“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 to 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.”