It chanced, one evening, that I was walking alone through the park. I
had been on foot to the village to send a telegram, which I had not
cared to trust to a servant. The weather had suddenly cleared, and there
had been a sharp frost in the morning; towards midday it had thawed a
little, but by the time it was dark everything was frozen hard again.
The moon was nearly full, and shone brightly upon the frozen grass,
casting queer shadows through the bare branches of the trees; it was
very cold, and I walked fast; the brittle, frozen mud of the road broke
beneath my feet with a creaking, crunching sound, and startled the deep
stillness. As I neared the house the moon was before me, and the mass of
buildings cast a dark shadow.
Carvel Place is like many old country houses in England; it is a typical
dwelling of its kind, irregular, yet imposing, and though it has no
plan, for it has been added to and enlarged, and in part rebuilt, it is
yet harmonious and of good proportion. I had often reflected that it was
too large for the use of the present family, and I knew that there must
be a great number of rooms in the house which were never opened; but no
one had ever proposed to show them to me, and I was not sufficiently
curious to ask permission to visit the disused apartments. I had
observed, however, that a wing of the building ran into an inclosure,
surrounded by a wall seven or eight feet high, against which were ranged
upon the one side a series of hot-houses, while another formed the back
of a covered tennis court. The third wall of the inclosure was covered
with a lattice, upon which fruit trees had been trained without any
great success, and I had noticed that the lattice now completely
covered an old oak door which led into the inclosure. I had never seen
the door open, but I remembered very well that it was uncovered the last
time I had been at Carvel Place.
When I reached the house I was no longer cold, and the night was so
clear and sparkling that I idly strolled round the great place,
wandering across the frozen lawn and through the winding paths of the
flower garden beyond, till I came to the wall I have described, and
stood still, half wondering why the door had been covered over with
fruit trees, as though no one would ever wish to enter the house from
that side. The space could hardly be so valuable for gardening purposes,
I thought, for the slender peach-trees that were bound upon the lattice
on each side of the door had not thriven. There was something melancholy
about the unsuccessful attempt to cultivate the delicate southern fruit
in the unkindly air of England, and the branches and stems, all wrapped
in straw against the frost, looked unhappy and unnatural in the cold
moonlight. I stood looking at them, with my hands in my pockets,
thinking somewhat regretfully of my southern birthplace. I smiled at
myself and turned away, but as I went the very faintest echo of a laugh
seemed to come from the other side of the wall. It sounded disagreeably
in the stillness, and I slowly finished my walk around the house and
came back to the front door, still wondering who it was that had laughed
at me from behind the wall in the moonlight. There was certainly no
original reason in the nature of things why it should not chance that
some one should laugh on the other side of the wall just as I happened
to be standing before the closed gate. The inclosure was probably in
connection with the servants' apartments; or it might be the exclusive
privilege of Chrysophrasia to walk there, composing anapaestic verse to
the infinite faintness of the moon,--or anything. A quarter of an hour
later I was in the drawing-room drinking a cup of tea. I came in when
the others had finished reading their evening letters, and there were
none for me. The tea was cold. I wished I had walked half an hour
longer, and had not come into the drawing-room at all.
"Let me make you a fresh cup, Mr. Griggs," said Hermione; "do,--it will
be ready in a moment!"
I politely declined, and the conversation of the rest soon began where
it had left off. It appeared that Professor Cutter was expected that
night, and the son of the house, with Patoff, on the following day. It
was Thursday, and Christmas was that day week. John Carvel seemed
unusually depressed; his words were few and very grave, and he did not
smile, but answered in the shortest manner possible the questions
addressed to him. He thought Cutter might arrive at any moment. Hermione
hazarded a remark to the effect that the professor was rather dull.
"No, my dear," answered John, "he is not at all dull."
"But, papa, I thought he was so immensely learned"----
"He is very learned," said her father, shortly, and buried himself in
his newspaper, so that hardly anything was visible of him but his feet,
encased in exceedingly neat shoes; those nether extremities moved
impatiently from time to time. Chrysophrasia was not present, a
circumstance which made it seem likely that she might have been the
person who had laughed behind the wall. Mary Carvel, like her husband,
was unusually silent, and I was sitting not far from Hermione. She
looked at me after her father's curt answer to her innocent remark, and
smiled faintly.
The drawing-room where we sat exhibited a curious instance of the effect
produced upon inanimate things when subjected to the contact of persons
who differ widely from each other in taste. You smile, dear lady, at the
complicated form of expression. I mean merely that if two people who
like very different things live in the same room, each of them will try
to give the place the look he or she likes. At Carvel Place there were
four to be consulted, instead of two; for John had his own opinions as
to taste, and they were certainly sounder than those of his wife and
sister-in-law, and at least as clearly defined.
John Carvel liked fine pictures, and he had placed three or four in the
drawing-room,--a couple of good Hogarths, a beautiful woman's head by
Andrea del Sarto, and a military scene by Meissonnier,--about as
heterogeneous a quartette of really valuable works as could be got for
money; and John had given a great deal of money for them. Besides the
pictures, there stood in the drawing-room an enormous leathern
easy-chair, of the old-fashioned type with semicircular wings projecting
forward from the high back on each side, made to protect the rheumatic
old head of some ancestor who suffered from the toothache before the
invention of dentists. Near this stood a low, square, revolving
bookcase, which always contained the volumes which John was reading at
the time, to be changed from day to day as circumstances required.
Mary Carvel was, and is, an exceedingly religious woman, and her tastes
are to some extent the expression of her religious feelings. She has a
number of excellent engravings of celebrated pictures, such as Holbein's
Madonna, Raphael's Transfiguration, and the Dresden Madonna di San
Sisto; she owns the entire collection of chromo-lithographs published by
the Arundel Society, and many other reproductions of a similar nature.
Many of these she had hung in the drawing-room at Carvel Place. Here and
there, also, were little shelves of oak in the common Anglomaniac style
of woodwork, ornamented with trefoils, crosses, circles, and triangles,
and containing a curious collection of sacred literature, beginning with
the ancient volume entitled Wilberforce's View, including the poetry
published in a series of Lyras,--Lyra Anglicana, Lyra Germanica, and so
on,--culminating at last in the works of Dr. Pusey; the whole perhaps
exhibiting in a succinct form the stages through which Mary Carvel had
passed, or was still passing, in her religious convictions. And here
let me say at once that I am very far from intending to jest at those
same convictions of Mary Carvel's, and if you smile it is because the
picture is true, not because it is ridiculous. She may read what she
pleases, but the world would be a better place if there were more women
like her.
There were many other possessions of hers in the drawing-room: for
instance, upon the mantel-piece were placed three magnificent Wedgwood
urns, after Flaxman's designs, inherited from her father, and now of
great value; upon the tables there were several vases of old Vienna, but
of a green color, vivid enough to elicit Chrysophrasia's most eloquent
disapprobation; there were several embroideries of a sufficiently
harmless nature, the work of Mary Carvel's patient fingers, but
conceived in a style no longer popular; and on the whole, there was a
great number of objects in the drawing-room which belonged to her and by
which she set great store, but which bore decidedly the character of
English household decoration and furniture at the beginning of the
present century, and are consequently abhorrent to the true aesthete.
Chrysophrasia Dabstreak, however, had sworn to cast the shadow of beauty
over what she called the substance of the hideous, and to this end and
intention, by dint of honeyed eloquence and stinging satire, she had
persuaded John and Mary to allow her to insert stained glass in one of
the windows, which formerly opened upon and afforded a view of a certain
particularly brilliant flower bed. Beneath the many-colored light from
this Gothic window--for she insisted upon the pointed arch--Miss
Dabstreak had made her own especial corner of the drawing-room. There
one might see strange pots and plates, and withered rushes, and
fantastic greenish draperies of Eastern weft, which, however, would not
fetch five piastres a yard in the bazaar of Stamboul, curious
water-colors said to represent "impressions," though one would be shy of
meeting, beyond the bounds of an insane asylum, the individual whose
impressions could take so questionable a shape; lastly, the centre of
the collection, a "polka mazurka harmony in yellow," by Sardanapalus
Stiggins, the great impressionist painter of the day. Chrysophrasia paid
five hundred pounds for this little gem.
But it was not enough for Miss Dabstreak to have collected so many
worthless objects of price in her own little corner of the room. She had
encumbered the tables with useless articles of pottery; she had fastened
a green plate between the better of the two Hogarths and an Arundel
chromo-lithograph, and connected it with both the pictures by a drooping
scarf of faint pink silk; she had adorned the engraving of Raphael's
Transfiguration with a bit of Broussa embroidery, because it looked so
very Oriental; and she had bedizened Mary Carvel's water-color view of
Carisbrooke Castle with peacock's feathers, because they looked so very
English. There was no spot in the room where Chrysophrasia's hand had
not fallen, and often it had fallen heavily. She had respected John
Carvel's easy-chair and revolving bookcase, but she had respected
nothing else.
There was a fourth person, however, who had set her especial impress on
the appearance of the room where all met in common. I mean Hermione
Carvel. Educated and brought up among the conflicting tastes and views
of her parents and her aunt, she had imbibed some of the characteristics
of each, although in widely different degrees. At that time, perhaps,
the various traits which were united in her had not yet blended
harmoniously so as to form a satisfactory whole. The resultant of so
many more or less conflicting forces was prone to extremes of enthusiasm
or of indifference. Her heart was capable of feeling the warmest
sympathy, but was liable also to conceive unwarrantable antipathies; her
mind was of admirable quality, fairly well gifted and sensibly trained;
though not marvelously quick to understand, yet tenacious and slow to
forget. The constant attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable opinions
of her mother and aunt had given Hermione a certain versatility of
thought, and a certain capacity to see both sides of the question when
not under the momentary influence of her enthusiasm. She is, and was
even then, a fine type of the English girl who has grown up under the
most favorable circumstances; that is to say, with an excellent
education and a decided preference for the country. It is not necessary
to allow her any of the privileges and immunities usually granted to
exceptional people; in any ordinary position of life she would bear the
test of any ordinary difficulty very well. She inherits common sense
from her father, an honest country gentleman of the kind now
unfortunately growing every day more rare; a man not so countrified as
to break his connection with the intelligent world, nor so foolishly
ambitious as to abandon a happy life in the country in order to pursue
the mirage of petty political importance: a man who holds humbug in
supreme contempt, and having purged it from his being has still
something to fall back upon. From her mother Hermione inherits an
extreme conscientiousness in the things of every-day life; but whereas
in Mary Carvel this scrupulous pursuance of what is right is on the
verge of degenerating into morbid religionism, in Hermione it is
tempered by occasional bursts of enthusiasm, and relieved by a wholesome
and natural capacity for liking some people and disliking others.
In the drawing-room I have been describing, Hermione touched everything,
and did her best to cast over the various objects some grace, some air
of harmony, which should make the contrasted tastes of the rest of her
family less glaring and unpleasant to the eye. Her task was not easy,
and it was no fault of hers if the room was out of joint. Her love of
flowers showed itself everywhere, and she knew how to take advantage of
each inch of room on shelf, or table, or window-seat, filling all
available spaces with a profusion of roses, geraniums, and blossoms of
every kind that chanced to be in season. Flowers in a room will do what
nothing else can accomplish. The eye turns gladly to the living plant,
when wearied and strained with the incongruities of inanimate things. A
pot of pinks makes the lowliest and most dismal cottage chamber look gay
by comparison; a single rose in a glass of water lights up the most
dusty den of the most dusty student. A bit of climbing ivy converts a
hideous ruin into a bower, as the Alp roses and the Iva make a garden
for one short month of the roughest rocks in the Grisons. Only that
which lives and of which the life is beautiful can reconcile us to those
surroundings which would otherwise offend our sense of harmony, or
oppress us with a dullness even more deadly than mere ugliness can ever
be.
Hermione loves all flowers, and at Carvel Place she was the sweetest
blossom of them all. Her fresh vitality is of the contagious kind, and
even plants seem to revive and get new life from the touch of her small
fingers, as though feeling the necessity of growing like her. Her beauty
may not last. It is not of the imperious kind, nor even quite classic,
but it has a wonderful fineness and delicacy. Her soft brown hair coils
closely on her small, well-shaped head; her gentle, serious blue eyes
look tenderly on all that lives and has being within the circle of her
sight; her small mouth smiles graciously and readily, though sometimes a
little sadly; and her pleasant voice has a frank ring in it that is good
to hear. Her slight fingers, neither too long nor too short, are often
busy, but her labors are generally labors of love, and she is never
weary of them. Of middle height, she has the grace of a taller woman,
and the ease in motion which comes only from natural, healthy, elastic
strength, not weakened by enforced idleness, not overdeveloped by
abominable and unwomanly gymnastic exercises. Everything she does is
graceful.
It is very strange and interesting to see in her the combination of such
different elements. Even her aunt Chrysophrasia's queer nature is
represented, though it needs some ingenuity to trace the resemblance
between the two. There are indeed tones of the voice, phrases and
expressions, which seem to belong to particular families, and by which
one may sometimes discover the relationship. But the modification of
leading characteristics in the individual is not so easily detected.
Miss Dabstreak is eccentric, but the wild ideas which continue to
flourish in the aesthetic cells of Chrysophrasia's brain are softened and
made more gentle and delicate in Hermione, so that even if they were
inconsequent they would not seem offensive; though one might not admire
them, one could not despise them. The young girl loves all that is
beautiful: not as Chrysophrasia loves it, by sheer force of habitual
affectation, without discernment and without real enjoyment, but from
the bottom of her heart, from the well-springs of her own beautiful
soul; knowing and understanding the great divisions between the graceful
and the clumsy, between the true and the false, the lovely and the
unlovely. The extraordinary passion for the eccentric is tempered to an
honest and natural craving after the beautiful; the admixture of the
gentleness the girl has inherited from her saintly mother and of the
genuine common sense which characterizes her father has produced a
rational desire and ability to do good to every one. Mary Carvel is
sometimes exaggerated in her ideas of charity, and John on rare
occasions--very rarely--used to be a little too much inclined to the
practice of economy; "near" was the term applied by the village people.
It was at first with him but the reminiscence of poorer years, when
economy was necessary, and forethought was an indispensable element in
his life; but the tendency has remained and sometimes shows itself. All
that can be traced of this quality in the daughter is a certain power of
keen discernment, which saves her from being cheated by the sham paupers
who abound in the neighborhood of Carvel Place, and from being led into
spoiling the school-children with too many feasts of tea, jam, and
cake.
It is not easy to be brief in describing Hermione Carvel, because in her
fair self she combines a great many qualities belonging to contradictory
persons, which one would suppose impossible to unite in one harmonious
whole; and yet Hermione is one of the most harmonious persons I ever
knew. Nothing about her ever offended my sense of fitness. I often used
to wonder how she managed to be loved equally by the different members
of the household, but there is no doubt of the fact that all the members
of her family not only love her, but excuse readily enough those of
their own bad qualities which they fancy they recognize in her; for,
indeed, nothing ever seems bad in Hermione, and I doubt greatly whether
there is not some touch of white magic in her nature that protects her
and shields her, so that bad things turn to good when they come near
her. If she likes the curious notions of her aunt, she certainly changes
them so that they become delicate fancies, and agree together with the
gentle charity she has from her mother and the sterling honesty she gets
from her father. John sometimes shrugs his shoulders at what he calls
his wife's extraordinary faith in human nature, and both he and Mary are
sometimes driven to the verge of distraction by Chrysophrasia's
perpetual moaning over civilization; but no one is ever out of temper
with Hermione, nor is Hermione ever impatient with any one of the three.
She is the peace-maker, the one whose sympathy never fails, whose
gentleness is never ruffled, and whose fair judgment is never at fault.
When John Carvel answered Hermione's question about Professor Cutter by
a simple affirmation to the effect that he was a very learned man, the
young girl did not press her father with any more inquiries, but turned
to me.
"Do you not think learned people are very often dull, Mr. Griggs?" she
asked.
"Oppressively," I answered.
"What makes them so?"
"It is the very low and common view which they take of life," put in
Miss Dabstreak, who entered the room while we were speaking, and sank
upon the couch with a little sigh. "They have no aspirations after the
beautiful,--and what else can satisfy the human mind? The Greeks were
never dull."
"What do you call dull?" asked Mrs. Carvel very mildly.
"Oh--anything; parliamentary reports, for instance, and agricultural
shows, and the Rural Dean,--anything of that sort," answered Miss
Chrysophrasia languidly.
"In other words, civilization as compared with barbarism," I suggested.
"It is true that there cannot be much boredom among barbarous tribes who
are always scalping their enemies or being scalped themselves; those
things help to pass the time."
"Yes, scalping must be most interesting," murmured Chrysophrasia, with
an air of conviction.
Hermione laughed.
"I really believe you would like to see it done, aunt Chrysophrasia,"
said she.
"Hermy, Hermy, what dreadful ideas you have!" exclaimed Mrs. Carvel, in
gentle horror. But she immediately returned to her embroidery, and
relapsed into silence.
"It is Mr. Griggs, mamma," said Hermione, still laughing. "He agrees
with me that learned people are all oppressively dull, and that the only
tolerably exciting society is found among scalping Indians."
"Did you not once scalp somebody yourself, Griggs?" asked John, suddenly
lowering his newspaper.
"Not quite," I answered; "but I once shaved a poodle with a
pocket-knife. Perhaps you were thinking of that?"
While I spoke there was a sound of wheels without, and John rose to his
feet. He seemed impatient.
"That must be Cutter at last'" he exclaimed, moving towards the door
that led into the hall. "I thought he was never coming."
I rose also, and followed him. It was Cutter. The learned professor
arrived wrapped in a huge ulster overcoat, his hands in the deep pockets
thereof, and the end of an extinguished cigar between his teeth. He
furtively disposed of the remains of the weed before shaking hands with
our host. After the first greetings John led him away to his room, and I
remained standing in the hall. The professor's luggage was rather
voluminous, and various boxes, bags, and portmanteaus bore the labels of
many journeys. The men brought them in from the dog-cart; the strong cob
pawed the gravel a little, and the moonlight flashed back from the
silver harness, from the smooth varnished dashboard, the polished
chains, and the plated lamps. I stood staring out of the door, hardly
seeing anything. Indeed, I was lost in a fruitless effort of memory. The
groom gathered up the reins and drove away, and presently I was aware
that Stubbs, the butler, was offering me a hat, as a hint, I supposed,
that he wanted to shut the front door. I mechanically covered my head
and strolled away.
I was trying to remember where I had seen Professor Cutter. I could not
have known him well, for I never forget a man I have met three or four
times; and yet his face was perfectly familiar to me, and came vividly
before me as I paced the garden walks. Instinctively I walked round the
house again, and paused before the door that had attracted my attention
an hour earlier. I listened, but heard nothing, and still I tried to
recall my former meeting with Cutter. Strange, I thought, that I should
seem to know him so well, and that I should nevertheless be unable to
connect him in my mind with any date, or country, or circumstance. In
vain I went over many scenes of my life, endeavoring to limit this
remembrance to a particular period. I argued that our meeting, if we
really had met, could not have taken place many years ago, for I
recognized exactly the curling gray hairs in the professor's beard, the
wrinkles in his forehead, and a slight mark upon one cheek, just below
the eye. I recollected the same spectacles; the same bushy, cropped gray
hair; the same massive, square head set upon a short but powerful body;
the same huge hands, spotlessly clean, the big nails kept closely pared
and polished, but so large that they might have belonged to an extinct
species of gigantic man. The whole of him and his belongings, to the
very clothes he wore, seemed familiar to me and witnesses to his
identity; but though I did my best for half an hour, I could not bring
back one circumstance connected with him. I grew impatient and returned
to the house, for it was time to dress for dinner, and I felt cold as I
strolled about in the frosty moonlight.
We met again before dinner, for a few minutes, in the drawing-room. I
went near to the professor, and examined his appearance very carefully.
His evening dress set off the robust proportions of his frame, and the
recollection I had of him struck me more forcibly than ever. I am not
superstitious, but I began to fancy that we must have met in some former
state, in some other sphere. He stood before the fire, rubbing his hands
and answering all manner of questions that were put to him. He appeared
to be an old friend of the family, to judge by the conversation, and yet
I was positively certain that I had never seen him at Carvel Place. He
knew all the family, however, and seemed familiar with their tastes and
pursuits: he inquired about John's manufacturing interests, and about
Mrs. Carvel's poor people; he asked Hermione several questions about the
recent exhibitions of flowers, and discussed with Chrysophrasia a sale
of majolica which had just taken place in London. After this round of
remarks I suspected that the professor would address himself to me, for
his gray eyes rested on me from time to time with a look of recognition.
But he held his peace, and we presently went to dinner.
Professor Cutter talked much and talked well, in a continuous,
consistent manner that was satisfactory for a time, but a little
wearisome in the long run. His ideas were often brilliant, and his
expression of them was always original, but he had an extraordinary
faculty of dominating the conversation. Even John Carvel, who knew a
great deal in his way, found it hard to make any headway against the
professor's eloquence, though I could sometimes see that he was far from
being convinced. The professor had been everywhere and had seen most
things; he talked with absolute conviction of what he had seen, and
avoided talking of what he had not seen, doubtless inferring that it was
not worth seeing. Nevertheless, he was not a disagreeable person, as
such men often are; on the contrary, there was a charm of manner about
him that was felt by every one present. I longed for the meal to be
over, however, for I intended to seize the first opportunity which
presented itself of asking him whether he remembered where we had met
before.
I was destined to remain in suspense for some time. We had no sooner
risen from dinner than John Carvel came up to me and spoke in a low
voice.
"Will you excuse me if I leave you alone, Griggs?" he said. "I have very
important business with Professor Cutter, which will not keep until
to-morrow. We will join you in the drawing-room in about an hour."
It was nothing to me if the two men had business together; I was
sufficiently intimate in the house to be treated without ceremony, and I
did not care for anybody's company until I could find what I was
searching for in the forgotten corners of my brain.
"Do not mind me," I answered, and I retired into the smoking-room, and
began to turn over the evening papers. How long I read I do not know,
nor whether the news of the day was more or less interesting and
credible than usual; I do not believe that an hour elapsed, either, for
an hour is a long time when a man is not interested in what he is doing,
and is trying to recall something to his mind. I cannot even tell why I
so longed to recollect the professor's face; I only remember that the
effort was intense, but wholly fruitless. I lay back in the deep
leathern easy-chair, and all sorts of visions flitted before my
half-closed eyes,--visions of good and visions of evil, visions of
yesterday and visions of long ago. Somehow I fell to thinking about the
lattice-covered door in the wall, and I caught myself wondering who had
been behind it when I passed; and then I laughed, for I had made up my
mind that it must have been Miss Chrysophrasia, who had entered the
drawing-room five minutes after I did. I sat staring at the fire. I was
conscious that some one had entered the room, and presently the
scratching of a match upon something rough roused me from my reverie. I
looked round, and saw Professor Cutter standing by the table.
It sometimes happens that a very slight thing will recall a very long
chain of circumstances; a look, the intonation of a word, the attitude
of a moment, will call up other looks and words and attitudes in quick
succession, until the chain is complete. So it happened to me, when I
saw the learned professor standing by the table, with a cigar in his
mouth, and his great gray eyes fixed upon me from behind his enormous
spectacles. I recognized the man, and the little I knew of him came back
to me.
The professor is one of the most learned specialists in neurology and
the study of the brain now living; he is, moreover, a famous
anthropologist. He began his career as a surgeon, and would have been
celebrated as an operator had he not one day inherited a private
fortune, which permitted him to abandon his surgical practice in favor
of a special branch for which he knew himself more particularly fitted.
So soon as I recalled the circumstances of our first meeting I realized
that I had been in his company only a few moments, and had not known his
name.
He came and sat himself down in an easy-chair by my side, and puffed in
silence at a big cigar.
"We have met before," I said. "I could not make you out at first. You
were at Weissenstein last year. You remember that affair?"
Professor Cutter looked at me curiously for several seconds before he
answered.
"You are the man who let down the rope," he said at last. "I remember
you now very well."
There was a short pause.
"Did you ever hear any more of that lady?" asked he, presently.
"No, I did not even know her name, any more than I knew yours," I
replied. "I took you for a physician, and the lady for your patient."
We heard steps on the polished floor outside the smoking-room.
"If I were you, I would not say anything to Carvel about that matter,"
said the professor quickly.
The door opened, and John entered the room. He was a little pale and
looked nervous.
"Ah," he ejaculated, "I thought you would fraternize over the tobacco."
"We are doing our best," said I.
"It is written that the free should be brothers and equal," said the
professor, with a laugh.
"I never knew two brothers who were equal," said Carvel, in reflective
tones. "I do not know why the ideal freedom and equality, attaching to
the ideal brothers, should not be as good as any other visionary aim for
tangible earthly government; but it certainly does not seem so easy of
realization, nor so sound in the working, as our good English principle
that exceptions prove the rule, and that the more exceptions there are
the better the rule will be."
"Is that speech an attack upon American freedom?" asked the professor,
laughing a little. "I believe Mr. Griggs is an American."
"No, indeed. Why should I attack American freedom?" said John.
"American freedom is not so easily attacked," I remarked. "It eludes
definition and rejects political paradox. No one ever connects our
republic with the fashionable liberty-fraternity-and-equality doctrines
of European emancipation; still less with the communistic idea that,
although men have very different capacities for originating things, all
men have an equal right to destroy them."
"Griggs is mounted upon his hobby," remarked John Carvel, stretching his
feet out towards the fire. The professor turned the light of his
spectacles upon me, and puffed a cloud of smoke.
"Are you a political enthusiast and a rider of hobby-horses, Mr.
Griggs?" he asked.
"I do not know; you must ask our host."
"Pardon me. I think you know very well," said the professor. "I should
say you belonged to a class of persons who know very well what they
think."
"How do you judge?"
"That is, of all questions a man can ask, the most difficult to answer.
How do you judge of anything?"
"By applying the test of past experience to present fact," I replied.
"Then past experience is that by which I judge. How can you expect me to
tell you the whole of my past experience, in order that you may
understand how my judgment is formed? It would take years."
"You are a pair of very singular men," remarked John Carvel. "You seem
to take to argument as fish to the water. You ought to be successful in
a school of walking philosophers."
John seemed more depressed than I had ever seen him, and only made an
observation from time to time, as though to make a show of hospitality.
The professor interested me, but I could see that we were boring Carvel.
The conversation languished, and before long the latter proposed that we
should go into the drawing-room for half an hour before bed-time.
We found the ladies seated around the fire. Their voices fell suddenly
as we entered the room, and all of them looked towards John and the
professor, as though expecting something. It struck me that they had
been talking of some matter which was not intended for our ears.
"We have been making plans for Christmas," said Mrs. Carvel, as though
to break the awkward silence that followed our entrance.