The Weeping Ash Read Online Free Page B

setting up his expectations so high that it was inevitable he should be disappointed; this was possibly the only way in which he found any gratification.
    Son of an ineffectual younger son, in a family of decayed aristocracy, he had discovered in his teens that, while his cousins were all due to inherit money or places, the most that he could expect was to be assisted into a naval or military career by wealthier relatives, whether or not such a prospect was congenial to his taste. This was indeed done, a great-uncle bought him a commission in the navy, and Thomas might, with luck or ability, have prospered and risen in his profession; but luck was lacking; in his very second engagement—and that a wholly unimportant one, with a Spanish privateer—he was so unfortunate as to have the finger and thumb of his right hand shot away, thus rendering him ineligible for further active service. Other sailors might, perhaps, have surmounted such a disability; but Thomas Paget was not of this caliber. It is true also that he was not a favorite with his companions or superiors, being of a jealous, exacting, contentious nature, prone to argue the rights of every matter, however trifling, that touched on his own prestige or position; his messmates were thoroughly glad to see the last of him.
    Having been on active service for so short a period, he could not hope for a pension, and the sole opening left him, after such an abbreviated naval career, was to become a “yellow admiral” or regulating officer, that is, a shore official of the press gang, which, by government warrant, seized men, whatever their calling, and forcibly enrolled them in the King’s service at sea. A very few professions were exempt: fishermen, harvesters—also males under eighteen or over fifty-five; but these exemptions were often conveniently ignored. Every town in the country had its own press gang, varying in size from fifteen to thirty men, and each gang was commanded by an officer with naval rank, known as the regulating captain. Press officers were usually thwarted men, men whose careers, for one reason or another, had gone wrong.
    Thomas Paget, in due course, had been lucky enough to marry a girl whose plainness had been offset by the fact that she sincerely loved him and had some money of her own, for she was the daughter of a wealthy undertaker. But Thomas had mismanaged her money, and his wife had disappointed him bitterly, first by giving birth to nothing but female children, and subsequently by a series of miscarriages and stillbirths. Perhaps simply because he was denied a son, Thomas became obsessed by longing for one; a son, a boy, who might be able to achieve everything that his father had not. And then—even more aggravatingly—his wife, after the fifth or sixth faulty birth, had, not died, but gone melancholy mad, so that she could not be divorced, or even put away without shocking expense, for she was not raving; she had to be kept locked in a room at the top of the house. At first, even then, her husband had not wholly given up hope of a son; even after her incarceration there had been a couple more miscarriages. After the second of these, Thomas did give up hope; unfortunately, even then, the first Mrs. Paget survived for another ten years, mumbling and crying and throwing her food about, while downstairs her husband silently raged and the acid of frustration ate into the fabric of his nature.
    In the end Mrs. Paget mercifully died, of an obstruction of the bowel; Thomas lost no moment, as soon as the obsequies were over, in negotiating with his school friend, Theophilus Herriard, for the youngest and healthiest of his eight daughters; the rector must be delighted to get one of them satisfactorily off his hands before his own demise—for he was a failing man.
    And now at last Thomas’s fortunes seemed to have taken a dramatic turn for the better, with his cousin Juliana’s astonishing offer of house and