CHAPTER XLI A CROOKED BILLET
Once I saw the solid keeper of a well-known elephant (a grand mass of sagacious substance, gentle, good, and amiable) try his hand among the monkeys, creatures in their way as worthy, but of different fibre. These too knew what kindness is, and had their sense of gratitude, but could not stop to dwell upon it, and let it ripen in their hearts. The keeper, accustomed to slow ways, and leisurely though deep emotion, exerted all his charm of eye and benevolence of whistle, and offered baits to cupboard-love, and even deigned to winsome ticklings of places not too hairy to be touched by human tenderness. He gazed with zoologic pride at the manager of the monkeys, who was putting a new lash on his whip; then his glory flew into a shriek, for his thumb was bitten in twain, and a jabber of general joy endorsed it.
So it is too sure to be with any man, who drawing reason from her higher sources, applies the product of his skill, even in homœopathic doses, to that irrational creature—love. Strogue had no idea of the meaning of that word. A traveller gets too-far abroad, too loose, and large, and vague, and shifty, shallow with glancing instead of gazing, skimming the world instead of letting it cream. Therefore to me there was scarcely a crumb of comfort in all his assurances; and the only thing to stroke the long anxiety the right way of the grain, and smooth its tissue, was to keep on steadily with the labours of the day. And when these can be carried on out of doors, under the sky, and (if so I may say) with the eyes of the Lord smiling down on them, it is not to the credit of any young man, if he kicks about under his blanket and groans, when the night makes all things equal. Unless he has bodily pain, I mean—which is another pair of shoes, that can never be unlaced by any effort of our own.
Moreover, to see one's dearest friends escaping from some black distress, and coming back to their usual cheer, and jokes, and pleasure in the world around, takes or ought to take a lot of lead out of our own handicap. Although my sister had never been by any means painfully sympathetic with my misfortunes in the way of love, I was candid enough to feel that this might be because I had never asked her. Such an affection as mine was far beyond her understanding, a thing too holy to be discussed by any girl with yellow hair in love with a member of the Stock Exchange. But I quite forgave her all short-comings, the moment she fell into real trouble, and I wiped her eyes almost as softly as if they had been Dariel's. And this renewed our deep attachment, which had lost perhaps some little of its warmth, when she took to finding virtues in that marvellous Jackson Stoneman, which she had pronounced a hundred times to be sadly deficient in her brother. However they revived and flourished now; and I was not so mean as to ask how they came back, but was proud of their possession. Let us take all the credit we can get, from people who are fond of us; there will scarcely be enough to plug the holes our other brethren pick in us.
Stoneman, too, having turned the corner by the narrowest of shaves, with the paint shorn from his shaft and felly, but his box and axle as sound as ever, was much improved for the present by the increase of humility. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say, by the birth of that quality within him; for if it had existed heretofore, it had been so true to itself as to recoil from all recognition. Except of course in his first love-time; for if a man cannot be humble then, Lucifer is no match for him. It is needless to say that the losses of the firm were spread from mouth to mouth at any figure that occurred to the imagination, long before the senior partner himself could lay a loose measure along them. But he managed to stick to the Hall and the Park; though he gave up his yacht, and the hounds, and other enjoyments now too costly, and at Grace's urgent order clave to money-making all the week, and left the love for Sundays.
There was even some little talk about my throwing up the plough, and harrow, pitchfork, flail, and stable-bucket, and quitting in despair the land that had now become too honest to maintain mankind. To wit, I was to join our Jackson, not as a partner (for the solid reason that I had no capital), but as an agent, an assessor, or I forget what they called it. My father wished it, and so did my mother, and every one except myself; and I was doubting whether the sense of duty to my relatives ought not to outweigh my own tastes and wishes, when all my thoughts were upset again, and all my mind unsettled, by a letter just as follows:—
"Dear Sir,—I must seek pardon for neglect or carelessness about something. But it did not enter my thoughts at first, that the letter enclosed belongs to you, or perhaps to the lady to whom it was written. And we have been on the railway, or at sea so much, and in strange hotels, that I could not procure it from my boxes. I hope that it is of no importance; but I now perceive that I have been guilty of a sad want of attention, which may have caused blame to fall on others. If so I beg to be pardoned by them, for I had no intention of retaining what could never belong to me.—Your obedient servant,
"Dariel, daughter of Imar."
The letter enclosed, or rather the note, was one of several little billets, in which I had answered questions from Tom Erricker's sister, Argyrophylla, during that most melancholy time, when there was no one else to support her. She behaved, all through that terrible period, in a faultless manner; such as even Dariel herself would have found it hard to equal. Argyrophylla was just as mournful, just as trustful in the Lord and the depth of heartfelt sympathy, just as determined to overcome her own feelings for the sake of others, as the nicest girl that was ever born, and therefore has to deal with death, could be. Any man who could be cold to her (with her father just dead, and her mother scarcely more than alive enough to moan) deserved to be screwed down, I say, and find no one at his funeral. But I never care to defend myself. It is clear enough what any one must think of this, being told that it was all about some crayfish soup, which was more for the lawyer's delectation than for mine:—