Chapter Eighteen.
“Anthony Miles is gone to London,” said Mr Robert Mannering, walking into the library of the Red House, on the day following that described in the last chapter.
Mr Mannering looked with a shiver at the door his brother had left open behind him. He had a cold, and a great many theories about its treatment.
“I don’t know what good he can do himself by going up,” added Mr Robert in a perturbed tone.
“He will be able to see Pitt,” suggested Mr Mannering, drawing nearer the fire.
“I wish I could feel there was any chance of his convincing Pitt. It’s a bad business, Charles.”
Mr Mannering looked up with a little surprise; for although his brother frequently indulged in cynical speeches, he had never yet known him to believe in them, or take anything but a largely hopeful view of individualised human nature.
“My dear Robert—would you object to shutting the door?—”
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr Robert hastily, doing as he was requested with an abstracted bang, which made Mr Mannering wince. But he went on.
“Look calmly at the matter. What do we know of the contents of that letter? How is it possible to judge of the terms in which the suggestion was made?—of the burden it may have inflicted upon Anthony?”
“That is not the question,” said his brother, shaking his head. “He denies, you must remember, having received any suggestion whatever. Pooh, the thing’s absurd. Besides, young Lee seems to have implied that he was aware of what had taken place.”
Sometimes they are odd things which warp our judgments. Robert Mannering was an old lawyer, with a red face and short iron-grey hair, and yet it took a very little thing to turn aside his shrewd every-day sense. Only a woman’s name, and a curl of brown hair out of which the living light had faded.
“I have said all I can for him to the Squire,” he went on. “We shall see when he comes back. But—”
He walked to the window, and stood with his hands behind him, looking out. There was a threatening of snow in the air, and a few solitary flakes, the more dismal for their want of companionship, came fluttering down upon the empty beds. That “but” sounded like the key-note of all dreary disbelief.
“Nobody can tell,” said Mr Mannering, who usually took a more desponding view of human nature than his brother. “My own opinion is that you are all deciding hastily, but with the wind where it is, I don’t believe there’s a man alive could give an unprejudiced judgment. As to these hot-water pipes, Jane contrives to convert them into conductors of cold air, with an ingenuity worthy of a better cause.”
“The room is like a hot-house,” said Mr Robert, a little shortly, and still keeping his back turned. “That fool Stokes has not had the sense to mat up the red geranium. He’ll have got rid of every flower in the garden before long, that’s certain. Commend me to this place for incapable idiots.”
While he spoke, Mr Mannering with great care and deliberation proceeded to fold a handkerchief, and to tie it round his head, thus imparting an extraordinarily rueful expression to his face.
“Yates tells me they’re going to push the Bill for connecting the two lines,” he said, fastening the knot.
“So I supposed. Nothing is too fraudulent for me to discredit, and I’m quite aware that you may pick as many pockets as you please, if only you do it on a large enough scale.”
“Come, come, Robert. You’ll be had up for a libel.”
“I dare say. There’s no bigger libel than truth in these days.”
And then he suddenly turned round with a laugh at himself. To do him justice, he was not often so cross, but then he was not often so sore and disappointed at heart. It was very bitter to him to think of Anthony Miles committing a dishonourable action, and it smote him again to remember the injustice to the dead. He could not get one predominant feeling, and that irritated his natural sense of orderliness.
Winifred, of whom he thought much at this time, was, perhaps, more impatient than grieved, having an unflinching faith in the triumph of right, which to such natures is as the very air they breathe. Only she had not lived long enough to know that though the triumph comes, it is not always the thing we picture to ourselves, laurel crowns, joyful music, and the people looking on and shouting. There are other triumphs besides this, wounds and tears, and a slow struggle upwards.
She believed that every shadow of blame would be swept away from Anthony as soon as he returned from seeing Mr Pitt, and though keenly sensitive to the reproaches she was forced to hear, took a pride in treating them indifferently, as stings too slight even to require defence. When Mr Robert met her one day and would have said something, she was very cool with him.
“When Anthony returns,” she said, scarcely stopping, “we shall know exactly how such a mistake can have arisen.”
“Anthony is come back,” said Mr Robert, gravely.
She could not resist the rush of blood to her heart, which made her ask hastily, “When?”
“He came last night. I have just seen him,” Mr Mannering said in the same tone.
“Well?”
“You will hear from himself, no doubt. Only, my dear, don’t set your heart too strongly upon things being made straight.”
Winifred had grown a little pale, but there was not one shade of doubt in her clear eyes as she looked at him.
“I do not understand you,” she said quietly. “Things must be made straight, as you call it, in the end; and in the mean time, of course, no one who knows Anthony can doubt him for a moment. That such a report should have ever lived for an hour is the real hardship that we have to regret.”
She was so unflinchingly steadfast, that Mr Robert, who believed there was more trouble in store for her, left his warnings alone, and went away mute. After all, she would know soon enough.
And to know enough, in this case, simply meant to know nothing. Anthony had come back as he went, with hard lines about his face, and the bitterness deepened and intensified. His first care had been to go to Mr Pitt’s chambers, where he found the old lawyer polite, cold, and unshaken. “I posted the letter myself, Mr Miles. You have ascertained, I presume, that it is not to be heard of in the Dead-Letter Office?” was the text to which he returned when all had been said. He had not seen the contents, but Mr Tregennas had communicated them to him. Anthony grew exceedingly angry, and lost his temper. Although he was aware when he left him that it was absolutely imperative that he should follow Mr Pitt’s suggestions, which were of a very obvious and practical nature, the manner in which they had been thrown out had raised so strong an antagonism in his blood, that he was tempted to fling them and all prudent dealing to the winds, and was, perhaps, not without a feeling of satisfaction, when they proved altogether barren of results.
It was a word, however, of Mr Pitt’s about Marmaduke Lee, which gave him something approaching to a clew, at first no more than an idea that his brother-in-law might be able to assist him to grope in the darkness in which he found himself, but gradually, after he went down to Oakham, and had seen Marmaduke, growing by some instinctive power into a perception of what had actually happened. Only those who have some knowledge of the strength and weakness of a character like Anthony’s can conceive what a shattering of landmarks came with this perception. All his impulses were full of indignation and contempt; he almost withered Marmaduke with an outbreak of angry scorn, and yet felt compelled, by the very intensity of this scorn to save so miserable a man from the consequences that would have crushed him. Something in the excessive meanness and cowardice of the act filled him with a loathing shame which made it impossible to proclaim it. Naturally his connection with Marion touched him more nearly with its dishonour, but without such a shield it is probable that he would have shrunk from dragging such a deed from its hiding-place, in order to shelter himself behind it. Yet, although there was a certain generosity in this attitude, there was little mercy in his heart. It enraged him to feel the helplessness of his position, the impotence with which he must submit to the world’s verdict His was a nature to which injustice was the most unbearable form of persecution that could have visited him, one, also, which seemed to raise all his worst qualities in opposition, so as to sweep away with a crash the noble ideal he had set up of men and things; and such a moment in a man’s life is full of danger and trial, his weakness concealing itself so deceptively that it seems to himself to be the armour which enables him to present an undaunted front.
In Marions case, it was pity which Anthony felt, and he was as anxious as Marmaduke to spare her the disclosure; but this did not prevent a hard contempt becoming visible in his manner, when she, as was daily the case, openly displayed her enthusiastic admiration for her husband. Naturally, this made her angry, and placed Anthony again in the wrong. It was, as it often is in the world, although, in spite of the repetitions of some thousand years, every experience comes to us with the sense of novelty, the man who was most heavily weighted had the least sympathy, the hardest blame, the sharpest judgments. Other people, less bound to partiality than Marion, compared Anthony’s abruptness, and the strong lines which had grown round his mouth, unfavourably with Marmaduke’s easy-humoured placidity by which he had become a popular neighbour. All the crooks and angles of Anthony’s disposition seemed to be showing themselves, and yet the poor fellow had never so sorely wanted pity, and kindness, and patient treatment. Whether he judged rightly or not, there was something even beyond chivalry in accepting the burden of this hateful thing, to spare another a more terrible weight. There was so much cowardice and feebleness in Marmaduke’s nature that to avoid the pain of disgrace he might, so Anthony believed, have fled from it at any cost,—even life itself; and though he scorned such cowardice, he had not the heart to leave it to its fate.
He left Oakham with a bitter consciousness that a gulf was dug between them, and a hot, sore feeling with the world which he was about to face without the power of clearing himself from its accusation. He would make no attempt to save anything out of the wreck; with the pride of youth, he determined that he would not stoop to offer assurances. Knowing how impossible it was that he could have done this deed,—as careless of money as those can be who have never wanted it,—it cut him to the heart that he should be suspected, and he revenged himself by a simulated indifference. Nothing could have been more repellent than his manner of meeting Mr Robert, or less satisfactory than the answers he vouchsafed. He would make no appeal for trust. Little by little, the people who wished to be friendly grew irritated, and the matter was talked of more openly and more unfavourably for Anthony when, instead of conciliating, he seemed to provoke war to the knife. When the Squire passed him with a cool bow, he retaliated by taking no notice whatever of the Squire the next time they met. Even kindness appeared to wound him. Winifred was bewildered when Anthony would lift his hat and go by as if he saw no appeal in her sad eyes. He put himself in opposition to all the world, and as a natural consequence grew hard, bitter, and mistrustful.
Perhaps our powers of endurance are never so near giving way as when we are holding them tightly strung, yet conscious of every jar and vibration in the effort; and poor Anthony, with his sensitive and affectionate temperament, went about with a dumb misery in his heart. He was rejecting friendship at the time he most needed it, and really longed to stretch out the hands with which he repelled its sweet kindness, in pitiful entreaty for some touch of fellowship which should break the cold isolation he was creating for himself.