Arminell, a social romance/Chapter 18
CHAPTER XVIII.
HOW ARMINELL TOOK IT.
Giles inglett Saltren walked on fast, he was disturbed in the stream of his thoughts by the interruption of the tiresome old cripple. He had more important matters to occupy his mind than the requirements of Samuel Ceely. His heart beat, his hands became moist. What a marvellous disclosure had been made to him—and he wondered at himself for not having divined it before. He argued much as did his mother. Why had Lord Lamerton done such great things for him, why had he sent him abroad, found him money, given him education, lifted him far above the sphere in which his parents moved, unless he felt called to do so by a sense of responsibility, such as belongs to a father?
To a whole class of minds disinterested conduct is inconceivable. All such conduct as is oblique is to them intelligible, and allowance is made by them for stupidity, and stupidity with them is the same thing as unselfishness. But such unselfishness is permissible only by fits as lapses from the course which all men naturally take. But that men should act consistently on disinterested motives is an idea too preposterous for them to allow of its existence.
This class of minds does not belong specially to any particular stratum of society, though it is found to be most prevalent where the struggle for existence is most keen, and where there is least culture.
But of culture there are two kinds, that which is external, and that which is within: it is generally found that this inability to understand disinterested conduct is found everywhere where the inner culture does not exist.
There is, we believe, a Rabbinic legend concerning a certain cow which was its own calf, and much disputation ensued among the Talmudists, to determine the point of time at which the cow calved itself, and when it ceased to be accounted beef, and became veal, or the contrary. But what seems to us Gentiles to be impossible in the material sense, is possible enough in the spiritual realm, and a very calf-like self may become the mother of a cow-self, so vast, so considerable that, like the Brahminic cow, Varuna, it will occupy the entire firmament, extend to the horizon on all sides, and overshadow and envelope everything. Varuna in fact is the universe, and as we see and exist in that universe, so with the cow-self born of calf-self, it becomes our universe. We see only that cow, inhale the breath of that cow, think only cow thoughts, stand on cow, and our aspirations are limited on all sides by cow. That cow is Self born of self. The breath of that cow is sweet to our nostrils, its milk the nourishment of our bowels, its low is music to our ears, and nothing that does not smell and taste and sound of that cow is worthy of being smelt, and tasted, and listened to.
Of this cow we can give information unattainable by the Rabbis. We can watch its development, if we cannot determine the moment of its nativity. It probably comes to the birth at an early age, but there is this deserving of consideration about it that this cow born of calf can be bled to whiteness, and knocked on the head if taken in time.
If, however, it be allowed to attain to heiferhood, it is thenceforth unmanageable: we see everything through its medium, and like and dislike, love and hate all objects and persons as they stand within or without of the compass of the great cow-self, which has become our Varuna, our universe.
It must not be supposed that such as live under the shadow of this great cow, are oppressed by it. On the contrary they have become so accustomed to it that they could not exist apart from it. There is a story of a man who carried a monstrous cow on his shoulders, and explained that he had acquired the ability to do so by beginning with the creature when it was a day old. As the calf grew, so grew his ability to support its weight. It is the same with us, we carry the little calf-self about on our shoulder, and dance along the road and leap over the stones, and as day by day the calf grows, so does our capacity for carrying it, till at last we trudge about everywhere, into all society, even into church, with the monstrous cow-self on our shoulders, and do not feel that we have anything weighing on us whatsoever.
Now Giles Inglett Saltren had grown up nursing and petting this calf. He had good natural abilities, but partly through his mother's folly, partly through external circumstances, he had come to see everything through a medium of self. The notice taken of him by his schoolmaster because he was intelligent, by Lord Lamerton because he was delicate, the very stethoscoping of his lungs, the jellies and grapes sent him from the great house, the petting he got in the servants' hall, because he was handsome and interesting, the superiority he had acquired over his parents by his residence abroad, and education, all tended to the feeding and fattening of the calf-self; and the cod-liver oil he had consumed, had not merely gone to restore his lungs, but to build up piles of yellow fat on the flanks of self. Jingles had already reached that point at which his cow had become Varuna, his entire universe. He thought of, considered, nothing from any other point of view than as it touched himself.
His consciousness of discomfort in the society of Orleigh, his bitterness of mood, his resentment of the distinctions not purposely made, but naturally existing and necessarily insuperable, between himself and those with whom he associated, all this sprang out of the one source, all came of the one disease—intense, all-absorbing, all-prevailing selfishness.
He observed the natural ease that pervaded all the actions of those with whom he was brought into contact in the upper world, and their complete lack of self-consciousness, their naturalness, simplicity, in all they said and did. He had not got it—he could not acquire it, he was like a maid-of-all-work from a farmhouse on a market day in the county town wearing a Mephistopheles hat on her red head, and ten-button gloves on her mottled arms. He was conscious of his self-consciousness—he feared it would be remarked. It made him suspicious and envious and angry. He could not reach to the ease of those above him, and therefore he desired to level them to his own plane. A man with black blood in his veins is fearful lest those at the table should look at his nails. Jingles was ever dreading lest some chance glance should discover the want of breed in himself.
This caused him much misery and this all came of his carrying about the cow-self with him into my lady's boudoir, and my lord's study, to the dining-room, and to the parlour.
I was at the autumn fair some years ago at Liège; on the boulevards were streets of booths, some for the sale of cakes and toys, others shows; but, as among the stalls those for cakes prevailed, so among the shows did the Rigolade Parisienne preponderate.
Not having the faintest conception of what the Rigolade was, I paid my sou and entered one in quest of knowledge; and this is what I saw—a series of mirrors. But there was this peculiar about the mirrors, one was convex, and in it I beheld my nose reduced to a pimple, and my eyes to currants; another was concave, in which my nose swelled to a proboscis and my eyes to plums. A third mirror multiplied my face fifty times. A fourth showed me my face elongated, as when my MS. has been returned "not suited," from an editor; a fifth widened my face to an absurd grin; in a sixth I saw my pleasant self magnified in serene and smiling beauty in the midst, and showed me every surrounding person and object, the faces of men, the houses, the cathedral, the sky, the sun, all distorted out of shape and proportions. "Eh ça, M'sou," said the showman, "c'est la véritable Rigolade Parisienne."
Eh ça—my dear readers, was Giles Inglett Saltren's vision of life. He saw himself infinitely magnified and everything else dwarfed about him and tortured into monstrosity.
Of one thing I am very certain, dear reader, in this great Rigolade of life into which we have entered, and through which we are walking, there are some who are always seeing themselves in the multiplying mirror, and there are others who contemplate their faces continually elongated, whilst others again see themselves in the widening mirror and accommodate themselves to be the perpetual buffoon. Let us trust that these are not many, but there certainly are some who view themselves enlarged, and view everything and every person beside, the world about them, the heaven above them, in a state of distortion.
Lord Lamerton had shown the young tutor extraordinary kindness, for he was a man with a soft heart, and he really wished to make the young fellow happy. He would have liked Giles to have opened out to him and not to have maintained a formal distance, but he was unable to do more than invite confidence, and he attributed the stiffness of the tutor to his shyness. Of late, his lordship had begun to think that perhaps Jingles was somewhat morbid, but this he attributed to his constitutional delicacy. Consumptive people are fantastical, was his hasty generalization.
In the heart of Giles Inglett Saltren a very mixed feeling existed as he walked back to the park. He was gratified to think that he had noble blood in his veins, but he was incensed at the thought of the treachery to which his mother had fallen a victim, and which robbed him of his birthrights. Had that function in the drawing-room, described by his mother, been celebrated legally, he and not the snivelling little Giles would be heir to Orleigh, to fifty thousand a year, and a coronet, and a seat in the House of Lords. What use would Giles the Little make of his privileges? Would he not lead the same prosaic life as his father, planting pines, digging fish-ponds, keeping a pack of hounds, doing the active work of a county magnate and magistrate?—whereas he—Giles Inglett Saltren, no longer Saltren, but Baron Lamerton of Orleigh, might become, with the advantages of his birth, wealth, and abilities combined, the greatest statesman and reformer England had known. He felt that his head was bursting with ideas, his blood on fire to give them utterance, and his hands tingling to carry his projects into effect. Without some adventitious help, such as position and wealth could give, he could not take the place he knew by inner illumination should be his.
"I was sure of it," said Jingles, "that is to say I imagined that I could not be the son of a common mining captain. There was something superior to that sort of stuff in me. But now this infamous act of treachery stands between me and acknowledgment by the world, between me and such success as, perhaps no man in England, except perhaps Mr. Gladstone, has attained to. All I want is a lift on the ladder—after that first step I will mount the rest of the way myself."
He walked on fast. His blood seethed in his heart. He was angry with Lord Lamerton for having betrayed his mother's trust, and with his mother for allowing herself to be deceived.
"Something may yet be done. It is not impossible that I may discover what has not been suspected. I must discover this friend who pretended to be a parson, and search the archiepiscopal registers for the alleged licence. It is hardly likely, that my lord would dare to fabricate a false licence, or for a friend of his to run the risk, out of friendship, of twenty-five years' penal servitude. No—it is, calmly considered, far more likely that a true licence was obtained, that the marriage though secret, was valid, and that my mother was imposed upon, when assured she had been duped, and then she was forced on Captain Saltren to dispose of her securely against discovering her rights and demanding them. I will go to town and then take advice what to do. It will, perhaps, be best for me thence to write to his lordship and ask for the particulars, threatening unless they are furnished me voluntarily, that I will search them out for myself. If I were the Honourable Giles Inglett," mused Jingles, with his eyes on the moonlit road, "how utterly different my position in the house would be to what it now is. That confounded butler—who assumes a patronising air, and would, if I gave him encouragement, pat me on the shoulder. That impudent valet, who brought me up the wrong waistcoat yesterday morning, and allowed me to ring thrice before he chose to answer the bell, and never apologised for having kept me waiting. Then, again, at table the other day, when something was said of fish out of water, the footman touched my back with the dish of curried prawns. He did it intentionally, he meant that I was a fish out of water, a curried prawn myself, in fiery heat. There was something said among the gentlemen about Gammon, the man who has just been created High Sheriff. He made his money in mines. One of those present said that those fellows who scramble into society for which they are not qualified always reminded him of French poodles, half-shaven and half-savage; every one laughed and the laugh cut me like knives. I am sure several at the table thought of me, and that they have taken to calling me 'the French poodle.' What am I? I am either his lordship's legitimate but unacknowledged son—and if so I am shaved all over; but if I am as he would pretend, his bastard—I am half-shaved, and so half-shaved I must run about the world, laughed at, thought monstrous, pitied, a creature of aristocratic and plebeian origin commingled, with the hair about my neck, and ears, and eyes, and nose, but all the rest of me polished and cultured. A poodle indeed! I—a French poodle!"
A piece of decayed branch fallen from a tree lay in the road. Jingles kicked it away.
"That," said he passionately, "is what I should like to do to the butler, were I the Honourable Giles. And that," he kicked another stick, "is how I would treat that brute who allowed me to wait for my waistcoat. And so," he trod on and snapped a twig that lay athwart his path, "so would I crush the footman who dared to nudge me with the curried prawns! And," he caught a hazel bough that hung from the hedge, and broke it off, and ripped the leaves away, and then with his teeth pulled the rind away, "and this is what I would do to that man who dared to talk of half-shaved French poodles. Oh! if I could be but a despot—a dictator for an hour—for an hour only—to ram the curried prawns down the throat of that insolent ruffian who nudged me, and to flay alive that creature who spoke of poodles! Then I would cheerfully surrender my power into the hands of the people and be the democratic leader once more."
He entered the park grounds by a side-gate and was soon on the terrace. There he saw Arminell returning to the house from her stroll in the avenue.
"Mr. Saltren," she said, "have you also been enjoying the beauty of the night?"
"I have been trying to cool the fever within," he replied.
"I hope," she said, misunderstanding him, "that you have not caught the influenza, or whatever it is from Giles."
"I have taken nothing from Giles. The fever I speak of is not physical."
"Oh! you are still thinking of what we discussed over the Noah's Ark."
"Yes—how can I help it? I who am broken and trodden on at every moment."
"I am sorry to hear you say this, Mr. Saltren. I also have been talking the matter over with papa, and after he went in, I have been walking up and down under the trees meditating on it—but I get no farther, for all my thinking."
"Miss Inglett," said Jingles, "the time of barley-mows is at an end. Hitherto we have had the oats, and the wheat, and the rye, and the clover, and the meadow-grass ricked, stacked separately. All that is of the past. The age of the stack-yard is over with its several distinct classified ricks—this is wheat, that is rye; this is clover, that damaged hay. We are now entering an age of Silo, and inevitably as feudalism is done away with, so will the last relics of distinctions be swept aside also, and we shall all enter an universal and common silo."
"I do not think I quite understand you."
"Henceforth all mankind will make one, all contribute to the common good, all be pressed together and the individuality of one pass to become the property of all."
Arminell shook her head and laughed.
"I confess that I find great sweetness in the old stack-yard, and a special fragrance attaches to each rick. Is all that to be a thing of the past, and the savour of the silo to be the social atmosphere of the future?"
"You strain the illustration," said Saltren, testily.
"You wish to substitute an aggregate of nastiness for diversified sweets."
"Miss Inglett, I will say no more. I thought you more sympathetic with the aspirations of the despised and down-trodden, with the movement of ideas in the present century."
"I am sympathetic," said Arminell. "But I am as bewildered now as I was this morning. I am just as one who has been spun through the spiral tunnel on the St. Gothard line, when one rushes forth into day: you know neither in which direction you are going, nor to what level you are brought. I dislike your similitude of a silo, and so have a right to criticise it."
"Arminell," said Jingles standing still.
"Mr. Saltren!" The girl reared herself haughtily, and spoke with icy coldness.
"Exactly," laughed the tutor, bitterly. "I thought as much! You will not allow the presumed son of a manganese captain, the humble tutor, to presume an approach of familiarity to the honourable the daughter of a peer."
"I allow no one to presume," said she, haughtily, and turned her back on him, and resumed her walk.
"Yet I have a right," pursued Jingles, striding after her. "Miss Inglett—Arminell, listen to me. I am not the man to presume. I know and am made to feel too sharply my inferiority to desire to take a liberty. But I have a right, and I stand on my right. I have a right to call you by your Christian name, a right which you will acknowledge. I am your brother."
Arminell halted, turned and looked at him from head to foot with surprise mingled with disdain.
"You doubt my words," he went on. "I am not offended—I am not surprised at that; indeed, I expected it. But what I say is true. We have different mothers, mine"—with bitterness—"of the people, that I allow—of the people, of the common, base lot, who are dirt under your feet; yours is of the aristocracy, made much of, received in society, in the magic circle from which mine would be shut out. But we have one father; I stand to you in precisely the same relation as does the boy Giles, but I am your elder brother, and should be your adviser and closest friend."