PETER BINNEY
A NOVEL
BY
ARCHIBALD MARSHALL
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1921
PUBLISHED 1921 IN U. S. A.
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
First Printing, September, 1921
Second Printing, October, 1921
Third Printing, December, 1921
Fourth Printing, January, 1922
PRINTED IN THE USA BY
The Quinn & Boden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY
TO
E. F. BENSON
INTRODUCTION
It is over twenty years since "Peter Binney" was first published in England, and I should be unwilling to offer it to my American readers at this time of day without some plea for leniency towards a young man's book, which contains perhaps more than the average number of crudities to be found in such beginnings. A few of the crudities I have been able to soften, but if you begin tampering with early work in the light of maturer knowledge, you are very apt to rub off the bloom that attaches to it just because it is early work, written with spirit and freshness, though with little skill. So I have left "Peter Binney" much as it was, with most of its imperfections on its head, and I trust some compensating merits.
One merit I know it to possess. It presents a picture of the lighter side of undergraduate life as it was in Oxford and Cambridge, and as it still exists, in spite of superficial changes; and that is something that can only be done by a young man, whose memories are still fresh, and to whom that life is still important enough to make it the basis of a story.
New York, July, 1921
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I [Mr. Binney Makes Up His Mind]
II [Mr. Binney Interviews One Tutor, and Engages Another]
III [Lucius Wins a Year's Respite]
IV [No Help To Be Gained from Mrs. Higginbotham]
V [Mr. Binney Arrives in Cambridge]
VI [Lord Blathgowrie Has Something to Say]
VII [Mr. Binney Speaks at the Union And Makes a Distinguished Acquaintance]
VIII [The Newnham Girl]
IX [Mr. Binney Gives a Dinner and Receives a Rebuff]
X ["The New Court Chronicle"]
XI ["Put Him in the Fountain"]
XII [Lucius Makes One Discovery and Mrs. Toller Another]
XIII [Mr. Binney Gets into Trouble]
XIV [Nemesis]
XV [Lucius Finds a Backwater]
XVI [Third Trinity Makes a Bump]
XVII [Mr. Binney Drinks the Health of a "Blue"]
CHAPTER I
MR. BINNEY MAKES UP HIS MIND
"I'll do it to-day," said Peter Binney.
He had been sitting deep in thought ever since he had climbed on to the omnibus outside his place of business in the Whitechapel Road. As the vehicle pursued its ponderous way through the crowded streets of the City, stopping now and again to add to its load of homeward-bound business men, Mr. Binney sat in his seat, silent and preoccupied, his eyes on the ground and a thoughtful frown on his face. As it left the Post Office, full inside and out, and bowled smartly along the broad asphalted road towards the Viaduct, his face cleared, the light of determination shone in his eye, and looking up, he said aloud:—
"I'll do it to-day."
His fellow passengers gazed at him in surprise, and a young lady who sat by his side, heavily fringed and feathered, and laden with a huge cardboard box, laughed a coarse laugh, and said:
"That's right, guv'nor, don't you put it off no longer."
Mr. Binney had not intended to express his determination aloud, and the notice his remark had drawn annoyed him. As the young lady was apparently turning over in her mind further witticisms, he decided to leave the omnibus and walk the rest of the way to his house in Russell Square. He made his way slowly down the unsteady stairs, and the young lady said:
"A good cup o' beef tea's what you want, George, and don't forgit the 'ot-water bottle," and as the omnibus pursued its way, leaving him walking briskly along the pavement, she leant over the side and called out, "Git Mariar to put a mustard plaster on yer chest," which made the people on the omnibus laugh, although Mr. Binney could see no humour in the remark.
He had come, however, to such a momentous decision during the last half-hour that by the time he had gone a dozen steps he had ceased to feel any irritation at the young lady's pleasantries, and walked smartly along, his brain all on fire with his mighty purpose.
Peter Binney was a small man of about forty-five years of age. His hair was gingery, and his whiskers decidedly red. He looked rather like a little bantam-cock as he strutted along, and this was a curious coincidence, for he had made his fortune by selling poultry food.
Every one has heard of Binney's Food for Poultry. Indeed it would be quite impossible for anybody who is able to read to be unaware of its existence, for its fame is blazoned on every hoarding in the United Kingdom. It was Peter Binney who first conceived the idea of advancing the cause of art and advertising his wares at the same time. In the early days, when the future world-famed business was just emerging from its chrysalis state of a little cornchandler's shop in the neighbourhood of the East India Docks, he was content to publish a picture of a simpering young woman in a quilted satin petticoat and dancing shoes, feeding a number of plethoric hens in a very clean farmyard. But when the shop became a factory and Mr. Binney's keen business capacity began to tell, he issued his celebrated series of "Raphael's Cartoons for the Home," across the sky of each of which ran the inscription, "Binney's Food for Poultry." After a little time he published an edition of the "Plays of Shakespeare," in which all the passages that Mr. Bowdler would have omitted were ingeniously converted by Mr. Binney into eulogies on his Food for Poultry. Poultry and taste were alike fed by Mr. Binney, and his business flourished accordingly. At the age of forty-five he found himself a rich man, with a house in Russell Square, a family tomb in Kensal Green Cemetery (tenanted at present only by his wife), and a son who was being educated at Eton.
But to return to the present time and Mr. Binney's purpose. When he had let himself into the house in Russell Square, he rang the bell and inquired of the parlour-maid who answered it if Mr. Lucius was at home. Hearing that he was not, Mr. Binney seemed somewhat relieved, and went straight up into his dressing-room, where he put on the coat and trousers generally reserved for Sunday wear, and exchanged his dark tie for a brilliant red one. Then he looked at his boots, and hesitated. They were neat enough, but they had lost the sober brilliance of the morning. There was a row of similar boots freshly blacked under the dressing-table, but even these must have wanted something in Mr. Binney's eyes, for after looking at them thoughtfully he shook his head, and opening the door stole quietly out and upstairs into a room above his own. It was rather an untidy room and evidently occupied by a young man of athletic tastes, to judge by the dumb-bells and Indian clubs, cricket-bats, guncases and fishing-rods that littered the corners. There was a row of boots and shoes under the dressing-table here too, and among them a pair of shining patent leathers. Mr. Binney made his way across the room on tiptoe, and seizing the boots, trees and all, retreated with them hurriedly to his own room, where he sat down and put them on. They were a good deal too big, but an extra pair of winter socks set that right, and when Mr. Binney had buttoned them he stood up on a chair and surveyed himself in the glass with considerable satisfaction. "I must get a pair like that," he said. Then he went downstairs, and putting on his best hat and gloves, and taking his best umbrella out of the stand, he left the house.
Turning to the left, Mr. Binney made his way towards Woburn Square. If he had looked the other way as he came out of his house he would have seen his son Lucius coming towards him not fifty yards off. Lucius was very unlike his father. He was a good-looking boy of about eighteen, tall and slim, with blue eyes and a pleasant smiling mouth fringed with a few fair downy hairs, of which he always spoke collectively. He was very popular among his school-fellows, and was commonly known by the name of "Lucy."
"Halloa!" he said to himself as he caught sight of his father coming down the steps of the parental mansion. "Where's the governor off to, I wonder! Looks jolly smart, too. S'pose he's going to call on that old woman. Jove! he's got a pair of shiny boots on. I say, governor, you're going it! They're a bit too big for you though, my boy. Shall I give him a hail? Think I won't. He might want me to go and call on the old tabby with him."
So Lucius let himself into the house and went upstairs. As he passed his father's room, the door of which was open, he looked in and saw that the floor was littered with the component parts of a pair of boot-trees. "Didn't know the governor went in for those luxuries," he said to himself. Then a sudden thought struck him; he went in and took up one of the pieces. "Well, I'm hanged!" he said in a tone of deep annoyance. "They are mine. And he's actually got on my boots. There's a piece of nerve for you! There'll be a row when you get home, young man. I really can't stand that, you know." And Lucius went out of his father's room very much annoyed.
We left Mr. Binney making his way towards Woburn Square. He walked on until he came to a house with a brightly-painted blue door, where he rang the bell and asked if Mrs. Higginbotham was at home. The maid treated him with the subdued cordiality of an old acquaintance and led him straight upstairs to Mrs. Higginbotham's drawing-room, where her mistress was discovered warming her feet at a bright fire, and reading the Christian World. She was a stout, middle-aged lady, and wore a dress of rich black silk. The room wore an air of warm, solid comfort. Its decorations would not have satisfied the late Mr. William Morris, it is true, but as they completely satisfied Mrs. Higginbotham, that was not a matter of great importance.
"Dear me, Mr. Binney, this is very kind of you," said Mrs. Higginbotham, rising to greet her visitor.
Mr. Binney shook hands with her and took the chair to which she had motioned him. He did not speak, but the compressed upper lip and the thoughtful look with which he regarded Mrs. Higginbotham caused a slight fluttering in that lady's ample bosom. With a woman's instinct she immediately knew as surely as if he had already told her what he had come to say. "He's going to do it to-day," she said to herself, and true to the tactics of her sex she set herself at once to ward off the critical moment as long as possible. She plunged into conversation of the sprightly religious order, for Mrs. Higginbotham was a good woman and could talk by the hour together of preachers and movements and causes, in which conversation Mr. Binney was quite capable of holding his own, for he and Mrs. Higginbotham sat under the same preacher and held the same theological views. There was another point in common between them, and while Mrs. Higginbotham is struggling to maintain a bright and lively conversation, to which Mr. Binney replies only by terse monosyllables, there will be time to explain what this was.
Both Mr. Binney and Mrs. Higginbotham had a soul above their surroundings. In the case of Mr. Binney this has already been indicated by the way in which, while conducting his business on the most approved lines of commercial progress, he essayed to import into it something better and nobler than the mere pushing of his wares and the piling up of a fortune. Those cartoons from Raphael had infused a love of art into many humble homes, and not a few minds had been enriched by the perusal of Binney's Shakespeare (a play given away with every sack of his food for poultry), to such an extent that the deterioration of eyesight brought about by the quality of paper and print with which those masterpieces were issued was a very small matter in consideration of the mental enlightenment which had been diffused throughout the country.
Mrs. Higginbotham's aspirations were not of so educational a character. Her literary yearnings were satisfied by the weekly appearance of the Family Herald Supplement, to which event she looked forward regularly with great pleasure. That excellent periodical never made its appearance in her drawing-room, although sundry works of fiction from the lending library round the corner, dealing with the habits and customs of the aristocracy, did. Mrs. Higginbotham's father had been a draper in a small way of business, and her husband, beginning life in her father's shop, by the time he died had become a draper in a very large way. Wealth and luxury had been Mrs. Higginbotham's lot for many years, but what she yearned for was the larger, freer life led by those happy beings of whom she read in her chosen novels. To be able to look upon a lord without blinking; to be able to look upon lords every day of your life; to have it said in a newspaper, "I saw Mrs. 'Fluffy' Higginbotham" (Fluffy had been the term of endearment enjoyed by the late Mr. Higginbotham) "sitting under the Achilles Statue in a plum-coloured gown with lettuce-green revers;" to have cards of invitation pouring in, every other one illuminated by a title; to regard the London season as something more than the time of year when the days were getting longer and it would soon be time to think about going to the seaside—comfortable as Mrs. Higginbotham's circumstances were, her life had been singularly devoid of these delights.
And this was not all. Mrs. Higginbotham was romantic. She revelled in a love-story. She adored the Apollo-like heroes of her favourite fiction with an ungrudging wealth of admiration, and she envied hardly less the blushing heroines on whom they lavished the stores of their magnificent affections. Mrs. Higginbotham felt that it ought to be the lot of every girl to be a blushing heroine at one time of her life. She felt that she herself had been unjustly deprived of that privilege, although she had been an attractive girl, and, if she read the expression in Peter Binney's eyes rightly, was attractive still. The late Mr. Higginbotham had been a good husband to her, but his actual proposal had been of the "Here I am—Take me if you like—If you don't there are plenty that will, and only too glad to get the chance" order. She had taken him, but he had never satisfied the romantic cravings of her nature. She, on her part, had been a good wife to him, but so far as she was aware he had never, from first to last, regarded her as a heroine, or if he had he had never shown it.
Would Peter Binney do more? Was it too late to hope that a whiff of the fragrant breezes of romance might yet blow upon her? Mrs. Higginbotham scarcely knew. There was a something in the little man that inclined her to think that he would not be averse to dally in the Indian summer of a romantic courtship if she made it quite plain to him that that was what she required; and there was a something, in spite of his diminutive stature and the byegone forty-five years of his successful life, in the fire of his eye and in his erect and proud bearing, that whispered to Mrs. Higginbotham's heart that she might, by guarding the sensation with extreme care, bring herself to regard him as a very good substitute for the youthful adorer who it was almost too much to hope would come forward at this time of day.
While these questions passed through her mind, Mrs. Higginbotham went on talking, and Mr. Binney, answering her without knowing in the least what she was talking about, mentally braced himself up for the proposal he was about to make. At last he broke into the middle of one of Mrs. Higginbotham's sentences, and said in a firm and resolute voice, "Mrs. Higginbotham, ma'am."
Mrs. Higginbotham saw that the time had come, and gave up the struggle.
"Yes, Mr. Binney?" she said in as cool a tone as she could muster.
"I am not so young as I was, ma'am," said Mr. Binney.
"We are none of us that," said Mrs. Higginbotham. "At least not people at our time of life."
"You have no reason to complain, ma'am," said Mr. Binney gallantly.
"My heart is young," said Mrs. Higginbotham, greatly pleased at the compliment, "and if I am not very much mistaken, yours is also."
"I hope it is," said Mr. Binney, greatly pleased in his turn; "and on that account I have a proposal to make to you, ma'am, which I hope you will consider favourably."
"I'm sure I shall do that, whatever it is," said Mrs. Higginbotham comfortably.
"I hope so," said Mr. Binney again. "The fact is, ma'am, that I have long regarded you with feelings of interest, which have in the course of time developed into feelings of affection. I can scarcely hope that those feelings are returned, but I should wish to ask, ma'am, if there is any chance in the near or distant future that they might be."
"Oh, Mr. Binney!" exclaimed Mrs. Higginbotham with a lively recollection of the heroines of fiction. "This is so sudden."
"It is, ma'am," said Mr. Binney. "I am aware of that. This sort of thing must be sudden at some time or another, if it is to result in bus—I mean if anything is to come of it. I don't wish to press you for an answer yet. I merely wish to lay my ideas before you. I might say that I wish to marry again in order to obtain those advantages which—er—which come from marrying again. I might say that I want an agreeable companion to sit at the head of my table, to entertain me with her society in my leisure hours, and to act in the capacity of mother to my only son. I do want that, but that is not all. I have worked hard all my life, ma'am, and am now a comparatively rich man. But I have had very little pleasure in my life. I married my first wife to please her. I want to marry my second to please myself. And I want above all to impart into the affair some of that—er—glamour, which, in my opinion, should envelop all courtship. I therefore come to you, ma'am, an agreeable and charming woman, and ask you, not to accept me as a man of good position able to offer you a comfortable home, which I am aware you have already, but as a man who, although no longer young, is younger than a good many people, and who loves you for yourself alone, and would like to take an opportunity of proving it."
Could Mrs. Higginbotham believe her ears? If Peter Binney had asked her to marry him in the way he had suggested, and scouted, she would have accepted him with a sigh for lost illusions now no longer tenable. But it really seemed as if that romance for which the poor lady had so longed was going to be opened up for her, and an ardent swain, in the person of Peter Binney, Manufacturer of Poultry Food, was ready to throw himself at her feet and plead for her favour. Mrs. Higginbotham could scarcely yet grasp the happiness that seemed to be dawning on her horizon.
"Do you really love me for myself, Mr. Binney?" she asked with faltering lips.
"Say Peter," corrected Mr. Binney.
"Peter," said Mrs. Higginbotham submissively, with a delicious thrill.
"Yes, I do," said that gentleman. "But I don't want you to accept me in a hurry, you know," he added hastily. "I want you to try me, to prove me, to see what I'm made of." He slapped his little breast with a determined air, and looked round the room as if in search of some object by means of which he might be proved on the spot.
Mrs. Higginbotham might have replied that she knew him tolerably well already, having met him with some frequency for the last twenty years. But his attitude caused her such a degree of pleasure that she was by no means prepared to spoil the sensation by reminding him of that fact. At the same time she was a little nervous and flurried. She had all the will in the world to prove him, but she didn't quite know how to set about it. If there had been a crusade handy she might have sent him off to that, but she could think of no nineteenth century substitute on the spur of the moment. Mr. Binney had been a Volunteer in his youth, as he had often told her, but he was one no longer, so she could not set him to watch his accoutrements all night in a church. Besides, Mr. Binney went to chapel, and the minister wouldn't have liked it. She didn't really quite know what he did want, but fortunately Mr. Binney himself came to the rescue and made himself a little clearer.
"Now, Mrs. Higginbotham," he began. "By-the-bye, may I call you Martha?"
"Yes, do," said Mrs. Higginbotham.
"Now, my dear Martha," began Mr. Binney again, "what you have got to do is to tell me what in your opinion the behaviour of an ideal lover should be, and what I have got to do is to endeavour to the best of my ability to act up to your opinion."
"Well, Peter," began Mrs. Higginbotham, "I must confess that I have always wished that I had had in my youth a devoted lover who should be something of a hero."
"Quite so, quite so," assented Mr. Binney with an energetic nod. "I shall do my best to be that, my very best."
"One," continued Mrs. Higginbotham, "whom I could admire for—er—manliness and—er—light-heartedness, and—er—beauty, both of form and feature."
"Exactly so," nodded her wooer.
"One who would regard me as the most beautiful—er—female in the world; not that I should be that, of course, but I should like him to think so."
"Of course, of course," said Mr. Binney. "Quite natural."
"And who would try to make little opportunities of meeting me, and being where I was."
"Exactly," said Mr. Binney, who had been admitted into Mrs. Higginbotham's house any time these last twenty years whenever he liked to present himself.
"Whose heart would beat quicker when he did see me, and who would be quite rewarded for any trouble he might have taken over the matter by seeing me."
"I quite see, ma'am, I quite see," said Mr. Binney. "The truth of it is, you want to renew your youth, I take it. Not that it requires much renewing," he added gallantly.
"Oh, Peter!" exclaimed Mrs. Higginbotham coyly.
"And I want to renew my youth, Martha," continued Mr. Binney with some fervour. "I've worked very hard ever since I was a boy, as you know, and I never had the fun that I should like to have had, or that the young fellows I see about me now have—my son, for instance."
"Dear boy," murmured Mrs. Higginbotham.
"Dear boy, certainly," acquiesced Mr. Binney, "and lucky boy, too, Martha. Look what I've done for that boy. I've sent him to Eton, where I never had a chance of going, or anywhere like it. Why, Martha, life is one continuous round of pleasure at Eton. And now he is going to Cambridge. There's a place for you! Why, I assure you, you could hardly believe the fun that young fellows have at a place like Cambridge."
"Yes, I can. I've read books about it," said Mrs. Higginbotham, "and I had a nephew there once who used to tell me things. Ah, Mr. Binney, if I were only what I used to be twenty years ago, and you were at Cambridge!"
"Pooh, Martha," said Mr. Binney. "You weren't half so attractive as you are now, I'll be bound. And as for me, though I am forty-five, I'm as active as ever and could hold up my head with the best of them."
"I know you could, Peter," said Mrs. Higginbotham.
"Now, Martha, I've got something in my mind," said Mr. Binney. "It's been there for some time, but I haven't liked to mention it to you because I was afraid—well, I didn't know how you might take it. But really, you've taken what I have said in such a way as—as to be extremely gratifying to me, and upon my word I don't believe you'll think my idea so very absurd after all."
Mrs. Higginbotham looked at him with deep interest depicted in her face.
Mr. Binney squared himself and sat up in his chair. "Lucius is going to Cambridge in October," he said. "Now what do you say to my going with him?"
Mrs. Higginbotham's look of interest gradually brightened into one of delighted agreement. "Oh, Peter," she said, "if you only could! Isn't it too late?"
"Not a bit," said Mr. Binney. "There's no limit of age. I found that out long ago. I could go up there and be treated in all respects as if I was five-and-twenty years younger than I am. And do you know, Martha," added the little man confidentially, "such is my freshness of mind that I believe in time I should come to believe that I was five-and-twenty years younger."
Mrs. Higginbotham looked at him in speechless admiration. "It would be lovely," she said. "What an interest I should take in your doings, Peter!"
This speech was as a spark to the tinder of Mr. Binney's inclinations. "If you think about it like that, Martha, I'll do it," he cried delightedly. "And now I must be getting home. I'll have a talk to Lucius about it to-night, and come and tell you what I have decided to-morrow."
Mr. Binney took a tender farewell of Mrs. Higginbotham, and left her to spend the evening in roseate dreams of returning youth and a wider horizon than that visible from her windows in Woburn Square.
CHAPTER II
MR. BINNEY INTERVIEWS ONE TUTOR AND ENGAGES ANOTHER
Mr. Binney and his son sat over their wine that evening in the seclusion of the dining-room in Russell Square. Mr. Binney had been somewhat silent during dinner, thinking over the disclosure he was about to make. Somehow, now that it came to the point, he felt a certain diffidence in mentioning it. Lucius also had something to say, but waited until the servants were out of the room.
"I say, father," he said, when they were left alone, "I've ordered a new pair of patent leather boots from Peal's, and asked them to send the bill in to you."
Mr. Binney, immersed in his thoughts, had forgotten the occurrence of the afternoon, or he would not have rushed with such haste to his own destruction. "Bill into me, Lucius?" he exclaimed angrily. "What do you mean? You've got your own allowance, and a very handsome one it is. I'm not going to pay your bills for you besides. If it comes into me I shall tear it up."
"You've got your own boots," retorted Lucius, "and very handsome ones they are. If you take a fancy to mine I don't mind you wearing them a bit, only I haven't got enough for us both, so I thought you wouldn't mind my getting another pair, as I can't do without."
"H'm! Ah! yes!" said Mr. Binney, a trifle confused. "No, I don't mind really, my boy, though I don't think there are many fathers who would take it like that."
"There aren't many fathers who would take their sons' boots," said Lucius. "By the way, father, talking about allowances, what allowance are you going to make me at Cambridge?"
"Ah, Cambridge!" echoed Mr. Binney, as if that ancient seat of learning had just been brought to his notice for the first time. "Yes, we must talk about Cambridge."
"I should like to have it settled before I go back to Eton for my last half, if you don't mind," said Lucius. "A lot of my friends are going up, and we shall be sure to be talking over it a good deal. I should like to know what I shall be able to do and what I shan't."
"You ought to think yourself very lucky to be going to Cambridge at all," said Mr. Binney with a shake of the head. "I never had the chance of going to Cambridge when I was a young fellow."
"Oh, I daresay it's a jolly enough place," said Lucius, "although I shall be sorry to leave Eton. Still, it isn't all fun, you know, father. There's a certain amount of work to be done."
"Work! Of course there is," said Mr. Binney. "But what work! Think of being able to carry on your education till you're twenty-two or thereabouts. It's a grand thing, education. I never had any myself, at least not what you would call education, although I flatter myself I know as much as most people."
"Oh, yes, father," said Lucius. "Why, bless me, you've edited the text of Shakespeare."
"H'm, yes," said Mr. Binney, on whom a certain amount of adverse comment had bred a measure of distrust in this feat. He took a gulp of port. "We've always been friends, my boy, you and I, haven't we?" he continued rather nervously.
"Friends, father?" said Lucius. "Why, of course. I should think so."
"You might, perhaps, almost say that we are more like brothers than father and son," pursued Mr. Binney.
"I don't know that I should go quite so far as that," said Lucius. "But we always get on very well together, don't we?"
"Yes, that is what I meant," said Mr. Binney. "Now I've got an idea, which may be a little unusual." ("Not at all," murmured Lucius politely.) "But I hope you'll fall in with it. At least when I say, I hope, it doesn't matter a fig whether you do or not. I'm not going to be dictated to by my son, though he has been to a public school and I haven't. Who sent him there?"
"Why, you did, of course, father," said Lucius. "I don't want to dictate to you. What is your idea? That I shall go into the business when I come down from Cambridge?"
"That you'll do, of course," said Mr. Binney. "I hope you know on which side your bread's buttered, and who buttered it for you. No, my idea is about myself. I have worked very hard until now, but I haven't had the time for self-improvement that I should have liked. Now, what I propose to do is to take three years holiday off business and go up to Cambridge with you in October. What do you think of that?"
What Lucius thought of it might have been accurately gathered from the length of his face. All power of speech seemed to have left him. He could only sit with open mouth staring at his father, and this demeanour instantly set up the comb of that peppery little bantam.
"Well, well, what have you got to say? Why don't you speak?" he cried, with some heat.
Suddenly Lucius lay back in his chair, and gave vent to a loud, but entirely mirthless, peal of laughter. "That's a good joke, father," he said. "Gad! you are a ripper. Won't the fellows laugh when I tell 'em?"
This behaviour seemed to have a very ill effect on the circulation of Mr. Binney's blood, which flew into his head to such an extent that his face got as red as a tomato.
"What do you mean, sir?" he cried angrily. "It isn't a joke at all. Why should the fellows laugh, I should like to know? I tell you what it is, sir, you're ashamed of your father, you ungrateful young snob. Where would you have been, I should like to know, if I hadn't made my fortune and sacrificed myself to give you a good education? Sweeping a shop, I dare say, or a clerk on ten shillings a week. That's what you would have been, my fine fellow, and a good deal too good for you, too, you idle young——"
"Steady on, father," interposed Lucius, now quite serious again. "I'm not ashamed of you, you know that quite well—there's nothing to be ashamed of—but I didn't think you could mean it, really. You can't mean it, you know, why it's ridic—it's out of the question."
"Why is it out of the question, sir?" asked Mr. Binney. "Why is it out of the question?"
"Well," said Lucius, "look what a precious pair of fools we shall look."
"You may, sir," said Mr. Binney. "I dare say you will. I can't help your looking anything you please. But I flatter myself there's nothing particularly foolish looking about me, is there? Is there, I say?"
"Oh, no, nothing at all," Lucius made haste to reply, "but I should think there would be if you went up to Cambridge as an undergraduate—something precious foolish. I suppose you mean to take a house there, though, or something, and enter at some small college where they won't worry you."
"I intend to do nothing of the sort, sir," said Mr. Binney. "I shall enter myself at Trinity. It is, I believe, the best college at Cambridge. You chose it yourself. And I have no intention of taking a house. I shall live in the college, and comport myself in the same way as the steady young men with whom I, and you, too, I hope, expect to associate."
"Oh, Lord!" groaned Lucius. "Are we to go about together as steady young men? Well, you can't get into Trinity, you know, that's one comfort. The entrance examination is over and you couldn't pass it if it wasn't."
"Couldn't pass it, sir! You little know either your father's ability or determination. And it is not over. There is another in October, for which I shall present myself."
"You'll have your work cut out for you to get ready for it. I suppose you'll go to school for a term. I should go to Johnson's at Margate if I were you, where you sent me—you see you're just over age for a public school—they'll take you as a parlour-boarder, and I should think you might get the good-conduct prize if you're careful."
"That's right, sir," said Peter bitterly. "Pour scorn on your own father, who has given you all the advantages you ever had. Of course, you're a gentleman. You've been to Eton and you're going to Trinity. Yet you grudge me having my little bit of education, though I pay for both."
"Oh, blow the education, father. Why don't you stew up for London University, and live comfortably at home?"
"Because I choose to 'stew up' for Cambridge University, sir, and let that be an end of the matter. You'll find there will only be one of us there if you're not precious careful, and it won't be you."
Poor Lucius went to bed that night with a heavy heart. He had rowed for one year in the Eton eight, and wore with great satisfaction a flannel coat of light blue. He had hitherto looked forward with pleasure to his career at Cambridge, with the hope of wearing another light blue coat of a slightly different cut and shade of colour in the course of it. Now a dark cloud had arisen to obscure the happy azure of his mental horizon.
"If he's going to be such a fool as to go up," he said to himself as he undressed, "I'm hanged if I will. I'll go to Oxford instead, although all the chaps I know best are going to the other shop, and I shan't like it half as well."
He broached this proposition to his father the next morning at breakfast, hoping all the time that he had given up his intention. But Mr. Binney was more than ever confirmed in it, having spent a happy night in dreams of glorious youthful feats to be laid at the feet of the fair Mrs. Higginbotham; and Lucius's idea was received so badly that he relinquished it at once, and made up his mind ruefully that he should either have to go to Cambridge with his father as his close companion, or not go at all. He went back to Eton the next day with all his pleasure in the coming half spoilt by the dark fate that was hanging over him, his only consolation being the recollection of the difficulty of the Trinity entrance examination, which it had taken him all his time to get through, although his work for the last ten years had led directly up to it.
"Of course he can't do the work by October," he said to himself. "He doesn't know a word of Greek and only about three of Latin."
And this consolation had to suffice him, for he knew his father well enough to realise that if he had made up his mind to do this thing, and it was in him to do it, do it he would. Moreover, on the day he had left Russell Square for Eton he had seen a letter on the hall-table addressed in his father's handwriting to the tutor on whose side he himself was entered at Trinity, and blushed to think of what it contained.
Lucius's tutor, who was the most popular in the college, wrote to say that his own side was full, but that his colleague, Mr. Rimington, still had a few vacancies. So Peter wrote to Mr. Rimington and received a reply requesting him to go up to Cambridge for a personal interview.
Peter travelled to Cambridge the same evening and put up at the "Bull." After dinner he went out to make his first acquaintance with a University town. It was a lovely April evening. The deep violet of the twilight sky revealed the irregular roofs and towers of the old buildings. There was a half foreign air about the clean paved streets with the open rivulets running along the pavements. Peter walked up King's Parade and viewed with awe the pile of the famous chapel of King's, past the University Library and the Senate House, and the modern pretentious façade of Caius College, conceived and executed in the best Insurance office style of architecture, and into the narrow, noisy little Trinity Street. The streets were full of men in caps and gowns, and a few still in flannels and straw hats. Mr. Binney wondered how these latter could walk along so unconcernedly when they might at any corner run straight into the arms of a perambulating Proctor. He was so imbued with the idea of himself as a budding undergraduate that he half expected to be taken for one, and felt quite nervous when he did meet a Proctor a little later on, lest he should be asked for his name and college. He was a little disappointed when that functionary passed him without comment, but so reverential were his feelings towards one who held such high office in the University that he could not refrain from taking off his hat to him, a salute which the Proctor gravely returned, much to Mr. Binney's gratification. He would perhaps have been less gratified if he had known that the great man, who was not accustomed to receiving respectful greetings from middle-aged gentlemen, took him for a subservient tradesman whose face he happened to have forgotten.
When Mr. Binney turned into the open space in front of Trinity College and passed through the noble gateway into the Great Court, his heart swelled with pride as he stood and looked round him. The twilight had deepened into night, and the court lay quiet and spacious under the stars. Opposite to him stood the hall, its painted windows shining brightly through the dusk. To its right lay the Master's lodge, which Mr. Binney had been told was also a royal palace, and in front of it plashed the fountain underneath its graceful canopy of stone. To his right was the dark mass of the closed chapel, and all round the court stretched the long low buildings with their lighted windows and busy staircases, their modest regularity broken up by the three gate towers, the hall, the lodge, and the chapel. A little group of chatty dons came towards him from the combination room, across the sacred grass, one of them in all the bravery of a scarlet gown, and passed out through the gate. A porter touched his hat to them and Mr. Binney felt that he could have done the same with pleasure. Towards the undergraduates who went to and fro in the court, along the flagged pathways, his feelings were less reverential, but more curious, for he hoped some day to be one of them. What a proud thing it would be to walk on these very stones in a square cap and a blue gown and feel that one had a share in all the ancient surrounding glories. He walked slowly across the court, and up the steps of the hall. He stopped to read the college notices in the glass-covered cases which hang in the passage between the kitchen and buttery hatches on the one side, and the carved screen which gives access to the hall itself, through heavy swing doors, on the other. A crowd of waiters in their shirt-sleeves were busy between the two clearing away the remains of the feast. Mr. Binney looked into the hall which was now nearly ready to be shut up for the night. The massive boards and benches of polished oak ran up to the daïs in which were the two long tables where the dons sit at their dinner long after the undergraduates have finished and left them to their grandeur. The pictures of bygone worthies whom their college delights to honour looked down on him solemnly from the walls. Behind him was the beautiful screen with the gallery above, from which the panels are removed on state occasions, when a bright array of fair visitors looks down on the "animals feeding." The lights were going out now, and the high-pitched roof with its many rafters was fading into dimness. Mr. Binney turned with a sigh and went out, while a servant locked the door and left the great hall to its solitude, with the moonlight streaming in through the blazoned windows and the wakeful eyes of the departed worthies watching through the night.
The next morning Mr. Binney called on Mr. Rimington. He had to sit for a quarter of an hour in the Tutor's ante-room, where half-a-dozen undergraduates were awaiting their turn for admittance, looking over the bound volumes of Punch which were laid on the table for their amusement. Two of them were talking, and Mr. Binney listened with open ears to their conversation which was "shoppy" in the extreme, and all the more interesting to him on that account. His appearance caused no surprise, for fathers do sometimes visit their son's Tutors, but Mr. Binney thought that every one present would know what he had come for, and felt a little shy.
He was shown presently into the inner room, a handsome one with a beautiful ceiling, and was received very kindly by Mr. Rimington, who, however, seemed a little nervous.
"I don't know, Mr. Binney," he said, with some hesitation, "whether I quite understood your letter." (Here he took Mr. Binney's application from an orderly little pile on his desk.) "It seemed to mean that you wished to enter yourself as an undergraduate of the college."
Mr. Binney sat on a chair before the Tutor fumbling his hat between his knees. "Certainly, sir," he said, "that is what I meant."
"There is an undergraduate of your name already entered, I believe, on Mr. Segrave's side?"
"Yes, my boy Lucius. He passed the certificate examination last month."
"Quite so. We are very glad to have him here. We hope he may row in the boat and help us to beat Oxford."
Mr. Binney was surprised to find a don taking an interest in such a frivolous affair as a boat-race, but it put him a little more at his ease.
"There is nothing to prevent a man of my age entering at the University, I suppose?" he inquired.
"No," said Mr. Rimington with some hesitation, "not from our point of view. But have you thought what it means, Mr. Binney? It is a little—er—unusual for father and son to be undergraduate members of the same college at the same time. Our rules are not at all irksome for a young man—in fact, some people think we allow too much freedom, although we find that we get on better by not drawing the rein so tight as they do at some other colleges—but such as they are we could not relax them, and in your case they might very well prove to be irksome."
"Not at all," said Mr. Binney, "not at all. I am prepared to take the rough with the smooth, and I can keep rules, if they are sensible rules, as well as the young fellows."
Mr. Rimington laughed nervously. "May I ask your reason for wanting to come up to Cambridge so—so late in life?" he asked.
"I have a passion for education, sir," said Mr. Binney. "I left school at the age of fourteen, and have worked hard at my business ever since. But money-making isn't the sole interest in life—besides I have got as much money as I want. I wish to regain some of the lost opportunities of youth."
"Have you kept up your classical studies at all since you left school?" asked the Tutor.
"I never learnt any classics, sir," answered Mr. Binney airily; "that has all to come. They didn't consider that Latin and Greek prepared us for the business of life when I was a boy."
"Oh! then I am afraid it is not of the slightest use your attempting to enter for our examination," said the Tutor, with a visible shade of relief overspreading his face, "it would take you years to come up to the standard we require."
"That is my affair, sir," said Mr. Binney. "I shall not only attempt it, I shall succeed. I have ability and determination."
Mr. Rimington looked annoyed. "I think you will find you are mistaken," he said. "However, as you say, that is your affair and not mine. But, apart from that, I am not sure, Mr. Binney—I speak quite openly—that it is the kindest course you could take, as far as your son is concerned, to enter at the same college. He comes to us with a very good character, and we hope he will do us credit. But it is likely to go against him—I mean it will hardly be giving him a fair chance with the other men of the college to be constantly under your supervision. A University education, you know, Mr. Binney, is a valuable training for a young man, because he begins to learn to stand alone, while he is not left entirely alone. Your son would lose that advantage, whatever else he might gain, if you were to be constantly with him."
Mr. Binney straightened himself up. Mr. Rimington's opposition roused his fighting business instincts, which prompted him to take every opportunity of gaining an advantage. "That again is a matter for me to decide, sir," he said. "Lucius and I are very good friends and understand one another thoroughly. I have given him advantages of education that I never had, but when I put my foot down he has to obey. He knows that by this time. We will leave him out of the question, if you please."
Mr. Rimington again looked annoyed.
"If you are determined to come up for entrance to this college," he said, "and succeed in passing the necessary test, which, I warn you, will be a harder matter than you imagine, you would find yourself compelled to associate with men of very immature views, Mr. Binney."
"I am not afraid of that," said Mr. Binney. "In fact I shall enjoy it. I have preserved my youth and can take the young fellows on their own ground and beat 'em."
Mr. Rimington passed his hand over his mouth. "Then I had better give you the necessary papers," he said. "You must send us a certificate of good conduct, signed by a clergyman who has known you for three years."
"My pastor, the celebrated Dr. Toller, under whose ministrations I have sat for the last twenty years would do, I suppose," said Mr. Binney. "I am a Baptist."
"Yes, certainly," said the Tutor. "Then there is the certificate of birth. And this paper will tell you all about the subjects for examination. I should advise you to engage a private coach. You are too late, of course, for the first examination, but——"
"There is another in October," interrupted Mr. Binney. "I know. I shall present myself for that."
"Then I will wish you good-morning, Mr. Binney," said the Tutor. "You will excuse me, but I have a good many pupils to see." Mr. Rimington summoned up his usual amiable smile and took leave of Mr. Binney with a warm grasp of the hand; and Mr. Binney went out through the ante-room, where the waiting crowd had swelled to unusual proportions, and clattered down the oak staircase into the court, hugging his precious sheaf of papers.
In the Combination Room, that evening, Mr. Rimington and Mr. Segrave discussed Mr. Binney over their wine.
"I did my best to dissuade him," said Mr. Rimington. "It is very hard lines on the boy."
"He is a nice boy," said the other. "Wargrave"—this was Lucius's house-master at Eton—"says he is one of the best boys he has in his house; not at all brilliant, but of excellent character and a first-rate oar—just the sort of freshman we want, as we can't expect them all to be scholars. I'm afraid it will spoil his life here if his father insists upon inflicting himself on us. What sort of a man is he?"
Mr. Rimington laughed. He would have liked to say, "Just a cocky little tradesman," but he was a charitable man. "If I were the boy," he said, "I would rather have him in London than at Cambridge. But I don't think we shall see him at Cambridge. He left school thirty years ago and has never learnt either Latin or Greek, or indeed anything that we want, excepting, perhaps, arithmetic, and we don't want much of that. Yet he expects us to admit him in October."
"Oh, well then, we may set our minds at rest," said Mr. Segrave. "But it's a curious idea altogether."
Mr. Binney had got back to Russell Square by that time and was just then engaged in writing out an advertisement for a resident tutor.
CHAPTER III
LUCIUS WINS A YEAR'S RESPITE
A week after Mr. Binney's visit to Cambridge, he wrote the following letter to his son:—
"MY DEAR Lucius,—Yours of 29th ult. to hand. I note you are getting on with your work and enjoying yourself. I have now relinquished my attendance at the office, and have left the management in Mr. Walton's hands, merely dropping in for an hour or two once a week to see how things are going. As far as I can see he will carry on the business well during my three years' absence, and at the end of that time I shall take the reins again and you will begin work there. If all goes well I shall take you into partnership a year after that, by which time you ought to have fully mastered the details.
"Re work for Trinity Entrance Examination.
"I have started on above, having engaged a private coach. I had 430 answers to my application. My choice fell on a gentleman named Minshull, a Peterhouse man who dwells in the vicinity. He took his degree only last year and expects to enter the Church shortly. He comes every morning at nine o'clock and we work till one. He lunches with me, after which we take a walk in the Park or elsewhere, returning for tea and another two hours' work. Then Minshull leaves me, and after a light dinner I do preparation for him for another two hours and then to bed. On Saturday we knock off at one, and I generally take an outing with Mrs. Higginbotham, who wishes to be kindly remembered to you. She takes a great interest in my enterprise, and refreshes her memory and mine during our little jaunts by getting me to repeat to her without book such things as I have learnt during the week as come within the limits of the curriculum to which she applied herself during girlhood. The subjects themselves are hardly such as in my judgment repay the amount of study necessary to master them. What with the growing competition in commercial life, and the great influx of foreigners—Germans and others—it seems to me waste of time to devote three valuable years of a young man's life in getting up the opinions of a man like Plato, who lived so many years ago that his ideas are by no means up-to-date. Or take a poet like Virgil again—if Virgil can be justly called a poet. Compare his thoughts with those of our own immortal Shakespeare—the Swan of Avon—or even with Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, if you must have matters of ancient history treated in poetry. And what is the use of puzzling over the Acts of the Apostles in the Original Greek, when that book, as well as the rest of the New Testament, has been so admirably translated in the Revised Version? What the authorities of our Universities entirely fail to grasp is that Latin and Greek are not spoken nowadays. How much better young men would be fitted for the business of life if they were trained to speak and write French and German fluently! This is so obvious to a man of experience that I seriously thought of writing to the Chancellor of the University, the Duke of Devonshire, and laying my views before him, but Minshull dissuaded me, saying that I should be in a better position to bring to bear any influence I might possess after I have taken my degree, which is perfectly true. But the truth of it is there are too many old women at the head of the Universities. What you want are keen-headed men, men of experience in the world, who would move with the times, and get Oxford and Cambridge to move with them. I am so convinced I am right in this opinion, that if it were not for the cares of business, to which I must return when I have finished with Cambridge, I should apply for a Trinity fellowship after I have taken my degree, and try to infuse a little spirit into the counsels of the college and through it into the University.
"I must now draw to a close and return to my studies. I feel that they are beneath my powers, but at the same time I must not grumble at having to begin at the bottom rung of the ladder. 'Thorough' has always been my motto and will continue so. No more at present, from your affectionate father,—PETER BINNEY."
Mr. Binney's letters as the time went on became more and more sprightly in tone. With the cares of business he seemed to have finally laid aside all the interests commonly felt by gentlemen who have reached middle age. He relapsed into slang. Minshull, he said, was a "jolly good sort," only you had to work. It was no good trying to "kid him." The subjects for examination he now found "beastly stiff," and it was an "awful sap" getting them up, but he quite expected to have "bowled them over" by the time the examination was due. He mentioned Mrs. Higginbotham once or twice as one on whose approval of the course he was pursuing he greatly relied.
"Confound that old woman," said Lucius when he read this. "She's backing him up in all this nonsense. She's a sentimental old donkey. Well, he can't do it in time, that's one comfort;" and Lucius would encourage himself by dwelling on this conviction, and then tear up his father's letters.
He came up to town for two nights about the end of June on his long leave. Mr. Binney, of course, was full of his work. He wished to be treated just like any other youth with the ordeal of an examination before him, and itched to talk over his chances. But Lucius retired into his shell whenever Cambridge was mentioned. Mr. Binney, of course, noticed this and began to get his back up about it. At last he tackled his son in the most effectual way as they sat together in the library at Russell Square after dinner.
"Look here, young man," he said, "you may as well get used to this idea. You and I are going up to Trinity together, and I want to do the thing fairly and squarely. I shall put us both on an allowance, and at present I intend to make them equal. But if you're going to be sulky about it, they won't be equal, or anything like it. So put that in your pipe and smoke it."
"What allowance?" inquired Lucius with some interest. His father had always refused to come to the point when he had asked him the same question before.
"Well, I thought of £300 a year," said Mr. Binney. "Minshull did it on £200, and did it very well, but, as he says, Trinity is the college where all the swells go, and if you want to live up to 'em you might have to spend a bit more. As I say, I want to do the thing well."
"I don't suppose Minshull knows much about it," said Lucius. "Most of the chaps I know are going to have about four hundred, and hardly any of them less than three. You have to be jolly careful on three hundred a year at Trinity."
"Ah, well," said Mr. Binney, "I won't let a hundred a year, or even two, stand in the way, and we'll share alike if you're sensible about it. But I'm not going to pay you four hundred a year to look down on your father, so you had better make up your mind how you're going to behave before October comes."
Lucius sat silent with a gloomy countenance and his hands in his pockets. When he was at school the idea of his father accompanying him to Cambridge as a freshman seemed so absurd that he was sometimes surprised to find that he was enjoying life much as usual, without being very much burdened by it. When he was at home and realised how very much in earnest Mr. Binney was, the dark fate that hung over him became less remote, and filled him with gloomy forebodings. But youth is elastic. It seemed almost out of the question that Mr. Binney would succeed in passing the entrance examination, while Lucius himself was already admitted a member of Trinity College. The allowance his father had named seemed to him quite adequate, and he allowed himself to cheer up a little and inquire after the health of Mrs. Higginbotham.
Mr. Binney coughed in some little embarrassment.
"Mrs. Higginbotham has a bad cold," he said, "and is confined to the house. I hope she will be well enough to accompany me to Lord's for the Eton and Harrow match, if the state of her bronchial tubes, which are giving her a lot of trouble just now, permit of it. You will be able to introduce us to some of your friends and future companions at Cambridge."
"I'm very sorry," said Lucius, "but I shan't be there. Henley comes in the same week."
"I shall be at Henley as well," said Mr. Binney, "and Mrs. Higginbotham has kindly consented to accompany me. She takes a great interest in your rowing career, Lucius, as she does in every other manly sport. Ah! I hope the day may come when I myself—but we mustn't count our chickens before they are hatched, must we? With regard to Henley, you will be able to go about with us, I suppose, and see that——"
"Very sorry, father," interrupted Lucius hastily, "I shall be rowing nearly all day long. We're in for the Grand and the Ladies' Plate. Besides, the captain of the boats is a terrible fellow. If he caught one of us so much as speaking to a lady he'd cut up very rough."
"Why is that, pray?" inquired Mr. Binney.
"Oh, I don't know. They might offer us an ice or something. We have to be awfully strict, you know, over training."
"Ah, well, that's a pity. Mrs. Higginbotham would like to meet a few of the young fellows who will be my companions for the next three years. She said so. Perhaps you might get one of your cricketing friends who would be unoccupied to look after us."
"I'm afraid most of them will have people of their own to look after. However, if any of them happens to lose his father and mother between now and Henley, I'll see what can be done."
"And now I must go to bed," said Mr. Binney, "so as to begin work early to-morrow morning. I don't want to lose a minute more than I can help. I'm not getting on terms with Mr. Plato as quickly as I should like. I shall be able to introduce you to Minshull before you start, Lucius. He's a good chap, and not a bit stand-offish as you might expect, considering he's a B.A., and I'm not even a freshman yet. You'll find him quite easy to get on with."
Minshull was one of those people in whose eyes a three years' residence at Oxford or Cambridge is such a glorious thing, that if they have gone through it themselves they can talk or think of nothing else throughout their lives. The healthy pleasant life of the average undergraduate is idealised into a sort of seventh heaven, and a "blue" takes his place immediately below the archangels and considerably above any mere mortal. Seniority of residence forms an almost complete bar to social intercourse with undergraduates of lower standing, and the little code of etiquette invented to enliven proceedings in the lesser colleges is as the laws of the Medes and Persians. To be or to have been "a 'Varsity man" was the only thing quite necessary in Minshull's eyes, if you were to call yourself a gentleman, and he therefore saw nothing that was not entirely laudable in Mr. Binney's determination to acquire this hall-mark of superiority, however late in life. While trying to instil into his pupil the requisite amount of Latin and Greek, he imparted to him at the same time his own particular point of view in matters of undergraduate custom, taught him what to admire and what to avoid, until Mr. Binney was infused with the spirit of a provincial youth about to enter the gates of the University paradise from his country grammar school. Mr. Binney had first of all considered a belated career at Cambridge as an opportunity for mending a defective education; under the encouragement of Mrs. Higginbotham's yearnings after vanished delights he had come to look upon it as a means of gaining some of the prestige of golden youth; influenced by Minshull's complacent reverence, he had insensibly drifted away from the careless acquiescence with which Lucius, for instance, regarded his own proposed residence at the University, and now felt that he should break his heart if he was prevented from taking his part in the glamorous delights which his tutor held before his eyes. He made herculean efforts to get on terms with his examination subjects, and worked harder than he had ever done in his life before.
Minshull arrived at nine o'clock the next morning as usual. Mr. Binney, who had been working since seven and had breakfasted at eight, had not yet returned from a short constitutional, and Lucius had the privilege of an interview with his father's tutor.
Minshull was a tall young man, rather shabbily dressed, with a long solemn face diversified by little ranges of spots of an eruptive tendency. He greeted Lucius with some respect, for Lucius was a potential "blue," and Minshull would have been as incapable of keeping on his hat in church as of talking without due reverence to a "blue."
"How's the governor getting on with his work?" asked Lucius with an abashed snigger.
"Oh, pretty well," replied Minshull. "He works very hard, but of course he has to do everything from the beginning."
"No chance of his getting through, I suppose?" said Lucius.
"Oh, I don't know," said Minshull. "If he works as hard as he has been doing so far for the next three months he may just be able to scrape through in October."
Lucius began to pace the room.
"If he gets into Trinity I won't go up, that's flat," he said.
"What! Not go up to the ''Varsity' when you've got a chance!" exclaimed Minshull. "My dear fellow, you don't know what you're talking about. You will regret it all your life if you don't."
"Look here," said Lucius, "you were at Cambridge, weren't you?"
"Yes, certainly," said Minshull, slightly offended. "I took my degree last year."
"Well, how would you have liked to have your old governor playing the fool up there at the same college?"
"I see no reason to suppose that Mr. Binney will play the fool," said Minshull stiffly. "I have put him up to everything he ought to know. He won't make mistakes. He is not likely to carry an umbrella with a cap and gown or anything of that sort."
"Why shouldn't he carry an umbrella if it rains? Look here, can't you make certain of his getting pilled for this examination?"
Minshull looked horrified. "What! and prevent his going up to the 'Varsity when he wants to?" he exclaimed.
"Or if you can't do that and he's likely to get through, tell him that you don't think much of Trinity, and get him to go somewhere else."
"There are plenty of good colleges in Cambridge besides Trinity," said Minshull, "although Trinity men don't seem to think so. My own college, for instance, Peterhouse, isn't big, but it is one of the best, if not the best of the smaller ones."
"Is it? Well then, get him to go there. Do you mean to say you don't think it's a beastly shame him wanting to come up and spoil all my time at Cambridge?"
"I can't see——" began Minshull, but just then Mr. Binney came in, and Lucius left them to their labours, with the uncomfortable conviction that the toils were closing in on him and that there was no help at any rate to be gained from his father's tutor.
Henley week came round in due course, but Mrs. Higginbotham, alas, did not come round with it. Her cold had settled on her lungs and the poor lady was brought very low. At the time Mr. Binney hoped to have been paddling her about on the Thames in a Canadian canoe she was surveying the beauties of Torquay in a bathchair. Mr. Binney had been told by Minshull that if he really wished to pass the Trinity entrance examination in October, it was absolutely imperative that he should not lose a single day's work if he could possibly help it, so Lucius won a reprieve for that occasion, at least, and as the Eton boys managed to win the Ladies' Plate and rowed a good race in the semi-final heat for the Grand Challenge Cup, he spent on the whole a pleasant Henley. During the first few weeks of his holidays he was training for and rowing in some of the up-river regattas, and September he spent with various school-fellows in Scotland, so it was not until just before he was due at Cambridge that he found himself once more in the house in Russell Square and the society of his father. Mr. Binney, in the meantime, fired with a mighty ambition to show his mettle and acquit himself well in his examination, had retired to an east coast village with Minshull, and devoted himself strenuously to his books. He had worked very hard for six months, but a man who has left a cheap commercial school at the age of fourteen, and that thirty years before, can hardly expect to do in that time what a public school boy has been working steadily up to ever since his education began. A month before the examination, Minshull saw that his pupil had no chance of success, and told him so one morning as they were walking together by the sea. Mr. Binney was heart-broken.
"No chance, Minshull?" he asked plaintively. "I don't mind working another two hours a day, you know. Isn't there any chance?"
"I'm afraid not, Mr. Binney," said Minshull. "You have worked very hard; you couldn't have done better; but you see the work is all new to you. You might get in at the Hall, perhaps, or if you cared about it I should think I might have enough influence with the Peterhouse authorities to——"
"Never," said Mr. Binney firmly. "Trinity or nowhere. If I make up my mind to a thing, I stick to it. I shouldn't have made my fortune if I hadn't."
"I should advise you, sir, to give up all ideas of attempting the October examination," said Minshull. "I can assure you you can't possibly pass it, and if you do very badly it may be prejudicial to your chances in the future. Take a month's holiday, or you'll knock yourself up. Then set to work again and be ready for them next spring."
"I feel you're right," said poor Mr. Binney. "I feel you're right, Minshull, but it's a sad blow. You'll excuse me if I just walk on alone for a bit. I shall get over it better."
Minshull left him, and Mr. Binney spent a very bitter hour by himself. He had never been beaten before when he had made up his mind to succeed, and it enraged him to think of the two hundred beardless boys who would enter Trinity College as freshmen in a month's time, most of whom had succeeded without any difficulty in doing what he could not do even with the most strenuous endeavours. Lucius, for instance, had taken the whole thing very calmly, although he was not a particularly clever nor a particularly diligent boy. Then his thoughts passed on to Mrs. Higginbotham—Martha. That was the worst thought of all. He had written once a week to Mrs. Higginbotham, alluding in an airy way to his new acquaintances, Plato and Virgil and Euclid, as if he and they were on the most intimate terms of familiarity. Now he would have to tell her that their thoughts were too deep for him—for him who had familiarised all England with the mind of a Shakespeare—and that the languages by means of which they expressed their thoughts still presented such a mountain of obstacles to him that it was doubtful if he would ever succeed in getting over them. Still, the confession would have to be made, and Mr. Binney, with that directness which characterised all his actions, determined that it should be made that very night. "I am very, very sorry, Martha," he wrote, "I have really done my best. I shouldn't have been worthy of you if I hadn't. I'm afraid your Peter is a bit of a dunce, although he never thought so before. Write and say you will not throw me over for it, and I shall set to work again with renewed earnestness."
Mrs. Higginbotham, although deeply disappointed, wrote a very kind and consoling letter from Torquay, where her bronchial tubes, which had assumed complete mastery over all her actions, still detained her.
"If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again," she wrote, and thought she had said a very original thing. "I always found, when I was a young lady at school, that if I couldn't master my tasks immediately, the only thing for it was, not to give them up, but to determine that I would master them in time; and my mistress, Miss Dolby—now an angel—used frequently to point me out to the parents of other pupils, and say, 'That child has great determination, and will undoubtedly make her mark.' I am aware that I have not fulfilled Miss Dolby's prophecy up to present date, but your triumphs are mine, Peter, and I trust that we shall both grow famous together."
Mr. Binney was much encouraged by Mrs. Higginbotham's letter. He took a holiday and went to Torquay, and by the time Lucius went up to Cambridge early in October, very much relieved at the idea of at least one year free from the companionship of his father as a fellow undergraduate, he had settled down for a hard winter's work in Russell Square.
CHAPTER IV
NO HELP TO BE GAINED FROM MRS. HIGGINBOTHAM
Lucius Binney enjoyed his first year at Cambridge exceedingly. He had been popular at school and he was very much liked at the University. He did enough work to enable him to avoid friction with the authorities and passed both parts of his Littlego in his first term. He rowed in the Trial Eights, but as he was not heavy enough to fill any place but bow in a University boat, a place which was adequately filled already, he did not get his Blue. His allowance enabled him to play his part in the hospitalities of University life with credit, and he showed no disposition to exceed it. He was made a member of the historic Amateur Dramatic Club, commonly known as the A.D.C., and played the part of a maid-servant in the first performances of his year on the most approved principles of Cambridge dramatic art, with a slim waist, a high colour, and an unmistakably masculine voice. He would have been one of the happiest men in the University if he had not been continually haunted by the thought of his father.
But for some reason or other Mr. Binney, although he insisted upon lengthy letters being written to him, giving the fullest possible account of University matters, expressed no intention of paying him a visit, as Lucius lived in continual fear of his doing. Perhaps he was ashamed of his inability to pass the entrance examination after having made certain of doing so; perhaps he preferred to make his first appearance amongst Cambridge men as an undergraduate and not as the guest of an undergraduate. At any rate he left Lucius unmolested during his first two terms, but his letters became more and more jubilant as he worked on at his examination subjects, and felt himself getting nearer the desired goal.
Lucius had a friend called Dizzy. His name was not really Dizzy, but it is only fair to state that he had been christened Benjamin. To him alone, of all his friends, Lucius had disclosed, under a solemn promise of secrecy, the dark fate that was hanging over him.
"He'll pass this time, Dizzy, I know he will," said Lucius, after receiving a more than usually confident letter from his father, who informed him that Minshull had told him that his Latin prose was, at last, beginning to show signs of an elementary grasp of the fact that there was such a thing as Latin grammar.
"Not he," said Dizzy with complete confidence. "He'll never pass. I knew an old geezer—no offence to your governor, Lucy—who first took up Latin when his little boys were seven and eight, under a governess. First week they were all three about equal. Then the eldest boy began to forge ahead. In a fortnight the little one left the old man behind, and after a month the governess said she'd have to go if he didn't do her more credit. He didn't want that, so he married her, which was what he'd been after all along, only hadn't liked to say so. They can't learn things at that time of life, my boy, any more than we can make a pot of money by winking at a fellow on the Stock Exchange. It's not in 'em."
"You don't know my governor," said Lucius, his depression very little lightened by Dizzy's narrative. "He's been at it for nearly a year now, grinding like a galley slave. That fellow Minshull must have got something into his head by this time. And after all the entrance exam isn't anything very big, is it?"
"Not to us; we're educated men," said Dizzy, who was a member of Trinity Hall, where the entrance examination is tempered to the shorn Trinity candidate. "But it's the devil and all to people like your old governor who ain't used to that sort of thing. He won't pass, Lucy; don't you be afraid of it."
"It's too bad of him wanting to come up, isn't it, Dizzy?" said poor Lucius, who yearned for sympathy and could only obtain it from this one particular friend.
"It is too bad," said Dizzy. "I don't know what governors are coming to. There's mine wrote to me the other day and said I was disgracing the family name, just because I turned out those lights in St. Andrew's Street and got hauled up at the police court for it. I told him I did it entirely to save the ratepayers' money. He's always talking about the enormous fiscal burdens he's got to bear, or some such tommy-rot, and I thought that would please him. But not a bit of it. Governors never listen to reason. I got eight pages back with a lot more about the family name. Hang it, it ain't much of a name after all."
It was not. It was Stubbs. But General Sir Richard Stubbs, V.C., had done his little best to adorn it in days gone by and saw no great probability of his son Benjamin doing the same in days to come.
The account Lucius gave at home of his doings fired Mr. Binney's imagination.
"Splendid, my boy, splendid!" cried the little man, when he described the two bumps which the Third Trinity boat had made in the Lent races. "I shall go in for rowing myself; best exercise you can have," and Mr. Binney drew himself up and struck the place where his chest would have been if he had had one. "Is it likely, do you think, Lucius, that you and I will row in the same boat?"
"It's not only unlikely," said Lucius shortly, "it's impossible."
"Oh, indeed," said Mr. Binney, with a dangerous gleam in his eye. "You are such a swell I suppose, that nobody else can expect to come near you."
"You wouldn't even belong to the same boat-club," said Lucius. "You ought to know that by this time. Third Trinity is only for Eton and Westminster men, the rest of the college belongs to First Trinity."
"I did know it," said Mr. Binney, "but I had forgotten it for the moment. You needn't take me up so sharp, Lucius. Is First Trinity a good boat club?"
"Of course it is," said Lucius.
"Very well, then, I shall join it, and take up rowing seriously. Have you spoken at the Union yet?"
"No, I don't belong to it. I shouldn't speak if I did, and it's no good belonging to that and the 'Pitt' too."
"The 'Pitt'! What's the 'Pitt'?"
"It's a club."
"Is it the thing to belong to it?"
"Oh, I don't know. A lot of people do."
"Ah, well, I must belong to that too."
"You have to be elected to it. People sometimes get pilled."
"Well, I should hope there wouldn't be much chance of my getting pilled, whatever that may mean. I belong to the National Liberal Club. That ought to be enough for them, oughtn't it?"
"Quite enough for them, I should think," answered Lucius, who had once dined at that famous institution with Peter, and been offensively patronised by one of Mr. Binney's fellow-members, a man old enough to be his father.
"I shall join the Union," continued Mr. Binney. "I expect most of my triumphs will lie there. I am accustomed to addressing large assemblies. I was nearly elected to the London County Council two years ago, as you know. That's where I score, you see, being a man of the world among a lot of boys. I've learnt to do things that they are only just beginning to think about."
"Yes. You've made your pile among other things," replied Lucius. "Most of us haven't learnt to do that yet. We generally begin at the other end and spend it first."
"I shan't grudge spending some of it," said Mr. Binney. "I hope to entertain the young fellows a good deal. Minshull says if you give a few good breakfasts every term—do the thing well, you know, with perhaps some fruit and a bottle of claret to come after—you get a tremendous reputation for hospitality throughout the 'Varsity. Is that so?"
"Well, I'm not sure I ever met anybody who drank claret at breakfast. I did know a fellow who used to drink brandy. He certainly did get a tremendous reputation throughout the 'Varsity, but it wasn't for hospitality. He wasn't up there long."
"H'm. Well, Minshull said he knew a man who went up a bit late, who had more money to spend than most people, who got into the first set at Peterhouse through his breakfasts."
"Did he? Lucky fellow! Well, I should give a few breakfasts if I were you, father. We shall all think you a tremendous chap."
"I mean to go one better than that, my boy, and give a little dinner occasionally, to the élite of the 'Varsity—Blues, and people of that sort. I daresay you young fellows will only be too pleased to go outside the ordinary lines once in a way. I suppose there's no rule against giving dinners, is there?"
"I never heard of it. It's pretty often broken if there is."
"I intend to do the thing well, and open a bottle of champagne. I daresay, now, champagne's a thing that's hardly known at Cambridge."
"That's what I told my wine merchant last term. He was rather annoyed."
"I don't object to a little jollification occasionally. I daresay you and I, Lucius—-for you shall do what I do—will become pretty well known up there by-and-bye."
"I dare say we shall," said Lucius with a sigh. And, indeed, it did not seem unlikely.
Before Lucius went back to Cambridge for the summer term, he made one last attempt to avert the catastrophe which had now become imminent—for Minshull had told him that Mr. Binney was now quite capable of passing the required test. He called on Mrs. Higginbotham, whose bronchial tubes had by this time become less ostentatious in their behaviour.
"Well, Lucius," said that lady, when he was seated opposite to her in her comfortable drawing-room, "you will soon have your dear father to look after you at college. It is not many young men who have a father so ready to share in all their little pleasures."
"No," said Lucius. "Don't you think you could stop him, Mrs. Higginbotham, if you tried?"
"Stop him!" exclaimed Mrs. Higginbotham with raised voice and hands. "My dear Lucius, do not tell me that you are so selfish as to be jealous of an excellent father."
"Jealous!" echoed Lucius. "I don't know what you mean."
"You do know what I mean, Lucius," said Mrs. Higginbotham severely. "And you are jealous. I can see it in your face. Here is your dear father continually talking to me with pride about the things you are doing at Cambridge, while you are only thinking of yourself, and fear that you will lose the position you have won when he is there to compete with you. What a contrast! You should be ashamed of such feelings, Lucius. I am sure I should be if I were in your place. What matter if you do have to take a lower place in the estimation of your young friends, when it is your own father—and such a father—who will replace you? I do not like to think of such behaviour."
"He'll only be laughed at, you know," said Lucius.
"And do you mean to tell me that, as an unworthy revenge for your loss of prestige, you would actually dare to hold your own father up to ridicule?" inquired Mrs. Higginbotham.
"Of course I shouldn't," said Lucius. "I should do my best to prevent his making a f—I mean becoming notorious."
"There!" said Mrs. Higginbotham triumphantly. "Now you have acknowledged your baseness, Lucius. I am thoroughly ashamed of you. But you will learn that you cannot prevent your father from becoming notorious. He is bound to take the lead in whatever he takes up, especially among a lot of boys many years his juniors, and far inferior in capacity. I am afraid that in addition to your miserable jealousy, Lucius, there are things you wish to hide in your life at Cambridge, things that you do not wish your father to know of. I hope, indeed, that is not so. I should be truly sorry if the innocent life to which he is looking forward with such pleasure was to be spoiled by the misbehaviour of one for whom he has done so much."
"I've got nothing to be ashamed of in my life at Cambridge, Mrs. Higginbotham," said Lucius. "You don't seem to be any more reasonable about this silly scheme than my father himself. I had better go, I think."
"I think so too," said Mrs. Higginbotham. "And do not come and see me again, Lucius, until you are in a better frame of mind, and can speak with more respect to one of your father's oldest friends."
"I won't come and see you again at all, you silly old fool," said Lucius; but he waited to say it until he was on the other side of the door.
CHAPTER V
MR. BINNEY ARRIVES IN CAMBRIDGE
Lucius's first May term wore itself out with a burst of glorious summer weather. The boat races and cricket matches, the dances and college concerts, the crowds of sisters and cousins, the mayonnaises and iced cups, and all the other attributes of those ten days of mid-June which go by the name of the May week, played their accustomed parts in mitigating the severity of the toil to which Cambridge devotes itself for the rest of the academic year.
But to Lucius there was a heavy cloud darkening the vivid blue of the summer sky. Mr. Binney was to arrive at the end of the term, to undergo his examination. The days passed with relentless speed, and one unhappy morning he found himself walking up and down the long unlovely platform of the Cambridge station, awaiting the train which was bearing his father rapidly towards the scene of his future exploits. So far only Mr. Benjamin Stubbs shared with him the knowledge of the evil fate that was in store for him. But the secret was bound to come out now, and Lucius wondered whether there was a more unhappy man in all Cambridge than himself.
Mr. Binney arrived, accompanied by Minshull, for whom he had taken rooms at the Hoop, in order that he might have the advantage of his able tuition up to the very last moment, for he was determined to throw away no little chance that might add to his prospect of success. Mr. Binney himself had been allotted rooms in college for the few days during which the examination lasted. If he was not already a Cambridge man this was the next best thing to it, and a proud man was Mr. Binney to find himself the occupant of a garret in the Great Court with a bedroom which any one of his servants at Russell Square would have turned up her nose at. They were the rooms of a sizar, and were barely furnished even for a very poor man's rooms, but the sizar had blossomed into the Senior Wrangler of that year, and that fact repaid Mr. Binney in full for any little inconvenience he might have felt at being deprived of most of the necessities and all the luxuries of life to which he had been accustomed.
Lucius accompanied his father to these rooms and left him to himself, for he was lunching with the captain of his boat. It was the last night of the races, and Mr. Binney proposed, after spending a busy afternoon with Minshull over his books, to go down to Ditton Corner and see the boats. Lucius thanked his lucky stars that he was rowing and need not present his father to an admiring circle of friends on that very public occasion. He would have been pleased enough to introduce him as a father, there or at any other place, if he had come up simply to pay him a visit, for Lucius was a right-minded boy and showed no disposition to be ashamed of his somewhat humble origin among his circle of more or less gilded youth; but to have to say "My father, who is coming up here next term," and to have to stand by while little Mr. Binney tried to reduce himself to the level of an inexperienced schoolboy, as he felt certain he would do, was an ordeal that he did not feel equal to, and he made up his mind to let the inevitable catastrophe bring itself about in its own way. He told himself that he was happy to have averted it for so long, for although some of the dons knew of Mr. Binney's intention, and his own Tutor had actually talked to him about it, the secret did not seem to have become public property among the undergraduates of the college.
Mr. Binney was delighted with everything he saw. The gay crowd in the paddock at Ditton Corner, the lines of carriages on one side, and the flotilla of moored boats under the bank, appealed to him with all the force of a delightful novelty. The boating men and others on the tow-path across the river, with the photographers plying their trade and letting off their amiable witticisms through their megaphones, the boat crews in their coloured coats, some of them with flowers in their hats, swinging down to their stations round the bend, gave him great pleasure. Then, after a pause, filled with the gossip and laughter of the crowd, when a distant gun was heard, and three minutes afterwards a second, and a minute after yet another; when the men in the boats under the bank straightened themselves and said, "They're off"; when a moving mass of the heads of men running was seen far away under the willows across the meadows; when little men laden with bundles of coats fled along the tow-path opposite towards the "Pike and Eel"; when the noise of the shouting and the springing of rattles drew nearer; when every head in the crowd was turned towards Ditton Corner, and two boats came into sight very close to one another, and after them two more, and the shouting and cheering was taken up by every one around him, Mr. Binney lost his head with excitement, and yelled with the best of them, especially for the heroes of Fitzwilliam Hall whom he, for some reason or other, mistook for a Trinity crew.
"It's grand, Minshull, it's grand," he said as they made their way home with the crowd along the river bank and across Midsummer Common. "I don't wonder at your being proud of Cambridge, Minshull."
"I'm glad Pothouse made their bump just opposite Ditton," said Minshull complacently. "Now you see what rowing is like, Mr. Binney."
"Lucius rowed well," said Mr. Binney. "Didn't you think so?"
"Yes," said Minshull, who had been a diligent but ineffective La Crosse and hockey player during his residence at the University, and hardly knew an oar from a barge pole. "But it seemed to me that he hardly caught the beginning enough."
"You had better tell him that," said Mr. Binney with unconscious irony. "I dare say he'll be glad of any hints he can get."
Lucius sat in his rooms in Jesus Lane the next afternoon in a very depressed frame of mind. His father had intimated that he was coming to tea. Lucius had invited Dizzy to meet him, hoping that his friend's pleasant flow of conversation would help out the entertainment, and prevent his own plentiful lack of cheerfulness from becoming too apparent; but Dizzy had not arrived yet. He devoutly hoped that nobody else would unexpectedly honour him with his society. But alas! an Eton friend, one year his junior, who was in for the entrance examination, took that untoward opportunity of paying him a visit.
"There's such a rummy little devil up," he said in the course of conversation, "about sixty years old, with carrotty whiskers. It oughtn't to be allowed."
The blow had fallen. Poor Lucius sat silent in untold misery, and just then in walked Mr. Binney. "My father," said the wretched boy. "Lord Blathgowrie."
Lord Blathgowrie shook hands with Mr. Binney without visible embarrassment, and then, suddenly remembering a pressing engagement, went out to spread his extraordinary news.
"A lord!" said little Mr. Binney with great satisfaction. "Well, there are a good many lords I could buy up. However, that seems a nice young fellow. I wonder how he got on with his Virgil paper. I must ask him to-morrow."
Lucius groaned inwardly. "I shouldn't pal up to chaps like that, if I were you, father," he said. "I should keep as quiet as I could, or you'll make yourself and me look jolly ridiculous."
"Allow me to tell you, sir," said Mr. Binney up in arms at once, "that no action I choose to take is likely to make either you or myself look ridiculous. And I object to being made the butt of such observations from my own son. It isn't the first time it has happened, and in order that it may be the last, I beg to tell you that it is my intention to knock ten pounds a year off your very handsome allowance for every speech of that sort that I am called upon to listen to."
Lucius groaned again and passed his hand wearily across his brow, but made no verbal remonstrance to his father's harsh announcement, and just then the door of the house was heard to slam, and Dizzy tumbled noisily upstairs and into the room.
"My father—Mr. Stubbs," said Lucius dejectedly.
"How do you do, Mr. Binney," said the cheerful Dizzy. "Pleased to meet you. Lucy—I mean Lucius, told me you were thinking of giving us a turn up here. Not a bad place, is it? Better than Threadneedle Street, eh?"