‘I haf found oudt vat you are coing to London for,’ said Darco. ‘You are a tarn fool. I haf never seen such a tarn fool in all my tays ant years—nefer: nefer since I gave up peing a tarn fool myself. You can vork; you haf got prains; you haf cot a gareer in front of you; you are one-ant-dwenty. My Cott! you are one-and-dwenty; ant you haf prains, ant intustry, ant jances, and you juck them all into the gudder for liddle Jarlie Prown.’
‘Who is Jarlie Prown?’ asked Paul.
‘Jarlie Prown is Glautia Pelmond,’ said Darco. ‘She has kebt her initials. C stands for Glautia, just as veil as it stands for Jarlie; and P stands both for Prown and Pelmond. She has ruint as many men as she has does and vingers. It is no pusiness of mine. Co your vays, you silly itiot ‘Id is your dime of life to be an itiot, and it is my dime of life to laugh at you.’
‘I have never heard a man breathe a word till now against Miss Belmont’s virtue,’ cried Paul.
‘Firtue?’ cried Darco, with a snorting laugh; ‘what is firtue? Let me dell you this: Your Miss Glautia Pelmond is a volubtuous ice-woman; ant that is the most tangerous of all the taughters of the horse-leedge. Ant zo, my younk donkey, goot-night ant goot-bye. I am Cheorge Dargo, ant I nefer forgive an incratitude.’
This contemptuous parting wounded Paul to the quick, and the strange statements about Claudia maddened him. In one respect, at least, Darco, in his treatment of women, was chivalry incarnate; he would speak no scandal—no, nor listen to it. Paul tossed and tumbled throughout the night—a prey to shame and passion and cold doubt. Darco, who had so well deserved his gratitude, had accused him of the contrary—the one vice of all others which had seemed most repugnant to his nature. Darco was right, and Paul was bitten by shame. Then his mind flew to Claudia, and he thought how tender she had been that afternoon, how confiding, how warm, yet how delicately reticent in conduct Then he flamed and held his arms out in the darkness, and swore to be constant to that lovely creature, that maddening, dazzling, priceless idol, for ever. Then, like a stinging douche to a man in ardent heat of blood, came Darco’s saying. Darco was a true man, and to think of him as a scandalmonger was mere folly. He had quarrelled with Claudia, to be sure, and there was a loophole out of which a hopeful doubt might pass. And yet to think so was an insult, for Darco was the last man in the world to take a revenge so base. But Darco honestly and mistakenly disliked her. That was another matter. He was a headstrong man, impetuous, prone to leap to conclusions—a very walking heap of favourable and unfavourable prejudice. Thus, neither Claudia nor Darco was dethroned. The headlong, stammering, vivid man had made a mistake—the fat, unwieldy, diamond-hearted creature, all crusted with slag and scoria. Paul could have cried to know that Darco dreamed him ungrateful.
‘Who knows him as I do?’ he thought. ‘People laugh at his boasting, and run away from his blundering thunder; but the man has the heart of an angel.’
He thought of all those underground benefactions in which he himself had acted as almoner—the bank-notes to poverty, the Sandeman’s port and the evaporated turtle-soup to sickness. And the pity of it that such a man should so misjudge his Claudia! ‘Voluptuous ice-woman.’ He could fathom the meaning of the phrase, but the wave it would fain have spouted over his Claudia left her angel raiment dry. Neither one nor the other of the far-parted spumings of the wave touched her. Was that ice when her lips were so tenderly laid on his, and their hearts beat close together? Was that voluptuous when she held him to a brother’s part, and soothed his passions into slumber with quiet talk of sweet and sober things? And yet in Darco’s face, to one who knew him as well as Paul did, there had been a mournful look when he had spoken of the most dangerous of all the daughters of the horse-leech. Out with the thought—out with it ‘trample it down! Poor, dear old Darco had been abused. Claudia was spotless as the snow, soft as the dawn, sweet, sweet and sweeter than the honey or the honeycomb. Thus round the clock of the dark hours ran Paul’s thoughts, with never a definite hour to strike.
He packed his portmanteaux before leaving his room next morning, and even in that simple act he found reproaches. He was carrying away from Darco’s service a far different kit to that he had brought into it. The three or four coarse homemade shirts, and the rough and scanty supply of underclothing, were exchanged for linen and silks and woollen stuffs of the finest. There were trees for his boots; there was a dandy dressing-case; there were many things of the mere existence and use of which he had not known two years ago. They were all mementoes of Darco’s generosity. Surely no man had ever found so open-handed an employer. But, for all these reflections, Paul could not surrender Claudia.
He heard the clatter of the breakfast apparatus, and smelt the odours of coffee and the savoury meats the soul of which Darco loved; but he dared not face the man to whom he felt he had behaved so badly.