In the meantime the life of Horace Scarsdale had made progress,
according to his own plan, in his new sphere. His uncle, at first
annoyed and disturbed by the summary settlement which the young man had
made for himself, was perhaps, after all, rather pleased than otherwise
to be thus freed from the charge of arranging for one whom he understood
so little; and no opposition of friends hindered his establishment in
the office of Mr. Pouncet, where the lawyer, half out of admiration for
the abilities which speedily developed themselves in his new clerk, and
half in tender regard for the suit which he possibly might have to
conduct for him, was very gracious to Horace. Everything promised well
for the new comer: his prodigious knowledge of the private affairs of
everybody in the county, their weaknesses and follies--knowledge
acquired, as we have said, from the outdoor servants and humble country
tradesmen in the village alehouses, but of which Horace was skilful
enough to veil the origin--amazed his employer, who found these
gleanings of unexpected knowledge wonderfully useful to him, and could
not comprehend how they had been gained. The young man had now an
income, small in reality, but to him competent and satisfactory, and
sweetened by the consciousness of freedom and of knowing it was all his
own. He was eminently cold-blooded, and "superior to impulse"--a man who
could calculate everything, and settle his manner of life with an
uncompromising firmness; but he was not a stoic. He stepped into all the
dissipations of the little country town--stepped, but did not
plunge--with an unlovely force, which _could_ command itself, and did
not. He was not "led away," either by society, or youthful spirits, or
by that empire of the senses which sometimes overcomes very young men.
What he did which was wrong he did with full will and purpose,
gratifying his senses without obeying them. He carried his cool head and
steady nerves through all the scenes of excitement and debauchery of
which Kenlisle was capable--and it had its hidden centre of shame and
vice, like every other town--sometimes as an observer, often as a
partaker; but he was never "carried away"--never forgot himself--never,
by any chance, either in pleasure, or frolic, or vice more piquant than
either, ceased to hold himself, Horace Scarsdale, closer and dearer than
either sin or pleasure. He was the kind of man to be vicious in
contradistinction to being a victim or a slave of vice. He was the man
to pass triumphantly through hundreds more innocent than himself, strong
in the unspeakable superiority of being able to stop when he found it
necessary, and of having at all times that self-control and
self-dominion which belongs to cold blood and a thoroughly selfish
spirit. Secure in this potent ascendancy of self-regard, Horace could do
many things which would have destroyed the reputation of a less cool or
more impressionable man. Yet his entry into independent life, and those
pleasures hitherto unknown to him--mean and miserable as were the
dissipations of the little country town--occupied Horace, though not to
the exclusion of his own interests, enough to make him slower than he
had intended to be, in his searches after his father's secret. True,
there was no case of Scarsdale _versus_ Scarsdale, or _versus_ any other
person, in any of the law reports he could reach, any more than there
was in Mr. Pouncet's brain; and he knew no means at the present moment
of entering on his inquiry, and had obtained no clue whatever as to the
manner of this secret, or which was the way of finding it out. But he
did not chafe under this, as in other circumstances he might have done:
for the present he was sufficiently occupied, and not at all
discontented with his life.
At the same time, in spite of the deportment which displeased the
Colonel, there were some traces of breeding, unconsciously to himself,
in the speech and manner of Horace, which gained him acceptance among
the people around him. He was not refined nor cultivated, nor accustomed
to society; but though his sentiments might be vulgar enough, he himself
was not so. His very rudeness was not the rudeness of a Kenlisle
townsman; he was ignorant of that extraordinary junction of rural vanity
and urban importance, which goes towards the making of the fashionable
class of such a place. His father, whom Horace would not have imitated
consciously on any account whatever, and who certainly bestowed no pains
on his instruction, had notwithstanding known in his day a society and
breeding much superior to anything in the little north-country town, and
the atmosphere lingered still about Mr. Scarsdale, an imperceptible
influence which had affected his son unawares. Then his very position,
outcast from society as he had been brought up, gave him a certain
superiority over the limited people to whom a local "circle" was the
world, and an introduction to some certain house the highest point of
ambition. Horace laughed aloud among his new associates at the idea of
society in Kenlisle, and smiled to the same import with a silent
contempt which was extremely superior and imposing in Mrs. Pouncet's
drawing-room, to which he was speedily admitted, in right of his
mysterious "prospects."
By dint of this contempt for the community in general, which everybody
of course understood to bear exception for themselves, and of the
singular and mysterious circumstances of his family, which began to be
remembered and talked of; by his own arrogant philosophy, which imposed
upon the inexperienced youths about him, and the subtle talents to which
his employer bore witness, he grew rapidly into an object of interest
and curiosity in the little town. No one could tell what sudden eminence
he might spring into, upon some sudden discovery; nobody knew anything
of him--no one was admitted to his confidence; he was the inscrutable
personage of the place, and left the fullest ground for fancy, which, in
the form of gossip, occupied itself mightily about the singular young
man. All this involuntary homage was incense to Horace; he sneered at
it, yet it pleased him. He was elated to find himself a person of
importance, though he despised the community which honoured him; and
between the honours of the little Kenlisle society, the pleasures deep
down below the surface, which gave a black side to the humanity of even
that secluded place, and the new sense of freedom, solitude, and
self-government in this new life--the whole put together effaced from
his mind for the time all that eagerness for his father's secret which
had preyed upon him when his life was idle and unoccupied, and when he
sat by that father's table every day. He had no responsibilities, no
"ties," and no heart to feel the want of affection. He abandoned
himself, so far as he could abandon that self which was the only thing
he never forgot, to all his new enjoyments. He was still young,
absolute, and highflying, though his youth was neither innocent nor
lovely; he forgot his deeply-laid projects for the moment, and stood
still on his way, contenting himself with an importance, a mysterious
superiority, a license of pleasure unknown to him before.
He was not an experienced schemer, bent upon the success of his plans,
and deaf to the voices of the charmers. He was young, and, according to
his fashion, he stood still and forgot his object in the pastimes of his
youth.