by Grant Allen
“Only fifteen hundred!” Isabel cried with a start. “And he makes all that fuss over fifteen hundred pounds! Why, say, Mr. Solomons, I’ll give you two thousand, money down, for the lot, and we’ll make it a bargain.”
Mr. Solomons drew a deep breath and hesitated. Four hundred and seventy-odd pounds clear profit — besides the compound interest at twenty per cent. — was more than his fondest wish had ever anticipated. Such a young woman as that, properly worked, would indeed be a perfect mine of wealth for a capitalist to draw upon. He looked at her long and his heart faltered. Four hundred and seventy-odd pounds! “Well, what do you want them for?” he asked at last cautiously.
“That’s my business, I guess,” Isabel answered with sharp incisiveness. “To burn ’em if I choose, perhaps. When I buy things at a store, I don’t usually expect to tell the drygoodsman what I want to do with ’em.”
Mr. Solomons eyed with an inquisitive look. “Let’s be plain and aboveboard with one another,” he said. “Do you intend to marry him?”
“Oh, my, no,” Isabel answered at once with a prompt decision that carried conviction in its very tone immediately.
Mr. Solomons was nonplussed. “You don’t want to marry him!” he exclaimed, taken aback.
“No, I aint going to marry him,” Isabel answered stoutly, just altering the phrase into closer accordance with the facts of the case, but otherwise nodding a bland acquiescence. “I aint going to marry him, I give you my word, Mr. Solomons.”
“Then, what do you want?” Mr. Solomons asked, all amazed.
“I want those papers,” Isabel answered with persistence.
Mr. Solomons rose, faltered for a second, replaced them in their pigeon-hole with a decided air, locked the safe, and put the key in his pocket. Then he turned round to Isabel with a very gracious smile, and observed politely:
“Have a glass of wine, miss?”
It was his mode of indicating with graceful precision that the question between them was settled — in the negative.
Against the rock of that decisive impassive attitude the energetic little American broke herself in wild foam of entreaties and expostulations, all in vain. She stormed, begged, prayed, and even condescended to burst into tears, but all to no purpose. Mr. Solomons, now his mind was once made up, remained hard as adamant. All she could obtain from Mr. Solomons was the solemn promise that he would keep this fruitless negotiation a dead secret from Paul and Faith, and would never even mention the fact of her visit to Hillborough. Thus re-assured, the kind-hearted little Pennsylvanian dried her eyes, and refusing in return to make Mr. Solomons the confidant of her name, descended the stairs once more, wondering and disappointed.
“Shall I call you a cab, miss?” Mr. Solomons asked politely as he went down by her side.
“Thank you, I’ve gotten one waiting,” Isabel answered, trying hard to look unconcerned. “Will you tell the man to drive to the best place in the village where I can get something to eat.” For Americans wot not of the existence of towns — to them everything that isn’t a city is a mere village.
But when Mr. Solomons saw the driver of Isabel’s cab, he gave a sudden little start of surprise, and exclaimed involuntarily, “Why, bless my soul, Gascoyne, it’s you is it? The young lady wants to be driven to the Golden Lion.”
Isabel Boyton drew back, herself surprised in her turn. “You don’t mean to say,” she cried, looking hard at the cabman, “this is Mr. Gascoyne’s father.”
Mr. Solomons nodded a nod of acquiescence, Isabel gazed at him with a good hard stare, as one gazes at a new wild beast in the Zoo, and then held out her hand frankly. “May I shake hands with you?” she said. “Thank you very much. You see, it’ll be something for me to tell my friends when I get back home to America that I’ve shaken hands with an English baronet.”
At the Golden Lion she paused as she paid him. “You’re a man of honor, I suppose,” she said, hesitating slightly.
And the English baronet answered with truth, “I ‘opes I is, miss.”
“Then I trust you, Mr. Gascoyne, Sir Emery, or whatever else it ought to be,” she went on seriously. “You won’t mention either to your son or your daughter that you drove an American lady to-day to Mr. Solomons’ office.”
The English baronet touched his hat respectfully. “Not if I was to die for it, miss,” he answered with warmth; for the honest grasp of Isabel’s hand had touched some innermost chord of his nature till it resounded strangely.
But Isabel went in to gulp down her lunch with a regretful sense of utter failure. She hadn’t succeeded in making things easier, as she had hoped, for Paul and Nea.
And the English baronet and Mr. Solomons kept their troth like men. Paul and Faith never knew Isabel Boyton had visited Hillborough, and Mr. Solomons himself never learned the name of his mysterious little golden-haired American visitor.
CHAPTER XXIV.
HONORS.
THE rest of that term at Oxford was a dull one for Paul. As soon as Faith and Nea “went down” (to use the dear old Oxford phrase) he set to work with redoubled vigor at his reading, and went in at last for his Final examination. Upon that examination much, very much depended. If only he could gain a first, he would stand a fair chance in time for a fellowship; and a fellowship would allow him leisure to look around, and to lay his plans for slowly repaying Mr. Solomons. But if he succeeded merely in attaining a second or third, his prospects of a fellowship would be greatly decreased, and with them the probability of his shaking off that load of debt that clogged and oppressed him in all his schemes for the future.
He knew, of course, that the necessity for taking pupils during his undergraduate years told heavily against him. No man can row in two boats at once; and the time he had used up in reading with Thistleton and his other pupils had been so much subtracted from the time he ought to have devoted to his own reading. Still, he was able, undeniably able; and, little disposed to overestimate his own powers as he was, he had, nevertheless, a dim consciousness in his own soul that, given even chances, he was more than a match for most of his contemporaries. He had worked hard, meanwhile, to make up for lost time; and he went into the examination cheered and sustained by the inspiring thought that Nea Blair’s eyes were watching his success or failure from afar in Cornwall.
Day after day he worked and wrote in those dreary Schools, deep in Aristotle, Plato, Grote, and Mommsen. Night after night he compared notes with his competitors, and marked the strong or weak points of their respective compositions. As time went on his spirits rose higher. He was sure he was doing himself full justice in his papers. He was sure what he had to say upon most of the questions asked in the Schools was more original and more philosophical than the ideas and opinions of any of his neighbors. He felt quite at ease about his success now. And if only once he could get his first, he was pretty sure of a fellowship, and of some chance at least of repaying Mr. Solomons.
At last the examination was over, the papers sent in, and nothing remained but that long, weary delay while the examiners are glancing over the tops of the answers and pretending to estimate the relative places of the candidates. Paul waited and watched with a yearning heart. How much hung for him on the issue of that dreaded class list!
On the day when it came out, nailed up according to Oxford wont on the doors of the Schools, he stole into the quadrangle half an hour late — he couldn’t bear to be there with the first eager rush — and looked among the G’s in the First Class for the name of Gascoyne.
It was with a thrill of surprise — only surprise at first — that he noticed the list went straight from Galt to Groves: there was no Gascoyne at all in the place where he expected it. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. Surely some mistake; for the names go in each class in alphabetical order. G-a-l, G-a-s, G-r-o. Had they misspelt it somehow? Then, all at once, the truth flashed across his mind in a horrible revelation. The truth, or a part of it. His name wasn’t put in the First Class at all! He must have taken a Second!
&
nbsp; For a moment he could hardly believe his eyes. It was all too strange, all too incredible. He had worked so hard, he had deserved it so well! But, still he must face the worst like a man. He fixed his glance steadily on the Second Class. Farrington, Flood, Galbraith, Girdlestone. He rubbed his eyes once more. Was he going mad on the spot? Or had the examiners neglected to place him altogether?
With a vague sinking feeling about his left breast, he glanced yet lower to where the Third Class filled up its two much longer columns. About halfway down his eyes caught his own name with that miraculous rapidity whith enables one always to single out those familiar words on a printed page from a thousand others. “Gascoyne, Paulus, ex Æde Christi.” Yes, yes, it was too true. There was no denying it. A Third — the lowest of all classes in honors — was all he had got for all his toil and trouble!
He reeled as he stood, sick — sick with disappointment.
How had it happened? Who knows? Who can say? It’s the greatest mistake in the world to suppose the best men always come uppermost. If a board of third class men in afterlife were to examine their examiners, it is highly probable they might often turn the tables on the dons who misplaced them. Humanum est errare, and examiners are human. They often make blunders, like all the rest of us, and they added one more to that long list of mistakes when they gave Paul Gascoyne a Third in Finals.
The fact is Paul was original; and Oxford, like Mr. Peter Magnus, hates originality. A decorous receptivity is what it most prefers. It likes a human mind to be modeled on the phonographic pattern — prompt to take in exactly what it is told, and ready to give it out once more, precisely as inspired, whenever you turn the barrel on again by pressing the handle. In Paul’s essays, the examiners detected some flavor of ideas which appeared to them wholly unfounded on any opinions set forth by Professor Jowett or Mr. T. H. Green of Balliol; and, shocked at this revolt from established usage, they relegated their author to a Third Class, accordingly.
But Paul, for the moment, knew none of these things. He was only aware that a crushing blow had fallen upon him unexpectedly; and he went back inconsolable to his own rooms in Peckwater; where he sported his oak, or big outer door, flung himself passionately into his easy-chair, and had his bad hour alone by himself in unutterable misery. It was hard to have worked so long and so well for so bitter a disappointment. But these things happen often, and will happen always, as long as men consent to let themselves be measured by a foot-rule measurement like so many yards of brick and mortar. They are the tribute we pay to the examination Juggernaut. It crushes the best, and rolls unfelt over the bodies of the hardest.
Paul lunched alone; he was incapable of going into Thistleton’s rooms, as he often did for luncheon; but at two o’clock he heard a loud knocking at his big oak door — contrary to all established rules of University etiquette; for when once a man fastens that outer barrier of his minor castle, he is supposed to be ill, or out of town, or other-wise engaged, and inaccessible for the time being, even to his nearest and dearest intimates. However, he opened it regardless of the breach, and found Thistleton waiting for him on the landing, very red-faced. The blond young man grasped his hand hard, with a friendly pressure.
“Gascoyne,” he cried, bursting, and hardly able to gasp with stifled indignation, “this is just atrocious. It’s wicked; it’s incredible. I know who it was. Confound his impudence! It was that beast Pringle. Let’s go round to John’s, and punch his ugly old head for him!”
In spite of his disappointment, Paul smiled bitterly. Of what good would it be to punch the senior examiner’s head, now that irrevocable class list had once been issued.
“I wanted to be alone, Thistleton,” he said; “it was almost more than I can bear in company. It wasn’t for myself, you know, but for — for the heavy claims that weigh upon me. However, since you’ve come and broken my oak, let’s go down the river to Sandford Lasher in a tub pair and work it off. There’s nothing like muscular effort to carry away these things. If I don’t work I feel as if I could sit down and cry like a girl. What I feel most is — the gross injustice of it.”
And gross injustice is quite inevitable as long as men think a set of meritorious and hard-working schoolmasters can be trusted to place in strict order of merit the pick and flower of intelligent young Englishmen. The vile examination system has in it nothing viler than this all but certain chance of crushing at the outset, by want of success in a foolish race, the cleverest, most vivid, and most original geniuses.
They went down the river, Thistleton still protesting his profound intention of punching Pringle’s head, and, as they rowed and rowed, Paul gradually worked off the worst of his emotion. Then he came back, and dined alone, to try to accommodate himself to his new position. All his plans in life had hitherto been based upon the tacit assumption that he would take a First — an assumption in which he had been duly backed by all who knew him — and now that he found himself stranded on the bank with a Third instead, he had to begin and reconsider his prospects in the world under the terrible weight of this sudden disillusionment. A fellowship would now, no doubt, be a practical impossibility; he must turn his attention to some other opening — if any.
But the more he thought, the less he saw his way clear before him. And, in effect, what can a young man of promise, but without capital, and backed only by a Third in Greats, find to turn his hand to in these latter days in this jammed and overstocked realm of England? Of what practical use to him now was this costly education, for which he had mortgaged his whole future for years in advance to Mr. Solomons? The Bar could only be entered after a long and expensive apprenticeship, and even then he would in all probability do nothing but swell the noble ranks of the briefless barristers. Medicine required an equally costly and tedious novitiate. From the Church he was cut off by want of sufficient faith or natural vocation. No man can become a solicitor offhand any more than he can become a banker, a brewer, or a landed proprietor. Paul ran over all conceivable professions rapidly in his mind, and saw none open before him save that solitary refuge of the destitute — to become a schoolmaster; and even that, with a Third in Greats for his sole recommendation, would certainly be by no means either easy or remunerative.
And then Mr. Solomons! What would Mr. Solomons say to such a move? He would never allow his protégé to take to schoolmastering. Mr. Solomons’ ideals for him were all so different. He always figured to himself Paul taking his proper place in society as the heir to a baronetcy, and there captivating and capturing that supposititious heiress by the charms of his person and the graces of his high-born aristocratic manners. But to become a schoolmaster! In Mr. Solomons’ eyes that would be simply to chuck away the one chance of success. What he wanted was to see Paul living in good chambers in London, and moving about among the great world, where his prospective title would mean in the end money or money’s worth for him. If the heir of all the Gascoynes had to descend to the drudgery of mere schoolmastering, it would be necessary to have an explanation with Mr. Solomons; and then — and then his father’s dream must vanish for ever.
How could he ever have been foolish enough in such circumstances to speak to Nea! His heart misgave him that he had been so unkind and so cruel. He would have bartered his eyes now if only he could undo the past. And, even as he thought so, he unfastened his desk and, so weak is man, sat down to write a passionate appeal for advice and sympathy and aid from Nea.
He could never marry her. But she would always be his. And it calmed his soul, somehow, to write to Nea.
As he wrote a knock came at the sported oak — the sharp double rap that announces a telegram. He opened the door and took it from the bearer:
“To PAUL GASCOYNE, CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD.
“Mrs. Douglas has telegraphed me result of class list. Your disappointment is my disappointment. I feel it deeply, but send you all sympathy. You must take to literature now. — NEA.”
He flung himself back in his easy-chair once more and kissed that flimsy bit of cheap
paper fervently. Then Nea had taken the trouble to arrange beforehand with Mrs. Douglas for a telegram. Nea had been puzzling her head about the self-same problems. Nea had felt for him in his day of humiliation. He would work away yet, and clear himself for Nea. Mr. Solomons should still be paid off somehow. And sooner or later he must marry Nea.
Till that night he had never even dared to think it. But just then, in his deepest hour of despair, that bold thought came home to him as a fresh spur to effort. Impossible, incredible, unattainable as it seemed, he would pay off all and marry Nea.
The resolve alone was worth something.
Mechanically he rose and went to his desk once more. This time he pulled out a clean sheet of foolscap. The need for an outlet was strong upon him now. He took up his pen, and almost without thinking sat down and wrote furiously and rapidly. He wrote as he had rowed that afternoon to Sandford Lasher, in the wild desire to work off his excitement and depression in some engrossing occupation. He wrote far into the small hours of the night, and, when he had finished some seven or eight closely written foolscap sheets, he spent another long time in correcting and repolishing them. At last he got up and strolled off to bed. He had followed Nea’s advice, red hot at the moment. He had written for dear life. All other means failing he had taken to literature.
And that is about the way we all of us who live by the evil trade first took to it.
CHAPTER XXV.
COMPENSATION.
As it happened, that most terrible disappointment in all his life was probably the luckiest thing on earth that could possibly have befallen Paul Gascoyne. Had he taken a First, and then gained a fellowship, he would doubtless have remained up at Oxford for many years to come, plodding and coaching, leading a necessarily expensive and useless life, and paying off Mr. Solomons but very slowly by long-deferred instalments out of his scanty savings. As it was, however, being thus cast adrift on the world upon his own resources, he was compelled more frankly to face life for himself, and to find some immediate paying work which would enable him to live by hook or by crook, as best he might, over the next six months or so. And that prompt necessity for earning his salt proved, in fact, his real salvation. Not, of course, that he gave up at once the idea of a fellowship. He was too brave a man to let even a Third in Greats deter him from having a final fling at the hopelessly unattainable. A week later he went in for the very first vacancy that turned up, and missed it nobly, being beaten by a thick-headed Balliol Scot, who knew by heart every opinion of every recognized authority on everything earthly, from Plato and Aristotle down to John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Jowett. So, having thus finally buried his only chance of University preferment before October term, Paul set to work with a brave heart to look about him manfully for some means of livelihood that might tide him over the summer vacation.