The following day was spent by Maitland in travel, and in pushing such
inquiries as suggested themselves to a mind not fertile in expedients.
He was not wholly unacquainted with novels of adventure, and he based
his conduct, as much as possible, on what he could remember in these
“authorities.” For example, he first went in search of the man who had
driven the cab which brought the mysterious Mr. Lithgow to flutter the
Dovecot. So far, there was no difficulty. One of the cabdrivers who
plied at the station perfectly remembered the gentleman in furs whom he
had driven to the school After waiting at the school till the young lady
was ready, he had conveyed them back again to the station, and they took
the up-train. That was all _he_ knew. The gentleman, if his opinion were
asked, was “a scaly varmint.” On inquiry, Maitland found that this wide
moral generalization was based on the limited _pour-boire_ which Mr.
Lithgow had presented to his charioteer. Had the gentleman any luggage?
Yes, he had a portmanteau, which he left in the cloak-room, and took
away with him on his return to town--not in the van, in the railway
carriage. “What could he want with all that luggage?” Maitland wondered.
The next thing was, of course, to find the guard of the train which
conveyed Margaret and her mysterious friend to Taunton. This official
had seen the gentleman and the young lady get out at Taunton. They went
on to London.
The unfortunate guardian of Margaret Shields was now obliged to start
for Taunton, and thence pursue his way, and his inquiries, as far as
Paddington. The position was extremely irksome to Maitland. Although, in
novels, gentlemen often assume the _rôle_ of the detective with apparent
relish, Maitland was not cast by Nature for the part. He was too
scrupulous and too shy. He detested asking guards, and porters, and
station-masters, and people in refreshment-rooms if they remembered
having seen, yesterday, a gentleman in a fur coat travelling with a
young lady, of whom he felt that he had to offer only a too suggestive
description. The philanthropist could not but see that everyone properly
constructed, in imagination, a satisfactory little myth to account for
all the circumstances--a myth in which Maitland played the unpopular
part of the Avenging Brother or Injured Husband.
What other path, indeed, was open to conjecture? A gentleman in a fur
coat, and a young lady of prepossessing appearance, are travelling alone
together, one day, in a carriage marked “Engaged.” Next day, another
gentleman (not prepossessing, and very nervous) appears on the same
route, asking anxious questions about the wayfarer in the notable coat
(bearskin, it seemed to have been) and about the interesting young lady.
Clearly, the pair were the fond fugitives of Love; while the pursuer
represented the less engaging interests of Property, of Law, and of the
Family. All the romance and all the popular interest were manifestly
on the other side, not on Maitland’s side. Even his tips were received
without enthusiasm.
Maitland felt these disadvantages keenly; and yet he had neither the
time nor the power to explain matters. Even if he had told everyone he
met that he was really the young lady’s guardian, and that the gentleman
in the fur coat was (he had every reason to believe) a forger and a
miscreant, he would not have been believed. His opinion would, not
unjustly, have been looked on as distorted by what Mr. Herbert Spencer
calls “the personal bias.” He had therefore to put up with general
distrust and brief discourteous replies.
There are many young ladies in the refreshment-bar at Swindon. There
they gather, numerous and fair as the sea-nymphs--Doto, Proto, Doris,
and Panope, and beautiful Galatea. Of them Maitland sought to be
instructed. But the young ladies were arch and uncommunicative,
pretending that their attention was engaged in their hospitable duties.
Soup it was their business to minister to travellers, not private
information. They _had_ seen the gentleman and lady. Very attentive to
her he seemed. Yes, they were on the best terms: “very sweet on each
other,” one young lady averred, and then secured her retreat and
concealed her blushes by ministering to the wants of a hungry and
hurried public. All this was horribly disagreeable to Maitland.
Maitland finally reached Paddington, still asking questions. He had
telegraphed the night before to inquire whether two persons answering
to the oft-repeated description had been noticed at the terminus. He had
received a reply in the negative before leaving Tiverton. Here, then,
was a check. If the ticket-collector was to be credited, the objects
of his search had reached Westbourne Park, where their tickets had
been taken. There, however, all the evidence proved that they had not
descended. Nobody had seen them alight Yet, not a trace was to be
found at Paddington of a gentleman in a fur coat, nor of any gentleman
travelling alone with a young lady.
It was nearly nine o’clock when Maitland, puzzled, worn out, and
disgusted, arrived in town. He did what he could in the way of
interrogating the porters--all to no purpose. In the crowd and bustle of
passengers, who skirmish for their luggage under inadequate lights,
no one remembered having seen either of the persons whom Maitland
described. There remained the chance of finding out and cross-examining
all the cab-drivers who had taken up passengers by the late trains the
night before. But that business could not be transacted at the moment,
nor perhaps by an amateur.
Maitland’s time was limited indeed. He had been obliged to get out at
Westbourne Park and prosecute his inquisition there. Thence he drove to
Paddington, and, with brief enough space for investigations that yielded
nothing, he took his ticket by the 9.15 evening train for Oxford. His
whole soul was set on consulting Bielby of St. Gatien’s, whom, in his
heart, Maitland could not but accuse of being at the bottom of all these
unprecedented troubles. If Bielby had not driven him, as it were, out of
Oxford, by urging him to acquire a wider knowledge of humanity, and to
expand his character by intercourse with every variety of our fallen
species, Maitland felt that he might now be vegetating in an existence
peaceful, if not well satisfied. “Adventures are to the adventurous.” It
is a hard thing when they have to be achieved by a champion who is not
adventurous at all. If he had not given up his own judgment to Bielby’s,
Maitland told himself he never would have plunged into philanthropic
enterprise, he never would have taken the _Hit or Miss_ he never would
have been entangled in the fortunes of Margaret Shields, and he would
not now be concerned with the death, in the snow, of a dissipated old
wanderer, nor obliged to hunt down a runaway or kidnapped school-girl.
Nor would he be suffering the keen and wearing anxiety of speculating on
what had befallen Margaret.
His fancy suggested the most gloomy yet plausible solutions of the
mystery of her disappearance. In spite of these reflections, Maitland’s
confidence in the sagacity of his old tutor was unshaken. Bielby had not
been responsible for the details of the methods by which his pupil was
trying to expand his character. Lastly, he reflected that if he had not
taken Bielby’s advice, and left Oxford, he never would have known Mrs.
St. John Deloraine, the lady of his diffident desires.
So the time passed, the minutes flitting by, like the telegraph posts,
in the dark, and Maitland reached the familiar Oxford Station. He jumped
into a hansom, and said, “Gatien’s.” Past Worcester, up Carfax, down the
High Street, they struggled through the snow; and at last Maitland got
out and kicked at the College gate. The porter (it was nearly midnight)
opened it with rather a scared face:
“Horful row on in quad, sir,” he said. “The young gentlemen ‘as a
bonfire on, and they’re a larking with the snow. Orful A they’re a
making, sir.”
The agricultural operation thus indicated by the porter was being
forwarded with great vigor. A number of young men, in every variety of
garb (from ulsters to boating-coats), were energetically piling up a
huge Alp of snow against the door of the Master’s lodge. Meanwhile,
another band had carried into the quad all the light tables and
cane chairs from a lecture-room. Having arranged these in a graceful
pyramidal form, they introduced some of the fire-lighters, called
“devils” by the College servants, and set a match to the whole.
Maitland stood for a moment in doubt, looking, in the lurid glare, very
like a magician who has raised an army of fiends, and cannot find work
for them. He felt no disposition to interfere, though the venerable mass
of St Ga-tien’s seemed in momentary peril, and the noise was enough
to waken the dead, let alone the Bursar of Oriel. But Maitland was a
non-resident Fellow, known only to the undergraduates, where he was
known at all, as a “Radical,” with any number of decorative epithets,
according to the taste and fancy of the speaker. He did not think he
could identify any of the rioters, and he was not certain that they
would not carry him to his room, and there screw him up, according to
precedent. Maitland had too much sense of personal dignity to face
the idea of owing his escape from his chambers to the resources of
civilization at the command of the college blacksmith. He, therefore,
after a moment of irresolution, stole off under a low-browed old
door-way communicating with a queer black many-sided little quadrangle;
for it is by no means necessary that a quadrangle should, in this least
mathematical of universities, be quadrangular. Groping and stumbling his
familiar way up the darkest of spiral staircases, Maitland missed his
footing, and fell, with the whole weight of his body, against the door
at which he had meant to knock.
“Come in,” said a gruff voice, as if the knocking had been done in the
most conventional manner.
Maitland had come in by this time, and found the distinguished Mr.
Bielby, Fellow of St. Gatien’s, sitting by his fireside, attired in a
gray shooting-coat, and busy with a book and a pipe. This gentleman had,
on taking his degree, gone to town, and practised with singular success
at the Chancery Bar. But on some sudden disgust or disappointment, he
threw up his practice, returned to College, and there lived a retired
life among his “brown Greek manuscripts.” He was a man of the world,
turned hermit, and the first of the kind whom Maitland had ever known.
He had “coached” Maitland, though he usually took no pupils, and
remained his friend and counsellor.
“How are you, Maitland?” said the student, without rising. “I thought,
from the way in which you knocked, that you were some of the young men,
coming to ‘draw me,’ as I think they call it.”
Mr. Bielby smiled as he spoke. He knew that the undergraduates were as
likely to “draw” him as boys who hunt a hare are likely to draw a fierce
old bear that “dwells among bones and blood.”
Mr. Bielby’s own environment, to be sure, was not of the grisly and
mortuary character thus energetically described by the poet His pipe was
in his hand. His broad, bald, red face, ending in an auburn spade-shaped
beard, wore the air of content. Around him were old books that had
belonged to famous students of old--Scaliger, Meursius, Muretus--and
before him lay the proof-sheets of his long-deferred work, a new
critical edition of “Demetrius of Scepsis.”
Looking at his friend, Maitland envied the learned calm of a man who had
not contrived, in the task of developing his own human nature, to become
involved, like his pupil, in a singular and deplorable conjuncture of
circumstances.
“The men are making a terrible riot in quad,” he said, answering the
other’s remark.
“Yes, yes,” replied Bielby, genially; “boys will be boys, and so will
young men. I believe our Torpid has bumped Keble, and the event is being
celebrated.”
Here there came a terrific howl from without, and a crash of broken
glass.
“There go some windows into their battels,” said Mr. Bielby. “They will
hear of this from the Provost But what brings you here, Maitland, so
unexpectedly? Very glad to see you, whatever it is.”
“Well, sir,” said Maitland, “I rather want to ask your advice on an
important matter. The fact is, to begin at the beginning of a long
story, that some time ago I got, more or less, engaged to be married.”
This was not a very ardent or lover-like announcement, but Bielby seemed
gratified.
“Ah-ha,” replied the tutor, with a humorous twinkle. “Happy to hear it
Indeed, I _had_ heard a rumor, a whisper! A little bird, as they say,
brought a hint of it--I hope, Maitland, a happy omen! A pleasant woman
of the world, one who can take her own part in society, and your part,
too, a little--if you will let me say so--is exactly what you need. I
congratulate you very heartily. And are we likely to see the young lady
in Oxford? Where is she just now?”
Maitland saw that the learned Bielby had indeed heard something, and not
the right thing. He flushed all over as he thought of the truth, and of
Mrs. St John Deloraine.
“I’m sure I wish I knew,” said Maitland at last, beginning to find this
consulting of the oracle a little difficult. “The fact is, that’s just
what I wanted to consult you about. I--I’m afraid I’ve lost all traces
of the young lady.”
“Why, what do you mean?” asked the don, his face suddenly growing grave,
while his voice had not yet lost its humorous tone. “She has not eloped?
You don’t mean to tell me she has run away from you?”
“I really don’t know what to say,” answered Maitland. “I’m afraid
she has been run away with, that she is the victim of some plot or
conspiracy.”
“You surely can’t mean what you say” (and now the voice was gruffer than
ever). “People don’t plot and conspire nowadays, if ever they did, which
probably they didn’t! And who are the young lady’s people? Why don’t
they look after her? I had heard she was a widow, but she must have
friends.”
“She is not a widow--she is an orphan,” said Maitland, blushing
painfully. “I am her guardian in a kind of way.”
“Why, the wrong stories have reached me altogether! I’m sure I beg your
pardon, but did you tell me her name?”
“Her name is Shields--Margaret Shields”--(“Not the name I was told,”
muttered Bielby)--“and her father was a man who had been rather
unsuccessful in life.”
“What was his profession, what did he do?”
“He had been a sailor, I think,” said the academic philanthropist; “but
when I knew him he had left the sea, and was, in fact, as far as he was
anything, a professional tattooer.”
“What’s that?”
“He tattooed patterns on sailors and people of that class for a
livelihood.”
Bielby sat perfectly silent for a few minutes, and no one who saw him
could doubt that his silence arose from a conscious want of words on a
level with the situation.
“Has Miss--h’m, Spears--Shields? thank you; has she been an orphan
long?” he asked, at length. He was clearly trying to hope that the most
undesirable prospective father-in-law described by Maitland had long
been removed from the opportunity of forming his daughter’s character.
“I only heard of his death yesterday,” said Maitland.
“Was it sudden?”
“Why, yes. The fact is, he was a man of rather irregular habits, and he
was discovered dead in one of the carts belonging to the Vestry of St
George’s, Hanover Square.”
“St. George’s, Hanover Square, indeed!” said the don, and once more he
relapsed, after a long whistle, into a significant silence. “Maitland,”
he said at last, “how did you come to be acquainted with these people?
The father, as I understand, was a kind of artist; but you can’t,
surely, have met them in society?”
“He came a good deal to ‘my public-house, the _Hit or Miss_. I think
I told you about it, sir, and you rather seemed to approve of it. The
tavern in Chelsea, if you remember, where I was trying to do something
for the riverside population, and to mix with them for their good, you
know.”
“Good-night!” growled Bielby, very abruptly, and with considerable
determination in his tone. “I am rather busy this evening. I think you
had better think no more about the young lady, and say nothing whatever
about the matter to anyone. Good-night!”.
So speaking, the hermit lighted his pipe, which, in the astonishment
caused by Maitland’s avowals, he had allowed to go out, and he applied
himself to a large old silver tankard. He was a scholar of the Cambridge
school, and drank beer. Maitland knew his friend and mentor too well to
try to prolong the conversation, and withdrew to his bleak college room,
where a timid fire was smoking and crackling among the wet faggots,
with a feeling that he must steer his own course in this affair. It was
clearly quite out of the path of Bielby’s experience.
“And yet,” thought Maitland, “if I had not taken his advice about trying
to become more human, and taken that infernal public-house too, I never
would have been in this hole.”
All day Maitland had scarcely tasted anything that might reasonably be
called food. “He had eaten; he had not dined,” to adopt the distinction
of Brillat-Savarin. He had been dependent on the gritty and flaccid
hospitalities of refreshment-rooms, on the sandwich and the bun. Now
he felt faint as well as weary; but, rummaging amidst his cupboards,
he could find no provisions more tempting and nutritious than a box of
potted shrimps, from the college stores, and a bottle of some Hungarian
vintage sent by an advertising firm to the involuntary bailees of St.
Gatien’s. Maitland did not feel equal to tackling these delicacies.
He did not forget that he had neglected to answer a note, on
philanthropic business, from Mrs. St. John Deloraine.
Weary as he was, he took pleasure in replying at length, and left
the letter out for his scout to post. Then, with a heavy headache,
he tumbled into bed, where, for that matter, he went on tumbling and
tossing during the greater part of the night. About five o’clock he
fell into a sleep full of dreams, only to be awakened, at six, by the
steam-whooper, or “devil,” a sweet boon with which his philanthropy
had helped to endow the reluctant and even recalcitrant University of
Oxford.
“Instead of becoming human, I have only become humanitarian,” Maitland
seemed to hear his own thoughts whispering to himself in a night-mare.
Through the slowly broadening winter dawn, in snatches of sleep that
lasted, or seemed to last, five minutes at a time, Maitland felt the
thought repeating itself, like some haunting refrain, with a feverish
iteration.