THE frost hardened again in the night, and Tottenham’s was all white and shining when Edgar looked out from his window in the morning. The house was square and somewhat ugly, but the great semi-circle of trees which swept round it was made into something magical by the feathery silvering of the rime which coated every branch and every twig. He made an exclamation of pleasure when he looked out. The grass, the trees, the glistening pinnacles of the great conservatory which stretched to the south, just catching a glimpse of frosty and wavering sunlight upon their metallic tops, were all virgin white, though here and there it began to melt in the sun. Edgar had been far from thinking himself happy when he fell asleep on the previous night; he was still confused and harassed by his thoughts, keeping up a hopeless struggle against them; but he woke up in a state of causeless exhilaration, he did not know why. The hoar frost and the red sunshine went to his head. His heart beat more lightly than usual, the blood coursed pleasantly through his veins. He was like most imaginative people, often glad, and sorry he did not know why, and a certain unreasonable capricious confidence in his fate came over him to-day. Something good was coming to him he felt sure.
The breakfast table at Tottenham’s was lively enough. Lady Mary and her husband were in full and animated discussion about something or other, with a shoal of opened letters lying before them, and all the newspapers that could be had, when Edgar made his appearance somewhat late. The children who were present on the previous night were flanked by another small pair, too small to be restrained by mamma, who chattered and crowed, and made themselves very happy. A bright fire was burning, and the red sunshine shone in, glinting over the white covered table and its shining dishes.
“Mr. Earnshaw will agree with me,” Lady Mary cried as he went in, appealing to him.
“Come along, Earnshaw, you will take my side,” said Mr. Tottenham.
They were both eager to claim his help, and the elder children looked up at him with the freedom of perfect ease and intimacy.
“Nobody can ever call Molly the late one, now Mr. Earnshaw is here,” cried Phil exulting. They all received him as one of themselves, and in everything they said there was a silent suggestion that he belonged to them, that he was to remain with them, which bewildered him beyond words. The letters on the table were about every subject under heaven. They had their domestic correspondence, I suppose, and family affairs of their own; but these epistles were all about “schemes” of one kind and another, plans for the reformation of heaven knows how many classes of society, and for the improvement of the world altogether, which indeed has great need of improvement. I cannot tell what the special question might be that morning; there were so many of them that it was difficult for a stranger to discriminate; and as Lady Mary had told him, she and her husband very seldom agreed. They were both intensely in earnest, and both threw themselves with all their might into everything they did. Edgar, however, was not in a mood to utter any oracles, or to associate himself with one scheme or another. He was disposed to enjoy the strange holiday which had come to him, he could not tell how. He left the father and mother to themselves, and addressed himself to the children.
“Phil,” he said, “you and I are ignoramuses, we don’t know about these deep matters. Talk to me of something within my capacity; or Molly, if Phil will not talk, do you.”
The reply to this was that both children talked together.
“Mr. Earnshaw, the ice is bearing; what an awful pity it’s Sunday!” said the boy, “I wanted to tell you whenever you came in—” and “Oh, Mr. Earnshaw, come to church with us, and I’ll show you the village and my pet old woman who tells us stories,” said the little girl.
Edgar was delighted. He asked about the ice, what it was, an ornamental piece of water, or the village pond; and told Molly he would go and see her village, and try whether he or she could remember most of the sermon. Phil interfered when he heard this bargain. He shook his head over the rashness of his new friend.
“She has an awful good memory,” he said, “I wouldn’t try against her, Mr. Earnshaw, if I was you. She remembers what people said ages and ages ago, and comes down upon you after you have forgotten all about it. I wouldn’t go in against Moll.”
“But I haven’t such an awfully good memory for sermons,” said Molly, with modest deprecation of the excessive praise, “though I do remember most things pretty well.”
“Molly will win of course; but I shall try my best,” said Edgar. The children suited him best on this day of exhilaration when his heart was so foolishly free. He caught the father and mother looking at him, with significant glances to each other, while this conversation was going on, and was bewildered to think what they could mean. What did they mean? It was altogether bewildering and perplexing. The man who attended him that morning had informed him that he had been told off for his especial service, and had looked somewhat offended when Edgar laughed and declared he required no particular tending. “I ’ad my horders, Sir,” said the man. Everybody seemed to have their orders; and if that curious insanity of thought which had assailed him yesterday, a running riot of imagination, for which he did not feel himself to be responsible—if that came back again, tearing open the doors of his heart, and pouring through them, was it his fault?
The village lay at the park gates; but villages so near London are not like villages in the depths of the country. This was one where there was a number of smaller gentlefolks, tributaries on all great occasions of Tottenham’s; but when they had a chance, very glad to note any deficiency on the part of the man whom they called a nouveau riche, and even a shopkeeper, which was the title of deepest reproach they could think of. Indeed if Mr. Tottenham had not married Lady Mary, I believe he would have had many little pricks and stings from his poor yet well-born neighbours; but a Lady Mary in English village society cannot do wrong. It was a pleasant walk to church, where they all went together, the children walking demurely in honour of Sunday, though Phil’s eye and heart were tempted by the long expanse of white which showed between two lines of green at the right side of the road.
“It is hard enough to bear the big town carriage,” he said confidentially to Edgar, “or one of the farmer’s huge carts.”
“We’ll go and see it after church,” said Edgar in the same tone; and so the little procession moved on. Perhaps Lady Mary was the one who cared for this family progress to church the least. Mr. Tottenham, though he was given over to schemes of the most philosophical description, was the simplest soul alive, doing his duty in this respect with as light a heart as his children. But Lady Mary was very “viewy.” She was an advanced liberal, and read the “Fortnightly,” and smiled at many things that were said out of the pulpit once a week. Sometimes even she would laugh a little at the “duty” of going to church, and hearing old Mr. Burton maunder for half an hour; but all the same she respected her husband’s prejudices, and the traditions of the superior class, which, even when it believes in natural equality, still feels it necessary to set an example to its neighbours. Lady Mary professed sentiments which were inclined towards republicanism and democracy; but nevertheless she knew that she was one of the gods, and had to conduct herself as became that regnant position among men.
“There goes the shopkeeper and his family,” said Mrs. Colonel Witherington from her window, which looked out on the village green. “Girls, it is time to put on your bonnets. A man like that is bred up to be punctual; he comes to church as he goes to the shop, as the hour strikes. There he goes—”
“As ostentatiously humble as ever,” said one of the girls.
“And he has got one of the shopmen with him, mamma,” said Myra, who was the wit of the family. “Not a bad looking draper’s assistant; they always have the shopmen out on Sundays. Poor fellows, it is their only day.”
“Poor fellows, indeed! I suppose Lady Mary thinks because she is an earl’s daughter she can do whatever she likes; introducing such people as these into the society of gentle-folks,” cried the mother. “Myra, don’t stand laughing there, but put on your things.”
“We need not go into their society unless we please,” said Myra.
“And to be sure an Earl’s daughter can do whatever she likes; no nonsense of that description will make her lose caste,” said the eldest Miss Witherington, turning away from the window with a sigh. This poor young lady, not being an Earl’s daughter, had not been able to do as she liked, or to marry as she liked, and she felt the difference far more keenly than her mother did, who was affected only in theory. This was one of the many scraps of neighbourly talk which went on at Harbour Green when the party from Tottenham’s were seen walking through the village to church. Lady Mary was an Earl’s daughter, and she did take it upon her to do precisely as she liked; but her neighbours directed most of their indignation upon her husband who had no such privileges, a man who was civil to everybody, and whom they all confessed, whenever they wanted anything of him, to be the best-natured fellow in the world.
The service in the little church was not so well-conducted as it might have been, had Lady Mary taken more interest in it; but still the lesser authorities had done something for the training of the choir, and a gentle Ritualism, not too pronounced as yet, kept everything in a certain good order. Lady Mary herself did not take the same honest and simple part in the devotions as her husband and children did; various parts of the service went against her views; she smiled a little as she listened to the sermon. A close observer might have noticed that, though she behaved with the most perfect decorum, as a great lady ought, she yet felt herself somewhat superior to all that was going on. I cannot say that Edgar noticed this on his first Sunday at Harbour Green, though he may have remarked it afterwards; but Edgar’s mind was not at the present moment sufficiently free to remark upon individual peculiarity. The sense of novelty or something else more exciting still worked in him, and left him in a state of vague agitation; and when the service being over, Lady Mary hurried on with the children, on pretence of calling on some one, and left Mr. Tottenham with Edgar, the young man felt his heart beat higher, and knew that the moment at last had come.
“Well, Earnshaw! you have not had much time to judge, it is true; but how do you think you like us?” said Mr. Tottenham. The question was odd, but the questioner’s face was as grave as that of a judge. “We are hasty people, and you are hasty,” he added, “so it is not so absurd as it might be; how do you think you shall like us? Now speak out, never mind our feelings. I am not asking you sentimentally, but from a purely business point of view.”
“I am so hasty a man,” said Edgar, laughing, with a much stronger sense of the comic character of the position than the other had, “that I made up my mind at sight, as one generally does; but since then you have so bribed me by kindness—”
“Then you do like us!” said Mr. Tottenham, holding out his hand, “I thought you would. Of course if you had not liked us our whole scheme would have come to nothing, and Mary had rather set her heart on it. You will be sure not to take offence, or to think us impertinent if I tell you what we thought?”
“One word,” said Edgar with nervous haste. “Tell me first what it has been that has made you take such a warm interest in me?”
Mr. Tottenham winced and twisted his slim long person as a man in an embarrassing position is apt to do. “Well,” he said, “Earnshaw, I don’t know that we can enter into it so closely as that. We have always taken an interest in you, since the time when you were a great friend of the Thornleigh’s and we were always hearing of you; and when you behaved so well in that bad business. And then some months ago we heard that you had been seen coming up from Scotland—travelling,” Mr. Tottenham added, with hesitation, “in the cheap way.”
“Who told you that?” Edgar’s curiosity gave a sharpness which he had not intended to his voice.
“Come, come,” said Mr. Tottenham good-humouredly; “that is just the point which I cannot enter into. But you may permit us to be interested, though we can’t describe in full detail how it came about. Earnshaw, Mary and I are fanciful sort of people, as you perceive; we don’t always keep to the beaten path; and we want you to do us a favour. What I am going to ask may be a little irregular; it may sound a little obtrusive; you may take it amiss; though I hope not—”
“I shall not take it amiss in any case,” Edgar managed to say; but his heart was beating very loudly, and an agitation for which he could not account had got possession of his whole being. His mind went wildly over a whole world of conjecture, and I need not add that he was utterly astray in everything he thought of, and did not reach to the faintest notion of what his companion meant to be at.
“In the first place,” said Mr. Tottenham nervously, “it is evident that you must wait till there is an opening in that business with Newmarch. I don’t doubt in the least that he wants to have you, and that he’ll give you the first vacancy; but he can’t kill off a man on purpose, though I dare say he would if he could. I don’t go on to say in the second place, as I might perhaps, that a Queen’s Messenger has a very wearisome life, and not much to make amends for it—”
Here he paused to take breath, while Edgar watched and wondered, getting more and more bewildered every moment in the maze of conjecture through which he could not find his way.
“Of course,” said Mr. Tottenham, himself displaying a certain amount of rising excitement, “I don’t mean to say that you ought not to accept such an appointment if it was offered. But in the meantime, what are you to do? Live in London, and waste your resources, and break your spirit with continual waiting? I say no, no, by no means; and this is what put it into my head to say what I am going to say to you, and to insist upon your coming here.”
What was he going to say? Still Edgar, subdued by his own excitement, could make no reply. Mr. Tottenham paused also, as if half fearing to take the plunge.
“What we meant, Earnshaw,” he said abruptly, at last, “what Mary and I want, if you will do it, is—that you should stay with us and take charge of our boy.”
The last words he uttered hastily, and almost sharply, as if throwing something out that burned him while he held it. And oh! dear reader, how can I express to you the way in which poor Edgar fell, fell, low down, and lower down, as into some echoing depth, when these words fell upon his dismayed and astonished ears! Take charge of their boy! God help him! what had he been thinking about? He could not himself tell; nothing, a chimera, the foolishest of dreams, some wild fancy which involved the future in a vain haze of brightness with the image of the veiled maiden in the railway carriage, and of Gussy, who was never veiled. Oh, Heaven and earth! what a fool, what a fool he was! She had nothing to do with it; he himself had nothing to do with it. It was but a benevolent scheme of people with a great many benevolent schemes about them, for the relief of a poor young fellow whom they knew to be in trouble. That was all. Edgar went on walking as in a dream, feeling himself spin round and round and go down, as to the bottom of some well. He could hear that Mr. Tottenham went on speaking, and the hum of his voice made, as it were, a running accompaniment to his own hubbub of inarticulate thoughts; Edgar heard it, yet heard it not. When he woke up from this confusion, it was quite suddenly, by reason of a pause in the accompanying voice. The last words his bewildered intelligence caught up were these:
“You will think it over, and tell me your decision later. You will understand that we both beg you to forgive us, if we have said or done anything which is disagreeable to you, Earnshaw. You promise me to remember that?”
“Disagreeable!” Edgar murmured half consciously. “Why should it be disagreeable?” but even his own voice seemed to be changed in his own ear as he said it. He was all changed, and everything about him. “I must go across to the pond before I go in,” he added, somewhat abruptly. “I promised Philip to look at the ice;” and with scarcely any further excuse, set off across the grass, from which the whiteness and crispness of the morning frosts had been stolen away by the sun. He could not get free of the physical sensation of having fallen. He seemed to himself to be bruised and shaken; he could do nothing with his mind but realize and identify his state; he could not discuss it with himself. It did not seem to him even that he knew what he had been thinking of, what he had been hoping; he knew only that he had fallen from some strange height, and lay at the bottom somewhere, aching and broken in heart and strength, stunned by the fall, and so confused that he did not know what had happened to him, or what he must do next. In this state of mind he walked mechanically across the grass, and gazed at the frozen pond, without knowing what he was doing, and then strode mechanically away from it, and went home. (How soon we begin to call any kind of a place home, when we have occasion to use it as such!). He went home, back to his room, the room which surely, he thought to himself, was too good for Mr. Tottenham’s tutor, which was the post he had been asked to occupy. Mr. Tottenham’s boy’s tutor, that was the phrase.
It was his own repetition of these words which roused him a little; the tutor in the house; the handy man who was made to do everything; the one individual among the gentlemen of the house whom it was possible to order about; who was an equal, and yet no equal. No, Edgar said to himself, with a generous swelling of his heart, it was not thus that a dependent would be treated in Mr. Tottenham’s house; but the very idea of being a dependent struck him with such sharp poignancy of surprise, as well as pain, that he could not calm himself down, or make the best of it. He had never tasted what this was like yet. When he had made his application to Lord Newmarch, the experience had not been a pleasant one; but it was short at least, and the position he had hoped for had been independent at least. In it, he would have been no man’s servant, but the Queen’s, whom all men delight to serve. Mr. Tottenham’s tutor was a very different thing.
He sat at his window, and heard without knowing the great luncheon-bell peal out through all the echoes. He felt that he could not go downstairs to confront them all, while still in the confusion and stupor of his downfall; for he had sustained a downfall more terrible than anyone knew, more bewildering than he could even realize himself; from vague, strange, delicious suspicions of something coming which might change all his life, down to a sickening certainty of something come, which would indeed change everything in every way, in the estimation of the world and of himself.
Mr. Tottenham walked home very seriously on his side, after this interview. He had some sort of comprehension that the proposal he had just made was one which, at the first hearing, would not delight his new friend; and he was sufficiently friendly and large-minded to permit the young man a little moment of ruffled pride, a little misery, even a little offence, before he could make up his mind to it, notwithstanding that it was, on the part of the Tottenhams, an impulse of almost pure and unmixed charity and kindness which had suggested it. They were impulsive people both, and fond of making themselves the Providence of poorer people; and the very best thing that can be said of them, better even than their universal and crotchety willingness to serve everybody who came in their way, was their composure when the intended recipients of their bounty hesitated, or, as sometimes happened, kicked at it altogether. Their kindnesses, their bounties, their crotchets, and their theories were all mixed up together, and might occasionally be less good, and do less good than they were meant to do; but the toleration which permitted a prospective protégé to weigh the benefit offered, without any angry consciousness of his want of gratitude, was admirable, and much more unusual in this world than even the kindness itself. Mr. Tottenham hurried off to his wife, and told her all about it; and the two together waited for Edgar’s decision with sympathetic excitement, almost as much disturbed in their minds as he was, and with no indignant feeling that their good intentions were having scanty justice. On the contrary, they discussed the matter as they might have done something in which their amour propre was not at all engaged.
“I hope he will see it is the best thing for him,” said Mr. Tottenham.
“Of course it is the best thing for him, and he must see it,” said the more impetuous Lady Mary; but neither one nor the other declared that he would be a fool or ungrateful if he neglected this opening, as so many intending benefactors would. They discussed it all the afternoon, taking their Sunday stroll together through the greenhouses, which were splendid, and talking of nothing but Edgar.
“He must do it; we must insist upon it, Tom,” Lady Mary cried, growing more and more eager.
“I cannot make him, dear, if he don’t see it,” said the husband, shaking his head.
Thus both upstairs and downstairs there was but one subject of consideration. The ugly things about dependence, about domestic slavery, about the equal who would not be an equal, which Edgar was saying to himself, found no echo in the talk of the good people, full of wealth and power to benefit others, who puckered their brows on the subject downstairs. In this respect the thoughts of the poor man whom they wanted to befriend, were much less generous than theirs who wanted to befriend him. He judged them harshly, and they judged him kindly. He attributed intentions and motives to them which they were guiltless of, and thought of himself as degraded in their eyes by the kindness they had offered; while, in fact, he had become a most important person to them, solely on that account—a person occupying a superior position, with power to decide against or for them, to honour or discredit their judgment. Indeed, I am bound to allow that Edgar was not generous at all at this moment of his career, and that his hosts were. But ah me! it is so much easier to be generous, to be tolerant, to think the best, when you are rich and can confer favours; so difficult to keep up your optimist views, and to see the best side of everything, when you are poor!
“He will either come down and tell us that he accepts, or he will pack his things and go off to-night,” said Lady Mary as they waited. They were seated in the conservatory, in the centre circle under the glittering glass dome, which had been built to give room for the great feathery branches of a palm tree. This was the favourite spot in which all the pretty luxury of these conservatories culminated. Some bright-coloured Persian rugs were laid on the floor, here and there, upon which were some half-dozen chairs, half rustic and wholly luxurious. All the flowers that art can extract or force from nature in the depth of Winter were grouped about, great moon-discs of white camellias, heaths covered with fairy bells, spotless primulas rising from out the rough velvet of their leaves. The atmosphere was soft as a moderate gentle Summer, and the great palm leaves stirred now and then against the high dome of glass. Mr. Tottenham lounged on a rustic sofa, with a cloud of anxiety on his face, and Lady Mary, too anxious to lounge, sat bolt upright and listened. Why were those good people anxious? I cannot tell; they wanted, I suppose, to succeed in this good action which they had set their hearts on doing; they did not want to be foiled; and they had set their hearts upon delivering Edgar from his difficulties, and making him comfortable. Along with their other sentiments there was mixed a certain generous fear lest they should have been precipitate, lest they should have hurt the feelings and wounded the pride of their friend whom they wished to serve. I wish there were more of such people, and more of such susceptibilities in the world.
They sat thus, until the twilight grew so deep and shadowy that they could scarcely see each other. It was very cold outside, where everything began again to congeal and whiten, and all the world resigned itself with a groan to the long, long interval of dead darkness, hopelessness, and cold which must deepen before day. At the end of a vista of shrubs and great evergreen plants, the red glow of the drawing-room fire shone out, shining there like a ruddy star in the distance. Lady Mary drew her shawl round her with a little shiver, and her husband got up and yawned in the weariness of suspense. Had he gone away without giving an answer? Had they done nothing but harm, though they had wished so much to do good. They both started like a couple of guilty conspirators when at length a step was heard approaching, and Edgar appeared, half hesitating, half eager, against the glow of the distant fire.