Into the Highways and Hedges Part 16

It was not till he had been some weeks in the house that he noticed his brother-in-law's absence.

"Joseph is quite as well as usual," Mrs. Russelthorpe said coldly, in reply to his inquiry. "He fancies himself an invalid, and will never make the slightest exertion now. It's no use for you to try and see him, Charles;" and Charles did not try.

Perhaps he rather dreaded the old man's sharp-edged cynicism just then; though he need not have been afraid: Meg's uncle was quite as sore about her as was Meg's father, and a good deal more remorseful.

Very few people saw anything of Mr. Russelthorpe during the last years of his life. George Sauls declared that the poor old fellow was scandalously neglected; but then George Sauls was a good hater, and not likely to take a lenient view of Mrs. Russelthorpe.

Oddly enough, Mr. Sauls was the only person who guessed how heavily Meg's last hopeless appeal weighed on her uncle's mind. He was fiercely angry himself, inclined to quarrel (if they would give him the chance) with all Meg's relatives, to scoff at the popular sympathy for Mr.

Deane, and to be unamiably sceptical when he was told that Mrs.

Russelthorpe was an altered woman, and felt far more deeply than might have been supposed.

People said, indignantly, that Mr. Sauls did not show himself in at all a pleasing light; and that, considering how kind Mr. Deane had been to him, he might have exhibited more feeling for his friend's trouble; and, indeed, the worst side of the man seemed uppermost at that time.

Yet he called at the house in Bryanston Square when the Russelthorpes returned to town, showing some boldness in continuing his visits in spite of Mrs. Russelthorpe's surprised looks when they encountered each other in the hall. Mr. Russelthorpe had a liking for the young Jew, whose secret he had guessed; and though George had made his way into the library, in the first instance, from purely interested motives, being determined to know all there was to be known about Meg, yet he came again and again, from an unexpressed friendship for the queer, whimsical recluse, who was nominally master of that big house, but who was of no account whatever, and who seemed to grow lonelier and queerer as the years went by.

On the occasion of his first visit after hearing of Meg's departure, George had almost forced an entry, and had found Meg's uncle sitting almost as Meg herself had found him, save that he was making no pretence of reading now, and that his little wizened face was surmounted by a nightcap.

"Go away, I am ill!" he cried fretfully, when the door opened; but when he saw who his visitor was, he straightened himself, and held out his hand.

"Have you come to look at my Egyptian coins again, Sauls?" he asked.

"You haven't heard the news then, or you would know that the study of antiquities won't repay you,--won't repay you at all."

"It is true, then!" said Mr. Sauls, a trifle hoa.r.s.ely. "Would you mind telling me what you know about it, sir?"

"Yes, I should mind," said the old man. Then, when he looked at Mr.

Sauls, he apparently relented. "Sit down; though the story won't take long. It's short, and not particularly sweet," he remarked; and he told it in as few words as possible.

"Put not your trust in women," said George, with rather a futile attempt at flippancy, when he had heard the end. "What a fool I've been! I thought I had bought all my experience in that line years ago. Oh well!

it's done now, and the sweetest _ingenue_ in the world won't take me in again."

Mr. Russelthorpe looked up sharply. "I suppose when a man's hurt he must blame some one," he said; "and it's easiest to throw the blame on the woman; and this, perhaps, is as good a reason for raving against her as any other. Otherwise, I should say that whoever has cause of complaint, you've none; but my eyes are old and blind. You talk of being 'taken in'. Possibly she encouraged you more than I knew."

George coloured. "I beg your pardon, sir," he said. "I did not mean to imply that Miss Deane--Mrs. Thorpe, I mean--ever did more than barely tolerate me at times. She was a cut above me, I fancied. As events have proved, I was a trifle too modest. It isn't generally my failing; but, evidently, her taste was not so fastidious as I supposed. Barnabas Thorpe knew better. D----n him!" he added savagely.

"Oh certainly!" said Mr. Russelthorpe. "We'll do that, with all my heart. Not that it will make any difference. But, as to her, you're wrong. If it's any consolation to you, I don't think that she would have married you in any case. Not that I don't believe she would have done a wise thing if she had," he added, holding out his hand with a gleam of sympathy. "I should have been glad to see it; but--and this is one of those little arrangements that make one wonder whether there isn't a devil at the steering wheel after all--the purer minded and more innocent a girl is, the more likely she is to fling herself away for an empty idea, and the more faith she'll have in any canting fool who appeals to her 'higher motives'. It is born with some women, that pining to sacrifice themselves, and to spend all their energies on other people. It used to amuse me, when my niece was a child, to see how she was always throwing pearls before swine. Well! well! she's done it with a vengeance this time!"

"Ah! I am glad it amuses you so much," said Mr. Sauls. "It's a very entertaining story from first to last, isn't it? I don't know which is funniest, the thought of that girl's lonely girlhood in this house, where no one seems to have cared twopence about her, or her reckless marriage with a man who'll probably make her repent every hour of her life. Do you suppose he'll kick her when he gets sick of the pearls?

That would be most amusing of all, wouldn't it?"

He spoke almost brutally. Mr. Deane, however angry, could not have used that tone to an old man; but George had been brought up in a less strict school of manners, and, perhaps, at that moment had a revulsion of feeling against these grandees amongst whom he had pushed himself in,--to his own undoing, as he felt just then.

At that moment he found it hard to look at things calmly, or to consider that, after all, a love affair was an episode he would get over; whereas the advantages he had derived from an intimacy with the Deanes were solid and lasting, the _entree_ to Mr. Deane's house having been a decided step upwards on the social ladder. Mr. Russelthorpe made no reply, and George took up his hat.

"I am in too bad a temper to be good company, sir," he said; "though, I daresay, I amuse you. Good-bye."

"You are young still, and angry with fate, or Providence, or the devil,--whichever you like to call it," said the old man. "But as for me, I am old,--too old to be indignant any more, or to go on knocking my head against stone walls; but--I am sorry too--I have not outlived sorrow yet;--unfortunately, that is the last thing we leave behind."

George twisted his eyegla.s.s rapidly. "There are a good many years before me, in all probability," he said. "I may meet her again. In fact, I will try to, sooner or later. One would like to know how it answers, but not just yet. I don't want to be taken up for a.s.sault, and I should find it hard to keep my hands off that preaching villain. I will wait."

"Well," said Mr. Russelthorpe drily, "I think you'd better; for I've heard that Barnabas Thorpe knows how to use his fists too: it would be undignified, should you get the worst of it. Besides (though you can hardly be expected to see this), though I've met hypocrites in my time, I doubt whether they are common. Self-deceived idiots there are in plenty, who dub their own desires and prejudices the 'Voice of the Lord'; but villains are scarce. He may be one; of course, it simplifies matters to believe that he is; one can curse him the more heartily,--but I doubt it."

"Do you?" said George shortly; "I don't!"

"No," said the old man; "I don't suppose you do. You're young and hard, as I said before, and sure about everything. Well, don't go and make a fool of yourself about her. What good do you suppose you could do? You might, of course, do harm--that is always so much easier--harm to her and yourself too. I don't know that it would amuse me much if harm should come to you. I should miss you rather--though probably I should do nothing to prevent it."

His voice died away sadly, in a rambling sentence, about something he had said or had not said, and might have prevented and hadn't prevented.

"But you are in such a hurry, Margaret, and I am too old to think so quickly--too old, too old!" he mumbled.

Mr. Sauls, who was just going away, turned back, arrested by that long weak murmur. He crossed the room again, made up the fire, and pushed the armchair closer to it.

"You are not well, sir. Ought you to be alone like this? shall I fetch any one?"

"No--no--don't fetch her. I can't stand her. Don't, I say, _don't_!"

cried Mr. Russelthorpe so nervously that George gave up the idea at once.

"I'll look in again if you would like it," he said, half wondering at himself while he spoke.

"Yes; come again, and, Sauls--come nearer--I've something to say."

George came nearer, and bent over him. "If ever they tell you that I am dying, you insist on coming in, and turn her out," he whispered. "You turn her out! And--and--I want to make my will. Come in and talk it over. I wish to make you executor--and I'll tell you where I put it--then you can find it, when I am dead; but don't let her know--she knows only about the old one. Promise me!"

"All right!" said George; "I promise." Mr. Russelthorpe broke into a low chuckle.

"I wish my spirit could be there to see," he said. "Who knows? it may be, eh? We really know nothing after all. You won't mind a scene with her, will you?"

"With Mrs. Russelthorpe?" said George. "Oh, no; I shall rather like it!"

"Ah!" said the old man. "So shall I, if I am there, released from this feeble old body. I hope I may be." Arid he chuckled again. "Well, good-night, lad."

As for George, he wended his way to Hill Street to dine with his mother.

He had pulled his rather unpresentable family up with him, and he was worshipped at home. He always gave Mrs. Sauls the pleasure of his society on one evening in the week; and, considering how busy he was, and how manifold were his engagements, his constancy in keeping to this rule showed some tenacity of purpose.

Mrs. Sauls most firmly believed that all the grand ladies he met were simply dying for "her George," and that he might, as she elegantly expressed it, "'ave 'is pick of them". Perhaps some of "George's"

partners might have been rather appalled at the idea of having her for a mother-in-law; but then, as she said, "Lord bless you, they won't marry _me_; and George's wife will be able to afford to put up with my yellow old face if the Sauls' diamonds set off her young one. I shan't grudge 'em to her, though I won't give them up to any one else; and she'll have the finest in London."

While awaiting the arrival of "George's wife," who had been discussed and speculated on since George had been in petticoats, his mother wore the diamonds herself, in season and out of season. She had a gay taste in dress, delighting in crimsons and yellows, and she always put on her best clothes for her son. Rebecca Sauls had had a bad husband; but George more than made up, as she never tired of saying.

He had been a most objectionable little boy, and had sown a too liberal supply of wild oats as a youth; but his manhood had repaid her: he had turned out cleverer than his father; for, while old Sauls had known only how to make and to save, George, in addition, knew how to spend.

It had required something of an effort on George's part to tear himself away from the old place in the City; but his ambition was even stronger than his talent for money-making, and he boldly cut the shop, and went in for the law. His mother supported him, though all his father's relations held up their hands in holy horror.

"And now my son sits down at table in houses where the Benjamin Mosses and Joseph Saulses wouldn't dream of putting the tips of their long noses!" said she. "And, what's more, they are glad and thankful to get him; but he won't give _me_ up, not for the grandest of them; he'll dine here on a Sat.u.r.day night, let alone who wants him." And that Sat.u.r.day night was Mrs. Sauls' gala day. Then she donned her lowest and gayest dress, and most fearful and wonderful headgear, and ordered an aldermanic feast. She would have given George melted pearls to drink, had he expressed any desire that way.

She was an odd-looking old lady, with jet black hair and curiously light-coloured eyes, which were in strong contrast to her very dark complexion, and gave her rather a strange expression. Her mouth was coa.r.s.e, like her son's, and, like him also, she had plenty to say for herself, and was excellent company.

Some cousins came to dinner, also loud-voiced and bedizened with diamonds. The youngest cousin was at the age when Jewesses are handsomest, being barely seventeen.

She flirted outrageously with George, and he patronised her in a free and easy style. He could generally suit his manners to his company, and _this_ company was rather a rest and relaxation to him.