‘And if you got a fellowship you could never marry, could you?’ asked Edie, going on with her work.
‘Not, while I held it, certainly. But I wouldn’t hold it long. I regard it only as a makeshift for a time. Unhappily, I don’t know how to earn my own bread by the labour of my hands, as I think we ought all to do in a well-constituted society; so unless I choose to starve (about the rightfulness of which I don’t feel quite certain), I MUST manage somehow to get over the interval. But as soon as I could I would try to find some useful work to do, in which I could repay society the debt I owe it for my bringing up. You see, I’ve been fed and educated by a Government grant, which of course came out of the taxes—your people have had to help, whether they would or not, in paying for my board and lodging—and I feel that I owe it as a duty to the world to look out some employment in which I could really repay it for the cost of my maintenance.’
‘How funnily you do look at everything, Mr. Le Breton,’ said Edie. ‘It would never have struck me to think of a pension from the army in that light. And yet of course it’s the right light; only we don’t most of us take the trouble to go to the bottom of things, as you do. But what will you do if you don’t get the fellowship?’
‘In that case, I’ve just heard from my mother that she would like me to take a tutorship at Lord Exmoor’s,’ Ernest answered. ‘Lynmouth, their eldest son, was my junior at school by six or seven years, and now he’s going to prepare for Christ Church. I don’t quite know whether it’s a right place for me to accept or not; but I shall ask Max Schurz about it, if I don’t get Pembroke. I always take Herr Max’s advice in all questions of conscience, for I’m quite sure whatever he approves of is the thing one ought to do for the greatest good of humanity.’
‘Harry told me about Herr Schurz,’ Edie said, filling in the details of the doorway. ‘He thinks him a very earnest, self-convinced, good old man, but a terrible revolutionist. For my part, I believe I rather like revolutionists, provided, of course, they don’t cut off people’s heads. Harry made me read Carlyle, and I positively fell in love with Camille Desmoulins; only I don’t really think he ought to have approved of QUITE so much guillotining, do you? But why shouldn’t you take the tutorship at the Exmoors’?’
‘Oh, because it isn’t a very useful work in the world to prepare a young hereditary loafer like Lynmouth for going to Christ Church. Lynmouth will be just like his father when he grows up—an amiable wholesale partridge-slayer; and I don’t see that the world at large will be any the better or the worse off for his being able to grope his way somehow through two plays of Sophocles and the first six books of Euclid. If only one were a shoemaker now! What a delightful thing to sit down at the end of a day and say to oneself, “I have made two pairs of good, honest boots for a fellow-mortal this week, and now I deserve to have my supper!” Still, it’ll be better, anyway, than doing nothing at all, and living off my mother.’
‘If you went to Dunbude, when would you go?’
‘After the Christmas vacation, I suppose, from what Lady Hilda says.’
‘Lady Hilda? Oh, so there’s a sister, is there?’
‘Yes. A very pretty girl, about twenty, I should say, and rather clever too, I believe. My mother knows them a little.’
Poor little Edie! What made her heart jump so at the mere mention of Lady Hilda? and what made the last few strokes at the top of the broken yew-tree look so very weak and shaky? How absurd of herself, she thought, to feel so much moved at hearing that there was another girl in the world whom Ernest might possibly fall in love with! And yet she had never even seen Ernest only ten days ago! Lady Hilda! What a grand name, to be sure, and what a grand person she must be. And then Ernest himself belonged by birth to the same class! For in poor little Edie’s mind, innocent as she was of the nice distinctions of the peerage, Lady So-and-So was Lady So-and-So still, whoever she might be, from the wife of a premier marquis to the wife of the latest created knight bachelor. To her, Lady Hilda Tregellis and Lady Le Breton were both ‘ladies of title’; and the difference between their positions, which seemed so immense to Ernest, seemed nothing at all to the merry little country girl who sat sketching beside him. After all, how could she ever have even vaguely fancied that such a young man as Ernest, in spite of all his socialistic whims, would ever dream of caring for a girl of the people like her? No doubt he would go to the Exmoors’, fall naturally in love with Lady Hilda, and marry decorously in what Edie considered his own proper sphere of life! She went on with the finishing touches of her little picture in silence, and folded it up into the tiny portfolio at last with a half-uttered sigh. So her poor wee castle in the air was knocked down before she had begun to build it up in any real seriousness, and she turned to join Harry in the boat almost without speaking.
‘I hope you’ll get the Pembroke fellowship,’ she said again, a little later, as they rowed onward down the river to Nuneham. ‘But in any case, Mr. Le Breton, you mustn’t forget you’ve half promised to come and look us up at Calcombe Pomeroy in the Christmas vacation.’
Ernest smiled, and nodded acquiescence.
Meanwhile, on that same Thursday afternoon, Arthur Berkeley had gone up from Oxford by the fast train to Paddington, as was his weekly wont, and had dived quickly down one of the small lanes that open out from the left-hand side of Praed Street. He walked along it for a little way, humming an air to himself as he went, and then stopped at last in front of a small, decent brick house, with a clean muslin blind across the window (clean muslin forms a notable object in most London back streets), and a printed card hanging from the central pane, bearing the inscription, ‘G. Berkeley, Working Shoemaker.—The Trade supplied with Ready-closed Uppers.’ At the window a beaming face was watching for his appearance, and Arthur said to himself as he saw it through the curtain, ‘The dear old Progenitor’s looking better again this week, God bless him!’ In a moment he had opened the door, and greeted his father in the old boyish fashion, with an honest kiss on either cheek. They had kissed one another so whenever they met from Arthur’s childhood upward; and the Oxford curate had never felt himself grown too much of a man to keep up a habit which seemed to him by far the most sacred thing in his whole existence.
‘Well, father dear, I needn’t ask you how you are to-day,’ said Arthur, seating himself comfortably in the second easy-chair of the trim little workshop parlour. ‘I can see at once you’re a good deal better. Any more pain in the head and eyes, eh, or any trouble about the forehead?’
The old shoemaker passed his hand over his big, bulging brow, bent outward as it is so often in men of his trade by the constant habit of stooping over their work, and said briskly, ‘No, Artie, my boy, not a sign of it this week—not a single sign of it. I’ve been taking a bit of holiday, you see, and it’s done me a lot of good, I can tell you;—made me feel another man entirely. I’ve been playing my violin till the neighbours began to complain of it; and if I hadn’t asked them to come and hear me tune up a bit, I really believe they’d have been having me up before the magistrate for a public nuisance.’
‘That’s right, Daddy dear; I’m always glad when you’ve been having a little music. It does you more good than anything. And the jelly—I hope you’ve eaten the jelly?’
‘Oh, I’ve eaten it right enough, Artie, thank your dear heart; and the soup too, dearie. Came by a boy from Walters’s every day, addressed to “Berkeley, Esquire, 42 Whalley Street;” and the boy wouldn’t leave it the first day, because he thought there must have been a mistake about the address. His contention was that a journeyman shoemaker wasn’t an esquire; and my contention was that the “Berkeley” was essential, and the “Esquire” accidental, which was beyond his logic, bless you, Artie; for I’ve often noticed, my son, that your errand-boy is a naturally illogical and contradictory creature. Now, shoemakers aren’t, you know. I’ve always taken a just pride in the profession, and I’ve always asserted that it develops logic; it develops logic, Artie, or else why are all cobblers good Liberals, I should like to know? Eh, can you tell me that; with all