Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  Mrs. Brandreth turned the telegram over nervously, with two big tears standing ready to fall in the corners of her dear motherly old eyes, and then asked in a timid voice, “So you’ve quite decided, have you, Arthur, that it must be all broken off between him and poor Iris?”

  The Bishop played with his paper-knife, half stuck through the Guardian in his testy fashion. “My dear,” he answered, with the natural impatience of a just man unduly provoked by female persistence, “how is it possible, I put it to you, that we could ever dream of letting her marry him? I don’t wish to judge him harshly — far be it from me to judge any man: I hope I understand my duty as a Christian better: but still, Charlotte, it’s one of our duties, you know, — an unpleasant duty, but none the less a duty on that account — not to shut our eyes against plain facts. We are entrusted with the safe-keeping of our daughter’s happiness, and I say we oughtn’t to allow her to imperil it by throwing herself away upon a man whom we strongly suspect — upon just grounds — to be quite unworthy of her. I’m sorry that we must give Iris so much pain; but our duty, Charlotte, our duty, I say, lies clear before us. The young man himself sees it. What more would you wish, I wonder?”

  Mrs. Brandreth sighed quietly, and let the two tears roll unperceived down her placid, gentle, fair old face. “The court-martial has taken a more lenient view of the case, Arthur,” she suggested tentatively, after a pause of a few minutes.

  The Bishop looked up from the table of contents of the Guardian with a forcedly benign glance of Christian forbearance. Women will be women, of course, and will sympathize with daughters and so forth in all their foolish matrimonial entanglements. “My dear,” he explained, with his practised episcopal smile of gentle condescension to the lower intelligence of women and of the inferior clergy, “you must recollect that the court-martial had to judge of legal proof and legal certainty. Moral proof and moral certainty are, of course, quite another matter. I might hesitate, on the evidence given, to imprison this young man or even to deprive him of his commission in the army; and yet I might hesitate on the very same grounds to let him take my daughter in marriage. He has been acquitted, it is true, on the charge; but a suspicion, Charlotte, a certain vague shadow of formal suspicion must always, in future, hang over him like a cloud. Cæsar’s wife — you remember the Roman dictator said, Cæsar’s wife must be above suspicion. Surely, if even a heathen thought that, we, Charlotte, with all our privileges, ought to be very careful on what sort of man we bestow Iris.”

  And having thus summarily dismissed the matter, the Bishop turned with profound interest to the discussion on the evil consequences of the Burials Bill and the spread of dissent in the West of England.

  To a mind deeply engrossed with these abstruse and important subjects, the question about poor Iris’s relations with Captain Burbury, of the Hundred and Fiftieth, was, of course, a relatively small one. Iris, indeed, had never been engaged to him; that was a great comfort in all this ugly, unpleasant business. The young man had only buzzed a little around the episcopal palace at Whitchester, danced with her, talked to her, and arrived at a slight private understanding which didn’t exactly amount to a regular engagement, and which had never been officially communicated to the parental ear. That, at least, was a great comfort; the Bishop considered it almost providential. Since this awkward question about the deficiency in the adjutant’s accounts had first arisen, to be sure, the Bishop had learned from Mrs. Brandreth that this young man (he always spoke of Harry Burbury in that oblique fashion) had succeeded in making a passing impression upon poor Iris’s unbestowed affections. But then girls, you see, are always fancying themselves in love with some young man or other, and are always profoundly convinced for the time being that they can never conceivably be happy without him. We, my dear Mr. Dean or my dear Sir William, who are men of the world — I mean, who are persons of maturer years and more solid understanding — we know very well that in six months or so girls forget all about that nice Mr. Blank or that dear Captain Somebody in their last passing fancy for young So-and-so, who will in due time be equally forgotten, in favour of some more really desirable and eligible person. And as in this case there would be no public withdrawal, no open breach of an announced engagement, Dr. Brandreth turned complacently to the discussion on the Burials Bill, and in ten minutes had completely dismissed from his profound episcopal mind the whole subject of Captain Burbury’s unfortunate court-martial.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Brandreth, who was not philosophical, like the Bishop, but who felt herself most imprudently sympathetic with all dear Iris’s little girlish feelings — quite wickedly so, she was almost afraid — Mrs. Brandreth, I say, had stolen away quietly to her daughter’s room, and was sitting on the little couch at the foot of the bed, with Iris’s hand held fast in hers, and Iris’s soft crimson cheek laid tenderly on her motherly shoulder. “There, there, darling,” she was saying with tears in her eyes, as she soothed her daughter’s hand gently with her own; “don’t cry, Iris, don’t cry, my pet. Yes, do cry; it’ll do you good, darling. Perhaps by-and-by, when things blow over a little, your papa will think rather differently about it.”

  Iris took up the telegram for the fiftieth time with a fresh flood of tears: “From Captain Burbury, Aldershot, to Miss Brandreth, Eaton Place, London. The court-martial has acquitted me on all the charges. But I can never, never see you again.”

  “Oh, mamma,” she cried through her sobs and tears, “how cruel of him to say such a thing as that, and at such a moment!”

  “No, no, dearest,” her mother said. “He was quite right to say it. He feels the horrible suspicion rests upon him still, and he can’t bear to face you while it’s hanging over him. No good and true man could do otherwise.... But,” she added after a moment’s pause, “I think, Iris, ... I think, darling, in spite of what he says, you’ll probably see him here this very evening.”

  Iris gave a sudden start of surprise and pleasure. “This evening, mamma! This very evening?” she cried excitedly. “Oh no, not after sending me such a telegram as that, dear, surely!”

  Mrs. Brandreth had not the slightest idea in the world that she was a practical psychologist — probably she could not have pronounced the word even if you had asked her — yet she answered quite readily, “Why, you know, Iris, he must have come straight out from the court-martial and sent off that telegram in the heat of the moment, just to let you know at once he had been at any rate acquitted. Of course he couldn’t help adding the despairing tag about his never, never seeing you. But when he goes back to his own quarters and thinks it over a little, he’ll make up his mind — I know young men, my dear — he’ll make up his mind that he must just run up to town and speak with you once more before he breaks it all off for ever. And if he sees you, Iris — but, after all, why should he break it off? He has nothing to be ashamed of. For, indeed, I’m quite sure, darling, he never, never, never, never could have taken that dreadful money.”

  “Of course not, mamma,” Iris answered simply, with profound confidence. What a blessed thing it is to be a trustful woman! The Bishop’s moral certainty was really nothing at all compared to his pretty, weeping daughter’s unshaken conviction.

  “Charlotte,” the Bishop said, putting his head in at the door for a second, with his episcopal hat suspended loosely in his right hand, “I’ve ordered the carriage, and I’m going down now to the Athenæum; from the Athenæum I shall drive on to the House of Lords; from the House of Lords, after dinner, I shall go into the Commons and hear what those dissenting Glamorgan people have got to say about this distressing Welsh disestablishment business. Very probably the debate may be late. I shall send the carriage home, in case you want it, and I shall cab it back or take the Metropolitan. Don’t sit up for me. Have you got a latch-key?”

  Mrs. Brandreth gave an involuntary start. The notion of the Bishop demanding a latch-key was really and truly too ridiculous. The fact was, the Brandreths had only just taken their furnished house in Eaton Place for the season that very
week, and the Bishop himself had arrived alone from the Palace, Whitchester, that identical morning. A man oppressed by the spiritual burdens of an entire diocese cannot, of course, be reasonably expected to go house-hunting. It was irrational and unscriptural, Dr. Brandreth held, to suppose that he should leave the work of his see to serve tables. So Mrs. Brandreth and Iris had come to town and secured the episcopal lodgings beforehand; and as soon as everything was put fully straight, the Bishop himself came up for the session to “his own hired house” (like St. Paul) and entered into the enjoyment of a neatly ordered and well-arranged study. This, he explained, left his mind perfectly free for the wearing and harassing duties of the episcopate, combined, as they were under our existing circumstances, with the arduous work of a Lord Spiritual in the Upper House.

  Yes, Mrs. Brandreth had a latch-key; and the Bishop, still absorbed in soul by the effects of the Burials Bill and the aggressive conduct of the Glamorganshire Dissenters, kissed his wife and daughter mechanically, and went off ruminating to the Athenæum. “Iris has been crying,” he said to himself with a pensive smile, as John turned the handle of the carriage-door respectfully behind him. “Girls will make a fuss about these foolish love affairs. But in a little while she’s sure to get over it. Indeed, for my part, what she can possibly see to admire in this young man in the Hundred and Fiftieth rather than in poor dear good Canon Robinson, who would make such an admirable husband for her — though, to be sure, there is a certain disparity in age — fairly passes my comprehension.”

  And yet, when young Mr. Brandreth of Christ Church had wooed and won Charlotte Vandeleur, he was himself a handsome young curate.

  The afternoon wore away slowly in Eaton Place, but dinner-time came at last, and just as Mrs. Brandreth and Iris were rising up disconsolately from a pitiable pretence of dinner, “for the sake of the servants,” there came a very military knock at the front door, which made poor Iris jump and start with a sudden flush of vivid colour on her pale cheek.

  “I told you so, darling,” Mrs. Brandreth half whispered in a pleased undertone. “It’s Captain Burbury.”

  And so it was. The mother’s psychology (or instinct if you will) had told her correctly. Mrs. Brandreth rose to go into the drawing-room as soon as the card was duly laid before her. “I oughtn’t to leave them alone by themselves,” she thought to herself silently. “If I did, under the circumstances, Arthur would be justifiably angry.” And, so thinking, she drew her daughter’s arm in hers, murmured softly, “Iris dear, I really feel I oughtn’t to leave you,” and — walked off quietly without another word into her own boudoir.

  Iris, her heart beating fast and high, opened the door and stepped alone into the front drawing-room.

  As she entered, Harry Burbury, that penitent and shamefaced man, walked up to her with hands outstretched, ... seemed for a moment as if he would bow merely, ... then made as though he would shake hands with her ... and finally, carried away for a moment from his set purpose, caught her up ardently in both his arms, kissed her face half a dozen times over, and pressed her tight against his heaving bosom.

  He had never kissed her so before, but Iris somehow felt to herself that the action just then really required no apology.

  Next minute, Harry Burbury stepped back again a few paces and surveyed her sadly, with his face burning a fiery crimson. “Oh, Iris,” he cried, “I mean Miss Brandreth — no, Iris. I made up my mind as I came along in the train from Aldershot that I should never, never again call you Iris.”

  “But, Harry, you made up your mind, too, you would never see me!”

  “I did, Iris, but I thought — I thought, when I came to think it over, that perhaps I had better come and tell you, before I left England, why I felt it must be all closed for ever between us.”

  “Left England, Harry! All closed between us!”

  “Yes, Iris; yes, darling!” And here Harry so far forgot his resolution once more that he again kissed her. “I shall resign my commission and go away somewhere to the Colonies.”

  “Harry!”

  It was a cry of distress, and it rang terribly in the young man’s ears; but with an effort he steeled himself. He didn’t even kiss her. “Iris,” he began once more, “it isn’t any use my trying to call you Miss Brandreth, and I won’t do it. Iris, I feel that, after this, I have no right to come near you in future. I have no right to blight your life with that horrid, terrible, undeserved suspicion.”

  “But, Harry, you are innocent! You didn’t take it! And the court-martial acquitted you.”

  “Yes, darling, they acquitted me of the charge, but not of the suspicion. If I had taken it, Iris — if a man had taken it, I mean, he might perhaps have kept his place, on the strength of the acquittal, and tried to live it down and brazen it out in spite of everything. But, as I didn’t take it, and as I can’t bear the shadow of that horrible suspicion, I won’t live on any longer in England, and I certainly won’t burden you, dearest, with such a terrible, unspeakable shame.”

  “Harry,” Iris cried, looking up at him suddenly, “I know you didn’t do it. I love you. I trust you. Why should we ever mind the other people?”

  Harry faltered. “But the Bishop?” he asked. “How about your father, Iris? No, no, darling, I can never marry you while the shadow of this hideous, unworthy doubt rests over me still.”

  Iris took his hand in hers with a gesture of tenderness which robbed the act of all suspicion of unwomanly forwardness. Then she began to speak to him in a low, soft voice, to comfort him, to soothe him, to tell him that nobody would ever believe it about him, till Harry Burbury himself began half to fancy that his sensitive nature had exaggerated the evil. How long they sat there whispering together it would be hard to say: when lovers once take to whispering, the conversation may readily prolong itself for an indefinite period. So at least Mrs. Brandreth appeared to think, for at the end of a quiet hour or so her sense of propriety overcame her sympathy with Iris, and she went down to join the young couple in the front drawing-room. It gives me great pain to add, however, that she stood for a moment and rustled about a few magazines and papers on the landing-table, very prudently, before actually turning the handle of the drawing-room door. This is a precaution too frequently neglected in such cases by the matter-of-fact and the unwary, but one whose breach I have often known to produce considerable inconvenience to the persons concerned.

  When Mrs. Brandreth at last entered, she found Iris, as girls are usually found on similar occasions, seated by herself bolt upright on a very stiff-backed chair at the far end of the room, while Harry Burbury was playing nervously with the end of his moustache on the opposite side of the centre ottoman. Such phenomenal distance spoke more eloquently to Mrs. Brandreth’s psychological acumen than any degree of propinquity could possibly have done. “They must have been very confidential with one another,” Mrs. Brandreth thought to herself wisely. “I’ve no doubt they’ve settled the matter by themselves offhand, without even thinking the least in the world about dear Arthur.”

  “Mamma,” Iris said timidly, but quite simply, as her mother stood half hesitating beside her, “Harry and I have been talking this matter over, and at first Harry wanted to leave England; but I’ve been saying to him that somebody must have taken the money, and the best thing he can do is to stop here and try to find out who really took it. And he’s going to do so. And, for the present,” Iris emphasized the words very markedly, “we’re not to be engaged at all to one another; but, by-and-by, when Harry has cleared his reputation — —” and here Iris broke off suddenly, a becoming blush doing duty admirably for the principal verb in the unfinished sentence. (This figure of speech is known to grammarians as an aposiopesis. The name is for the most part unknown to young ladies, but the figure itself is largely employed by them with great effect in ordinary conversation.)

  Mrs. Brandreth smiled a faint and placid smile. “My dear Iris,” she said, “what would your papa say if he only heard you talk like that?” And feeling now quite comp
romised as one of the wicked conspirators, the good lady sat down and heard it all out, the house thereupon immediately resolving itself into a committee of ways and means.

  It was very late, indeed, when Mrs. Brandreth, looking at her watch, exclaimed in some surprise that she really wondered dear Arthur hadn’t come home ages ago.

  At this unexpected mention of the Bishop, Harry Burbury, who had run up to town honestly intending to see him and renounce his daughter, but had allowed himself to be diverted by circumstances into another channel, rose abruptly to take his departure. It occurred to him at once that two o’clock in the morning is not perhaps the best possible time at which to face a very irate and right reverend father. Besides, how on earth could he satisfactorily explain his presence in the Bishop’s own hired house at that peculiarly unseasonable hour?

  As for Mrs. Brandreth, now fairly embarked on that terrible downward path of the committed conspirator, she whispered to Iris, as William fastened the big front door behind Captain Burbury, “Perhaps, dear, it might be quite as well not to mention just at present to your papa that Harry” — yes, she actually called him Harry!— “has been to see you here this evening. And if we were to go to bed at once, you know, and got our lights out quickly, before your papa comes home from the House, it might, perhaps, be all the better!”

  To such depths of frightful duplicity does the downward path, once embarked in, rapidly conduct even an originally right-minded clerical lady!

  Meanwhile the Bishop, sitting with several of his episcopal brethren in the Peers’ gallery at the House of Commons, forgot all about the lapse of time in his burning indignation at the nefarious proposals of the honourable gentlemen from that revolutionary Glamorganshire. It was a field-night for the disestablishers and disendowers, and there seemed no chance, humanly speaking, that the debate would be terminated within any reasonable or moderate period. At last, about a quarter to two, the Bishop took his watch casually from his pocket. “Bless my soul!” he cried in surprise to his right reverend companion, “I must really be going. I hadn’t the least idea the time had gone so fast. Mrs. Brandreth will positively be wondering what has become of me.”