Nevertheless as Harry, poor boy, had been brought up within that limited horizon, he could not help being sorry for him. It was sad for a young man. He was rather fond of the boy; so far as he did give in to the prejudice that because a boy was your grand-nephew you ought to be fond of him, Harry, it certainly was, that was the object of his affections. After all he was a Joscelyn, and, as Joscelyns went in the present generation, as good a specimen as any. This was not saying very much, but still it was something to say; for though the Joscelyns of a former generation were in every way superior, yet it was clear that it was impossible to go back to them. However much we may prefer the past we must all have, it is evident, to put up with the present. Mr. Joscelyn transacted his Club business, and went very closely into that question about the waste-paper. The waste-paper at the Club was of a very superior kind. It was chiefly made up of letters and circulars printed on fine paper, and the brouillons of replies, which even the rural magnates, who frequented the place, liked to write out once before they actually produced the autograph which was to go to their correspondents; it brought a far better price than the usual refuse of a house. But this the present major-domo had failed to grasp; he had treated these choice scraps as if they had been old newspapers. Mr. Joscelyn fully proved his mistake to the reluctant functionary, who was disposed to sneer at the whole business.
“After all, Sir, it is only five shillings difference—and I don’t mind if I paid that out of my own pocket, sooner than make a fuss;” said the flippant official. Mr. Joscelyn looked at him with eyes from which the finest London butler, much less a trifling person in the country, might have shrunk.
“My man,” he said, “the difference is seven and sixpence, and I don’t know what your pocket has to do with it. The state of your pocket is a matter of perfect indifference to the Club; but it is my business to see that our property is not wasted. I hope I shall not have to make a complaint on this subject again.” When he had said this he went home, with some little complacency to see Harry, feeling that his time had not been wasted, and that the property of the Club was not likely to be neglected in this manner again. As for Harry he had not left the house. He had resisted all Mrs. Eadie’s exhortations to send a note to his mother, telling her where he was, or even to send for his luggage, declaring that he would have nothing to do with them, that he would take nothing out of the house, nor ever return to it. And since he could not show himself in Uncle Henry’s high collars, Mrs. Eadie had gone out to the best shop there was in Wyburgh to get some linen for him, and a few necessary articles; while he himself sat in the tranquil house, the peaceful old man’s habitation, where everything was adapted for comfort, every chair an easy-chair, every passage and stair carpeted and noiseless, and the atmosphere kept up to one regular warmth by the thermometer. Harry sat in his uncle’s snuggery, half stifled by the want of air, half asleep in the drowse of warmth and comfort. He had rarely entered these rooms when he was a school-boy—in those days he had been much more at home with Eadie than with her master—and to sit there now had a strange sort of Sunday feeling, a suggestion of silent ease and contemplative leisure. He could understand Uncle Henry liking it. If you were an old man with ever so much to look back upon, it would, no doubt (he thought) be pleasant to sit in these arm-chairs for hours together, and review the past, turning everything over, and living it through once more; but at Harry’s age, with so little to look back upon, and so much to look forward to, this slumbrous calm would have been intolerable but for the strange feverish weariedness of that nuit blanche which he had spent in wandering over the dark country, and which made the present warmth and quiet at once oppressive and luxurious. He dropped asleep half-a-dozen times in the course of the morning, waking up more uncomfortable and feverish than ever, and ashamed of himself to boot. What would have done him more good would have been to go out and walk off his drowse; but then the thought of the high collar, which cut his cheek, and of all the acquaintances to whom this masquerade would have to be explained, made the idea of going out still more insupportable; while on the other hand to think that he was here under a kind of hiding, skulking indoors, not wishing to be seen, was terrible to the unsophisticated youth, who had never before known what it was to shrink from the eye of day.
All these things worked bitterly in Harry’s mind as he sat and turned them over, falling into vague feverish moments of forgetfulness, rousing up again to more angry and uncomfortable consciousness than before. Of course, he could not think of any other subject. He took up the newspaper and tried to read it, but after he had gone over a sentence or two, some scene from the last twenty-four hours would glide in over the page and obliterate everything—his father’s furious face lowering upon him, or that pale glare in the window of the house which was now shut up and closed to him for ever; or the confused darkness of the shed in which Joan (old Joan, a kind soul after all, as he said, in his boyish jargon) had tried to comfort him—or it might be merely an incident of his night’s walk, the sound of the water running below him as he stopped on the bridge, only its sound betraying it in the darkness, or the sudden graze of his hand against a wall as he made his way through the gloom, or the dogs barking, baying against him on all sides. These scenes came flashing before him one by one; and then his young cheeks would grow red and hot as he remembered how he shrank from the policeman’s lantern, and avoided the eye of the carter driving his cabbages to the market in the grey of the morning. He had done nothing to be ashamed of, and yet he had been made to feel guilty and ashamed; what greater wrong could be done to a youth in the beginning of his career?
All this went through his mind, not in any formal succession—now one scene, now another touching his sore and angry soul to sudden exasperation. That he should have to remain all the long day inactive after this convulsion which had changed his life, was an additional irritation to him. Since Uncle Henry had failed to show him any sympathy, what he would have liked would have been to rush out on the moment and post away somewhere out of reach, he did not mind where. In old days, or in primitive places, when a man could hire a horse or a carriage and set out at once, there must have been a wonderful solace in that possibility of instant action; but to wait for a train is a terrible aggravation of the impatience of an angry or anxious mind, even though the train arrives much sooner at its destination than the other could do. The long hours of daylight which must pass ere that train came up seemed to be years to him. He longed for the clang and the movement as for the only comfort that remained to him. After, he did not know what would happen. He would go back to Liverpool; he could realise the arrival there, but he did not know what would follow. Was he to accept his defeat quietly, to sit down upon his stool and continue his work, and see some one else, unfamiliar to the office, enter and pay his money, and take the place which Harry was to have had? All this made the blood mount to his cheeks again in successive waves. Could he bear it? could he put up with it? Sometimes the blood seemed to boil in his veins and swell as if they would burst; and there came upon him, as upon so many others, that wild sudden burst of longing—oh! to have wings like a dove, to fly away! It is not always an elevating or noble longing; it is the natural outcry of that sense of the intolerable which is in all unaccustomed to trouble. To escape from it is the first impulse of the undisciplined mind. Even when experience has taught us that we cannot escape from it, nature still suggests that cry, that desire. Oh to have wings like a dove! oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness! oh to turn our backs upon our pain and all its circumstances, and flee away! And the less this impulse is spiritual and visionary, the less it is restrained by that deeper knowledge so soon acquired that we can rarely escape from our troubles by any summary road, seeing that we can never escape from ourselves. Harry began to get bewildered by the rising fever in his heart of this longing to escape. Why should not he escape? cut all the bonds of which so many had already been rent asunder for him, throw family, and home (which had rejected him), and duty, and custom, and the life he knew, and the circumstances which had hitherto shaped it, all away with one effort, and emancipate himself?
He had roused a little under the influence of this suggestion when his uncle returned. Mr. Joscelyn had a compunction in his mind which made him very conciliatory to Harry. To give him what he seemed to want, to subtract so much, even if not very much, from his own possessions in order to give to Harry, was an idea which he would not contemplate. If Harry waited long enough he would get it; but in the meantime, a demand upon him was like a warning that he had lived long enough, and that his money was wanted for a new generation, which was as intolerable to Uncle Henry as young Harry’s troubles were to him. He would not take upon himself the burden of setting his grand-nephew up in life, but at the same time he felt it was a hardship that the young fellow should not have some one to set him up in life, and was conciliatory and soothing by a kind of generous instinct, an instinct not generous enough to go further. He came in in a mood which was much more agreeable to Harry than that in which he had gone out, and which raised Mrs. Eadie’s hopes high, who knew that her master did not often come back in this way, or show himself so amiable. Mr. Joscelyn told Harry all the story of the waste-paper, and gave him great insight into the workings of the Club.
“If you are faithful to your native county, as I have been, I daresay you will end by being a member of it,” he said.
“It is not very likely, Sir,” said Harry. “I don’t care if I were never to see the old place again.”
“That is nonsense,” said his uncle, promptly. “That’s a question of age entirely. At your time of life you think that all that is to be desired is to be in the world, and you don’t understand that the world is not in one place as much as another, not the grand world in London, or the business world in Liverpool, but is just your world wherever you may happen to be.”
This was above Harry, who gaped slightly, and opened his eyes with curiosity and wonder.