To torture and to love simultaneously is a proceeding strange to reason,but possible to practice,as these instances show.
Hence,when Timothy's brother Edward said slightingly one day that Timothy's son was well enough,but that he had nothing but shops and offices in his backward perspective,while his own children,should he have any,would be far different,in possessing such a mother as the Honourable Harriet,Timothy felt a bound of triumph within him at the power he possessed of contradicting that statement if he chose.
So much was he interested in his boy in this new aspect that he now began to read up chronicles of the illustrious house ennobled as the Dukes of Southwesterland,from their very beginning in the glories of the Restoration of the blessed Charles till the year of his own time.He mentally noted their gifts from royalty,grants of lands,purchases,intermarriages,plantings and buildings;more particularly their political and military achievements,which had been great,and their performances in art and letters,which had been by no means contemptible.He studied prints of the portraits of that family,and then,like a chemist watching a crystallization,began to examine young Rupert's face for the unfolding of those historic curves and shades that the painters Vandyke and Lely had perpetuated on canvas.
When the boy reached the most fascinating age of childhood,and his shouts of laughter ran through Stapleford House from end to end,the remorse that oppressed Timothy Petrick knew no bounds.Of all people in the world this Rupert was the one on whom he could have wished the estates to devolve;yet Rupert,by Timothy's own desperate strategy at the time of his birth,had been ousted from all inheritance of them;and,since he did not mean to remarry,the manors would pass to his brother and his brother's children,who would be nothing to him,whose boasted pedigree on one side would be nothing to his Rupert's.
Had he only left the first will of his grandfather alone!
His mind ran on the wills continually,both of which were in existence,and the first,the cancelled one,in his own possession.
Night after night,when the servants were all abed,and the click of safety locks sounded as loud as a crash,he looked at that first will,and wished it had been the second and not the first.
The crisis came at last.One night,after having enjoyed the boy's company for hours,he could no longer bear that his beloved Rupert should be dispossessed,and he committed the felonious deed of altering the date of the earlier will to a fortnight later,which made its execution appear subsequent to the date of the second will already proved.He then boldly propounded the first will as the second.
His brother Edward submitted to what appeared to be not only incontestible fact,but a far more likely disposition of old Timothy's property;for,like many others,he had been much surprised at the limitations defined in the other will,having no clue to their cause.He joined his brother Timothy in setting aside the hitherto accepted document,and matters went on in their usual course,there being no dispositions in the substituted will differing from those in the other,except such as related to a future which had not yet arrived.
The years moved on.Rupert had not yet revealed the anxiously expected historic lineaments which should foreshadow the political abilities of the ducal family aforesaid when it happened on a certain day that Timothy Petrick made the acquaintance of a well-known physician of Budmouth,who had been the medical adviser and friend of the late Mrs.Petrick's family for many years;though after Annetta's marriage,and consequent removal to Stapleford,he had seen no more of her,the neighbouring practitioner who attended the Petricks having then become her doctor as a matter of course.
Timothy was impressed by the insight and knowledge disclosed in the conversation of the Budmouth physician,and the acquaintance ripening to intimacy,the physician alluded to a form of hallucination to which Annetta's mother and grandmother had been subject--that of believing in certain dreams as realities.He delicately inquired if Timothy had ever noticed anything of the sort in his wife during her lifetime;he,the physician,had fancied that he discerned germs of the same peculiarity in Annetta when he attended her in her girlhood.One explanation begat another,till the dumbfoundered Timothy Petrick was persuaded in his own mind that Annetta's confession to him had been based on a delusion.
'You look down in the mouth?'said the doctor,pausing.
'A bit unmanned.'Tis unexpected-like,'sighed Timothy.
