Peter Binney: A Novel

by Archibald Marshall

The other girl, who was still walking about along the river bank, and had seen it disappear, waited for an hour, and then went away furious, half intending to report Miss Betty Jermyn to the authorities of her college. Directly she had gone, the canoe came sliding out into the river again.

Betty was speaking.

"I shouldn't much mind if John did see us now, should you, Lucius?"

"Not a bit, darling," answered the happy Lucius. "But it wasn't John at all. I looked when you were holding the umbrella in front of your face."

Our narrative has dwelt so long on a series of painful and discreditable events, that it is hoped that the account of how Lucius and Betty, boy and girl as they were, made up their minds to spend their lives together, may have dissipated the gloom which the sympathetic reader will have experienced in following the chequered career of Mr. Binney. We must now go back a little and fill up the gap which we have left between the end of February and the end of April.

And first let us say that the very time Lucius and Betty were cooing like a pair of young doves in the seclusion of that backwater of the Cam, which now holds for them more tender memories than any other spot in the world, Mr. Binney was still in evidence as an undergraduate member of the University of Cambridge. Lucius's plea had been successful. A week after Mr. Binney's return to Russell Square he had received a letter from Mr. Rimington, to inform him that he might come up again at the beginning of the following term, but that the slightest breach of discipline on his part in the future would mean a sentence of instant dismissal from which there would be no appeal.

But alas! this letter, welcome as its contents were, did not suffice to raise Mr. Binney from the despondency into which he had fallen. After the receipt of Mrs. Higginbotham's mute but eloquent dismissal he had passed a week of such black despair that he could never look back upon it in after life without shuddering. He had beaten his wings against the doors of Mrs. Higginbotham's dwelling, but in vain. There was no admittance for him. He had importuned her by post. His letters remained unanswered. He scarcely knew how to bear the hard fate that he had brought upon himself. He was all alone in the house, for Lucius had gone straight from Cambridge to Norfolk, and was now engaged in the Reverend Mr. Jermyn's pleasant rectory house and garden in laying the train which eventually culminated in the scene between him and Betty recounted at the beginning of this chapter. He would have gone down to his place of business, but he was ashamed to face his manager and his clerks. He thought that every one would know he had been sent down from Cambridge.

As a matter of fact, this particular event of his University career never did become known to any but a very few. Even Mrs. Toller did not know it, although Mr. Binney was convinced that she must have done, for she cut him pointedly in Gower Street one afternoon as he crept miserably along taking a little air and exercise, and audibly instructed her daughter to do the same, as Mr. Binney raised his hat.

After that he was not surprised to receive a letter from his fellow deacons of Dr. Toller's chapel requesting him to resign his office, which he did that day with an added pang of shame, and resolved that, as he had now made the Baptist community too hot to hold him, he would become a Wesleyan Methodist, and work his way up to a position of authority in that body. He also made up his mind to let the house in Russell Square, which was far too large for himself and Lucius, and take a flat in Earl's Court, since Mrs. Higginbotham seemed to be made of adamant, and there seemed very little chance now of her ever gracing his establishment. With all these wrenches in his life, actual and imminent, it may be imagined that Mr. Binney was not a happy man at this time.

When Mr. Rimington's letter came, he decided to make one more appeal to Mrs. Higginbotham. He told her that he was going back to Cambridge, and intended to lead a very different life in the future from that of the past. Might he nourish a hope that if he did something to make up for past disgrace, Mrs. Higginbotham would forgive him and smile on him once more?