‘I wish I knew,’ Eleanor said to herself, as they stopped at their own hall-door. ‘I wonder he ever condescended to speak to her again. It’s the only thing about him that seems inexplicable,’ was her further reflection, as Otho lifted her from her horse.
CHAPTER XVI
A FRIENDSHIP EXPLAINED
Michael, tired himself, threw himself on to his tired horse when he left Magdalen’s parlour, and rode down the drive and into the high-road. He had had a long and hard day, and there was weariness visible in the paleness of his face, which was a thinner and an older face than it had been.
But there was a theme in his mind, occupying it to the exclusion of his weariness, and this it was which engrossed him as he rode towards Bradstane.
‘So that is Otho Askam’s sister?’ he reflected. ‘I had nearly forgotten that he had a sister. Somehow, one never associates him with human, kindly connections of that kind. I remember her now, though, when we used to be children together in the Thorsgarth garden. She wore a blue velvet frock, I remember, and little kid shoes. I used to think her a pretty little thing. She is something more than a pretty little thing now, though’—he smiled a little to himself—‘rather a superb young woman, I should say, and, judging from all one can gather from a flying glimpse and a few words about the antipodes of her brother in everything—yes, I should say everything. I wonder if she knows about his character? I wonder how she got to Balder Hall so soon after her arrival? With him for a brother, and Magdalen for a friend—she is splendidly equipped, and need fear nothing, morally or socially.... She is a beautiful girl. Such eyes, and such a fine expression.’
Thinking such thoughts, he presently arrived at the Red Gables, where he had to devote himself to work till Roger came in for dinner. Eleanor had wondered, after she had heard Michael’s story, how he had been able to remain on terms of politeness with Magdalen, who said plainly that he was her friend still. But Magdalen had given no recital of the steps by which she and Michael had arrived at their present degree of mutual courtesy and neutrality. It was hardly likely that she should, when such a recital must have laid bare the very eye and core of her own humiliation, of the degradation which was constantly present in her consciousness, and of the disappointment and the failure which made her see all things in the light of bitterness and cynicism.
She had broken with Michael, suddenly, promptly, and pitilessly: she had not stayed her hand, she had not softened her expressions; she had dealt a blow which she knew might ruin his life, and that knowledge had not deterred her, or caused her hand to tremble as she struck. She had sent Michael—a broken man, as he thought—to recover his health, moral and physical, as best he might; and he had returned, saying he was glad that nothing remained of the man who had been Michael Langstroth, since that man had been a great fool.
When things have happened to a man which make him feel as if the sun had fallen out of the heavens, and the stars changed their courses, he is, no doubt, a little apt to feel astounded on finding, after a time, that it was not the sun nor the stars, but himself who was disturbed and jolted out of his old orbit into a new one. But let him be astonished as much as he will—let him even be indignant, as he very often is, at such vagaries of the universe so distressing him—he cannot alter things. The sun goes on shining, and the stars pursue their appointed march, and by and by he—to descend from great things to small ones—also falls into some sort of progress, be it march, or shamble, or shuffle, or steady struggle onwards and upwards. This always happens if the man be a very man, and not an amorphous sort of thing without backbone or sinew.
In obedience to this law it had come to pass that Michael Langstroth, five years after he had been stricken down, found himself able to stand upright—found that he was still living, moving, working; could laugh when a joke tickled him, which it did pretty often; could feel hungry when he had fasted, and thought perhaps a little more of the nature of the provision set before him than he had formerly done. This last trait was, no doubt, if one argues rightly, a powerful sign that if he moved now easily enough, still it was in a different way, and on a different platform from the old ones.
On his return from Hastings, after the illness which followed his father’s death and Magdalen’s repudiation of him, Dr. Rowntree had attacked him, and gone near to kill him with kindness of a very practical sort; insisting that he was an old man, tired of hard work, who had long been wanting to retire, and had only been waiting till Michael should be ready to take his place. All tenders of payment for his generosity he had firmly and steadily put aside, till Michael had been forced to stop any such suggestions. He had finally accepted the doctor’s goodness, as the latter had fully made up his mind that he should; and so it came to pass that, soon after his return to work, Michael had found himself in possession of a practice of his own, and also that the retirement of his old friend had called a rival into the field, another surgeon, who perhaps thought that the Bradstane circuit was too large for the unaided management of one man. Thus Michael, while he became better off than he had ever been before, in a pecuniary point of view, found at the same time that he must work with all his might, just to keep the lead—not to be swamped in the struggle. The practice he now had was not as lucrative as the practice of the old doctor, untroubled by any rival, had been, but it was a practice on which Michael could have afforded that marriage which had been his goal for three years. When he had come home and begun work, he had heard many rumours, many asseverations, even, that Magdalen Wynter and Otho Askam were to be married. Scandal-mongers said that she had jilted Michael in order that she might marry Otho. Michael had to steel his heart and his nerves and his whole moral man in a triple brazen armour, in order to receive these assaults without wincing, and in order to hear without shrinking the proofs adduced in support of the hypothesis—Otho’s constant visits, namely, to Balder Hall, and Magdalen’s graciousness to him. For his own part, with a natural revulsion of feeling, the result of the demolition of his blind trust in her, he was firmly persuaded that the marriage would take place; but it did not. Months passed by, and the indignation at Magdalen’s infidelity had merged into ridicule of her failure—if failure it were, for Otho’s visits to Balder Hall continued with unabated regularity.