ANOTHER BREAK-DOWN.
Arminell had awoke to the fact that she had made a mistake before that
conviction had been brought home to the mind of Jingles; but she
entertained not the shadow of a suspicion how radical that mistake was.
She became conscious that she had put herself in a false position almost
as soon as she had taken the false step. At the first large station the
guard had been obtrusively obliging, and a little familiar. He had
allowed her to see that he regarded her and Giles as a young couple
starting on their honeymoon tour; that he took a friendly interest in
them, and he assured them he would allow no one to invade their
compartment. He looked in on them half-way to know how they were getting
on; whether she would desire refreshments to be brought her to the
carriage; whether she would like to have the blinds drawn down.
Arrived in town, they went to a quiet private hotel in Bloomsbury,
mostly frequented by literary persons consulting the library of the
British Museum. Jingles had not been there before. He knew of the hotel
only by repute.
The landlady, an eminently respectable person, hesitated at first about
receiving the young people. She did not understand the relation in which
they stood to each other, and she looked inquisitively at Arminell’s
left hand. There was not a trace of family likeness that she could
discover in their faces, when young Saltren explained that they were
brother and sister. A further explanation was necessary when he gave his
name as Saltren, and hers as Inglett. Then he regretted that he had not
gone to a large hotel, where no questions would have been asked. He had
considered his pocket, and Arminell’s wishes. He could not afford a
heavy expense, and she shrank from publicity.
Next morning Arminell woke with a sense of depression she could not
shake off. As she dressed, the tears of mortification rose into her
eyes. She was vexed with herself and vexed with Jingles. She knew that
what she had done must wound her father, and compromise herself, at all
events, for a while. She had taken the step in a fit of pique at her
father’s desire to get rid of her, and of romantic enthusiasm, to force
him to acknowledge Jingles. She had felt convinced that in no other way
could he be induced to do this. She entertained no particular admiration
for young Saltren, no great affection for him, only a girlish eagerness
to see a misunderstood and ill-used man put in his proper place and
acknowledged by the world. When she met Jingles at breakfast in the
coffee-room, there was mutual restraint between them of which both were
conscious; and in Arminell’s heart a little welling up of wrath against
him. She knew that the feeling was ungenerous. He was less to blame than
herself—that is, she had proposed the elopement; but then he was older
than herself, and as a man ought to have pointed out the impropriety of
the proposal. Now it was too late. The die was cast which must mould the
rest of her life, and of what nature that die was she could not yet
tell.
Sunday passed quietly. Arminell remained for the most part in her own
room, and young Saltren also kept secluded, going through, recopying,
and improving his article on Port Hamilton, which he regarded as his
masterpiece.
On Monday, at breakfast, Saltren told her that he would go at once,
early in the day, to consult his uncle, and that then they would go
together in search of suitable lodgings. The looking out for lodgings
could be done in the afternoon, as their nature would be determined by
the amount of income on which Saltren could reckon.
“I suppose,” he said, “that my uncle can help me into getting the
composition of a leader every alternate day as a beginning, and if I get
five guineas for a leader, that will make fifteen in the week. Then, I
suppose, I can do reviewing, and write for magazines, and make about
thirty pounds a week, that will be, say fifteen hundred a year, as a
beginning. I have reckoned the year as one of fifty instead of fifty-two
weeks, because I shall have to allow myself a short holiday. On fifteen
hundred a year we ought to have a nice villa residence, with garden and
conservatories. What do you say to a Queen Anne house at Turnham Green?
I, myself, rather incline to Chislehurst.”
When he was gone, Arminell, left to herself, had returned to her
bedroom, to find it not ready for her. So she went downstairs again, and
sat by the window in the coffee-room, looking into the street through
the wire-gauze blind, not thinking of and interested in what passed in
the street, but turning in mind to Orleigh, to her pretty chamber there;
to the breakfast-room, with the windows to the east, and the sun
flooding it; to the table with its silver, and flowers, and porcelain.
How small everything in this inn was, and how lacking in freshness and
grace!
Her father’s cheery face had been a feature at the meal, as was also her
step-mother, fresh, gentle, pale, and dove-like in movement and tone.
She remembered these things now that she had cast them from her, and
found that they had been pleasant, and were not to be recalled without a
beating of the pulse, and a rising in the throat.
Two gentlemen were at breakfast at a table near her, and were eating
eggs—London eggs—and the savour of eggs, especially London eggs, in a
low room is not agreeable.
They were talking about the tribes of Northern Asia—Samojeds, Ostiacks,
Tungus, Vogulese, about brachycephalic and dolichocephalic heads, and
agglutinative tongues, and linguistic roots; and then one of the
gentlemen dropped some of his egg on his beard, and continued to eat and
talk of agglutinative tongues, and ethnological peculiarities, and
Turanian characteristics, without observing it; and the drop of yolk
coagulated on his beard, and moved with his jaw, and became agitated and
excited over the linguistic affinities of the Tchuchtchees with the
Koriacks on one side and the Yuckaheres on the other.
Arminell was teased both by the drop of yolk from which she could not
withdraw her eye, and by the vehemence of the disputants, and by the—to
her—uninteresting nature of the topic that was discussed. She forced
herself to look into the street, and observe the passers-by; but in
another minute fell to ruminating on the condition of the gentleman’s
beard, to wondering whether he had yet wiped the egg-drop away, or why
his friend did not point it out to him; and then her eye mechanically
travelled back to the beard, and the gamboge spot on it. Presently a
stout, shabbily-dressed lady entered with her two plain daughters, all
three with that grey complexion that makes one think the heads must be
cut out of Jerusalem artichoke. The mother had puffy cheeks, and small
beady eyes. She talked loudly to her daughters, loudly enough to be
heard by all in the room, about her distinguished acquaintances, her
butler, and footmen, and lady’s-maid, and coachman, and carriages, and
gradually subdued the gentlemen who had been arguing over the ethnology
of Northern Asia, and set them wondering how it was that this stout
party and her daughters had come to so small an inn, and were not
occupying a suite in the Hotel Metropole.
Arminell had endured the talk of the learned men, but the vulgar clack
of this underbred woman was insupportable. She rose and ascended the
stairs to her bedroom, which was now, fortunately, ready for her.
This room did not command the street. It looked out at the mews, and
beyond the mews at a row of brick houses, seen above the wall enclosing
the back premises. In the mews yard were some carriages being washed,
and grooms with their braces discharged from their right shoulders,
brushing and combing their horses. Over the stables were the windows of
the dwellings of the cabdrivers and their wives, and of the ostlers; and
there were sickly attempts at flower gardening in some of them. Out of
others hung articles of clothing to be aired or dried. A multitude of
dingy sparrows hopped about in the yard, and also a considerable and
apparently inexhaustible number of equally dingy children.
Beyond the wall of the backyard of a house in the row was a gaunt
Lombardy poplar, trunk and branches sable as the stalks of maidenhair
fern. What a pretty view had been that which Arminell had commanded from
her bed-room window at Orleigh! The sweeps of green turf in the park,
the stately trees, the cedars, and the copper beech, and the silver
birch! How the birds had sung in the morning about her window! How sweet
had been the incense of the wisteria trusses of lilac flowers entering
at the open casement!
What would her father say at her departure? Into what a predicament had
she put him? She had forced him into one from which he could not escape
without publishing his own dishonour, without allowing his wife, and the
parish, and the county, and society generally to know that once on a
time he had behaved in a manner unworthy of a gentleman to a poor
servant girl. He to whom every one in the place, in the county, looked
up as a spotless and worthy John Bull, was to be proclaimed an impostor,
and made the talk of idle and malicious tongues.
“If a man has done wrong,” she said to justify herself, “he must bear
the consequences. It is cowardly to try and hide the act, evade what it
entails, and base to appear before the world under false pretences. Let
him acknowledge the wrong he has done, and men will then respect him
because he is open, and does not shrink from those consequences a wrong
act brings on the wrong-doer.”
But this did not satisfy her. It might be true, it was true, that this
was the only right and honourable course for one to take who had erred,
but—was she, his daughter, the proper person to force her father into
the course and out of the road he had elected to pursue? Was it for her
hand to rip up old wounds, and drag into the light the dark secrets he
strove to bury out of sight? Was it for her to reveal a stain which
disfigured the whole house? Was it for her to shock her step-mother, and
disturb her trust? To mar the domestic unity and mutual esteem which had
been so perfect?
Lady Lamerton had her weaknesses, but she had also her strength, and her
strength was the rectitude of her heart, which made her do her duty with
all her power. In pursuance of this sense of duty, Lady Lamerton had
been unfailingly kind to Arminell. The girl, looking back, saw this now,
and was stung with self-reproach, because in return for this treatment
she cast the apple of discord between her father and mother, and broke
what to her ladyship was the most precious jewel she possessed—her
reverence for my lord.
And how—when it pleased Arminell to return home after all the
disturbance she had caused, the pain and humiliation she had
occasioned—how would she be received again by those she had wronged and
hurt? She had no doubt upon this point. She knew that she would be
received with open arms, and without a word of reproach from one or the
other.
Then Arminell began to sob, and she saw no more the ostler curricombing
his horse, nor the woman shaking a table-cloth out of a window, nor the
sparrows quarrelling for the crumbs, nor the back of a maid seated
outside a house on a window ledge cleaning the glass, or she saw these
things through a watery film.
She was roused by a tap at her door. She hastily dried her eyes, and
stood up, with her back to the light, that her discomposure might be
unobserved, and called to the person without to enter.
A waiter opened the door and announced that a gentleman had called, and
was below in a private sitting-room. He extended a tray, and Miss
Inglett took from it a card, and read, “Mr. James Welsh.”
“I will come down directly,” she said.
The waiter bowed and closed the door.
Arminell tarried for a moment only, to recover herself, and then
descended. She expected to see Jingles with his uncle, but he was not in
the room.
“At your service, Miss Inglett. I am the uncle of Hansel who has run
away with Grethel. You find that you have not come to the cottage of
almond rock, with windows of barley sugar. You are not, I suppose,
interested in politics?”
“No, or only slightly. Social subjects—”
“Neither in Monday’s paper. Never in my life saw one with less of
interest in it, no news, nothing but a Temperance Demonstration at
Exeter Hall, presided over by the Reverend Jowles. It is not worth your
while looking into a paper to-day.”
“Is Mr. Saltren returned?” asked Arminell.
“Damped off,” replied Welsh. “That is a process whereby an amateur loses
a good many cuttings and seedlings. Hansel came to me with any amount of
young hopes and ambitions and cockscombs—especially, and I have damped
them all off. Expected to make a fortune in literature, wanted to tread
the walks of political journalism—as well try to tread the tight rope
without previous education. Miss Inglett, you will see no more of him.
So what is Grethel to do without her Hansel?”
He paused for a minute but received no answer, not, perhaps, that he
expected one, but he allowed time for what he had said to soak into her
mind before he went on.
“There is a story,” continued Welsh, who purposely spun out what he had
to say, knowing it was an unpleasant dose, and therefore to be mixed
with jam. “There is a story by a classic author, whom I have read only
in English, concerning a young man named Lucius who once saw a woman
smear herself with an unguent, whereupon she flew out at the window,
transformed into a bird. Lucius got hold of the unguent and applied it
to himself and found himself to have become—not a bird by any
means—simply an ass. Our good friend has been going through the same
experience. You, Miss Inglett, have spread your wings, and Giles comes
trotting after with a bray. You need not be afraid—he will not show
himself again. He has looked on himself in a mirror, and is hiding his
ears.”
“Do you mean, Mr. Welsh, that your nephew has deserted me?”
“The ass is just now so ashamed of himself, that he is in hiding. But no
more about him. What about yourself? I place myself unreservedly at your
disposal. I will reconduct you to Orleigh, by the next train, and
telegraph for the carriage to meet us at the station.”
“I cannot go back—just now.”
“Have you a relation, a lady, in town who could receive you?”
“Lady Hermione Woodhead—my aunt.”
“Then I will take you to her at once.”
“I cannot go to her.”
“Then Mrs. Welsh will be happy to accommodate you. She is without a
cook, but that don’t matter. She can make good pastry. Come along with
me to Shepherd’s Bush. There will be rissoles for dinner to-day as we
had joint yesterday; and we will buy a pair of soles on our way.”
“I cannot understand,” said Arminell. “I came here with your nephew. I
suppose you are aware that he is my half-brother.”
“Half-fiddlesticks,” exclaimed Mr. Welsh. “My dear young lady, you have
been carried off your feet by romantic fancies, which at a certain
ingenious age inflate the head as carburetted hydrogen does a
goldbeaterskin bag. Giles has been in the same condition, but I have
pricked the bag and let out the nonsense. Now his head is in a condition
of collapse. That which you were told about his parentage is all
nonsense.”
“Do you mean—” Arminell did not finish the sentence, she was interrupted
by Welsh.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “I know all the circumstances. I know more about
them than my sister Marianne supposes. Marianne is an utter liar, has a
physical infirmity, I suppose, which prevents her tongue from being
straight. It describes as many curls as a corkscrew on the St. Gothard
line. She has about as keen a sense of truth as a Russian diplomatist,
and as much bounce as General Boulanger. Now then—as you see from which
direction the wind blows, and where lie the reefs, perhaps you will
allow a pilot to come unsignalled on board, and turn your head off the
breakers.”
“I have made a mistake—a fatal mistake,” was all that Arminell could
say, dropping her hands at her sides.
“Those are precisely my nephew’s words—literally the same; which is not
to be wondered at, because you have both fallen together into the same
error. Come, I must help you out of your difficulties. What will you do?
Go to your aunt? Return home? Or come to Shepherd’s Bush to rissoles and
a pair of soles, fried or boiled as you prefer?”
“But where is Mr. Saltren? I ought to see him.”
“He will not show his face again. He is at the present moment like
blancmange from which the isinglass has been omitted, in a condition of
mental and moral imbecility.”
A tap at the door, and without waiting for an answer Giles Inglett
Saltren entered, erect with firm step, and a resolute face.