“But what is your reason, Mr. Beauclerc, for disbelief? I have as yet only heard that you believe every thing that Mr. Churchill said was true, and yet that you do not believe in his truth,” said Helen, in a tone of raillery.
And many a time before had Beauclerc been the first to laugh when one of his own paradoxes stared him in the face; but now he was more out of countenance than amused, and he looked seriously about for reasons to reconcile his seeming self-contradiction.
“In the first place, all those allusions and those metaphorical expressions, which you have so wonderfully well remembered, and which no doubt were worth remembering, all those do not give me the idea of a man who was really feeling in earnest, and speaking the plain truth about faults, for which, if he felt at all, he must be too much ashamed to talk in such a grand style; and to talk of them at all, except to most intimate friends, seems so unnatural, and quite out of character in a man who had expressed such horror of egotists, and who is so excessively circumspect in general.”
“Yes, but Mr. Churchill’s forgetting all his little habits of circumspection, and all fear of ridicule, is the best proof of his being quite in earnest—that all he said was from his heart.”
“I doubt whether he has any heart,” said Beauclerc.
“Poor man, he said——” Helen began, and then recollecting the words, ‘or I would make the offer,’ she stopped short, afraid of the construction they might bear, and then, ashamed of her fear, she coloured deeply.
“Poor man, he said——” repeated Beauclerc, fixing his eyes upon her, “What did he say, may I ask?”
“No,—” said Helen, “I am not sure that I distinctly heard or understood Mr. Churchill.”
“Oh, if there was any mystery!” Beauclerc begged pardon.
And he went away very quickly. He did not touch upon the subject again, but Helen saw that he never forgot it; and, by few words which she heard him say to Lady Davenant about his dislike to half-confidences, she knew he was displeased, and she thought he was wrong. She began to fear that his mistrust of Churchill arose from envy at his superior success in society; and, though she was anxious to preserve her newly-acquired good opinion of Churchill’s candour, she did not like to lose her esteem for Beauclerc’s generosity. Was it possible that he could be seriously hurt at the readiness with which Mr. Churchill availed himself of any idea which Beauclerc threw out, and which he dressed up, and passed as his own? Perhaps this might be what he meant by “the truth is not in him.” She remembered one day when she sat between him and Beauclerc, and when he did not seem to pay the least attention to what Mr. Beauclerc was saying to her, yet fully occupied as he had apparently been in talking for the company in general, he had through all heard Granville telling the Chinese fable of the “Man in the Moon, whose business it is to knit together with an invisible silken cord those who are predestined for each other.” Presently, before the dessert was over, Helen found the “Chinese Man in the Moon,” whom she thought she had all to herself, figuring at the other end of the table, and received with great applause. And was it possible that Beauclerc, with his abundant springs of genius, could grudge a drop thus stolen from him? but without any envy in the case, he was right in considering such theft, however petty, as a theft, and right in despising the meanness of the thief. Such meanness was strangely incompatible with Mr. Churchill’s frank confession of his own faults. Could that confession be only for effect?