Chapter IX: Part 2: Sawston (3)

“Mine’s the formal invitation,” said Agnes. “How very odd! Mr. Ansell will be there. Surely we asked him here! Did you know he knew the Jacksons?”

“This makes refusal very difficult,” said Herbert, who was anxious to accept. “At all events, Rickie ought to go.”

“I do not want to go,” said Rickie, slowly opening his own letter. “As Agnes says, Ansell has refused to come to us. I cannot put myself out for him.”

“Who’s yours from?” she demanded.

“Mrs. Silt,” replied Herbert, who had seen the handwriting. “I trust she does not want to pay us a visit this term, with the examinations impending and all the machinery at full pressure. Though, Rickie, you will have to accept the Jacksons’ invitation.”

“I cannot possibly go. I have been too rude; with Widdrington we always meet here. I’ll stop with the boys—” His voice caught suddenly. He had opened Mrs. Silt’s letter.

“The Silts are not ill, I hope?”

“No. But, I say,”—he looked at his wife,—“I do think this is going too far. Really, Agnes.”

“What has happened?”

“It is going too far,” he repeated. He was nerving himself for another battle. “I cannot stand this sort of thing. There are limits.”

He laid the letter down. It was Herbert who picked it up, and read: “Aunt Emily has just written to us. We are so glad that her troubles are over, in spite of the expense. It never does to live apart from one’s own relatives so much as she has done up to now. He goes next Saturday to Canada. What you told her about him just turned the scale. She has asked us—”

“No, it’s too much,” he interrupted. “What I told her—told her about him—no, I will have it out at last. Agnes!”

“Yes?” said his wife, raising her eyes from Mrs. Jackson’s formal invitation.

“It’s you—it’s you. I never mentioned him to her. Why, I’ve never seen her or written to her since. I accuse you.”

Then Herbert overbore him, and he collapsed. He was asked what he meant. Why was he so excited? Of what did he accuse his wife. Each time he spoke more feebly, and before long the brother and sister were laughing at him. He felt bewildered, like a boy who knows that he is right but cannot put his case correctly. He repeated, “I’ve never mentioned him to her. It’s a libel. Never in my life.” And they cried, “My dear Rickie, what an absurd fuss!” Then his brain cleared. His eye fell on the letter that his wife had received from his aunt, and he reopened the battle.

“Agnes, give me that letter, if you please.”

“Mrs. Jackson’s?”

“My aunt’s.”

She put her hand on it, and looked at him doubtfully. She saw that she had failed to bully him.

“My aunt’s letter,” he repeated, rising to his feet and bending over the table towards her.

“Why, dear?”

“Yes, why indeed?” echoed Herbert. He too had bullied Rickie, but from a purer motive: he had tried to stamp out a dissension between husband and wife. It was not the first time he had intervened.

“The letter. For this reason: it will show me what you have done. I believe you have ruined Stephen. You have worked at it for two years. You have put words into my mouth to ‘turn the scale’ against him. He goes to Canada—and all the world thinks it is owing to me. As I said before—I advise you to stop smiling—you have gone a little too far.”

They were all on their feet now, standing round the little table. Agnes said nothing, but the fingers of her delicate hand tightened upon the letter. When her husband snatched at it she resisted, and with the effect of a harlequinade everything went on the floor—lamb, mint sauce, gooseberries, lemonade, whisky. At once they were swamped in domesticities. She rang the bell for the servant, cries arose, dusters were brought, broken crockery (a wedding present) picked up from the carpet; while he stood wrathfully at the window, regarding the obscured sun’s decline.

“I _must_ see her letter,” he repeated, when the agitation was over. He was too angry to be diverted from his purpose. Only slight emotions are thwarted by an interlude of farce.

“I’ve had enough of this quarrelling,” she retorted. “You know that the Silts are inaccurate. I think you might have given me the benefit of the doubt. If you will know—have you forgotten that ride you took with him?”

“I—” he was again bewildered. “The ride where I dreamt—”

“The ride where you turned back because you could not listen to a disgraceful poem?”

“I don’t understand.”

“The poem was Aunt Emily. He read it to you and a stray soldier. Afterwards you told me. You said, ‘Really it is shocking, his ingratitude. She ought to know about it’ She does know, and I should be glad of an apology.”

He had said something of the sort in a fit of irritation. Mrs. Silt was right—he had helped to turn the scale.

“Whatever I said, you knew what I meant. You knew I’d sooner cut my tongue out than have it used against him. Even then.” He sighed. Had he ruined his brother? A curious tenderness came over him, and passed when he remembered his own dead child. “_We_ have ruined him, then. Have you any objection to ‘we’? _We_ have disinherited him.”

“I decide against you,” interposed Herbert. “I have now heard both sides of this deplorable affair. You are talking most criminal nonsense. ‘Disinherit!’ Sentimental twaddle. It’s been clear to me from the first that Mrs. Failing has been imposed upon by the Wonham man, a person with no legal claim on her, and any one who exposes him performs a public duty—”

“—And gets money.”

“Money?” He was always uneasy at the word. “Who mentioned money?”

“Just understand me, Herbert, and of what it is that I accuse my wife.” Tears came into his eyes. “It is not that I like the Wonham man, or think that he isn’t a drunkard and worse. He’s too awful in every way. But he ought to have my aunt’s money, because he’s lived all his life with her, and is her nephew as much as I am. You see, my father went wrong.” He stopped, amazed at himself. How easy it had been to say! He was withering up: the power to care about this stupid secret had died.

When Herbert understood, his first thought was for Dunwood House.

“Why have I never been told?” was his first remark.

“We settled to tell no one,” said Agnes. “Rickie, in his anxiety to prove me a liar, has broken his promise.”

“I ought to have been told,” said Herbert, his anger increasing. “Had I known, I could have averted this deplorable scene.”

“Let me conclude it,” said Rickie, again collapsing and leaving the dining-room. His impulse was to go straight to Cadover and make a business-like statement of the position to Stephen. Then the man would be armed, and perhaps fight the two women successfully, But he resisted the impulse. Why should he help one power of evil against another? Let them go intertwined to destruction. To enrich his brother would be as bad as enriching himself. If their aunt’s money ever did come to him, he would refuse to accept it. That was the easiest and most dignified course. He troubled himself no longer with justice or pity, and the next day he asked his wife’s pardon for his behaviour.

In the dining-room the conversation continued. Agnes, without much difficulty, gained her brother as an ally. She acknowledged that she had been wrong in not telling him, and he then declared that she had been right on every other point. She slurred a little over the incident of her treachery, for Herbert was sometimes clearsighted over details, though easily muddled in a general survey. Mrs. Failing had had plenty of direct causes of complaint, and she dwelt on these. She dealt, too, on the very handsome way in which the young man, “though he knew nothing, had never asked to know,” was being treated by his aunt.

“‘Handsome’ is the word,” said Herbert. “I hope not indulgently. He does not deserve indulgence.”

And she knew that he, like herself, could remember money, and that it lent an acknowledged halo to her cause.

“It is not a savoury subject,” he continued, with sudden stiffness. “I understand why Rickie is so hysterical. My impulse”—he laid his hand on her shoulder—“is to abandon it at once. But if I am to be of any use to you, I must hear it all. There are moments when we must look facts in the face.”

She did not shrink from the subject as much as he thought, as much as she herself could have wished. Two years before, it had filled her with a physical loathing. But by now she had accustomed herself to it.

“I am afraid, Bertie boy, there is nothing else to hear, I have tried to find out again and again, but Aunt Emily will not tell me. I suppose it is natural. She wants to shield the Elliot name. She only told us in a fit of temper; then we all agreed to keep it to ourselves; then Rickie again mismanaged her, and ever since she has refused to let us know any details.”

“A most unsatisfactory position.” “So I feel.” She sat down again with a sigh. Mrs. Failing had been a great trial to her orderly mind. “She is an odd woman. She is always laughing. She actually finds it amusing that we know no more.”

“They are an odd family.”

“They are indeed.”

Herbert, with unusual sweetness, bent down and kissed her.

She thanked him.

Their tenderness soon passed. They exchanged it with averted eyes. It embarrassed them. There are moments for all of us when we seem obliged to speak in a new unprofitable tongue. One might fancy a seraph, vexed with our normal language, who touches the pious to blasphemy, the blasphemous to piety. The seraph passes, and we proceed unaltered—conscious, however, that we have not been ourselves, and that we may fail in this function yet again. So Agnes and Herbert, as they proceeded to discuss the Jackson’s supper-party, had an uneasy memory of spiritual deserts, spiritual streams.

XXVI

Poor Mr. Ansell was actually sitting in the garden of Dunwood House. It was Sunday morning. The air was full of roasting beef. The sound of a manly hymn, taken very fast, floated over the road from the school chapel. He frowned, for he was reading a book, the Essays of Anthony Eustace Failing.

He was here on account of this book—at least so he told himself. It had just been published, and the Jacksons were sure that Mr. Elliot would have a copy. For a book one may go anywhere. It would not have been logical to enter Dunwood House for the purpose of seeing Rickie, when Rickie had not come to supper yesterday to see him. He was at Sawston to assure himself of his friend’s grave. With quiet eyes he had intended to view the sods, with unfaltering fingers to inscribe the epitaph. Love remained. But in high matters he was practical. He knew that it would be useless to reveal it.

“Morning!” said a voice behind him.

He saw no reason to reply to this superfluous statement, and went on with his reading.

“Morning!” said the voice again.

As for the Essays, the thought was somewhat old-fashioned, and he picked many holes in it; nor was he anything but bored by the prospect of the brotherhood of man. However, Mr. Failing stuck to his guns, such as they were, and fired from them several good remarks. Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity (coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something), and his avowed preference for coarseness. Vulgarity, to him, had been the primal curse, the shoddy reticence that prevents man opening his heart to man, the power that makes against equality. From it sprang all the things that he hated—class shibboleths, ladies, lidies, the game laws, the Conservative party—all the things that accent the divergencies rather than the similarities in human nature. Whereas coarseness—But at this point Herbert Pembroke had scrawled with a blue pencil: “Childish. One reads no further.”

“Morning!” repeated the voice.

Ansell read further, for here was the book of a man who had tried, however unsuccessfully, to practice what he preached. Mrs. Failing, in her Introduction, described with delicate irony his difficulties as a landlord; but she did not record the love in which his name was held. Nor could her irony touch him when he cried: “Attain the practical through the unpractical. There is no other road.” Ansell was inclined to think that the unpractical is its own reward, but he respected those who attempted to journey beyond it. We must all of us go over the mountains. There is certainly no other road.

“Nice morning!” said the voice.

It was not a nice morning, so Ansell felt bound to speak. He answered: “No. Why?” A clod of earth immediately struck him on the back. He turned round indignantly, for he hated physical rudeness. A square man of ruddy aspect was pacing the gravel path, his hands deep in his pockets. He was very angry. Then he saw that the clod of earth nourished a blue lobelia, and that a wound of corresponding size appeared on the pie-shaped bed. He was not so angry. “I expect they will mind it,” he reflected. Last night, at the Jacksons’, Agnes had displayed a brisk pity that made him wish to wring her neck. Maude had not exaggerated. Mr. Pembroke had patronized through a sorrowful voice and large round eyes. Till he met these people he had never been told that his career was a failure. Apparently it was. They would never have been civil to him if it had been a success, if they or theirs had anything to fear from him.

In many ways Ansell was a conceited man; but he was never proud of being right. He had foreseen Rickie’s catastrophe from the first, but derived from this no consolation. In many ways he was pedantic; but his pedantry lay close to the vineyards of life—far closer than that fetich Experience of the innumerable tea-cups. He had a great many facts to learn, and before he died he learnt a suitable quantity. But he never forgot that the holiness of the heart’s imagination can alone classify these facts—can alone decide which is an exception, which an example. “How unpractical it all is!” That was his comment on Dunwood House. “How unbusiness-like! They live together without love. They work without conviction. They seek money without requiring it. They die, and nothing will have happened, either for themselves or for others.” It is a comment that the academic mind will often make when first confronted with the world.

But he was becoming illogical. The clod of earth had disturbed him. Brushing the dirt off his back, he returned to the book. What a curious affair was the essay on “Gaps”! Solitude, star-crowned, pacing the fields of England, has a dialogue with Seclusion. He, poor little man, lives in the choicest scenery—among rocks, forests, emerald lawns, azure lakes. To keep people out he has built round his domain a high wall, on which is graven his motto—“Procul este profani.” But he cannot enjoy himself. His only pleasure is in mocking the absent Profane. They are in his mind night and day. Their blemishes and stupidities form the subject of his great poem, “In the Heart of Nature.” Then Solitude tells him that so it always will be until he makes a gap in the wall, and permits his seclusion to be the sport of circumstance. He obeys. The Profane invade him; but for short intervals they wander elsewhere, and during those intervals the heart of Nature is revealed to him.

This dialogue had really been suggested to Mr. Failing by a talk with his brother-in-law. It also touched Ansell. He looked at the man who had thrown the clod, and was now pacing with obvious youth and impudence upon the lawn. “Shall I improve my soul at his expense?” he thought. “I suppose I had better.” In friendly tones he remarked, “Were you waiting for Mr. Pembroke?”

“No,” said the young man. “Why?”

Ansell, after a moment’s admiration, flung the Essays at him. They hit him in the back. The next moment he lay on his own back in the lobelia pie.

“But it hurts!” he gasped, in the tones of a puzzled civilization. “What you do hurts!” For the young man was nicking him over the shins with the rim of the book cover. “Little brute—_ee—ow_!”

“Then say Pax!”

Something revolted in Ansell. Why should he say Pax? Freeing his hand, he caught the little brute under the chin, and was again knocked into the lobelias by a blow on the mouth.

“Say Pax!” he repeated, pressing the philosopher’s skull into the mould; and he added, with an anxiety that was somehow not offensive, “I do advise you. You’d really better.”

Ansell swallowed a little blood. He tried to move, and he could not. He looked carefully into the young man’s eyes and into the palm of his right hand, which at present swung unclenched, and he said “Pax!”

“Shake hands!” said the other, helping him up. There was nothing Ansell loathed so much as the hearty Britisher; but he shook hands, and they stared at each other awkwardly. With civil murmurs they picked the little blue flowers off each other’s clothes. Ansell was trying to remember why they had quarrelled, and the young man was wondering why he had not guarded his chin properly. In the distance a hymn swung off—

“Fight the good. Fight with. All thy. Might.”

They would be across from the chapel soon.

“Your book, sir?”

“Thank you, sir—yes.”

“Why!” cried the young man—“why, it’s ‘What We Want’! At least the binding’s exactly the same.”

“It’s called ‘Essays,’” said Ansell.

“Then that’s it. Mrs. Failing, you see, she wouldn’t call it that, because three W’s, you see, in a row, she said, are vulgar, and sound like Tolstoy, if you’ve heard of him.”

Ansell confessed to an acquaintance, and then said, “Do you think ‘What We Want’ vulgar?” He was not at all interested, but he desired to escape from the atmosphere of pugilistic courtesy, more painful to him than blows themselves.

“It _is_ the same book,” said the other—“same title, same binding.” He weighed it like a brick in his muddy hands.

“Open it to see if the inside corresponds,” said Ansell, swallowing a laugh and a little more blood with it.

With a liberal allowance of thumb-marks, he turned the pages over and read, “‘—the rural silence that is not a poet’s luxury but a practical need for all men.’ Yes, it _is_ the same book.” Smiling pleasantly over the discovery, he handed it back to the owner.

“And is it true?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Is it true that rural silence is a practical need?”

“Don’t ask me!”

“Have you ever tried it?”

“What?”

“Rural silence.”

“A field with no noise in it, I suppose you mean. I don’t understand.”

Ansell smiled, but a slight fire in the man’s eye checked him. After all, this was a person who could knock one down. Moreover, there was no reason why he should be teased. He had it in him to retort “No. Why?” He was not stupid in essentials. He was irritable—in Ansell’s eyes a frequent sign of grace. Sitting down on the upturned seat, he remarked, “I like the book in many ways. I don’t think ‘What We Want’ would have been a vulgar title. But I don’t intend to spoil myself on the chance of mending the world, which is what the creed amounts to. Nor am I keen on rural silences.”

“Curse!” he said thoughtfully, sucking at an empty pipe.

“Tobacco?”

“Please.”

“Rickie’s is invariably filthy.”

“Who says I know Rickie?”

“Well, you know his aunt. It’s a possible link. Be gentle with Rickie. Don’t knock him down if he doesn’t think it’s a nice morning.”

The other was silent.

“Do you know him well?”

“Kind of.” He was not inclined to talk. The wish to smoke was very violent in him, and Ansell noticed how he gazed at the wreaths that ascended from bowl and stem, and how, when the stem was in his mouth, he bit it. He gave the idea of an animal with just enough soul to contemplate its own bliss. United with refinement, such a type was common in Greece. It is not common today, and Ansell was surprised to find it in a friend of Rickie’s. Rickie, if he could even “kind of know” such a creature, must be stirring in his grave.

“Do you know his wife too?”

“Oh yes. In a way I know Agnes. But thank you for this tobacco. Last night I nearly died. I have no money.”

“Take the whole pouch—do.”

After a moment’s hesitation he did. “Fight the good” had scarcely ended, so quickly had their intimacy grown.

“I suppose you’re a friend of Rickie’s?”

Ansell was tempted to reply, “I don’t know him at all.” But it seemed no moment for the severer truths, so he said, “I knew him well at Cambridge, but I have seen very little of him since.”

“Is it true that his baby was lame?”

“I believe so.”

His teeth closed on his pipe. Chapel was over. The organist was prancing through the voluntary, and the first ripple of boys had already reached Dunwood House. In a few minutes the masters would be here too, and Ansell, who was becoming interested, hurried the conversation forward.

“Have you come far?”

“From Wiltshire. Do you know Wiltshire?” And for the first time there came into his face the shadow of a sentiment, the passing tribute to some mystery. “It’s a good country. I live in one of the finest valleys out of Salisbury Plain. I mean, I lived.”

“Have you been dismissed from Cadover, without a penny in your pocket?”

He was alarmed at this. Such knowledge seemed simply diabolical. Ansell explained that if his boots were chalky, if his clothes had obviously been slept in, if he knew Mrs. Failing, if he knew Wiltshire, and if he could buy no tobacco—then the deduction was possible. “You do just attend,” he murmured.

The house was filling with boys, and Ansell saw, to his regret, the head of Agnes over the thuyia hedge that separated the small front garden from the side lawn where he was sitting. After a few minutes it was followed by the heads of Rickie and Mr. Pembroke. All the heads were turned the other way. But they would find his card in the hall, and if the man had left any message they would find that too. “What are you?” he demanded. “Who are you—your name—I don’t care about that. But it interests me to class people, and up to now I have failed with you.”

“I—” He stopped. Ansell reflected that there are worse answers. “I really don’t know what I am. Used to think I was something special, but strikes me now I feel much like other chaps. Used to look down on the labourers. Used to take for granted I was a gentleman, but really I don’t know where I do belong.”

“One belongs to the place one sleeps in and to the people one eats with.”

“As often as not I sleep out of doors and eat by myself, so that doesn’t get you any further.”

A silence, akin to poetry, invaded Ansell. Was it only a pose to like this man, or was he really wonderful? He was not romantic, for Romance is a figure with outstretched hands, yearning for the unattainable. Certain figures of the Greeks, to whom we continually return, suggested him a little. One expected nothing of him—no purity of phrase nor swift edged thought. Yet the conviction grew that he had been back somewhere—back to some table of the gods, spread in a field where there is no noise, and that he belonged for ever to the guests with whom he had eaten. Meanwhile he was simple and frank, and what he could tell he would tell to any one. He had not the suburban reticence. Ansell asked him, “Why did Mrs. Failing turn you out of Cadover? I should like to hear that too.”

“Because she was tired of me. Because, again, I couldn’t keep quiet over the farm hands. I ask you, is it right?” He became incoherent. Ansell caught, “And they grow old—they don’t play games—it ends they can’t play.” An illustration emerged. “Take a kitten—if you fool about with her, she goes on playing well into a cat.”

“But Mrs. Failing minded no mice being caught.”

“Mice?” said the young man blankly. “What I was going to say is, that some one was jealous of my being at Cadover. I’ll mention no names, but I fancy it was Mrs. Silt. I’m sorry for her if it was. Anyhow, she set Mrs. Failing against me. It came on the top of other things—and out I went.”

“What did Mrs. Silt, whose name I don’t mention, say?”

He looked guilty. “I don’t know. Easy enough to find something to say. The point is that she said something. You know, Mr.—I don’t know your name, mine’s Wonham, but I’m more grateful than I can put it over this tobacco. I mean, you ought to know there is another side to this quarrel. It’s wrong, but it’s there.”

Ansell told him not to be uneasy: he had already guessed that there might be another side. But he could not make out why Mr. Wonham should have come straight from the aunt to the nephew. They were now sitting on the upturned seat. “What We Want,” a good deal shattered, lay between them.

“On account of above-mentioned reasons, there was a row. I don’t know—you can guess the style of thing. She wanted to treat me to the colonies, and had up the parson to talk soft-sawder and make out that a boundless continent was the place for a lad like me. I said, ‘I can’t run up to the Rings without getting tired, nor gallop a horse out of this view without tiring it, so what is the point of a boundless continent?’ Then I saw that she was frightened of me, and bluffed a bit more, and in the end I was nipped. She caught me—just like her—when I had nothing on but flannels, and was coming into the house, having licked the Cadchurch team. She stood up in the doorway between those stone pilasters and said, ‘No! Never again!’ and behind her was Wilbraham, whom I tried to turn out, and the gardener, and poor old Leighton, who hates being hurt. She said, ‘There’s a hundred pounds for you at the London bank, and as much more in December. Go!’ I said, ‘Keep your—money, and tell me whose son I am.’ I didn’t care really. I only said it on the off-chance of hurting her. Sure enough, she caught on to the doorhandle (being lame) and said, ‘I can’t—I promised—I don’t really want to,’ and Wilbraham did stare. Then—she’s very queer—she burst out laughing, and went for the packet after all, and we heard her laugh through the window as she got it. She rolled it at me down the steps, and she says, ‘A leaf out of the eternal comedy for you, Stephen,’ or something of that sort. I opened it as I walked down the drive, she laughing always and catching on to the handle of the front door. Of course it wasn’t comic at all. But down in the village there were both cricket teams, already a little tight, and the mad plumber shouting ‘Rights of Man!’ They knew I was turned out. We did have a row, and kept it up too. They daren’t touch Wilbraham’s windows, but there isn’t much glass left up at Cadover. When you start, it’s worth going on, but in the end I had to cut. They subscribed a bob here and a bob there, and these are Flea Thompson’s Sundays. I sent a line to Leighton not to forward my own things: I don’t fancy them. They aren’t really mine.” He did not mention his great symbolic act, performed, it is to be feared, when he was rather drunk and the friendly policeman was looking the other way. He had cast all his flannels into the little millpond, and then waded himself through the dark cold water to the new clothes on the other side. Some one had flung his pipe and his packet after him. The packet had fallen short. For this reason it was wet when he handed it to Ansell, and ink that had been dry for twenty-three years had begun to run again.

“I wondered if you’re right about the hundred pounds,” said Ansell gravely. “It is pleasant to be proud, but it is unpleasant to die in the night through not having any tobacco.”

“But I’m not proud. Look how I’ve taken your pouch! The hundred pounds was—well, can’t you see yourself, it was quite different? It was, so to speak, _inconvenient_ for me to take the hundred pounds. Or look again how I took a shilling from a boy who earns nine bob a-week! Proves pretty conclusively I’m not proud.”

Ansell saw it was useless to argue. He perceived, beneath the slatternly use of words, the man, buttoned up in them, just as his body was buttoned up in a shoddy suit,—and he wondered more than ever that such a man should know the Elliots. He looked at the face, which was frank, proud, and beautiful, if truth is beauty. Of mercy or tact such a face knew little. It might be coarse, but it had in it nothing vulgar or wantonly cruel. “May I read these papers?” he said.

“Of course. Oh yes; didn’t I say? I’m Rickie’s half-brother, come here to tell him the news. He doesn’t know. There it is, put shortly for you. I was saying, though, that I bolted in the dark, slept in the rifle-butts above Salisbury, the sheds where they keep the cardboard men, you know, never locked up as they ought to be. I turned the whole place upside down to teach them.”

“Here is your packet again,” said Ansell. “Thank you. How interesting!” He rose from the seat and turned towards Dunwood House. He looked at the bow-windows, the cheap picturesque gables, the terracotta dragons clawing a dirty sky. He listened to the clink of plates and to the voice of Mr. Pembroke taking one of his innumerable roll-calls. He looked at the bed of lobelias. How interesting! What else was there to say?

“One must be the son of some one,” remarked Stephen. And that was all he had to say. To him those names on the moistened paper were mere antiquities. He was neither proud of them nor ashamed. A man must have parents, or he cannot enter the delightful world. A man, if he has a brother, may reasonably visit him, for they may have interests in common. He continued his narrative, —how in the night he had heard the clocks, how at daybreak, instead of entering the city, he had struck eastward to save money,—while Ansell still looked at the house and found that all his imagination and knowledge could lead him no farther than this: how interesting!

“—And what do you think of that for a holy horror?”

“For a what?” said Ansell, his thoughts far away.

“This man I am telling you about, who gave me a lift towards Andover, who said I was a blot on God’s earth.”

One o’clock struck. It was strange that neither of them had had any summons from the house.

“He said I ought to be ashamed of myself. He said, ‘_I_’ll not be the means of bringing shame to an honest gentleman and lady.’ I told him not to be a fool. I said I knew what I was about. Rickie and Agnes are properly educated, which leads people to look at things straight, and not go screaming about blots. A man like me, with just a little reading at odd hours—I’ve got so far, and Rickie has been through Cambridge.”

“And Mrs. Elliot?”

“Oh, she won’t mind, and I told the man so; but he kept on saying, ‘_I_’ll not be the means of bringing shame to an honest gentleman and lady,’ until I got out of his rotten cart.” His eye watched the man, a Nonconformist, driving away over God’s earth. “I caught the train by running. I got to Waterloo at—”

Here the parlour-maid fluttered towards them. Would Mr. Wonham come in? Mrs. Elliot would be glad to see him now.

“Mrs. Elliot?” cried Ansell. “Not Mr. Elliot?”

“It’s all the same,” said Stephen, and moved towards the house.

“You see, I only left my name. They don’t know why I’ve come.”

“Perhaps Mr. Elliot sees me meanwhile?”

The parlour-maid looked blank. Mr. Elliot had not said so. He had been with Mrs. Elliot and Mr. Pembroke in the study. Now the gentlemen had gone upstairs.

“All right, I can wait.” After all, Rickie was treating him as he had treated Rickie, as one in the grave, to whom it is futile to make any loving motion. Gone upstairs—to brush his hair for dinner! The irony of the situation appealed to him strongly. It reminded him of the Greek Drama, where the actors know so little and the spectators so much.

“But, by the bye,” he called after Stephen, “I think I ought to tell you—don’t—”

“What is it?”

“Don’t—” Then he was silent. He had been tempted to explain everything, to tell the fellow how things stood, that he must avoid this if he wanted to attain that; that he must break the news to Rickie gently; that he must have at least one battle royal with Agnes. But it was contrary to his own spirit to coach people: he held the human soul to be a very delicate thing, which can receive eternal damage from a little patronage. Stephen must go into the house simply as himself, for thus alone would he remain there.

“I ought to knock my pipe out? Was that it?” “By no means. Go in, your pipe and you.”

He hesitated, torn between propriety and desire. Then he followed the parlour-maid into the house smoking. As he entered the dinner-bell rang, and there was the sound of rushing feet, which died away into shuffling and silence. Through the window of the boys’ dining-hall came the colourless voice of Rickie—

“‘Benedictus benedicat.’”

Ansell prepared himself to witness the second act of the drama; forgetting that all this world, and not part of it, is a stage.

XXVII

The parlour-maid took Mr. Wonham to the study. He had been in the drawing-room before, but had got bored, and so had strolled out into the garden. Now he was in better spirits, as a man ought to be who has knocked down a man. As he passed through the hall he sparred at the teak monkey, and hung his cap on the bust of Hermes. And he greeted Mrs. Elliot with a pleasant clap of laughter. “Oh, I’ve come with the most tremendous news!” he cried.

She bowed, but did not shake hands, which rather surprised him. But he never troubled over “details.” He seldom watched people, and never thought that they were watching him. Nor could he guess how much it meant to her that he should enter her presence smoking. Had she not said once at Cadover, “Oh, _please_ smoke; I love the smell of a pipe”?

“Would you sit down? Exactly there, please.” She placed him at a large table, opposite an inkpot and a pad of blotting-paper.

“Will you tell your ‘tremendous news’ to me? My brother and my husband are giving the boys their dinner.”

“Ah!” said Stephen, who had had neither time nor money for breakfast in London.

“I told them not to wait for me.”

So he came to the point at once. He trusted this handsome woman. His strength and his youth called to hers, expecting no prudish response. “It’s very odd. It is that I’m Rickie’s brother. I’ve just found out. I’ve come to tell you all.”

“Yes?”

He felt in his pocket for the papers. “Half-brother I ought to have said.”

“Yes?”

“I’m illegitimate. Legally speaking, that is, I’ve been turned out of Cadover. I haven’t a penny. I—”

“There is no occasion to inflict the details.” Her face, which had been an even brown, began to flush slowly in the centre of the cheeks. The colour spread till all that he saw of her was suffused, and she turned away. He thought he had shocked her, and so did she. Neither knew that the body can be insincere and express not the emotions we feel but those that we should like to feel. In reality she was quite calm, and her dislike of him had nothing emotional in it as yet.

“You see—” he began. He was determined to tell the fidgety story, for the sooner it was over the sooner they would have something to eat. Delicacy he lacked, and his sympathies were limited. But such as they were, they rang true: he put no decorous phantom between him and his desires.

“I do see. I have seen for two years.” She sat down at the head of the table, where there was another ink-pot. Into this she dipped a pen. “I have seen everything, Mr. Wonham—who you are, how you have behaved at Cadover, how you must have treated Mrs. Failing yesterday; and now”—her voice became very grave—“I see why you have come here, penniless. Before you speak, we know what you will say.”

His mouth fell open, and he laughed so merrily that it might have given her a warning. But she was thinking how to follow up her first success. “And I thought I was bringing tremendous news!” he cried. “I only twisted it out of Mrs. Failing last night. And Rickie knows too?”

“We have known for two years.”

“But come, by the bye,—if you’ve known for two years, how is it you didn’t—” The laugh died out of his eyes. “You aren’t ashamed?” he asked, half rising from his chair. “You aren’t like the man towards Andover?”

“Please, please sit down,” said Agnes, in the even tones she used when speaking to the servants; “let us not discuss side issues. I am a horribly direct person, Mr. Wonham. I go always straight to the point.” She opened a chequebook. “I am afraid I shall shock you. For how much?”

He was not attending.

“There is the paper we suggest you shall sign.” She pushed towards him a pseudo-legal document, just composed by Herbert.

“In consideration of the sum of........., I agree to perpetual silence—to restrain from libellous ... never to molest the said Frederick Elliot by intruding—’”

His brain was not quick. He read the document over twice, and he could still say, “But what’s that cheque for?”

“It is my husband’s. He signed for you as soon as we heard you were here. We guessed you had come to be silenced. Here is his signature. But he has left the filling in for me. For how much? I will cross it, shall I? You will just have started a banking account, if I understand Mrs. Failing rightly. It is not quite accurate to say you are penniless: I heard from her just before you returned from your cricket. She allows you two hundred a-year, I think. But this additional sum—shall I date the cheque Saturday or for tomorrow?”

At last he found words. Knocking his pipe out on the table, he said slowly, “Here’s a very bad mistake.”

“It is quite possible,” retorted Agnes. She was glad she had taken the offensive, instead of waiting till he began his blackmailing, as had been the advice of Rickie. Aunt Emily had said that very spring, “One’s only hope with Stephen is to start bullying first.” Here he was, quite bewildered, smearing the pipe-ashes with his thumb. He asked to read the document again. “A stamp and all!” he remarked.

They had anticipated that his claim would exceed two pounds.

“I see. All right. It takes a fool a minute. Never mind. I’ve made a bad mistake.”

“You refuse?” she exclaimed, for he was standing at the door. “Then do your worst! We defy you!”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Elliot,” he said roughly. “I don’t want a scene with you, nor yet with your husband. We’ll say no more about it. It’s all right. I mean no harm.”

“But your signature then! You must sign—you—”

He pushed past her, and said as he reached for his cap, “There, that’s all right. It’s my mistake. I’m sorry.” He spoke like a farmer who has failed to sell a sheep. His manner was utterly prosaic, and up to the last she thought he had not understood her. “But it’s money we offer you,” she informed him, and then darted back to the study, believing for one terrible moment that he had picked up the blank cheque. When she returned to the hall he had gone. He was walking down the road rather quickly. At the corner he cleared his throat, spat into the gutter, and disappeared.

“There’s an odd finish,” she thought. She was puzzled, and determined to recast the interview a little when she related it to Rickie. She had not succeeded, for the paper was still unsigned. But she had so cowed Stephen that he would probably rest content with his two hundred a-year, and never come troubling them again. Clever management, for one knew him to be rapacious: she had heard tales of him lending to the poor and exacting repayment to the uttermost farthing. He had also stolen at school. Moderately triumphant, she hurried into the side-garden: she had just remembered Ansell: she, not Rickie, had received his card.

“Oh, Mr. Ansell!” she exclaimed, awaking him from some day-dream. “Haven’t either Rickie or Herbert been out to you? Now, do come into dinner, to show you aren’t offended. You will find all of us assembled in the boys’ dining-hall.”

To her annoyance he accepted.

“That is, if the Jacksons are not expecting you.”

The Jacksons did not matter. If he might brush his clothes and bathe his lip, he would like to come.

“Oh, what has happened to you? And oh, my pretty lobelias!”

He replied, “A momentary contact with reality,” and she, who did not look for sense in his remarks, hurried away to the dining-hall to announce him.

The dining-hall was not unlike the preparation room. There was the same parquet floor, and dado of shiny pitchpine. On its walls also were imperial portraits, and over the harmonium to which they sang the evening hymns was spread the Union Jack. Sunday dinner, the most pompous meal of the week, was in progress. Her brother sat at the head of the high table, her husband at the head of the second. To each she gave a reassuring nod and went to her own seat, which was among the junior boys. The beef was being carried out; she stopped it. “Mr. Ansell is coming,” she called. “Herbert there is more room by you; sit up straight, boys.” The boys sat up straight, and a respectful hush spread over the room.

“Here he is!” called Rickie cheerfully, taking his cue from his wife. “Oh, this is splendid!” Ansell came in. “I’m so glad you managed this. I couldn’t leave these wretches last night!” The boys tittered suitably. The atmosphere seemed normal. Even Herbert, though longing to hear what had happened to the blackmailer, gave adequate greeting to their guest: “Come in, Mr. Ansell; come here. Take us as you find us!”

“I understood,” said Stewart, “that I should find you all. Mrs. Elliot told me I should. On that understanding I came.”

It was at once evident that something had gone wrong.

Ansell looked round the room carefully. Then clearing his throat and ruffling his hair, he began—“I cannot see the man with whom I have talked, intimately, for an hour, in your garden.”

The worst of it was they were all so far from him and from each other, each at the end of a tableful of inquisitive boys. The two masters looked at Agnes for information, for her reassuring nod had not told them much. She looked hopelessly back.

“I cannot see this man,” repeated Ansell, who remained by the harmonium in the midst of astonished waitresses. “Is he to be given no lunch?”

Herbert broke the silence by fresh greetings. Rickie knew that the contest was lost, and that his friend had sided with the enemy. It was the kind of thing he would do. One must face the catastrophe quietly and with dignity. Perhaps Ansell would have turned on his heel, and left behind him only vague suspicions, if Mrs. Elliot had not tried to talk him down. “Man,” she cried—“what man? Oh, I know—terrible bore! Did he get hold of you?”—thus committing their first blunder, and causing Ansell to say to Rickie, “Have you seen your brother?”

“I have not.”

“Have you been told he was here?”

Rickie’s answer was inaudible.

“Have you been told you have a brother?”

“Let us continue this conversation later.”

“Continue it? My dear man, how can we until you know what I’m talking about? You must think me mad; but I tell you solemnly that you have a brother of whom you’ve never heard, and that he was in this house ten minutes ago.” He paused impressively. “Your wife has happened to see him first. Being neither serious nor truthful, she is keeping you apart, telling him some lie and not telling you a word.”

There was a murmur of alarm. One of the prefects rose, and Ansell set his back to the wall, quite ready for a battle. For two years he had waited for his opportunity. He would hit out at Mrs. Elliot like any ploughboy now that it had come. Rickie said: “There is a slight misunderstanding. I, like my wife, have known what there is to know for two years”—a dignified rebuff, but their second blunder.

“Exactly,” said Agnes. “Now I think Mr. Ansell had better go.”

“Go?” exploded Ansell. “I’ve everything to say yet. I beg your pardon, Mrs. Elliot, I am concerned with you no longer. This man”—he turned to the avenue of faces—“this man who teaches you has a brother. He has known of him two years and been ashamed. He has—oh—oh—how it fits together! Rickie, it’s you, not Mrs. Silt, who must have sent tales of him to your aunt. It’s you who’ve turned him out of Cadover. It’s you who’ve ordered him to be ruined today. Mrs. Elliot, I beg your pardon.”

Now Herbert arose. “Out of my sight, sir! But have it from me first that Rickie and his aunt have both behaved most generously. No, no, Agnes, I’ll not be interrupted. Garbled versions must not get about. If the Wonham man is not satisfied now, he must be insatiable. He cannot levy blackmail on us for ever. Sir, I give you two minutes; then you will be expelled by force.”

“Two minutes!” sang Ansell. “I can say a great deal in that.” He put one foot on a chair and held his arms over the quivering room. He seemed transfigured into a Hebrew prophet passionate for satire and the truth. “Oh, keep quiet for two minutes,” he cried, “and I’ll tell you something you’ll be glad to hear. You’re a little afraid Stephen may come back. Don’t be afraid. I bring good news. You’ll never see him nor any one like him again. I must speak very plainly, for you are all three fools. I don’t want you to say afterwards, ‘Poor Mr. Ansell tried to be clever.’ Generally I don’t mind, but I should mind today. Please listen. Stephen is a bully; he drinks; he knocks one down; but he would sooner die than take money from people he did not love. Perhaps he will die, for he has nothing but a few pence that the poor gave him and some tobacco which, to my eternal glory, he accepted from me. Please listen again. Why did he come here? Because he thought you would love him, and was ready to love you. But I tell you, don’t be afraid. He would sooner die now than say you were his brother. Please listen again—”

“Now, Stewart, don’t go on like that,” said Rickie bitterly. “It’s easy enough to preach when you are an outsider. You would be more charitable if such a thing had happened to yourself. Easy enough to be unconventional when you haven’t suffered and know nothing of the facts. You love anything out of the way, anything queer, that doesn’t often happen, and so you get excited over this. It’s useless, my dear man; you have hurt me, but you will never upset me. As soon as you stop this ridiculous scene we will finish our dinner. Spread this scandal; add to it. I’m too old to mind such nonsense. I cannot help my father’s disgrace, on the one hand; nor, on the other, will I have anything to do with his blackguard of a son.”

So the secret was given to the world. Agnes might colour at his speech; Herbert might calculate the effect of it on the entries for Dunwood House; but he cared for none of these things. Thank God! he was withered up at last.

“Please listen again,” resumed Ansell. “Please correct two slight mistakes: firstly, Stephen is one of the greatest people I have ever met; secondly, he’s not your father’s son. He’s the son of your mother.”

It was Rickie, not Ansell, who was carried from the hall, and it was Herbert who pronounced the blessing—

“Benedicto benedicatur.”

A profound stillness succeeded the storm, and the boys, slipping away from their meal, told the news to the rest of the school, or put it in the letters they were writing home.

XXVIII

The soul has her own currency. She mints her spiritual coinage and stamps it with the image of some beloved face. With it she pays her debts, with it she reckons, saying, “This man has worth, this man is worthless.” And in time she forgets its origin; it seems to her to be a thing unalterable, divine. But the soul can also have her bankruptcies.

Perhaps she will be the richer in the end. In her agony she learns to reckon clearly. Fair as the coin may have been, it was not accurate; and though she knew it not, there were treasures that it could not buy. The face, however beloved, was mortal, and as liable as the soul herself to err. We do but shift responsibility by making a standard of the dead.

There is, indeed, another coinage that bears on it not man’s image but God’s. It is incorruptible, and the soul may trust it safely; it will serve her beyond the stars. But it cannot give us friends, or the embrace of a lover, or the touch of children, for with our fellow mortals it has no concern. It cannot even give the joys we call trivial—fine weather, the pleasures of meat and drink, bathing and the hot sand afterwards, running, dreamless sleep. Have we learnt the true discipline of a bankruptcy if we turn to such coinage as this? Will it really profit us so much if we save our souls and lose the whole world?