“Damn you!” he said; “that’s what I called you back to say. Damn you! Damn Blandamer! Damn everybody! Damn poverty! Damn wealth! I will not touch a farthing of his money for the organ. Now you can go.”
Westray had been cleanly bred. He had been used neither to the vulgarity of ill-temper nor to the coarser insolence of personal abuse. He shrank by natural habit even from gross adjectives, from the “beastly” and the “filthy” which modern manners too often condone, and still more from the abomination of swearing. So Mr. Sharnall’s obloquy wounded him to the quick. He went to bed in a flutter of agitation, and lay awake half the night mourning over a friendship so irreparably broken, bitter with the resentment of an unjustified attack, yet reproaching himself lest through his unwittingness he might have brought it all upon himself.
The morning found him unrefreshed and dejected, but, whilst he sat at breakfast, the sun came out brightly, and he began to take a less despondent view of the situation. It was possible that Mr. Sharnall’s friendship might not after all be lost beyond repair; he would be sorry if it were, for he had grown fond of the old man, in spite of all his faults of life and manner. It was he, Westray, who had been entirely to blame. In another man’s room he had lectured the other man. He, a young man, had lectured the other, who was an old man. It was true that he had done so with the best motives; he had only spoken from a painful sense of duty. But he had shown no tact, he had spoken much too strongly; he had imperilled his own good cause by the injudicious manner in which he had put it forward. At the risk of all rebuffs, he would express his regret; he would go down and apologise to Mr. Sharnall, and offer, if need be, the other cheek to the smiter.
Good resolves, if formed with the earnest intention of carrying them into effect, seldom fail to restore a measure of peace to the troubled mind. It is only when a regular and ghastly seesaw of wrongdoing and repentance has been established, and when the mind can no longer deceive even itself as to the possibility of permanent uprightness of life, that good resolves cease to tranquillise. Such a seesaw must gradually lose its regularity; the set towards evil grows more and more preponderant; the return to virtue rarer and more brief. Despair of any continuity of godliness follows, and then it is that good resolves, becoming a mere reflex action of the mind, fail in their gracious influence, and cease to bring quiet. These conditions can scarcely occur before middle age, and Westray, being young and eminently conscientious, was feeling the full peacefulness of his high-minded intention steal over him, when the door opened, and the organist entered.
An outbreak of temper and a night of hard drinking had left their tokens on Mr. Sharnall’s face. He looked haggard, and the rings that a weak heart had drawn under his eyes were darker and more puffed. He came in awkwardly, and walked quickly to the architect, holding out his hand.
“Forgive me, Westray,” he said; “I behaved last night like a fool and a cad. You were quite right to speak to me as you did; I honour you for it. I wish to God there had been someone to speak to me like that years ago.”
His outstretched hand was not so white as it should have been, the nails were not so well trimmed as a more fastidious mood might have demanded; but Westray did not notice these things. He took the shaky old hand, and gripped it warmly, not saying anything, because he could not speak.
“We must be friends,” the organist went on, after a moment’s pause; “we must be friends, because I can’t afford to lose you. I haven’t known you long, but you are the only friend I have in the world. Is it not an awful thing to confess?” he said, with a tremulous little laugh. “I have no other friend in the world. Say those things you said last night whenever you like; the oftener you say them the better.”
He sat down, and, the situation being too strained to remain longer at so high a pitch, the conversation drifted, however awkwardly, to less personal topics.
“There is a thing I wanted to speak about last night,” the organist said. “Poor old Miss Joliffe is very hard up. She hasn’t said a word to me about it—she never would to anyone—but I happen to know it for a fact: she is hard up. She is in a chronic state of hard-up-ishness always, and that we all are; but this is an acute attack—she has her back against the wall. It is the fag-end of Martin’s debts that bother her; these bloodsucking tradesmen are dunning her, and she hasn’t the pluck to tell them go hang, though they know well enough she isn’t responsible for a farthing. She has got it into her head that she hasn’t a right to keep that flower-and-caterpillar picture so long as Martin’s debts are unpaid, because she could raise money on it. You remember those people, Baunton and Lutterworth, offered her fifty pounds for it.”
“Yes, I remember,” Westray said; “more fools they.”
“More fools, by all means,” rejoined the organist; “but still they offer it, and I believe our poor old landlady will come to selling it. ‘All the better for her,’ you will say, and anyone with an ounce of common sense would have sold it long ago for fifty pounds or fifty pence. But, then, she has no common sense, and I do believe it would break her pride and worry her into a fever to part with it. Well, I have been at the pains to find out what
