NEXT morning Harry went to the office with an air of resolution about him which no one could have mistaken. He thought the others looked at him curiously with investigating eyes, which, indeed, was true enough; for his predecessor there never could make out how it was that the stranger had gained so much interest with the Consul, and Paolo, who was the only other person present, was full of the most anxious wonder and suspense. But, as it happened, Harry was kept so fully occupied all day that he could not say a word to the Vice-Consul, and his air of resolution and sense of being wound up for a great crisis, came to nothing. But he did not go near the Consulate in the evening. Had things been in their ordinary course he would, in the most natural way, and, indeed, with a semblance of necessity, have proceeded there to consult Mr. Bonamy about some matter of business, or to ask directions from him. But he forbore. He sat in his own rooms all the evening, feeling it unutterably long, trying to amuse himself with reading, and finding very little amusement in that somewhat unwonted exercise. He had been “reading up,” with a great deal of industry and some interest, books which he had heard discussed in the Vice-Consul’s house, and in this way had at least procured a good deal of information, the advantage of which was evident. But Harry had not read for enjoyment, and now that things had come to this pass, and that he was about to be compelled to give up the society of the Bonamys, and lose the gratification of pleasing Rita, it seemed to his practical mind that there was no great reason for continuing those studies. It was quite likely that he never would live among such people again, and why should he take so much trouble—trouble taken with the idea of pleasing them? it was no longer worth his while. He was driven back to his books indeed by the tedium of the long, unoccupied evening, for he had no heart to go out, to be waylaid by Paolo, and have questions put to him which he would find it very difficult to answer. But he yawned a great deal, and went to bed very early, and slept badly in consequence, tossing about for two hours and hearing the melancholy clocks peal. Next day he was resolved he must speak. Indeed, it would be indispensable that he should, as it was the day on which Rita received, and he had never yet been absent from her drawing-room on that special evening. He had a good opportunity this time, for the Vice-Consul called for him as soon as he appeared after his luncheon, and bade him bring certain papers to be examined. “I quite expected you to have brought them last night,” Mr. Bonamy said. “For two nights we have not seen you, Oliver. Rita was asking me to-day whether you were ill. I hope you are not ill. There’s no fever here that I know of; still it is always well to take care.”
“I am not ill, Sir,” said Harry, colouring high, and then growing pale; “but there was another reason. I should like to speak to you for a few minutes, about myself, if you could spare the time.”
“Certainly I can spare you the time,” said the Vice-Consul, readily; “but not now, you know. Come to me again as soon as the office is closed. Shall we talk your business over here, or in the house?”
“Here, if you please,” said Harry.
“Here be it, then. Do you know you excite my curiosity? you look so serious. But I hope it’s nothing disagreeable, nothing to interfere with our alliance?” said the Vice-Consul, good-humouredly. He thought he knew exactly what it was. No doubt the family had found him out, and Harry was about to be recalled to its bosom. This would give Mr. Bonamy himself a little regret, and he could understand that to leave a place where everybody had been kind to him would be a sort of trial to the young man; but at the same time it was far better for him that he should be reconciled to his family. So he went through his business with a little gentle interest, looking forward to the éclaircissement. It was like the third volume of a novel to the Vice-Consul, and even something more than that, more than the mere end of a story which had interested him—for it would also settle various questions in his mind, and prove if he had been right or not in the instantaneous opinion which he had formed about Harry’s concerns. He felt quite sure that he would prove to have been right. By the time Harry returned to him, after the work of the afternoon was done, he had made out within himself quite what the scene was to be. The young man would say: “My father is here;” or “My brother is here,” as might be; and a hale, hearty old country gentleman, or a young, ruddy, fresh-coloured youth, like Harry himself, would be brought in and presented to him, and he would give himself the gratification of saying, “This is precisely how I expected it would be; I have been looking for you this past year daily, though I had no notion who you were.” When Harry came back with the same face of serious excitement the Consul almost laughed. “Bring them in, bring them in,” he said, “I have nothing to say against you. You need not be afraid that I will give you a bad character.” Harry looked at him with that look of blank astonishment which so often turns into lofty superiority and disapproval of their seniors’ folly in youthful eyes.
“Bring—whom in?” he said.
“Your people, to be sure, my dear Oliver. Come, Oliver, I am not an old wife; you can’t conceal it from me.”
“I know nothing about my people,” said Harry, hastily; “I have nothing more to say about them than I have already told you. Things are exactly as they were between them and me. What I have got to tell you is a very different sort of thing. But you will see by it, at least, Sir, that I have no wish to conceal anything from you.”
“Bless my soul!” said the Vice-Consul, “what’s the matter? Have you got into any scrape? Have you come in contact with the police? What is the matter, my boy?”
“It is nothing outside of this house, Sir,” Harry said, with a grave smile; “the police have got nothing to say to it. If it is a scrape it is one I have got myself into, and I must get myself out of it. Anyhow, it is not likely to hurt anybody but myself,” and here, in spite of all his precautions, his lip quivered a little. At this moment, the very worst for such a strong wave of feeling, it suddenly came over him what a tremendous change it would be, and how much it would hurt himself—if nobody else.
“You alarm me,” said Mr. Bonamy, growing grave in his turn. “My dear fellow, I hope you feel that I take an interest in everything that concerns you, and that you may safely confide in me——”
“Yes, Sir, I am sure of that,” said Harry; and then he added; “all the more that it concerns you too.”
Mr. Bonamy pushed away his chair from the table, opened his eyes wide, and looked at Harry as if he thought him mad.
“I can’t come to your house any more, Sir,” said Harry, “that’s what I wanted to tell you. I’ve enjoyed it very much, and it has done me more good than anything else in my life—but I ought not to do it, and I can’t do it any longer. I hope you won’t think I am an ungrateful cur; I don’t think I am that. But I must give it up, Sir, and I hope you’ll excuse me for it. I’d rather not say any more.”
“Oliver,” said the Vice-Consul, greatly disturbed, “what is the meaning of this? Do you mean there is something in your past—something in your character and actions that makes you unfit to be my visitor? I have always trusted in your honour. If it’s that, and your conscience has been quickened to find it out, of course I have nothing more to say.”
“It’s not that,” said Harry, bluntly. “I am not afraid of my conscience. It says as much to me, I suppose, as to other people; but you might hear all it says and welcome. There is nothing against my character here or elsewhere. You know as much harm of me as there is to know.”
“I know no harm of you,” said the Vice-Consul. “Come, come, don’t alarm me. If you find we don’t suit you—though by your manner I should never have guessed it—why, then, give us up, my fine fellow, and there’s no more to be said.”
Harry laughed a somewhat tremulous laugh.
“I should think you did suit me,” he said. “I don’t believe I was ever half so happy before.”
“Then, in the name of wonder, what does this mean?” the Vice-Consul cried.
Harry cleared his throat; his lips were beginning to get parched and his throat was dry.
“Did you never hear, Sir,” he said, abruptly, “of a fellow falling in love—with a girl he’d no business to fall in love with?”
Mr. Bonamy half rose out of his chair, then changed his mind and dropped back again. His own face became suffused with colour. A sudden exclamation came from his lips it spite of himself.
“Is this what has happened to you?” he said.
“This is what has happened to me,” said Harry. “I’m very sorry—nobody can be more sorry—it shuts me out from a great deal I had got to be proud of, and happy in. I wish I had made any blunder in the world rather than this; but it’s done, and I can’t help it. So the only thing I have got to do now is—— well, either to stay away from the house, or to go away altogether, as you think best.”
“I suppose then that at my house you run the risk,” said the Vice-Consul, with suspicious breaks in his words, either of doubt or excitement, “of meeting—the young lady?”
Harry did not say a word; but he looked at him fixedly, with a deep colour flaming over his face. At this the Vice-Consul gazed at him with an alarmed expression, gradually catching fire too.
“You don’t mean to say——?” he cried, and then he was silent, and there ensued a confused and uncomfortable pause.
“Yes, Sir,” said Harry. He had looked his chief in the face all this time; but now he avoided the other’s eye, “that is just how it stands. I told you it was not my fault. I never thought of such a thing. It never,” he said, putting out his hand to a bundle of papers upon the table by which he was standing, and turning them vaguely over and over, “it never—happened to me before.”
When the Vice-Consul looked at him standing there, with that look of half-astonished simplicity on his face, and those artless words on his lips, it was all he could do to keep in an outburst of laughter. He thought he had never come in contact with so simple-minded, and candid, and honourable a fellow. He was startled and alarmed, and made uneasy by his confession; but yet he had the greatest desire to laugh. Yet why should he laugh? it was serious enough; his lively mind jumped to the possibility that his Rita might prefer this young stranger to himself. It would be an extraordinary choice, he could not but think; but yet, alas! that was how things often were in this strange world. A girl would prefer a man she had seen three or four times in a ball-room, to the father whose very existence she was; and nobody would be surprised at it; it was the course of nature; it was the way of the world. This idea chilled and alarmed him to the bottom of his heart; but yet he could hardly help laughing at Harry and his perturbed air. “I never thought of such a thing—it never happened before.” The Consul was almost too much amused to take in the seriousness of the event.
“I presume you have said nothing to her,” he said at last, looking portentously serious by reason of the inclination to untimely mirth, which he had to subdue.
“That is just the thing,” cried Harry, rousing up from his bashful pre-occupation. “No, I have not spoken—what you would call speaking; but on Monday night I just dropped a word——”
“Good Lord!” cried the Vice-Consul. He had no longer any inclination to laugh; what he was disposed to do was to take the young fellow by the throat.
“You can’t be more frightened than I was,” said Harry, ingenuously. “It was by that I found out. Of course I knew I admired—her more than anybody I had ever seen; but I had no more notion how far it had gone—— and then like a fool I began to speak of going home to England, and how I was sure I could take her all safe if she would go with me. That was all: I assure you that was all,” cried Harry, discomposed by Mr. Bonamy’s look and manner. He was alarmed by this look: the Vice-Consul had risen up, trembling with wrath.
“I would like to know,” he cried, “what more you could have said!—what more could you wish to say? And this is what you call love! To betray my child; to propose death to her—death! Oh, boy, boy, do you know what you are doing in your folly and simplicity; beguiling her to her death, and me to—— Good God! why should I always be such a fool? Why did I have this fellow here?”
“You are judging me too harshly, Sir,” cried Harry; “you think it was a great deal worse than really happened. She never took any notice of it; it hadn’t the least meaning to her. She asked me did I know something—some physic I suppose,” Harry said, in a kind of parenthesis, with disdain—“that would make it safe. That was all she thought of it; but as for me, as soon as I had said it I came to myself. I’ve had a dreadful time of it since,” he added once more, with that air of downright sincerity and solemnity which made the Vice-Consul wish to smile. “I’ve turned over every kind of plan in my mind. Sometimes I’ve thought of going right away; but that seemed hard, too, when I had just got settled here. And at the last the right thing seemed just to come and tell you. Of course I put myself in your hands. I’ll do whatever you think it proper I should do: give up the office; go away from the town; anything you please. I don’t want to leave you—or her,” cried Harry. “God knows! you have been so kind to me!”
And then the Vice-Consul, hearing the young fellow’s voice falter, and seeing that he kept his eyes down to conceal the water that had got into them, felt a little knot in his throat too, and was melted in spite of himself.
“Oliver,” he said, “I don’t want to be hard upon you. You said she took no notice—that is just like her; she is no coquette, my girl; she is very innocent. I daresay it never occurred to her that you meant anything.”
“I don’t think it did, Sir,” Harry said eagerly. Of course he had no clue to Rita’s retirement to her own room, or the amused consideration she gave to the subject there.
“I don’t want to be hard upon you,” Mr. Bonamy repeated, “if that is the case. Answer me one more thing, Oliver, and answer it on your honour. Have you any reason to think (that I should have to put such a question?) that if you had spoken out more plainly, she—— Heavens! I can’t put it into words.”
“How could I,” cried Harry, almost provoked, “have reason to think anything about it, when I never even suspected myself? It was that word that opened my eyes.”
And then there was another pause. Harry stood turning over and over that bundle of papers. He looked at them as if he thought they contained some secret of state. He took them in his hand as if anxious to know how many ounces they weighed. His face wore a look of the gravest stolid seriousness. He had now withdrawn from the consideration of his duty, or what he ought to do, and put it into another person’s hands. He was freed of the responsibility, and he had only to wait now to see what he should be told to do.
Then once more a sense of the humour of the situation intruded upon its seriousness in the Vice-Consul’s eyes. His anger and alarm were quenched in a sense of the absolute simplicity and honesty of the culprit, and a hope that no harm had been done. Mr. Bonamy began to breathe freely again, even to smile.
“Sit down,” he said, “and let us talk this over. I don’t blame you, Oliver. I can understand that you were not seriously to blame; and, if no harm is done—I suppose you will promise me that it shall not occur again.”
“Well, Sir,” said Harry, “that is just what I should like to be able to do; but seeing I was such a fool as to do it once, how can I tell that I may not be a greater fool again? especially as then I did not know anything about it, whereas I know all about it now.”
“That is just the reason,” said Mr. Bonamy. “Now you are on your guard, and you will know when to be watchful. I can’t give you permission to make love to—my daughter, Oliver. I suppose you did not expect I could?”
“Oh, no,” cried Harry, eagerly; “not in the least. I could not, of course, even if you did, for I have no money. I could no more marry than I could fly.”
“Marry!” cried the Vice-Consul. The young man said the word in the most matter-of-fact way, but it took away the other’s breath. “Do you know what you are doing?” he cried; “you are putting a knife to my throat. Marry! That means that if you could you would break up this home of mine in which you confess you have been received so kindly. You would rob me of all I have. You would take from me everything that makes life precious. For what, young man, for what? Because you admire a pretty face! You don’t know any more of her—I am not sure that you are able to appreciate any more of her. But she is everything in the world—she is all that makes life worth living—to me.”
Harry threw down the bundle of papers and looked across the table with the intensest astonishment. “Do you mean,” he said, “that you don’t intend her ever to be married at all? Is nobody to have the chance? Is she always to be kept up in one place, and never to settle, nor have her own choice and her own life?”
Mr. Bonamy felt as if he were being stoned—one solid, heavy fact tossed at him after another; and looked at his questioner with a sort of gasp between the blows. He faltered after a while, “She is very young. She has everything that her heart can desire. Why should she not be content, at least for years to come, in her father’s house?”
“I always understood, Sir,” said Harry, with his usual straightforwardness, “that the right thing for girls was to marry when they were young, and that parents were supposed to wish it.”
“To scheme for it, perhaps?” said Mr. Bonamy, furiously, “and put out all sorts of snares to catch young fellows like you—eh? To lay traps for you, and lead you on, and give you encouragement and opportunity, and so forth? Perhaps you think that’s what I’ve been doing—eh? God forgive me,” he said, “in my day I’ve said that sort of thing, and believed it myself; I’ve sneered and scoffed like the rest—and now I’ve got my punishment. You think there is nothing so fine for a girl as to get married—eh?”
Harry was struck with consternation by this attack; but yet, feeling that he had right on his side, he stood his ground. “I am not saying anything about you, Sir,” he said, “but surely it is thought the best thing that could happen. I’ve always heard it. Fathers and mothers, you know, Sir, don’t generally live as long as their children—at least, that is what is supposed—and they like to see their daughters settled, don’t they, before they die?”
This was what the French would call a brutal speech—for, in the first place, it was true; and then Mr. Bonamy was at an age which seemed old to Harry, but rather young than otherwise to himself, and he was not at all pleased to have it taken for granted that he must shortly be going to die. Yes, of course Rita would outlive him, would live long, he hoped, after him; but still the idea that there was any need to marry her off in haste, lest he might die and leave her before she was—settled, was most repugnant to him; it went to his heart, wounding him with a possibility which he had no desire to think of; and it made him hot and angry, as if it had been a personal insult. No one likes to be told that he has come to a period of life at which it is more likely than otherwise that he will shortly die, and that it is very necessary to take precautions against that event. It was all he could do to keep from bursting out upon Harry, crushing him with a bitter rejoinder. He to address his benefactor thus! He to speak in this tone to the man who had received him when nobody else would, who had lifted him out of all the difficulties of a stranger, and opened not only his office, which gave him bread, but his house, which gave him friends, and position, and everything a young man could wish for! These words were rushing to Mr. Bonamy’s lips, when fortunately a sense of his personal dignity, and of the impropriety of any such demonstration, came in and stopped him. Harry’s speech, after all, was good common sense, just the sort of thing that everybody says; the world was on that side of the question. Perhaps prudence and the foresight which love itself ought to possess was on that side too. So he was silent, repressing the first instinct of reply. When he was able to do it, he answered with as much self-possession as he could muster.
“I admire your prudence, Mr. Oliver. I hope you will always see your own duties with the same clearness which you display about those of others; and I have no doubt you are quite right; but it is a question which I don’t care to discuss. Let me say, before we finish this talk, that I think you have behaved very honourably, and as a gentleman should; and I quite accept your reason for coming to my house much less frequently. I will make your excuses to my daughter; and nothing that has passed need make any difference in our official relations,” he added, looking up with a smile that was sharp and cold, not like his usual sunshine, “in that respect there is no possible reason why everything should not go on as before.”
“Very well, Sir,” said Harry, getting up with some confusion. The conversation had been going on so long, and so much less indignation than he expected had been in the Vice-Consul’s air at the beginning, that this sudden sentence confounded him. He was quite ready, when he began, to be taken at his word; but somehow he was not now so ready; the bitterness had seemed to be past, and he had hoped that the indulgent and fatherly friend before him would have found some way by which he should still be permitted to come and go. But now all at once Harry found himself, in his own words, “shut up,” and had nothing to do but to stumble to his feet as quickly as he could, and take himself off, much subdued and astonished, to his desk in the outer office—where he gave his mind to his business, not too clearly, but with as much devotion as was practicable, for the rest of the day.