by Grant Allen
“And when you’ve taken your degeee, what then?” Nea asked with some eagerness after Paul had duly enlightened her mind as to the precise period of his Greats examination, and the chances for and against his obtaining a First in that arduous undertaking.
“Well, then,” Paul answered with some little embarrassment, “after that, I suppose I must go in for a fellowship.”
“But if you get a fellowship you won’t be able to marry, will you?” Nea inquired with interest. “Haven’t they got some horribly barbarous rule at Oxford that if a fellow marries he must lose his position?”
“No, no; not now,” Paul answered, smiling. “C’était autrefois ainsi, mais nous avons changé tout cela, as Sganarelle says in the play. A fellowship now is for a fixed period.”
“Well, that’s well, anyhow,” Nea went on, more easily. “I hope, Mr. Gascoyne, you’ll get your fellowship.”
“Thank you,” Paul replied. “That’s very kind of you. But I’m ashamed of having bored you with all this talk about myself — the subject upon which, as somebody once put it, all men are fluent and none agreeable.”
“The somebody was wrong, then,” Nea answered, with decision. “Whenever one meets an interesting individuality one wants to know as much as possible about it. Don’t you think,” and she looked up at him with her charming smile, “in our society nowadays we never really get to know half enough about one another?”
“I know nothing about society,” Paul replied frankly.
“I’ve never been in it. I’ve had no chance. But I think in as much of the world as I know — which is a very tiny world indeed — we do somehow seem to go round and round, like the people in the maze at Hampton Court, and never get at the heart and core one of the other.”
Dangerous ground, dangerous ground, dear Paul, for Mr. Solomons’ chance of recovering in full on that long investment.
Nea felt it so, perhaps, for she paused a moment, and examined a little pink rock-cistus that sprang from a cleft in the sandstone at her feet with unnecessarily close attention for anyone who was not a professed botanist. Then she said suddenly, as if with a burst of inspiration, “I shall be up in Oxford myself, I expect, next summer-term. Mrs. Douglas, the wife of the Accadian professor — at Magdalen, you know — means to ask me up for the Eights or something.”
“That’ll be just delightful!” Paul answered warmly.
“We shall have some chance then of really getting to know one another.”
“I always like Oxford,” Nea murmured, looking down, and half afraid the conversation was leading her too far.
“I just love every inch of it,” Paul replied with fervor.
“But then I’ve much reason to be grateful to Oxford. I owe it everything.”
“You’ll live there when you’re a fellow?” Nea asked, looking up again.
Paul hesitated a second, and pulled grasses in his turn. “I’ve got to get my fellowship first,” he said with some reserve. “And then — and then I suppose I must do something or other to make some money. I have heavy claims upon me.”
“Oh, dear! what a pity!” Nea cried with genuine regret.
“Why so, Miss Blair?”
“Because it’s so dreadful you should have to enter the world with claims, whatever they may be, to clog you. If you were free to choose your own walk in life, you know, you might do such wonders.”
“I should like literature,” Paul went on, relapsing once more into that egoistic vein. “But, of course, that’s impossible.”
“Why impossible?” Nea asked quickly.
“Because nobody can make money at literature nowadays,” Paul answered with a sigh; “and my circumstances are such that it’s absolutely necessary before everything else I should make money, and make it quickly. I must sacrifice everything to my chance of making money.”
“I see,” Nea answered with a faint tinge of displeasure in her tone. And she thought to herself “Perhaps he means he must get rich so as to keep up the dignity of the title. If so, I’m really and truly sorry; for I thought he had a great deal better stuff than that in him.’
“There are so many claims I have to satisfy,” Paul went on in a low voice, as if answering her inmost unspoken thought. “My time’s not my own. It’s somebody’s else I’ve mortgaged it all by anticipation.”
Nea gave a start.
“Then you’re engaged,” she said, putting the obvious feminine interpretation upon his ambiguous sentence. (A woman reads everything by the light of her own world — courtship and marriage.)
“Oh, no,” Paul answered, smiling. “I didn’t mean that, or anything like it. I wouldn’t mind that. It was something much more serious. I start in life with a grave burden.”
CHAPTER X.
THE HEIRESS IS WILLING.
“SAY, Mr. Gascoyne,” Isabel Boyton exclaimed, catching him up, breathless, on the Promenade du Midi, one day in the last week of Paul’s stay at Mentone; “Will you come and ride with us over to La Mortola to-morrow?”
“I’m sorry,” Paul answered, smiling at her free Pennsylvanian mode of address, “but I’ve no horse to ride upon.”
“Oh, I don’t mean ride horseback,” Isabel exclaimed promptly. “Mamma and I have chartered a kahrriage — a break, I think you call it over here in Europe — and we’re taking a party of ladies and gentlemen across to see the gardens.”
“I shall be delighted to go,” Paul answered truthfully — for Nea would be there, he knew, and he went accordingly.
At La Mortola, however, he soon found out that Miss Isabel meant to keep him all for herself, and, indeed, that she stuck to him with creditable persistence. This was a very new sensation for Paul, who had never been made so much of; but he accepted it as youth accepts almost everything — with the frank delight of a new experience.
And how charming it was, that drive across to La Mortola, with the hot southern afternoon sun beating full upon the hills! Bordighera gleaming white upon its seaward point, and Cap Martin behind bathed in broad floods of glorious sunshine! How Grimaldi shone among its silvery olives; how the spires of Mentone rose tall and slender in the glistening background! At the deep dark gorge spanned by the Pont St. Louis they crossed the frontier, and Paul found himself for the first time in his life on the soil of Italy. Past the Italian custom house and the old Saracen tower in Dr. Bennett’s garden, they wound along the ledge to the corner by La Mortola; and then they skirted a deep rocky ravine, all in darkest shade, with green pines clambering up its steep sides, till they halted against a broken cliff near the summit. At last they reached those marvelous hanging gardens, hewn out of the bare rock, where feathery African palms and broad-leaved tropical vegetation bask in the hot sun as on their native deserts. There they descended and wandered about at will, for it was a “free day,” and Isabel Boyton, taking possession of Paul, walked him off alone, with American coolness, to a seat that overhung the villa and the sea, with a view along the coast for a hundred miles from San Remo to Toulon.
“You go back next week,” she said at once after an awkward pause, when Paul had found nothing more to say to her, for he talked far less freely with the heiress than with Nea Blair.
“Yes: I go back next week,” Paul repeated vaguely.
“To Oxford?”
“To Oxford.”
“We shall miss you so at Mentone,” the Pennsylvanian went on with genuine regret. “You see, we’re so shorthanded for gentlemen, aint we?”
“You’re very kind,” Paul murmured, much abashed by this frank remark. “But perhaps somebody else will come who’ll do as well — or better.”
“What’s a good time to come and see Oxford in?” Isabel asked abruptly, without heeding his remark, but gazing with a vacant expression seaward.
“Summer term’s the best for visitors,” Paul answered, taken aback. “I should say about the twentieth of May, for example.”
“Perhaps I’ll fetch mamma along and have a look at it then,” the golden-haired American continued,
playing nervously with her parasol. “We could have a good time at Oxford about May, could we?”
“I’d do my best to help you enjoy yourself,” Paul replied, as in duty bound, but with a sinking recollection that just about that precise date he would be straining every nerve for his final examination.
“I call that real nice of you,” Isabel replied, still poking her parasol into the ground by her side. “Will you take us about and show us the College, the same as we read about it in ‘Tom Brown at Oxford’?”
“The University’s changed a good deal since those days,” Paul replied with a smile, “but I shall be glad to do whatever I can to make your visit a pleasant one. Though Thistleton,” he added, after a short pause, “would be able to show you a great deal more about the place than I can.”
The Pennsylvanian brought back her clear blue eyes from space with a sudden flash upon him. “Why?” she asked curtly.
“Because he’s so much richer,” Paul answered, boldly shaming the devil. “He’s a member of all the clubs and sports and everything. His father’s one of the wealthiest men in Sheffield.”
Isabel drew a face with her parasol on the gravel below. “I don’t care a pin for that,” she answered shortly.
“I suppose not. You’re so rich yourself,” Paul retorted with a sigh. Then he turned the subject clumsily. “These are lovely gardens.”
“My poppa could buy up a place like this with a month’s income,” the young lady answered, refusing to follow the false trail. She said it, not with any vulgar, boastful air, but simply as if to put him in possession of the facts of the case. She wanted him to know her exact position.
“Why isn’t he here with you?” Paul ventured to ask, just to keep the conversational ball rolling.
“Oh, my!” Isabel exclaimed. “What a question to ask! Why, he’s got to stay at home and mind the store, of course, like every other man, hasn’t he?”
“He’s in business then!” Paul said, with a start of surprise.
“In my country,” Isabel answered gravely, “it aint respectable not to be in business. My poppa’s the richest man in Philadelphia.” Then she looked down at her shoes and added once more, “But I don’t care a pin about money myself, for all that. What I care for is whether people are nice or not. And I like Mr. Thistleton well enough in a sort of a way; he’s quite nice, of course, and there’s nothing grubby about him. But he kind of don’t take me.”
“No?” Paul said, feeling he was called upon to say something. —
“No,” Isabel answered. “He don’t,” and then relapsed into strange silence.
For a moment or two they sat with their eyes fixed on the ground, and neither spoke a single word to the other. Then Isabel began once more, just to encourage him a bit, for she misinterpreted his awkwardness and shyness—” It is a lovely place. I’m most inclined to make my poppa give up the States and come across to reside for a permanence in some elegant place like this in Europe.”
“Your father would come if you wished him then?” Paul asked, all trembling with excitement, for he dimly suspected he was neglecting his duty (and Mr. Solomons’ interests) in the most culpable manner.
Isabel noticed his tremulous voice, and answered in the softest tones she could command:
“He’d do anything most to make me happy.”
“Indeed,” Paul replied, and gazed once more with a preoccupied air toward the distant Esterels. They came out so clear against the blue horizon.
“Yes, poppa just spoils me,” Isabel went on abstractedly; “he’s a real good poppa. And how lovely it’d be to pass one’s life in a place like this, with all those glorious mountains and hills around one, and that elegant sea tumbling and shining right in front of one’s eye — with somebody that loved one.”
The running was getting uncomfortably hot now.
“It would be delightful, indeed,” Paul echoed, very warm in the face, “if only one had got the money to do it with.”
Isabel waited a moment again with downcast eyes; but her neighbor seemed disinclined to continue the conversation. And to think he had the power to make any woman My Lady! She paused and looked long at him. Then she rose at last with a stifled sigh. He was real nice, she thought, this British baronet’s son, and he trembled a good bit, and felt like proposing, but he couldn’t just make up his mind right away on the spot to say what he wanted. English young men are so absurdly awkward.
“Well, we shall meet at Oxford, anyway,” she said lightly, moving down toward the shore. “Let’s get along and see what those great red plants on the rocks are, Mr. Gascoyne. I expect by this time mamma’ll be looking out for me.”
Paul went home to the Continental that night with a terrible consciousness of neglected duty. Modest as he was, he couldn’t even pretend to conceal from himself the obvious fact that the golden-haired Pennsylvanian had exhibited a marked preference for his conversation and society. He fancied she almost expected him to propose to her. And, indeed, the idea was not wholly of his own suggestion. Thistleton, retailing the common gossip of the Promenade du Midi, had more than once announced the firm belief that Paul might have “the Yankee girl for the asking.” And Paul, himself much inclined to underrate his own powers of attraction, could not, nevertheless, deny in his own soul the patent evidences that Isabel Boyton, for all her wealth, was fully susceptible to the charms of a British baronetcy.
He stood at last face to face in earnest with a great difficulty.
Could he or could he not carry out his compact?
As he sat by himself in his room at the Continental that night, he thought it all over, how it had gradually grown up step by step from the very beginning. It seemed so natural, every bit of it, to him, who had grown up with it himself, as a sort of religion. So strange to anyone else who heard it only for the first time now as a completed transaction.
For six years past and more, his father and mother and Mr. Solomons — the three great authorities that framed his life for him — had impressed it upon him as the first article of his practical creed, that he was to grow up a gentleman and marry an heiress.
To us, what an ignoble aim it seems! but on Paul it had always been enforced for years by all the sanctions of parental wisdom and commercial honesty as the supreme necessity. He was indebted to Mr. Solomons for his schooling, and his clothing, and his Oxford education; and the way he was bound to repay Mr. Solomons was to follow instructions to the very letter and marry an heiress. His stock-in-trade in life was his prospective title, and he was to sell that commodity, in accordance with recognized commercial maxims, in the dearest market.
And yet, strange to say, Paul Gascoyne himself was not mercenary. He had passively accepted the rôle in life, as most young men passively accept the choice of a profession made for them by their parent, without thinking very much, one way or the other, as to either its morality or its feasibility. He was so young when Mr. Solomons first hit upon his grand scheme for utilizing the reversion to a British baronetcy — no more than fourteen — that he had got the idea thoroughly dinned into his head long before he was able to recognize in all its naked hideousness the base and sordid side of that hateful compact. Solomons had supplied him with money from time to time — not liberally, to be sure, for he did not wish to make his protégé extravagant, but in sufficient quantities for the simple needs and wants of a scallywag; and Paul had accepted the money, giving in return his worthless notes of hand, as youth always accepts its livelihood from its accustomed purveyors, without much care or thought as to the right or wrong of the customary supplies.
And then, there had been so much besides to distract his attention from the abstract question of the ethics of marriage. He was occupied so much with reading for the schools, and taking pupils in his spare time to help eke out his scanty income; for he felt deeply what a drain he had always made on the family resources, and how much his father was beginning to stand in need of a son’s assistance in the management of his business. The question of the momen
t — the definite question then and there before him at each instant of his life — the necessity for reading hard and taking a good degree, and the parallel necessity for living at Oxford as cheaply as even a scallywag could do it — had overshadowed and eclipsed that remoter question of the underlying morality of the whole transaction, which had been settled for him beforehand, as it were, by his father and Mr. Solomons.
Paul, in fact, was the inheritor of two arduous heritages — the barren baronetcy, and Mr. Solomons’ claims to principal and interest.
Till that evening, then, though qualms of conscience had now and then obtruded themselves, he had never fairly and squarely faced his supreme difficulty. But, to-night, in the solitude of his room at the Continental, sitting by himself in the dark (so as not to waste his friend Thistleton’s boicgies at a franc apiece, hotel reckoning: for economy in small matters, had long since become instinctive with him), he turned the matter over for the first time in his soul with the definite issue clearly before him — could he or could he not ever conscientiously marry Isabel Boyton?
His whole soul within him revolted at once with a tempestuous No. Now that the chance for carrying Mr. Solomons’ scheme into actual practice had finally arrived — nay, even had thrust itself bodily upon him — he felt at once the whole meanness and baseness of the entire arrangement. Not so far as Mr. Solomons and his father were concerned — of their wisdom and goodness he could hardly have permitted himself even now to entertain a doubt — but so far as his own execution of their plan was at issue, he realized that at once in its true colors. —
