the devil’s own striking illuminated him. An idea of the devil’s own
bringing entered his mind. He looked stealthily round at the man whose
life he had saved--at the man who had devotedly served him in return. A
hideous cunning leered at his mouth and peeped out of his eyes. “Arnold
Brinkworth pretended to be married to her at the inn. By the lord Harry!
that’s a way out of it that never struck me before!” With that thought
in his heart he turned back again to his half-finished letter to Julius.
For once in his life he was strongly, fiercely agitated. For once in
his life he was daunted--and that by his Own Thought! He had written to
Julius under a strong sense of the necessity of gaining time to delude
Anne into leaving Scotland before he ventured on paying his addresses to
Mrs. Glenarm. His letter contained a string of clumsy excuses, intended
to delay his return to his brother’s house. “No,” he said to himself, as
he read it again. “Whatever else may do--_this_ won’t!” He looked round
once more at Arnold, and slowly tore the letter into fragments as he
looked.)
In the mean time Blanche had not done yet. “No,” she said, when Arnold
proposed an adjournment to the garden; “I have something more to say,
and you are interested in it, this time.” Arnold resigned himself to
listen, and worse still to answer, if there was no help for it, in the
character of an innocent stranger who had never been near the Craig
Fernie inn.
“Well,” Blanche resumed, “and what do you think has come of my letter to
Anne?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“Nothing has come of it!”
“Indeed?”
“Absolutely nothing! I know she received the letter yesterday morning. I
ought to have had the answer to-day at breakfast.”
“Perhaps she thought it didn’t require an answer.”
“She couldn’t have thought that, for reasons that I know of. Besides, in
my letter yesterday I implored her to tell me (if it was one line only)
whether, in guessing at what her trouble was, Sir Patrick and I had not
guessed right. And here is the day getting on, and no answer! What am I
to conclude?”
“I really can’t say!”
“Is it possible, Arnold, that we have _not_ guessed right, after all?
Is the wickedness of that man who blew the candles out wickedness beyond
our discovering? The doubt is so dreadful that I have made up my mind
not to bear it after to-day. I count on your sympathy and assistance
when to-morrow comes!”
Arnold’s heart sank. Some new complication was evidently gathering round
him. He waited in silence to hear the worst. Blanche bent forward, and
whispered to him.
“This is a secret,” she said. “If that creature at the writing-table has
ears for any thing but rowing and racing, he mustn’t hear this! Anne
may come to me privately to-day while you are all at luncheon. If she
doesn’t come and if I don’t hear from her, then the mystery of her
silence must be cleared up; and You must do it!”
“I!”
“Don’t make difficulties! If you can’t find your way to Craig Fernie, I
can help you. As for Anne, you know what a charming person she is, and
you know she will receive you perfectly, for my sake. I must and will
have some news of her. I can’t break the laws of the household a second
time. Sir Patrick sympathizes, but he won’t stir. Lady Lundie is a
bitter enemy. The servants are threatened with the loss of their places
if any one of them goes near Anne. There is nobody but you. And to Anne
you go to-morrow, if I don’t see her or hear from her to-day!”
This to the man who had passed as Anne’s husband at the inn, and who had
been forced into the most intimate knowledge of Anne’s miserable secret!
Arnold rose to put Milton away, with the composure of sheer despair.
Any other secret he might, in the last resort, have confided to the
discretion of a third person. But a woman’s secret--with a woman’s
reputation depending on his keeping it--was not to be confided to any
body, under any stress of circumstances whatever. “If Geoffrey doesn’t
get me out of _this,_,” he thought, “I shall have no choice but to leave
Windygates to-morrow.”
As he replaced the book on the shelf, Lady Lundie entered the library
from the garden.
“What are you doing here?” she said to her step-daughter.
“Improving my mind,” replied Blanche. “Mr. Brinkworth and I have been
reading Milton.”
“Can you condescend so far, after reading Milton all the morning, as to
help me with the invitations for the dinner next week?”
“If _you_ can condescend, Lady Lundie, after feeding the poultry all the
morning, I must be humility itself after only reading Milton!”
With that little interchange of the acid amenities of feminine
intercourse, step-mother and step-daughter withdrew to a writing-table,
to put the virtue of hospitality in practice together.
Arnold joined his friend at the other end of the library.
Geoffrey was sitting with his elbows on the desk, and his clenched fists
dug into his cheeks. Great drops of perspiration stood on his forehead,
and the fragments of a torn letter lay scattered all round him. He
exhibited symptoms of nervous sensibility for the first time in his
life--he started when Arnold spoke to him.
“What’s the matter, Geoffrey?”
“A letter to answer. And I don’t know how.”
“From Miss Silvester?” asked Arnold, dropping his voice so as to prevent
the ladies at the other end of the room from hearing him.
“No,” answered Geoffrey, in a lower voice still.
“Have you heard what Blanche has been saying to me about Miss
Silvester?”
“Some of it.”
“Did you hear Blanche say that she meant to send me to Craig Fernie
to-morrow, if she failed to get news from Miss Silvester to-day?”
“No.”
“Then you know it now. That is what Blanche has just said to me.”
“Well?”
“Well--there’s a limit to what a man can expect even from his best
friend. I hope you won’t ask me to be Blanche’s messenger to-morrow. I
can’t, and won’t, go back to the inn as things are now.”
“You have had enough of it--eh?”
“I have had enough of distressing Miss Silvester, and more than enough
of deceiving Blanche.”
“What do you mean by ‘distressing Miss Silvester?’”
“She doesn’t take the same easy view that you and I do, Geoffrey, of my
passing her off on the people of the inn as my wife.”
Geoffrey absently took up a paper-knife. Still with his head down, he
began shaving off the topmost layer of paper from the blotting-pad under
his hand. Still with his head down, he abruptly broke the silence in a
whisper.
“I say!”
“Yes?”
“How did you manage to pass her off as your wife?”
“I told you how, as we were driving from the station here.”
“I was thinking of something else. Tell me again.”
Arnold told him once more what had happened at the inn. Geoffrey
listened, without making any remark. He balanced the paper-knife
vacantly on one of his fingers. He was strangely sluggish and strangely
silent.
“All _that_ is done and ended,” said Arnold shaking him by the shoulder.
“It rests with you now to get me out of the difficulty I’m placed in
with Blanche. Things must be settled with Miss Silvester to-day.”
“Things _shall_ be settled.”
“Shall be? What are you waiting for?”
“I’m waiting to do what you told me.”
“What I told you?”
“Didn’t you tell me to consult Sir Patrick before I married her?”
“To be sure! so I did.”
“Well--I am waiting for a chance with Sir Patrick.”
“And then?”
“And then--” He looked at Arnold for the first time. “Then,” he said,
“you may consider it settled.”
“The marriage?”
He suddenly looked down again at the blotting-pad. “Yes--the marriage.”
Arnold offered his hand in congratulation. Geoffrey never noticed it.
His eyes were off the blotting-pad again. He was looking out of the
window near him.
“Don’t I hear voices outside?” he asked.
“I believe our friends are in the garden,” said Arnold. “Sir Patrick may
be among them. I’ll go and see.”
The instant his back was turned Geoffrey snatched up a sheet of
note-paper. “Before I forget it!” he said to himself. He wrote the word
“Memorandum” at the top of the page, and added these lines beneath it:
“He asked for her by the name of his wife at the door. He said, at
dinner, before the landlady and the waiter, ‘I take these rooms for my
wife.’ He made _her_ say he was her husband at the same time. After
that he stopped all night. What do the lawyers call this in
Scotland?--(Query: a marriage?)”
After folding up the paper he hesitated for a moment. “No!” he thought,
“It won’t do to trust to what Miss Lundie said about it. I can’t be
certain till I have consulted Sir Patrick himself.”
He put the paper away in his pocket, and wiped the heavy perspiration
from his forehead. He was pale--for _him,_ strikingly pale--when Arnold
came back.
“Any thing wrong, Geoffrey?--you’re as white as ashes.”
“It’s the heat. Where’s Sir Patrick?”
“You may see for yourself.”
Arnold pointed to the window. Sir Patrick was crossing the lawn, on
his way to the library with a newspaper in his hand; and the guests at
Windygates were accompanying him. Sir Patrick was smiling, and saying
nothing. The guests were talking excitedly at the tops of their voices.
There had apparently been a collision of some kind between the old
school and the new. Arnold directed Geoffrey’s attention to the state of
affairs on the lawn.
“How are you to consult Sir Patrick with all those people about him?”
“I’ll consult Sir Patrick, if I take him by the scruff of the neck and
carry him into the next county!” He rose to his feet as he spoke those
words, and emphasized them under his breath with an oath.
Sir Patrick entered the library, with the guests at his heels.
CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH.
CLOSE ON IT.
THE object of the invasion of the library by the party in the garden
appeared to be twofold.
Sir Patrick had entered the room to restore the newspaper to the place
from which he had taken it. The guests, to the number of five, had
followed him, to appeal in a body to Geoffrey Delamayn. Between these
two apparently dissimilar motives there was a connection, not visible on
the surface, which was now to assert itself.
Of the five guests, two were middle-aged gentlemen belonging to that
large, but indistinct, division of the human family whom the hand of
Nature has painted in unobtrusive neutral tint. They had absorbed the
ideas of their time with such receptive capacity as they possessed;
and they occupied much the same place in society which the chorus in an
opera occupies on the stage. They echoed the prevalent sentiment of the
moment; and they gave the solo-talker time to fetch his breath.
The three remaining guests were on the right side of thirty. All
profoundly versed in horse-racing, in athletic sports, in pipes, beer,
billiards, and betting. All profoundly ignorant of every thing else
under the sun. All gentlemen by birth, and all marked as such by the
stamp of “a University education.” They may be personally described as
faint reflections of Geoffrey; and they may be numerically distinguished
(in the absence of all other distinction) as One, Two, and Three.
Sir Patrick laid the newspaper on the table and placed himself in one of
the comfortable arm-chairs. He was instantly assailed, in his domestic
capacity, by his irrepressible sister-in-law. Lady Lundie dispatched
Blanche to him with the list of her guests at the dinner. “For your
uncle’s approval, my dear, as head of the family.”
While Sir Patrick was looking over the list, and while Arnold was making
his way to Blanche, at the back of her uncle’s chair, One, Two, and
Three--with the Chorus in attendance on them--descended in a body on
Geoffrey, at the other end of the room, and appealed in rapid succession
to his superior authority, as follows:
“I say, Delamayn. We want You. Here is Sir Patrick running a regular
Muck at us. Calls us aboriginal Britons. Tells us we ain’t educated.
Doubts if we could read, write, and cipher, if he tried us. Swears he’s
sick of fellows showing their arms and legs, and seeing which fellow’s
hardest, and who’s got three belts of muscle across his wind, and who
hasn’t, and the like of that. Says a most infernal thing of a chap.
Says--because a chap likes a healthy out-of-door life, and trains for
rowing and running, and the rest of it, and don’t see his way to stewing
over his books--_therefore_ he’s safe to commit all the crimes in the
calendar, murder included. Saw your name down in the newspaper for the
Foot-Race; and said, when we asked him if he’d taken the odds, he’d
lay any odds we liked against you in the other Race at the
University--meaning, old boy, your Degree. Nasty, that about the
Degree--in the opinion of Number One. Bad taste in Sir Patrick to rake
up what we never mention among ourselves--in the opinion of Number Two.
Un-English to sneer at a man in that way behind his back--in the opinion
of Number Three. Bring him to book, Delamayn. Your name’s in the papers;
he can’t ride roughshod over You.”
The two choral gentlemen agreed (in the minor key) with the general
opinion. “Sir Patrick’s views are certainly extreme, Smith?” “I think,
Jones, it’s desirable to hear Mr. Delamayn on the other side.”
Geoffrey looked from one to the other of his admirers with an expression
on his face which was quite new to them, and with something in his
manner which puzzled them all.
“You can’t argue with Sir Patrick yourselves,” he said, “and you want me
to do it?”
One, Two, Three, and the Chorus all answered, “Yes.”
“I won’t do it.”
One, Two, Three, and the Chorus all asked, “Why?”
“Because,” answered Geoffrey, “you’re all wrong. And Sir Patrick’s
right.”
Not astonishment only, but downright stupefaction, struck the deputation
from the garden speechless.
Without saying a word more to any of the persons standing near him,
Geoffrey walked straight up to Sir Patrick’s arm-chair, and personally
addressed him. The satellites followed, and listened (as well they
might) in wonder.
“You will lay any odds, Sir,” said Geoffrey “against me taking my
Degree? You’re quite right. I sha’n’t take my Degree. You doubt whether
I, or any of those fellows behind me, could read, write, and cipher
correctly if you tried us. You’re right again--we couldn’t. You say you
don’t know why men like Me, and men like Them, may not begin with rowing
and running and the like of that, and end in committing all the crimes
in the calendar: murder included. Well! you may be right again there.
Who’s to know what may happen to him? or what he may not end in doing
before he dies? It may be Another, or it may be Me. How do I know?
and how do you?” He suddenly turned on the deputation, standing
thunder-struck behind him. “If you want to know what I think, there it
is for you, in plain words.”
There was something, not only in the shamelessness of the declaration
itself, but in the fierce pleasure that the speaker seemed to feel in
making it, which struck the circle of listeners, Sir Patrick included,
with a momentary chill.
In the midst of the silence a sixth guest appeared on the lawn, and
stepped into the library--a silent, resolute, unassuming, elderly man
who had arrived the day before on a visit to Windygates, and who
was well known, in and out of London, as one of the first consulting
surgeons of his time.
“A discussion going on?” he asked. “Am I in the way?”
“There’s no discussion--we are all agreed,” cried Geoffrey, answering
boisterously for the rest. “The more the merrier, Sir!”
After a glance at Geoffrey, the surgeon suddenly checked himself on the
point of advancing to the inner part of the room, and remained standing
at the window.
“I beg your pardon,” said Sir Patrick, addressing himself to Geoffrey,
with a grave dignity which was quite new in Arnold’s experience of him.
“We are not all agreed. I decline, Mr. Delamayn, to allow you to connect
me with such an expression of feeling on your part as we have just
heard. The language you have used leaves me no alternative but to meet
your statement of what you suppose me to have said by my statement
of what I really did say. It is not my fault if the discussion in the
garden is revived before another audience in this room--it is yours.”
He looked as he spoke to Arnold and Blanche, and from them to the
surgeon standing at the window.
The surgeon had found an occupation for himself which completely
isolated him among the rest of the guests. Keeping his own face in
shadow, he was studying Geoffrey’s face, in the full flood of light
that fell on it, with a steady attention which must have been generally
remarked, if all eyes had not been turned toward Sir Patrick at the
time.
It was not an easy face to investigate at that moment.
While Sir Patrick had been speaking Geoffrey had seated himself near the
window, doggedly impenetrable to the reproof of which he was the object.
In his impatience to consult the one authority competent to decide
the question of Arnold’s position toward Anne, he had sided with Sir
Patrick, as a means of ridding himself of the unwelcome presence of his
friends--and he had defeated his own purpose, thanks to his own brutish
incapability of bridling himself in the pursuit of it. Whether he was
now discouraged under these circumstances, or whether he was simply
resigned to bide his time till his time came, it was impossible, judging
by outward appearances, to say. With a heavy dropping at the corners of
his mouth, with a stolid indifference staring dull in his eyes, there
he sat, a man forearmed, in his own obstinate neutrality, against all
temptation to engage in the conflict of opinions that was to come.
Sir Patrick took up the newspaper which he had brought in from the
garden, and looked once more to see if the surgeon was attending to him.
No! The surgeon’s attention was absorbed in his own subject. There he
was in the same position, with his mind still hard at work on something
in Geoffrey which at once interested and puzzled it! “That man,” he was
thinking to himself, “has come here this morning after traveling from
London all night. Does any ordinary fatigue explain what I see in his
face? No!”
“Our little discussion in the garden,” resumed Sir Patrick, answering
Blanche’s inquiring look as she bent over him, “began, my dear, in a
paragraph here announcing Mr. Delamayn’s forthcoming appearance in a
foot-race in the neighborhood of London. I hold very unpopular opinions
as to the athletic displays which are so much in vogue in England just
now. And it is possible that I may have expressed those opinions a
little too strongly, in the heat of discussion, with gentlemen who
are opposed to me--I don’t doubt, conscientiously opposed--on this
question.”
A low groan of protest rose from One, Two, and Three, in return for the
little compliment which Sir Patrick had paid to them. “How about rowing
and running ending in the Old Bailey and the gallows? You said that,
Sir--you know you did!”
The two choral gentlemen looked at each other, and agreed with the
prevalent sentiment. “It came to that, I think, Smith.” “Yes, Jones, it
certainly came to that.”
The only two men who still cared nothing about it were Geoffrey and the
surgeon. There sat the first, stolidly neutral--indifferent alike to
the attack and the defense. There stood the second, pursuing his
investigation--with the growing interest in it of a man who was
beginning to see his way to the end.
“Hear my defense, gentlemen,” continued Sir Patrick, as courteously
as ever. “You belong, remember, to a nation which especially claims to
practice the rules of fair play. I must beg to remind you of what I said
in the garden. I started with a concession. I admitted--as every person
of the smallest sense must admit--that a man will, in the great majority
of cases, be all the fitter for mental exercise if he wisely combines
physical exercise along with it. The whole question between the two is a
question of proportion and degree, and my complaint of the present time
is that the present time doesn’t see it. Popular opinion in England
seems to me to be, not only getting to consider the cultivation of the
muscles as of equal importance with the cultivation of the mind, but to
be actually extending--in practice, if not in theory--to the absurd
and dangerous length of putting bodily training in the first place of
importance, and mental training in the second. To take a case in point:
I can discover no enthusiasm in the nation any thing like so genuine and
any thing like so general as the enthusiasm excited by your University
boat-race. Again: I see this Athletic Education of yours made a
matter of public celebration in schools and colleges; and I ask any
unprejudiced witness to tell me which excites most popular enthusiasm,
and which gets the most prominent place in the public journals--the
exhibition, indoors (on Prize-day), of what the boys can do with their
minds? or the exhibition, out of doors (on Sports-day), of what the
boys can do with their bodies? You know perfectly well which performance
excites the loudest cheers, which occupies the prominent place in the
newspapers, and which, as a necessary consequence, confers the highest
social honors on the hero of the day.”
Another murmur from One, Two, and Three. “We have nothing to say to
that, Sir; have it all your own way, so far.”
Another ratification of agreement with the prevalent opinion between
Smith and Jones.
“Very good,” pursued Sir Patrick. “We are all of one mind as to which
way the public feeling sets. If it is a feeling to be respected and
encouraged, show me the national advantage which has resulted from it.
Where is the influence of this modern outburst of manly enthusiasm on
the serious concerns of life? and how has it improved the character of
the people at large? Are we any of us individually readier than we ever
were to sacrifice our own little private interests to the public good?
Are we dealing with the serious social questions of our time in a
conspicuously determined, downright, and definite way? Are we becoming a
visibly and indisputably purer people in our code of commercial morals?
Is there a healthier and higher tone in those public amusements which
faithfully reflect in all countries the public taste? Produce me
affirmative answers to these questions, which rest on solid proof, and
I’ll accept the present mania for athletic sports as something better
than an outbreak of our insular boastfulness and our insular barbarity
in a new form.”
“Question! question!” in a general cry, from One, Two, and Three.
“Question! question!” in meek reverberation, from Smith and Jones.
“That is the question,” rejoined Sir Patrick. “You admit the existence
of the public feeling and I ask, what good does it do?”
“What harm does it do?” from One, Two, and Three.
“Hear! hear!” from Smith and Jones.
“That’s a fair challenge,” replied Sir Patrick. “I am bound to meet you
on that new ground. I won’t point, gentlemen, by way of answer, to the
coarseness which I can see growing on our national manners, or to the
deterioration which appears to me to be spreading more and more widely
in our national tastes. You may tell me with perfect truth that I am too
old a man to be a fair judge of manners and tastes which have got beyond
my standards. We will try the issue, as it now stands between us, on its
abstract merits only. I assert that a state of public feeling which does
practically place physical training, in its estimation, above moral and
mental training, is a positively bad and dangerous state of feeling in
this, that it encourages the inbred reluctance in humanity to submit to
the demands which moral and mental cultivation must inevitably make on
it. Which am I, as a boy, naturally most ready to do--to try how high I
can jump? or to try how much I can learn? Which training comes easiest
to me as a young man? The training which teaches me to handle an oar?
or the training which teaches me to return good for evil, and to love
my neighbor as myself? Of those two experiments, of those two trainings,
which ought society in England to meet with the warmest encouragement?
And which does society in England practically encourage, as a matter of
fact?”
“What did you say yourself just now?” from One, Two, and Three.
“Remarkably well put!” from Smith and Jones.
“I said,” admitted Sir Patrick, “that a man will go all the better
to his books for his healthy physical exercise. And I say that
again--provided the physical exercise be restrained within fit limits.
But when public feeling enters into the question, and directly exalts
the bodily exercises above the books--then I say public feeling is in a
dangerous extreme. The bodily exercises, in that case, will be uppermost
in the youth’s thoughts, will have the strongest hold on his
interest, will take the lion’s share of his time, and will, by those
means--barring the few purely exceptional instances--slowly and surely
end in leaving him, to all good moral and mental purpose, certainly an
uncultivated, and, possibly, a dangerous man.”
A cry from the camp of the adversaries: “He’s got to it at last! A man
who leads an out-of-door life, and uses the strength that God has given
to him, is a dangerous man. Did any body ever hear the like of that?”
Cry reverberated, with variations, by the two human echoes: “No! Nobody
ever heard the like of that!”