay you an allowance of a hundred a year while you are articled, so that if you don’t like it you needn’t live here.”

“But I don’t like the business, Doll; I hate it; it is a beastly business; it’s a devil’s business.”

“I should like to know what right you have to talk like that, Mr. Knowall! Let me tell you that many better men than you are content to earn their living by lawyer’s work. I suppose that a man can be honest as a lawyer as well as in any other trade.”

Jeremy shook his head doubtfully. “It’s blood-sucking,” he said energetically.

“Then you must suck blood,” she answered, with decision. “Look here, Jeremy, don’t be pig-headed and upset all my plans. If you fall out with Reginald over this, he won’t do anything else for you. He doesn’t like you, you know, and would be only too glad to pick a quarrel with you if he could do it with a clear conscience, and then where would you be, I should like to know?”

Jeremy was unable to form an opinion as to where he would be, so she went on:

“You must take to it for the present, at any rate. And then there is another thing to think of. Ernest is to go to the bar, and unless you become a lawyer, if anything happened to Reginald, there will be nobody to give him a start, and I’m told that is everything at the bar.”

This last Jeremy admitted to be a weighty argument.

“It is a precious rum sort of lawyer I shall make,” he said, sadly, “about as good as grandfather yonder, I’m thinking. By the way, how has he been getting on?”

“O, just as usual—write, write, write all day. He thinks that he is working out his time. He has got a new stick now, on which he has nicked all the months and years that have to run before he has done—little nicks for the months and big ones for the years. There are eight or ten big ones left now. Every month he cuts out a nick. It is very dreadful. You know he thinks that Reginald is the devil, and he hates him, too. The other day, when he had no writing to do in the office, I found him drawing pictures of him with horns and a tail, such awful pictures, and I think Reginald always looks like that to him. And then sometimes he wants to go out riding, especially at night. Only last week they found him putting a bridle on to the gray mare—the one that Reginald sometimes rides, you know. When did you say that Ernest was coming back?” she said, after a pause.

“Why, Doll, I told you—next Monday week.”

Her face fell a little. “O, I thought you said Saturday.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“O, only about getting his room ready.”

“Why, it is ready; I looked in yesterday.”

“Nonsense! you know nothing about it,” she answered, colouring. “Come, I wish you would go out; I want to count the linen, and you are in the way.”

Thus adjured, Jeremy removed his large form from the table on which he had been sitting, and whistling to Nails, now a very ancient and preternaturally wise dog, set off for a walk. He had mooned along some little way, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground, reflecting on the unpleasant fate in store for him as an articled clerk, continually under the glance of Mr. Cardus’s roving eye, when suddenly he became aware that two ladies were standing on the edge of the cliff within a dozen yards of him. He would have turned and fled, for Jeremy had a marked dislike to ladies’ society, and a strong opinion, which, however, he never expressed, that women were the root of all evil; but, thinking that he had been seen, he feared that retreat would appear rude. In one of the young ladies, for they were young, he recognised Miss Florence Ceswick, who to all appearance had not changed in the least since, some years ago, she came with her aunt to call on Dorothy. There was the same brown hair, curling as profusely as ever, the same keen brown eyes and ripe lips, the same small features and resolute expression of face. Her square figure had indeed developed a little. In her tight-fitting dress it looked almost handsome, and somehow its very squareness, that most women would have considered a defect, contributed to the air of power and unchanging purpose that would have made Florence Ceswick remarkable among a hundred handsomer women.