CHAPTER XVII. BRAM SPEAKS HIS MIND.
Meg Tyzack had hardly left the farmyard before Bram knew what she had done, and realized the full extent of the danger Claire had escaped. The bottle Meg had carried, and which she had thrown at the head of Theodore Biron, had contained vitriol. Luckily for Mr. Biron, he had moved aside just in time to escape having the bottle broken on his face, but part of the contents had fallen on his head, on the side of his face, and on his left hand before the bottle itself was dashed into two pieces as it fell on the ground.
Bram wiped Theodore’s face and hands as quickly as he could, but the effeminate man had so entirely lost his self-control that he could not keep still; and by his own restlessness he hindered the full effect of Bram’s good offices.
The young man saw that his best chance with the hysterical creature was to get him into the house as quickly as he could. But Theodore objected to this. He wanted Bram to go in pursuit of the woman, to bring her back, to have her taken up. And as his cries had by this time caused a little crowd to assemble from the cottages round about, he began to harangue them on the subject of his wrongs, and to try to stir them up to resent the outrage to which he had been subjected.
It is needless to say that his efforts were ineffectual. Mr. Biron had succeeded in establishing a thoroughly bad reputation among his neighbors, who knew all about his selfish treatment of his daughter. He found not one sympathizer, and at last he was fain to allow himself to be led indoors by Bram, who was very urgent in his persuasions, being indeed afraid that Theodore’s curses upon the bystanders for their supineness would bring upon him some further chastisement. He prevailed upon a lad in the crowd to go for a doctor, assuring him that it was the pain from which the gentleman was suffering that made him so irritable.
Once inside the house, Bram found that his difficulties with his unsympathetic patient had only just begun. Mr. Biron was not used to pain, and had no idea of suffering in silence. He raved and he moaned, he cursed and he swore, and Bram was amazed and disgusted to find that this little, well-preserved, middle-aged gentleman was quite as much concerned by the injury which he should suffer in appearance as by the pain he had to bear.
“Do you think, Elshaw, that the marks will ever go away? Oh, good heavens, I know they won’t,” he cried, as with his uninjured eye he surveyed himself in the glass over the dining-room sideboard by the light of a couple of candles. “Oh, oh, the wretch! The hag! I’ll get her six months for this!”
And the little man, trembling with rage, shook his fist and gnashed his teeth, presenting in his anger and disfigurement a hideous spectacle.
The left side of his face was already one long patch of inflammation. His left eye was shut up; the hair on that side of his head had already begun to come away in tufts from the burnt skin.
Bram was disgusted. Mr. Biron’s grief over the loss of his daughter, keen as it had been, could not be compared to that which he felt now at the loss of his remaining good looks. There was a note of absolute sincerity in his every lament which had been conspicuously lacking in his grief of the morning. The young man could scarcely listen to him with patience. He tried, however, out of humanity, to remain silent, since he could give no comfort. But silence would not do for his garrulous companion, who insisted on having an answer.
“Do you think, Elshaw, that I shall be disfigured for life?” he asked with tremulous anxiety.
“I’m afraid so,” answered Bram rather gruffly. “But I don’t think I’d worry about that when you have worse things than that to trouble you.”
Unluckily, Mr. Biron was so much absorbed in the loss of his own beauty that he fell into the mistake of being absolutely sincere for once.
“Worse troubles than that! Worse than to go about like a scarecrow, a repulsive object, all the years of one’s life! What can be worse?” groaned he.
Bram, who was standing solemnly erect, answered at once, in a deep voice, out of the fulness of his heart—
“Well, Mr. Biron, if you don’t know of anything worse, I suppose there is nothing worse—for you!”
But Mr. Biron was impervious to sneers. He walked up and down the room in feverish anxiety until the arrival of the doctor, whom he interrogated at once with as much solicitude as if he had been a young beauty on the eve of her first ball.
The doctor, a stolid, hard-working country practitioner, with a dull red face and dull black eyes, showed Theodore much less mercy than Bram had done. He knew his patient well, having been called in to him on several occasions when that gentleman’s excesses had brought on the attacks of dyspepsia to which he was subject; and the more he saw of him the less he liked him. Theodore’s anxiety about his appearance he treated with cruel bluntness.
“No, you’ll never be the same man again to look at, Mr. Biron,” he said quite cheerfully. “And you may be thankful if we can save you the sight of the left eye.”
“You think the scar will never go away? Nor the hair grow again?” asked Theodore piteously.
“The scar won’t go away certainly. But that’s not much to trouble about at your time of life, I should think,” returned the doctor bluntly. “There’s a greater danger than that to concern ourselves with. Unless you are very careful, you will have erysipelas. You must get that little daughter of yours to nurse you very carefully. Where is she?”
Theodore burst out fretfully with a new grievance—
“My daughter! She’s not here to nurse me. I’ve no one to nurse me now. She’s gone away, gone away and left me all by myself!”
The doctor stared at him with the unpleasant fixity of eyes which have to look hard before they see much.
“You told her to go, I suppose?” said he at last, abruptly.
Taken by surprise, Theodore, to the horror of Bram, who was standing in the background, confessed—
“Well, I told her she could go if she liked; but I never meant her to take me at my word.”
Bram was thunderstruck. Such a simple solution of the mystery of the disappearance of the dutiful daughter had never entered his mind. In a fit of passion, perhaps of partial intoxication, Theodore had bade his daughter get out of the house. And the long-suffering girl had taken him at his word.
The doctor nodded.
“I thought so,” said he. “I thought there was no end to what the child would put up with at your hands. So you have driven her away? Well, then you’ll have to suffer for it, I’m afraid. I don’t know of anybody else who would come to nurse you.”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Bram in a hollow voice from the background.
It needed an effort on his part to make this offer. He felt that he loathed the little wretch who had himself driven his daughter into the arms of her untrustworthy lover. Only the thought that Claire would wish him to do so enabled him to undertake the distasteful task of ministering to such a patient. Theodore thanked him in a half-hearted sort of way, feeling that there was something not altogether grateful to himself in the spirit in which this offer was made. The doctor was far more cordial.
He told Bram he was doing a fine thing.
“But then,” he added in his rough way, “fine things are what one expects of you, Mr. Elshaw.”
And then he went out, leaving Theodore in much perplexity as to what the fellow could see in Elshaw to make such a fuss about.
Bram spent the night with him, doing his best to soothe and to comfort the unfortunate man, whose sufferings, both of mind and body, grew more acute as the hours wore on. His own worry about himself was the chief cause of this. Long before morning he had lost sight of the shame of his daughter’s flight, and looked upon it solely as a wicked freak which had resulted in his own most cruel misfortune.
“Why, surely, man,” broke out Bram at last, losing patience at his long tirades of woe and indignation, “it’s better that you should be disfigured than her, at any rate.”
“No, it isn’t,” retorted Theodore sharply. “Claire never cared half as much about her appearance as I did about mine. And, besides,” he went on, with a sudden feeling that he had got hold of a strong argument, “if she had been disfigured, she would have had no temptation to do wrong!”
Bram jumped up, clenching his fist. He could bear no more. With a few jerked-out words to the effect that he would send Joan to get his breakfast, he rushed out of the house.
Poor Claire! Poor little Claire! Was this the creature she had wronged in going away? This shallow, selfish wretch who had turned her out, and who regretted the ministrations of her gentle hands far more than he did the shame her desperate act had drawn down upon her!
Bram went down to the works that morning a different man from what he had been the day before. He was waking from the dull lethargy of grief into which the first discovery of Claire’s flight had thrown him. A smouldering anger against the Cornthwaites, father and son, was taking the place of sullen misery in his breast. He had gathered from Theodore that the elder Mr. Cornthwaite had taken his remonstrances not only coolly, but with something like relief, as if he felt glad of an excuse for getting rid of the relations whose vicinity had been a continual annoyance.
But Bram did not mean to be put off. Josiah, who had not been at the office at all on the previous day, should see him, and answer his questions. And Bram, maturing a grave resolution, strode down into the town with a steady look in his eyes.
Mr. Cornthwaite saw him as soon as he himself arrived, and, evidently with the intention of taking the bull by the horns, spoke to him at once.
“Ah, Elshaw, good-morning. Come in here a moment, please. I want to speak to you.”
Bram followed in silence, and stood within the room with his back to the door, with a stern expression on his pale face.
Mr. Cornthwaite broached the unpleasant subject at once.
“Nice business this, eh? Nice thing Chris has done for himself now! Brought a hornet’s nest about his ears and mine too! Old Hibbs and his wife have been down to my house blackguarding me; Minnie herself is fit for a lunatic asylum, and, to complete the business, the girl’s rascally father has been to my house, trying to levy blackmail. But I’ve made up my mind to make short work of the thing! I start for London to-night; find out Master Chris (luckily he gave his address to no one but me, or he’d have had his wife’s family about his ears already), and bring the young man back to his wife’s feet—bring him by the scruff of the neck if necessary!”
“And—Claire—Miss Biron?” said Bram hoarsely.
“Oh, she must shift for herself. She knew what she was doing, running off with a married man. I’ve no pity for her; not the least. I wash my hands of the pair of them, father and daughter, now. He must just pack up his traps and be off after her. What becomes of her is his affair, not ours!”
“Mr. Christian can’t get rid of the responsibility like that, sir,” said Bram, with a note of sombre warning in his voice.
“I take upon myself the responsibility for him,” retorted Mr. Cornthwaite coldly. “My son is dependent upon me, and he can do nothing without my approval. I am certainly going to give him no help towards the maintenance of a baggage like that. You know what my opinion of her always has been. Circumstances have confirmed it most amply. A young man is not much to blame if he gets caught, entangled, by a girl as artful and as designing as she is.”
“I don’t think you will find yourself and Mr. Christian in agreement upon that point, sir,” said Bram steadily.
“Well, whether he agrees or not, he’ll come back with me to-morrow,” replied Mr. Cornthwaite hotly.
“Then, Mr. Cornthwaite, you’ll please take my notice now, and I’ll be out of this to-day. For,” Bram went on, with a rising spot of deep color in his cheek, and a bright light in his eye, “I couldn’t trust myself face to face with such a d——d scoundrel as Mr. Christian is if he leaves the girl he loves, the girl he’s betrayed, and comes sneaking back at your heels like a cur, when he ought to stand up for the woman who loves him!”
“Upon my word, yours is very singular morality for a young man who goes in for such correctness of conduct as you do. Where does the wife come in, the poor, injured wife, in your new-fangled scheme of right and wrong? Is she to be left out in the cold altogether?”
“Where else can she be left, poor thing?” cried Bram with deep feeling. “Do you think if you brought Mr. Christian back ‘by the scruff of the neck,’ as you say, that you’d ever be able to patch matters up between ’em so as to make ’em live anything but a cat-and-dog’s-life? No, Mr. Cornthwaite, you couldn’t. The wife won’t come to so much hurt; she wouldn’t have come to none if you hadn’t forced on this cursed marriage. Let her get free, and make him free; and let Mr. Christian put the wrong right as far as he can by marrying the girl he wants, the girl who knows how to make him happy!”
Mr. Cornthwaite’s black eyes blazed. He hated even a semblance of contradiction; and Bram’s determined and dogged attitude irritated him beyond measure. He rose from his arm-chair, and clasping his hands behind his back with a loud snap, he assumed towards the young man an air of bland contempt which he had never used to him before.
“Your notions are charming in the abstract, Elshaw. I have no doubt, too, that there are some sections of society where your ideas might be carried out without much harm to anybody. But not in that in which we move. If my son were to commit such an unheard-of folly as you suggest I would let him shift for himself for the rest of his days. And perhaps you know enough of Christian to tell whether he would find life with any young woman agreeable under those conditions.”
Bram remained silent. There was a pause, rather a long one. Then Mr. Cornthwaite spoke again——
“Of course, you are sensible enough to understand that this is my business, and my son’s; that it is a family matter, a difficulty in which I have to act for the best. And I hope,” he went on in a different tone, “for your own sake, more than for mine, that you will not take any step so rash as leaving this office would be. Without notice, too!”
“As to that, sir, you had better let me go—and without notice,” said Bram with a sullen note in his voice which made Mr. Cornthwaite look at him with some anxiety, “if it’s true that you’re going to make Mr. Christian leave Miss Claire in the lurch. For I tell you, sir,” and again he looked up, with a steely flash in his gray eyes and a look of stubborn ferocity about his long upper lip and straight mouth, “if I was to come face to face wi’ him after he’d done that thing I couldn’t keep my fists off him; Ah couldn’t, sir. That’s what comes of my being born in a different section of society, sir, I suppose. And so, as Ah’ve loved Mr. Christian, and as Ah’ve had much to thank you and him for, sir, you’d best let me go back—to my own section of society, where a man has to stand by his own deeds, like a man!”
Mr. Cornthwaite’s attitude, his tone, changed insensibly as he looked and listened to the man who told him his views so honestly, and stood by them so firmly. He saw that Bram was in earnest, and he began to walk up and down the room, thinking, planning, considering. He did not want to lose this clever young man; he could not afford to do so. Bram had something like a genius for the details of business, and was besides as honest as the day; not a too common combination.
The young man waited, but at last, as Mr. Cornthwaite made no sign of addressing him, he turned to touch the handle of the door. Then Mr. Cornthwaite suddenly stopped in his walk, and made a sign to him to stay.
“Well, Elshaw,” said he in a more genial tone, “will you, if you must go, promise me one thing? Will you see Mr. Christian in my presence first, and hear what he has to say for himself?”
Bram hesitated.
“I don’t want to hear anything,” said he sullenly. “I’d rather go, sir.”
“No doubt you would, but you wouldn’t like to treat us in any way unfairly, would you, Bram? You acknowledge that we’ve not treated you badly, you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, then, you can hardly refuse to hear what the culprit has to say in his own defence. If, after hearing him, you are not satisfied, you can have the satisfaction of telling him what you think of him in good round terms before you go. Now, is that a bargain? You stay here until I come back from town—at least—with or without (for, of course, you may be right, and he may not come) my son?”
Bram hesitated; but he could not well refuse.
“All right, sir. I’ll stay till you come back,” he answered sullenly.
And, without another word or another look, he accepted his employer’s satisfied motion of assent as a dismissal, and left the room.