Desperate Remedies (Hardy)/Part 1/Chapter 4

by Thomas Hardy

4. OCTOBER THE NINETEENTH

When death enters a house, an element of sadness and an element of horror accompany it. Sadness, from the death itself: horror, from the clouds of blackness we designedly labour to introduce.

The funeral had taken place. Depressed, yet resolved in his demeanour, Owen Graye sat before his father's private escritoire, engaged in turning out and unfolding a heterogeneous collection of papers--forbidding and inharmonious to the eye at all times--most of all to one under the influence of a great grief. Laminae of white paper tied with twine were indiscriminately intermixed with other white papers bounded by black edges--these with blue foolscap wrapped round with crude red tape.

The bulk of these letters, bills, and other documents were submitted to a careful examination, by which the appended particulars were ascertained:--

 First, that their father's income from professional sources had
 been very small, amounting to not more than half their expenditure;
 and that his own and his wife's property, upon which he had relied
 for the balance, had been sunk and lost in unwise loans to
 unscrupulous men, who had traded upon their father's too
 open-hearted trustfulness.

 Second, that finding his mistake, he had endeavoured to regain
 his standing by the illusory path of speculation. The most notable
 instance of this was the following. He had been induced, when at
 Plymouth in the autumn of the previous year, to venture all his
 spare capital on the bottomry security of an Italian brig which
 had put into the harbour in distress. The profit was to be
 considerable, so was the risk. There turned out to be no security
 whatever. The circumstances of the case tendered it the most
 unfortunate speculation that a man like himself--ignorant of all
 such matters--could possibly engage in. The vessel went down, and
 all Mr. Graye's money with it.

 Third, that these failures had left him burdened with debts he
 knew not how to meet; so that at the time of his death even the few
 pounds lying to his account at the bank were his only in name.

 Fourth, that the loss of his wife two years earlier had
 awakened him to a keen sense of his blindness, and of his duty by
 his children. He had then resolved to reinstate by unflagging zeal
 in the pursuit of his profession, and by no speculation, at least a
 portion of the little fortune he had let go.

Cytherea was frequently at her brother's elbow during these examinations. She often remarked sadly--

'Poor papa failed to fulfil his good intention for want of time, didn't he, Owen? And there was an excuse for his past, though he never would claim it. I never forget that original disheartening blow, and how that from it sprang all the ills of his life --everything connected with his gloom, and the lassitude in business we used so often to see about him.'

'I remember what he said once,' returned the brother, 'when I sat up late with him. He said, "Owen, don't love too blindly: blindly you will love if you love at all, but a little care is still possible to a well-disciplined heart. May that heart be yours as it was not mine," father said. "Cultivate the art of renunciation." And I am going to, Cytherea.'

'And once mamma said that an excellent woman was papa's ruin, because he did not know the way to give her up when he had lost her. I wonder where she is now, Owen? We were told not to try to find out anything about her. Papa never told us her name, did he?'

'That was by her own request, I believe. But never mind her; she was not our mother.'

The love affair which had been Ambrose Graye's disheartening blow was precisely of that nature which lads take little account of, but girls ponder in their hearts.