BRAM SPEAKS HIS MIND.
Meg Tyzack had hardly left the farmyard before Bram knew what she had
done, and realized the full extent of the danger Claire had escaped.
The bottle Meg had carried, and which she had thrown at the head of
Theodore Biron, had contained vitriol. Luckily for Mr. Biron, he had
moved aside just in time to escape having the bottle broken on his
face, but part of the contents had fallen on his head, on the side of
his face, and on his left hand before the bottle itself was dashed into
two pieces as it fell on the ground.
Bram wiped Theodore’s face and hands as quickly as he could, but the
effeminate man had so entirely lost his self-control that he could not
keep still; and by his own restlessness he hindered the full effect of
Bram’s good offices.
The young man saw that his best chance with the hysterical creature was
to get him into the house as quickly as he could. But Theodore objected
to this. He wanted Bram to go in pursuit of the woman, to bring her
back, to have her taken up. And as his cries had by this time caused
a little crowd to assemble from the cottages round about, he began to
harangue them on the subject of his wrongs, and to try to stir them up
to resent the outrage to which he had been subjected.
It is needless to say that his efforts were ineffectual. Mr. Biron
had succeeded in establishing a thoroughly bad reputation among his
neighbors, who knew all about his selfish treatment of his daughter.
He found not one sympathizer, and at last he was fain to allow himself
to be led indoors by Bram, who was very urgent in his persuasions,
being indeed afraid that Theodore’s curses upon the bystanders for
their supineness would bring upon him some further chastisement. He
prevailed upon a lad in the crowd to go for a doctor, assuring him that
it was the pain from which the gentleman was suffering that made him so
irritable.
Once inside the house, Bram found that his difficulties with his
unsympathetic patient had only just begun. Mr. Biron was not used to
pain, and had no idea of suffering in silence. He raved and he moaned,
he cursed and he swore, and Bram was amazed and disgusted to find that
this little, well-preserved, middle-aged gentleman was quite as much
concerned by the injury which he should suffer in appearance as by the
pain he had to bear.
“Do you think, Elshaw, that the marks will ever go away? Oh, good
heavens, I know they won’t,” he cried, as with his uninjured eye he
surveyed himself in the glass over the dining-room sideboard by the
light of a couple of candles. “Oh, oh, the wretch! The hag! I’ll get
her six months for this!”
And the little man, trembling with rage, shook his fist and gnashed his
teeth, presenting in his anger and disfigurement a hideous spectacle.
The left side of his face was already one long patch of inflammation.
His left eye was shut up; the hair on that side of his head had already
begun to come away in tufts from the burnt skin.
Bram was disgusted. Mr. Biron’s grief over the loss of his daughter,
keen as it had been, could not be compared to that which he felt now
at the loss of his remaining good looks. There was a note of absolute
sincerity in his every lament which had been conspicuously lacking in
his grief of the morning. The young man could scarcely listen to him
with patience. He tried, however, out of humanity, to remain silent,
since he could give no comfort. But silence would not do for his
garrulous companion, who insisted on having an answer.
“Do you think, Elshaw, that I shall be disfigured for life?” he asked
with tremulous anxiety.
“I’m afraid so,” answered Bram rather gruffly. “But I don’t think I’d
worry about that when you have worse things than that to trouble you.”
Unluckily, Mr. Biron was so much absorbed in the loss of his own beauty
that he fell into the mistake of being absolutely sincere for once.
“Worse troubles than that! Worse than to go about like a scarecrow,
a repulsive object, all the years of one’s life! What can be worse?”
groaned he.
Bram, who was standing solemnly erect, answered at once, in a deep
voice, out of the fulness of his heart--
“Well, Mr. Biron, if you don’t know of anything worse, I suppose there
is nothing worse--for you!”
But Mr. Biron was impervious to sneers. He walked up and down the
room in feverish anxiety until the arrival of the doctor, whom he
interrogated at once with as much solicitude as if he had been a young
beauty on the eve of her first ball.
The doctor, a stolid, hard-working country practitioner, with a dull
red face and dull black eyes, showed Theodore much less mercy than
Bram had done. He knew his patient well, having been called in to him
on several occasions when that gentleman’s excesses had brought on the
attacks of dyspepsia to which he was subject; and the more he saw of
him the less he liked him. Theodore’s anxiety about his appearance he
treated with cruel bluntness.
“No, you’ll never be the same man again to look at, Mr. Biron,” he said
quite cheerfully. “And you may be thankful if we can save you the sight
of the left eye.”
“You think the scar will never go away? Nor the hair grow again?” asked
Theodore piteously.
“The scar won’t go away certainly. But that’s not much to trouble about
at your time of life, I should think,” returned the doctor bluntly.
“There’s a greater danger than that to concern ourselves with. Unless
you are very careful, you will have erysipelas. You must get that
little daughter of yours to nurse you very carefully. Where is she?”
Theodore burst out fretfully with a new grievance--
“My daughter! She’s not here to nurse me. I’ve no one to nurse me now.
She’s gone away, gone away and left me all by myself!”
The doctor stared at him with the unpleasant fixity of eyes which have
to look hard before they see much.
“You told her to go, I suppose?” said he at last, abruptly.
Taken by surprise, Theodore, to the horror of Bram, who was standing in
the background, confessed--
“Well, I told her she could go if she liked; but I never meant her to
take me at my word.”
Bram was thunderstruck. Such a simple solution of the mystery of the
disappearance of the dutiful daughter had never entered his mind. In a
fit of passion, perhaps of partial intoxication, Theodore had bade his
daughter get out of the house. And the long-suffering girl had taken
him at his word.
The doctor nodded.
“I thought so,” said he. “I thought there was no end to what the child
would put up with at your hands. So you have driven her away? Well,
then you’ll have to suffer for it, I’m afraid. I don’t know of anybody
else who would come to nurse you.”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Bram in a hollow voice from the background.
It needed an effort on his part to make this offer. He felt that he
loathed the little wretch who had himself driven his daughter into the
arms of her untrustworthy lover. Only the thought that Claire would
wish him to do so enabled him to undertake the distasteful task of
ministering to such a patient. Theodore thanked him in a half-hearted
sort of way, feeling that there was something not altogether grateful
to himself in the spirit in which this offer was made. The doctor was
far more cordial.
He told Bram he was doing a fine thing.
“But then,” he added in his rough way, “fine things are what one
expects of you, Mr. Elshaw.”
And then he went out, leaving Theodore in much perplexity as to what
the fellow could see in Elshaw to make such a fuss about.
Bram spent the night with him, doing his best to soothe and to comfort
the unfortunate man, whose sufferings, both of mind and body, grew more
acute as the hours wore on. His own worry about himself was the chief
cause of this. Long before morning he had lost sight of the shame of
his daughter’s flight, and looked upon it solely as a wicked freak
which had resulted in his own most cruel misfortune.
“Why, surely, man,” broke out Bram at last, losing patience at his
long tirades of woe and indignation, “it’s better that you should be
disfigured than her, at any rate.”
“No, it isn’t,” retorted Theodore sharply. “Claire never cared half as
much about her appearance as I did about mine. And, besides,” he went
on, with a sudden feeling that he had got hold of a strong argument,
“if she had been disfigured, she would have had no temptation to do
wrong!”
Bram jumped up, clenching his fist. He could bear no more. With a few
jerked-out words to the effect that he would send Joan to get his
breakfast, he rushed out of the house.
Poor Claire! Poor little Claire! Was this the creature she had wronged
in going away? This shallow, selfish wretch who had turned her out, and
who regretted the ministrations of her gentle hands far more than he
did the shame her desperate act had drawn down upon her!
Bram went down to the works that morning a different man from what he
had been the day before. He was waking from the dull lethargy of grief
into which the first discovery of Claire’s flight had thrown him. A
smouldering anger against the Cornthwaites, father and son, was taking
the place of sullen misery in his breast. He had gathered from Theodore
that the elder Mr. Cornthwaite had taken his remonstrances not only
coolly, but with something like relief, as if he felt glad of an excuse
for getting rid of the relations whose vicinity had been a continual
annoyance.
But Bram did not mean to be put off. Josiah, who had not been at the
office at all on the previous day, should see him, and answer his
questions. And Bram, maturing a grave resolution, strode down into the
town with a steady look in his eyes.
Mr. Cornthwaite saw him as soon as he himself arrived, and, evidently
with the intention of taking the bull by the horns, spoke to him at
once.
“Ah, Elshaw, good-morning. Come in here a moment, please. I want to
speak to you.”
Bram followed in silence, and stood within the room with his back to
the door, with a stern expression on his pale face.
Mr. Cornthwaite broached the unpleasant subject at once.
“Nice business this, eh? Nice thing Chris has done for himself now!
Brought a hornet’s nest about his ears and mine too! Old Hibbs and his
wife have been down to my house blackguarding me; Minnie herself is
fit for a lunatic asylum, and, to complete the business, the girl’s
rascally father has been to my house, trying to levy blackmail. But
I’ve made up my mind to make short work of the thing! I start for
London to-night; find out Master Chris (luckily he gave his address
to no one but me, or he’d have had his wife’s family about his ears
already), and bring the young man back to his wife’s feet--bring him by
the scruff of the neck if necessary!”
“And--Claire--Miss Biron?” said Bram hoarsely.
“Oh, she must shift for herself. She knew what she was doing, running
off with a married man. I’ve no pity for her; not the least. I wash my
hands of the pair of them, father and daughter, now. He must just pack
up his traps and be off after her. What becomes of her is his affair,
not ours!”
“Mr. Christian can’t get rid of the responsibility like that, sir,”
said Bram, with a note of sombre warning in his voice.
“I take upon myself the responsibility for him,” retorted Mr.
Cornthwaite coldly. “My son is dependent upon me, and he can do nothing
without my approval. I am certainly going to give him no help towards
the maintenance of a baggage like that. You know what my opinion of her
always has been. Circumstances have confirmed it most amply. A young
man is not much to blame if he gets caught, entangled, by a girl as
artful and as designing as she is.”
“I don’t think you will find yourself and Mr. Christian in agreement
upon that point, sir,” said Bram steadily.
“Well, whether he agrees or not, he’ll come back with me to-morrow,”
replied Mr. Cornthwaite hotly.
“Then, Mr. Cornthwaite, you’ll please take my notice now, and I’ll
be out of this to-day. For,” Bram went on, with a rising spot of deep
color in his cheek, and a bright light in his eye, “I couldn’t trust
myself face to face with such a d----d scoundrel as Mr. Christian is if
he leaves the girl he loves, the girl he’s betrayed, and comes sneaking
back at your heels like a cur, when he ought to stand up for the woman
who loves him!”
“Upon my word, yours is very singular morality for a young man who goes
in for such correctness of conduct as you do. Where does the wife come
in, the poor, injured wife, in your new-fangled scheme of right and
wrong? Is she to be left out in the cold altogether?”
“Where else can she be left, poor thing?” cried Bram with deep feeling.
“Do you think if you brought Mr. Christian back ‘by the scruff of the
neck,’ as you say, that you’d ever be able to patch matters up between
’em so as to make ’em live anything but a cat-and-dog’s-life? No,
Mr. Cornthwaite, you couldn’t. The wife won’t come to so much hurt;
she wouldn’t have come to none if you hadn’t forced on this cursed
marriage. Let her get free, and make him free; and let Mr. Christian
put the wrong right as far as he can by marrying the girl he wants, the
girl who knows how to make him happy!”
Mr. Cornthwaite’s black eyes blazed. He hated even a semblance of
contradiction; and Bram’s determined and dogged attitude irritated him
beyond measure. He rose from his arm-chair, and clasping his hands
behind his back with a loud snap, he assumed towards the young man an
air of bland contempt which he had never used to him before.
“Your notions are charming in the abstract, Elshaw. I have no doubt,
too, that there are some sections of society where your ideas might be
carried out without much harm to anybody. But not in that in which we
move. If my son were to commit such an unheard-of folly as you suggest
I would let him shift for himself for the rest of his days. And perhaps
you know enough of Christian to tell whether he would find life with
any young woman agreeable under those conditions.”
Bram remained silent. There was a pause, rather a long one. Then Mr.
Cornthwaite spoke again----
“Of course, you are sensible enough to understand that this is my
business, and my son’s; that it is a family matter, a difficulty
in which I have to act for the best. And I hope,” he went on in a
different tone, “for your own sake, more than for mine, that you will
not take any step so rash as leaving this office would be. Without
notice, too!”
“As to that, sir, you had better let me go--and without notice,” said
Bram with a sullen note in his voice which made Mr. Cornthwaite look
at him with some anxiety, “if it’s true that you’re going to make Mr.
Christian leave Miss Claire in the lurch. For I tell you, sir,” and
again he looked up, with a steely flash in his gray eyes and a look of
stubborn ferocity about his long upper lip and straight mouth, “if I
was to come face to face wi’ him after he’d done that thing I couldn’t
keep my fists off him; Ah couldn’t, sir. That’s what comes of my being
born in a different section of society, sir, I suppose. And so, as
Ah’ve loved Mr. Christian, and as Ah’ve had much to thank you and him
for, sir, you’d best let me go back--to my own section of society,
where a man has to stand by his own deeds, like a man!”
Mr. Cornthwaite’s attitude, his tone, changed insensibly as he looked
and listened to the man who told him his views so honestly, and stood
by them so firmly. He saw that Bram was in earnest, and he began to
walk up and down the room, thinking, planning, considering. He did
not want to lose this clever young man; he could not afford to do so.
Bram had something like a genius for the details of business, and was
besides as honest as the day; not a too common combination.
The young man waited, but at last, as Mr. Cornthwaite made no sign of
addressing him, he turned to touch the handle of the door. Then Mr.
Cornthwaite suddenly stopped in his walk, and made a sign to him to
stay.
“Well, Elshaw,” said he in a more genial tone, “will you, if you must
go, promise me one thing? Will you see Mr. Christian in my presence
first, and hear what he has to say for himself?”
Bram hesitated.
“I don’t want to hear anything,” said he sullenly. “I’d rather go, sir.”
“No doubt you would, but you wouldn’t like to treat us in any way
unfairly, would you, Bram? You acknowledge that we’ve not treated you
badly, you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, then, you can hardly refuse to hear what the culprit has to say
in his own defence. If, after hearing him, you are not satisfied, you
can have the satisfaction of telling him what you think of him in good
round terms before you go. Now, is that a bargain? You stay here until
I come back from town--at least--with or without (for, of course, you
may be right, and he may not come) my son?”
Bram hesitated; but he could not well refuse.
“All right, sir. I’ll stay till you come back,” he answered sullenly.
And, without another word or another look, he accepted his employer’s
satisfied motion of assent as a dismissal, and left the room.