by Grant Allen
“I expect my governor’s grieved and annoyed at a great many things I do,” Thistleton retorted with the unruffled philosophical calm of one-and-twenty, where others are concerned. “It don’t pay to be too tender to the feelings of fathers, you see; it gives them too high and mighty an idea of their own importance. Fathers in any case are apt to magnify their office overmuch, and it would never do for sons as well to pamper them. But, after all, I don’t know why you need have spoken at all, nor why you shouldn’t go on accepting this old buffer’s assistance and support, with a quiet conscience, till you take your degree. When one looks it in the face, you don’t know that you won’t marry an heiress. Accidents will happen, you see, even in the best regulated families. It’s just as easy, if it comes to that, to fall in love with a girl with five thousand a year as with a girl who hasn’t a penny to bless herself with. If the five thousand pounder’s pretty and nice, like that Yankee at Mentone with the mamma in tow, I should say on the whole it’s a great deal easier.”
“Not for me,” Paul answered, with the prompt fervor born of recent internal debate on this very question. “I can understand that another fellow, who hadn’t been brought up to look out for money, might fall in love with a girl with money quite as easily as with a girl without any. He has no prejudice one way or the other. But in my case it’s different. The very fact that the money’s been so much insisted upon for me, and that part of it would go to pay Mr. Solomons” — Paul never even thought of calling his creditor anything less respectful than “Mr. Solomons,” even to his nearest acquaintance—” would suffice to prevent me from falling in love with money. You see, falling in love’s such a delicately balanced operation! If I married money at all, it’d be simply and solely because I married for money, not because I fell in love with it; and I could never take any woman’s money to pay the debt incurred beforehand for my own education. I should feel as if I’d sold myself to her, and was her absolute property.”
Thistleton stirred the fire meditatively with his friend’s poker. “It is awkward,” he admitted unwillingly, “devilishly awkward, I allow. I say, Gascoyne, how much about does it cost you to live for a term here?”
“Oh, an awful lot of money,” Paul answered, much downcast, staring hard at the embers. “Not much short of fifty pounds on an average.”
Thistleton looked across at him with a broad smile of surprise. “Fifty pounds!” he echoed. “You don’t mean to say, my dear fellow, you manage to bring it down to fifty pounds, do you?”
“Well, for summer term especially I do, when there are no fires to keep up,” Paul answered soberly. “But spring term comes rather heavy sometimes, I must say, because of the cold and extra clothing.”
Thistleton looked long at the fire, staring harder than ever with blank astonishment. “Gascoyne,” he said at last in a very low tone, “I’m clean ashamed of myself.”
“Why, my dear boy?”
“Because I spend at least five times as much as that on an average.”
“Ah, but then you’ve got five times as much to spend, you know. That makes all the difference.”
Thistleton paused and ruminated once more. How very unevenly things are arranged in this world! He was evidently thinking how he could word a difficult proposition for their partial readjustment. Then he spoke again. “I could easily cut my own expenses down fifty quid this term,” he said, “if you’d only let me lend it to you. I’m sure I wouldn’t feel the loss in any way. The governor’s behaved like a brick this winter.”
Paul shook his head. “Impossible,” he answered with a despondent air. “It’s awfully good of you, Thistleton — awfully kind of you to think of it; but as things stand, of course I couldn’t dream of accepting it.”
“It wouldn’t make the slightest difference in the world to me,” Thistleton went on persuasively. “I assure you, Gascoyne, my governor’d never feel or miss fifty pounds one way or the other.”
“Thank you, ever so much,” Paul answered with genuine gratitude. “I know you mean every word you say, but I could never by any possibility take it, Thistleton.”
“Why not, my dear boy?” the blond young man said, laying his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“Because, in the first place, it’s your father’s money, not yours, you propose to lend; and I couldn’t accept it: but also in the second place, which is far more important, I haven’t the very slightest chance of ever repaying you.”
“Repaying me!” Thistleton echoed with a crestfallen air. “Oh, dash it all, Gascoyne, I never thought of your really repaying me, of course, you know. I meant it as an offer of pure accommodation.”
Paul laughed in spite of himself. “That sort of a loan,” he said, taking his friend’s hand in his and wringing it warmly, “is usually called by another name. Seriously, Thistleton, I couldn’t think of taking it from you. You see, I’ve no right to pay anybody else till I’ve repaid the last farthing I owe to Mr. Solomons: and to borrow money on the chance of repaying it at such a remote date — say somewhere about the Greek Kalends — would be downright robbery.”
A bright idea seized suddenly upon Thistleton. “By Jove!” he cried, “I’ll tell you how we’ll manage it. It’s as easy as pap. You can’t lose either way. You know that prize essay you were mugging away at all the time we were at Mentone—’ The Influence of the Renaissance on Modern Thought,’ wasn’t it? — ah, yes, I thought so. Well, how much would you get, now, if you happened to win it?”
“Fifty pounds,” Paul answered. “But then, that’s so very improbable.”
“Awfully improbable,” his friend echoed warmly, with profound conviction. “That’s just what I say. You haven’t a chance. You ought to back yourself to lose, don’t you see; that’s the way to work it. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll bet you ten to one in fivers you win.
And you put a fiver on the chance you don’t. Then— ‘don’t you catch on?’ — as the Yankee girl used to say; you stand to come out pretty even either way. Suppose you get the prize, you earn fifty pounds, out of which you owe me a fiver — that leaves forty-five to the good, doesn’t it? But suppose you lose, I owe you fifty. So, you see, you clear pretty nearly the same lot whichever turns up. I call that good hedging.” And the blond young man leant back in his chair with a chuckle at his own ingenuity.
Paul smiled again. The blond young man seemed so hugely delighted at the cleverness of his own device that he was really loth to be compelled to disillusion him. “Your adroitness in trying to find a way to make me a present of fifty pounds, under a transparent disguise, really touches me,” he said with a faint tremor in his voice; “but don’t think about it any more, you dear, good fellow. It’s quite impossible. I must try to make it up myself with pupils and economy, and back my chances for the prize essay. If at the end of the term I’m still to the bad, I’ll put the matter fairly before Mr. Solomons. Whether I stop up one term longer and take my degree or not must then depend upon what he thinks best for his own interest. After all, my whole future’s mortgaged to him already, and it’s more his affair than mine in the end what becomes of me.”
“Why, I call it downright slavery?” Thistleton exclaimed warmly. “I think it ought to be prohibited by Act of Parliament. It’s a great deal worse than the chimney boys and the indentured laborers. I only wish I’d got that beastly old Jew, with his head in chancery here under my arms, this very minute. By George, sir, wouldn’t I just punch it as flat as a pancake in rather less than no time!”
“I think,” Paul answered with a smile, “punching his head flat would do me very little permanent good. Indeed, in his own way he really means me well. He’s bound us down by all the terrors of the law to his percentages and his policies; but I believe he considers himself my benefactor for all that.”
“Benefactor be blowed!” Thistleton responded, rising with north country vehemence. “If only I could see the old blackguard in college to-night, it’d give me the sincerest pleasure in life-to kick him a dozen times round T
om Quad till he roared for mercy.”
CHAPTER XVI.
FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE.
IN spite of Paul’s fears, however, that dreaded spring term went off most happily. To be sure he had to work for his bread like a London cab-horse (as Sir Emery loved professionally to phrase it), but Paul had never been afraid of hard work, and as long as he could make both ends meet somehow, and avoid running into further debt with Mr. Solomons, he was amply satisfied. And that spring term he got as many pupils as he could possibly find time for. The reason for this sudden run upon tutorial powers was, of course, the usual one which accounts for all successes and failures in life — a woman’s wire-pulling. It is a mistake to think this world is mainly run by men. Genius, talent, industry, capacity, nay, even the invaluable quality of unscrupulousness itself, are as dust in the balance as a means to success compared with the silent, unobtrusive, backstairs influence of the feminine intelligence. A woman’s wit is worth the whole lot of them.
And this valuable ally in the struggle for life Paul managed to secure almost without knowing it.
For two days after his return to The House (as Christ Church men insist upon calling their college) Paul received a little note from Faith’s new friend, Mrs. Douglas, inviting him to drink afternoon tea at her house in the Parks — the fashionable tutorial suburb of modern married Oxford.
The Parks, in fact, which are the natural outcome of the married fellow system, have completely revolutionized the Oxford we all knew and loved in our own callow undergraduate period. In those monastic ages the fellow who married lost his fellowship; the presence of women in the University was unknown; and even the stray intrusion of a sister or cousin into those stern gray quads was severely frowned upon by ascetic authority. But, nowadays, under the new petticoat régime, all that is changed: the Senior Tutor lives in a comfortable creeper-clad villa in the Parks; his wife gives lunches and afternoon teas; and his grownup daughters play tennis with the men, and belong to the University just as much as the average undergraduate — or even in virtue of their fixity of tenure a little more so. Mrs. Senior Tutor (with marriageable girls) is quite as anxious to catch the eligible undergraduate for her own dance in Commemoration week as any Belgravian mamma in all London; and the Reverend the Bursar himself smiles benignly while scholars and exhibitioners waste the shining hours in flirtation and punts on the banks of the Cherwell. Things were not so ordered Consule Planco, when Leighton was vice-chancellor. But as everybody seems satisfied with the existing system — especially the Senior Tutor’s daughters — there can be little doubt that all is for the best in the best of all possible Universities, and that flirting, so far from distracting the heads of students, as the older school devoutly believed, is in reality a powerful spur on the mind of the youth to the acquisition of classical and mathematical knowledge. —
To this new microcosm of the Parks and their inhabitants, Mrs. Douglas played the part of center of gravity. Round her as primary the lesser orbs of that little system revolved in their various subordinate places. Not that Mrs. Douglas herself was either rich or pretentious. The Accadian professor’s stipend consisted of the modest interest on a sum in Reduced Two-and-three-quarters per cent. Consols, which he supplemented only by private means of the smallest, and by a very moderate income from his wife’s family. But Mrs. Douglas had the invaluable quality of being able to “hold her salon”; and being besides an earl’s niece, she had rapidly grown into the principal wire-puller and recognized leader of Oxford tutorial society. With that greater world where the heads of houses move serene in placid orbits, indeed, she interfered but little; but the Parks acknowledged her sway without a murmur, as the representative of authority in its most benign avatar. For Mrs. Douglas had tact, sense, and kindliness; she was truly sympathetic to a very high degree, and she would put herself out to serve a friend in a way that was sure to attract the friend’s warmest gratitude. Moreover, she was a woman, and, therefore, skilled in the femine art of mounting the back stairs with address and good humor. This combination of qualities made her justly loved and admired in Oxford by all save those unfortunate people whom her kindly machinations often succeeded in keeping out of posts for which they possessed every qualification on earth except the one needful one of Mrs. Douglas’ friendship. But drawbacks like this are, of course, incidental to every possible system of “influence” in government.
Now things had made this powerful and good-natured lady particularly anxious to know and serve Paul Gascoyne. In the first place, she had been deeply interested in his sister Faith, whose curious character had engaged her sympathy at once, and with whom their one night at the country hotel together had made her suddenly quite intimate. In the second place, on her return to Oxford, she had found a letter awaiting her from Nea Blair, her little Cornish friend, which contained some casual mention of a certain charming Christ Church man, a Mr. Gascoyne, who had created quite a puzzle for Mentone society by his singular mixture of pride and humility. Well, if Mrs. Douglas had a fault, it was that of taking too profound an interest in the fancies and fortunes of young people generally. Her husband, indeed, was wont to aver that, after Bryant & May, she was the greatest matchmaker in all England. Something in Nea Blair’s letter — some mere undertone of feeling, that only a clever woman would ever have guessed at — suggested to Mrs. Douglas’s quick instincts the idea that Nea Blair was more than commonly interested in Paul Gascoyne’s personality and prospects. That alone would have been enough to make Mrs. Douglas anxious to meet and know Paul: the accident of her chance acquaintance with Faith in the commodious horsebox made her doubly anxious to be of use and service to him.
So when Paul duly presented himself at the eligible creeper-clad villa in the Parks, to drink tea with the wife of the Accadian professor, Mrs. Douglas drew out of him by dexterous side-pressure the salient fact that he was anxious to find private pupils, or otherwise to increase his scanty income. And having once arrived at a knowledge of that fact, Mrs. Douglas made it her business in life for the next ten days to scour all Oxford in search of men who wanted to read for Mods with a private tutor, going out into the very highways and by-ways of the University, so to speak, and compelling them to come in with truly Biblical fortitude. But when once Mrs. Douglas took a thing in hand, it was well beknown to the chancellor, masters, and scholars of the University of Oxford that, sooner or later, she meant to get it done, and that the chancellor, masters, and scholars aforesaid might, therefore, just as well give in at once, without unnecessary trouble, bother, or expense, and let her have her way as soon as she asked for it. “Going in for Mods in June?” Mrs. Douglas would remark, with a sigh of pity, to the unhappy undergraduate of limited brains, fixing her mild brown eyes upon him with an air of the profoundest sympathy and friendly assistance. “Then you’ll want to read up your books this term with a private coach or somebody, of course and when the unhappy undergraduate of limited brains, falling readily into the trap thus baited for his destruction, admitted abstractly, in a general way, that a little tutorial assistance of a friendly sort would, perhaps, be not wholly unsuited to his intellectual needs, Mrs. Douglas, fixing her mild brown eye still more firmly than ever upon his trembling face, would nail him to his admission at once by responding cheerfully, “Then I know the very man that’ll suit your book just down to the ground. Mr. Gascoyne of Christ Church has a great many pupils reading with him this term, but I daresay I could induce him to make room for you somehow. My husband thinks very highly of Mr. Gascoyne. He’s a capital coach. If you want to get through with flying colors, he’s just the right man to pull you out of the moderator’s clutches. That’s his card in my basket there; don’t forget the name; ‘Gascoyne of Christ Church, first pair right, number six, Peckwater.’ Yes, one of the great Gascoyne people down at Pembrokeshire — that’s the very family. I’m glad you know them. His father’s the present Baronet, I believe, and his sister’s coming up to see me next Commemoration. If you like, you can take his card to remember the nam
e by — and when Mr. Gascoyne comes again on Sunday, I’ll make a point of asking him whether you’ve been to call upon him about reading for Mods, or not, and I’ll tell him (as you’re a most particular friend of mine) to be sure to pay you every possible attention.”
When a clever and good-looking woman of thirty-five, who happens to be also a professor’s wife, flings herself upon an unhappy undergraduate of limited brains in that dashing fashion, with a smile that might soften the heart of a stone, what on earth can the unhappy undergraduate do in self-defense but call at once upon Gascoyne of Christ Church, and gratefully receive his valuable instructions? Whence it resulted that, at the end of a fortnight, Gascoyne of Christ Church had as many pupils as he could easily manage (at ten pounds a head) and saw his way clearly to that term’s expenses, about which he had so despaired a few days before with Faith at Hillborough. A woman of Mrs. Douglas’ type is the most useful ally a man can find in life. Make friends with her, young man, wherever met; and be sure she will be worth to you a great deal more than many hundred men at the head of your profession.
One further feat of Mrs. Douglas’ the candid historian blushes to repeat, yet, in the interest of truth, it must needs be recorded.