And, now, after all this half-moralising narrative, an important fact or two. The duke was very busy, and stayed in town, and, as a consequence, the duke's coachman. Moreover, the duke's coachman's son came home invalided, and stayed with his father; and Charles, with the hearty approval of the cornet, used to walk across the park every night to see him, and talk over the campaign, and then look in at the Servants' Club, of which he was still a member. And the door of the Servants' Club room had glass windows to it. And I have noticed that anybody who looks through a glass window (under favourable circumstances) can see who is on the other side. I have done it myself more than once.
CHAPTER LVIII.
THE NORTH SIDE OF GROSVENOR SQUARE.
John Marston's first disappointment in life had been his refusal by Mary. He was one of those men, brought up in a hard school, who get, somehow, the opinion that everything which happens to a man is his own fault. He used to say that every man who could play whist could get a second if he chose. I have an idea that he is in some sort right. But he used to carry this sort of thing to a rather absurd extent. He was apt to be hard on men who failed, and to be always the first to say, "If he had done this, or left that alone, it would not have been so," and he himself, with a calm clear brain and perfect health, had succeeded in everything he had ever tried at, even up to a double first. At one point he was stopped. He had always given himself airs of superiority over Charles, and had given him advice, good as it was, in a way which would have ruined his influence with nine men out of ten; and suddenly he was brought up. At the most important point in life, he found Charles his superior. Charles had won a woman's love without knowing it, or caring for it; and he had tried for it, and failed.
John Marston was an eminently noble and high-minded man. His faults were only those of education, and his faults were very few. When he found himself rejected, and found out why it was so—when he found that he was no rival of Charles, and that Charles cared naught for poor Mary—he humbly set his quick brain to work to find out in what way Charles, so greatly his inferior in intellect, was superior to him in the most important of all things. For he saw that Charles had not only won Mary's love, but the love of every one who knew him; whereas he, John Marston, had but very few friends.
And, when he once set to work at this task, he seemed to come rapidly to the conclusion that Charles was superior to him in everything except application. "And how much application should I have had," he concluded, "if I had not been a needy man?"
So you see that his disappointment cured him of what was almost his only vice—conceit. Everything works together for good, for those who are really good.
Hitherto, John Marston has led only the life that so many young Englishmen lead—a life of study, combined with violent, objectless, physical exertion as a counterpoise. He had never known what enthusiasm was, as yet. There was a vast deal of it somewhere about him; in his elbows or his toes, or the calves of his legs, or somewhere, as events prove. If I might hazard an opinion, I should say that it was stowed away somewhere in that immensely high, but somewhat narrow, forehead of his. Before he tried love-making, he might have written the calmest and most exasperating article in the Saturday Review. But, shortly after that, the tinder got a-fire; and the man who set it on fire was his uncle Smith, the Moravian missionary.
For this fellow, Smith, had, as we know, come home from Australia with the dying words of his beautiful wife ringing in his ears: "Go home from here, my love, into the great towns, and see what is to be done there." And he had found his nephew, John Marston. And, while Marston listened to his strange, wild conversation, a light broke in upon him. And what had been to him merely words before this, now became glorious, tremendous realities.