CHAPTER XLIV

MY FATHER IS MIRACULOUSLY RELIEVED BY FORTUNE

My grandfather had a gratification in my success, mingled with a transparent jealousy of the chief agent in procuring it.  He warned me when I left him that he was not to be hoodwinked:  he must see the money standing in my name on the day appointed.  His doubts were evident, but he affected to be expectant.  Not a word of Sarkeld could be spoken.  My success appeared to be on a more visionary foundation the higher I climbed.

Now Jorian DeWitt had affirmed that the wealthy widow Lady Sampleman was to be had by my father for the asking.  Placed as we were, I regarded the objections to his alliance with her in a mild light.  She might lend me the money to appease the squire; that done, I would speedily repay it.  I admitted, in a letter to my aunt Dorothy, the existing objections:  but the lady had long been enamoured of him, I pleaded, and he was past the age for passionate affection, and would infallibly be courteous and kind.  She was rich.  We might count on her to watch over him carefully.  Of course, with such a wife, he would sink to a secondary social sphere; was it to be regretted if he did?  The letter was a plea for my own interests, barely veiled.

At the moment of writing it, and moreover when I treated my father with especial coldness, my heart was far less warm in the contemplation of its pre-eminent aim than when I was suffering him to endanger it, almost without a protest.  Janet and a peaceful Riversley, and a life of quiet English distinction, beckoned to me visibly, and not hatefully.  The image of Ottilia conjured up pictures of a sea of shipwrecks, a scene of immeasurable hopelessness.  Still, I strove toward that.  My strivings were against my leanings, and imagining the latter, which involved no sacrifice of the finer sense of honour, to be in the direction of my lower nature, I repelled them to preserve a lofty aim that led me through questionable ways.

‘Can it be you, Harry,’ my aunt Dorothy’s reply ran (I had anticipated her line of reasoning, though not her warmth), ’who advise him to this marriage from a motive so inexplicably unworthy?  That you will repay her the money, I do not require your promise to assure me.  The money is nothing.  It is the prospect of her life and fortune which you are consenting, if not urging him, to imperil for your own purposes.  Are you really prepared to imitate in him, with less excuse for doing it, the things you most condemn?  Let it be checked at the outset.  It cannot be.  A marriage of inclination on both sides, prudent in a worldly sense, we might wish for him, perhaps, if he could feel quite sure of himself.  His wife might persuade him not to proceed in his law-case.  There I have long seen his ruin.  He builds such expectations on it!  You speak of something worse than a mercenary marriage.  I see this in your handwriting!—­your