“What! with Mr Crediton? and his daughter?” said Dr Mitford. He thought he had made a joke, and turned away with a mild little laugh to arrange and caress his folios. Then he went on talking with his back to John—“I should be glad to know what you really think of it now that you have had time to make the experiment. I don’t understand the commercial mind myself. I don’t know that I could be brought to understand it; but the opinion of an intelligence capable of judging, and accustomed to trains of thought so different, could not but be interesting. I should like to hear what you think of it frankly. Somebody has made dog’s ears in this Shakespeare, which is unpardonable,” said the Doctor, passing his hand with sudden indignation over the folded edges. “I should like to know what your opinion is.”
“I think I can get it straight, sir,” said John, “if you will trust the book to me.”
“Thanks—and put a label on it, 'Not to be lent,'” said Dr Mitford. “It is not to be expected, you know, that the most good-natured of men should lend one of the earliest editions. What were we talking of? oh, the bank. I hope you are quite satisfied that you can do your duty as well or better in your own way than in the manner we had intended for you. Nothing but that thought would have induced me to yield. It was a disappointment, John,” said his father, turning round with a tall volume in his hand—“I cannot deny that it was a great disappointment. Do you really feel that you are able to do your duty better where you are?”
“What is my duty, father?” said John, with a hoarseness in his voice.
And then it was Dr Mitford’s turn to show consternation. “Your duty,” he faltered—“your duty? It does not say much for my teaching and your mother’s if you have to ask that question at this time of day.”
This, it will be easy to see, was a very unsatisfactory sort of answer. John got up too, feeling very heavy about the heart. “Relative duty is easy enough,” he said; “but absolute duty, what is it? is there such a thing? Is it not just as good both for myself and other people that I should live for myself as I am doing, instead of living for God and my neighbour like my mother? So far as I can see, it comes to exactly the same thing.”
Dr Mitford looked at his son with an absolute astonishment that would have been comical had John been able to see it. But then it was not so much his son’s perplexity the Doctor thought of as that curious, quite inexplicable reference. “Like your mother!” the Rector of Fanshawe Regis said, with utter amazement. It took away his breath. He could not even notice his son’s question in his consternation. “Yes,” said John, not in the least perceiving the point, “what is the good? That is what one asks one’s self; it does not seem to make any difference to the world.”
Dr Mitford turned, and put up the dog’s-eared folio on its shelf. He shook his head in his bewilderment, and gave a sigh of impatience. “You young men have a way of talking and of thinking which I don’t understand,” he said, still shaking his head. “I hope to goodness, John, that you have not been led astray by those ridiculous fallacies of Comtism. You may suppose that as you are not to be a clergyman it does not matter what your opinions are; but it always matters. A private Christian has as much need to be right as if he were an archbishop; and I confess, after your careful training, I little expected——a mere farrago of French sentiment and nonsense. Your mother! what she has to do with the question I can’t understand.”
“And I am sure neither do I, sir,” said John, moved to a laugh, “nor why you should set me down as a Comtist. I am not an anythingist, worse luck—for then, perhaps, one might see a little more plainly what to do.”
“If a young man, with the best education England can give, and friends to consult, who, I flatter myself, are not idiots, cannot see what to do, it does not say much for his sense,” said Dr Mitford, with some indignation. “I suppose by all this I am to understand that you are tired of the office drudgery and beginning to repent——”