The cold, rarefied air carried her words distinctly to the ear of Stephen. Holding Francis by one hand to prevent his escape, he told Mrs. Radcliffe that she was a liar, adding other polite epithets and a few oaths. And then he began pummelling the lad again.
“Come in, Francis! Let him come in!” implored the mother, clasping her hands in her bitter agony. “Oh, is there no refuge for him and for me?”
She ran down to their sanctum, the Pine Room. Francis came up, sore all over, and his face bleeding. He was a brave little lad, and he strove to make light of it, and keep his tears down. She held him to her, and burst into sobs while trying to comfort him. That upset him at once.
“Oh, my darling, try and bear! My poor boy, there’s nothing left for us both but to bear. The world is full of wrongs and tribulation: but, Francis, it will all be made right when we get to heaven.”
“Don’t cry, mamma. It didn’t hurt me much. But, indeed, the snowball was not mine.”
At ten years old the boys were sent to school. Young Tom, allowed to have his own way, grew beyond every one’s control, even his father’s; and Stephen packed him off to school. Selina besought her husband to send Francis also. Why not, replied Mr. Radcliffe; the boy must be educated. And, in spite of Stephen’s opposition, Francis was despatched. It was frightfully lonely and unpleasant for Selina after that, and she grew to have a pitiful look on her face.
The school was a sharp one, and Francis got on well; he seemed to possess his grandfather Elliot’s aptitude for learning. Tom hated it. After each of the half-yearly holidays, it took Stephen himself to get him to school again: and before he was fourteen he capped it all by appearing at home uncalled for, a red-hot fugitive, and announcing an intention of going to sea.
Tom carried his point. After some feats of skirmishing between him and his father, he was shipped off as “midshipman” on board a fine merchantman bound for Hong Kong. Stephen Radcliffe might never have given a consent, but for the certainty that if he did not give it, Tom would decamp from the Torr, as he did from school, and go off as a common seaman before the mast. It was strange, with his crabbed nature, how much he cared for those two children!
“You’ll have that other one home now,” said sullen Stephen to his father. “No good to be paying for him there.”
And most likely it would have been so; but fate, or fortune, intervened. Francis had a wind-fall. A clergyman, who had known Mr. Elliot, died, and left Francis a thousand pounds. Selina decided that it should be spent, or at least a portion of it, in completing his education in a more advanced manner—though, no doubt, Stephen would have liked to get hold of the money. Francis was sent up to King’s College in London, and to board at the house of one of the masters. In this way a few more years passed on. Francis chose the Bar as a profession, and began to study law.
“The Bar!” sneered Stephen. “A penniless beggar like Francis Radcliffe! Put a pig to learn to spell!”
A bleak day in winter. The wind was howling and crying round Sandstone Torr, tearing through the branches of the almost leafless trees, whirling the weather-cock atop of the lofty tower, playing madly on the window-panes. If there was one spot in the county that the wind seemed to favour above all other spots, it was the Torr. It would go shrieking in the air round about there like so many unquiet spirits.
In the dusk of evening, on a sofa beside the fire in the Pine Room lay Mrs. Radcliffe, with a white, worn face and hollow eyes. She was slowly dying. Until to-day she had not thought there was any immediate danger: but she knew it all now, and that the end was at hand.
So it was not that knowledge which had caused her, a day or two ago, to write to London for Francis. Some news brought in by Stephen Radcliffe had unhinged and shocked her beyond expression. Francis was leading a loose, bad life, drinking and gambling, and going to the deuce headlong, ran the tales, and Stephen repeated them indoors.
That same night she wrote for Francis. She could not rest day or night until she could see him face to face, and say—Is this true, or untrue? He might have reached the Torr the previous day; but he did not. She was lying listening for him now in the twilight gloom amidst the blasts of that shrieking wind.
“If God had but taken my child in infancy!” came the chief thought of her troubled heart. “If I could only know that I should meet him on the everlasting shores!”
“Mother!”
She started up with a yearning cry. It was Francis. He had arrived, and come upstairs, and his opening of the door had been drowned by the wind. A tall, slender, bright-faced young fellow of twenty, with the same sunny hair as in his childhood, and a genial heart.
Francis halted, and stood in startled consternation. The firelight played on her wasted face, and he saw—what was there. In manners he was still almost a boy; his disposition open, his nature transparent.
She made room for him on the sofa; sitting beside him, and laying her weary head for a moment on his shoulder. Francis took a few deep breaths while getting over the shock.
“How long have you been like this, mother? What has brought it about?”
“Nothing in particular; nothing fresh,” she answered. “I have been getting nearer and nearer to it for years and years.”
“Is there no hope?”
“None. And oh, my darling, but for you I should be so glad to die. Sitting here in my loneliness for ever, with only heaven to look forward to, it seems that I have learnt to see a little already of what its rest will be.”
Francis pushed his hair from his brow, and left his hand there. He had loved his mother intensely, and the blow was cruel.
Quietly, holding his other hand in hers, she spoke of what Stephen Radcliffe had heard. Francis’s face turned to scarlet as he listened. But in that solemn hour he could not and would not tell a lie.
Yes, it was true; partly true, he said. He was not always so steady as he ought to be. Some of his acquaintances, young men studying law like himself, or medicine, or what not, were rather wild, and he had been the same. Drink?—well, yes; at times they did take more than might be quite needful. But they were not given to gambling: that was false.
“Francis,” she said, her heart beating wildly with its pain, “the worst of all is the drink. If once you suffer yourself to acquire a love for it, you may never leave it off. It is so insidious–”
“But I don’t love it, mother; I don’t care for it—and I am sure you must know that I would tell you nothing but truth now,” he interrupted. “I have only done as the others do. I’ll leave it off.”
“Will you promise me that?”
“Yes, I will. I do promise it.”
She carried his hand to her lips and kissed it. Francis had always kept his promises.
“It is so difficult for young fellows without a home to keep straight in London,” he acknowledged. “There’s no good influence over us; there’s no pleasant family circle where we can spend our evenings: and we go out, and get drawn into this and that. It all comes of thoughtlessness, mother.”
“You have promised me, Francis.”
“Oh yes. And I will perform.”
“How long will it be before you are called to the Bar?” she asked, after a pause.
“Two years.”
“So much as that?”
“I think so. How the wind howls!”
Mrs. Radcliffe sighed; Francis’s future seemed not to be very clear. Unless he could get on pretty quickly, and make a living for himself—
“When I am gone, Francis,” she said aloud, interrupting her own thoughts, “this will not be any home for you.”
“It has not been one for me for some