On the evening of the same day Archie Rowland knocked at Eddy’s door. It had been an evening of the lively order, which had now become habitual at Rosmore. Eddy and Marion had carried all before them. After a long discussion of the details of the ball, the decorations in which Eddy was collaborating with Mrs. Rowland, and fertile in a thousand suggestions, Rosamond had again struck up a waltz on the piano, and the two gayest members of the party had immediately started off. There were present some of Miss Eliza’s many nieces and nephews from the Burn, and in a few minutes two or three couples had “taken the floor,” winding in and out of the furniture, with difficulties which increased the mirth. Mr. Rowland himself had come in from the dining-room while this lively scene was going on, and had looked upon it benignantly for a minute or two in the doorway, but had ended by going away, amused but perhaps a little bored by this unreasoning invasion of his quiet, as the father of a family not unfrequently does, not displeased that his children should enjoy themselves, but with an odd sense of bachelorhood and detachment as he takes refuge in his library, supposing him to have one. Evelyn had been looking on too, still more benignant, glad that the youthful members of the party should be occupied anyhow, ready to take her place at the piano, and help them to keep it up, yet a little disturbed by the withdrawal of her husband, and instantly conscious, sympathetically, that the too-prominent and continual amusement of the young people had its disadvantageous side. Probably had she been their mother, she would have taken their part more warmly, and with a vague blame in her mind of the man who could not blot himself out as she did, for what pleased the children. Archie, to whom this evening, in the greater number of performers, Rosamond could not offer herself as a partner, felt like his father, a little annoyed and very much amazed with himself for feeling annoyed. How much better, he said to himself, to be like Saumarez, able to give himself up to what other people wished, to amuse them, and make the evening “go off” for the guests. Archie felt that he himself would never be up to that. He would never be able to forget himself and throw off all his cares, and sacrifice himself on the altar of his guests. A secret longing forced itself upon him to get rid of them all, to be quiet, even as in the dull evenings before the arrival of the visitors. The evenings had been very dull, but still—. As for the old life in Glasgow, Archie somehow did not go back to that—it had retired so very far away out of his ken. If it had been thirty years ago instead of four months it could not have become more completely impossible, a thing got into the abyss of the past, not to be thought of any more.
It was late when he walked softly through the dim corridor upstairs, in which one lamp only was burning low, making a sort of darkness visible. Everybody was asleep, or at least so it appeared from the absolute stillness of the house. He felt as if his step now and then coming upon a plank in the flooring which creaked, must startle the people retired in those silent rooms like the tread of a thief in the night. Nothing could be more unlike a thief than Archie was, stealing along in the dark to give away all he possessed in the world to a man whom he did not by any means love, who was his neighbour only in the broadest sense of the word, one who wanted something which he possessed. He had made out all his generous foolish plans, as to how it could be best done, so that nobody need ever know that he had come to Eddy’s aid, not even a banker’s clerk. He knocked softly at the door from underneath which there was a glimmer of light, the only one in the long corridor where any sign of life was to be seen. His knock was not responded to for the first moment. He heard a little rustle and movement of paper, and then he knocked a second time, and again after a little interval Eddy came and opened the door.
“Oh it’s you, Rowland,” he said, admitting him instantly.
Eddy had been sitting at a writing table, with a number of papers before him, over which he had tossed a newspaper, the first thing that came handy, when he heard Archie’s knock. There was no reason why he should have covered up his papers so. What he had been lost in contemplation of, was Archie’s cheque, which was stretched out before him in his blotting book, and which he was poring over with no doubt the grateful sensations which a man has when a friend holds out to him, when he is drowning, a helpful hand. He had been looking at it with his head on one side, and a look of earnest and fixed observation, sometimes making a visionary line with his pencil in the air, here and there. Perhaps a little regret about that nought that was wanting might be in his mind. Eddy was very hard pressed. The bit of paper which the money-lender had in his possession, which he held over the unfortunate young man’s head, demanding a ransom as cruel and extravagant as any blood-money, was enough to ruin Eddy for ever and ever. No aid or succour from his friends would enable him to get over it, and he dared not on account of this examine the demand made upon him, or attempt to have it ratified. He must pay it or he himself must sink to the very pit of social annihilation. Eddy was very well known to be a little mauvais sujet, as his father had been before him. Still that was a thing which society could ignore: it could even have permitted him to marry an heiress, with a sensation of pleasure in having him so well disposed of; but the bit of paper in the usurer’s hand was a different matter. That was a thing which could not be admitted, and could not be forgotten. At all hazards, at all costs, that must be got rid of. If there only had been that other nought, if only a t had been prefixed to the h of the hundred, and sundry other unimportant alterations made! It was impossible not to think of this, not to see how easy it would have been, had Mr. Rowland been possessed by so good an idea. What a pity! what a pity! Eddy with all his thinking could not imagine a plan by which Rowland could be made to do that: and yet how easy it would be! He threw the Glasgow paper over it when he heard the knock at the door.
“Oh, is it you, Rowland? Come in. I was just looking at the—paper before I went to bed.”
“Its little interest it can have for you—a Glasgow paper,” said Archie with a smile. And then he said, “I’ve come to speak about what we were saying this afternoon on the hill.”
“Yes?” said Eddy. He has repented already, he said to himself with a deep drawn breath.
Archie stammered and hesitated, and blushed as he sat down at the table. He began to rustle and pluck at the corner of the paper unconsciously with those awkward fingers which he never knew what to do with. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, and could get out no more.
“Look here,” said Eddy nervously, “if you’ve been thinking, Rowland, as would be quite natural, that you were taken by surprise to-day on the hill, that you handed over that cheque to me in a moment of weakness, and that now on thinking it over you felt that you had been a fool, and that my troubles were no concern of yours—don’t beat about the bush. I have been thinking just the same myself. Its monstrous you should be put out about a fellow’s concerns whom you had never seen a month ago, and never may see again. Say it out, there’s a good fellow; don’t hesitate and spare my feelings. I agree beforehand in every word you say.”
Archie stood open-mouthed while his companion delivered very rapidly this little oration, in which there was a great deal of genuine feeling: for Eddy thought it was almost inevitable that such a rash piece of generosity should be repented of, and yet was in so much mental excitement concerning the matter altogether, that his mind was full of impatient resentment against the man whose action (mentally) he approved, and whom he believed to be doing the most natural thing in the world.