CHAPTER XXIII.
It was the beginning of the Lent term. I had stayed up during the vacation, my College being also my home. And during that vacation a weight of loneliness descended upon me. This was wrong, since had I not very much to be thankful for? My position was a secure, and, from the university standpoint, an even brilliant one. I liked my work. It interested me. Yet, in some aspects, this university life seemed to me narrow. It pained me to see old faces depart, and new ones enter who knew naught of me. Other men halted here, but for a while, on their life’s journey, moving forward to meet the larger issues, to seek ‘fresh woods and pastures new.’ And I remained—as one, held up by accident, remains at some half-way house, seeing the stream of traffic and of wayfarers sweep for ever forward along the great crowded highroad, and pass him by.
If I had not had that break in my university course, if I had not spent those two years at Hover in a society and amid interests and occupations—pleasures, let me put it roundly—foreign to my own social sphere, Cambridge, and all Cambridge stood for, would not probably have palled upon me. But I had beheld wider horizons; beheld them, moreover, through the windows of an enchanted castle. Thus memory cast its shadow over the present, making me—it was faithless, ungrateful, I had nearly said, sinful—dissatisfied and sad.
However, being in good health, I was not too sad to eat a good dinner; and so, one fine day at the beginning of term, when the bell rang for hall, I crossed the quadrangle and went in—or went rather to the door, and there stopped short. For, face to face, I met none other than Mr. Halidane, in all the glory of a freshman’s brand-new gown.
‘Ah! Mr. Brownlow,’ he exclaimed, with his blandest and most beaming smile, ‘it is indeed a gracious dispensation to meet you, sir, an old and valued friend, on my first day within these hallowed and venerable walls. I feared you might not have come up yet. Allow me to congratulate you upon your distinctions, your degree, your fellowship. With what gladness have I heard of them, have I welcomed the news of your successful progress. I trust you are duly thankful to an over-ruling providence!’
‘I trust I am,’ quoth I.
I believed the man to be a hypocrite. He had done me all the harm he could. Yet, what with my loneliness, what with my memories of that enchanted castle, I could not but be moved at this unexpected meeting with him. I choked down my disgust, my resentment for the dirty tricks he had played me, and shaking him by the hand asked what had brought him here.
‘The generosity of my pious patron,’ he answered, casting up his eyes devoutly. ‘Ah! what do I not owe—under providence—to that true ornament of his exalted station! Through his condescending liberality I am enabled to fulfil the wish long nearest my heart; and by taking, as I humbly hope in due time, Holy Orders, to enter upon a more extended sphere of Christian and national usefulness.’
I abstained from asking how he had suddenly discovered the Church of England suited his religious convictions and abilities better than the sect of the ‘Saints indeed,’ and contented myself, not without a beating heart, by enquiring after Lord Longmoor and all at Hover.
I got answers; but none that I wanted. The Earl was perfection; the Countess perfection; even for Colonel Esdaile he had three or four superlatives. The Countess, he trusted, had been lately brought to the knowledge of the truth. The Colonel only needed to be brought to it—and he was showing many hopeful signs—to be more than mortal man.—It was evidently his cue to approve highly of Hover and all dwellers therein. And when, with almost a faltering voice, I asked news of my dear boy, he broke out into fresh superlatives; from amid the rank growth of which I could only discover that Lord Hartover was a very dashing and popular young man about town, and that it served Mr. Halidane’s purpose to approve—or seem to approve—of his being such.
‘The pomps and vanities of this wicked world, you know, my dear Brownlow,’—the fellow began to drop the ‘Mr.’ now—‘the pomps and vanities—but we must make allowances for youth—and those to whom little is given, you know, of them will little be required.’
‘Little given!’ thought I with a shudder, as I contrasted Halidane’s words with my own old lessons.—God grant that this fellow may not have had the opportunity of undoing all the good which I had done! I made the boy believe once that very much had been given him.—But I said nothing. Why waste words where the conversation will never go deeper than words?
So we went in to hall together; and, what was more, came out together, for it was plainly Mr. Halidane’s plan to quarter himself upon me, physically and morally—physically, in that he came up into my rooms and sat down therein, his countenance falling when he perceived that I brought out no wine.
‘You are a Nazarite still?’ he said at last, after looking uneasily several times towards door and cupboard.
‘I am, indeed,’ I replied, amused at his inability to keep his own counsel.
‘Ah—well. All the more freedom, then, for the wine of the Spirit. I trust that we shall have gracious converse together often, my dear Brownlow, and edify one another with talk of that which belongs to our souls’ health as we wander through this wilderness of tears.’
I replied by asking, I fear a little slyly, after Lord Longmoor’s book on prophecy.
‘As was to be expected—a success,’ he replied—‘a magnificent success, though I say so. Not perhaps in the number of copies sold. But what is worldly fame, and how can we expect the carnal man to favour spiritual things? Not, again, from a pecuniary point of view. But what is filthy lucre? His lordship’s philanthropy has enabled him, so to speak, to make the book a present, a free gift to the elect. No, not in such material gains as Christians will leave to the unsanctified, to a Scott or a Byron, does success lie; but in the cause of the Gospel. And, if humble I have been instrumental to that success, either in assisting his lordship’s deeper intellect, as the mouse might the lion, or in having the book properly pushed in certain Gospel quarters where I have a little unworthy influence—’ (Unworthy indeed, I doubt not, thought I!)—‘why, then—have I not my reward—I say, have I not my reward?’
I thought he certainly had. For being aware he wrote the whole book himself, and tacked his patron’s name to it, I began to suspect shrewdly he had been franked at College as hush-money, the book being a dead failure.
And so I told the good old Master next day, who slapped his thigh and chuckled, and then scolded me for an impudent truth-speaking fellow who would come to ruin by his honesty.
I assured him that I should tell no one but him, having discovered at Hover that the wisdom of the serpent was compatible with the innocence of the dove, and that I expected to need both in my dealing with Mr. Halidane.
‘Why, I understood that he was an intimate friend of yours. He told me that your being here was one of the main reasons for his choosing this College. He entreated humbly to be allowed rooms as near you as possible. So—as he came with the highest recommendations from Lord Longmoor—we have put him just over your head!’
I groaned audibly.
‘What’s the matter? He is not given to playing skittles, or practising the fiddle at midnight, is he?’
‘Heavens, no!’
But I groaned again, at the thought of having Halidane tied to me, riding me pick-a-back as the Old Man of the Sea did Sindbad, for three years to come. In explanation I told the Master a good deal of what I knew. About Nellie, however, I still said not one word.
The Master smiled mischievously.
‘I suspect the object of his sudden conversion from sectarianism is one of my lord’s fat livings. You may see him a bishop yet, Brownlow, for a poor opinion of his own merits will never stand in the way of his promotion.—Well, I will keep my eye on this promising convert to the Church of England as by Law Established, meanwhile—and you may do the same if you like.’
I did like—the more so because I found him, again and again, drawing round to the subject of Mr. Braithwaite and of Nellie. He slipped away smoothly enough when he saw I avoided the matter, complimenting me greasily upon my delicacy and discretion. I was torn two ways—by longing to hear something of both father and daughter, and repulsion that this man should soil the name of her whom I loved by so much as daring to pronounce it. But of all living creatures lovers are the most self-contradictory, fearing the thing they desire, desiring that which they fear.
At last one day, when he had invaded my rooms after hall, he said something which forced me to talk about Hover with him. He had been praising, in his fulsome fashion, Mademoiselle Fédore among the rest. She too, it appeared, was under gracious influences, aware of her soul’s danger and all but converted—the very dogs and cats of the house were qualifying for salvation, I believe, in his suddenly charitable eyes. He finished up with—‘And how nobly the poor thing behaved, too, when that villain Marsigli absconded.’
‘Marsigli absconded?’ I exclaimed, in great surprise.
‘Of course—I thought you knew⸺’
‘I know nothing of what happens at Hover now,’ I said, foolishly allowing bitterness to get the better of caution.
‘No—you don’t tell me so!—Really, very strange,’ and he eyed me sharply. ‘But the facts are simple and lamentable enough. This villain, this viper, the trusted and pampered servant—for far too much kindness had been lavished upon him by my lord and lady, as upon all—yes, all—my unworthy self included.—How refreshing, how inspiring is condescension in the great!—This pampered menial, I say—ah I what a thing is human nature when unregenerate!—as was to be expected—for what after all, my dear Brownlow, can you hope from a Papist?—disappeared one fine morning, and with him jewels and plate—plate belonging to our sainted friend and patron, in whose service the viper had fattened so long, to the amount of four thousand pounds.’
I listened in deepening interest.
‘This is serious,’ I said. ‘Has any of the property been traced and recovered?’
‘Not one brass farthing’s worth.’
‘And is there no clue?’
‘None, alas! save what Mademoiselle Fédore gave. With wonderful subtlety and instinct—Ah! that it were further quickened by divine grace!—she pieced together little incidents, little trifling indications, which enabled the police to track the miscreant as far as Liverpool. But, after that, no trace. They concluded he must have sailed for America, where he is doubtless even now wantoning, amid the licentious democracy of the West, upon the plunder of the saints.’
He buried his face in his hands and appeared to weep.
I remained silent, greatly perturbed in mind. For there flashed across me those words of Warcop’s, spoken on the morning of my departure, when I sat with him in his sanctum, dedicated to the mysteries of the stud-farm and the chase: ‘By times they—Marsigli and Mamzell—are as thick as thieves. By times they fight like cat and dog or’—with a knowing look—‘like man and wife.’ There flashed across me, too, a strange speech of Fédore’s I had overheard, as I walked along one of the innumerable dimly lighted passages at Hover, one night, on my way from the library, where I had worked late, to my own study. To whom she spoke I did not know, for a door was hastily closed immediately I passed, though not hastily enough to prevent my hearing a man’s voice answer.—‘Ah! you great stupid,’ she had said. ‘Why not what these English call feather your own nest? I have no patience with you when, if you pleased, you could so easily be rich.’—The episode made an unpleasant impression upon me at the time, but had almost faded from my mind. Now in the light of my conversation with Halidane it sprung into vivid relief.
The loss of a few thousand pounds’ worth of jewels and plate was a small matter. But that Mademoiselle Fédore should remain in the household as Marsigli’s accomplice—and that she was his accomplice I suspected gravely—perhaps to regain her power over the boy, was intolerable. As to her assisting the police by pointing out the probable route of the delinquent, what easier than to do so with a view to putting them on a false scent?
‘This is indeed ugly news,’ I said at last. ‘I wonder if the Master knows.’
‘Why not? It was reported in the papers at the time.’
‘Ah! and I was absorbed in my work and missed it. How unfortunate!’
‘Do you think you know anything, then?’ he said greedily, with sharp interest.
But the question I did not answer, perceiving he was curiously anxious to be taken into my confidence.