'I'll risk my name no more.'So he abstained from marriage,and overcame his wish for a lineal descendant to follow him in the ownership of Stapleford.
Timothy had scarcely noticed the unfortunate child that his wife had borne,after arranging for a meagre fulfilment of his promise to her to take care of the boy,by having him brought up in his house.
Occasionally,remembering this promise,he went and glanced at the child,saw that he was doing well,gave a few special directions,and again went his solitary way.Thus he and the child lived on in the Stapleford mansion-house till two or three years had passed by.
One day he was walking in the garden,and by some accident left his snuff-box on a bench.When he came back to find it he saw the little boy standing there;he had escaped his nurse,and was making a plaything of the box,in spite of the convulsive sneezings which the game brought in its train.Then the man with the encrusted heart became interested in the little fellow's persistence in his play under such discomforts;he looked in the child's face,saw there his wife's countenance,though he did not see his own,and fell into thought on the piteousness of childhood--particularly of despised and rejected childhood,like this before him.
From that hour,try as he would to counteract the feeling,the human necessity to love something or other got the better of what he had called his wisdom,and shaped itself in a tender anxiety for the youngster Rupert.This name had been given him by his dying mother when,at her request,the child was baptized in her chamber,lest he should not survive for public baptism;and her husband had never thought of it as a name of any significance till,about this time,he learnt by accident that it was the name of the young Marquis of Christminster,son of the Duke of Southwesterland,for whom Annetta had cherished warm feelings before her marriage.Recollecting some wandering phrases in his wife's last words,which he had not understood at the time,he perceived at last that this was the person to whom she had alluded when affording him a clue to little Rupert's history.
He would sit in silence for hours with the child,being no great speaker at the best of times;but the boy,on his part,was too ready with his tongue for any break in discourse to arise because Timothy Petrick had nothing to say.After idling away his mornings in this manner,Petrick would go to his own room and swear in long loud whispers,and walk up and down,calling himself the most ridiculous dolt that ever lived,and declaring that he would never go near the little fellow again;to which resolve he would adhere for the space perhaps of a day.Such cases are happily not new to human nature,but there never was a case in which a man more completely befocled his former self than in this.
As the child grew up,Timothy's attachment to him grew deeper,till Rupert became almost the sole object for which he lived.There had been enough of the family ambition latent in him for Timothy Petrick to feel a little envy when,some time before this date,his brother Edward had been accepted by the Honourable Harriet Mountclere,daughter of the second Viscount of that name and title;but having discovered,as I have before stated,the paternity of his boy Rupert to lurk in even a higher stratum of society,those envious feelings speedily dispersed.Indeed,the more he reflected thereon,after his brother's aristocratic marriage,the more content did he become.
His late wife took softer outline in his memory,as he thought of the lofty taste she had displayed,though only a plain burgher's daughter,and the justification for his weakness in loving the child--the justification that he had longed for--was afforded now in the knowledge that the boy was by nature,if not by name,a representative of one of the noblest houses in England.
'She was a woman of grand instincts,after all,'he said to himself proudly.'To fix her choice upon the immediate successor in that ducal line--it was finely conceived!Had he been of low blood like myself or my relations she would scarce have deserved the harsh measure that I have dealt out to her and her offspring.How much less,then,when such grovelling tastes were farthest from her soul!
The man Annetta loved was noble,and my boy is noble in spite of me.'
The afterclap was inevitable,and it soon came.'So far,'he reasoned,'from cutting off this child from inheritance of my estates,as I have done,I should have rejoiced in the possession of him!He is of pure stock on one side at least,whilst in the ordinary run of affairs he would have been a commoner to the bone.'
Being a man,whatever his faults,of good old beliefs in the divinity of kings and those about 'em,the more he overhauled the case in this light,the more strongly did his poor wife's conduct in improving the blood and breed of the Petrick family win his heart.
He considered what ugly,idle,hard-drinking scamps many of his own relations had been;the miserable scriveners,usurers,and pawnbrokers that he had numbered among his forefathers,and the probability that some of their bad qualities would have come out in a merely corporeal child,to give him sorrow in his old age,turn his black hairs gray,his gray hairs white,cut down every stick of timber,and Heaven knows what all,had he not,like a skilful gardener,minded his grafting and changed the sort;till at length this right-minded man fell down on his knees every night and morning and thanked God that he was not as other meanly descended fathers in such matters.
It was in the peculiar disposition of the Petrick family that the satisfaction which ultimately settled in Timothy's breast found nourishment.The Petricks had adored the nobility,and plucked them at the same time.That excellent man Izaak Walton's feelings about fish were much akin to those of old Timothy Petrick,and of his descendants in a lesser degree,concerning the landed aristocracy.
