THE PARSON IN NORTHUMBERLAND.
Linnell, for his part, had made his mind up at once: Psyche Dumaresq should never marry a penniless painter. But unless she was ready to marry a penniless painter, father or no father to the contrary notwithstanding — unless she was ready to forsake all and follow the man of her choice willingly, to poverty or riches, she was not the girl he imagined her to be; and dearly as the wrench would cost him now, he would go away the very next evening, and never again set eyes on Psyche. Not, indeed, that Linnell had any doubt whatsoever in his own mind upon that score. He had never felt before how deeply he loved Psyche — how profoundly and implicitly he trusted her instincts. He knew she could never harbour so mercenary a thought in her pure little soul as that fallen idol, her unworthy father. He knew she would take him, money or no money. He knew that there he could never be mistaken. He had watched her daily, he repeated to himself once more in the words of the ballad, a little altered, and he knew she loved him well. If he went to Psyche to-morrow, and asked her plainly, ‘Will you marry a penniless painter who loves you from the bottom of his heart?’ he felt sure she would answer, with her own sweet, innocent, guileless boldness, ‘I will gladly;’ and he would love her all the better for that naïve frankness.
To do that would be no real breach of the virtual promise he had made her father; for was he not rich? Was he not well-born? Would he not make her supremely happy? Would he not be keeping the spirit of his bond by thus evading it in the outer letter? He said to himself ‘Yes’ to that question ten thousand times over, as he walked home alone across the breezy Downs to the Red Lion, with the keen wind blowing fresh against his flushed hot face, and the blood running warm in his tingling cheeks at the memory of that hideous unsought interview.
Not that he really meant thus to break even the letter of his bond with Haviland Dumaresq. Oh no; he needed no such overt trial of his beautiful Psyche’s fidelity as that. He could trust her implicitly, implicitly, implicitly. Besides, the trial would be taken out of his hands. Dumaresq would go home, full of his discovery, his miserable discovery that Linnell was nothing but a common artist — a painter by trade — a journeyman colour-monger. The sordid philosopher, that mistaken father, would tell Psyche more or less directly the result of his own unspeakable inquiries: he would warn her against listening to that penniless young man; he would talk to her the common stereotyped cant of worldly-wise paternity: he would sink the brain that conceived the ‘Encyclopædic Philosophy’ to the miserable level of the Maitland intelligence.
Linnell could hear in his ears even now the echoes of that hideous unholy cant— ‘they were dangerous guides, the feelings,’ and so forth, and so forth, usque ad nauseam, as though Haviland Dumaresq, a prophet born, had consented to dwell in his old age in the coasts of the Philistines. He could hear the greatest thinker of our time, in that sad dotage of his, ‘with a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter’s heart!’ Oh, heavens! It was incredible, it was loathsome, but it was nevertheless true. He hardly knew how to believe it himself, but he admitted it grudgingly to his own soul: Haviland Dumaresq had feet of clay, and the feet of clay had tottered to their fall in these last stages of a once mighty intellect.
But Psyche? Ah, well! He had no fear at all in his heart for Psyche. He could never conceive his own beautiful, free, great-hearted Psyche ‘puppet to a father’s threats, or servile to a shrewish tongue.’ He knew what Psyche would do; he knew it perfectly. Psyche would burst in upon him to-morrow morning, when he called round to finish her father’s picture, and flinging all conventional restrictions to the four winds of heaven — rules like those were not for such as Psyche — would cast herself upon him with a wild emotion, clasp her arms around his neck in a torrent of joy, and cry aloud that, rich or poor, come what might, she loved him, she loved him. Or if Psyche didn’t do that — for, after all, a maiden is a maiden still — at least he would see, from the timid and tearful way she greeted him, that she at any rate was wholly unchanged by anything her father might have said to her overnight against a penniless lover. She would treat him more kindly and tenderly than ever; she would say by her actions, if not by her words, ‘I would love you still, though you had no roof to cover you.’ That was how a girl like Psyche ought to feel and act; and because he knew she would feel and act so, he loved her, he loved her. In Psyche’s presence he was no longer shy. Perfect love casteth out fear. Psyche would never be bent aside by such base considerations as swayed that clay-footed idol, her father. The grand incorruptible Haviland Dumaresq of former days, that was dead now in the old man’s shrunken and shrivelled soul, lived still in the purer and nobler nature of his spotless daughter.
And then, when Psyche had thus proved herself worthy of her high lineage — for what lineage, after all, could be higher in any real scale of worth than direct descent from the greatest and deepest of modern thinkers? — he would clasp her to his breast in an ecstasy of passion, and tell her plainly, what he had never yet told any living being, that the sacrifice she thought she was making for his sake had no existence; that all her father asked for her she should freely enjoy — that money, position, respect, should be hers — that she should be everything he himself had never been. For Linnell was rich, if it came to that; from Haviland Dumaresq’s point of view quite fabulously rich; wealthy beyond the utmost dreams of Dumaresquian avarice: and if for some quixotic fad of his own he had chosen so long to give up the money that was rightly his due to the service of others, and to live entirely on his artistic earnings, he would not consider himself bound any longer to continue his obedience to that self-inflicted, self-denying ordinance, when he had a wife’s happiness to consult and to provide for — and that wife his own matchless Psyche. He was rich; and he stood next heir in blood to an English baronetcy. Many things had conspired to make the shrinking, sensitive painter feel the importance of his own position far less acutely than most men would have done; but that was no reason why others should not value it at the current valuation of such things in the world of England. He could go to Haviland Dumaresq, if need were, and say to him honestly, with unblushing pride: ‘The penniless painter has asked your daughter’s hand in marriage, and has been duly accepted. But the man who marries her is rich beyond the furthest you ever demanded from your daughter’s suitors, and belongs to one of the oldest and most distinguished families in all England.’ It was horrible, indeed, to think of coupling such a base and vulgar thought as that with the honoured name of Haviland Dumaresq; but if Haviland Dumaresq had in point of fact sunk so low, Linnell would meet him on his own new level, and ask him still for his guileless Psyche.
With such thoughts as these whirling fast in his brain, the painter strolled back to the village inn, the air all full of Psyche, Psyche, Psyche. As he passed the Mansels’, he caught through the hedge the gleam of a rustling white summer dress, and overheard the tones of a most educated voice, which he recognised at once as the final flower of Girtonian culture. He hoped Mrs. Mansel would let him pass by without calling him in, for he was in small humour that day to discuss the relative merits of Wagner and Mendelssohn, or to give his opinion in set epigrammatic phrase on the latest development of the subjective novel. But Mrs. Mansel spied him out with keen vision as he passed the gate, and came over with her sweetly subdued smile, in a Greek-looking robe looped up with an old gold oriental scarf, to call him for colloquy into her most cultivated garden. The Academy and Mind lay beside the learned lady’s vacant place on the rustic seat, but in her hand she held coquettishly that far more mundane journal, the Morning Post. Curiosity survives as a maternal legacy even in the most highly-strung of the daughters of Eve; and Mrs. Mansel’s curiosity was now at boiling-point.
‘Oh, Mr. Linnell,’ she cried with unwonted eagerness, ‘I’m so glad you’ve come! I’ve been longing to see you. I wanted to ask you something so important. Have you any relations living in Northumberland?’
The question fell upon Linnell’s ear like a clap of thunder from a clear sky. He hadn’t the slightest idea in his own mind what on earth Mrs. Mansel could mean. But glancing hastily at her finger on the open page, the thought occurred to him with lightning rapidity that perhaps his half-brother Frank had just got married. That was the secret, then, of Sir Austen’s desire to have the question of the succession settled upon a firm and secure basis before he left England! Linnell hesitated a fraction of a moment: then he answered doubtfully: ‘I believe there’s one member of my family living there at present. But I know very little of him. I’ve never seen him. To tell you the truth, our family relations haven’t been always quite what you could call cordial.’
‘A clergyman?’ Mrs. Mansel asked with her soft low voice.
‘A clergyman, yes,’ Linnell made answer, bewildered. ‘Is there anything about him in the paper to-day, then?’
‘Oh, I felt sure he must be one of your family,’ Mrs. Mansel cried, still holding that tantalizing sheet tightly in her small white hand. ‘The name’s Francis Austen Linnell, you see, and I recognised him, as I recognised you, by the peculiar spelling of the name Austen.’
‘We’re all of us Austens,’ Linnell answered with a short, uneasy laugh. ‘It’s a point of honour with every Linnell I ever heard of to continue the family tradition in that respect. It’s gone on in an unbroken line, I believe, since the time of Charles the Second; and it’ll go on still till baronetcies are as extinct as dodos and megatheriums. But may I ask what my respected namesake’s been doing at all to get himself mentioned in the Morning Post? Up to date, I can’t say I ever remember any performance of his, except his birth, being thought worth recording in a London newspaper.’
‘Like Mark Twain’s hero,’ Mrs. Mansel suggested with a musical little laugh, ‘who up to the age of seventy-five years had never shown any remarkable talent — and never showed any afterward: so that when he died, ill-natured people said he’d done it on purpose to gain notoriety.’
‘Died!’ Linnell exclaimed, holding out his hand incredulously for the paper. ‘You don’t mean to say Frank’s dead, do you?’
‘Oh yes, I forgot to say it’s his death that comes next by way of record,’ Mrs. Mansel went on with serene composure. ‘In fact, of course, I took it for granted you’d have seen the announcement somewhere already. No, not in the Births, Deaths, and Marriages: it’s later than that. See, there’s the place: “Appalling Catastrophe on the Great Northern Railway.”’
Linnell took the paper from her hand with trembling fingers and ran his eye hastily down the lengthy telegram. ‘As the 6.45 night express was steaming out of Doncaster yesterday evening’ ... ‘goods-waggons laden with heavy pig-iron’ ... ‘both trains were completely telescoped’ ... ‘harrowing scenes among the dead and wounded’ ... ‘the following bodies have already been identified’ ... ‘The Rev. Francis Austen Linnell, Vicar of Hambledon-cum-Thornyhaugh, Northumberland.’
He handed back the paper, very white in the face, to Mrs. Mansel. It was clear that the news profoundly affected him.
‘Why, Mr. Linnell, I didn’t know you were so much interested in the man,’ the learned lady cried, astonished and penitent. ‘If I’d thought you were so deeply concerned as that, I’d have broken it gently to you — indeed I would. Was he such a very near relation, then?’
‘He was only — my brother,’ Linnell answered with a gasp. He had never seen him; but blood is thicker than water, after all. A nameless shock seemed to run through his system. Two thoughts came uppermost in the painter’s mind amid the whirl of emotion that those words had brought upon him. The first was a sense of profound thankfulness that he had written and posted that letter to Sir Austen before he knew of his brother’s sudden death. The second was the idea that even Haviland Dumaresq would now no doubt be satisfied to accept as Psyche’s husband the heir-presumptive to an English baronetcy, who had no longer any reason for concealing his position and prospects from the world in deference to the feelings of an illegitimate relative.