As Kate Mellon had soliloquised, some time had elapsed since Mr. Simnel had visited The Den. A wary general, Mr. Simnel; a man who, like the elephant, never put his foot forward without first carefully feeling the ground in front of him, and trying whether it would bear; a man who, above all, never was in a hurry. He had not gone through life cautiously and with his eyes wide open without remarking how frequently a little impulse, a little over excitement or yielding to headstrong urging, had led to direful results.
"No hurry" was one of his choicest maxims: to sleep upon an idea; to let information just received mellow in his mind until he saw the very best way to utilise it; to brood over the most promising projects, carefully sifting the chaff from the grain; to wait patiently until the two or three shadowy alternatives had, after due inspection, resolved themselves into one broad path, impossible to be shrunk from--that was Mr. Simnel's way of doing business. He never allowed the iron to be overheated. So soon as it was malleable, he struck--struck with irresistible force and sure aim; but he never dallied with the half-heated metal, or tried warpings with pincers, or blind struggles with solid resistance. If he had a fault in his worldly dealings, it was that he delighted in hiding the power which he was able to wield, even beyond the legitimate time for its manifestation. There are men, you will have observed, who, in playing whist and other games of chance and skill,--long-headed calculators, far-seers, sticklers for every point of Hoyle,--yet cannot resist the temptation of withholding their ace until the best time for its production is long past, solely for the sake of causing a sensation, for the sake of creating a feeling of astonishment among their fellow players that the great card has been all that time in hand. So it was, to a certain extent, with Robert Simnel.
He had known nothing of love, this man, during his youth. He had had no time for the cultivation of any tender passion. He had been brought up roughly, with his own way to make, with his own living to get. He was not pretty to look at, and no ladies felt an interest in smoothing his hair or patting his cheeks. The matron at the Combcardingham grammar-school,--a sour blighted old maid, a poor sad old creature, who yet retained some reminiscences of hope in her forlorn frame; in whom head-washing and looking after linen had not obliterated all traces of feminine weakness, and who remembered early days, when she dreamed that some day some one might make her some kind of a marriage offer, dreams which had never been fulfilled,--this weird sister had her favourites among the boys; but Simnel was not of them. They were mostly fat-headed, sleek-faced boys, apply, rubicund, red-lipped, and shiny; boys with reminiscences of home, who kissed Miss Wardroper as a kind of bad substitute for Ma, and who traded on their blowing beauty to be let off easily on tub-night, and to have advances of pocket money before the regular day. Robert Simnel had no share in these pettings; he was what Miss Wardroper considered an "uncomfortable lad;" he was "nothing to look at;" and preferred lying on his stomach under trees with a book between his elbows, on which his face was resting, or sitting bolt upright, trying to catch on his page the glimmer from the school-fire, to all the cossettings of the housekeeper's room. In immediate after-life his course of conduct was pretty much the same. Combcardingham was not a moral town. Many of the pretty girls who worked hard all day dressed in great finery in the evenings, and proceeded to the theatre, to the gardens, to the al-fresco entertainments with which the suburbs of the town were studded, attended by the youth of the place. The conveyancing-clerk of Messrs. Banner and Blair, the common-law ditto, and the Chancery manager, were accustomed to speak of Annie, and Emmy, and Fanny, as though the establishment of those eminent lawyers had been the Hotel-Dieu, and they the interlocutors had been Parisian students instead of provincial lawyers; the very copying-clerk, who served writs, and fetched beer for the gentlemen in the inner office, had been seen to wink his eye, and heard to mention some such article as "a bit of muslin." But Robert Simnel had remained adamant. They dared not chaff him; there was something in his manner which forbade any approach to familiarity. Some of the ribalds had once set some of their female friends to get a rise out of the quiet studious shame-faced young man; but the girls had been met with perfect politeness, mixed with such studied coldness, that the game was given up in despair. From that time until he came up to London, Simnel was left unworried.
His life in town was equally cold and celibate. He moved very little in the female society of his own class; not that he was unwelcome, but that he disliked it. It bored him; and that was the worst thing that could happen to him when once his foot was fairly set on the ladder. In the old days he had endured men, women, parties, society,--all utterly repugnant to his feelings and tastes; and he had vowed that, should he ever have the power, the severance of such obligatory ties would be the first luxury in which he would indulge; and he kept his word. "My lady," would chirp little Sir Hickory Maddox,--"my lady has bid me bring you this note of invitation to dine with us next Wednesday, Simnel. Formal, you perceive; for you are such a well-known stickler for formalities, that we fain must treat you à la Grandison;" and then Sir Hickory, who prided himself on the construction of his sentences, would double up his little head into his ample cravat, and bow in a mock heroic manner. But Mr. Simnel managed to find an excuse for not attending the solemn dinners of his chief; nor did he ever attend the pleasant réunions of Mrs. Gillotson and Mrs. Franks, wives of the senior officers of his department, to which he was bidden. Of course, as a bachelor, it was not supposed that he should receive lady visitors; and though his rooms in Piccadilly had witnessed certain scenes which their proprietor described as petits soupers, but which the mother-in-law of the serious saddler who held the shop below openly proclaimed as "orgies," at which certain distinguished coryphées of Her Majesty's Theatre were present, and there was lots of fun and laughter and champagne, and an impromptu galop after supper,--no one could tax Simnel with any decided flirtation. He had been very polite to, more than that, very jolly with every body, thoroughly hospitable, genial, and kind; but when they broke up, and Punter Blair put Fanny Douglas into a cab, and Sis Considine walked away with Kate Trafford and her sister Nelly, and the whole party turned out laughing and singing into the street, Robert Simnel went round the rooms and put out the wax-lights, and picked up bits of lobster-shell and cracker-paper from the floor, and, yawned confoundedly, and was deuced glad it was over.
So he went on his way through life, with that way unillumined by one spark of love until he first saw Kate Mellon. How well he recollected every circumstance connected with the first glimpse of her! It was on a glorious spring afternoon at the beginning of the season; he was walking with Beresford (with whom he was just beginning to be intimate) through the Row, when he noticed the heads of the promenaders all turned one way; and following the direction, he saw a mounted female figure coming at a rapid pace down the ride. The horse she sat was a splendid black barb, an impetuous tearing fellow, who had not yet learned that he was not to have his own way in life, and who was making the most desperate struggle to recover such submission as he had been compelled to yield. In and out, in and out, from side to side, he bounded, obedient to the light hand, the scarcely tapping whip and the swerving body of his rider; but his foam-flecked chest and his sweat-rippled neck showed how unwillingly he accepted his lesson. At length, on catching sight of Beresford, who left Simnel's arm and walked to the rails, Kate drew rein, and, while she gave one hand to her acquaintance, she relaxed the other until the horse had full play for his stretching neck. Simnel stood amazed at her beauty and at the perfect outline of her supple figure. She was just exactly his style. Mr. Simnel had no admiration for Grecian features or classic mould. Ebon tresses and deep dreamy eyes were little regarded by him; his taste was of the earth, earthy; piquancy of expression, plumpness of form, was what he, to use his own expression, "went in for." He would not have bestowed a second glance upon Barbara Churchill; but Kate Mellon was exactly to his taste. He filled his eyes and his heart with her as she sat talking to Beresford that day; the sweeping lines of her habit, the dainty little handkerchief peeping out of the saddle-pocket, the dogskin gauntlets, the neat chimney-pot hat, the braided hair, the face flushed with exercise,--all these lived vividly in his remembrance, and came in between his eyes and letters for signature to irascible correspondents and long accounts of indebted tax-payers. He was not long in obtaining an introduction to his idol; and then he saw at once, with his innate sharpness, that he had but little chance of pressing his suit. Long before that éclaircissement which Beresford had described to him, Simnel saw the state of affairs in that direction, and knew what Kate Mellon fondly hoped could never be realised. He did not think that the girl ever would have the chance of so plainly stating the position of affairs; but he knew Beresford well enough to be certain that moral cowardice would prevent his availing himself of the position offered to him. Nor did Simnel blame him in this; that far-seeing gentleman knew perfectly that for any man in society to ally himself in matrimony to a woman with a reputation which was equivocal simply from her profession, no matter how excellent the individual herself might be, was sheer madness. "It isn't," he argued to himself, "as though I were a landed proprietor or a titled swell, who could throw the aegis of my rank and position over her, and settle the question. Heaps of them have done that; dukes have married actresses of queer names and women of no name at all, and all the past life has been elegantly festooned over with strawberry-leaves. I'm a self-made man, and they hate me for that, though my status is now such that they can't deny it; but then they'd immediately begin to ask questions about my wife; and if there were a chance of flooring us there, we should be done entirely."
So when Mr. Beresford had told the story of his adventure with Kate Mellon, Mr. Simnel, who had very much slacked off the scent, purely from want of encouragement and a chance of seeing his way, returned to the charge with renewed vigour. Beresford had faithfully repeated to his Mentor every word of Kate's wild outburst; and in that sudden revelation Simnel, nothing amazed thereby, had found a strong incentive to farther exertion. Kate had hinted at relatives of whom her future husband need not be ashamed. Who were they? That was one of the first points to be found out, He wisely looked upon Charles Beresford as now cleared out of his way. It was not for nothing that Mr. Simnel had read at the Combcardingham grammar-school of the spretae injuria formae; and he knew that the Commissioner had probably committed himself for ever in the eyes of the lady of The Den. Nevertheless, to make assurance doubly sure, he at once used all his influence towards turning Beresford's views in another direction; thus farther irritating Kate's pride, and preventing any chance of a reconciliation; for this apparently phlegmatic man of business, this calm, calculating, long-headed dry chip of an official, loved the little woman with his whole heart and strength, and determined to miss no opportunity of so winning her regard by his devotion to her cause, and by the tangible results springing therefrom. That must tell in the end, he thought. She is now heart-sore about Beresford; she has discovered the foundation of sand on which her first little castle was built; and now she will not touch the ruins or lay another stone. There is but one way to arouse in her any new life,--the keynote to be touched is ambition. If there be any truth in her assertion that the is sprung from a race of which she can be proud, one may work it through that. So Mr. Simnel worked away. He speedily found that Kate's own knowledge of her origin was cloudy in the extreme; but he possessed, in a rare degree, the faculty of putting two and two together and making four of them very rapidly; and he had not been very long chewing the cud of poor Kitty's stories of the circus, and the uncle, and all the rest of it, before he saw a clue which sent him spinning far into Northumberland by express-train to a place where he saw the circus which Kate had named was advertised in those wonderful column Era as then performing.
No one accompanied Mr. Simnel on that journey; no one knew what he did or what he heard; but as the chronicler of these mild adventures, I may state that though not in the least astonished at what was--after a free pecuniary disbursement--imparted to him, he came back to London radiant. The clerks in the Tin-Tax Office did not know what to make of him; some of the young ones thought he had got married; but at that suggestion the older men shook their heads. That was the last thing, they opined, to cause an access of animal spirits. He might have come in for a legacy, or taken the change out of some body whom he hated; that was all they could see to account for his cheerfulness. Two or three of the men, Mr. Pringle of course among the number, improved the occasion by asking for a day or two's leave of absence; a request at once granted by the smiling secretary, who, on the day after his return, announced his intention of making a half-holiday, and wound his way towards The Den. He rode through the lodge-gate, and exchanged salutations with the rosy porteress; but as he turned into the carriage-drive he perceived Freeman, the old stud-groom, standing at the entrance to the stables, alert and expectant. As soon as the old man recognised Simnel, he advanced towards him, and motioned him towards the farmyard. Simnel turned his horse's head in that direction, and when he arrived inside the gates and on the straw-ride, old Freeman held his bridle as he dismounted.
"A word wi' you, sir," said the old man, putting his finger on his lip and nodding mysteriously.
Mr. Simnel looked astonished, but said nothing, as the old groom called to a helper, to whose care he relinquished the horse; then taking Simnel into a little room and planting him in the midst of a grove of girths and stirrups, the saddles of which formed an alcove above him, the old man produced a short set of steps, and motioning to Simnel to seat himself on the top of them, took up his position immediately in front of him, and said, in a voice intended to be low, but in reality very hissingly sonorous,--
"Waät be matther?"