CHAPTER XVII.
A CATASTROPHE.
After that day of curious abandonment and imprudence, Mr. Brownlow returned to his natural use and wont. He could not account to himself next day even for his want of control, for his injudiciousness. What end could it serve to lay open his plans to Sara? He had supposed she would take it seriously, as he had done, and, lo! she had taken it very lightly, as something at the first glance rather amusing than otherwise. Nothing could have so entirely disconcerted her father. His position, his good name, his very life, seemed to hang upon it, and Sara had taken it as a singularly piquant novelty, and nothing more. Then it was that it had occurred to him about that softening of the brain, and the thought had braced him up, had reawakened all his energies, and sealed his lips, and made him himself again. He went to the office next day, and all the following days, and took no more notice of young Powys than if he had never tried to win his confidence, and never introduced him to his daughter. No doubt it was a disappointment to the young man. No doubt a good deal of the intoxication of the moment had remained in Powys’s brain. He had remembered and dwelt upon the effect of that passing sunbeam on Miss Brownlow’s hair and her dress, much more than he need have done. And though he did not look at it much, the young Canadian had hung up the Claude in his memory—the Claude with a certain setting round it more important than its actual frame. This he had done naturally, as a kind of inevitable consequence. And it was not to be denied that he watched for Mr. Brownlow’s coming next morning, and waited for some little sign of special friendship, something that should show, on his employer’s part as well, a consciousness of special favor extended. But no such sign came. He might have been a cabbage for all the notice Mr. Brownlow took of him as he passed to his own office. Not a glance, not a word, betrayed any thing different from the ordinary not unkind but quite indifferent demeanor of the lawyer to his clerks. Then, as was to be expected, a certain surprise and painful enlightenment—such as every body has to encounter, more or less, who are noticed by their social superiors—came upon the young man. It was all a caprice, then, only momentary and entirely without consequences, which had introduced him to Mr. Brownlow’s table and his daughter. He belonged to a different world, and it was vain to think that the other world would ever open to him. He was too unimportant even to be kept at a distance. He was her father’s clerk. In Canada that would not have mattered so much, but in this old hard long-established England— Poor young fellow! he knew so little. The thought brought with it a gush of indignation. He set his teeth, and it seemed to him that he was able to face that horrible conventional system, and break a lance upon it, and make good his entrance. He forgot his work even, and laid down his pen and stared at Mr. John, who was younger than himself. How was he better than himself? that was the question. Then an incipient sneer awoke in the soul of the young backwoodsman. If there was such a difference between the son of a country solicitor and his clerk, what must there be between the son and the clients, all the county people who came to have their difficulties solved? But then Mr. Brownlow was something more than a solicitor. If these two men—the one old and full of experience, the other young and ignorant, with only a screen of glass and a curtain between them—could have seen into each other’s thoughts, how strange would have been the revelation. But happily that is one refuge secured for humanity. They were each safe, beyond even their own powers of self-interpretation, in the recesses of their hearts.
Mr. Brownlow, by a superhuman effort not only took no notice of young Powys, but, so far as that was possible, dismissed all thought of him from his mind. It was a difficult thing to do, but yet he all but did it, plunging into the Wardell case, and other cases, and feeling with a certain relief that, after all, he had not any particular symptoms of softening of the brain. The only thing he could not do was to banish from his own mind the consciousness of the young man’s presence. Busy as he was, occupied to the full extent of his powers, considering intently and with devotion fine points of law and difficult social problems, he never for one minute actually forgot that young Powys was sitting on the other side of the screen. He could forget any thing else without much difficulty. Neither Sara nor Brownlows were in his mind as he labored at his work. He thought no more of Jack’s presence in the office, though he knew very well he was there, than of the furniture; but he could have made a picture of the habitual attitude in which his clerk sat, of the way he bent over his work, and the quick upward glance of his eyes. He could not forget him. He could put out of his mind all his own uncomfortable speculations, and even the sense that he had conducted matters unwisely, which is a painful thought to such a man. All this he could do, but he could not get rid of Powys’s presence. He was there a standing menace, a standing reminder. He did not even always recall to himself, in the midst of his labors, why it was that this young man’s presence disturbed him, but he never could for a moment get free of the consciousness that he was there.
At the same time he regarded him with no unfriendly feelings. It was not hatred any more than it was love that moved him. He carried the thought with him, as we carry about with us, as soon as they are gone, that endless continual thought of the dead which makes our friends in the unseen world so much closer to us than any body still living to be loved and cherished. Mr. Brownlow carried his young enemy, who at the same time was not his enemy, about with him, as he would have carried the thought of a son who had died. It came to his mind when he got up in the morning. It went side by side with him wherever he went—not a ghost, but yet something ghostly in its perseverance and steady persistency. When he laid down his pen, or paused to collect his thoughts for a moment, the spectre of this youth would cross him, whatever he might be doing. While Mr. Wrinkell was talking to him, there would suddenly glide across Mr. Wrinkell’s substantial person the apparition of a desk and a stool and the junior clerk. All this was very trying; but still Mr. Brownlow wisely confined himself to this one manifestation of Powys’s presence, and sternly silenced in his own mind all thought on the subject. On that one unlucky day of leisure he had gone too far; in the rebound he determined to do nothing, to say nothing—to wait.
This was perhaps as little satisfactory to Sara as it was to young Powys. She had, there can not be a doubt, been much amused and a little excited by her father’s extraordinary proposal. She had not taken it solemnly indeed, but it had interested her all the same. It was true he was only her father’s clerk, but he was young, well-looking, and he had amused her. She felt in her soul that she could (or at least so she thought) make an utter slave of him. All the absurdities that ever were perpetrated by a young man in love would be possible to that young man, or else Sara’s penetration failed her, whereas the ordinary young men of society were incapable of absurdities. They were too much absorbed in themselves, too conscious of the possibility of ridicule, to throw themselves at a girl’s feet heart and soul; and the girl who was still in the first fantastic freshness of youth despised a sensible and self-respecting lover. She would have been pleased to have had the mysterious Canadian produced again and again to be operated upon. He was not blasé and instructed in every thing like Jack. And as for having to marry him, if he was the man, that was still a distant evil, and something quite unexpected no doubt would come of it; he would turn out a prince in disguise, or some perfectly good reason which her father was now concealing from her, would make every thing suitable. For Sara knew too well the important place she held in her father’s opinion to imagine for a moment that he meant to mate her unworthily. This was how the tenor of her thoughts was turned, and Mr. Brownlow was not insensible to the tacit assaults that were made upon him about his protégé. She gave up her judgment to him as she never had done before, with a filial self-abandonment that would have been beautiful had there been no arrière pensée in it. “I will do as papa thinks proper. You know best, papa,” she said, in her new-born meekness, and Mr. Brownlow understood perfectly what she meant.
“You have turned dreadfully good all of a sudden,” said Jack. “I never knew you so dutiful before.”
“The longer one lives, one understands one’s duties the better,” said Sara, sententiously; and she looked at her father with a mingled submission and malice which called forth a smile about the corners of his mouth.
“I hope so,” said Mr. Brownlow; “though you have not made the experiment long enough to know much about it yet.”
“There are moments which give one experience as much as years,” said Sara, in the same lofty way, which was a speech that tempted the profane Jack to laughter, and made Mr. Brownlow smile once more. But though he smiled, the suggestion did not please him much. He laid his hand caressingly on her head, and smoothed back her pretty hair as he passed her; but he said nothing, and showed no sign of consciousness in respect to those moments which give experience. And the smile died off his lip almost before his hand was withdrawn from her hair. His thought as he went away was that he had been very weak; he had betrayed himself to the child who was still but a child, and knew no better than to play with such rude edge-tools. And the only remedy now was to close his lips and his heart, to tell nobody any thing, never to betray himself, whatever might happen. It was this thought that made him look so stern as he left Brownlows that morning—at least that made Pamela think he looked stern, as the dog-cart came out at the gate. Pamela had come to be very learned in their looks as they flashed past in that rapid moment in the early sunshine. She knew, or she thought she knew, whether Mr. John and his father were quite “friends,” or if there had been a little inevitable family difference between them, as sometimes happened; and it came into her little head that day that Mr. Brownlow was angry with his son, perhaps because— She would not put the reason into words, but it filled her mind with many reflections. Was it wrong for Mr. John to come home early so often?—to stay at home so often the whole day?—to time his expeditions so fortunately that they should end in stray meetings, quite accidental, almost every day? Perhaps he ought to be in the office helping his father instead of loitering about the avenue and elsewhere, and finding himself continually in Pamela’s way. This she breathed to herself inarticulately with that anxious aim at his improvement which is generally the first sign of awakening tenderness in a girl’s heart. It occurred to her that she would speak to him about it when she saw him next; and then it occurred to her with a flash of half guilty joy that he had not been in the dog cart as it dashed past, and that, accordingly, some chance meeting was very sure to take place that day. She meant to remonstrate with him, and put it boldly before him whether it was his duty to stay from the office; but still she could not but feel rather glad that he had stayed from the office that day.