Margaret Oliphant - The House on the Moor. Volume 1

Silence ensued. Susan made nervous haste with her needlework, and stumbled over it in her little flutter of vexation; but Horace was too much absorbed to notice this girlish show of feeling. When he had rocked in his chair a little, placing one foot on the side of the old-fashioned grate, he suddenly sprang up and thrust away his seat. “By George!” cried Horace – but not as that exclamation is usually uttered, “I’ve not got a friend in the world! – there isn’t a man in existence, so far as I know, that will do anything for me!”

“Oh, Horace!” said Susan, “think how much better off you are than some people. Don’t always make the worst of everything! Think of poor Roger Musgrave at Tillington, who has neither father nor home – his godfather dead without making any provision for him, and nothing to do and nobody to look to, poor fellow – and breaking his heart for grief besides, and Peggy says will either ’list or die!”

“And a very good alternative too,” said Horace; “he’s very well off for a poor milk-and-water nobody – free! and able to ’list if he likes, or die if he likes, without any one troubling their head about the matter. As to home and father, I heartily wish he had my share of these precious commodities. Do you think anywhere else a man like me would sell his soul for a bed and a dinner? There! there! hold your tongue, or talk of what you understand.”

“What do I understand, I wonder,” cried Susan, “sewing on your worship’s buttons? A man like you! – you are only nineteen after all, when the truth is told.”

“I am man enough to make my own way,” said the youth, angrily; “it is not a question of years or days, if indeed you were able to judge of it at all, which you are not.”

“If I were so very certain of my own strength,” cried Susan, following up her advantage, “I’d run away, if I did not care for home, or father, or – or anybody. If I did not mind about duty or affection, or such trifles, I’d go and make my own way, and not talk of it – I would! I know something, though I’m not so wise as you. I think it’s shocking to talk discontent for ever, and gloom at everything. Why don’t you go away? Think of the great people in books, that go to London with sixpence in their pockets, and turn out great merchants – or with a tragedy, and turn out Dr. Johnson. Think of Chatterton, whom you were reading of. You are better off a great deal than he!”

“Chatterton was a fool,” said Horace. “I promise you I’ll wait for the tide, and not shoot myself when it’s in the flow. I am much obliged for your advice. I’ve neither a tragedy nor a sixpence that I can call my own – but some of these days I’ll go.”

Pronouncing these words with slow and formal emphasis, as if he meant something dreadful, Horace marched solemnly to his German exercise, and sat down to it once more. The evening grew darker round the two; by degrees Susan’s head drooped down on her needlework, till you could see that she had been seized by a womanish panic, and was secretly putting up the linen on her knee to wipe her wet eyes. This terror and compunction worked its way silently as the early wintry night came on. By-and-by, through the quietness, which was broken only by Horace’s pen, the ashes from the grate, and a slow patter outside of the wet which dropped from the eaves, there broke a little hurried, suppressed sob. Then Susan’s white work, more distinct than herself in the twilight, went down suddenly upon the floor, and a darkling figure glided round to Horace’s side. “Oh, don’t think of it any more!” cried Susan; “it was only my ill-temper. Oh, Horace, never mind me! – don’t think of it again.”

“Think of what?” said Horace, peevishly; “what on earth do you mean, thrusting your arms about me? I did not ask to be petted, did I? – what do you mean?”

“Oh, Horace – what we were saying,” said his sister, with humility.

“What were we saying? Can I remember all the nonsense you talk?” cried the young man, shaking off her arms with impatience – “can’t you keep to your own business, and let me alone? Oh, you wanted me to be Whittington and the cat, didn’t you? – thank you, that’s not my vocation. Isn’t it bad enough I must stand your sauciness, without standing your repentance – oh, for mercy’s sake, go away!”

Susan went away without another word, gathered her work into her big work-bag, and went out of the room, not without making it sufficiently audible that she had closed the door.

“He’s a coward! he does nothing but talk!” she said between her teeth, as she went up the dark stairs; but nobody save herself knew that her momentary passion had brought these words to Susan’s lips, and ten minutes after she would not have believed she had said them – nevertheless, sometimes passion, unawares, says the truth.

THE household of Marchmain consisted of four persons. The brother and sister we have already seen, their father, and one female servant. In this little interval of twilight, while Susan puts on her clean collar for dinner, and which Horace, who would rather disarrange than improve his dress, out of pure ill-humour and disrespect, spends in the dark, staring into the fire with his head between his hands, we will explain to our readers the economy of this singular household. At this hour all is dark in the solitary house. Without, the chill invisible rain, the great unbroken blackness of the moor and the night – within, an unlighted hall and staircase, with a red glow of firelight at the end of a long passage, betraying the kitchen, and a faint thread of light coming out beneath a door opposite the dining-room. Thrift, severe and rigid, reigns in this dwelling. In Mr. Scarsdale’s own room a single candle burns, when it is no longer possible to read without one; but there are no lights in the family sitting-room till the dinner is placed on the table, and Peggy has nothing but firelight in the kitchen, and Susan puts on her collar by intuition upstairs. Everything is under inexorable rule and law. The family have breakfast between nine and ten, sometimes even later; for Mr. Scarsdale is not a man to modify his own habits for any consideration of suitability. From that time till six o’clock, when there is dinner, the young people see nothing of their father. He sits with them in the evening, imposing silence by his presence; and that, so far as family intercourse goes, is the chronicle of their life.

Let us enter at this door, which marks itself off from the floor of the hall by that slender line of light. It has the same prospect as the dining-room, when there is any daylight to see it; but it is smaller than that gloomy apartment; two large bookcases, shut in by a brass network, stand out with sharp and angular corners from the walls, no attempt having been made to fill up the vacant space at either side of them, or to harmonize these gaunt pieces of furniture with anything else in the room. There are two or three chairs, which stand fixed and immovable in corners, plainly testifying that nobody ever sits there; and before the fire a library table, and in a round-backed elbow-chair the father of the house. He sits there reading with a forlorn persistence wonderful to see – reading for no purpose, reading with little interest, yet turning page after page with methodical regularity, and bending his lowering forehead on the book as if it were the business of his life. He is dark, not so much in complexion as in sentiment – a close, self-absorbed, impenetrable man. It is not difficult to perceive that he is neither a student by ardent inclination, nor by profession a searcher into books; but what is the secret of these solitary studies is hard to discover. He sits with his head leaning upon one hand, and the other turning the pages – sits often for hours in that one position. He is scarcely ever stimulated into interest, and never owns the enlivening touch of that zeal and curiosity which hunts for proofs or illustrations of a favourite theory through a dozen volumes. There is no heap of books by his side, but only one orderly volume, which is not of the class of those fantastic delightful reverie books in which studious men delight. The blank, straightforward manner in which he reads on comes to be impressive in its singularity after a time. He seems to pursue this occupation as a clerk keeps books, and counts his progress, you could imagine, by the number of the pages he has read, and by no less tangible criterion; and nothing moves the settled darkness of his uncommunicative face.