CHAPTER XXXV.
ANOTHER BREAK-DOWN.
Arminell had awoke to the fact that she had made a mistake before that conviction had been brought home to the mind of Jingles; but she entertained not the shadow of a suspicion how radical that mistake was.
She became conscious that she had put herself in a false position almost as soon as she had taken the false step. At the first large station the guard had been obtrusively obliging, and a little familiar. He had allowed her to see that he regarded her and Giles as a young couple starting on their honeymoon tour; that he took a friendly interest in them, and he assured them he would allow no one to invade their compartment. He looked in on them half-way to know how they were getting on; whether she would desire refreshments to be brought her to the carriage; whether she would like to have the blinds drawn down.
Arrived in town, they went to a quiet private hotel in Bloomsbury, mostly frequented by literary persons consulting the library of the British Museum. Jingles had not been there before. He knew of the hotel only by repute.
The landlady, an eminently respectable person, hesitated at first about receiving the young people. She did not understand the relation in which they stood to each other, and she looked inquisitively at Arminell’s left hand. There was not a trace of family likeness that she could discover in their faces, when young Saltren explained that they were brother and sister. A further explanation was necessary when he gave his name as Saltren, and hers as Inglett. Then he regretted that he had not gone to a large hotel, where no questions would have been asked. He had considered his pocket, and Arminell’s wishes. He could not afford a heavy expense, and she shrank from publicity.
Next morning Arminell woke with a sense of depression she could not shake off. As she dressed, the tears of mortification rose into her eyes. She was vexed with herself and vexed with Jingles. She knew that what she had done must wound her father, and compromise herself, at all events, for a while. She had taken the step in a fit of pique at her father’s desire to get rid of her, and of romantic enthusiasm, to force him to acknowledge Jingles. She had felt convinced that in no other way could he be induced to do this. She entertained no particular admiration for young Saltren, no great affection for him, only a girlish eagerness to see a misunderstood and ill-used man put in his proper place and acknowledged by the world. When she met Jingles at breakfast in the coffee-room, there was mutual restraint between them of which both were conscious; and in Arminell’s heart a little welling up of wrath against him. She knew that the feeling was ungenerous. He was less to blame than herself—that is, she had proposed the elopement; but then he was older than herself, and as a man ought to have pointed out the impropriety of the proposal. Now it was too late. The die was cast which must mould the rest of her life, and of what nature that die was she could not yet tell.
Sunday passed quietly. Arminell remained for the most part in her own room, and young Saltren also kept secluded, going through, recopying, and improving his article on Port Hamilton, which he regarded as his masterpiece.
On Monday, at breakfast, Saltren told her that he would go at once, early in the day, to consult his uncle, and that then they would go together in search of suitable lodgings. The looking out for lodgings could be done in the afternoon, as their nature would be determined by the amount of income on which Saltren could reckon.
“I suppose,” he said, “that my uncle can help me into getting the composition of a leader every alternate day as a beginning, and if I get five guineas for a leader, that will make fifteen in the week. Then, I suppose, I can do reviewing, and write for magazines, and make about thirty pounds a week, that will be, say fifteen hundred a year, as a beginning. I have reckoned the year as one of fifty instead of fifty-two weeks, because I shall have to allow myself a short holiday. On fifteen hundred a year we ought to have a nice villa residence, with garden and conservatories. What do you say to a Queen Anne house at Turnham Green? I, myself, rather incline to Chislehurst.”
When he was gone, Arminell, left to herself, had returned to her bedroom, to find it not ready for her. So she went downstairs again, and sat by the window in the coffee-room, looking into the street through the wire-gauze blind, not thinking of and interested in what passed in the street, but turning in mind to Orleigh, to her pretty chamber there; to the breakfast-room, with the windows to the east, and the sun flooding it; to the table with its silver, and flowers, and porcelain. How small everything in this inn was, and how lacking in freshness and grace!