“I am talking, Sir Guy. But, Joan,” continued Mr. Maturin, “they insisted that I could cure you of your attachment to me, if I wished. I pointed out that I had already put myself before you as a man whose character contained certain grave flaws; and that you had, while deploring my recent and second bankruptcy and my only too frequent lapses from the strictly moral code, chosen to believe that there is still some good in me, and had therefore remained by your decision to become my wife. Your mother and grandfather, however, have dared me to tell you the complete truth about myself and yet hold you. Joan, did I think for one moment that I would lose you in this way, I frankly admit,” said Mr. Maturin emphatically, “that I would not put my hand to any such quixotic folly——”
“After all,” said Joan de Gramercy, “the past is dead.”
“My point exactly, child. And that is why,” said Mr. Maturin, “if only to satisfy your mother and grandfather of the inevitability of your choice and of my complete faith in your love, I have decided to do what I will do. Listen, Joan——”
It was Sir Guy’s stern voice that fell on the room like an axe.
“You live up to my description of you completely, Mr. Maturin. You are indeed the ace of cads! For now you are betraying your word of a few minutes ago.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t interrupt,” said Mr. Maturin warmly. “I am embarked, let’s face it, on a suspension-bridge of very doubtful strength and you keep on trying to upset my balance with sweeping comments on my character. My tale, Joan,” he continued into the middle air, and spoke from this moment on with his eyes fixed absently in the shadows of the books on the shelves opposite, “my tale has to do with many years ago. Now I have been and I have done many things in my time; and have become one of those men of whom it is vaguely said, ‘He could write a book about his life,’ which of course means that I have done everything in my life except write a book. At the time I speak of I was a subaltern in a Guards regiment; a mode of life which, it may distress you to hear, Sir Guy, bored me in the extreme. As, however, the small allowance my father gave me was contingent on my retaining my commission, and as even the smallest allowance is better than a poke in the eye, I endured in patience the while I gave myself up to the pleasures of the town. You must not for a moment think,” protested Mr. Maturin with feeling, “that I am trying to belittle the gentlemen of the Brigade, for better men than I have tried and failed at that game: nor that I am a slave to malice, for as you know I was later expelled from their company: but truth compels me to confess that my companions of those days were notable rather for the correctness of their appearance than for their learning, while their charm was of that static, profound sort which no one could call ingratiating and a certain kind of primitive badinage was held among them to be the superior of wit. And as time went on I came to be esteemed among the lighter sort for those qualities of the tongue and mind that are calculated to send any man, in due course, headlong down the crooked path.
“But I must tell you I had one very great friend among them. This was a man who had everything I had not: a simple frankness, a plain but almost painfully honest bearing, and a heart like gold; which was then, of course, more evidently in circulation than it is now. I cannot imagine how a boy of that sort could have loved and admired me; but he undoubtedly did, and to a singular degree, so that I was frequently enabled to borrow money from him almost painlessly, for he was heir to a great fortune, with which went a great name; although, to be sure, he was often as hard put to it as I was to fit a morsel of caviare to a piece of toast, for his father had ideas about real estate quite contrary to ours.
“My friend became engaged to a beautiful girl. What she saw in the boy, I do not know. Women are, let’s face it, odd. That she loved him, I was instantly certain. Even my youthful cynicism could not ascribe to her the mean calculation of a fortune-hunter. That he loved her, madly and madly again, he frequently made clear to me in those broken and inarticulate periods that are the hall-mark of all honest Englishmen in love: and which, being often quite inaudible, have earned for Englishmen a delightful reputation for restraint. But let us not generalise when we can so profitably be particular.
“We were at that time in the barracks that guard the frontiers of Chelsea: my friend and I in adjacent rooms. Our ways of life, however, were at that time vastly different; for as I was passing through a financial void I would, with that resignation which no one can deny has been my one consistent virtue, go early to bed every night: whereas my friend would return night after night at about this hour, having escorted his betrothed home after a play and a ball; and night after night, as he prepared himself for bed in the adjoining room, he would softly whistle a tune. Thus, you understand, he expressed his happiness; and killed it, for the walls were thin and the tune intolerable.
“It was Mendelssohn’s Spring Song; and, Sir Guy, I have already told you,” said Mr. Maturin with a glance at the old gentleman, who was listening with every mark of attention if not of approval, “how my distaste for that composition led me, some months after the time I speak of, to a hasty action. But what that same distaste caused me to do to that boy was not done hastily.