Their aunt was as much of a surprise to the boys as their cousin. Lady Eva modified herself considerably, with a view to conciliating her pious sister-in-law; but in spite of extra tuckers, the first sight of her when dressed for dinner was a severe shock to Sainty, accustomed to the modest décolletages of the neighbouring clergywomen who dined from time to time with Lady Charmington, and the little square of his mother’s neck, which barely accommodated the large oblong locket of black enamel, like a baby’s coffin, with which she decorated herself for these festive occasions.
Luckily for Lady Eva, Lady Charmington was not of the intimate order of women, and never invaded a guest’s bedroom, or she might have been a little scandalised by the tone of some of the literature she found there; but she would probably have been still more bewildered, as she had kept up scarcely a bowing acquaintance with even ordinary French. ‘I have read Madame Craven’s Récit d’une Sœur,’ she said, ‘but I read few novels in any language; it does not seem to me very profitable. I was once recommended Feuillet’s Histoire de Sibylle as quite unobjectionable, but I found it very papistical. It did me no harm, but I shouldn’t have given it to any young person to read in whom I was interested.’
‘I don’t remember to have read either of the romans you mention,’ said her sister-in-law wearily.
The two women found it increasingly difficult to talk to each other; neither of them seemed to take the faintest interest in anything which occupied the other. Lady Eva dwelt much on the disadvantages of her bringing-up, finding that a subject on which her hostess was much inclined to be sympathetic, and also on her maternal anxieties about her boy’s future. She and Claude laughed a great deal at the good lady behind her back, and smoked a great many cigarettes together in the long shrubbery, when Sainty was having his daily drive, and Lady Charmington was busy about her farms. Arthur caught them at it one day, but was bribed to silence by being lured into participation in the crime.
‘Tell me, Eva,’ said Lady Charmington, when the ladies were sitting alone together, ‘you are not, I trust, a Catholic, are you?’
‘No; oh no!’ answered her sister-in-law, with perfect truth; though she might have added that she had at one time been a very devout one, and had since tried several other cultes, of which the last had been some queer Parisian form of esoteric Buddhism. ‘Oh no! I have seen too much of Romanism; I have lived abroad too much.’
Lady Charmington was delighted. ‘I have no doubt they tried to pervert you,’ she said, fairly beaming on this martyr to the faith.
‘Tried!’ repeated Lady Eva with an eloquent gesture.
‘And your boy?’ continued Lady Charmington. ‘He must have been much exposed in those countries. I trust you have managed to keep his faith untouched?’
‘I have done my best,’ said Lady Eva meekly. ‘Poor boy! he has had to knock about the world very young, and to see and hear much that he should not. I have felt that he had only his poor weak mother to stand between him and—and—well—all sorts of things. He has not had the advantages of your dear boys, Sarah—a good home, and peaceful, virtuous surroundings, nor such a good mother, I’m afraid.’ And Lady Eva cast down her fine eyes, on the lids of which she had not been able to deny herself a faint tinge of blue, on learning that Lord Corstorphine was expected, though she had been trying not to paint at Belchamber. ‘You know how my own youth was neglected,’ she added presently. ‘But I had rather not talk of that. After all, the duchess is my mother, and in her own way has meant to be kind to me, I think. Only, I have dreamt of something very different for my Claude. Such influences as he finds here are exactly what I have wished for him, and what I have all too seldom been able to give him.’
‘Well, now we have got him here, we must try and keep him, and see what we can do for him,’ said Lady Charmington, much gratified. ‘Have you thought at all what you are going to do with him? You are not going back to France?’
‘Oh no! I want to stay in England—at home’; and Lady Eva gazed tenderly at her surroundings in a manner which hinted plainly that an invitation to consider Belchamber in that light might not be unwelcome. Lady Charmington, however, was in no hurry to give it, but she debated in her own mind many plans for the benefit of her nephew. She got but little encouragement from her brother, who by no means seemed inclined to take a friendly view of these interlopers.
‘That’s a horrible woman,’ he remarked, with brutal frankness of the ‘belle Morland’; ‘and just the sort I should have thought you would have hated, Sarah.’
‘I can’t honestly say I exactly like her, Cor,’ his sister answered; ‘but I’m sorry for her and for the boy. Think of her deplorable bringing-up; think what a mother she has had, and what a husband! The poor body seems to have some glimmerings of a desire for better things, if she had any one to take her by the hand; and I must say it’s to her credit to have kept by her faith, exposed as she has been to the darts of the enemy. But what touches me most about her is that she evidently wants to do well by her boy. She’s not a bad mother, whatever else she may be; and, after all, she’s poor Char’s sister, you know.’
Lady Charmington very seldom delivered herself of so long a speech, and still more rarely made any allusion to her dead husband. Corstorphine was surprised and touched. Perhaps some likeness to her brother in Lady Eva, some trick of speech, or expression that recalled him, had gone to the not very accessible heart of her sister-in-law, and reinforced the adroit flattery which had been offered to her pet prejudices. Perhaps mother’s heart really spoke to mother’s heart in some language he did not understand; the woman, with all her faults, might have a genuine wish to do the best for her brat. He could have checked his sister’s nascent inclination to befriend her husband’s kinsfolk with a word, but it seemed an ungracious task. After all, Sarah was not too often in a melting mood, and if she could do something for this wretched lad, whose best chance was that he was fatherless, why should he seek to restrain her?
‘I don’t like the boy either,’ he couldn’t help saying; ‘he’s a deal too smooth and civil spoken. He’s no business to have such finished manners at thirteen, and be such an accomplished little man of the world. But if you think you can do anything to prevent his turning out such a blackguard as his deceased parent, pray do; it’s a Christian act. All I say is, consider whether he is likely to harm your own boys in any way.’
‘I’ve thought very much of that. Do you suppose it wasn’t my first thought?’ his sister answered. ‘But one mustn’t let anxiety for one’s own stand in the way of snatching a brand from the burning. Something tells me this boy has not been sent here for nothing.’
‘Well,’ said Corstorphine, ‘and what particular form of charity do you think he was sent for?’
Lady Charmington ignored the scoff. ‘I was thinking whether I mightn’t offer to send him to Eton, if he could be got in,’ she said; ‘he won’t be fourteen till November. I know his mother can’t afford it. Then he is very gentle with Sainty, and the child seems to like him; and I thought if later on Sir John thought Sainty could go to Eton, it might be a help to him to have a cousin who had been there a year or two, and could look after him a little. He can never be quite like other boys, you know.’
Corstorphine smiled grimly. It tickled his not unkindly cynicism to find his pious sister had so human a thought for her own offspring nestled under her zeal for her nephew’s soul.
‘Well, I agree,’ he said, ‘that the best chance the youth can have is to see as little as possible of his mother and grandmother. Perhaps if he gets well kicked at Eton, and you have him here mostly for his holidays, he may not turn out so ill. It would take an 18-horse power profligate to corrupt Sainty, it is true; but how about Arthur?’
‘Arthur doesn’t like Claude; he makes no secret of it; so I don’t think he can do him any harm. Besides, when the boys are at home I have them so constantly under my own eye, I should know in a minute; and by the time Arthur goes to Eton, Claude will be almost leaving.’
‘Or if he turns out badly, he may even have left,’ said Lord Corstorphine.
So the matter was broached to Lady Eva, who, you may be sure, was profuse in a mother’s blessings and tears. She was fond of her son in a way, and honestly wanted the best that was to be had for him in life. She had been ruefully reflecting that she would never be able to send him to a good school, except at the cost of decided privations to herself; and there was no doubt he would be dreadfully in her way in London.
Lord Corstorphine proposed himself for a Sunday to a great friend among the Eton masters, and found that his host, having an unexpected vacancy for the next half, was delighted to do a good turn to any one in whom he was interested. The duchess, when she heard what was on foot, suddenly insisted on helping, and promised to pay half of her grandson’s expenses; and though her contribution was frequently several terms in arrear, she generally paid up in the end, unless she had been unusually unlucky at cards.
So, though Lady Eva had failed to extract from her sister-in-law that general invitation to regard Belchamber as her country-home, which she had hoped for, she left for town with a comfortable feeling that her visit had not been wasted. Claude was practically off her hands; he would go to Eton at no expense to her, and spend most of his holidays at Belchamber. ‘Dear Belchamber, where poor Char and I spent our happy childhood, and of which I have always carried the picture in my heart, through all my wanderings,’ she said to Lady Charmington the day before her departure.
‘Indeed,’ said Sarah, with a little dry cough, ‘I always understood from poor Char that he had hardly ever been here as a child. He said, when we first came here in the old lord’s time, that he hoped his son wouldn’t feel such a stranger here as he did, when he grew up.’
‘Ah well,’ said Lady Eva hurriedly, ‘my happiest times, almost the only happy ones of my neglected childhood were here, so I suppose they bulk large in my memory. I have so little reason to remember most of my youth with pleasure.’
‘You said, Aunt Eva,’ Arthur burst in, ‘vat you wemembered every corner of ve place, blindfold, but you soon lost your way even in ve shrubbery, and you thought One-tree Wood was the other side of the village.’
‘Ah, traitor!’ cried his aunt, playfully embracing him, ‘have you so little gallantry as to try to convict a lady of making mistakes?’
‘You were a little rash, dear mamma,’ Claude said to her afterwards, ‘in remembering your happy childhood at Belchamber so well, unless you took a little more trouble to get up the subject.’ Claude for his part was quite willing to go to Eton and try how he liked it. Almost the only principle that had been early instilled into him was that it was always worth while to accept anything expensive that could be enjoyed at another person’s expense. It was rather absurd, no doubt, for so finished a gentleman to go to school; but experience had taught him that it was always quite easy to get sent away from educational establishments, if one did not happen to like them; and what was the use of his precocious knowledge of the world if it did not insure him an easy victory over such simple people as schoolmasters and schoolboys? As a matter of fact his astuteness did save him from paying the extreme penalty for many peccadilloes that would have cut short the career of less sophisticated youths under ‘Henry’s holy shade.’ His tutor’s attitude towards him was a curious alternation of attraction and distrust. But though never cordially liked by either boys or masters, he was still there, as an overgrown youth in ‘lower division,’ when Sainty hobbled into the school, a pale, gloomy little boy with an iron boot and a stick, and was even keeping a precarious footing when Arthur appeared a year later, and of course took the place by storm with his frank and friendly manners, hatred of books, love of games, and perfectly obvious and understandable type of beauty.
Whether Claude really did much for his cousins on their arrival at Eton may be doubted, but he certainly managed to impress Sainty with the belief that he had been of incalculable service to him. To Claude, Sainty meant Belchamber with all its comforts, horses to ride, pheasants to shoot, good food, luxurious quarters, and presents at Christmas; things his shelterless childhood had taught him to consider in a way that boys to whom they had always been matters of course could not understand. It never occurred to Sainty that his cousin’s attentions proceeded from anything but a naturally kind heart compassionating the limitations of a cripple and an invalid. He soon learned to disapprove of Claude, and to dread his influence over Arthur, and on several occasions screwed himself up almost with torture to the point of speaking very plainly to his senior, a thing especially difficult among boys; and the indulgent good nature with which his strictures were received, where they might easily have been resented, gave him an uncomfortable sense of obligation towards one to whom his conscience forced him to say such disagreeable things in return for uniform kindness and affection.
‘Dear Sainty,’ Claude would say, ‘you do look so sweet when you’re angry and solemn, for all the world like an old hen with all her feathers up in defence of her chick. Of course I’m a wicked unprincipled hawk, but I promise not to devour your bantling.’ He generally managed to refer again to these conversations when Arthur was present, knowing that nothing enraged the younger brother so much as the idea that Sainty, for whom he always entertained the sublimest contempt, had dared to give himself the airs of looking after him.
It early dawned on Sainty that a loving heart was not an unmixed blessing, unless one had the gift of imposing one’s views on the object of one’s affection. Had he not been fond of Claude, it would be nothing to him that he disapproved of him; if he did not love Arthur, it would not have been a daily grief to him to see so clearly what his brother ought and ought not to do, while he was destitute of the smallest shred of influence over his actions.
‘You know, dear,’ Claude said to him once, ‘there is nothing so easy as to get rid of me. I am horribly mal vu by the authorities. If tutor hadn’t stuck up for me like a brick, I should have been sacked long ago; he has told me pretty plainly that if there are any more rows he shall say he thinks they had better take me away. A hint to him that I am corrupting his pet lamb, and a word to your mother, and neither Eton nor Belchamber will be troubled with me much longer.’
Such a speech hurt Sainty like a lash. ‘Don’t you see,’ he cried, ‘that it is just the knowledge of what you say that makes it impossible for me to do anything? I am helpless.’
See? Of course Claude saw; no one better. ‘Dear generous old boy!’ he said, with one of his sudden pretty changes of manner, throwing an arm lightly round his cousin’s shoulder; ‘who should know what an angel you are, so well as your poor scamp of a cousin, who owes everything to you?’
‘Don’t,’ Sainty said, wincing; ‘you do things you know I hate, and teach Arthur to do them, and then you manage to make me feel a brute, and put me in the wrong.’
Claude shrugged his shoulders, almost the last of his little foreign tricks of manner that he had not lost at Eton. ‘You are impossible, dear Saint,’ he said, and went his way, quite secure that what he had let fall of the ease with which his cousin could get rid of him would effectually tie his hands.
The day came, however, when without any intervention of a schoolfellow, the measure of Claude Morland’s ill-fame overflowed, and the College of the Blessed Mary numbered him no longer among her children.
That summer half was ‘long remembered’ at Eton (almost eighteen months) for what Claude called a ‘great massacre of the innocents.’ We are not concerned at this distance of time to inquire into the nature of this old story. As usual, it was not the most guilty who were sent away; there were angry mothers in many counties of England who declared their darlings had been most unjustly used, and that ‘there was a boy called Morland who was much worse than poor Tom, Dick, or Harry, who had only had to leave at the end of the half, and with no blame attached to him.’ ‘Claude was more or less mixed up in rather a painful affair,’ his tutor wrote to Lord Corstorphine. ‘He did not know how much he was to blame, but it would be best for the boy himself if his friends were to remove him. Personally he liked him, but ...’; and Sainty tried hard not to feel a certain relief at his cousin’s departure. He atoned for this unchristian want of sympathy by making the best of the matter to his mother and guardian, and begging that it should make no difference in the culprit’s footing at Belchamber. What he never mentioned at home was that Arthur had come very near being implicated, and that he, Sainty, had strained his conscience to the utmost, in solemnly pledging his word to his tutor for his brother’s innocence. Arthur accepted this as he did everything else from Sainty. ‘What is vere to make a fuss about?’ he said. ‘I’d have done as much for you, or for vat matter, for any over chap who wasn’t my bwover. You jaw about your conscience, and not being sure, and tell me to see what I’ve made you do. I don’t call that lying. Of course, if a fellow’s asked point-blank if anover fellow’s done a fing, he’s got to say he hasn’t. Don’t be such a pwig.’
Sainty did not stay very long at Eton himself. In spite of constant staying out, and much sick-leave, he really was not strong enough for the life there; nor was it a great grief to him to go. He did not make friends easily; his shy reserved manner, his studious habits, and inability for athletics, not less than his austerely high standard of ethics which his minor found so unnecessary, were not calculated to make him popular with his schoolfellows; and he resented their familiar abbreviation of his title into ‘Belcher.’ He stayed long enough to see Arthur launched on a course of prosperity, and in a fair way to become a ‘swell,’ and then sang his Nunc dimittis. Arthur remained, alone of the three, and flourished like a green bay-tree. He did just enough work to get through his various examinations with a little cribbing, and found plenty of people ready to do all the rest for him. He was quite selfish, self-indulgent, easy-going, good-natured, and happy, and was as popular with the masters as with the boys. The elastic code of schoolboy honour fitted him like a glove, and he had the makings in him of a first-rate cricketer.
CHAPTER IV
Lord Corstorphine had been an Oxford man, but some curious lingering dread of Puseyism made Lady Charmington send Sainty to Cambridge. She gave a moment’s anxious thought to the vicinity of Newmarket, but, as she truly said, that hardly seemed a danger to Sainty; and as Arthur was to read for the army when he left Eton, there was no question of the University for him.
Sainty went to college, as he did most things, from the habit of obedience, but with no great hope of personal enjoyment. Anticipation to him was rarely pleasurable; he had not the sanguine temperament. He looked on Cambridge as a larger Eton, a new field for unpopularity and isolation in the midst of a crowd, but he soon began to be aware of an atmosphere of wider toleration than he had known at school.
It is true he was a dreary failure among his peers, the gilded youth who went to Newmarket, kept hunters, and spent their evenings at the card-table; and he was ignominiously blackballed for a certain fashionable dining-club for which some one was so ill-advised as to put him up. His college, however, was large enough to contain men of all sorts, and among some of the more thoughtful he found congenial society and kindly appreciation, especially in the little knot of undergraduates who gathered round a young don called Gerald Newby.
Sainty was just ripe for some one to worship, and Newby supplied the object beautifully. In all his reserved, unhappy boyhood, he had never known the joy of that falling in friendship, so to speak, which is one of youth’s happiest prerogatives. The only two companions for whom he had felt much affection, his cousin and his brother, had certainly given him more pain than pleasure. The generous delights of an enthusiastic admiration had hitherto been withheld from him. This young man, sufficiently his senior to speak to his troubled soul with a certain authority, yet near enough to his own age for discussion on equal terms, excited such a feeling in the highest degree.
It is difficult for older people not to smile at very young men’s estimates of themselves or of one another. Newby had opinions, splendid opinions, on all sorts of subjects, which his disciple imbibed with rapture. Sainty took his young mentor quite seriously, and Gerald, it need hardly be said, took himself quite seriously; and between them they were sublimely earnest and high-toned, and perhaps, if the truth must be told, just a trifle priggish.
For one thing, of course, Sainty had ‘doubts.’ It is not to be supposed that a youth with a morbid conscience, a tender heart, a keen mind and delicate health, reared in Lady Charmington’s school of extreme Calvinistic theology, should have reached the age of eighteen without many searchings of heart.
Little as this profane page may seem the place for the discussion of such subjects, it would be impossible to give an adequate notion of Sainty’s life at Cambridge or his relations with Gerald Newby, without a passing reference to the topics that kept them from their beds far into the small hours of many a chilly morning.
Young men of Gerald Newby’s stamp can conceive of nothing that is not the better for being ‘threshed out,’ as he would have called it. He held that if the old creeds were ‘outworn,’ it was no reason for abandoning faith—that there was to be evolution in belief as in other things; and he had dreams of an universal Church freed from strangling dogmas, in which all sincere seekers after truth should meet in a common brotherhood. Perhaps he was a little vague as to what was to be left as the object of belief, when everything had been eliminated in which the controversially inclined could find matter for discussion, but that did not trouble him in the least.
‘What we want,’ he said to Sainty, ‘is more light. All churches in all ages have been alike in the mistake of endeavouring to stifle discussion of their doctrines. Discussion is the breath of life; unquestioning acceptance is death.’
‘But once one begins questioning things, one is so apt to find one doesn’t believe them——’
‘Then let them go. Depend upon it, what won’t bear the investigation of reason cannot be worth keeping. The truth, and the truth only, must emerge clearer and purer from every test to which it is submitted; and it is the truth we want. Why, when in all other departments of knowledge our understanding becomes truer and stronger every year, should we seek to stultify ourselves and shrink from all growth in the highest science of all, that which deals with the fount of all knowledge, and the spring of all conduct?’
‘But suppose,’ Sainty asked, ‘one should find in the end that one believes nothing?’
‘Then believe nothing,’ said Newby grandly. ‘But I won’t, I can’t, suppose any such thing; it is belief that comes of inquiry, not the negation of belief.’
Sainty was very much impressed. He had never before had any one to whom he could unburthen himself on these subjects. His mother, he knew well, would have revolted in horror from any questioning of the doctrines she herself accepted, and his uncle would not have approached the discussion in that serious spirit which alone he thought befitting. But the lads who assembled evening after evening in Newby’s rooms had no angelic fear of treading on anything, and talked everlastingly on all subjects, religious doubt or belief among the rest. If they found the world out of joint they by no means shared Hamlet’s distress at being ‘born to set it right,’ or doubted for a moment their perfect ability to do so. These boys who so confidently settled the affairs of the nation, the world, the universe, are getting middle-aged men now, hard-working public officials, clergymen, schoolmasters, and would probably smile at their own youthful enthusiasms. Many of them are married and fathers of families. Newby himself is senior dean of the college, and a very different person from the ardent apostle of universal belief and brotherhood to whom Sainty brought so many of his perplexities.
Belchamber spent an immense amount of time in the young don’s comfortable rooms. A kind of sensual austerity marked the place, something cloistral and monastic, yet with a touch of art and luxury. Pale autumnal sunlight, or the soft glow of shaded lamps, lingered lovingly on the backs of well-bound books, some large framed photographs of early Italian Madonnas, and a reproduction of a Neapolitan bronze. A great many teacups reflected the fire, while a permanent faint smell of tobacco just gave a masculine character to the mellow warmth of the atmosphere. Several armchairs and a huge sofa seemed always trying, by the sad colour and severe pattern of their coverings, to conceal the fact of their depth and softness, just as their owner, who had a handsome refined face and a well-knit frame, affected a slouch and wore shabby clothes to show he was not vain.
If Sainty poured himself out to Gerald when they were alone, he took but little share in the general discussions, when other people were present. To express himself was always a difficulty to him; he lay, as it were, on the margin of the pool of talk, into which one eager speaker after another dashed past him while he was still trying to summon courage for the plunge. It would sometimes happen that at the end of a long evening he had not opened his mouth, and he was taken to task more than once on the subject by his friend. ‘You really should try and talk more; men take your silence for ungraciousness. It looks as if you didn’t think them even worth disagreeing with, you know. Locke asked me to-day if you weren’t very proud; he said you sat all the time he was talking about the essential Christianity of Shelley’s point of view, the other night, with a little supercilious expression which said plainer than words that you thought him a fool.’
‘Oh dear! and I was so much interested,’ Sainty cried. ‘I had nothing particular to say about it; to tell the truth, I had never thought of Shelley exactly from that point of view, but I liked it all so much.’
‘Well, you should have told him so; you see, you didn’t convey that impression to Locke.’
Gerald was by no means always tender with his proselyte. He had great belief in his own powers of sympathy—(‘I understand,’ he used to say in a meaning way to those who laid bare their difficulties to him)—but he was quite capable of ‘smiting friendly and reproving’ when the occasion seemed to demand it. ‘I shouldn’t be your friend, if I didn’t say ...’ was a favourite formula with him, and he constantly invited an equal frankness in others, though it is doubtful how he would have liked the invitation to be accepted.
‘I have been thinking a good deal,’ he said, pausing in the act of making tea, and turning to Sainty with the kettle in one hand, ‘about what you said the other day of shunning uncongenial society. Of course there is a great deal of truth in it, and nothing obliges one to live habitually with people with whom one has nothing in common, but one has a duty to the outside world as well as to oneself.’
‘I can no more be myself with certain people,’ Sainty objected, ‘than I can write my own handwriting on paper I don’t like.’
‘Of course we all feel that,’ responded Gerald rather brutally, ‘but there are two things to consider: in the first place, there’s the danger to one’s own character of getting narrow and cliquey; and in the second, unless you have something to do with men who are your inferiors in aim or culture, how are you to influence them for better things?’
‘I don’t say they are my inferiors,’ said Sainty humbly; ‘I only say they are so unlike me in their habits and point of view that I can’t talk to them. They may be quite as good fellows as I am; probably they think themselves much better——’
‘Yes, but you don’t think so; you know you don’t,’ insisted his mentor sternly. ‘Ah! you are looking at that Giotto; it’s from the Arena Chapel at Padua; it’s a jolly thing, isn’t it? The meekness of the Virgin’s expression is so wonderful. Those fellows lost so much of the religious feeling when they ceased to be archaic. Probably you don’t cordially like or approve even of all the fellows you meet here. I don’t altogether myself. But it is one of my principles to welcome all sorts of men. It is not only that I think they may get good from us, but they teach us too. We must try to be broad, to keep our sympathies open on all sides, to be in touch with every kind of person, if we hope to do any good.’
‘You are like St. Paul,’ said Sainty quite seriously; ‘it is very wonderful of you. I wish I was more adaptable, but people shut me up so.’
Newby smilingly deprecated the likeness to St. Paul, but in his heart he thought it quite true. ‘Take Parsons, for instance,’ he said; ‘do you suppose I am not often shocked by things he says? Yet I think he keeps us fresh, as it were; he is bracing, stimulating, useful, if only as keeping alive in us the wholesome reprobation of some of the views he thinks it necessary to advocate. And look at the matter from his point of view. It is far better he should come here, and find his own level, and meet with wholesome disagreement, than be driven into thinking himself a social pariah persecuted for his opinions, or surround himself with a little set of duller men, who would take what he says for gospel, and on whom his influence would be wholly bad.’
‘I don’t like Ned Parsons,’ said Sainty simply. ‘I know he’s clever and amusing and all that, but I think he’s rather a beast.’
They were interrupted by the arrival of several undergraduates, including the subject of their discussion, the pursuit of which had therefore to be postponed to a more fitting opportunity.
‘Yes, Newby,’ said Parsons, settling himself luxuriously in the deepest armchair, ‘I will take a cup of tea, though I should prefer a whisky and soda. And what might we be going to improve ourselves with to-night? the religious opinions of Swinburne, or the relation of the Ego to the non-Ego?’
‘You are incurably flippant, Ned,’ said Gerald, with an indulgent smile.
‘Here we all are, burning to be enlightened,’ continued Parsons. ‘Pray don’t deny us the tonic of stimulating conversation.’
‘I’ve been wondering,’ innocently struck in a large rowing man, whom Ned described as having ‘aspirations after higher things,’ ‘what it is that keeps us all together, when we’ve so little in common, and I’ve come to the conclusion it must be our sense of humour.’
‘Quite right, Og; no doubt it is,’ said Parsons approvingly. ‘And you and Newby are specially rich in it; and so is Sainty over there in the corner, though he is funny by stealth and blushes to find it fame.’
The room was growing full of smoke and of the buzz of voices; Newby was holding forth to a small knot of admirers. ‘The Radicalism of Mill,’ he was saying, ‘is as dead as the dodo; all the things that were vital to his generation have been attained——’
‘How about female suffrage?’ Parsons asked.
‘But there is a newer Radicalism,’ Gerald went on, without paying any attention, ‘which is not incompatible with Imperialism in its best forms——’
‘All Radicalism,’ said the rowing man sententiously, with the air of making a valuable contribution to contemporary thought, ‘tends to Socialism——’
‘Well, yes, in a way you may say it does,’ assented Newby politely; ‘but that in my mind is not altogether an objection. The word Socialism used to be a bugbear to frighten children with; but there is a new Socialism as there is a new Radicalism. If you come to think of it, all interference by the State is a form of Socialism; it is the community at work for the good of the community, instead of the individual making weak and isolated effort for his own good——’
‘Poor dear Mill!’ interjected Ringwood, a young man who in those days would have been called ‘æsthetic,’ ‘it is a pity he is so vieux jeu; he had such a nice refined face, and learned Greek as a baby, and it was so nice and unconventional of him to want women in parliament. Perhaps in time parliament may come to be all women, and men be free to look after things that really matter.’
‘Such as old china,’ said Parsons.
‘Women,’ said the rowing man, ‘should stick to woman’s province; her home and children should be enough for any woman.’
‘And suppose she hasn’t got any?’ asked Ned.
‘But I see what Ringwood means,’ said the rowing man. ‘Of course politics are very important and all that; far be it from me to deny it. For my part I’m a Conservative, and I don’t care who knows it. But the thing that really matters is no doubt the intellectual life.’
Even Newby smiled discreetly.
‘No doubt, no doubt,’ he said. ‘There is a great deal in what you say; but it is essential that politics should not be left to inferior men, or what becomes of the nation? Look at America with her venal professional politicians, and see what it has brought her to. Depend upon it, it is the intellectual element in parliament that leavens the lump. Our thinkers must not shut themselves up from public life; we must go down into the arena and put the result of our thought into action, if we hope to do any good in our generation.’
This magnificent sentiment was applauded as it deserved to be, but Newby had not nearly had his innings. He had much more to say about the new Radicalism and the new Socialism, and he talked so beautifully of the wickedness of being a hermit that Sainty resolved to widen his horizon by asking Ned Parsons to lunch next day, and proceeded at once to ‘put the result of his thought into action.’
It was not often that he indulged in the luxury of entertaining. He had none of that genial desire for presiding which to many a man makes the top of his own table such an exciting position; moreover, he had been trained in the practice of the most careful economy, and had been accustomed to hear his mother condemn unnecessary profusion as hardly less sinful than irreligion.
The question of his allowance had been carefully discussed between his guardians, and the sum eventually decided on, although it would have been treated as quite inadequate by most young men of his position, seemed to him so ridiculously large that he was always endeavouring to conceal the amount of it from his poorer companions. He did so entirely from a feeling of delicacy; but it need hardly be said that his motives were frequently misconstrued, and he was firmly believed by many to be of a penurious and miserly disposition. As a matter of fact, if little of it went in ostentatious hospitality, he spent still less upon himself. Arthur early discovered that his brother was ‘a safer draw for cash than the mater,’ and Claude, if he asked for help less often and with more circumlocution, also found Sainty a convenient banker. Lady Eva’s son was studying with a well-known coach for diplomacy, and though he lived with his mamma, ‘found life in London,’ as he wrote to his cousin, ‘horribly expensive.’ ‘I wear my gloves till people look sympathetic when they shake hands with me, thinking I am in mourning, and should as soon think of taking a hansom as a coach and four. But cigarettes I must have; they are literally the breath of my nostrils, and no matter how skilfully I hide them, mamma will find them and smoke them when I’m out. If it were not for Sunborough House, I believe I should starve. How, when, and where my revered parent feeds I am wholly unable to discover; but there is never anything to eat at home. Luckily, I am in high favour with grandmamma. I tell her she is the most beautiful woman in London, and that if I wasn’t her grandson I should be frantically in love with her, and she swallows it all. We are the best of friends, but I don’t get much out of her, except food and an occasional back seat in her opera-box; and of course I have to make her little presents de temps en temps. I ask myself, my dear Saint, how on earth all the young men I see about, smiling and spruce, contrive to live in this wicked costly place. They can’t all be millionaires.’ This was the burthen of many letters. Belchamber smiled indulgently; he couldn’t help being amused by them; they were certainly better reading than the ill-spelt scrawls in which Arthur announced he was ‘infernal hard-up.’ ‘What with subscriptions, and one thing and another, a fellow had such lots of expenses at Eton, it was perfectly beastly, and the mater kept him so precious tight, and always seemed to think because you were at school you were a kid, and had no need of money.’ Unlike as were their styles, the upshot of all the letters was the same: the youthful writer was in pressing need of funds, and would ‘dear old Sainty’ kindly supply the deficiency? And ‘dear old Sainty’ usually did.
It is no doubt a very bad thing to be in want of money, but it is almost worse to be the quarry at which the impecunious let fly all their shafts; to know when you see a beloved handwriting on an envelope, that it is hunger and not love that has set the pen travelling, and dictated the letter that lies within. It is an experience that only comes to most of us later in life; boys of Sainty’s age are not often called upon to taste that half humorous bitterness. This was one of the few troubles about which Sainty did not consult Gerald Newby. He knew instinctively that his virtuous friend would have little sympathy with his supplying the funds of luxury and extravagance. The double drain, of which neither the amount nor the recurrence could ever be accurately foretold, kept the boy perpetually anxious about money matters. Perhaps it really did tend to make him, as people thought, unduly careful in his daily expenditure; and, though he took infinite pains to conceal the fact, he liked to be able to help humbler unfortunates than his brother or cousin.
Another eccentricity which showed his unfitness for the state of life to which he had the misfortune to be born, was his exaggerated propensity for work; he had a real aptitude for scholarship, a love of erudition for its own sake. No pains seemed too great to him, no research too profound, for the illustration of a curious expression or the elucidation of an obscure passage. There was a danger that his health, never robust, might suffer from such close application. ‘If you were a poor student,’ Newby said to him, ‘with your way to make in the world, having come up from Glasgow with a bag of oatmeal, I should think it most meritorious of you to peg away as you do, but for you to go injuring your health by overwork is worse than unnecessary—it’s wrong.’
‘My health does not seem to me such an unusually fine specimen that all risk of injury to it must be avoided at any cost,’ Sainty answered. ‘Besides, what am I to do, if I don’t work? I know few people, and the men I do know are all busy. I can’t play games or ride; when I am not working I loaf, and you are always inveighing against loafing as the root of all evil.’
‘You should come out more, have more air,’ persisted Gerald.
‘In the summer I am out a good deal, as you know,’ Sainty answered, ‘but at this time of year I can’t sit out, and I can only do a very moderate amount of walking without getting tired.’
‘Why don’t you start a cart and pony?’ his friend asked.
Sainty looked scared. ‘It costs such a lot to keep a cart and pony,’ he said. ‘I do hire one sometimes,’
‘What nonsense!’ Newby protested. ‘In your position it’s absurd to talk as if you couldn’t afford a trifling thing like that. That’s the sort of thing that makes fellows say you are screwy——’ He stopped rather abruptly, having said more than he intended.
Sainty froze instantly. ‘Oh! they say that, do they?’ he said, with an expression which would have recalled Lady Charmington to Newby, had he enjoyed the privilege of her acquaintance. ‘Perhaps I am the best judge of what I can afford.’
Like many people who are theoretically in favour of independence, Gerald resented it in his disciples. ‘For all your false air of humility,’ he said, ‘one has only to scratch you to find the aristocrat.’
It seemed to Sainty one more proof of the irony of fate that even such qualities as his application to study and careful ordering of life’s economy, which would have been held as highest virtues in many of his fellow-students, by a curious process of inversion became almost faults in him, faults too for which he must be rebuked by the mouth of Gerald Newby, the great apostle of industry and frugality, and the one person in the University whose praise would have been sweet and valuable to him.
‘The things you reproach me with are hardly aristocratic vices,’ he said, with a sad little smile; ‘but are you quite consistent? You lecture Parsons on his laziness, and Ringwood on his extravagance, and then you come and try to drive me into being an idler and a spendthrift, who have no gifts in those directions.’
‘Of course, if you resent advice,’ Newby said, ‘I’m sorry; I have no business to lecture you at all.’
‘Ah Gerald!’ said Sainty, stretching a protesting hand; but Mentor was nettled and would not immediately be mollified. It was on the tip of Sainty’s tongue to explain his need of economy, but the story of his mother’s long struggle to restore its solvency to their house seemed too sacred and intimate to be told even to his dearest friend. The unveiling of his own soul was only a personal immodesty, but his mother’s thrift and Arthur’s premature dissipation could not be touched upon without a sense of disloyalty to them from which he shrank.
‘Let us go and get a trap and have a drive,’ he said.
‘Thanks; I’m busy; I’m afraid I haven’t time,’ Newby said stiffly. ‘Did you think I was hinting that I wanted to be taken out driving?’ and the offended sage strode across the court to his own rooms. Sainty heard the man in the rooms below him, to whom a scholarship was a dire necessity, being dragged forth to football by clamorous companions who would take no denial. ‘Well, I won’t go and drive in an east wind and get neuralgia all alone,’ he concluded, as he turned again to his table piled up with learned commentaries.
CHAPTER V
In spite of his untoward mania for study, or rather because of it, the years spent at Cambridge were the happiest of Sainty’s life. He allowed himself to be dissuaded from going in for a scholarship, which he had much wished to do, on the ground that, as he would certainly have got it, it was grossly unfair to men to whom it was of real importance. Balked in this ambition, he concentrated his efforts on his degree, but here he encountered a new difficulty.
It happened that his second year at the University was also the twenty-first of his life, a coincidence which to most of his fellow-students would have been productive of no derangement; but it became apparent that in the very middle of the long vacation, just when he hoped to go up to Cambridge and do his most valuable and undisturbed work for the tripos, he had got to be present at a horrible function known as ‘coming of age.’
Nothing like serious hospitality on a large scale had been attempted at Belchamber during the two-thirds of his life in which he had been the nominal head of his family, but Lady Charmington was conscientiously anxious that this event should lack no befitting pomp and ceremony. Unfortunately, fourteen years of ceaseless watchfulness and economy are not a good training for lavish display when the time demands it; so the poor lady found herself much exercised in mind over many details, and not a little perturbed at the thought of what it was all going to cost. By no means a diffuse or prolific correspondent at ordinary times, she began early in the May term to rain letters upon her son about the selection of the house party for the great occasion. ‘Your Uncle Cor,’ she would write one week, ‘says that we must ask your grandmother and the duke. Of course I am only anxious to do what is right, and I suppose we must have them, though the duchess has never shown any particular interest in you or Arthur. Tell me what you think about it.’ The next it would be, ‘I am told there must be a ball, that there has always been a coming-of-age ball; the county will expect it. Such things are not much in my line, as you know, but I shouldn’t like anything to be wanting that ought to be done, or that people expect.’
To Sainty the whole thing loomed an unmitigated horror. What pleasing anticipations, for instance, could the prospect of a ball awaken in a young man, one of whose legs was shorter than the other, and to whom a highly polished floor was nothing but a danger? He came to dread these letters of his mother, each one of which contained some new detail of the approaching martyrdom; such alarming obligations as the necessity of a speech at the tenants’ dinner sprang suddenly on him at the turn of a page, and left him gasping.
‘You have rather a cold nature,’ his mother wrote, ‘not very imaginative, so I don’t feel I need fear your being carried off your balance by all this fuss. If you were excitable and emotional like Arthur, I should feel more anxious. In your case the danger is more that you will take the whole thing as a matter of course, and not realise fully the importance of this epoch in your life, and all the new responsibilities it entails on you.’ Characteristic passages like the above, scattered up and down the letters, seemed to give Sainty the measure of his exact knowledge of his mother, and cast a flickering light into the depths of her abysmal ignorance of him. The sense of a somewhat unfair advantage bred in him by these revelations of his superior insight brought into his love for her an element of almost pitying tenderness which alone was wanting to rivet the chains of his early acquired habit of obedience to her will.
‘Are you afraid of your mother?’ Gerald Newby asked him once, with some scorn, in reply to his repeated assertion of the impossibility of going counter to her wishes.
‘I am very fond of her,’ Sainty answered, with gentle dignity. He had an almost painful intuition of her sacrifices, her hopes, her frustrate ambitions for him, and of the disappointment he must inevitably be to her; he probably read into her not very complex emotions, fine shades of sensibility from his own consciousness, after the manner of tender-hearted ladies with their dogs, which made his sympathy for her a little exaggerated. It was this habit of deference to her lightest wish that sent him forth sorely against his will to make a solemn call on a youth whom Lady Charmington had indicated for this attention. ‘My friend Lady Eccleston has been staying here,’ she wrote, ‘with her daughter, and I have asked them to come in August for your coming of age. She tells me her son Thomas is at Cambridge. I didn’t know he had left Harrow, but it seems he has been at the University two terms. She said it would be very kind of you to call on him, and I hope you will, as his mother is a friend of mine. If you find the young man agreeable, you might ask him to come with his mother and sister in the vacation. A propos, of course you will ask any of your own friends you would like; we shall want some young men; there will be Cissy Eccleston and the two de Lissac girls—only let me know in good time how many you ask.’
On his way to show a grudging civility to Tommy Eccleston, Belchamber revolved in his mind his mother’s parting injunction to provide a band of youths for the feast. Luckily, here lay one ready indicated to his hand, but as he ran over the restricted roll-call of his intimates, they did not strike him as ornamental. Young Lord Springald and Sir Vaux Hunter and their friends would have been the very people for the occasion. They would have been voted ‘nice, gentlemanly young fellows,’ or ‘fine, high-spirited lads,’ according as they were shy and dull, or noisy and rowdy; but then, unfortunately, he did not know them. He could not ask men whom he had spent two years in avoiding, and who had blackballed him for their club, but his terrible habit of appreciating other people’s points of view showed him how unsuitable his own friends would seem in the eyes of the duke and duchess. Gerald of course he wanted, and Gerald would be at home and imposing anywhere. His uncle Corstorphine at least, who had many friends among the intelligent obscure, could be trusted to appreciate Gerald; but he inwardly hoped that his friend might not select Lady Charmington as the recipient of his views on revealed religion. Apart from Newby, his progress towards the compilation of a list had been purely one of elimination up to the time of his arrival at Mr. Eccleston’s lodgings. In response to his knock, the voice of some one who evidently spoke with a jersey over his head made muffled answer from an inner apartment.
‘All right, damn you, wait a sec., there’s no hurry. I’m changing,’ and a moment after the owner of the rooms appeared, a pleasant commonplace pink youth struggling into a college blazer, with one shoe on and the other dangling by its strings from his teeth.
‘Hulloa! beg pardon,’ he remarked; ‘I thought you were Johnson, who was coming to go down to the river with me. I thought as he was so quiet he was probably smashing something,’ and he held out a blistered palm of welcome.
‘Oh! er—how d’ye do,’ said Sainty, laying his own in it with no unnecessary cordiality. ‘My name’s Belchamber. My mother asked me to call on you; she knows your mother, don’t you know. I should have come sooner, but I didn’t know you were up.’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter; awfully good of you,’ answered Tommy. ‘Sit down, won’t you; have some lunch?’ A piece of cold pressed beef and a boxed tongue, with a pot of marmalade, showed that the host had himself recently partaken of that meal.
‘No thanks, I’ve had lunch,’ said Sainty. ‘But I oughtn’t to keep you; you are just going out.’
‘Oh no, not at all; there’s no hurry; I haven’t got to be at the river for half an hour. Besides, I’m waiting for Johnson; he said he’d come and go down with me.’
Then there was a moment of uneasy silence, broken with an effort by Sainty.
‘Your mother and sister have been staying with my mother,’ he remarked.
‘No, really?’ said Tommy, with the faintest possible show of interest. ‘My mother stays about a lot; she’s awfully popular.’
There was another pause, during which he finished putting on his shoes.
‘I say, are you sure you won’t have some lunch?’ he cried suddenly, with quite a show of eagerness. ‘Do. I’m afraid I haven’t got any cake or anything, ‘cos I’m in training. Have a whisky and soda, won’t you?’
‘No thanks, really not; I’ve just lunched. But I’m sure I’m keeping you in.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Tommy responded genially, and added, not very consistently, ‘I can’t think where that ass can be?’
The conversation seemed in danger of collapsing altogether, when the long-looked-for appearance of Johnson came as a welcome relief to both.
‘Tommy, you brute, why ain’t you ready?’
‘Well, I like that, when I’ve been waiting half an hour for you.’
Sainty got up.
‘Well, I mustn’t keep you,’ he said.
‘Beg pardon; didn’t know you’d got any one here,’ said Johnson.
‘Oh! Lord Belchamber—Mr. Johnson,’ said Eccleston, getting very red over the fearful embarrassment of an introduction. Then to Sainty, who remained standing, ‘Must you go? Awfully good of you to come; wish you’d have had some lunch.’
‘Good-bye,’ Sainty said. ‘I hope you’ll come and see me—D, Old Court. Come to lunch or tea or something; or look me up in the evening if it suits you better.’
Sainty reported this conversation verbatim to Newby.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘how hopeless it is for me to try and be gracious to people with whom I have nothing in common. If you could have seen how hard that poor boy struggled to look pleased to see me, and the grimness with which I sat and scowled upon him, you would have felt sorry for us both; you couldn’t have helped it.’
‘Of course, if your idea of being gracious is to sit and scowl at people——’ Newby said.
‘I didn’t mean to; I wanted to wreathe my unfortunate features in smiles, but it was not a success. I am sure I feel as kindly towards my fellow-creatures as most people do; but I approach them with invincible terror; and there is no such sure way of making a dog bite you, as to think he is going to.’
‘Then don’t think so,’ Newby said. ‘Have you no control over your apprehensions? Strengthen yourself in any way you like. If you can do it in no other way, say to yourself that you are a great personage and that most men will be only too glad of your attentions.’
‘Oh! but that is a way that I should not like,’ Sainty cried in horror; ‘the one thing that finishes me completely is any idea that people may think I think they could want to know me for such a reason.’
‘“The idea that people may think that you think,”’ Gerald repeated. ‘My dear Belchamber, this is very morbid. Do try and be simple.’ Like all elaborately synthetical people, Newby was always preaching simplicity and a return to nature.
‘And the sad part of this individual failure,’ Sainty continued, ‘is that I particularly wanted it to be a success. I had a purpose in calling.’
‘And what dark designs had you on this innocent fresher?’
‘My mother told me to ask him to the horrible business in August; his people are coming. By the way, she suggests that I should provide other victims, and I can’t think of any one who would not be hopelessly inappropriate and bored to death. None of our friends could take the thing seriously, except, perhaps, Og.’
‘Well, he’s no use to you, as Providence having unkindly made him nearly your twin, he has got, in a small way, the same business on, at home, and he takes it seriously enough, I promise you. I happen to know, because he has done me the honour to ask me to stay for it.’
Sainty gave the cry of a thing in pain. ‘You haven’t accepted?’
‘Well, I didn’t commit myself; I’m really not quite sure yet where I shall be this Long. I rather want to go abroad, and perhaps do some climbing. Holmes and Collinson want me to coach them part of the time, and I thought we might combine the reading and the exercise, and drop down to the Italian lakes in the autumn.’
‘And I had so counted on your being there, Gerald,’ Sainty said. ‘You are just the one person I did want. I felt there would be something human about it all if I had you with me.’
‘You never said so, you know,’ Newby interjected.
Sainty felt the hot pricking sensation at the back of his eyes which was the nearest he ever got to tears. He had so intensely desired that Gerald should be at Belchamber in August, that it had not occurred to him to put his desire into words; they had talked the subject over so often that he took it for granted his friend would know that he looked for his help on the occasion.
‘I thought—’ he began, ‘I hoped—I suppose you would feel——’ He couldn’t express just what he meant at the moment.
‘You see, you didn’t ask me,’ Newby persisted, ‘whereas Og did.’
‘Oh! go to Og, or Switzerland, or Hell, as far as I’m concerned,’ Sainty broke out.
Gerald laid a kind restraining hand upon his shoulder. ‘My dear boy, you needn’t lose your temper and swear at me,’ he said; ‘I haven’t said I wouldn’t come. I only said you hadn’t asked me, and I couldn’t be expected to assume that I was invited to your coming of age, unless you said something about it.’
Sainty was trembling all over; his little gust of passion had passed and left him humbled and ashamed. How could he have spoken so to his friend?
‘Oh! forgive me,’ he cried. ‘I suppose I felt in my heart such a need of you, that I couldn’t but fancy you would know it.’
Newby coughed uneasily. ‘For Heaven’s sake, don’t let us be sentimental,’ he said, in his little, prim, dry manner.
‘My mother says I am cold and unimaginative,’ Sainty answered sadly, ‘and you accuse me of hysteria. You can’t both be right; but anyway, I suppose I’m wrong. After all, why should I assume that just because I wanted you I was certain to get you? I haven’t so often got what I wanted in life. I should have remembered that though you are nearly everything to me, I am to you only one of a hundred men your kindness has helped.’
Gerald smiled. Like all Englishmen he had been frightened by the indecency of a glimpse of naked emotion, but he was always prepared to accept any amount of solid adulation soberly offered.
‘You make too much of anything I may have been able to do for you,’ he said graciously. ‘And affection is a great gift; I’m sure I’m very proud that you like me and feel I have been of some use to you. I have no doubt I can manage to make it fit in.’
Sainty was profusely grateful; he really felt that Gerald had conferred a tremendous favour on him, which is probably what Newby meant he should feel.
His other invitations were less successful. Even Ringwood, whom at last he decided to ask, though he knew his mother and Arthur would say he was an affected ass, had pledged himself to the rival celebration.
Tommy Eccleston, to be sure, accepted. ‘Oh, thanks!’ he said, ‘very good of you; I shall like it awfully.’
So Sainty wrote and announced this meagre harvest to Lady Charmington, who forthwith responded: ‘Do you mean to say that out of all the young men you must know at Cambridge, you can only get two? Try and find two more, or we shall be more women than men. Johnny Trafford is coming, and I have asked Algy Montgomery, and of course there will be Claude, but none of the other Trafford boys can come, and I know so few young men. You see, we are such a lot of women. There is grandmamma (my mother, I mean), and your Aunt Susie, and Lady Eccleston and her daughter, and Alice de Lissac writes that her husband, she is sure, won’t come, so there are three more women. And now the duchess insists on my asking Lady Deans, whom I don’t know, and your Aunt Eva wants to bring a friend of hers. I counted on your having lots of friends you would want asked, or I should not have agreed.’
At last, in despair, Sainty had recourse to Tommy Eccleston again, who seemed sociable and friendly, and was the only person who had accepted with anything like cordiality. ‘You haven’t got any friend you’d like to bring, have you?’ Sainty asked.
‘I think Johnson would come, if he was asked,’ said Tommy thoughtfully. ‘You see, between you and me, he’s rather sweet on my sister.’
It only wanted two days to the end of the term, when the list was finally completed in the most unexpected manner.
Sainty was hobbling disconsolately across the court one evening, when he almost ran into Parsons. Since he had invited this gentleman to lunch as an attempt at greater catholicity, they had frequently met, and something like friendship might by a little stretch of imagination be said to exist between them. Sainty, feeling how very little strain their intercourse would bear, was always careful not to tighten it unduly.
‘I hear you are coming of age,’ Ned remarked, ‘and have got a regular corroboree in honour of the event at the family fried-fish shop. I can’t think why you haven’t asked me.’
The intention was evidently humorous, but Sainty was a little taken aback. The fact was that Parsons was the only man of whom he saw anything like as much, whom he had not tried as the possible fourth demanded by the necessity for sexual symmetry.
‘Should you care about it?’ he asked, a little doubtfully.
‘My dear fellow,’ Ned answered candidly, ‘don’t ask a poor devil like me to a place like Belchamber; I should be ludicrously out of place. Besides, you know, you don’t really like me. Of course I was only joking.’
Sainty was touched. Perhaps he had done Ned injustice. He certainly had never been very civil to him, and Parsons had borne no malice.
‘Will you come?’ he said.
‘Do you mean it?’ said Ned. ‘Of course I will.’
As Sainty wrote to announce this last recruit to Lady Charmington, he could not help smiling at the thought of three out of the four who were to represent his chosen intimates and cronies on the great occasion.