Chapter 13
The loss of Mr. Jerome as a client proved only the beginning of
annoyances to Dempster. That old gentleman had in him the vigorous
remnant of an energy and perseverance which had created his own fortune; and being, as I have hinted, given to chewing the cud of a righteous indignation with considerable relish, he was determined to carry on his retributive war against the persecuting attorney. Having some influence with Mr. Pryme, who was one of the most substantial rate-payers in the neighbouring parish of Dingley, and who had himself a complex and long-standing private account with Dempster, Mr. Jerome stirred up this gentleman to an investigation of some suspicious points in the attorney's conduct of the parish affairs. The natural consequence was a personal quarrel between Dempster and Mr. Pryme; the client demanded his account, and then followed the old story of an exorbitant lawyer's bill, with the unpleasant anti-climax of taxing.
These disagreeables, extending over many months, ran along side by side
with the pressing business of Mr. Armstrong's lawsuit, which was
threatening to take a turn rather depreciatory of Dempster's professional
prevision; and it is not surprising that, being thus kept in a constant
state of irritated excitement about his own affairs, he had little time
for the further exhibition of his public spirit, or for rallying the
forlorn hope of sound churchmanship against cant and hypocrisy. Not a few
persons who had a grudge against him, began to remark, with satisfaction, that 'Dempster's luck was forsaking him'; particularly Mrs. Linnet, who thought she saw distinctly the gradual ripening of a providential scheme, whereby a just retribution would be wrought on the man who had deprived her of Pye's Croft. On the other hand, Dempster's well-satisfied clients. who were of opinion that the punishment of his wickedness might conveniently be deferred to another world, noticed with some concern that he was drinking more than ever, and that both his temper and his driving were becoming more furious. Unhappily those additional glasses of brandy, that exasperation of loud-tongued abuse, had other effects than any that entered into the contemplation of anxious clients: they were the little super-added symbols that were perpetually raising the sum of home misery.
Poor Janet! how heavily the months rolled on for her, laden with fresh
sorrows as the summer passed into autumn, the autumn into winter, and the
winter into spring again. Every feverish morning, with its blank
listlessness and despair, seemed more hateful than the last; every coming
night more impossible to brave without arming herself in leaden stupor. The morning light brought no gladness to her: it seemed only to throw its glare on what had happened in the dim candle-light—on the cruel man seated immovable in drunken obstinacy by the dead fire and dying lights in the dining-room, rating her in harsh tones, reiterating old reproaches—or on a hideous blank of something unremembered, something that must have made that dark bruise on her shoulder, which aches as she dressed herself.
Do you wonder how it was that things had come to this pass—what offence
Janet had committed in the early years of marriage to rouse the brutal
hatred of this man? The seeds of things are very small: the hours that
lie between sunrise and the gloom of midnight are travelled through by
tiniest markings of the clock: and Janet, looking back along the fifteen
years of her married life, hardly knew how or where this total misery
began; hardly knew when the sweet wedded love and hope that had set for
ever had ceased to make a twilight of memory and relenting, before the
on-coming of the utter dark.
