This speech had a wonderful effect upon the assembled family, but most of all upon the son thus commended, who lost all his ease and composure as his father spoke, and turned his head stiffly to one side, as if afraid to meet the Squire’s eyes, which indeed were not seeking his, but were fixed upon the table, as was natural, considering the state of emotion in which Mr. Wentworth was. As for Jack, when he had steadied himself a little, he got up from his seat and tried to laugh, though the effort was far from being a successful one.
“Even my father applauds me, you see, because I am a scamp and don’t deserve it,” he said, with a voice which was partially choked. “Goodbye, sir; I am going away.”
The Squire rose too, with the hazy bewildered look of which his other children were afraid.
“Goodbye, sir,” said the old man, and then made a pause before he held out his hand. “You’ll not forget what I’ve said, Jack,” he added, with a little haste. “It’s true enough, though I haven’t that confidence in you that—that I might have had. I am getting old, and I have had two attacks, sir,” said Mr. Wentworth, with dignity; “and anyhow, I can’t live forever. Your brothers can make their own way in the world, but I haven’t saved all that I could have wished. When I am gone, Jack, be just to the girls and the little children,” said the Squire; and with that took his son’s hand and grasped it hard, and looked his heir full in the face.
Jack Wentworth was not prepared for any such appeal; he was still less prepared to discover the unexpected and inevitable sequence with which one good sentiment leads to another. He quite faltered and broke down in this unlooked-for emergency. “Father,” he said unawares, for the first time for ten years, “if you wish it, I will join you in breaking the entail.”
“No such thing, sir,” said the Squire, who, so far from being pleased, was irritated and disturbed by the proposal. “I ask you to do your duty, sir, and not to shirk it,” the head of the house said, with natural vehemence, as he stood with that circle of Wentworths round him, giving forth his code of honour to his unworthy heir.
While his father was speaking, Jack recovered a little from his momentary attendrissement. “Goodbye, sir; I hope you’ll live a hundred years,” he said, wringing his father’s hand, “if you don’t last out half-a-dozen of me, as you ought to do. But I’d rather not anticipate such a change. In that case,” the prodigal went on with a certain huskiness in his voice, “I daresay I should not turn out so great a rascal as—as I ought to do. Today and yesterday it has even occurred to me by moments that I was your son, sir,” said Jack Wentworth; and then he made an abrupt stop and dropped the Squire’s hand, and came to himself in a surprising way. When he turned towards the rest of the family, he was in perfect possession of his usual courtesy and good spirits. He nodded to them all round—with superb good-humour. “Goodbye, all of you; I wish you better luck, Frank, and not so much virtue. Perhaps you will have a better chance now the lost sheep has gone back to the wilderness. Goodbye to you all. I don’t think I’ve any other last words to say.” He lighted his cigar with his ordinary composure in the hall, and whistled one of his favourite airs as he went through the garden. “Oddly enough, however, our friend Wodehouse can beat me in that,” he said, with a smile, to Frank, who had followed him out, “perhaps in other things too, who knows? Goodbye, and good-luck, old fellow.” And thus the heir of the Wentworths disappeared into the darkness, which swallowed him up, and was seen no more.
But naturally there was a good deal of commotion in the house. Miss Leonora, who never had known what it was to have nerves in the entire course of her existence, retired to her own room with a headache, to the entire consternation of the family. She had been a strong-minded woman all her life, and managed everybody’s affairs without being distracted and hampered in her career by those doubts of her own wisdom, and questions as to her own motives, which will now and then afflict the minds of weaker people when they have to decide for others. But this time an utterly novel and unexpected accident had befallen Miss Leonora; a man of no principles at all had delivered his opinion upon her conduct—and so far from finding his criticism contemptible, or discovering in it the ordinary outcry of the wicked against the righteous, she had found it true, and by means of it had for perhaps the first time in her life seen herself as others saw her. Neither was the position in which she found herself one from which she could get extricated even by any daring arbitrary exertion of will, such as a woman in difficulties is sometimes capable of. To be sure, she might still have cut the knot in a summary feminine way; might have said “No” abruptly to Julia Trench and her curate, and, after all, have bestowed Skelmersdale, like any other prize or reward of virtue, upon her nephew Frank—a step which Miss
