“Who? Miss ——. Oh! dear no,” said the good-humoured Sister. “She is what we call an associate, and does what she can for our charges, the poor people—in something like our dress; but it is far from being the dress of a professed sister,” the excellent woman added, adjusting her cross and collar. “I daresay you will meet her some day in society, and you need not tell her great friends that a Sister of the Charity House made her travel third class. We always do it; but fine people do not like to know.”
“I should have to betray myself,” said Edgar laughing, “if I betrayed you.”
“That is true,” said the Sister. “If you ever pass by the Charity House at Amerton ask for Sister Susan, and I shall be glad to show you over it. I assure you it is something to see.”
“I shall come some day or other,” said Edgar, not quite knowing what he said. Who was she then, the girl with the veil who kept herself shrouded from him? She had not seemed farouche or unfriendly. She had waited quietly while he did what he could for them at the railway station. She had even touched his hand lightly as he put her into the cab; but there had seemed to be three or four veils between him and her countenance. During all the long journey he had seen of her nothing but the little white hand stealing from under the cover of her cloak; but somehow his dream came back to him, and wove itself in with the semblance of this veiled stranger. Absurd! but sometimes an absurdity is pleasant and comforting, and so it was in this case. He could not have said what fancies came into his head, or if he had any fancies. No, he was past dreaming, past all that kind of boyish nonsense, he said to himself. But yet the recollection of the veiled maiden was pleasant to him, he could scarcely have told why.
Lord Newmarch was at his office, and he was ready after some time to see his visitor, whom he greeted with sufficient friendliness and good feeling. Lord Newmarch had been very democratic in his day; he had taken workmen in their working clothes to dine with him at his club in his hot youth, and had made them very uncomfortable, and acquired a delightful reputation himself for advanced ideas; which was a very great thing for a new lord, whose grandfather had been a small shopkeeper, to do. But somehow he was a great deal more at his ease with the working men than with his former friend and equal, now reduced to a perfectly incredible destitution of those ordinary circumstances which form the very clothing and skin of most men. Edgar was in soul and being, no doubt, exactly the same as ever; he had the same face, the same voice, the same thought and feelings. Had he lost only his money Lord Newmarch would not have felt the difficulty half so great, for indeed a great many people do (whatever the world may say) lose their money, without being dropped or discredited by society. But something a great deal more dreadful had happened in Edgar’s case. He had lost, so to speak, himself; and how to behave towards a man who a little while ago had been his equal, nay his superior, and now was not his equal, nor anybody’s, yet the same man, puzzled the young statesman beyond expression. This is a very different sort of thing from entertaining a couple of working men to the much astonishment (delightful homage to one’s peculiarities) of one’s club. The doctrine that all men are brothers comes in with charming piquancy in the one case, but is very much less easy to deal with in the other. Lord Newmarch got up with some perturbation from his seat when Edgar came in. He shook him warmly by the hand, and said,
“Oh, Arden—ah, Earnshaw,” looking at the card. “I beg your pardon. I am delighted to see you.”
And then they both sat down and looked at each other after the warmth of this accost, and found, as so often happens, that they had nothing more to say. I do not know a more embarrassing position in ordinary circumstances, even when there is no additional and complicating embarrassment. You meet your old friend, you shake hands, you commit yourself to an expression of delight—and then you are silent. He has sailed away from you and you from him since you last met, and there is nothing to be said between you, beyond that first unguarded and uncalled for warmth of salutation, the emblem of an intimacy past. This is how Lord Newmarch accosted Edgar; and Edgar accepted the salutation with a momentary glow at his breast. And then they sat down and looked at each other; they had given forth all the feeling they had toward each other, and how could they express sentiments which had no existence? They had to glide involuntarily into small talk about the empty state of town, and the new Minister’s devotion to business, and the question between Prussia and Russia which he had to keep at his post to watch. Lord Newmarch allowed, with dignified resignation, that it was hard upon him, and that an Under Secretary of State has much that is disagreeable to bear; and then he added politely, but thinking to himself—oh, how much easier were two, nay half-a-dozen working-men, than this!—an inquiry as to the nature of his old friend’s occupation. “What,” said the statesman, crossing and uncrossing his legs two or three times in succession to get the easiest position, and with a look at his shoes which expressed eloquently all the many events that had passed since their last meeting, “What are you doing yourself?”
CHAPTER X.
A Noble Patron.
When two men who have met in careless intercourse, without any possibility of obliging or being obliged, except so far as interchange of courtesy goes, come suddenly together in relations so changed, the easy question, “what are you doing?” spoken by the one whose position has not altered, to the one who has suffered downfall, has a new world of significance in it, of tacit encouragement or repulsion of kindly or adverse meaning. It means either “Can I help you?” or, “Don’t think of asking me for help.” If the downfallen one has need of aid and patronage, the faintest inflection of voice thrills him with expectation or disappointment—and even if he is independent, it is hard if he does not get a sting of mortification out of the suspected benevolence or absence of it. Edgar listened to Lord Newmarch’s questions, with a sudden rising in his mind of many sentiments quite unfamiliar to him. He was ashamed—though he had nothing to be ashamed of—angry, though no offence had been given him—and tingled with excitement for which there was no reason. How important it had become to him all at once that this other man, for whom he felt no particular respect, should be favourable to him, and how difficult to reconcile himself to the process of asking, he who had never done anything but give!
“I am doing nothing,” he said, after a momentary pause, which seemed long to him, but which Lord Newmarch did not so much as notice, “and to tell the truth, I had a great mind to come cap in hand to you, to ask for something. I want occupation—and to speak frankly, a living at the same time. Not pay without work, but yet pay.”