Arminell, a social romance/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII.
HOW JINGLES TOOK IT.
Giles inglett Saltren stood motionless, his hat in one hand, with the other holding the door, looking at the captain. No lamp had been lighted in the room since the sun had set, and he could only see his father's face indistinctly by the pale evening sky light cast in through the window and door. But he would have known from the tones of his father's voice that he was profoundly moved, even if he had not caught the words he uttered. At first, indeed, he was too surprised to comprehend the full force of these words; but, when their significance became clear to him, he also became moved, and he said gravely:
"This must be explained."
"What I said is quickly explained," answered the captain; and he rose to his feet.
Does the reader remember a familiar toy of childhood composed of pretty birds, with feathers stuck in them, strung on horsehair or wires so as to form a sort of cage, but with this difference, that the cage did not contain the birds? When this toy was set down, all the little figures quivered slowly, uncertainly, to the bottom, and when it was reversed, the same process was repeated. It was so with the captain's speech. His words were threaded on the tremulous strings of his vocal organ, and not only quivered from a high pitch down, but also went up from a low one with much vibration on high. A voice of this quality is provocative of sympathy; as, when a violincello string is touched, a piano chord trembles responsive. Such voices make not the voices, but the hearts of other men to tremble. I know a slater who, when I am ordering of him slates, brings tears into my eyes by asking if I will have "Duchess" or "Rag."
"My words are quickly explained," said Stephen Saltren. "I have never regarded you as my son—have never treated you as such. You know that I have shown you no fatherly affection, because I knew from the beginning that not a drop of my blood flowed in your veins. But never, before this evening, have I allowed you, or any one else, to suspect what I knew, lest the honour of your mother should suffer. Now, and only now, has the entire truth been disclosed to me. I did not suspect it, no, not when you were christened and given the name you bear. I thought it was a compliment paid through a fancy of your mother's to the family in which she had lived, that was all. A little flickering suspicion may have been aroused afterwards, when his lordship, to save you from consumption, sent you abroad; but I put it angrily from me as unworthy of being harboured. I had no real grounds for suspicion; since then it has come up in my heart again and again, and I have stamped down the hateful thought with a kind of rage and shame at myself for thinking it. Only to-night has the whole story been told me, and I find that your mother was not to blame—that no real dishonour stains her—that all the fault, all the guilt, lies on and blackens—blackens and degrades his soul!"
"I did not mean to say—that is, I did not wish——" began Mrs. Saltren, in a weeping, expostulating tone.
"Marianne, say nothing." Captain Saltren turned to her. "It is not for you to justify yourself to your child. The story shall be told him by me. I will spare you the pain and shame."
"But, mother," said Jingles, shutting the door behind him and leaning his back against it, "I must be told the whole truth. I must have it at least confirmed by your lips."
"My dear,"—Mrs. Saltren's voice shook—"I would not make mischief, for the world. I hate above everything the mischief-makers. If there be one kind of people I abhor it is those who make mischief; and I am, thank heaven, not one of such."
"Quite so," said her son, gravely; "but I must know what I have to believe, for I must act on it."
"Oh, my dear, do nothing! Let it remain, if you love me, just as if it had never been told. I should die of shame were it to come out."
"It shall not come out," said Giles; "but I must know from your lips, mother, whether I am—I cannot say it. My happiness, my future depend on my knowledge of what my real parentage is. You can understand that?"
"Well, then, it is true that you are not Stephen Saltren's son, and it is true that I was a shamefully-used and deceived woman, and that I had no bad intentions whatever. I was always a person of remarkable delicacy and refinement above my station. As for who your father was, I name no names; and, indeed, just now, when the captain asked me, I said the same—that I would name no names, and so I stick to the same resolution, and nothing more shall be torn from me, not if you were to tear me to pieces with a chain harrow."
"Come without," said the captain, "and you shall hear from me how it came to pass. We must spare your mother's feelings. She was not in fault, she was wickedly imposed on."
Then the mining captain moved to the door; Giles Inglett opened it, and stood aside to allow his reputed father to go through; then he followed him and shut the door behind them.
Half an hour passed. Mrs. Saltren remained for some minutes seated where she had been, consoling herself with the reflection that she had named no names; and that, if mischief came of this, the fact would attach to Saltren, not to her. A little while ago we said that love was blind, hymeneal love most blind; but blind with incurable ophthalmia, blindest of all blindness, is self-love.
Mrs. Saltren rose and went about her domestic affairs.
"No one can charge me," said she, "with having kept my house untidy, or with having left unmended my husband's clothes. To think of the cartloads of buttons I've put on during my married life! It is enough to convince any but the envious. Well, it is a comfort that Stephen has been brought to his senses at last, and come to view matters in a proper light. I've heard James say that there is a nerve goes from each eyeball into the brain, and afore they enter it they take a twist about each other, and, so coupled, march in together. And James said if it were not so we should see double, and neither eye would agree with the other. I mind quite well that he said this one day when I was complaining to him that Stephen and I didn't get on quite right together. He said we'd get our twist one day and then see all alike. What he said is come true; leastways, the proper twist has come in Stephen. Thank God, I always see straight."
She went to a corner cupboard and opened it.
"Now that Stephen is gone," she said, "I'll rinse out the glass James had for his gin-and-water. Saltren is that crazy on teetotalism that he would be angry if he knew I had given James any, and angry to think I kept spirits in the house; and because he is so stupid I'm obliged to put it in a medicine-bottle with 'For outward application only' on it, and say it is a lotion for neuralgia. It is a mercy that I named no names, so my conscience is clear. It is just as in Egypt, when there was darkness over all the land, the Israelites had light in their dwellings. I thank goodness I've always the clearest of light in me."
She removed the tumbler and washed it in the back kitchen.
"When one comes to consider it, after all, Stephen isn't so very much out in his reckoning. When does a nobleman take a delicate lad out of a school and send him to a warm climate because his lungs are affected, and then give him scholarship and college education, without having something that makes him do it? Are there no other delicate lads with weak lungs besides Giles? Why did not his lordship send them to Bordighera? Are there no other clever young fellows in national schools besides my boy, to be taken up and pushed on? There must have been some reason for my lord selecting Giles. Was it because I had been in service in the house? Other young women out of the Park have married and had children, but I never heard of my lord doing anything for their sons. None of them have been sent to college and made into gentlemen except my boy. But then I was uncommonly good-looking, that is true, and not another young hussey at the Park was fit to hold a candle to me. Though, the Lord knows, I never set store on good looks. If it pleases his lordship to treat Giles almost as if he were a son, he has a right to do so, but he must take the consequences. I don't interfere with the fancies of others, but if any one chooses to do a queer thing, he must expect to have to answer for it. I have no doubt that his lordship has frequently wished he had a son, such a fine and handsome fellow as my Giles, and for some years he was without any son of his own to inherit his title. There was only Miss Arminell. Anyhow, no responsibility attaches to me, whatever may be said. No one can blame me. His lordship ought never to have taken notice of Giles, never to have had the doctor examine his lungs, and, when told that the boy would die unless sent to the south of France, he should have said, 'He is the son of poor parents, who can't afford the expense, so I suppose he must die.' No one could have blamed him, then. And when Giles came back—better, but still delicate, and not suited to do hard work—my lord should not have sent him to school and college, and taken him in at Orleigh Park as tutor to his son—he should not have done any of these things unless he had made up his mind to take the consequences. Scripture says that no man sets down to build a tower without having first counted the cost. It is not at all unlikely that folks will say queer things, and I know for certain my husband thinks queer fancies about my boy and Lord Lamerton; but who is to blame for that? If his lordship didn't want to make it thought by all the world that Giles was his son, all I can say is, he shouldn't have done for him what he did. It is not my place to stop idle talk. I'd like to know whether it is any woman's duty to run about a parish correcting the mistakes made by the gossiping tongues therein. I thank heaven I am not a gadabout. I do my duty, washing, and ironing, and mending of waistcoats, and sewing on of buttons, and darning of stocking-feet, and baking of meat-dumplings, and peeling of potatoes; that is what my work is, and I do it well. I don't take upon me the putting to rights of other folks when in error. Every one stands for himself. If you cut the wick crooked you must expect your chimney-glass to get smoked, and, if Lord Lamerton has snipped his wick askew, he must look out for fish-tails."
Mrs. Saltren removed her petroleum lamp-glass, struck a match, and proceeded slowly to light her lamp.
"I remember James telling me once, how that he had been in France, I think he called it La Vendée, where the fields are divided by dykes full of stagnant water; and one of the industries of the place is the collecting of leeches. The men roll up their breeches above the knee and carry a pail, and wade in the ditches, and now and again throw up a leg, and sweep off two, three, or it may be a dozen leeches from the calf into the pail. Then they wade further, and up with a leg again, and off with a fresh batch of leeches. I haven't been in a big house, and seen the ways of the aristocracy, and not found out that they are waders in leech dykes, and that it is as much as they can do to keep their calves clear, and their blood from being sucked out of them altogether. Now what I want to know is, if a starved leech does bite, and suck and swell, and is not wiped off and sent to market, but gets reg'lar blown out with blood, hasn't that leech a right to say that he has in him the blood of the man to whom he has attached himself? I'd ask any independent jury whether my Giles Inglett has eaten and drunk more at Saltren's expense, or at that of his lordship, whether he does not owe his very life to his lordship as much as to me, for he'd have died of decline, if he had not been sent to the South? And if he owes his life to Lord Lamerton equally as he does to me, and has been fed and clothed, and educated by him and not by Saltren, why then, like the leech, he can say he has the blood of the Lamertons in him. That is common sense. And again—bother that lamp!"
Mrs. Saltren in place of turning the wick up, had turned it down, and was obliged to remove the chimney and strike another match.
"And then," she continued, "if Lord Lamerton has not chose to wipe him off into the pail, who is to blame but himself? If he choose to keep his leg in a leech pond, there's neither rhyme nor reason in my objecting; and he has no claim to cry out. Put Giles on a plate, and sprinkle salt on him, and whose blood will come out? Any one can see he is a gentleman! He has imbibed it all, his manners, his polish, his knowledge, everything he has, from Lord Lamerton and others; all the world can see it."
Then in came the young man about whom she was arguing with herself. He could not speak so great was his agitation, but he went to his mother, and threw his arms about her, clasped her to his heart, and kissed her. For some time he could not say anything, but after a while he conquered his emotion sufficiently to say—
"Oh, my mother—my poor mother! Oh, my dear, my ill-used mother!" and then again his emotions got the better of him. "I cannot," he said, after a pause, with a renewed effort to govern himself, "I cannot say what I shall do now, I cannot even think, but I am sure of one thing, I must remain no longer at the Park."
"My boy!" exclaimed Mrs. Saltren. "Fall off yourself into the plate and salt!"
"I do not understand," said he. She left him in his ignorance; she had been thinking of the leeches.
"My dear Giles! Whatever you do, don't breathe a word of this to any one."
"Mother, I will not, you may be sure of that."
"Not to Lord Lamerton above all—not for heaven's sake."
"Least of all to him."
"I should get into such trouble. Oh, my gracious!"
"Mother, dear," the young fellow clasped her to his heart again, "how inexpressibly precious you are to me now, and how I grieve for you. I can say no more now."
Then he went forth.
"Why, bless me!" exclaimed Mrs. Saltren. "He never was so affectionate before. Well, as far as human reason goes, it does seem as if all things were being brought to their best for me; for this day has given me my husband's love and doubled that of my son."
Giles Inglett Saltren walked hastily back to the Park. On his way he encountered Samuel Ceely, who put forth his maimed hand, and crooked the remaining fingers in his overcoat to arrest him, as he went by.
"What do you want with me?" asked Jingles impatiently.
"I should be so glad if you would put in a word for me," pleaded the old man.
"I am engaged—I cannot wait."
"But" urged old Ceely, without letting go his hold, "Joan has axed Miss Arminell for a scullery-maid's place for me. Now I'd rather have to do wi' the dogs, or I could keep the guns beautifully clean, or even the stables."
"I really cannot attend to this!" said Jingles impatiently. "I have other matters of more importance now on my mind; besides, my influence is not what—" he spoke bitterly—"what it should be in the great house."
"You might do me a good turn, and speak a word for me."
"The probability of my speaking a good word for you, or any one, to Lord Lamerton, or of doing any one a good turn in Orleigh Park, is gone from me for ever," said Giles. "You must detain me no longer—it is useless. Let me go."
He shook himself free from the clutch of the old man, and walked along the road.
After he had gone several paces, perhaps a hundred yards, he turned—moved by what impulse was unknown to him—and looked back. In the road, lit by the moon, stood the cripple, stretching forth his maimed hand after him, with the claw-like fingers.