Giles Inglett Saltren was so completely thrown off his balance by Welsh’s repudiations of the story of his parentage, that he did not resent, he hardly heard the burst of indignation that escaped his uncle; or, if he heard it, his mind was too preoccupied to follow his words, and measure their force, and take umbrage at their grossness. He was overpowered with dismay. What had he done? He could not even realise the extent of the evil he had wrought, nor measure the depth of his own baseness.
But Mr. Welsh was not a man to leave him without having spread out the mass of his misdeeds before him, and held his head down over it, and indicated its most salient features.
“You abominable little snob!” he exclaimed. “Have you forgotten what has been done for you? If his lordship had not taken you from the hard form on which you polished the seat of your corduroys, and set you in an easy chair, you’d have nice callosities now. Probably you would not have been alive at all had he not sent you to the South of France.” Mr. Welsh became sarcastic. “No doubt you owe his lordship a grudge because he didn’t let you go at once to kingdom come instead of detaining you here in this Vale of Tears. Mind you, Giles—there is no escape from this fact, that you owe your life to him. To him also you owe your education. To him you owe it that, supposing you had lived, you are not now a horny-handed ploughboy, that you know how to use a pocket-handkerchief, and don’t put your knife in your mouth.”
Mr. Welsh thrust his hands into his pockets, and stood with legs apart looking scornfully at his nephew.
“Pray, Mr. Giles Inglett, how would you like to go back to potato pasty and cold boiled junk of bacon? To an early dinner, and swipes instead of claret? To getting your clothes at a slop-shop, instead of being fitted by a tailor? To being without books and magazines and reviews? Are you aware that you have earned not one of the luxuries or even comforts of civilised life? That they have come to you undeserved as does free Grace? Upon my word, you make my blood splutter! Shall I tell you what would have been the end of you had not Lord Lamerton come to the rescue? After you were ill you would have been cared for, or not cared for, after the fashion of common folk’s children, and your mother’s haphazard way of doing everything, allowed to get your feet wet, and stand in draughts, neglected one day, coddled the next, till your weak lungs gave way, and rapid consumption set in. Shall I tell you what would have been the course of Act II? Then you would have been mewed up in that dismal back bedroom at Chillacot, with the ultramarine wash on the walls, and the snipped, emerald-green, silver-paper fly trap suspended in the middle of the room, and the blistered mirror, and the window looking out at a dripping rock, ugh! There you would have lain and coughed; and when an attempt was made to light the fire, the smoke would have refused to try the road up the chimney, and preferred that to your lungs; and when the window was opened to let the smoke out it would have let in the smell of the pigstye. When you wanted a book to enliven you, you would have been given Baxter’s ‘Saints’ Rest’ or a Methodist Missionary Magazine, and death itself would have been welcome as an escape from such literature. You would have needed wine, and not had it; cod-liver oil, and not had it; grapes, and not had them; calves’ foot jelly, and had to do without. You would have been given thin gruel, and fried india-rubber, that playfully considered itself rump steak, much as you consider yourself a nobleman, and leaden dough, greasy bacon, and lukewarm bad tea. Your bed would have been lumpy, and made occasionally, and your sheets changed now and then, and your pillow-case assuming the adhesiveness to your cheek of postage stamps; and there would have been a draught like a mill-race pouring in through that gap—I know it—under the door. When you wanted to sleep by day, your mother would be scouring pans in the back kitchen underneath, and when so inclined at night, your father, on the other side of the partition, would be snoring like John Willett. As you grew weaker, and more unable to endure worry, in would have come the captain, to exhort and expound, and stir and whip up your weary soul into a caper of screaming terror. You would have longed for death as an escape from the smells and the smoke, and the crude blue, and the draught, and the knots in your mattress, and the Missionary Magazines, and the pigs in the yard, and the benzoline lamp.”
Mr. Welsh stooped and picked up his newspaper, which lay crumpled on the floor. He smoothed it, and folded it on the table. Then he looked hard at his nephew. Giles remained motionless, with eyes on the carpet; his brow was troubled and his lips trembling. He was very pale.
“That is how you would have ended as a boy of seventeen,” pursued Mr. Welsh, remorselessly, mercilessly. “Your life you owe to Lord Lamerton, your mind has been expanded and enriched by him. Had he not sent you to college what would have been the range of your ideas? What would you have known of Shakespeare, Thackeray, Pope, Goethe and Dante? What appreciation of art? You would have been as incapable of judging between a good painting and a daub, of discriminating between Tannhauser and Sankey and Moody, as any chawbacon. What I have learned, I have learned with labour; I had no masters, no hand to help me over the stile. I wish I had had your advantages, but no Lord Lamerton took me up. I had not that luck. I have had to fight my own way. I daresay you think it inconsistent in me to take the part of his lordship against my own nephew, but that is because your conscience is disordered. I fight him tooth and nail, because he is an aristocrat, and I a democrat. It is my business to attack the Tories and the landed interest and the House of Lords. I am a politician, and in politics all is fair; but we are now in another region altogether, in that of common honesty, and domestic relations; I look on my lord, not as a nobleman, but as a father, and a kind-hearted man who has done much for you; and I am able to take the gauge of your conduct accordingly. You have behaved infamously towards your benefactor, you have hurt him where he is most sensitive—hitting, you contemptible little coward, below the belt. You have stained the pure name of his only daughter, tarnished the honour of an irreproachable house. Who will believe that the girl ran away with you, because she supposed that you were her brother? Everyone knows that you are nothing of the kind. Should it leak out that you are not Captain Saltren’s son, how will it mend matters if it be shown that you are the bastard brat of old blear-eyed, one-handed, limping Samuel Ceely?”
Giles winced, he raised both his hands, half beseechingly, half as if to protect himself from the words which struck him as blows. It was a convulsive, not a purposed movement. Also he looked up for a moment, and attempted to speak, but said nothing, the words died away in his throat. Then his head fell again.
“You say you have saved some money,” Welsh went on; “whose money? That which Lord Lamerton gave you. How many hundreds of pounds do you suppose you have cost him? In sending you to Bordighera, in doctors’ bills, in school and college accounts? You swaggered at Oxford as a gentleman, and Lord Lamerton paid for it. He furnished your rooms in college, paid your battels. You invited your friends to breakfasts and wines, and he paid for them. Who but he put the clothes on your back, hung the pictures on your walls, fitted neat boots on your feet, and supplied you with that silk pocket-handkerchief you are now using to wipe the shame drops off your brow with? And—in return for all this, you stab him to the heart and blast the fair name of his child! Good heavens! I feel as uncomfortable in your presence as would Mr. Gladstone in a lodge of Primrose Dames on St. Benjamin’s day. But there!—enough about your despicable self. It is high time something were done about Miss Inglett. I’ll go with you. What a nuisance it is that Tryphœna is just now without a cook. I’ll bring the girl here, nevertheless, if she has nowhere else to go to; or I will run down with her myself to Orleigh, or I’ll take her to any relation she may have in town. You come with me, you mean little cad, as far as your inn, or lodgings, or where the deuce you are, and leave me there. Don’t show your pasty face again. We have seen already too much of you.”
He rang the bell, and the maid-of-all-work appeared.