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Page 12
"Don't go on so, Alice. Tom and I never had any falling out. He just got
out of the way of writing. He likes India, and he had his own reasons
for not liking England in any shape you could offer England to him.
There's no back reckonings between Tom and me, and he'll be glad for
Julius to come to his own people. We will ask Julius to Sandal; and you
say, yourself, that the half of young folks' loving is in being handy to
each other. Eh? What?"
"I never thought you would bring my words up that way. But I'll tell you
one thing, my girls are not made of melted wax, William. You'll be a
wise man, and a strong man, if you get a ring on their fingers, if they
don't want it there. Sophia will say very soft and sweet, 'No, thank
you, father;' and you'll move Scawfell and Langdale Pikes before you get
her beyond it. As for Charlotte, you yourself will stand 'making' better
than she will. And you know that nothing short of an earthquake can lift
you an inch outside your own way."
And perhaps Sandal thought the hyperbole a compliment; for he smiled a
little, and walked away, with what his wife privately called "a
peacocky air," saying something about "Greek meeting Greek" as he did
so. Mrs. Sandal did not in the least understand him: she wondered a
little over the remark, and then dismissed it as "some of the squire's
foolishness."
CHAPTER III.
JULIUS SANDAL.
"Variety's the very spice of life
That gives it all its flavor."
"Domestic happiness, thou only bliss
Of Paradise that has survived the fall."
Life has a chronology quite independent of the almanac. The heart
divides it into periods. When the sheep-shearing had been forgotten by
all others, the squire often looked back to it with longing. It was a
boundary which he could never repass, and which shut him out forever
from the happy days of his daughters' girlhood,--the days when they had
no will but his will, and no pleasures but in his smile and
companionship. His son Harry had never been to him what Sophia and
Charlotte were. Harry had spent his boyhood in public schools, and, when
his education was completed, had defied all the Sandal traditions, and
gone into the army. At this time he was with his regiment,--the old
Cameronian,--in Edinburgh. And in other points, besides his choice of
the military profession, Harry had asserted his will against his
father's will. But the squire's daughters gave him nothing but delight.
He was proud of their beauty, proud of Charlotte's love of out-door
pleasures, proud of Sophia's love of books; and he was immeasurably
happy in their affection and obedience.
If Sandal had been really a wise man he would have been content with his
good fortune; and like the happy Corinthian have only prayed, "O
goddess, let the days of my prosperity continue!" But he had the
self-sufficiency and impatience of a man who is without peer in his own
small arena. He believed himself to be as capable of ordering his
daughters' lives as of directing his sheep "walks," or the change of
crops in his valley and upland meadows.
Suddenly it had been revealed to him, that Stephen Latrigg had found his
way into a life he thought wholly his own. Until that moment of
revelation he had liked Stephen; but he liked him no longer. He felt
that Stephen had stolen the privilege he should have asked for, and he
deeply resented the position the young man had taken. On the contrary,
Stephen had been guilty of no intentional wrong. He had simply grown
into an affection too sweet to be spoken of, too uncertain and immature
to be subjected to the prudential rules of daily life; yet, had the
question been plainly put to him, he would have gone at once to the
squire, and said, "I love Charlotte, and I ask for your sanction to my
love." He would have felt such an acknowledgment to be the father's most
sacred and evident right, and he was thinking of making it at the very
hour in which Sandal was feeling bitterly toward him for its omission.
And thus the old, old tragedy of mutual misunderstanding works to
sorrowful ends.
The night of the sheep-shearing the squire could not sleep. To lay awake
and peer into the future through the dark hours was a new experience,
and it made him full of restless anxieties. Of course he expected Sophia
and Charlotte to marry, but not just yet. He had so far persistently
postponed the consideration of this subject, and he was angry at Stephen
Latrigg for showing him that further delay might be dangerous to his own
plans.
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