Chapter XIII

May kept her word, and Rusk was obliged to go out sketching alone, or, rather, accompanied only by Denis, who on such occasions brought a book with him and read, sometimes to himself, sometimes to his companion. A good many hours they passed in this way--hours that brought Rusk a greater, though by no means a perfect, insight into the peculiar character of his pupil’s mind. There were certain things, above all, that he learned. Ordinary life, ordinary adventures, seemed to have but little attraction for Denis, and he would forsake the “Three Musketeers,” or “Treasure Island,” for any (to Rusk silly and fantastic) tale or poem or treatise that dabbled in the unseen. The boy had a mysterious standard, too, by which he judged such things. He examined them all impartially, but the vast majority he threw aside as worthless. “The man doesn’t know,” was his formula on such occasions--the man, of course, being the author--though what it was, exactly, that he knew, or didn’t know, to Rusk never became very clear. For, to himself, though varying in plausibility, the works in question all appeared to be of about equal value in relation to reality. He thought one or two of them rather clever, and one or two of them, as he called it, poetical; but the vast majority seemed to be merely foolish, and surely all alike were singularly profitless. He was not successful, nevertheless, when he tried to wean Denis from a taste which was evidently a part of his nature. Rusk himself saw in these productions nothing but a stimulus to an imagination already far too little under control. He found it difficult to reconcile the boy’s apparent credulity in such matters with his eager, alert intelligence in every other respect. There seemed to be a perpetual dream-life going on in his pupil’s mind, the reflections from which now and then flared out with so startling a brightness as actually to obscure that of his sensual perception. And his imagination had a curiously Eastern tinge Rusk found it difficult to follow. Beneath the wild fantasy of the “Arabian Nights,” he appeared to find hidden and strange realities. He knew they were fictions, and yet he had bewildering moods in which he apparently took them seriously. In all other directions Rusk found him amenable enough. He had never known anyone with so sweet a temper, so affectionate, so pleasant in his ways. Of course by this time he knew that Denis was extremely fond of him; there had been moments indeed when he had almost wished that the boy’s affection were a little less genuine--it had seemed so to deepen his responsibility. And he found himself growing alarmingly serious under the weight of this latter quantity; not outwardly so much as in the whole way he had come to look upon life. He had never particularly looked at life at all during his four extremely happy years at Cambridge. Now he seemed to himself to be plunged in it up to his eyes, as in some strange, perhaps dangerous, river, and without the least notion as to how well he could swim. He found himself endeavouring to gaze on into the future, and it was Denis’s future as often as his own that figured in the foreground of this temporal perspective. It was very well indeed, he thought, that the boy was, or would be, in a most comfortable position financially; otherwise he didn’t quite see what on earth would become of him. Even as it was, he had, somehow, a feeling of discouragement, as if he foresaw the waste of a fine intelligence and an exquisite sensibility, lost through some slight want of balance in one particular direction.

Denis sometimes had long fits of silence and abstraction which Rusk could not understand. He would be sitting before the fire, say, when he would drop off into a kind of dream from which it would be hardly possible to rouse him. Of course the tutor got accustomed to it, but at first it had made him a little anxious, for more than once he had noticed that, after he had been awakened, the boy’s mind would still seem to be filled with reflections and images from his dream, as if, indeed, he were hardly capable of distinguishing between it and reality. And now and then he appeared not even to know that he _had_ been dreaming. Rusk was perplexed, but he felt the problem to be so delicate a one that he feared to touch it, lest his touch should prove too coarse. He did not care to question Denis, because by doing so he might perchance turn his thoughts into morbid and weakening channels. Rusk was still haunted by the memory of their visit to the altar in the wood. The place surely had some mysterious influence on the boy, and any such influence, it appeared to him, must necessarily be malign. He had a horror of mental aberrations. They struck him as being far more dreadful than a twisted, misshapen body. His pupil, of course, was perfectly sane, but was there not an enemy somewhere, watching and waiting in the shadow?--crouching, ready to spring? The boy struck him as being a curious mixture of childishness and something quite different; and in the past he must have been left absolutely to himself. Certainly in things that mattered maybe most of all he had been allowed to struggle on alone as best he might. There had been an unpardonable indifference or stupidity somewhere. It was as if he had been left in the dark to find his way through a treacherous place where quicksands lay all about his feet. Possibly such things were inevitable. Possibly, if a boy was born with a certain temperament, disaster was bound to follow: but Rusk did not believe it, and he intended to prove the contrary. The idea filled him with a kind of dogged determination that was highly characteristic. No doubt if he had not happened to care for Denis his zeal would have been very much less, but it is probable that it would still have kept him to his post. He had ideas about work--they coincided beautifully with those Doctor Birch had imputed to him--that there are certain things that are worth doing, and that those were the things he wanted to do; and his present occupation, viewed with the high seriousness he just now brought to it, dropped naturally into this category.

* * * * *

Toward the end of August, in order to be present at the wedding of his eldest sister, he returned home for a week--a week which threw into extraordinary vividness the peculiarities of the Bracknel menage. He had had half a mind to bring his pupil with him, but on his arrival he was rather glad that he had left him behind. His young brother was home for the holidays; he had left school and would be going up to the university next year. His young brother was rather a swell at games, and he had staying with him a congenial spirit whom Rusk had not hitherto met. He could not in truth quite see Denis getting on with either of these important youths. They would have regarded “Skinny” with unfathomable, if unspoken, contempt, and would have said he was mad. It gave Rusk something of the measure of the change that was being wrought in his own mental attitude, when he found himself impatient of a point of view he would doubtless not very long ago have shared--found himself, too, on a good many occasions, secretly bored by the society of these two fine specimens of budding Anglo-Saxon manhood, and mentally contrasting them, not particularly favourably, with the young boy he had lately seen so much of. He had a certain simple tenderness for Denis which was quite different from any feeling he had ever had for anybody else. Rusk was not of a temperament to be easily carried away, and if he had formed no romantic friendship at school, he was certainly unlikely to do so later on in the world. He was eminently sensible and practical. His imagination, if it could indulge in a respectable flutter now and again, was not given to any particularly sustained or lofty flights. His feet were planted firmly and sturdily on this earth, and above all he hated “gush.” Of course he would have denied that there was anything in the least romantic about his affection for Denis, but the denial would not, in spite of its sincerity, have represented quite the whole truth. For undoubtedly he had come by many little steps to regard himself as, in a way, the boy’s protector; and the very fact of his pupil’s dependence upon him had strengthened this feeling, had given it just that quality of delicacy, of tenderness, which beautifully differentiated it from anything else he had ever experienced, which, at the same time, actually and tremendously deepened his whole sense of life.

His mother and sisters were eager to know all about how he was getting on, all about his pupil, all about the Bracknels; and they had evidently expected something less prosaic than Rusk’s bald account of his adventures proved to be, though what it was they had pictured was never exactly revealed.

“He’s a queer little chap,” Rusk said, in reply to a question concerning Denis, “but he’s as clever as anything. I half thought of bringing him over with me. He’d have come like a shot; he’d have liked to come, and I’d have liked you to see him.”

But he knew that it was really in the other members of the Bracknel household that his mother and sisters were interested. Rusk told them that he liked Mrs. Bracknel and May, that May was quite a jolly kind of girl, and that he didn’t care for Amy so much. Yet, in regard to this last opinion, he apparently could not, when questioned, give any particulars. A curious, and possibly absurd, idea had in fact suddenly taken possession of him, that he must say nothing in any way derogatory, nothing of the sort that his mother and sisters would have been keenly interested to hear. He did not tell them, for instance, of what had taken place on the evening of his arrival; he did not tell them even about Mr. Bracknel and Alfred. His powers of description were not vivid at the best, and to the feminine mind they seemed at present singularly pale and inadequate. To supplement them he produced a photograph--a group Denis had taken--and his sisters discovered that Amy was distinctly good-looking, but that May was almost plain, an opinion Rusk did not share. When he showed them a portrait of Denis himself, they thought him curiously unattractive.

His week at home passed quickly and pleasantly; nevertheless, at the expiration of his leave, he was surprised to find that he was not altogether sorry to return to his duties. On the day of his arrival he and Denis spent a good deal of their time paddling on the river. Denis had innumerable questions to ask, being tremendously interested in everything relating to his tutor. He wanted to know how the wedding had gone off, what his brother was like, what they had done, if they had had much tennis, what his brother’s friend was like. This last question reminded Rusk of something he had now and then thought of before--namely, that Denis himself appeared to have no friends of his own age. He had never so much as heard him allude to any companion he might have had in the past. Once indeed he had asked him if he knew any boys whom they could get to make up a four at tennis, and on that occasion his pupil had said there was no one. Mrs. Bracknel had thereupon mentioned two or three names--Denis could write and ask them if Mr. Rusk liked--but the thing viewed in this light had seemed so absurdly formal that he had not pushed it any further. Of course he could see in a way that his pupil would have little in common with his contemporaries; his mind was at once more subtle and more simple, more precocious and more childish, than that of the ordinary boy of his age; but he thought it rather a pity that he had been so isolated, so much thrown on the society of persons older than himself. It must have helped to accentuate, even to create, some of his peculiarities, and if it had not made him unbearably priggish, that was a mere happy chance.

The day after Rusk’s arrival they returned to work. Perhaps an hour had passed, and the tutor was looking over a Latin prose the boy had done for him, when the door opened and Amy entered. Rusk had known before he looked round that it was she. She had paid them several visits since the one recorded, and just before he had gone home she had come in on some pretext or another for two or three mornings in succession. Rusk, it must be confessed, had not yet screwed up his courage to the point of objecting to these interruptions, but to-day he determined to do so.

She had brought him a letter which the postman had just delivered. “How cosy you are in here,” she said calmly, seating herself in an armchair. “This room is really quite pleasant.... I can never read properly with mamma and May chattering beside me and moving about. Don’t you think it is hard to keep your attention on anything if there is a noise going on? I simply can’t read when people are talking, can you?... It is so delightfully quiet here.”

“I’m afraid we have to do a good deal of talking,” Rusk said. “We couldn’t very well work without.”

“Oh, but that isn’t the same thing. What I mean is, when people every now and then ask you some question or begin to tell you something they expect you to listen to. I could read perfectly here, for instance.”

“I don’t think it would be good for Denis’s work,” said Rusk quietly.

Amy’s tone changed slightly, taking a sharper key. “Oh, Denis’s work! I’m sure he does a lot.” Then she dropped to her softest note. “I wish you would tell me what I ought to read, Mr. Rusk--really good books--I’m sure you know everything of that kind.”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” answered Rusk, “and at present we must really go on with what we are doing.”

He returned to his prose, and Amy sat silent for a while. Then, happening to encounter her brother’s eyes, she gave him a glare. She got up. “I’m sorry for having disturbed you,” she said stiffly to Rusk as she walked to the door.

Rusk too had risen. “Oh, it’s all right,” he replied with wonderful coolness. He decided that now was the time to settle the matter once for all. “I think, all the same, if you don’t mind my saying it, that it would be better, when you want to speak to me about anything, to choose some other time than the morning.” He made this remark perfectly innocently, in all good faith, but Amy discovered a sarcastic meaning in it.

“Want to speak to you!” she cried, her cheeks flaming. “I sincerely hope I shall never want to do anything so unpleasant. I think you forget yourself and your position! One would imagine you _were_ somebody! I should have thought you might have learned how to address a lady before you volunteered to come and teach anybody else.”

Rusk stood in silence, his hand on the door handle, his eyes fixed on the opposite wall at a point somewhere above Amy’s head.

“Oh, you needn’t look at me if you don’t want to,” she continued, her voice trembling. “I know you think I’m only dirt under your feet without your telling me. But if you imagine I care you’re very much mistaken. It’s a nice example to set Denis, that is all.”

Rusk returned to the table and sat down, leaving Amy to find her own way out of the room. The boy had walked to the window while this scene was in progress. He stood there now with his back turned, his hands in his pockets, looking out. There was a minute or two of silence. Rusk scored a phrase through with his pen. “Where did you get this from?” he asked nervously. “Why will you never use your dictionary? I don’t see what objection you have to it.”

Denis came back and looked over his shoulder. Then he sat down in his place again. Rusk could not see his face, but he could tell from his attitude, from the way he sat, a good deal of what was passing in his mind. It made him regret that he had not chosen some more opportune moment to remonstrate with Amy. Denis was ashamed, and Rusk felt that it was partly his fault. A few minutes ago he had been quite glad to have been perfectly explicit. If Amy cared to take what he had said with a bad grace it was her own look-out, and probably it was all the better that she should do so. But now it suddenly appeared to him that he had been stupidly tactless. He had gone about the matter in the most maladroit fashion possible, and if his words had humiliated the girl, they could only, and in perhaps a deeper way, have had the same effect upon her brother.