When he was at dinner, Betsy came behind his chair under pretence of serving him; Betsy, whose place was in the kitchen, who had no right to show in the dining-room at all, and whose confused toilette had caught Ursula's eye and filled her with horror.
“Please, sir,” she said, breathing hot on Mr. May's ear, till he shrank with sensitive horror. “Cotsdean's in the kitchen. He says as how he must see you; and I can't get him away.”
“Ah, Cotsdean? tell him if he has anything to say to me, to write it down.”
“Which he's done, sir,” said Betsy, producing a little bit of paper rolled tightly together, “but I wasn't to give it till I'd asked you to see him. Oh, please see him, sir, like a dear good gentleman. He looks like a man as is going off his head.”
“He is a fool,” said Mr. May, taking the paper, but setting his teeth as he did so. Evidently he must get rid of this fellow—already beginning to trouble him, as if he was not the best person to know when and how far he could go.
“Tell him I'll attend to it, he need not trouble himself,” he said, and put the paper into his pocket, and went on with his dinner. Cotsdean, indeed! surely there had been enough of him. What were his trumpery losses in comparison with what his principal would lose, and how dare that fellow turn up thus and press him continually for his own poor selfish safety? This was not how Mr. May had felt three months before; but everything changes, and he felt that he had a right to be angry at this selfish solicitude. Surely it was of as much consequence to him at least as to Cotsdean. The man was a fussy disagreeable fool, and nothing more.
And as it happened they sat late that night at dinner, without any particular reason, because of some discussion into which Clarence and Reginald fell, so that it was late before Mr. May got back to his room, where his books were lying in a heap waiting their transportation. They seemed to appeal to him also, and ask him reproachfully how they had got there, and he went to work arranging them all with all the enthusiasm natural to a lover of books. He was a book-lover, a man full of fine tastes and cultured elegant ways of thinking. If he had been extravagant (which he was not) it would have been in the most innocent, nay delightful and laudable way. To attach any notion of criminality, any suspicion of wrong-doing to such a virtuous indulgence, how unjust it would be! There was no company upstairs that evening. Copperhead had strolled out with Reginald to smoke his cigar, much against the will of the latter, and was boring him all the way to the College with accounts of his own lavish expenditure, and how much he had given for this and that; his cameos, his diamond studs, the magnificent dressing-case which was the wonder of the Parsonage. “Hang it all, what is the good of having money if you don't spend it?” said Clarence, and Reginald, who had not much money to spend, felt as near hating him as it was in his nature to do. Thus Mr. May was released from duty in the drawing-room, where Ursula, palpitating with many thoughts which were altogether new to her, sat doing her darning, and eluding as well as she could Janey's questions. Janey was determinedly conversational that night. She drove Ursula nearly out of her senses, and kept Johnnie—who had crept into the drawing-room in high delight at finding it for once free to him—from learning his lessons.
“Oh, how nice it is to be by ourselves,” said Janey, “instead of all those new people. I don't mind Phœbe; but strange men in the house, what a nuisance they are, always getting in one's way—don't you think so, Ursula?”
Ursula made no reply, and after awhile even Janey sank into silence, and the drawing-room, usually so gay, got a cold and deserted look. The new life which had come in had left its mark, and to go back to what had once been so pleasant in the past was no longer possible. Johnnie and Janey might like it, having regained their former places, but to Ursula the solitude was horrible. She asked herself, with a great blush and quiver, what she would do if that temporary filling up of new interests and relationships was to fall away, as was likely, and leave her to the old life unbroken, to Janey's childish society and questions, and papa's imperious and unmodified sway. She grew pale and chill at the very thought.
But Mr. May, as we have said, was off duty. He forgot all about Cotsdean and the note in his pocket, and set to work with the most boyish simplicity of delight to arrange his books in his new shelves. How well they looked! never before had their setting done them justice. There were books in gorgeous bindings, college prizes which had never shown at all, and which now gleamed out in crimson and gold from behind the glass, and made their owner's heart beat with pleasure. Alas! to think how much innocent pleasure is denied us by the want of that small sum of money! and worse still, how an innocent pleasure becomes the reverse of innocent when it is purchased by the appropriation of something which should have been employed elsewhere. Perhaps, however, the sense of guilt which he kept under, added zest in Mr. May's mind to the pleasure of his acquisition; he was snatching a fearful joy, Heaven knows how soon the penalty might overwhelm him. In the mean time he was determined to take the good of it, and enjoy what he had gained.