Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  ‘I see,’ Linnell answered bitterly. ‘You think the world’s wisdom for women is summed up in that one short phrase — to marry well — do you?’

  ‘You say it yourself,’ Dumaresq answered oracularly. ‘You say it, not I. But perhaps you’re right, after all. To marry well! It means what the wisdom of the world has made it mean — to marry where the means of happiness are best forthcoming.’ He said it musingly.

  Linnell bowed his head once more in solemn acquiescence. ‘I may see Miss Dumaresq to-morrow?’ he asked after a pause.

  ‘You may come in and finish your picture, of course. That’s mere common justice. Take as many days as you find needful to finish it. I wouldn’t waste so much valuable work for worlds by curtailing in any way your opportunities for completing it.’

  ‘And I may see her alone?’ the painter asked again, trembling.

  Dumaresq hesitated. ‘Yes, you may see her alone,’ he answered after a moment’s consideration; ‘but you know my views, and as a man of honour, you will not try to take advantage, I’m sure, of the permission — I may even say the concession I make to you. You will not incite a girl of seventeen to differ from her own father on an important matter affecting her future. I allow you to see her only because it’s possible you may have already said things to her you would now wish to withdraw or to explain away. I rely upon your sense of honour for the rest.’ He faltered for a moment with a sudden servile air. ‘I’m an old man,’ he repeated once more, almost humbly; ‘I only want to make Psyche happy.’

  The last two sentences were plaintively said. They touched Linnell somehow, in spite of himself.

  ‘Very well,’ he replied; ‘you may rely upon me, then.’ He looked at Dumaresq fixedly. ‘I have come to the age of disillusionments,’ he went on; ‘but no disillusion I’ve ever had in all my life was half so bitter as this of to-day has been. I have seen with my own eyes a king of men dethroned from his high seat — a prince of thinkers lowered from his pinnacle to the level of the commonest and vulgarest humanity. But for the sake of what you have said, I will spare you more. Miss Dumaresq shall never marry a penniless painter.’

  ‘Oh, remember, it’s for her sake,’ the old man cried appealingly, wringing his hands, and now unstrung by the sudden collapse of the opium-ecstasy. ‘It’s for her sake, remember! Don’t be too hard upon me, I beseech you, Linnell. She’s very young: I must guard her youth, her ignorance, her innocence. I should be doing wrong as a father if I didn’t preserve her from the fatal consequences of her own impetuousness, as we take away knives from very young children. It’s my duty to guide her by my elder experience. Many a woman who married herself for love at twenty — and led a life of hopeless drudgery — regrets it enough when she’s reached fifty to make her daughters marry better than she did. The world knows best: the world knows best: it is wiser by far than any one of its component members.’

  ‘Good-bye,’ Linnell answered, rising up with an effort from the dreary bank. ‘I’ll call in to finish the picture at ten to-morrow.’

  ‘At ten to-morrow!’ Haviland Dumaresq repeated in a dreamy voice. ‘At ten to-morrow! Good-bye for the present, then. It’s for Psyche’s sake. At ten to-morrow.’

  And sinking down on the bank, when Linnell was gone, he buried his face in his hands like a child and sobbed bitterly. ‘I hope I’ve done right,’ he cried to himself in his profound despair; ‘I hope I’ve done right. Perhaps I’m wrong. But I never could sell my Psyche to a life of drudgery!’

  VOLUME II.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  THE PARSON IN NORTHUMBERLAND.

  Linnell, for his part, had made his mind up at once: Psyche Dumaresq should never marry a penniless painter. But unless she was ready to marry a penniless painter, father or no father to the contrary notwithstanding — unless she was ready to forsake all and follow the man of her choice willingly, to poverty or riches, she was not the girl he imagined her to be; and dearly as the wrench would cost him now, he would go away the very next evening, and never again set eyes on Psyche. Not, indeed, that Linnell had any doubt whatsoever in his own mind upon that score. He had never felt before how deeply he loved Psyche — how profoundly and implicitly he trusted her instincts. He knew she could never harbour so mercenary a thought in her pure little soul as that fallen idol, her unworthy father. He knew she would take him, money or no money. He knew that there he could never be mistaken. He had watched her daily, he repeated to himself once more in the words of the ballad, a little altered, and he knew she loved him well. If he went to Psyche to-morrow, and asked her plainly, ‘Will you marry a penniless painter who loves you from the bottom of his heart?’ he felt sure she would answer, with her own sweet, innocent, guileless boldness, ‘I will gladly;’ and he would love her all the better for that naïve frankness.

  To do that would be no real breach of the virtual promise he had made her father; for was he not rich? Was he not well-born? Would he not make her supremely happy? Would he not be keeping the spirit of his bond by thus evading it in the outer letter? He said to himself ‘Yes’ to that question ten thousand times over, as he walked home alone across the breezy Downs to the Red Lion, with the keen wind blowing fresh against his flushed hot face, and the blood running warm in his tingling cheeks at the memory of that hideous unsought interview.

  Not that he really meant thus to break even the letter of his bond with Haviland Dumaresq. Oh no; he needed no such overt trial of his beautiful Psyche’s fidelity as that. He could trust her implicitly, implicitly, implicitly. Besides, the trial would be taken out of his hands. Dumaresq would go home, full of his discovery, his miserable discovery that Linnell was nothing but a common artist — a painter by trade — a journeyman colour-monger. The sordid philosopher, that mistaken father, would tell Psyche more or less directly the result of his own unspeakable inquiries: he would warn her against listening to that penniless young man; he would talk to her the common stereotyped cant of worldly-wise paternity: he would sink the brain that conceived the ‘Encyclopædic Philosophy’ to the miserable level of the Maitland intelligence.

  Linnell could hear in his ears even now the echoes of that hideous unholy cant— ‘they were dangerous guides, the feelings,’ and so forth, and so forth, usque ad nauseam, as though Haviland Dumaresq, a prophet born, had consented to dwell in his old age in the coasts of the Philistines. He could hear the greatest thinker of our time, in that sad dotage of his, ‘with a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter’s heart!’ Oh, heavens! It was incredible, it was loathsome, but it was nevertheless true. He hardly knew how to believe it himself, but he admitted it grudgingly to his own soul: Haviland Dumaresq had feet of clay, and the feet of clay had tottered to their fall in these last stages of a once mighty intellect.

  But Psyche? Ah, well! He had no fear at all in his heart for Psyche. He could never conceive his own beautiful, free, great-hearted Psyche ‘puppet to a father’s threats, or servile to a shrewish tongue.’ He knew what Psyche would do; he knew it perfectly. Psyche would burst in upon him to-morrow morning, when he called round to finish her father’s picture, and flinging all conventional restrictions to the four winds of heaven — rules like those were not for such as Psyche — would cast herself upon him with a wild emotion, clasp her arms around his neck in a torrent of joy, and cry aloud that, rich or poor, come what might, she loved him, she loved him. Or if Psyche didn’t do that — for, after all, a maiden is a maiden still — at least he would see, from the timid and tearful way she greeted him, that she at any rate was wholly unchanged by anything her father might have said to her overnight against a penniless lover. She would treat him more kindly and tenderly than ever; she would say by her actions, if not by her words, ‘I would love you still, though you had no roof to cover you.’ That was how a girl like Psyche ought to feel and act; and because he knew she would feel and act so, he loved her, he loved her. In Psyche’s presence he was no longer shy. Perfect love casteth out fear. Psyche would never be bent aside by such base consi
derations as swayed that clay-footed idol, her father. The grand incorruptible Haviland Dumaresq of former days, that was dead now in the old man’s shrunken and shrivelled soul, lived still in the purer and nobler nature of his spotless daughter.

  And then, when Psyche had thus proved herself worthy of her high lineage — for what lineage, after all, could be higher in any real scale of worth than direct descent from the greatest and deepest of modern thinkers? — he would clasp her to his breast in an ecstasy of passion, and tell her plainly, what he had never yet told any living being, that the sacrifice she thought she was making for his sake had no existence; that all her father asked for her she should freely enjoy — that money, position, respect, should be hers — that she should be everything he himself had never been. For Linnell was rich, if it came to that; from Haviland Dumaresq’s point of view quite fabulously rich; wealthy beyond the utmost dreams of Dumaresquian avarice: and if for some quixotic fad of his own he had chosen so long to give up the money that was rightly his due to the service of others, and to live entirely on his artistic earnings, he would not consider himself bound any longer to continue his obedience to that self-inflicted, self-denying ordinance, when he had a wife’s happiness to consult and to provide for — and that wife his own matchless Psyche. He was rich; and he stood next heir in blood to an English baronetcy. Many things had conspired to make the shrinking, sensitive painter feel the importance of his own position far less acutely than most men would have done; but that was no reason why others should not value it at the current valuation of such things in the world of England. He could go to Haviland Dumaresq, if need were, and say to him honestly, with unblushing pride: ‘The penniless painter has asked your daughter’s hand in marriage, and has been duly accepted. But the man who marries her is rich beyond the furthest you ever demanded from your daughter’s suitors, and belongs to one of the oldest and most distinguished families in all England.’ It was horrible, indeed, to think of coupling such a base and vulgar thought as that with the honoured name of Haviland Dumaresq; but if Haviland Dumaresq had in point of fact sunk so low, Linnell would meet him on his own new level, and ask him still for his guileless Psyche.

  With such thoughts as these whirling fast in his brain, the painter strolled back to the village inn, the air all full of Psyche, Psyche, Psyche. As he passed the Mansels’, he caught through the hedge the gleam of a rustling white summer dress, and overheard the tones of a most educated voice, which he recognised at once as the final flower of Girtonian culture. He hoped Mrs. Mansel would let him pass by without calling him in, for he was in small humour that day to discuss the relative merits of Wagner and Mendelssohn, or to give his opinion in set epigrammatic phrase on the latest development of the subjective novel. But Mrs. Mansel spied him out with keen vision as he passed the gate, and came over with her sweetly subdued smile, in a Greek-looking robe looped up with an old gold oriental scarf, to call him for colloquy into her most cultivated garden. The Academy and Mind lay beside the learned lady’s vacant place on the rustic seat, but in her hand she held coquettishly that far more mundane journal, the Morning Post. Curiosity survives as a maternal legacy even in the most highly-strung of the daughters of Eve; and Mrs. Mansel’s curiosity was now at boiling-point.

  ‘Oh, Mr. Linnell,’ she cried with unwonted eagerness, ‘I’m so glad you’ve come! I’ve been longing to see you. I wanted to ask you something so important. Have you any relations living in Northumberland?’

  The question fell upon Linnell’s ear like a clap of thunder from a clear sky. He hadn’t the slightest idea in his own mind what on earth Mrs. Mansel could mean. But glancing hastily at her finger on the open page, the thought occurred to him with lightning rapidity that perhaps his half-brother Frank had just got married. That was the secret, then, of Sir Austen’s desire to have the question of the succession settled upon a firm and secure basis before he left England! Linnell hesitated a fraction of a moment: then he answered doubtfully: ‘I believe there’s one member of my family living there at present. But I know very little of him. I’ve never seen him. To tell you the truth, our family relations haven’t been always quite what you could call cordial.’

  ‘A clergyman?’ Mrs. Mansel asked with her soft low voice.

  ‘A clergyman, yes,’ Linnell made answer, bewildered. ‘Is there anything about him in the paper to-day, then?’

  ‘Oh, I felt sure he must be one of your family,’ Mrs. Mansel cried, still holding that tantalizing sheet tightly in her small white hand. ‘The name’s Francis Austen Linnell, you see, and I recognised him, as I recognised you, by the peculiar spelling of the name Austen.’

  ‘We’re all of us Austens,’ Linnell answered with a short, uneasy laugh. ‘It’s a point of honour with every Linnell I ever heard of to continue the family tradition in that respect. It’s gone on in an unbroken line, I believe, since the time of Charles the Second; and it’ll go on still till baronetcies are as extinct as dodos and megatheriums. But may I ask what my respected namesake’s been doing at all to get himself mentioned in the Morning Post? Up to date, I can’t say I ever remember any performance of his, except his birth, being thought worth recording in a London newspaper.’

  ‘Like Mark Twain’s hero,’ Mrs. Mansel suggested with a musical little laugh, ‘who up to the age of seventy-five years had never shown any remarkable talent — and never showed any afterward: so that when he died, ill-natured people said he’d done it on purpose to gain notoriety.’

  ‘Died!’ Linnell exclaimed, holding out his hand incredulously for the paper. ‘You don’t mean to say Frank’s dead, do you?’

  ‘Oh yes, I forgot to say it’s his death that comes next by way of record,’ Mrs. Mansel went on with serene composure. ‘In fact, of course, I took it for granted you’d have seen the announcement somewhere already. No, not in the Births, Deaths, and Marriages: it’s later than that. See, there’s the place: “Appalling Catastrophe on the Great Northern Railway.”’

  Linnell took the paper from her hand with trembling fingers and ran his eye hastily down the lengthy telegram. ‘As the 6.45 night express was steaming out of Doncaster yesterday evening’ ... ‘goods-waggons laden with heavy pig-iron’ ... ‘both trains were completely telescoped’ ... ‘harrowing scenes among the dead and wounded’ ... ‘the following bodies have already been identified’ ... ‘The Rev. Francis Austen Linnell, Vicar of Hambledon-cum-Thornyhaugh, Northumberland.’

  He handed back the paper, very white in the face, to Mrs. Mansel. It was clear that the news profoundly affected him.

  ‘Why, Mr. Linnell, I didn’t know you were so much interested in the man,’ the learned lady cried, astonished and penitent. ‘If I’d thought you were so deeply concerned as that, I’d have broken it gently to you — indeed I would. Was he such a very near relation, then?’

  ‘He was only — my brother,’ Linnell answered with a gasp. He had never seen him; but blood is thicker than water, after all. A nameless shock seemed to run through his system. Two thoughts came uppermost in the painter’s mind amid the whirl of emotion that those words had brought upon him. The first was a sense of profound thankfulness that he had written and posted that letter to Sir Austen before he knew of his brother’s sudden death. The second was the idea that even Haviland Dumaresq would now no doubt be satisfied to accept as Psyche’s husband the heir-presumptive to an English baronetcy, who had no longer any reason for concealing his position and prospects from the world in deference to the feelings of an illegitimate relative.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  RACK AND THUMBSCREW.

  Haviland Dumaresq sat long on the bank, with his head in his hands, sobbing like a child. Then he rose wearily, and plodded home alone, his head aching and his heart heavy at the downfall of that mad momentary opium dream for his beloved Psyche.

  Without and within, indeed, the day had changed. Dull weather was springing up slowly from the west, where the sun had buried itself behind a rising fog-bank. The philosopher made his way, with stumblin
g steps, across the open Downs — those prosaic Downs so lately mountains — and lifting the latch of the garden gate, entered the house and walked aimlessly into his bare little study.

  A dozen books lay open on the plain deal table — books of reference for the subject at which he was just then working — a series of papers on mathematical and astronomical questions for the ‘Popular Instructor.’ He sat down in his place and tried to compose. It was for bread, for bread, for bread, for Psyche. But even that strong accustomed spur could not goad him on to work this dreary afternoon. He gazed vacantly at the accusing sheet of virgin-white foolscap: not a thought surged up in that teeming brain; not a picture floated before those dim inner eyes; he couldn’t fix himself for a moment upon the declination of Alpha Centauri: with all the universe of stars and nebulæ and constellations and systems careering madly in wild dance around him to the music of the spheres, his mind came back ever to one insignificant point in space, on the surface of that petty planet he so roundly despised — the point occupied by a tiny inconspicuous organic result of cosmic energies, by name Psyche. At last he flung down his pen in despair, and opening the door half ajar in his hand, called up the stairs to her, ‘Psyche, Psyche, Psyche!’

  ‘Yes, papa,’ Psyche answered, jumping up at the call from the tiny couch in her own bedroom, and running down the steep and narrow cottage staircase. ‘You weren’t in for lunch. I was so sorry. You’ve had one of those horrid headaches again, I’m sure. I can tell it by your eyes. I see the pupils look so big and heavy.’