And as, a few moments later, the ring of his horse’s hoofs echoed away down the road, the girl ran hurriedly into the little back-parlour, threw herself into a chair, and broke into a passion of crying.
CHAPTER XIX.
Mr. Tuke rode homewards in a very grave and preoccupied frame of mind. Perhaps he was conscious of a peril more nearly threatening his peace than any scheme of truculent knavery. Of the latter he could take every advantage that circumstance permitted him, without risk of self-accusation. The other was a more delicate question to face—a question of such moment that, pondering it, he must temporarily relegate to the background of his thoughts the issues involved in his adventure of the night.
Plainly, it amounted to this—was it to be control or abuse of the indefinite quantity known as a man’s honour?
He was not a coxcomb, or conceited; but he was an experienced worldling, and, as such, he could not pretend to misdeem, in any pretty maid, those premonitory symptoms of a disease of the heart that may be called aptly an “affection.”
Now—except when the stubborn devil in him was baited into cruelty—he was a good-natured and humane enough fellow, with a natural scorn of inflicting upon any other the pain he would himself shrink from enduring. Moreover he had sworn himself to a life of cleanliness and redemption of the past. Thirdly, and most important, did he or did he not seriously contemplate the possibility of a connection with a lady of gentle degree, to whom—if he offered his heart at all—he must make his presentation with washed hands and an unstained conscience?
What problems may not be involved in a demand for straight yes or no where the heart is called upon to answer! But then, what an inextricable problem is the heart itself. Its sympathies are so manifold that, would it be consistent, it must seal its every artery of distribution, and so, in serene isolation, beat self-contained and self-sufficient.
And here, where the brain, with its power of selection, picks out the indubitable course, comes in the heart to reinstate a tender little image that reason has ousted from its niche.
“Oh, Betty, Betty!” groans our gentleman. “I would I had never happened across you, you jade!”
Desperate over his inability to navigate an uncharted sea, he put his thoughts about on a course that promised plainer sailing.