Geoffrey Hampstead: A Novel

by Stinson Jarvis

"Don't mind my saying this," Maurice added, with apology. "Really, I could not help it."

Geoffrey laughed. Margaret was grave. Rankin strayed on a few steps in advance, and Geoffrey, taking advantage of it, whispered quickly. "What are you thinking of, Margaret?"

"I was thinking I saw a wild man," said Margaret truthfully. Then, to be more pleasant, she added, "And I thought that if Tartar marauders were all like you, Geoffrey, I would rather prefer them as a class."

Maurice, who was unconsciously de trop at this moment, turned and said:

"You have got me 'worked up' over your story, and now I demand to know more. Do not say that 'the continuation of this story will be published in the New York Ledger of the current year.' Go ahead."

"Anything more I have to tell," said Geoffrey, "only relates to myself."

"Never mind. For once you are interesting. Drive on."

"Well, where was I? Oh, yes! Well, my father married again six months after my mother's death. He married a woman who had been a flame of his in early youth, and who had developed a fine temper in her virgin solitude. They had six children. I was packed off to school early, and was kept there almost continually. After that I was sent away traveling with a tutor, a sanctimonious fellow who urged me into all the devilment the Continent could provide, so that he might really enjoy himself. Then I came home and got rid of him. It was at this time that I first heard from my father about my mother and my birth. The story did me no good. I got morbid over it. Previously I had thought myself of the best blood in England. We were entitled as of right to royal quarterings, and the new intelligence struck all the peacock pride out of me. I felt like a burst balloon. The only thing I cared about was to go to Russia and see the place my mother came from. I got letters from my father to some of his old friends at St. Petersburg, and with their influence found my way to the very village my mother came from. Some of the villagers remembered quite well the raid when my mother was carried off and how her enterprising father had been killed. What made me wonder was where my mother got her aristocratic beauty. Among the undiluted, pug-nosed, bestial Tartars such beauty was impossible. I found, however, that my mother's mother had also been a captive. No one knew where she came from. Most likely from Circassia or Persia. The villagers at the time of the raid were the remnants of a large predatory tribe that formerly used to sally forth on long excursions covering many hundreds of miles. At that time—the time of their strength—they lived almost entirely by robbery, and their name was dreaded everywhere within a radius of five hundred miles. I have always hoped that my mother's mother was of some better race than the Tartar. There is no doubt, however, that my mother's father was a full-blooded Tartar, though he may have had straighter features than the generality of them. I found there a younger brother of my mother. He was a wallowing, drunken, thieving pig, this uncle of mine, but under the bloated look he had acquired from excesses, one could trace straight and possibly handsome features. As the son would most likely resemble his father, I can only infer that the father was not so bad-looking as he might have been, and so, with one thing and another, I came to understand the possibility of my mother's beauty.

"It may have been morbid of me. I should have left the matter alone, for I believed in 'race' so much that my discoveries ground me into dust. Nothing satisfied me, however, unless I went to the bottom of it. I watched this uncle of mine for two or three weeks, and made a friend of him, merely to see if I could trace in him any likeness to myself. I made him drunk. I made him sober. I made him run and walk and ride. Sometimes I thought I traced the likeness clearly, and then again I changed my mind. I tried him in other ways, leaving in my quarters small desirable objects partly concealed. They always disappeared. He stole them with the regularity of clockwork. I can laugh over these matters now, speaking of them for the first time in twelve years. At that time I groaned over it, and still persevered in trying to find out what could do me no good. I am so like my father that I could find no resemblance in me to the Tartar uncle. But at last I got a 'sickener.' While talking to him I noticed that he made his gestures pointing the two first fingers; instead of all or only one finger. I watched his dirty hands while he mumbled on, half drunk, and then I saw that for a pastime, as a Western Yankee might whittle or pick his teeth, this man threw the third and fourth fingers of his left hand out of joint and in again. He said his father and also, he had heard, his grandfather could do this with ease.

"An hour afterward, I think I must have been a good ten miles off—flying back to civilized Russia, my servants after me, thinking I was mad. Perhaps I was a little queer in the head at the time."