THE inn at Underhayes was not much to speak of, but the parlour in which the two friends talked was larger than Mrs. Bates’s parlour, where all the family assembled and all their existence was past. Durant sat down at the table to consume a simple dinner, a hastily-cooked chicken, which he had ordered after his journey, and which was not so savoury as the supper which Mrs. Bates would have given him; nor was it so cheerful a meal. While he ate, Arthur Curtis paced back and forward at the other end of the room, which, with its bare carpet and scant furniture, was still less objectionable than the room they had left, the place where all his happiness had lain so long. Perhaps if the shock had come sooner some deliverance would have been possible, though at the cost of a heartbreak; but nothing was possible now except to carry out his engagement. Lewis Durant was both honourable and high-minded, yet he had come with no better intention than to prevent his friend from keeping his word, with very little regard for the word and none at all for the happiness of the other person who was chiefly concerned. Happiness of a girl who had entangled a young man so much above herself! what was that to anybody? If she should be robbed of her happiness, why, was it not all her own fault? But he had not been so injudicious yet as to broach this idea; he was approaching it gradually, “acquiring information” on the subject. Of course it was natural that any one so interested in Arthur’s affairs as he was, should like to know all about it, and he had seen Lady Curtis herself he did not conceal from his friend, and the anxious mother was “in a great way.”
“I’d like to take up satisfactory news, old fellow,” he said; “both for their sake and my own.”
“What do you call satisfactory news?” said Arthur. His mind was in an unexampled commotion. His old life and his new had come into active conflict, and he himself seemed to be the puppet between them. But in the midst of the excitement caused by this bringing back of all the habits of his former existence, the poor young fellow was miserable at the thought of having come away from his love without a kind word, without a look even, which could stand in the place of their usual Good-night.
“Well—it is difficult to speak in plain words between you and them. Of course you know that this can’t be expected to give them satisfaction, Arthur. They have not been led on step by step as you have—”
“What do you mean?” he said hastily. “Do you mean the vulgar sort of thing that every fool says, that she has been leading me on?”
“I certainly did not say so,” said Durant. “I mean they have not been used to all the circumstances like you. Your mind has become familiar by degrees with this family—with everything about them.”
“Say it out plainly; don’t mind my feelings,” said the other bitterly, “with the difference between Bates, the tax-collector’s daughter and Sir John Curtis’s son. Well! and what is the difference? All on her side; all in her favour. She getting nothing but additional beauty from all her surroundings, I—doing not much honour to mine.”
“I was not making any personal comparison, Arthur,” said Durant, cautiously; “I was saying only—what you will fully allow—that taken just by themselves, without that knowledge of personal excellence which I suppose you have;—that the difference of the circumstances—the difference of manners—well! cannot but startle—shock perhaps—your immediate friends.”
“That means that you are shocked and startled. Mr. Bates’s rum-and-water was too much for your delicate nerves,” said Arthur, with a sneer; “and yet you and I have seen worse things that we were not shocked at.”
“Arthur, do you want to quarrel with me? or can you suppose I should have come here, if I had felt the slightest desire or intention to quarrel with you?”
The young man did not answer for some minutes, then he threw himself into a chair by the table and concealed his face from the other’s gaze, supporting his head on his hands. “Don’t you think I know everything you can say?” he cried; “it is plain enough. They are not like us—there are things in them which even I don’t relish. Their ways are more homely, their manners more simple than we have been used to.”
“If it was only simplicity,” said Durant, shrugging his shoulders, and thinking of the blandishments of the Misses Matilda and Sarah Jane.
“Well,” said Arthur, with a sudden outbreak, “call it what you like, what disagreeable name you please, and then I ask you what have you got to say to her? It is she I am going to marry, not her family. What have you got to say to HER? She is the person to be thought of. Old Bates is an old tax-collector, and the mother a good-natured old woman, and the sisters flirts if you please; I don’t say anything to the contrary; but what have you to say against the girl herself? What of HER?”
“Arthur! I have nothing to say; how could I? She sat behind backs, with you to screen her. I saw that she was pretty—”
“You saw that she was like a lily growing among weeds; that she was like a princess among the common people; that she behaved like the best-bred of ladies. That is what you would say, if you allowed yourself to speak the truth.”
“If I speak at all I shall certainly speak the truth,” said Durant, with a sigh of impatience. To him as to everyone else, Nancy Bates had seemed only an ordinary pretty girl; nothing more.
“Then speak!” said Arthur, “for if there is one assumption more intolerable than another, it is that of saying nothing with the aim of sparing your friend, as one who has nothing but what is disagreeable to say.”
“You press me too hard,” said Durant, smiling. “What can I say after what you have said? Arthur, this girl may be a Una for anything I can tell—as you wish me to believe she is; but how can I know? I can see she is pretty; but I don’t know her; how can I divine what her character is? She may be everything you think; but all that I can possibly make out is that she is a pretty girl, with sense enough to hold her tongue.”
Arthur grew red and grew pale as his friend spoke; his lip curled over his teeth with a furious sneer, almost like the snarl of a dog.
“Don’t you think,” he said, with an enraged semblance of extreme civility, “that when you are speaking of a lady who is about to become my wife, you might speak of her by another name than that of ‘the girl.’”
“By Jove you are too good!” said Durant, half angry, half amused, “what should I say? You called her a girl yourself, and so she is; so are the Princesses for that matter.”
“I call her many things which it would not become strangers to call her,” said Arthur, “and I think, perhaps, on the whole, it would be better taste not to favour me with your opinion on this subject. You would not, I suppose, give me your frank estimate of my mother, for instance, whatever it might be—and it is equally unnecessary of my wife.”
“As you please,” said Durant, offended; and then there ensued a temporary pause, during which the stranger, driven back upon that occupation, munched a crust with indignant fervour, and Arthur sat moodily by, holding his head in his hands. It was Durant who was the first to recover himself. The man who stands in the suspicious position of adviser and reprover, naturally does regain his temper sooner than the person who is advised and reproved. He said in a conciliating tone, “Why should we quarrel? I can have no right to disapprove of your choice. I am not here as the agent of your family, Arthur, who might have a right to interfere, but only as your friend. I can wish nothing but what is for your good.”
“For my good!” the young man said through his teeth; then he, too, smoothed himself down. “I don’t want to quarrel, Durant; but if my mother thinks I am to be dictated to—or any friend of mine supposes he can come to look surprise and criticism, even if he does not say anything——”
“This is too much,” said Durant, laughing; “if you are going to put meaning in my eyes which nature has denied to them, what can I say to you? I who scarcely see anything, to look criticism is rather too strong for a blind old mole like me!”
“Short-sighted people see a great deal more than they own,” said Arthur, oracularly, “but I don’t want to quarrel.” And then again there was a pause.
“Answer me one thing,” said Durant, re-opening the question after an interval; “have you really made up your mind to marry this—lady? Is it all settled? Is there room, or is there no room for anything I might find to say?”
“What could you find to say?”
“That is not the question,” said Durant; “whatever it might be it is unnecessary to say it if everything is settled. But, Arthur, if there is still time—if I may still once, before it is too late, speak plainly to you?”
“It is too late,” said Arthur hotly. “I am to be married in a fortnight; I should be married to-morrow if I could. Supposing you had the finest arguments in the world, and the best reasons against it, do you think I would break her heart and my own for your reasonings? Yes, it is all settled, and nothing on earth can change it.”
He got up as he spoke, and marched about the room with an air of defiance. Then he came back to where his friend was sitting, and sat down on a corner of the table, swinging his legs.
“All the same,” he said, with a laugh of affectation and bravado, “I’d like to hear what you have to say against it. It might be novel and amusing, perhaps.”
“I have not the slightest desire to be amusing.”
“Oh, impressive then—that is as good or better; impressive, eloquent! let us hear, Durant. I should like a specimen of the grand style you keep for your most serious cases.”
“Yours is not one of them,” said Durant calmly; “yours is simple enough. Don’t let us go farther, Arthur; we should come to blows again, and that would not answer my purpose, nor yours either.”
“Then you refuse to tell me what of course you came here to say. Your plea cannot be very powerful this time, nor your brief worth much,” said Arthur, with a pretence at scorn which was full of aggravation. This stirred his friend more than anything yet had done.
“My brief,” he said, “was not prepared as most briefs are. It seems to me that you are not worthy even to hear of it. ‘Prove the culprit guilty’ is what most briefs enjoin, but this one was ‘Prove him innocent; let his very judges see him to be right, and not wrong.’ These were my instructions; they do not much resemble your notion of them; nor do they deserve to be received in this way.”
Arthur rose again from his seat, and walked about the room restless and uncertain.
“Say what you have to say,” he said; “I will not interrupt you. Let me hear it all.”
“I have already told you that, if everything is settled and your mind made up, it would be foolish to go on at all. If there is any hope I will speak. Arthur,” said Durant suddenly, “you are very fastidious—very difficult to please in ordinary cases. Do you think you will be able to live with the good people we have seen to-night?”
“Why should I live with them? they have nothing to do with it. A wife comes with her husband. They, whatever they may be, are quite outside the question. She is to be thought of, and she alone.”
“Have you ever reflected, Arthur, that if she—the lady—is as noble a character as you think, she will not give up her own people for you or anyone? I should not care to have a woman do that for me. I think she would have good reason to judge me severely after, if I failed in threefold duty to her. You should be father and mother in such a case—and husband too.”
“And so I mean to be, so I am! What are father and mother to me now? I have formed a tie which is beyond all these mechanical, understood ties, in which there is no choice on the child’s part; and she will feel as I do.”
“Women don’t always do that,” said Durant; “and I, for one, don’t like them when they do. Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that she did not, what should you do then? It is worth taking into consideration.”
“She would be sure to do what was best; and if that is all, we can easily baffle your cross-examination, Durant. You are not good at bullying witnesses,” said Arthur, his heart rising in spite of him. “Ask me something more difficult than this.”
“You would have to live,” said the other. “I don’t think that is more difficult, but you may not be of my opinion. How are you to live? upon your allowance, which has never been too much for you alone?”
“Two spend no more than one,” said the catechumen, recovering his spirits; “and she is not a spendthrift like me. She has been trained to make a little go a great way. She will reduce my expenses instead of increasing them.”
“Yet two eat more than one, to put it on the simplest ground.”
“Eat! that is like you, Durant. How little you know about it! Is it on eating one spends one’s money? So far as that goes, you may say what you please. There is nothing in you, old fellow, to frighten anyone. Come, I forgive your objections to my happiness when I see how little you have got to say.”
“You are sure then, entirely sure, that it is your happiness, Arthur?” Durant rose, and put his hands on his friend’s shoulders, looking down upon him with a face full of emotion. “You have been the nearest a brother of anything I ever knew—brother, or sister, or both together. Are you sure, boy, are you sure? Happiness is a sacred thing. I would not touch it, I would not harm it. Are you sure?”
“As sure as that I love her, Durant.”
The elder man dropped his hands from the other’s shoulder, and turned away with a sigh. Whether it was the half-inspired look which at that moment came into Arthur’s face, or the resemblance of that face to another, or the superiority over himself of this boy whom he had been lecturing, and whom he had lectured so often—whatever it was, he turned away, with something that made his sight more uncertain than ever, rising in his eyes.
“Then I can’t say anything to you,” he said, in a voice tremulous with feeling. “I can say nothing to you! I would not meddle with that, right or wrong, were it to cost me mine.”
“Yours, old fellow?” cried Arthur, in the effusiveness of victory. “Hurrah for love! It’s the thing worth living for. Are you in Arcadia too?”
Durant did not make any answer. He went to the window, and looked out upon the dark night and the lamps flaring; and then returned to his chair. Whatever commotion there had been in his countenance, he had got rid of it. Neither blush nor smile was on his serious face, nor any further manifestation of sympathy. Arthur looked at him, and burst into excited laughter.
“You don’t look much like a fortunate shepherd,” he said. “Love! that was a bad guess; it was law I should have said—briefs and fees, and a silk gown at the end; that’s what moves you.”
“Ay, ay,” said the other, vaguely; “that’s what it is. Mine is not a corresponding case. You were always luckier, brighter than I, and I don’t grudge it you, Arthur. Your happiness (if you are happy) will be almost as good for me as my own. But I don’t think either of them very probable just now,” he went on, suddenly changing his tone; “that is the fact. I am not in a good way, and, my boy, you are in a bad way. I’ll say it once for all. You are deceiving yourself. You are the last man in the world to do this sort of thing. You will repent it, sooner or later. Don’t look at me as if you thought me a fool, with that supercilious face. It is you who are the fool. You are going to do what you will wish undone all the days of your life.”
“Durant!” cried Arthur, furious, springing from his seat, and lifting his arm as if for a blow.
His friend stood up facing him, folding his arms. His face had flushed with a momentary gleam of passion while he spoke. Now it stilled and paled again, and he stood in his superior strength, looking calmly at the slighter being whom he had roused to momentary fury. The young man’s clenched fist fell by his side. He turned away angry, but subdued.
“No man in the world but you dare speak so,” he said, “and even from you I will never bear it again.”
“You shall not be required,” said Durant, sadly. “I have said, once for all, what was in my mind. Now—I know you well enough—you’ll go and do what you want to do, Arthur, and with all the more zest. And when you have paid for your happiness, and got to the bottom of it, you will come to me again.”
“I think you presume a little too much on our long friendship,” said Arthur, seizing his hat. “Good night; there has been enough of this. Things will be bad indeed with me, I promise you, if, after this speech of yours, I ever come to you again.”
He rushed out of the room before the other could reply. Durant went to the window and looked after him with a wistful subdued light of pity and tenderness in his face.