by Grant Allen
“Well, you see, Faith,” Paul answered, musing, “I expect the fact is, very often, they don’t remember, and they’ve no idea what trouble they’re causing. Perhaps we oughtn’t to judge them too hardly.”
“I judge them hardly,” Faith cried, flushing up: “and so would you, if you’d the bills to make up, and had to go round to their very doors to ask them for the money. But Mrs. Douglas, she’s quite another sort — she’s quite different. You can’t think how friendly we got together in that one evening. Though, to be sure, we lay awake the best part of the night, chattering away like a couple of magpies; and before morning we were much more intimate than I ever was with any other woman in all my life.
I think, perhaps—” and then Faith hesitated.
“You think, perhaps, it was because she was more like the sort of person you ought naturally to mix with,” Paul suggested gently, reading with his quick sympathetic instinct her unuttered thought.
Faith faltered still. “Well, perhaps so,” she said. “More my equal, at least in intelligence and feeling. Though I should be sorry to think, Paul,” she added after a pause, “I had more in common with the class that keeps people waiting for their money than with dear, good, honest, hard-working souls like father and mother.”
“I don’t think the classes need be mutually exclusive, as we say in logic,” Paul mused slowly. “You see, I mix a good deal with both classes now; and it seems to me there may be good and bad in both about equally.”
“Perhaps so. But the harm the one class does comes home to me, of course, a great deal more than the harm done by the other. They give me such a lot of bother about the bills; you wouldn’t believe it. But Mrs. Douglas is a dear, I’m sure of that. She gave me such a kiss when she saw me off by the train next morning, and she said to me, ‘Now, remember. Faith, dear, I expect you to come in summer-term, and visit me at Oxford.’”
“At Oxford?” Paul cried, with a start of short-lived pleasure.
“Oh, yes, she was always going on about that the whole night through. She kept at it all the time, ‘You must come to Oxford.’ I’d happened to say to her earlier in the day, while we were in the train together, and before we got quite so intimate with one another, that I’d always had such a longing to see the university; and as soon as we’d begun to chum up a bit, you know, she said at once, ‘Next summer-term you must come and visit me at Oxford.’ But it couldn’t be managed, of course,” Faith went on with a sigh. “The thing’s beyond us. Though I couldn’t make her understand how utterly impossible it was.”
Paul’s face fell. “I suppose it is impossible,” he murmured, disappointed. “You couldn’t get the proper sort of clothes, I expect, to go and stop at Mrs. Douglas’, could you?”
“No,” Faith answered very decisively. “I couldn’t indeed. It may be wicked pride, but I’m woman enough to feel I won’t go unless I can be dressed as well as all the others.”
“It’s a dreadful thing, Faith,” Paul said, still holding her hand and looking away vaguely over the bare English landscape — so painful a contrast to the green of Mentone; “it’s a dreadful thing that I can’t do anything in that way to help you. Now, any other brother, situated as I am, would be able to assist his sister a bit, and make her a little present of a dress and hat for such an occasion as that, for example. But I — I can’t. Whatever I have is all Mr. Solomons’. I can’t spend a single penny unnecessarily on myself or you without doing wrong to him and father and you and mother. There’s the tenner, now, I got from Thistleton for coaching him: under any other circumstances, I’d be able to look upon that as my own to spend — I earned it myself — and to get you an evening dress (you’d want a simple evening dress, of course) to go to Oxford with. But I can’t allow myself such a luxury as that. If I did, I’d have to get another tenner the more from Mr. Solomons, and sign for it at once, and burden my conscience, and father’s, and yours, with another extra ten pounds and all the interest.”
“I sometimes think,” Faith exclaimed petulantly, “we should all have been a great deal happier in our lives if we’d never heard of that dreadful Mr. Solomons!”
Paul took a more judicial view of the situation as became his sex.
“I sometimes think so, too,” he answered after a pause.
“But then, you’ve got to remember, Faith, that we both of us are what we are now, wholly and solely through Mr. Solomons. We can’t unthink so much of our past as to make ourselves mentally into what we might have been if Mr. Solomons had never at all crossed our horizon. We must recollect that if it hadn’t been for Mr. Solomons I should never have gone either to grammar school or to Oxford. And if I’d never gone, you’d never have learnt all that you’ve learnt from me. You’d never even have become a teacher — now, would you? In a sort of way, Faith, you’re now a lady, and I’m a gentleman. I know we are not what the big people at Hillborough would call gentlefolk; but in the only sense of the word that’s worth anything, we are; and that we are, all depends upon Mr. Solomons. So being what we are, we can’t say now what we would have wished things to be if we had been quite otherwise.”
“That’s a trifle metaphys’cal,” Faith murmured, smiling.
“I don’t feel sure I follow it. But, perhaps, after all, on the whole, I agree with you.”
“Mr. Solomons is a factor you can’t eliminate from our joint lives,” Paul went on quietly; “and if we could eliminate him, and all that he implies, we’d not be ourselves. We’d be Tom and Mary Whitehead, if you understand me.”
“You might be Tom, but I’d not be Mary,” Faith answered with a not unbecoming toss of her head, for the Whiteheads in point of fact were her pet aversion. “The difference there is something in the fiber. I suppose Mrs. Douglas would say it was blue blood; but, anyhow, I believe I’m not quite made of the same stuff as she is.”
“Why, there you’re as bad as Mrs. Douglas herself,”
Paul retorted, laughing. “Who was so precious democratic just now, I’d like to know, about all mankind and its varieties of circulating fluid?”
Faith laughed in return, but withdrew her hand. We all of us object to the prejudices of others, but our own little prejudices are so much more sensible, so much more firmly grounded on reasonable distinctions! We don’t like to have them too freely laughed at.
“And this Yankee girl you were telling us about last night,” Faith went on after a pause. “Was she very nice? As nice as she was rich? And did you and she flirt desperately together?”
Paul’s smiling face grew suddenly grave.
“Well, Faith,” he said, “to tell you the truth — you may think it an awfully presumptuous thing for a fellow like me to say, but I really believe it — if I were to take pains about going the right way to work, I might get that Yankee girl to say Yes to me.”
“Most probably,” Faith answered, quite undiscomposed by this (to Paul) most startling announcement.
“You’re laughing at me,” Paul cried, drawing back a little sharply. “You think me a conceited prig for imagining it.”
“Not at all,” Faith replied, with supreme sisterly confidence in her brother’s attractions. “On the contrary, I should think nothing on earth could be more perfectly natural. There’s no reason that I can see why you need be so absurdly modest about your own position. You’re tall, you’re strong, you’re well-built, you’re good-looking, and, though it’s me that says it as oughtn’t to say it, you’re every inch a gentleman. You’ve been well-educated; you’re an Oxford man, accustomed to mix with the best blood in England; you’re cleverer than anybody else I ever met; and, last of all, you’re the heir to a baronetcy. Heaven knows I’m the least likely person in the world to overestimate the worth or importance of that; but, after all, it always counts for something. If all those combined attractions aren’t enough to bring down the American girl on her knees, where, for goodness’ sake, does she expect to find her complete Adonis?”
“I wish I felt half as confident about myself as you do abo
ut me,” Paul murmured, half-ashamed.
“If you did you wouldn’t be half as nice as you are now, my dear. It’s your diffidence that puts the comble on your perfections, as dear old Clarice would say. I’m so glad you saw her. She’d be so proud and delighted.”
“And yet it was awkward,” Paul said reflectively.
“I don’t doubt it was awkward,” his sister replied. “It’s always awkward to mix up your classes.”
“I’m not so much ashamed,” Paul went on with a sigh, “as uncomfortable and doubtful. It isn’t snobbishness, I think, that makes me feel so; but, you see, you don’t know how other people will treat them. And you hate having to be always obtruding on people whose whole ideas, and sympathies, and feelings, are restricted to one class the fact that you yourself are just equally bound up with another. It seems like assuming a constant attitude of needless antagonism.”
“Is she pretty?” Faith put in abruptly, not heeding his explanation.
“Who? Clarice? As pretty as ever, and not one day older.”
“I didn’t mean her” Faith interposed with a smile. “I meant the other one — the American.”
“Oh, her. Yes, in her way, no doubt. Mignonne, slender, pallid, and golden-haired. She looks as if a breath would blow her away. Yet she’s full of spirit, and cheek, and audacity, for all that. She said to me herself one day, ‘I’m a little one, but, oh my!’ and I’m sure she meant it. The man that marries her will have somebody to tackle.”
“And do you like her, Paul?”
Paul looked up in surprise, not at the words, but at the impressive, half-regretful way in which they were spoken.
“No,” he said. “Faith, if you ask me point-blank, she’s a nice little girl — pretty and all that sort of thing; but I don’t care for her.”
“And will you take pains about going the right way to make her say Yes to you?”
“Faith! How can you! I could never marry her. Rich as she is, and with all Mr. Solomons’ bills at my back, I could never marry her.”
There was a minute’s pause. Then Faith said again, looking up in his face, “So the revolt has come. It’s come at last. I’ve been waiting for it and expecting it. For months and months I’ve been waiting and watching. You’ve found yourself face to face with the facts at last, and your conscience is too strong for you. I knew it would be.”
“The revolt has come,” Paul answered with an effort. “I found it out last week at Mentone alone, and in my own mind it’s all settled now. It’s a terrible thing to have to say, Faith, and I’ve hardly worked out all it entails yet; but, come what may, I can’t marry an heiress.”
Faith said nothing, but she rose from her seat, and, putting her two hands to his warm, red cheeks, kissed him soundly with sisterly fervor.
“I know what it means, Paul,” she said, stooping over him tenderly. “I know what a struggle it must have cost you to make up your mind — you on whom it’s been enjoined as a sort of sacred duty for so many years past by father and Mr. Solomons. But I knew when once you came to stand face to face with it you’d see through the sham, and dispel the illusion. You could never, never so sell yourself into slavery, and a helpless woman into gross degradation.”
“It will kill father whenever I have to tell him,” Paul murmured in return. “It will be the deathknell of all his hopes and ideals.”
“But you needn’t tell him — at present at least,” Faith answered wisely. “Put off the worst till you find it’s inevitable. After all, it’s only a guess that the American would take you. Most men don’t marry at twenty-one. And you won’t be twenty-one till to-morrow. You’ve years before you yet to make up your mind in. You can earn money meanwhile and repay it slowly. The disillusionment may come by slow degrees. There’s no need to spring it upon him at one swoop, as you sprang it upon me unexpectedly this minute.”
“I can never earn it; I can never repay it,” Paul answered despondently. “It’s far too heavy a weight for a man to begin life upon. I shall sink under the burden, but I shall never get rid of it.”
“Wait and see,” Faith answered. “For the present, there’s no need for saying anything. To-morrow Mr. Solomons will want you to sign your name afresh. But don’t be foolish enough to tell him this. Why, goodness gracious, there’s the bell! I must hurry down at once. And how cold it is up here on the hilltop!”
Halfway down the slope she turned and spoke once more. “And the other girl,” she said: “Nea Blair? The English one?”
“She’s very, very nice,” Paul answered with warmth. “She’s a really good girl. I like her immensely.”
“Who is she?” Faith asked in a tremulous voice.
“Her father’s a clergyman somewhere down in Cornwall.”
“I should hate her,” Faith cried. “I know I should hate her. I never can bear grand girls like that. If this is one of that sort, I know I should hate her. The American I could stand — their ways are not our ways; and we have the better of them in some things; but an Englishwoman like that — I know I could never, never endure her.”
“I’m sorry,” Paul answered. And he looked at her tenderly.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE COMING OF AGE OF THE HEIR OF THE TITLE.
NEXT morning was Paul’s twenty-first birthday. For that important occasion he had hurried home to England three days before his term at Oxford began; for Mr. Solomons was anxious to bind him down firmly at the earliest possible moment to repay all the sums borrowed on his account by his father during his infancy from the very beginning. To be sure, they had all been expended on necessaries, and if the sturdy infant himself would not pay, it would always be possible to fall back upon his father. But then, what use was that as a security, Mr. Solomons asked himself. No, no; he wanted Paul’s own hand and seal to all the documents hereinafter recapitulated, on the date of his coming of age, as a guarantee for future repayment.
The occasion, indeed, was properly celebrated in the Gascoyne household with all due solemnity. The baronet himself wore his Sunday best, with the carefully brushed tall hat in which he always drove summer visitors to church in the Hillborough season, and at ten of the clock precisely he and Paul repaired, with a church-going air, as is the habit of their class (viewed not as a baronet, but as petite bourgeoisie) whenever a legal function has to be performed, to the dingy, stingy, gloomy-looking house where Mr. Solomons abode in the High Street of Hillborough.
Mr. Solomons, too, for his part, had risen in every way to the dignity of the occasion. He had to do business with a real live baronet and his eldest son; and he had prepared to receive his distinguished guests and clients with becoming hospitality. A decanter of brown sherry and a plate of plain cake stood upon the table by the dusty window of the estate agent’s office; a bouquet of laurestinus and early forced wallflowers adorned the one vase on the wooden chimney-piece, and a fancy waistcoat of the most ornate design decorated Mr. Solomons’ own portly person. Mr. Lionel, too, had come down from town to act as witness and general adviser, and to watch the case, so to speak, on his own behalf, as next-of-kin and heir-in-law to the person most interested in the whole proceeding. Mr. Lionel’s hair was about as curly and as oleaginous as usual, but the flower in his button hole was even nobler in proportions than was his wont on weekdays, and the perfume that exhaled from the silk pocket-handkerchief was more redolent than ever of that fervid musk which is dear to the Oriental nervous organization.
“Come in, Sir Emery,” Mr. Solomons observed, rubbing his hands with great unction, as the cabdriver paused for a second respectfully at his creditor’s door. Mr. Solomons called his distinguished client plain Gascoyne on ordinary occasions when they met on terms of employer and cabman, but whenever these solemn functions of high finance had to be performed he allowed himself the inexpensive luxury of rolling that superfluous title as for a special treat on his appreciative palate as a connoisseur rolls a good glass of Burgundy.
Paul grew hot in the face at the unwelcome sound — for to Paul t
hat hateful baronetcy had grown into a perfect bête noire — but Sir Emery advanced by shuffling steps with a diffident air into the middle of the room, finding obvious difficulties as to the carriage of his hands, and then observed, in a sheepish tone, as he bowed awkardly:
“Good-day, Mr. Solomons, sir. Fine mornin’, Mr. Lionel.”
“It is a fine morning,” Mr. Lionel condescended to observe in reply, with a distant nod; “but devilish cold, aint it?” Then extending his sleek white hand to Paul with a more gracious salute, “How de do, Gascoyne? Had a jolly time over yonder at Mentone?”
For Mr. Lionel never forgot that Paul Gascoyne had been to Oxford and was heir to a baronetcy, and that, therefore, social capital might, as likely as not, hereafter be made out of him.
“Thank you,” Paul answered, with a slight inclination of his head and a marked tone of distaste, “I enjoyed myself very much on the Riviera. It’s a beautiful place, and the people were so very kind to me.”
For Paul on his side had always a curious double feeling toward Lionel Solomons. On the one hand, he never forgot that Lionel was his uncle’s nephew, and that once upon a time, when he played as a child in his father’s yard, he used to regard Lionel as a very grand young gentleman indeed. And on the other hand, he couldn’t conceal from himself the patent fact, especially since he had mixed in the society of gentlemen on equal terms at Oxford, that Lionel Solomons was a peculiarly offensive kind of snob — the snob about town who thinks he knows a thing or two as to the world at large, and talks with glib familiarity about everyone everywhere whose name is bandied about in the shrill mouths of London gossip.
