CHAPTER III.—REGINALD CLINT.

Waikato Times, Volume IV, Issue 195, 9 August 1873, Page 3

CHAPTER 111. —REGINALD CLINT.

The Firs — aa Mr Cl.nt's s.nall estate \>n> called, because one of its few beauties consisted of a thick belt of Scotch iirtrees, which effectually screened the house and grounds from £he straight, monotonous high-road — was situated in a part of Hampshire which is not picturesque — a part in which there are few remnants ot the old village-houses, with their quaint small-paned windows, and their red-tiled lichen-grown roofs; where pert, dull, pretentious, rubbishy little ' villas' have sprung up along tho iron road-way ; w here the soil is naturally sticky, and all the new paths uro artificially blackened ; where the roads are mended with rubble, nnd the ponds are green and ill-smelling A dull, flat, coarse part of the county ; and yet, even there, the summer was beautiful ; and the Firs, a house w Inch by no means redeemed the character of the neighbourhood, but was in harmony with it, being both dull and ujly, had lost soire of its forbidding look, in tlie June sunshine, and surrounded by the thickly-leaved, bright green trees These nere 01113 middling specimens, lor Hampshire ; bill trees cannot help bung beautiful, and no place 111 which they grow can be quite usjly The house — whioh ha,d been ingeniously placed and constructed, so that all the best rooms which were not exposed to the northern were exposed to the eastorn aspect — was tasteless m design, and hideous in colour, a rambling, straggling, comfortless house, with a large neglected garden in the rear ; a flat scrubby lawn, on winch cattle grazed up to within a few feet of the windows; nnd a dreary pomi, the edges tramplod by the animals, lying blank and black on the borders of the belt of firs, "^ithin that plantation, however, there were many glimpses of beauty to be had on that si\th day of June, which was to witness Miriam Clint's reluctant return. A path, none the less picturesque because it was ill-kept, wound through tho lines of brown and flame colored stems, all along the boundary of Mr Clint's (state ; a path boi derod with rank tangled gi ass, and wild-flowers, with tender little twigs untimely snapped, and drifted brown handfuls of last year's leaves, left there to cumber the ground, and lending their quota to the general effect of color. Along this path, the figure of a man was moving, some little time before the hour at which Miriam and her maid irere 'due' at the railway station nearest to the Firs. The was that of Mr Clint, a large, tall man, somewhat upwards of fifty years old, who looked as if life and he had not been on good terms. His face, remarkably handsome in feature and form, wore an expression of morose and habitual ill-temper and discontent; and therein accurately interpreted his customary moral condition. Reginald Clint was one of those persons who make their acquaintances (they never ha\e fi lend?) impatiently question the designs of Providence in their creation ; they are so intolerable to other people, and so apparently unpleasant and unprofitable to themselves What are they for 9 is a question which irresistibly presents itself to the observer in such cases. Hwc was a'mnn who had never done a fjood, unselfish, large-hearted action, who had never made any human life happier, but on the contrary, had contrived to render one supremely miserable, and to mar two others to an extent which the future was destined to demonstrate, a mnn who had no redeeming qualities, not pven thoMj of Ins defects ; and for whose unendurable temper and consummate unainiability circumstances weie in nowise to blame. He had plenty of money, derived from sure aources, and entirely within his own control; a fair position in society, which, however, his odious disposition had marred, by causing ever) body who could so to withdraw from association with him ; and he had been protected from heartsorrows by that arrangement of nature which left him without a heart to feel them. He was an ignorant, narrow, selfish, rude, discontented tyrant, who loved no one, but contrived to dislike a good many people with a bitterness which reacted to his <?wn discomfiture, lor, like all men of his disposition, he could not endure that those he designed to make his victims should be indifferent to him, or should escape nun. No lnniß creature loied him, no woman, child, nor dog — indeed, all animals sagaciously avoided him ; and it is doubtful whether hissplenatic nature did not hinder his self-lo\e fi 0111 giving him any adequate satisfaction. There are self complacent people who are self-sufficing, but there must go to the comoosition of them a spice of bonhomie — which has no relation to benevolence — and in tins Reginald Clint was utterly deficient From the neighbourhood, he kept himself obstinately aloof — a benefit which it was not slow to appreiiate. He fulfilled none of the ordinary duties of a country gentleman, and he was cordially detested by all tho people in his employment ; a^very nomad population indeed, for no one would continue to work at the Firs who had any chance of occupation elsewhere; and the result was a badly managed half-productive estate, and a wretched, gloomy, iliregulated house, ehunned by all the families within visiting distance, and which had sinister repute in the adjacent villages a* ' unlucky.' Ueginald Clint was perfectly aware of his unpopularity, and, 111 his ill-conditioned way, rather liked it. He had no faculty for the enjoyment of .»jciel\, and no intellect for the comprehension of its inteieih- He was not an absolutely uninstrueted man ; he had gone through the routine of school and college j but tln> information he had received 111 the process might as well have bien packed into a trunk, and put away in a garret, for all the good it had done him. He knew nothing of politics, science, art, or literature ; his fellows had no interest for him ; his mind neither investigated the past, nor speculated upon the future. Lie was a mere handsome animal ; endowed, unfortunately, with the power of making human beings unhappy—of influencing tjieir destiny ; a man without either mind or conscience fitted for the task, dowered with authority over two fine, ardent, young natures, full of all the impulses and capacities of youth, and on whom the great problems of life were just beginning to press. If his son and daughter did not altogether hate him — and they did not— it certainly was not Reginald Clint's fault. That their mother had not hated him, was one of those mysterious contradictions in human experience which will no doubt continue to baffle human intelligence, as they have hitherto bafiled it Reginald Clint's wife had been dead so many years before the epoch at which the threads of her children's livob are taken up into this story, that there is hardly any room for her in it, but her death mint needs count for one influence in the destiny of Walter and Miriam ; that<leath, which, however it may have affected her children's future, nobody could have "been so hard-hearted as to grudge her. To our shallow perception, there are few respects in which Providence nets so unaccountably and so unsatisfactorily as in that of tho selection of subjects for the interposition of death. In how mnny instaneoa of unsuitable and unhappy marriages do the sufferers live to an old age, which would be enviable under other circumstances; how frequently, when one of them is ' taken,' it ii tho wrong one l In the case of Mr and Mrs Clint, pvery sort of contra diction existed. Amy Desart was a bright, clever, hrelj girl when she made the terrible mistake of falling in love with Reginald Clint, and incurred the horrible misfortune of mariymg him. Her brightness and liveliness were very evanescent ; they speedily yielded to his odious temper, and his truly infernal and ingenious tyranny ; but her love with that provoking obstinate irrationality distinctive of the passion in women, lasted much longer. Probably, if it, hM not, she might have lived ; so that, after all, it'was better for her that sho wan an obstinate fool on this point, persisting in regarding a man who bullied her and worried her, ordered her about as if she had been a slave, iwore at her as if she had been a hound, degraded her before her servants by his coarse contempt, who never was commonly ,civil, never was indeed anything but brutal to her— as an object of pity for his ' unfortunate' temper, and in fostering his inclination to make her miserable, by letting him see how thoroughly he possessed tho power to do so. Most people who knew Mr and Mrs Clint in the season during which j»he survived her marriage, held tho opinion that (ho decease of Mr Clint would be a decided advantage to his wife and children, and no loss to the world at large. Death did interpose at length, but he took the wrong person. It was that ever haunting question, ' What is to become of the children 9 ' which got the better of Amy Clint at last. She was the sort of woman to cherish hope,' to cling to delusions about herself, her own future, the possibilities of her own fate, but she entertained none where her children were concerned. She was powerless enough, Heaven knew, in every respect ; in this she was absolutely helpless. She poul'd save herself, to a certain extent, from him, or she cqi>ld do without being saved ; but the children were rictim» on whose behalf she could do nothing. When Amy Clint, compelled to do so by her common-sense, too it into her heart that there was no hope for her children, that they must inevitably be tho vir-tuns of their father's brutal temper, to their infinite misci v and moral detriment, she speedily lost the power of endurance which had hitherto kept her up, and in a curiously short space of time, sho died — of sheer fear for her children, of sheer despair.

I'unishmknt r.v Kind.— Early in the fifteenth century, a band of Highland robbers, headed bj M'Donald of Rosse, ha\ m^ tal^ea two cows from a poor woman, ahe vowed that she would wear no boots till she had complained to the king. 'Che savages, in ridicule of her oath, nailed horse-shoes to the soles of her feet. When hqr wounds were healed, she proceeded to the royal presence, tqld her story, and showed her tears. The just monarch instantly despatched an armed force to secure M' Donald who was brouc/ht to Perth, alon^' with twelve of his nssou.itt-s The k^i^i m a. I ill «i them to be shod in the same manner as they had done the poor woman j and after they had been for three days exhibited through the streets of the town as a public SlKJctaclr, M' Donald, was beheaded, and his companions )IUDg.