NEAR THE CLOSE
I wonder whether anyone will read these pages who
has never known anything of the bitterness of a family
quarrel? If so, I shall have a reader very fortunate,
or else very cold-blooded. It would be wrong to
say that love produces quarrels; but love does produce
those intimate relations of which quarrelling is too
often one of the consequences—one of the
consequences which frequently seem to be so natural,
and sometimes seem to be unavoidable. One brother
rebukes the other—and what brothers ever
lived together between whom there is no such rebuking?—then
some warm word is misunderstood and hotter words follow
and there is a quarrel. The husband tyrannizes,
knowing that it is his duty to direct, and the wife
disobeys, or only partially obeys, thinking that a
little independence will become her—and
so there is a quarrel. The father, anxious only
for his son’s good, looks into that son’s
future with other eyes than those of his son himself—and
so there is a quarrel. They come very easily
these quarrels, but the quittance from them is sometimes
terribly difficult. Much of thought is necessary
before the angry man can remember that he too in part
may have been wrong; and any attempt at such thinking
is almost beyond the power of him who is carefully
nursing his wrath, let it cool! But the nursing
of such quarrelling kills all happiness. The
very man who is nursing his wrath lest it cool—his
wrath against one whom he loves perhaps the best of
all whom it has been given to him to love—is
himself wretched as long as it lasts. His anger
poisons every pleasure of his life. He is sullen
at his meals, and cannot understand his book as he
turns the pages. His work, let it be what it
may, is ill done. He is full of his quarrel—nursing
it. He is telling himself how much he has loved
that wicked one, and that now that wicked one is repaying
him simply with wickedness! And yet the wicked
one is at that very moment dearer to him than ever.
If that wicked one would only be forgiven how sweet
would be the world again! And yet he nurses his
wrath.
So it was in these days with Archdeacon Grantly.
He was very angry with his son. It is hardly
too much to say that in every moment of his life,
whether waking or sleeping, he was thinking of the
injury his son was doing him. He had almost come
to forget the fact that his anger had been first roused
by the feeling that his son was about to do himself
an injury—to cut his own throat. Various
other considerations had now added themselves to that,
and filled not only his mind but his daily conversation
with his wife. How terrible would be the disgrace
to Lord Hartletop, how incurable the injury to Griselda,
the marchioness, should the brother-in-law of the
one, and the brother of the other, marry the daughter
of a convicted thief! Of himself he would say
nothing. So he declared constantly, though of
