And Helen having thought the matter over for an hour in her room, had by that time grown to be as anxious for the tour as any schoolboy, who has been reading a book of voyages, is eager to go to sea. Whither should they go? the farther the better—to some place so remote that even recollection could not follow them thither: so delightful that Pen should never want to leave it—anywhere so that he could be happy. She opened her desk with trembling fingers and took out her banker’s book, and counted up her little savings. If more was wanted, she had the diamond cross. She would borrow from Laura again. “Let us go—let us go,” she thought; “directly he can bear the journey let us go away. Come, kind Doctor Goodenough—come quick, and give us leave to quit England.”
The good Doctor drove over to dine with them that very day. “If you agitate yourself so,” he said to her, “and if your heart beats so, and if you persist in being so anxious about a young gentleman who is getting well as fast as he can, we shall have you laid up, and Miss Laura to watch you; and then it will be her turn to be ill, and I should like to know how the deuce a doctor is to live who is obliged to come and attend you all for nothing? Mrs. Goodenough is already jealous of you, and says, with perfect justice, that I fall in love with my patients. And you must please to get out of the country as soon as ever you can, that I may have a little peace in my family.”
When the plan of going abroad was proposed, it was received by that gentleman with the greatest alacrity and enthusiasm. He longed to be off at once. He let his mustachios grow from that very moment, in order, I suppose, that he might get his mouth into training for a perfect French and German pronunciation; and he was seriously disquieted in his mind because the mustachios, when they came, were of a decidedly red colour. He had looked forward to an autumn at Fairoaks; and perhaps the idea of passing two or three months there did not amuse the young man. “There is not a soul to speak to in the place,” he said to Warrington. “I can’t stand old Portman’s sermons, and pompous after-dinner conversation. I know all old Glanders’s stories about the Peninsular war. The Claverings are the only Christian people in the neighbourhood, and they are not to be at home before Christmas, my uncle says: besides, Warrington, I want to get out of the country. Whilst you were away, confound it, I had a temptation, from which I am very thankful to have escaped, and which I count that even my illness came very luckily to put an end to.” And here he narrated to his friend the circumstances of the Vauxhall affair, with which the reader is already acquainted.
Warrington looked very grave when he heard this story. Putting the moral delinquency out of the question, he was extremely glad for Arthur’s sake that the latter had escaped from a danger which might have made his whole life wretched; “which certainly,” said Warrington, “would have occasioned the wretchedness and ruin of the other party. And your mother and—and your friends—what a pain it would have been to them!” urged Pen’s companion, little knowing what grief and annoyance these good people had already suffered.
“Not a word to my mother!” Pen cried out, in a state of great alarm. “She would never get over it. An esclandre of that sort would kill her, I do believe. And,” he added, with a knowing air, and as if, like a young rascal of a Lovelace, he had been engaged in what are called affaires de coeur, all his life; “the best way, when a danger of that sort menaces, is not to face it, but to turn one’s back on it and run.”
“And were you very much smitten?” Warrington asked.
“Hm!” said Lovelace. “She dropped her h’s, but she was a dear little girl.”
O Clarissas of this life, O you poor little ignorant vain foolish maidens! if you did but know the way in which the Lovelaces speak of you: if you could but hear Jack talking to Tom across the coffee-room of a Club; or see Ned taking your poor little letters out of his cigar-case, and handing them over to Charley, and Billy, and Harry across the messroom table, you would not be so eager to write, or so ready to listen! There’s a sort of crime which is not complete unless the lucky rogue boasts of it afterwards; and the man who betrays your honour in the first place, is pretty sure, remember that, to betray your secret too.
“It’s hard to fight, and it’s easy to fall,” Warrington said gloomily. “And as you say, Pendennis, when a danger like this is imminent, the best way is to turn your back on it and run.”
After this little discourse upon a subject about which Pen would have talked a great deal more eloquently a month back, the conversation reverted to the plans for going abroad, and Arthur eagerly pressed his friend to be of the party. Warrington was a part of the family—a part of the cure. Arthur said he should not have half the pleasure without Warrington.