“Come, come,” said Mr. Tottenham good-humouredly; “that is just the point which I cannot enter into. But you may permit us to be interested, though we can’t describe in full detail how it came about. Earnshaw, Mary and I are fanciful sort of people, as you perceive; we don’t always keep to the beaten path; and we want you to do us a favour. What I am going to ask may be a little irregular; it may sound a little obtrusive; you may take it amiss; though I hope not—”
“I shall not take it amiss in any case,” Edgar managed to say; but his heart was beating very loudly, and an agitation for which he could not account had got possession of his whole being. His mind went wildly over a whole world of conjecture, and I need not add that he was utterly astray in everything he thought of, and did not reach to the faintest notion of what his companion meant to be at.
“In the first place,” said Mr. Tottenham nervously, “it is evident that you must wait till there is an opening in that business with Newmarch. I don’t doubt in the least that he wants to have you, and that he’ll give you the first vacancy; but he can’t kill off a man on purpose, though I dare say he would if he could. I don’t go on to say in the second place, as I might perhaps, that a Queen’s Messenger has a very wearisome life, and not much to make amends for it—”
Here he paused to take breath, while Edgar watched and wondered, getting more and more bewildered every moment in the maze of conjecture through which he could not find his way.
“Of course,” said Mr. Tottenham, himself displaying a certain amount of rising excitement, “I don’t mean to say that you ought not to accept such an appointment if it was offered. But in the meantime, what are you to do? Live in London, and waste your resources, and break your spirit with continual waiting? I say no, no, by no means; and this is what put it into my head to say what I am going to say to you, and to insist upon your coming here.”
What was he going to say? Still Edgar, subdued by his own excitement, could make no reply. Mr. Tottenham paused also, as if half fearing to take the plunge.
“What we meant, Earnshaw,” he said abruptly, at last, “what Mary and I want, if you will do it, is—that you should stay with us and take charge of our boy.”
The last words he uttered hastily, and almost sharply, as if throwing something out that burned him while he held it. And oh! dear reader, how can I express to you the way in which poor Edgar fell, fell, low down, and lower down, as into some echoing depth, when these words fell upon his dismayed and astonished ears! Take charge of their boy! God help him! what had he been thinking about? He could not himself tell; nothing, a chimera, the foolishest of dreams, some wild fancy which involved the future in a vain haze of brightness with the image of the veiled maiden in the railway carriage, and of Gussy, who was never veiled. Oh, Heaven and earth! what a fool, what a fool he was! She had nothing to do with it; he himself had nothing to do with it. It was but a benevolent scheme of people with a great many benevolent schemes about them, for the relief of a poor young fellow whom they knew to be in trouble. That was all. Edgar went on walking as in a dream, feeling himself spin round and round and go down, as to the bottom of some well. He could hear that Mr. Tottenham went on speaking, and the hum of his voice made, as it were, a running accompaniment to his own hubbub of inarticulate thoughts; Edgar heard it, yet heard it not. When he woke up from this confusion, it was quite suddenly, by reason of a pause in the accompanying voice. The last words his bewildered intelligence caught up were these:
“You will think it over, and tell me your decision later. You will understand that we both beg you to forgive us, if we have said or done anything which is disagreeable to you, Earnshaw. You promise me to remember that?”
“Disagreeable!” Edgar murmured half consciously. “Why should it be disagreeable?” but even his own voice seemed to be changed in his own ear as he said it. He was all changed, and everything about him. “I must go across to the pond before I go in,” he added, somewhat abruptly. “I promised Philip to look at the ice;” and with scarcely any further excuse, set off across the grass, from which the whiteness and crispness of the morning frosts had been stolen away by the sun. He could not get free of the physical sensation of having fallen. He seemed to himself to be bruised and shaken; he could do nothing with his mind but realize and identify his state; he could not discuss it with himself. It did not seem to him even that he knew what he had been thinking of, what he had been hoping; he knew only that he had fallen from some strange height, and lay at the bottom somewhere, aching and broken in heart and strength, stunned by the fall, and so confused that he did not know what had happened to him, or what he must do next. In this state of mind he walked mechanically across the grass, and gazed at the frozen pond, without knowing what he was doing, and then strode mechanically away from it, and went home. (How soon we begin to call any kind of a place home, when we have occasion to use it as such!). He went home, back to his room, the room which surely, he thought to himself, was too good for Mr. Tottenham’s tutor, which was the post he had been asked to occupy. Mr. Tottenham’s boy’s tutor, that was the phrase.