My pen fails me to record the diabolical manner in which Barrett played with his victim. It would have been like a cat and mouse if you can imagine the mouse throwing his chest out and fancying himself all the time. Barrett inveigled Maitland into going to Farnham, and accounted somehow for Maud’s non-appearance at the interview coyly deprecated by Maud, and consequently hotly demanded by Maitland. He actually made him shave off his moustache. Parker and I lost heavily on that. We each bet a fiver that Barrett would never get it off. It was a beastly moustache which would have made any decent woman ill to look at. It did not turn up at the ends like Barrett’s elder brother’s, but grew over his mouth like hart’s tongue hanging over a well. You could see his teeth through it. Horrible it was. But you can’t help how your hair grows, so I’m not blaming Maitland, and it was better gone. But we never thought Barrett would have done it. I must own my opinion of him rose.
And he kept it up all through the long vacation with a pertinacity I should never have given him credit for. He took an artistic pride in it, and the letters were first rate. I did not think so at first; I thought them rather washy until I saw how they took. Barrett said what Maitland needed was a milk and water diet. He seemed to know exactly the kind of letter that would fetch a timid old bachelor. But it was not all “beer and skittles” for Barrett. He sorely wanted to make Maud stand up to him once or twice, and put her foot through his mild platitudes. He wrote one or two capital letters in a kind of rage, but he always groaned and tore them up afterward.
“If Maud has any character whatever,” he sometimes said, “if she shows the least sign of seeing him except as he shows himself to her, if she has any interest in life beyond his lectures, he will feel she is not suited to him, and he will give his bridle-reins—I mean his waterproof spats—a shake, and adieu for evermore.”
Barrett eventually lured Maitland into deep water, long past the bathing machine of adieu forevermore, as he called it. When he was too cock-o-hoop, we reminded him that, after all, he was only one of a committee, and that he had been immensely helped by the young woman herself. She really looked such a saint, and as innocent as a pigeon’s egg.
But Barrett stuck to it that her appearance ought, on the contrary, to have warned Maitland off, and that he was an infernal ass to think such an exquisite creature as that would give a second thought to a stout old bachelor of forty-five, looking exactly like a cod that had lain too long on the slab. I could not see that Maitland was so very like a cod, but there was a vindictiveness about Barrett’s description of him that I really think must have been caused by his romantic admiration of Parker’s aunt, and his disgust at the slight that he felt had been put upon her. She married again the following year Barrett’s elder brother’s Colonel.
Barrett hustled Maitland about till he got almost thin. He snap-shotted him waiting for his Maud at Charing Cross station. And he did not make her write half as often as you would think. But he somehow egged Maitland on until, by the middle of the vacation, he had worked him up into such a state that Barrett had to send Maud into a rest cure for her health, so as to get a little rest himself.
When we met at Cambridge in October he had collected such a lot of material, such priceless letters, and several good photographs of Maitland’s back, that he said he thought we were almost in a position to discover to him exactly how he stood.
He threw down his last letter, and as Parker and I read them, any lurking pity we felt for him as having fallen into Barrett’s clutches, evaporated.
They showed Maitland at his worst. It was obvious that he was tepidly in love with Maud, or rather that he was anxious she should be in love with him. He said voluntarily all the things that torture ought not to have been able to wring out of him. He told her the story of the woman who had quarrelled with him because he did not dance attendance on her, and several other incidents which meant, if they meant anything, that there was something in his personality, hidden from his own searching self-examination, which was deadly to the peace of mind of the opposite sex. He was very humble about it. He did not understand it, but there it was. He said that he had from boyhood lived an austere, intellectual life, which he humbly hoped had not been without effect on the tone of the college, that he had never met so far any one whom he could love.
“That’s colossal,” said Parker, suddenly, striking the letter. “Never met any one he could love. He’ll never better that.”