“There are debts you can only settle by daily payments. To every man living on your land you owe such a debt. To every friend connected with you by name, or blood, or love, you owe such a debt. Do you suppose that you can cast yourself adrift, and make yourself a byword, and hurt no one but yourself? Why is it that we hate a suicide?”
“Because he sins.”
“Because he is a coward, and runs away from the burden which he ought to bear gallantly. He throws his load down on the roadside, and does not care who may bear it, or who may suffer because he is too poor a creature to struggle on! Have you no feeling that, though it may be hard with you here,”—and the Vicar, as he spoke, struck his breast—“you should so carry your outer self, that the eyes of those around you should see nothing of the sorrow within? That is my idea of manliness, and I have ever taken you to be a man.”
“We work for the esteem of others while we desire it. I desire nothing now. She has so knocked me about that I should be a liar if I were to say that there is enough manhood left in me to bear it. I shan’t kill myself.”
“No, Harry, you won’t do that.”
“But I shall give up the place, and go abroad.”
“Whom will you serve by that?”
“It is all very well to preach, Frank. Bad as I am I could preach to you if there were a matter to preach about. I don’t know that there is anything much easier than preaching. But as for practising, you can’t do it if you have not got the strength. A man can’t walk if you take away his legs. If you break a bird’s wing he can’t fly, let the bird be ever so full of pluck. All that there was in me she has taken out of me. I could fight him, and would willingly, if I thought there was a chance of his meeting me.”
“He would not be such a fool.”
“But I could not stand up and look at her.”
“She has left Bullhampton, you know.”
“It does not matter, Frank. There is the place that I was getting ready for her. And if I were there, you and your wife would always be thinking about it. And every fellow about the estate knows the whole story. It seems to me to be almost inconceivable that a woman should have done such a thing.”
“She has not meant to act badly, Harry.”
“To tell the truth, when I look back at it all, I blame myself more than her. A man should never be ass enough to ask any woman a second time. But I had got it into my head that it was a disgraceful thing to ask and not to have. It is that which kills me now. I do not think that I will ever again attempt anything, because failure is so hard to me to bear. At any rate, I won’t go back to the Privets.” This he added after a pause, during which the Vicar had been thinking what new arguments he could bring up to urge his friend’s return.
Fenwick learned that Gilmore had sent a cheque to his bailiff by the post of the preceding night. He acknowledged that in sending the cheque he had said no more than to bid the man pay what wages were due. He had not as yet made up his mind as to any further steps. As they walked round the enclosure of St. James’s Park together, and as the warmth of their old friendship produced freedom of intercourse, Gilmore acknowledged a dozen wild schemes that had passed through his brain. That to which he was most wedded was a plan for meeting Walter Marrable and cudgelling him pretty well to death. Fenwick pointed out three or four objections to this. In the first place, Marrable had committed no offence whatever against Gilmore. And then, in all probability, Marrable might be as good at cudgelling as the Squire himself. And thirdly, when the cudgelling was over, the man who began the row would certainly be put into prison, and in atonement for that would receive no public sympathy. “You can’t throw yourself on the public pity as a woman might,” said the Vicar.
“D⸺ the public pity,” said the Squire, who was not often driven to make his language forcible after that fashion.
Another scheme was that he would publish the whole transaction. And here again his friend was obliged to remind him, that a man in his position should be reticent rather than outspoken. “You have already declared,” said the Vicar, “that you can’t endure failure, and yet you want to make your failure known to all the world.” His third proposition was more absurd still. He would write such a letter to Mary Lowther as would cover her head with red hot coals. He would tell her that she had made the world utterly unbearable to him, and that she might have the Privets for herself and go and live there. “I do not doubt but that such a letter would annoy her,” said the Vicar.
“Why should I care how much she is annoyed?”
“Just so;—but everyone who saw the letter would know that it was pretence and bombast. Of course you will do nothing of the kind.”
They were together pretty nearly the whole day. Gilmore, no doubt, would have avoided the Vicar in the morning had it been possible; but now that he had been caught, and had been made to undergo his friend’s lectures, he was rather grateful than otherwise for something in the shape of society. It was Fenwick’s desire to induce him to return to Bullhampton. If this could not be done, it would no doubt be well that some authority should be obtained from him as to the management of the place. But this subject had not been mooted
