Chapter V: The Maelstrom

IN some part of the world, no matter where, is said to be a terrible whirlpool, which engulfs all sea-going craft which come within its influence. At certain states of the tide, we are told, this whirlpool is no whirlpool, but a tranquil though deceitful sea. Gradually, however, as the tide changes, the waves rise high, their circular movement commences, and woe then to the stoutest ship ever built, if driven by the winds, or lucklessly steered near the outer circumference of its vortex. Once within the fatal attraction, it is inevitably absorbed and carried down, and beaten to pieces against the rocks below.

Something like this is sometimes known to happen in the experiences of poor humanity. Not exactly, for no man is driven by irresistible force, despite his own will, to inevitable destruction, nor even into folly. However, as neither figures, similes, nor parables ever run upon all-fours, nor ever will, it is enough to say that there is a maelstrom of the passions in human life which does often draw the unthinking or unresisting mariner out of his course, and sometimes woefully shatters his barque. Happy are they who have wisdom to avoid even the appearance of evil!

Happiest of all when they have Divine grace given them in all their ways to acknowledge Him who is the source of wisdom, and to seek His direction and pilotage.

There were no more Oriental studies for John Tincroft now, or at most they were few and far between, unless indeed, he cultivated them in his walks between the Manor House and High Beech Farm.

Of course he had walked home on the evening of the picnic with the distressed damsel whom he had taken under his protection.

"What else, as a gentleman, could I do?" said the clumsy fellow, when afterwards rallied by his host and his college friend on the adventures of that night, which he was, sorely against his will, compelled partly to recount, to account for his late return.

He did not think it necessary, however, to tell how the maiden had, innocently enough—have I not said that Sarah was not gifted with superfluous intellect and strength of mind, and was as little of a heroine as was ever to be found in a true story or out of it?—so she had innocently enough, in that slow and faltering walk to High Beech Farm, disclosed to John the immediate cause of her fainting fit. Not that John had not in part known it before; but his indignation was roused against the poor girl's persecutors (as she deemed them), all and sundry, as they reached his ear through the medium of her soft and plaintive voice. Ah! John Tincroft, you are on the margin of the maelstrom now; but you do not know it.

Of course, when they reached the farmhouse, John was hesitatingly invited to step in and rest himself, which he did not do, however, for which Sarah was thankful, perhaps, when she found her father in one of his fits of drunken ill-humour, and ready to quarrel with anybody who came in his way. After this invitation, however, it seemed the more incumbent on the awkward youth, who had the instincts of a gentleman for all that, to step over the next morning to ask after the health and welfare of his "partner."

As the fates would have it—the expression is no doubt heathenish, as there are no such things or principles as the fates—as accident, then—and this is almost as bad, but let it pass—accidentally, then, Mark Wilson was within, and (a rare thing for him) happened to be in a good humour. He made "the gentleman from college" welcome, took him over his small farm, insisted on his staying to lunch, treated him to some home-brewed, which John thought execrable, but did not say so; and, finally, invited him to come again as often as it pleased him.

After that it did please John Tincroft to repeat his visits every day. Sometimes, he found Mark in the sulks, and sometimes he did not. Occasionally, he noticed a peculiar thickness and hesitancy in the farmer's speech (which he attributed to a severe cold in his head and throat, and John believed it); and then, on the next occasion, he seemed to have recovered from the distressing complaint.

Sometimes John—the infatuated youth—found Sarah deep in domestic duties, which never, however, prevented his obtaining a glimpse of her pretty face, and her pretty hands, which, if they were floury and pasty, he admired all the more for having been usefully employed.

Sometimes, he found the maiden free, and at liberty to receive him in the little shabbily-furnished parlour, where, seated on a high-backed slippery-seated mahogany, horse-haired chair, he could equally admire those pretty fingers, armed with a darning-needle and worsted thread, working in and out, in the intricacies of a stocking-web. At these times our hero, who was as little guilty of being a hero as the silently admired one was of the slightest approach to a heroine, enacted to perfection the part of the Laird of Dumbiedykes (if my readers have ever heard of such a personage). Who can doubt, though, that the maelstrom current was getting powerful now?

"And oh, Walter," wrote Sarah Wilson to her distant cousin and lover (I must correct the bad spelling and false English)—"oh, Walter, there is such a funny man comes hanging about here. His name is Tincroft, and he came to these parts with young Mr. Grigson from Oxford College, and he is up at the Manor House for all the long holidays. That isn't what they call it, though. I forget what the word is, but that's what it means. And father has taken a fancy to Mr. Tincroft, and brings him here every day, and sometimes twice a day, and more than that. And he takes him over the farm, and brings him in to lunch very often, and tea sometimes, and you cannot think what a stupid he is, though he is a college gentleman; and they say he is going over to India soon to hunt tigers. He hunts tigers, too! I should say he has never hunted a fox yet, nor yet a rat."

"You should only see him—Mr. Tincroft, I mean—when he comes in, and stops an hour, and sometimes more, and father isn't in the way, and poor mother is lying down, as you know she always does in the afternoon, and there's nobody but me to keep him company. You would laugh to see how he sits and stares, and looks as if he couldn't say Boo to a goose, and is ready to go into fits with our hard-bottomed chairs—I always put the hardest, knobbiest for him, dear; but he seems as if he was stuck to it with glue. You can't think what a donkey he is. But he is to be a rich man some day—so father says he says—if he can get an estate as rightfully belongs to him, only it is locked up in some London law-courts now."

"But what does this all matter to you and me, Walter, dear? Only I sometimes wish we had such a chance of an estate; wouldn't, we," etc. etc. etc.

And then the letter went on in this wise: "We don't get on any better at home, Walter. You know what father is; and poor mother gets weaker and weaker, I think. And as to the farm, it is all going to rack and ruin. Mr. Grigson came in the other day, and had high words with father about it. He said he wouldn't stand having his land kept down in such a ruination state, and that if father wouldn't farm it better, somebody else must be got to do it. And what's worse than this, he said—the squire, I mean—that he must and will have his rent paid up punctual, or he shall distrain. Now I know there has been no rent paid the last year and a half. And what is worse still, I know that father can't pay it. And the squire says that if it isn't paid up by Christmas, there shall be an end of it. Oh, Walter, what are we to do?"

Then the letter further went on: "I have not seen much of uncle Matthew and aunt and cousin lately, and don't want to. I know they are doing all they can to set you against me. And it is too bad of them, Elizabeth and all; but they shan't do it, they shan't—"

I shall spare my readers what follows. There are hundreds of such letters written every day, and will be so long as pen, ink, and paper are to be had for love or money.

Is it travelling out of the regular course of ordinary story-telling to say that Walter Wilson was not altogether pleased with the letter I have just transcribed when he received it? Lovers are naturally suspicious; and Walter did not half like the idea of a young college man from Oxford being always dangling about, and having the range of his own special preserve, as he might have said. Perhaps he was none the less displeased with the contents of the letter for its referring, in a postscript, to a certain Mary Burgess already mentioned; and in a tone of jealousy, too, which the writer had not cared to suppress.

"Sarah knows very well that Mary Burgess is nothing to me," said he bitterly to himself. "But while she keeps house for Ralph, how can I help being sometimes in her company? It is different with her and that puppy Tincroft," he added; "and I am half a mind to write and tell her so."

It would, upon the whole, have been better for Sarah to have left out that postscript, and to have filled up her sheet of letter-paper by telling how she first became acquainted with the shy and awkward collegian. At least, as it afterwards turned out, she laid herself open to additional suspicion by this reticence. We pass this matter by for the present, however.

No doubt the other part of Sarah's letter, as I have transcribed it,—the part, I mean referring to her troubles and apprehensions,—in some degree moved her cousin's sorrow and pity. But he had heard these or similar complaints so often, and he knew so well that the inevitable end could not be very much longer staved off, that they did not produce so much effect upon him as might otherwise have been expected. If eels get so used to skinning that they do not much mind it—which possibly might be the case if the operation could be repeated on the same individual eel—it is equally certain that, after a time, we become accustomed to wails of distress from our friends when often reiterated.

To return to the main branch of our narrative. John Tincroft knew nothing of the commotion he, in his innocence, was causing, and was equally insensible to the fact that the whirlpool beneath his frail bark of human nature was increasing in velocity and deepening. He felt no alarm, therefore, but, contrariwise, rather enjoyed the new sensations springing up within him by the novel quickening of his dull capacity for pleasure, accompanied as this was by his partially laying aside his abstruse researches into Oriental literature. As to those new sensations, he could not have given them a name if he had tried.

To be sure, his friends at the Manor House had given them a name in their daily quizzical, good-natured badinage concerning John's change of habits. But then, as John remarked, it was too preposterous and absurd. As to Tom Grigson, he was always fond of his jokes; and his elder brother did not seem to be far behind him in this respect.

The matter looked more serious, though, when one day about a month after the picnic, John Tincroft, either accidentally or designedly on one part, fell in with the clergyman of whom previous mention has been made. John was returning from one of his morning walks to High Beech Farm when the rencontre took place.

"You are fond of taking exercise, Mr. Tincroft," observed the reverend gentleman.

"I don't know; not particularly, I think, Mr. Rubric," said John, with his accustomed innocent awkwardness. "At least," added he, "not till lately. I have taken more exercise of late, I think."

"And a very good thing too, if taken discreetly. You Oxford men are not always good judges, though, of how and when and where to take it. Do you think you are?"

"I beg pardon, sir," said John; "but I—I don't quite understand you."

"No! May I give you a hint, then, without offence? I am an older man than you, Mr. Tincroft," remarked Mr. Rubric, gravely but good-humouredly.

"I shall be happy, I am sure, and obliged also," answered Tincroft.

"Thank you; then I'll speak. You are coming from High Beech, I see."

"True, sir; yes, I am," said John.

"Don't you think it would be wise occasionally to vary the direction? There are more points of the compass than one."

"I have not thought about it, Mr. Rubric," said John.

"I daresay not. I thought as much, Mr. Tincroft. But will you allow me to suggest that we have some delightful scenery in quite the opposite direction. The One Tree Hill, for instance. Why, you can see seven counties from the summit of that hill—on a fine day, at least."

"Dear me! I wasn't aware of that," said John.

"And another thing," continued the parson; "I should say that High Beech is—ahem!—is, in some respects, unhealthy. I am afraid your constant excursions in that direction are not doing you any good."

"Oh!" said John, with a start, for he was rather fidgety about his health. "Do you really think so? It has never struck me in that light. I fancied I was all the better for taking more exercise. I find I can get over the ground a good deal easier than I could a month ago. And I have a better appetite too. So I am rather surprised to hear you speak of High Beech being unhealthy."

"I must speak out," thought Mr. Rubric to himself. "What a nuisance it is to have to do with men who can't understand metaphors." He did not say this, of course, but went on another tack.

"Mr. Tincroft," said he, "when I was at Oxford, and that is forty years ago, I had a young friend in the same college—I should rather say, hall. I am a Pembroke Hall man. Well, we were very close companions, and I believe we had a strong regard for each other. There came a time, however, when our friendship was to be broken in twain. It came about in this wise. We used to take long walks together, and a favourite walk of ours was to the Hinkseys. You know the Hinkseys, Mr. Tincroft?"

Yes, John knew the Hinkseys, and said so.

"There was a snug little hostelry in one of the Hinkseys, and, as was natural enough in young men in those days, though not over-wise; when we were tired, and hot with walking, we sometimes called in at this village inn for refreshment. I daresay you have done such a thing yourself, now and then, Mr. Tincroft, in your walks round Oxford?"

"I—I can't say that I have, sir," said John, hesitatingly. "Not that I should think it improper," he added, by way of salvo for the grey-headed clergyman; "but the truth is, I don't often take walks round Oxford."

"Ah! That accounts—and—but, at any rate, we did, and, as I tell you, we got too fond of the walk to the Hinkseys, and to dropping in at the little inn. At least, my friend did."

"Ah! I see," remarked John Tincroft, who thought he did see, but he didn't. "Your poor friend got to be too fond of—of what you call refreshments. I am sorry, I am sure."

Mr. Rubric smiled sadly. "That would have been sad enough," he said; "but that was not the rock on which he split. Didn't I say there was a rock? At any rate, there was a pretty innocent-looking young person at that little inn, who officiated as barmaid. There—can you not guess the rest?"

No, John couldn't guess, so he declared.

"We quarrelled about that young person. I told my friend he was going wrong; and we had high words and parted. Poor Frank! He was a high-spirited, noble fellow, and in one way, I wronged him. But he did a foolish thing, for all that. He went again and again. He meant to be honourable, he said; and so he was, to the backbone. He made love to the maiden, and after years and years of waiting, he married her. It was a love match from beginning to end."

"I daresay they were happy, though," said John, dreamily, "and if they were—"

"But they were not. They were ill-assorted, to begin with. Then all Frank's prospects for life were blasted; and, in short, the affair ended miserably. And now, Mr. Tincroft," added the rector, after a short silence, "you must excuse the freedom I have taken in mentioning this old and not very uncommon story to you."

"Oh, certainly, certainly! On the other hand, much obliged," said John; but all the time he couldn't help wondering why the rather precise old clergyman should have brought up this old story, and what in the world it had to do with the unhealthiness of High Beech. While pondering this in his slow mind, his thoughts were broken in upon with—

"If I were you, Mr. Tincroft, I wouldn't go near Beech Farm again."

"Do you really mean on account of its being—"

"Of its being an unhealthy spot for you to ruralise in," said Mr. Rubric, taking up the words. "You don't know what harm you may be doing," he added.

"Harm!"

"Yes, harm. You go there to see Miss Wilson—Sarah Wilson—do you not?"

"Dear me, sir! Not that I am aware of," replied John, aghast.

"Just so. But for all that I am afraid that young lady is the attraction. Now, listen to me. That young—young person is already engaged, as I suppose you are aware."

Yes, John was aware of the fact.

"And people about here are beginning to talk of your constant visits to the farm. You do not wish to do that young person an injury, I am sure."

"An injury to that young person! I beg your pardon, Mr. Rubric; but what could make you think of such a thing?"

"You are doing her an injury, without intending it," said the rector, gravely.

And then he went on to tell (what John already knew) of Sarah Wilson's unhappy home, of her engagement with her cousin, and of the opposition to this engagement on the part of the young man's friends. He also told (what John did not know) of the actual insolvency and prospective ruin of Mark Wilson.

"Nothing can save him," continued Mr. Rubric; "his unhappy vice has dragged him down, and will sink him still lower; and his wife too—for they are almost both alike. But the daughter may be saved, though it is the strong arm of a husband must do this. And, Mr. Tincroft, you cannot be that husband."

"No, sir; no, no, no; of course not," exclaimed John, turning hot, as the plain speaking of the rector opened a way into his dull comprehension. "Of course not," said he, nervously.

"Quite right, Mr. Tincroft; and you understand me now, I am sure," said the parson. "And now if you are coming my way, and will step in with me—"

But John had other matters to think about.