Edgar read this letter with a great and sharp pang of disappointment. An hour before, had anyone asked him, he would have said he had no faith whatever in Lord Newmarch; yet now he felt, by the keenness of his mortification, that he had expected a great deal more than he had ever owned even to himself. He flung the letter down on the table beside him, and covered his face with his hands. It seemed to him that he had lost one of the primary supports on which, without knowing, he had been building of late. Now was there nothing before Gussy’s betrothed—he who had ventured to entangle her fate with his, and to ask of parents and friends to bless the bargain—but a tutorship in a great house, and kind Mr. Tottenham’s favour, who was no great man, nor had any power, nor anything but mere money. He could not marry Gussy upon Mr. Tottenham’s money, or take her to another man’s house, to be a cherished and petted dependent, as they had made him. I don’t think it was till next day, when again the wheel had gone momentarily round, and he had set out on Clare’s business, leaving Gussy behind him, that he observed the pregnant and pithy postscript, which threw a certain gleam of light upon Lord Newmarch’s letter. “How should you like a Consulship?” Edgar had no great notion what a Consulship was. What kind of knowledge or duties was required for the humblest representative of Her Majesty, he knew almost as little as if this functionary had been habitually sent to the moon. “Should I like a Consulship?” he said to himself, as the cold, yet cheerful sunshine of early Spring streamed over the bare fields and hedgerows which swept past the windows of the railway carriage in which he sat. A vague exhilaration sprang up in his mind—perhaps from that thought, perhaps from the sunshine only, which always had a certain enlivening effect upon this fanciful young man. Perhaps, after all, though he did not at first know what it was, this was the thing that he could do, and which all his friends were pledged to get for him. And once again he forgot all about his present errand, and amused himself, as he rushed along, by attempts to recollect what the Consul was like at various places he knew where such a functionary existed, and what he did, and how he lived. The only definite recollection in his mind was of an office carefully shut up during the heat of the day, with cool, green persiane all closed, a soft current of air rippling over a marble floor, and no one visible but a dreamy Italian clerk, to tell when H. B. M.’s official representative would be visible. “I could do that much,” Edgar said to himself, with a smile of returning happiness; but what the Consul did when he was visible, was what he did not know. No doubt he would have to sing exceedingly small when there was an ambassador within reach, or even the merest butterfly of an attaché, but apart from such gorgeous personages, the Consul, Edgar knew, had a certain importance.
This inquiry filled his mind with animation during all the long, familiar journey towards Arden, which he had feared would be full of painful recollections. He was almost ashamed of himself, when he stopped at the next station before Arden, to find that not a single recollection had visited him. Hope and imagination had carried the day over everything else, and the problematical Consul behind his green persiane had routed even Clare.
The letter, however, which had brought him here had been of a sufficiently disagreeable kind to make more impression upon him. Arthur Arden had never pretended to any loftiness of feeling, or even civility towards his predecessor, and Edgar’s note had called forth the following response:—
“Sir,—I don’t know by what claim you, an entire stranger to my family, take it upon you to thrust yourself into my affairs. I have had occasion to resent this interference before, and I am certainly still less inclined to support it now. I know nothing of any person named Lockwood, who can be of the slightest importance to me. Nevertheless, as you have taken the liberty to mix yourself up with some renewed annoyance, I request you will meet me on Friday, at the ‘Arden Arms,’ at Whitmarsh, where I have some business—to let me know at once what your principal means—I might easily add to answer to me what you have to do with it, or with me, or my concerns.
“A. Arden.
“P.S.—If you do not appear, I will take it as a sign that you have thought better of it, and that the person you choose to represent has come to her senses.”
Edgar had been able to forget this letter, and the interview to which it conducted him, thinking of his imaginary Consul! I think the reader will agree with me that his mind must have been in a very peculiar condition. He kept his great-coat buttoned closely up, and his hat down over his eyes, as he got out at the little station. He was not known at Whitmarsh, as he had been known at Arden, but still there was a chance that some one might recognize him. The agreeable thoughts connected with the Consul, fortunately, had left him perfectly cool, and when he got out in Clare’s county, on her very land, the feeling of the past began to regain dominion over him. If he should meet Clare, what would she say to him? Would she know him? would she recognize him as her brother, or hold him at arm’s length as a stranger? And what would she think, he wondered, with the strangest, giddy whirling round of brain and mind, if she knew that the dream of three years ago was, after all, to come true; that, though Arden was not his, Gussy was his; and that, though she no longer acknowledged him as her brother, Gussy had chosen him for her husband. It was the only question there was any doubt about at one time. Now it was the only thing that was true.
With this bewildering consciousness of the revolutions of time, yet the steadfastness of some things which were above time, Edgar walked into the little old-fashioned country inn, scarcely venturing to take off his hat for fear of recognition, and was shown into the best parlour, where Mr. Arden awaited him.
CHAPTER XV.
The Ardens.
Arthur Arden, Esq., of Arden, was a different man from the needy cousin of the Squire, the hanger-on of society, the fine gentleman out at elbows, whose position had bewildered yet touched the supposed legal proprietor of the estates, and head of the family, during Edgar’s brief reign. A poor man knocking about the world, when he has once lost his reputation, has no particular object to stimulate him to the effort necessary for regaining it. But when a man who sins by will, and not by weakness of nature, gains a position in which virtue is necessary and becoming, and where vice involves a certain loss of prestige, nothing is easier than moral reformation. Arthur Arden had been a strictly moral man for all these years; he had given up all vagabond vices, the peccadilloes of the Bohemian. He was rangé in every sense of the word. A more decorous, stately house was not in the county; a man more correct in all his duties never set an example to a parish. I do not know that the essential gain was very great. He took his vices in another way; he was hard as the nether millstone to all who came in his way, grasping and tyrannical. He did nothing that was not exacted from him, either by law, or public opinion, or personal vanity; on every other side he was in panoply of steel against all prayers, all intercessions, all complaints.