JOHN TINCROFT'S RESOLUTION.
JOHN TINCROFT went back to his hospitable quarters, and shut himself up in the old library. He remained there some time, even after the dinner-bell rang. But he did compel himself to move at last, and he met his friends at the dinner-table.
John Tincroft was not a bad young fellow, though he was awkward, and ungainly, and shy.
"Your heart is better than your head," he was once told by his schoolmaster, on occasion of some petty delinquency.
And though, of course, we demur to such a statement, if strictly theological grounds are to be taken, it was true enough of him in other respects and on lower grounds.
He was very dull of comprehension, was John. I have said this before, but there is no harm in repeating it. But there was this about him, that when he had grasped an idea, he did not let it go very easily.
Now Mr. Rubric had succeeded in giving a new turn to John's thoughts. It had been pleasant to him to take those walks of which I have spoken, pleasant to worship at the shrine of Sarah's loveliness, without knowing that he worshipped. The old self-accusation of being a woman-hater was fading away; or rather a new light had been cast on that subject. Of course he knew that the maiden's loveliness was nothing to him. Was not Sarah engaged to her cousin? Was not he himself engaged to his Oriental studies? In another year, or in less time than that, he would leave, or have left, England for ever, perhaps; and did not he know that, even if he had the disposition to marry, and the chance of marrying—neither of which propositions was on the carpet; but even if it had been—did he not know that he could not very well take out with him a wife?
But for all this, and perhaps because of the very absurdity of the idea of his falling in love, and the impossibility of his committing this absurdity in the instance of the fair damsel at High Beech, he had allowed himself to haunt her precincts, and to feast himself on her charms. Perhaps John thought—if he were ever guilty of thinking poetry—that "a thing of beauty is a joy for ever"; and that it would be—would be—nice is the word—nice for him, when thousands of miles away, to remember the fair vision which had broken in upon him at this time.
If in this John sinned, I am afraid many of us often sin without knowing it. Certainly, had he been asked the question, he might have replied with a clear conscience that he had not coveted his neighbour's goods, nor his prospective wife, nor anything that was his neighbour's. And yet, for all that, the maelstrom was there, and John Tincroft was whirling round its outer circles without intending it, and not even being aware of it, but at the same time enjoying its giddy motion.
Mr. Rubric, however, had, as I have said, put the matter before him in another light. He had not exactly told John that he was doing wrong to his own soul; but he had plainly indicated that he was inflicting injury on another's good name and prospects. It was already being talked about—this intimacy of his at the farm; and what if the result should be, as his mentor had hinted, the breaking off of the old engagement and the loss of a husband when a husband was so sorely needed?