The day will come

by M. E. Braddon

Language so strong as this forbade argument. Harrington concluded that there was a mystery in these things outside the limits of masculine understanding. To his eye the white satin and tulle his betrothed had worn had seemed faultless; but it may be that the glamour of first love acts like limelight upon a soiled white garment: and no doubt Miss Baldwin’s gown had seen service.

He walked back to the house with her, and left her at the door just as it was growing dusk, and the servants were coming home from church. He left her with a fictitious appearance of cheerfulness, promising to go to tea on the following afternoon.

He was glad of the six-mile walk to Dorchester, as it gave him solitude for deliberation. At home the keen eyes of his sisters would be upon him, and he would be pestered by inquiries as to what there had been for lunch and what Miss Baldwin wore; while the still more penetrating gaze of his father would be quick to perceive anything amiss.

“Oh, Juliet, if you knew how hard you are making our engagement to me!” he ejaculated mentally, as he walked, with the unconscious hurry of an agitated mind, along the frost-bound road.

There had been a hard frost since Christmas, and hunting had been out of the question, whereby the existence of Mahmud, and the bill at the livery stable seemed so much the heavier a burden.

Somehow or other he must get the difference between forty-three pounds and fifty, only seven pounds, a paltry sum, no doubt; but it would hardly do for him to leave himself penniless until Lady Day. He might be called on at any moment for small sums. Short of shamming illness and stopping in bed till the end of the quarter, he could not possibly escape the daily calls which every young man has upon his purse. He told himself, therefore, that he must contrive to borrow fifteen or twenty pounds. But of whom? That was the question.

His first thought was naturally of his brother—but in the next moment he remembered how Theodore in his financial arrangements with his father had insisted upon cutting himself down to the very lowest possible allowance.

“You will pay all my fees, Dad, and give me enough money to furnish my chambers decently, with the help of the things I am to have out of this house, and you will allow me so much,” he said, naming a very modest sum, “for maintenance till I begin to get briefs. I want to feel the spur of poverty. I want to work for my bread. Of course I know I have a court of appeal here if my exchequer should run dry.”

Remembering this, Harrington felt that he could not, at the very beginning of things, pester his brother for a loan. The same court of appeal, the father’s well-filled purse, was open to him; but he had no excuse to offer, no reason to give, for exceeding his allowance.

He might sell Mahmud, if there were not two obstacles to that transaction. The first that nobody in the neighbourhood wanted to buy him, the second that he was not yet paid for, except by that bill which rose like a pale blue spectre before the young man’s eyes as he was dropping off to sleep of a night, and sometimes spoiled his rest. He would have to sell Mahmud in order not to dishonour that bill; and if the horse should fetch considerably less than the price given for him, as all equine experience led his owner to fear, whence was to come the difference? That was the problem which would have to be solved somehow before the tenth of March. He would have to send the beast to Tattersall’s most likely, the common experience of the hunting field having taught him that nobody ever sells a horse among his own circle. He saw himself realizing something under fifty pounds as the price of the black, and having to bridge over the distance between that amount and eighty as best he might. But March was not to-morrow, and he had first of all to provide for to-morrow; a mere trifle, but it would have to be borrowed, and the sensation of borrowing was new to Matthew Dalbrook’s son. He had frittered away his ready money at the University, and he had got into debt; but he had never borrowed money of Jew or Gentile. And now the time had come when he must borrow of whomsoever he could.