Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  But he wasn’t permitted to rejoice over the side-issue long. Mrs. Mansel brought the conversation back again at a bound, with feminine instinct, to the purely personal and immediate question.

  ‘Mr. Linnell spells his Austen with an e, too,’ she said briskly. ‘I suppose, Mr. Linnell, you’re a member of the same old Rutland family?’

  Haviland Dumaresq turned round upon him once more with a strange display of earnest interest. Linnell hesitated. His face was crimson.

  ‘Of the same family,’ he repeated after a pause, with obvious reluctance; then he added with a little sidelong, suspicious look: ‘but the younger son of a younger son only. I hardly even know my cousin, Sir Austen, the head of the house. Junior branches are seldom held of much account, of course, in an English family.’

  ‘Primogeniture is a great injustice to the elder sons,’ Haviland Dumaresq murmured reflectively in his measured tones. ‘It deprives them of all proper stimulus to action. It condemns them to a life of partridge-shooting and dinner-giving. It stunts and dwarfs their mental faculties. It robs them of all that makes life worth living. Still, it has its compensating advantages as well, in the long-run, for the nation at large. By concentrating the whole fortune of able and successful families — judges, bishops, new peers, and so forth, the cream of their kind, who have risen by their own ability to the top, leaving the mere skim-milk of humanity at the bottom — on one single rich and useless representative, the scapegoat, as it were, of the family opulence, it turns the younger sons adrift upon the world, with their inherited intellect for their sole provision, and so urges them on to exceptional effort, in order to keep up their positions in society, and realize their natural expectations and the hopes of their upbringing. I’m not sure that it isn’t a good thing, after all, for an aristocratic community that a certain number of its ablest members should be left to shift for themselves by their own wits, and, after having been brought up in comfort and luxury with a good education, should be forced at last to earn their own living in the hard struggle for life which is the rule of nature.’

  ‘But all younger sons are not poor,’ the girl they called Psyche put in blushingly.

  Linnell turned to her with a quick, keen glance.

  ‘Not quite all, perhaps,’ he said with a decisive accent; ‘but so large a proportion of the total sum, that you may almost take it for granted about any of them whenever you meet one.’

  His interposition turned the current of the conversation. They sat for a few minutes talking trivialities about the beauty of the place and Linnell’s first impressions of Petherton Episcopi; then Mansel said, turning to the philosopher:

  ‘Where do you think I picked up my friend this morning, Mr. Dumaresq? He was at work on the slope yonder, sketching your cottage.’

  ‘It’s a pretty cottage,’ Dumaresq answered with a slight inclination of his leonine head. ‘So bright and fluffy. The prettiest place I’ve ever seen. I’ve always admired my own cottage.’

  ‘Oh, papa,’ Psyche broke in, red-faced, incidentally settling for Linnell, offhand, the hitherto moot-question of her personal identity, ‘it’s so very tiny!’

  ‘For you, my child, yes,’ the father answered tenderly. ‘But for me, no. It exactly fits me. My niche in nature is a very humble one. In all those matters I’m a perfect Stoic of the old school. I ask no more from fate or fortune than the chances of the Cosmos spontaneously bestow upon me.’

  ‘It makes a very pretty sketch,’ Linnell interposed gently, in his diffident way. ‘Will you allow an old admirer of the “Encyclopædic Philosophy” — perhaps one of your earliest and most devoted adherents — to present it to you as a memento — a disciple’s fee, so to speak — when finished?’

  Dumaresq looked him back in the face with an undecided air. He drummed his fingers dubitatively on his knee for a minute. Then, ‘You are a professional artist?’ he asked slowly.

  ‘A professional artist? Well, yes, of course; I sell my pictures — whenever I can; and as far as I’m able, I try to live upon them.’

  ‘Then I must buy the sketch,’ Dumaresq answered, with a quiet and stately decision in his manner. ‘If you’d been an amateur, now, I would gladly have accepted it from you; but I, too, am a workman, and I have my principles. In art, as in literature, science, and thought, the labourer, we remember, is worthy of his hire. I should like to have a fitting presentment of our little home. It would be nice for Psyche to possess it hereafter.’

  The calm dignity and precision of his tone took Linnell fairly by surprise. The man couldn’t have spoken with more majestic carelessness if he had been the lordly owner of five thousand acres, commissioning a Leighton or an Alma Tadema. Yet Linnell had only to look at his own studiously simple threadbare dress, and the neat quietness of his daughter’s little print, to see that five pounds was a large matter to him. The picture when completed would be worth full fifty.

  ‘We won’t quarrel about that,’ the artist said hastily, with a little deprecatory wave of his white hand. ‘I’ll show you the sketch as soon as it’s finished, and then we may perhaps effect an equitable exchange for it. Or at least’ — and he glanced shyly on one side towards Psyche— ‘may possibly be permitted to offer it by-and-by for Miss Dumaresq’s acceptance.’

  The old man was just about to answer with a hurried refusal, when Mansel intervened with a pacificatory remark. ‘Linnell was telling me this morning,’ he said, dragging it in by all-fours, ‘how greatly he admired and respected your philosophic system. He has all your doctrines at his fingers’ ends; and he was quite surprised to find an ungrateful world didn’t crowd to Petherton in its millions, by excursion train, to pay you the tribute of its respect and consideration. He means to have some royal confabs with you on Dumaresquian subjects whenever you can spare him an hour or two of your valuable leisure.’

  ‘Papa sees so few people here who care at all for the questions he’s interested in,’ Psyche said, looking up, ‘that he’s always delighted and pleased when he really lights upon a philosophic visitor and gets a chance of exchanging serious opinions.’

  The old man’s face flushed like a child’s with ingenuous pleasure; appreciation came so late to him, and came so rarely, that it went to his heart with pathetic keenness; but he gave no sign of his emotion by spoken words. He merely answered, in the same sonorous silvery voice as before: ‘Philosophy has necessarily a restricted audience. Intelligence being the special property of the few, the deeper and wider and more important a study, the narrower must needs be the circle of its possible students.’

  Mrs. Mansel tapped her parasol impatiently. Girton-bred as she was, she yet believed by long experience it was possible to have too much of poor dear old Dumaresq.

  ‘Psyche, my child,’ she said, yawning under cover of her Japanese fan, ‘shall we go on now and have our game of tennis?’

  They fell into their places in the court as if by accident, Psyche and the new-come artist on one side, Mansel and his wife opposite them on the other. Dumaresq sat by observant, and watched the play; it always interested him to look on at tennis: the run of the balls is so admirably pregnant with suggestive ideas for sidereal motions!

  As for Psyche, she never before had enjoyed a game with anyone so much. Linnell was so handsome, and played so admirably. In the excitement of the game, he had quite forgotten his lameness now, and remembered only the quick sight and nimble movement of his desert experiences. No man in England could play tennis better, indeed, when he managed to drop out of mind his infirmities; and that afternoon he was happily able to drop them altogether. He remembered only that Psyche was beautiful, and that to play with Haviland Dumaresq’s daughter was something very different indeed from playing with the common nameless herd of squireen femininity on the lawn of the vicarage in some country village.

  For to Linnell, Haviland Dumaresq’s was so great a name as to throw some reflected halo even around Psyche.

  As father and daughter walked home alone, after five o’clock tea
, in the cool of the evening, to their tiny cottage — the old man tall, erect, and grim; Psyche one rosebud blush from chin to forehead — Haviland Dumaresq stopped for a second at the turn of the road, and gazing at his daughter with a lingering affection, said abruptly:

  ‘I felt I must buy it. I was obliged to buy it. I couldn’t take it from the man for nothing, of course. Whatever it costs, I shall have to pay for it.’

  ‘How much is it worth, do you think, papa?’ Psyche asked, half trembling.

  ‘I know so little about this sort of thing,’ the old philosopher answered gravely; ‘but I shouldn’t be in the least surprised to learn he wanted as much as ten pounds for it.’

  ‘Ten pounds is an awful lot of money!’ Psyche cried, affrighted.

  ‘Ten pounds is a very large sum indeed,’ her father echoed, repeating the phrase in his own dialect. ‘Too large a sum for anyone to waste upon a piece of paper with the image or simulacrum of a common dwelling-house scrawled in colour upon it. But there was no help for it; I had to do it. Otherwise, the man might have pressed the thing upon me as a mere present. And a present’s an obligation I never can accept. We can save the necessary amount, perhaps, by giving up all needless luxuries for breakfast, and taking only tea and bread without butter.’

  ‘Oh, papa!’ Psyche murmured, aghast.

  ‘Not you, my child, not you!’ the father answered hurriedly. ‘I never meant you, my darling — but myself and Maria. I think the existing culinary utensil calls herself Maria.’

  ‘But, my dear, dear father — —’

  ‘Not a word, my child. Don’t try to interfere with me. I know what’s best for us, and I do it unhesitatingly. I must go through the world on my own orbit. The slightest attempt to turn a planet from its regular course recoils destructively upon the head of the aggressive body that crosses its cycle. I’m a planetary orb, obeying fixed laws: I move in my circuit undeterred and unswerving.’

  They walked along a few yards farther in silence. Then Haviland Dumaresq spoke again.

  ‘He belongs to a very good family, that painting young man,’ he said, with a jerk of his head towards the Mansels’. ‘The Linnells of Rutland are distinguished people. But he’s a younger son, and worth nothing. A younger son, and got no money. Lives on his pictures. Worth nothing.’

  ‘Papa!’ Psyche cried, in a ferment of astonishment, unable to suppress her surprise and wonder. ‘What a funny thing for you to say — you, of all men, who care nothing at all for money or position. He’s very clever, I think, and very handsome, and I know he’s read the “Encyclopædic Philosophy.”’

  Dumaresq held his proud gray head prouder and higher still against the evening sky.

  ‘I mean,’ he said evasively, ‘the young man’s poor. An artist who hardly lives on his art. All the more reason, then (if it comes to that), to pay for his picture. His time’s his money.’

  But Psyche herself vaguely knew in her own heart that that was nothing more than an excuse and an afterthought. She knew what her father really meant. She knew and wondered. For never before in all her life had Psyche Dumaresq heard that austere philosopher reckon up any man by his fortune or his family. And why should he make so unfavourable an exception against so pleasant a person as this new young painter?

  She didn’t understand the simple and well-known human principle that no man is a philosopher when he has daughters to marry.

  CHAPTER IV.

  A PROPHET IS NOT WITHOUT HONOUR.

  The next evening Linnell was to dine quietly at General Maitland’s. Only a few Petherton friends to meet him— ‘quite a simple affair, you know, Mr. Linnell: the regulation country-town entertainment: our next-door neighbours: just to introduce you to whatever there is of society at Petherton Episcopi.’ The Mansels were coming: of course the Mansels: and the Vicar and his wife, and the Craigies from the Manor House.

  ‘But not, I suppose, that old bore Dumaresq, and that gawky girl of his?’ the General observed, as they sat in the drawing-room, demurely expectant, on the very stroke of half-past seven. ‘He talks me off my legs with his crack-jaw philosophy. You haven’t asked them, I do hope, Maria.’

  ‘Do you take me for a fool, George?’ Mrs. Maitland answered with severe dignity, drawing herself up austerely to her full height. ‘Geraldine begged me to ask them, I need hardly say: she has no common-sense at all, poor dear Geraldine: but I was firm upon that point, perfectly firm’ — and Mrs. Maitland’s high-bred chin and thin lips of the Vere de Vere caste showed her firmness most distinctly as she spoke. ‘I put my foot down upon that sort of nonsense once for all. I said to her plainly: Geraldine, you may form what undesirable acquaintances you like for yourself; but you shall not drag your poor papa and me into the thick of your vulgar society. I’ve called upon that horrid old man and his daughter on your account, and I very much regret now that I ever did it. It lets us in for endless complications. The Dumaresqs are people who move in a different grade of society from our own, and any attempt to take them out of it and put them into one for which they’re not fitted can only be painful, and even ignominious, to both parties. I said it plainly to her, “even ignominious.” The fact is, George, we ought never to have known them. When one has to deal with a girl of poor dear Geraldine’s unfortunate temperament, the only way to do is to resist at once from the very beginning all her absurd fads and fancies.’

  The General sighed. ‘It’s a pity she won’t be more practical,’ he said with a faint reluctance in his voice, for he admired Geraldine. ‘She’s a fine girl, though she’s our own daughter, Maria, and, by George! I like her for it. I like to see a girl stick up for her opinions. Still, it’s a great pity, I don’t deny, she won’t be more practical. If only she’d take a fancy, now, to this young Linnell there!’

  ‘This young Linnell has money,’ Mrs. Maitland assented curtly, arranging a spray of maidenhair in a specimen glass on the table by the bow window. ‘I’m sure he has money. He won’t admit it; but it’s perfectly clear to anybody with half an eye. He couldn’t live as he does upon his pictures only.’

  ‘And you think?’ the General observed suggestively.

  ‘I think he hasn’t come down here for nothing, naturally,’ Mrs. Maitland went on with marked emphasis. ‘He was very much struck with Geraldine at Algiers, I feel sure; but his head’s stuffed as full of flighty sentimental nonsense as her own: and if he’s thrown in with that blushing bread-and-butter slip of a girl of poor old Dumaresq’s, he’ll fancy himself in love with her just because she’s poor and pretty and a nobody. That kind of man always does go and throw himself away upon a nobody, unless he’s closely watched, and protected by others against his own folly. Geraldine’s built the very same way. Nothing on earth would give her greater delight, I’m sure, than to marry a penniless poet, or painter, or music-master, and end her days with him comfortably in the workhouse.’

  The General toyed with the Japanese paper-knife uneasily. ‘It’s a great pity she can’t get settled,’ he said after a pause. ‘With Hugh’s expenses at Sandhurst so very heavy; and Gordon at Aldershot always asking for remittances, remittances, and again remittances, till one’s sick and tired of it; and the two boys at the Charterhouse eating their heads off and doing nothing; it’s really very much to be regretted, indeed, that she can’t find anybody anywhere to suit her. And yet, Maria, I sympathize a great deal, after all, with Geraldine. A girl naturally prefers to wait and watch till she’s found the man that really suits her.’

  ‘It’s not as if she met no young men,’ Mrs. Maitland went on, ignoring quietly her husband’s last rebellious sentence, ‘or never had any suitable offers. I’m sure no girl in England has been given better or greater chances. She was very much admired, indeed, at Aldershot: she goes to all the dances in Algiers: she’s been up in town for three seasons running: she travels about fifty times more than most girls do: and that man in the 42nd with the scar on his cheek would certainly have married her if only she’d have taken him, stammer or no stammer. I n
ever knew anyone more difficult to please or more impossible for an anxious mother to count upon.’

  Their conversation was cut short abruptly at that moment by the entry of the peccant Geraldine in person. She was tall and dark, with fine features, a little marred, perhaps, by a certain conscious pride and dignity; but her strong chin was instinct with character, and her upright carriage spoke her at once a woman with a will not to be bent even by a conscientiously worldly mother like Mrs. Maitland. Her father looked up at her with a glance of sidelong, surreptitious approbation as she entered. ‘Those passion-flowers become you, Geraldine,’ he said, with a furtive side-look at his formidable wife. ‘They’re very pretty. Where did you get them?’

  ‘Psyche gave them to me,’ Geraldine answered with a careless touch or two of her fingers on the drooping spray that hung gracefully down from her shapely neck over the open bosom. ‘They have a pale-blue passion-flower growing over their porch, you know, and Psyche picked me a few blossoms off it to wear this evening. She’s such a dear, always. They do look well, I think. Unusual things like that always suit me.’

  ‘You went round there this afternoon, then?’ her mother asked.