Magnum Bonum; Or, Mother Carey's Brood

At last, late on the long summer day, she was at the terminus, and with a heart beating so fast that she could hardly breathe, found herself in a cab, driving up to her own door, just as the twilight was darkening.

How dark it looked within, with all the blinds down! The servant who opened the door thought Miss Janet was in the drawing-room, but the master was out. It sounded desolate, and Carey ran up stairs, craving and eager for the kiss of her child—the child who must have borne the brunt of the shock.

The room was silent, all dusky and shadowed; the window-frames were traced on the blinds by the gas freshly lighted outside, and moving in the breeze with a monotonous dreariness. Carey stood a moment, and then her eyes getting accustomed to the darkness, she discerned a little heap lying curled up before the ottoman, her head on a great open book, asleep—poor child! quite worn out. Carey moved quietly across and sat down by her, longing but not daring to touch her. The lamp was brought up in a minute or two, and that roused Janet, who sprang up with a sudden start and dazzled eyes, exclaiming “Father! Oh, it’s Mother Carey! Oh, mother, mother, please don’t let him go!”

“And you have been all alone in the house, my poor child,” said Carey, as she felt the girl shuddering in her close embrace.

“Mrs. Lucas came to stay with me, but I didn’t want her,” said Janet, “so I told her she might go home to dinner. It’s father—”

“Where is father?”

“Those horrid people in Tottenham Court Road sent for him just as he had come home,” said Janet.

“He went out as usual?”

“Yes, though he had such a bad cold. He said he could not be spared; and he was out all yesterday till bedtime, or I should have told him grandmamma was not well.”

“You thought so!”

“Yes, she panted and breathed so oddly; but she would not let me say a word to him. She made me promise not, but being anxious about him helped to do it. Dr. Lucas said so.”

There was a strange hardness and yet a trembling in Janet’s voice; nor did she look as if she had shed tears, though her face was pale and her eyes black-ringed, and when old nurse, now very old indeed, tottered in sobbing, she flung herself to the other end of the room. It was more from nurse than from Janet that Carey learnt the particulars, such as they were, namely, that the girl had been half-dressed when she had taken alarm from her grandmother’s unresponsive stillness, and had rushed down to her father’s room. He had found that all had long been over. His friend, old Dr. Lucas, had come immediately, and had pronounced the cause to have been heart complaint.

Nurse said her master had been “very still,” and had merely given the needful orders and written a few letters before going to his patients, for the illness was at its height, and there were cases for which he was very anxious.

The good old woman, who had lived nearly all her life with her mistress, was broken-hearted; but she did not forget to persuade Caroline to take food, telling her she must be ready to cheer up the master when he should come in, and assuring her that the throbbing headache which disgusted her with all thoughts of eating, would be better for the effort. Perhaps it was, but it would not allow her to bring her thoughts into any connection, or to fix them on what she deemed befitting, and when she saw that the book over which Janet had been asleep in the twilight was “The Last of the Mohicans,” she was more scandalised than surprised.

It was past Janet’s bedtime, but though too proud to say so, she manifestly shrank from her first night of loneliness, and her mother, herself unwilling to be alone, came with her to her room, undressed her, and sat with her in the darkness, hoping for some break in the dull reticence, but disappointed, for Janet hid her head in the clothes, and slept, or seemed to sleep.

Perhaps Carey herself had been half dozing, when she heard the well-known sounds of arrival, and darted down stairs, meeting indeed the welcoming eye and smile; but “Ah, here she is!” was said so hoarsely and feebly, that she exclaimed “Oh Joe, you have knocked yourself up!”

“Yes,” said Dr. Lucas, whom she only then perceived. “He must go to bed directly, and then we will see to him. Not another word, Brownlow, till you are there, nor then if you are wise.”

He strove to disobey, but cough and choking forbade; and as he began to ascend the stairs, Caroline turned in dismay to the kind, fatherly old man, who had always been one of the chief intimates of the house, and was now retired from practice, except for very old friends.

He told her that her husband was suffering from a kind of sore throat that sometimes attacked those attending on this fever, though generally not unless there was some predisposition, or unless the system had been unduly lowered. Joe had indeed been over-worked in the absence of several of the regular practitioners and of all those who could give extra help; but this would probably have done little harm, but for a cold caught in a draughty room, and the sudden stroke with which the day had begun. Dr. Lucas had urged him to remain at home, and had undertaken his regular work for the day, but summonses from his patients had been irresistible; he had attended to everyone except himself, and finally, after hours spent over the critical case of the wife of a small tradesman, he had found himself so ill that he had gone to his friend for treatment, and Dr. Lucas had brought him home, intending to stay all night with him.

Since the wife had arrived, the good old man, knowing how much rather they would be alone, consented to sleep in another room, after having done all that was possible for the night, and cautioned against talking.

Indeed, Joe, heavy, stupefied, and struggling for breath, knew too well what it all meant not to give himself all possible chance by silent endurance, lying with his wife’s hand in his, or sometimes smoothing her cheek, but not speaking without necessity. Once he told her that her head was aching, and made her lie down on the bed, but he was too ill for this rest to last long, and the fits of struggling with suffocation prevented all respite save for a few minutes.

With the early light of the long summer morning Dr. Lucas looked in, and would have sent her to bed, but she begged off, and a sign from her husband seemed to settle the matter, for the old physician went away again, perhaps because his eyes were full of tears.

The first words Joe said when they were again alone was “My tablets.” She went in search of them to his dressing-room, and not finding them there, was about to run down to the consulting-room, when Janet came out already dressed, and fetched them for her, as well as a white slate, on which he was accustomed to write memorandums of engagements.

Her father thanked her by a sign, but there was possibility enough of infection to make him wave her back from kissing him, and she took refuge at the foot of the bed, on a sofa shut off by the curtains which had been drawn to exclude the light.

Joe meantime wrote on the slate the words, “Magnum bonum.”

“Magnum bonum?” read his wife, in amazement.

“Papers in bureau,” he wrote; “lock all in my desk. Mention to no one.”

“Am I to put them in your desk?” asked Caroline, bewildered as to his intentions, and finding it hard to read the writing, as he went on—

“No word to anyone!” scoring it under, “not till one of the boys is ready.”

“One of the boys!” in utter amazement.

“Not as a chance for himself,” he wrote, “but as a great trust.”

“I know,” she said, “it is a great trust to make a discovery which will save life. It is my pride to know you are doing it, my own dear Joe.”

“It seems I am not worthy to do it,” was traced by his fingers. “It is not developed enough to be listened to by anyone. Keep it for the fit one of the boys. Religion, morals, brains, balance.”

She read each word aloud, bending her head in assent; and, after a pause, he wrote “Not till his degree. He could not work it out sooner. These is peril to self and others in experimenting—temptation to rashness. It were better unknown than trifled with. Be an honest judge—promise. Say what I want.”

Spellbound, almost mesmerised by his will, Caroline pronounced—“I promise to keep the magnum bonum a secret till the boys are grown up, and then only to confide it to the one that seems fittest, when he has taken his degree, and is a good, religious, wise, able man, with brains and balance, fit to be trusted to work out and apply such an invention, and not make it serve his own advancement, but be a real good and blessing to all.”

He gave her one of his bright, sweet smiles, and, as she sealed her promise by a kiss, he took up the slate again and wrote, “My dear comfort, you have always understood. You are to be trusted. It must be done worthily or not at all.”

That was the burthen of everything; and his approval and affection gave a certain sustaining glow to the wife, who was besides so absorbed in attending to him, as not to look beyond the moment. He wrote presently, after a little more, “You know all my mind for the children. With God’s help you can fill both places to them. I should like you to live at Kenminster, under Robert’s wing.”

After that he only used the tablets for temporary needs, and to show what he wanted Dr. Lucas to undertake for his patients. The husband and wife had little more time for intimate communings, for the strangulation grew worse, more remedies were tried, and one of the greatest physicians of the day was called in, but only to make unavailing efforts.

Colonel Brownlow arrived in the middle of the day, and was thunderstruck at the new and terrible disaster. He was a large, tall man, with a good-humoured, weather-beaten face, and an unwieldy, gouty figure; and he stood, with his eyes brimming over with tears, looking at his brother, and at first unable to read the one word Joe traced for him—for writing had become a great effort—“Carey.”

“We will do our best for her, Ellen and I, my dear fellow. But you’ll soon be better. Horrid things, these quinsies; but they pass off.”

Poor Joe half-smiled at this confident opinion, but he merely wrung his brother’s hand, and only twice more took up the pencil—once to write the name of the clergyman he wished to see, and lastly to put down the initials of all his children: “Love to you all. Let God and your mother be first with you.—J. B.”

The daylight of the second morning had come in before that deadly suffocation had finished its work, and the strong man’s struggles were ended.

When Colonel Brownlow tried to raise his sister-in-law, he found her fainting, and, with Dr. Lucas’s help, carried her to another room, where she lay, utterly exhausted, in a kind of faint stupor, apparently unconscious of anything but violent headache, which made her moan from time to time, if anything stirred her. Dr. Lucas thought this the effect of exhaustion, for she had not slept, and hardly taken any food since her breakfast at Kyve three days ago; and finding poor old nurse too entirely broken down to be of any use, he put his own kind wife in charge of her, and was unwilling to admit anyone else—even Mrs. Robert Brownlow, who arrived in the course of the day. She was a tall, fine-looking person, with an oval face—soft, pleasant brown skin, mild brown eyes, and much tenderness of heart and manner, but not very well known to Caroline; for her periodical visits had been wholly devoted to shopping and sight-seeing. She was exceedingly shocked at the tidings that met her, and gathered Janet into her arms with many tears over the poor orphan girl! It was an effusiveness that overwhelmed Janet, who had a miserable, hard, dried-up feeling of wretchedness, and injury too; for the more other people cried, the less she could cry, and she heard them saying to one another that she was unfeeling.

Still Aunt Ellen’s presence was a sort of relief, for it made the house less empty and dreary, and she took upon her the cares that were greatly needed in the bereaved household, where old nurse had lost her head, and could do nothing, and the most effective maid was away with the children. So Janet wandered about after her aunt, with an adverse feeling at having her home meddled with, but answering questions and giving opinions, called or uncalled for. Her longing was for her brothers, and it was a great blow to find that her uncle had written to both Allen and Mr. Acton that they had better not come home at present. She thought it cruel and unjust both towards them and herself; and in her sickening sense of solitude and injury she had a vague expectation that they were all going to be left wholly orphans, like the children of fiction, dependent on their uncle and aunt, who would be unjust, and prefer their own children; and she had a prevision of the battles she was to fight, and the defensive influence she was to exert.

That brought to her mind the white slate on which her father had been writing, and she hurried to secure it, though she hardly knew where to go or to look; but straying into her father’s dressing-room, she found both it and the tablets among a heap of other small matters that had been, cleared away when the other chamber had been arranged into the solemnity of the death-room. Hastily securing them, she carried them to her own desk in the deserted school-room, feeling as if they were her charge, and thus having no scruple in reading them.

She had heard what passed aloud; and, as the eldest girl, had been so constantly among the seniors, and so often supposed to be intent on her own occupations when they were conversing, that she had already the knowledge that magnum bonum, was the pet home term for some great discovery in medical, science that her father had been pursuing, with many disappointments and much incredulity from the few friends to whom it had been mentioned, but with absolute confidence on his own part. What it was she did, not know, but she had fully taken in the injunction of secrecy and the charge to hand on the task to one of her brothers; only, while her father had spoken of it as a grave trust, she viewed it as an inheritance of glory; and felt a strange longing and repining that it could not be given to her to win and wear the crown of success.

Janet, did not, however, keep the treasure long, for that very evening Mrs. Lucas sought her out to tell her that her mother had been saying something, about a slate, and Dr. Lucas thought it was one on which her father had been writing. If she could find it, they hoped her mother would rest better.

Janet produced it, and, being evidently most unwilling to let it go out of her hands, was allowed to carry it in, and to tell her mother that she had it. There was no need for injunctions to do so softly and cautiously, for she was frightened by her mother’s dull, half-closed eye, and pale, leaden look; but there was a little air of relief as she faltered, “Here’s the slate, dear mother:” and the answer, so faint that she could hardly hear it, was, “Lock it up, my dear, till I can look.”

Mrs. Lucas told Janet she might kiss her, and then sent the girl away. There was need of anxious watch lest fever should set in, and therefore all that was exciting was kept at a distance as the poor young widow verged towards recovery.

Once, when she heard voices on the stairs, she started nervously, and asked Mrs. Lucas, “Is Ellen there?”

“Yes, my dear; she shall not come to you unless you wish it,” seeing her alarm; and she laid her head down again.

The double funeral was accomplished while she was still too ill to hear anything about it, though Mrs. Lucas had no doubt that she knew; and when he came home, Colonel Brownlow called for Janet, and asked her whether she could find her grandmother’s keys and her father’s for him.

“Mother would not like anyone to rummage their things,” said Janet, like a watch-dog.

“My dear,” said her uncle, in a surprised but kind tone, as one who respected yet resented her feeling; “you may trust me not to rummage, as you call it, unnecessarily; but I know that I am executor, if you understand what that means, my dear.”

“Of course,” said Janet, affronted as she always was by being treated as a child.

“To both wills,” continued her uncle; “and it will save your mother much trouble and distress if I can take steps towards acting on them at once; and if you cannot tell where the keys are, I shall have to look for them.”

“Janet ought to obey at once,” said her aunt, not adding to the serenity of Janet’s mind; but she turned on her heel, ungraciously saying, “I’ll get them;” and presently returned with her grandmother’s key-box, full of the housekeeping keys, and a little key, which she gave to her uncle with great dignity, adding, “The key of her desk is the Bramah one; I’ll see for the others.”

“A strange girl, that!” said her uncle, as she marched out of the room.

“I am glad our Jessie has not her temper!” responded his wife; and then they both repaired to old Mrs. Brownlow’s special apartment, the back drawing-room, while Janet quietly dropped downstairs with the key she had taken from her father’s table on her way to the consulting-room. She intended to prevent any search, by herself producing the will from among his papers, for she was in an agony lest her uncle should discover the clue to the magnum bonum, of which she regarded herself the guardian.

Till she had actually unlocked the sloping lid of the old-fashioned bureau, it did not occur to her that she did not know either what the will was like, nor yet the magnum bonum, which was scarcely likely to be so ticketed. She only saw piles of letters and papers, marked, some with people’s names, some with a Greek or Latin word, or one of the curious old Arabic signs, for which her father had always a turn, having, as his mother used to tell him, something of the alchemist in his composition. One of these parcels, fastened with elastic rings, must be magnum bonum, and Janet, though without much chance of distinguishing it, was reading the labels with a strange, sad fascination, when, long before she had expected him, her uncle stood before her, with greatly astonished and displeased looks, and the word “Janet.”

She coloured scarlet, but answered boldly, “There was something that I know father did not want anyone but mother to see.”

“Of course there is much,” said her uncle, gravely—“much that I am fitter to judge, of than any little girl.”

Words cannot express the offence thus given to Janet. Something swelled in her throat as if to suffocate her, but there could be no reply, and to burst out crying would only make him think her younger still; so as he turned to his mournful task, she ensconced herself in a high-backed chair, and watched him from under her dark brows.

She might comfort herself by the perception that he was less likely than even herself to recognise the magnum bonum. He would scarcely have thought it honourable to cast a glance upon the medical papers, and pushing them aside from where she had pulled them forward, searched till he had found a long cartridge-paper envelope, which he laid on the table behind him while he shut up the bureau, and Janet, by cautiously craning up her neck, managed to read that on it was written “Will of Joseph Brownlow, Executors: Mrs. Caroline Otway Brownlow, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Brownlow.”

Her uncle then put both that and the keys in his pocket, either not seeing her, or not choosing to notice her.