Whom God Hath Joined: A Question of Marriage

by Fergus Hume

To marry! Poor Angus was horror-struck at such a prospect, the more so when his father introduced him to the lady selected to be his bride, a certain Miss Cranstoun who had a good income, but nothing else to recommend her to his fastidious taste.

However, being a somewhat philosophical youth, he accepted the inevitable, for he knew it would be easier to move Ben Nevis than his father, and trusting to the intervention of a kind Providence to avert his matrimonial fate, he went up to London with Johnnie to enjoy himself, which he did, but hardly in the way anticipated by Lord Dunkeld.

Thinking his marriage with the plain-looking Miss Cranstoun was unavoidable, he made up his mind to see as much of life as he could during his days of freedom, and proceeded to do so to his own detriment, morally, physically and pecuniarily, when he chanced to meet with Eustace Gartney.

Eustace Gartney, whimsical in his fancies, took a liking to the lonely lad, left to his own devices in such a dangerous place as London, and persuaded him to come to Italy hoping to acquire an influence over the young man and keep him on the right path until his return to Dunkeld Castle.

There was certainly a spice of selfishness in this arrangement, as Eustace was attracted by the exuberant animal spirits and Irish wit of the lad, which formed a contrast to the general run of young men of to-day, and to his own pessimistic views of life, so, much as he disliked putting himself out in any way, he determined to stand by the inexperienced youth, and save him from his impulsive good nature and love of pleasure.

Lord Dunkeld, deeming it wise that Angus should see something of Continental life, and having full confidence in the straightforwardness of Johnnie Armstrong, agreed to the journey, much to his son's surprise, and this was how The Hon. Angus Macjean, in company with Eustace Gartney, was in a railway train midway between St. Gothard and Chiasso.

And Eustace Gartney, poet, visionary, philosopher, pessimist--what of him? Well, it is rather difficult to say. His friends called him mad, but then one's friends always say that of anyone whose character they find it difficult to understand. He was eminently a child of the latter half of this curious century, the outcome of an over-refined civilization, the last expression of an artificial existence, and a riddle hard and unguessable to himself and everyone around him.

For one thing, he always spoke the truth, and that in itself was sufficient to stamp him as an eccentric individual, who had no motive for existence in a society where the friendship of its members depends in a great measure on their dexterity in evading it. Again Gartney was iconoclastic in his tendencies, and loved to knock down, break up, and otherwise maltreat the idols which Society has set up in high places for the purposes of daily worship. The Goddess of Fashion, the Idol of Sport, the Deity of Conventionalism, all these and their kind were abominations to this disrespectful young man, who displayed a lack of reverence for such things which was truly appalling.

It was not as though he had emerged from that unseen world of the lower classes, of which the upper ten know nothing, to denounce the follies and fashions of the hour; no, indeed, Eustace Gartney had been born in the purple, inherited plenty of money, been brought up in a conventional manner, and the astonishing ideas he possessed, so destructive to the well-being of Society, were certainly not derived from his parents. Both his father and mother had been of the most orthodox type, and would doubtless have looked upon their son's eccentricities with dismay had they lived, but as they both finished with the things of this life shortly after he was born, they were mercifully spared the misery of reflecting that they had produced such a firebrand. Indeed they might have checked his radical-iconoclastic-pessimistic follies at their birth had they lived, but Fate willed it otherwise, and in addition to robbing Eustace of his parents had given him careless guardians, who rarely troubled their heads about him, so that he grew up without discipline or guidance, and even at the age of thirty-eight years was still under the control of an extremely ill-regulated mind.

Tall, heavily-built, loose-limbed, with a massive head, leonine masses of dark hair, roughly-cut features, and keen grey eyes, he gave the casual observer an idea that he possessed a fund of latent strength, both intellectual and physical, but he rarely indulged the former, and never by any chance displayed the latter. Clean-shaven, with a peculiarly sensitive mouth, his smile--when he did smile, which was seldom--was wonderfully fascinating, and completely changed the somewhat sombre character of his face. He usually dressed in a careless, shabby fashion, though particular about the spotlessness of his linen, rolled in his gait as if he had been all his life at sea, looked generally half asleep, and, despite the little trouble he took with his outward appearance, was a very noticeable figure. When he chose, he could talk admirably, played the piano in the most brilliant fashion, wrote charming verses and fantastic essays, and altogether was very much liked in London Society, when he chose to put in an appearance at the few houses whose inmates did not bore him.