Sir Jasper Carew: His Life and Experience. Lever Charles James
said my father, and sat with his head on his hand, unable to utter a word more.
“Poor Kitty!” said Dan, with a heavy sigh, while he balanced his spoon on the edge of his teacup. “I half suspect she is the only one in the world that you ever seriously wronged, and yet she is the very first to uphold you.”
“But you are unjust, Dan, – most unjust,” cried my father, warmly. “There was a kind of flirtation between us – I don’t deny it, – but nothing more than is always going forward in this free-and-easy land of ours, where people play with their feelings as they do with their fortunes, and are quite astonished to discover, some fine morning, that they have fairly run through both one and the other. I liked her, and she perhaps liked me, somewhat better than any one else that she met as often. We got to become very intimate; to feel that in the disposal of our leisure hours – which meant the livelong day – we were excessively necessary to each other; in fact, that if our minds were not quite alike, our tastes were. Of course, before one gets that far, one’s friends, as they call themselves, have gone far beyond it. There’s no need of wearying you with detail. Somebody, I ‘m sure I forget who it was, now took occasion to tell me that I was behaving ill to Kitty; that unless I really intended seriously, – that’s the paraphrase for marriage, – my attentions were calculated to do her injury. Ay, by Jove! your match-making moralists talk of a woman as they would of a horse, and treat a broken flirtation as if it were a breach of warranty. I was, I own it, not a little annoyed at the unnecessary degree of interest my friends insisted on taking in my welfare; but I was not fool enough to go to war with the world single-handed, so I seemed to accept the counsel, and went my way. That same day, I rode out with Kitty. There was a large party of us, but by some chance we found ourselves side by side and in an avenue of the wood. Quite full as my mind was of the communication of the morning, I could not resist my usual impulse, which was to talk to her of any or every thing that was uppermost in my thoughts. I don’t mean to say, Dan, that I did so delicately, or even becomingly, for I confess to you I had grown into that kind of intimacy whose gravest fault is that it has no reserve. I ‘m quite certain that nothing could be worse in point of taste or feeling than what I said. You can judge of it from her reply: ‘And are you such a fool, Walter, as to cut an old friend for such silly gossip?’ I blundered out something in defence of myself, – floundered away into all kinds of stupid, unmeaning apologies, and ended by asking her to marry me. Up to that moment we were conversing in all the freedom of our old friendship, not the slightest reserve on either side; but no sooner had I uttered these words than she turned towards me with a look so sad and so reproachful, I did not believe that her features could have conveyed the expression, while, in a voice of deepest emotion, she said: ‘Oh, Walter, this from you!’ I was brute enough – there ‘s only one word for it – to misunderstand her; and, full of myself and the splendid offer I had made her, and my confounded amour propre, I muttered something about the opinion of the world, the voice of friends, and so on. ‘Tell your friends, then,’ said she, and with such an emphasis on the word, – ‘tell your friends that I refused you!’ and giving her mare a tremendous cut of the whip, she dashed off at speed, and was up with the others before I had even presence of mind to follow her.”
“You behaved devilish badly, – infamously. If I ‘d been her brother, I’d have shot you like a dog!” cried Dan, rising, and walking the room.
“I see it,” said my father, covering his face with his handkerchief.
“I am sorry I said that, Watty, – I don’t mean that,” said Dan, laying his hand on my father’s shoulder. “It all comes of that infernal system of interference! If they had left you alone, and to the guidance of your own feelings, you ‘d never have gone wrong. But the world will poke in its d – d finger everywhere. It’s rather hard, when good-breeding protests against the bystander meddling with your game at chess, that he should have the privilege of obtruding on the most eventful incident of your existence.”
“Let us never speak of this again, Dan,” said my father, looking up with eyes that were far from clear.
MacNaghten squeezed his band, and said nothing.
“What have you been doing with Tony Fagan, Dan?” said my father, suddenly. “Have you drawn too freely on the Grinder, and exhausted the liberal resources of his free-giving nature?”
“Nothing of the kind; he has closed his books against me this many a day. But why do you ask this?”
“Look here.” And he opened a drawer and showed a whole mass of papers, as he spoke. “Fagan, whom I regarded as an undrainable well of the precious metals, threatens to run dry; he sends me back bills unaccepted, and actually menaces me with a reckoning.”
“What a rascal, not to be satisfied with forty or fifty per cent!”
“He might have charged sixty, Dan, if he would only ‘order the bill to lie on the table.’ But see, he talks of a settlement, and even hints at a lawyer.”
“You ought to have married Polly.”
“Pray, is there any one else that I should have married, Dan?” cried my father, half angrily; “for it seems to me that you have quite a passion for finding out alliances for me.”
“Polly, they say, will have three hundred thousand pounds,” said Dan, slowly, “and is a fine girl to boot. I assure you, Watty, I saw her the other day, seated in the library here; and with all the splendor of your stained-glass windows, your gold-fretted ceiling, and your gorgeous tapestries, she looked just in her place. Hang me, if there was a particle of the picture in better style or taste than herself.”
“How came she here?” cried my father, in amazement. And MacNaghten now related all the circumstances of Fagan’s visit, the breakfast, and the drive.
“And you actually sat with three hundred thousand pounds at your side,” said my father, “and did not decamp with it?”
“I never said she had the money in her pocket, Watty. Egad! that would have been a very tempting situation.”
“How time must have changed you, Dan, when you could discuss the question thus calmly! I remember the day when you ‘d have won the race, without even wasting a thought on the solvency of the stakeholder.”
“Faith, I believe it were the wisest way, after all, Watty,” said he, carelessly; “but the fact is, in the times you speak of, my conscience, like a generous banker, never refused my drafts; now, however, she has taken a circumspect turn, and I ‘m never quite certain that I have not overdrawn my account with her. In plain words, I could not bring myself to do with premeditation what once I might have done from recklessness.”
“And so the scruple saved Polly?” cried my father.
“Just so; not that I had much time to reflect on it, for the blacks were pulling fearfully, and Dan had smashed his splinter-bar with a kick. Still, in coming up by the new shrubbery there, I did say to myself: ‘Which road shall I take?’ The ponies were going to decide the matter for me; but I turned them short round with a jerk, and laid the whip over their flanks with a cut, – the dearest, assuredly, I ever gave to horseflesh, for it cost me, in all likelihood, three hundred thousand.”
“Who ‘d have ever thought Dan MacNaghten’s conscience would have been so expensive!”
“By Jove, Watty, it’s the only thing of value remaining to me. Perhaps my creditors left it on the same polite principle that they allow a respectable bankrupt to keep his snuff-box or his wife’s miniature, – a cheap complaisance that reads well in the newspapers.”
“The Grinder, of course, thought that he had seen the last of you,” said my father, laughing.
“He as much as said so to me when I came back. He even went further,” said Dan, reddening with anger as he spoke: “he proposed to me to go abroad and travel, and that he would pay the cost. But he ‘ll scarcely repeat the insolence.”
“Why, what has come over you all here? I scarcely know you for what I left you some short time back. Dan Mac-Naghten taking to scruples, and Tony Fagan to generosity, seem, indeed, too much for common credulity! And now as to politics, Dan! What are