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“The recognition of his rights therefore, the justice he requires of our hands or our thoughts, is the recognition of that which the person, in his inmost nature, really is; and as sympathy alone can discover that which really is in matters of feeling and thought, true justice is in its essence a finer knowledge through love.”

“Appreciations,” Walter Pater.

Six years after that memorable August day, Ralph and Evereld might have been seen on the tennis ground attached to the pretty house near Redvale, which Sir Matthew was pleased to call his “little country cottage.”

It was decidedly one of those cottages of gentility which once caused the devil to grin. But in spite of that it was a very charming place. Its windows commanded an exquisite view over the hills and woods of one of the southern counties, and its gardens were the admiration of the whole neighbourhood. The tennis-lawn lay to the left of the house in a cosy nook of its own, and there was no one to see the vigorous game which the two were playing. This was a pity, for the play was skilful and dainty to watch, and the players themselves were worth looking at.

Ralph, who had been a remarkably small boy, was never likely, as Geraghty expressed it, to be “six foot long and broad,” but he had developed into a well-proportioned, healthy-looking fellow, and still retained his open, boyish face, expressive brown eyes, and thick, wavy brown hair. Evereld was even less changed, she was still very small and young for her age; and although she was fast approaching her eighteenth birthday she wore the sort of nondescript dress which girls often wear during their last year in the schoolroom, her skirt revealing a pair of pretty ankles, and her hair still hanging down her back.

The contest was an exciting one, but it ended in a victory for Ralph, whose greater strength usually conquered.

“I am heavily handicapped,” said Evereld, throwing up her racket with a laugh. “We’ll borrow the vicar’s cassock and the Lord Chancellor’s wig and you shall play a set in them and see if I don’t beat you then!”

“Come and rest,” said Ralph, strolling towards the little shady arbour at the side of the lawn. “The sun is grilling.”

“You would find it worse if you had all this weight to endure,” said Evereld, shaking back the cloud of nut-brown hair which hung over her shoulders. “I shall take to plaiting it up, then at least one would be cool.”

“No, don’t!” protested Ralph. “You’ll never look half as nice afterwards. And besides, when girls do up their hair they always leave off being natural and get grown-up and horrid, and can’t talk sense to a fellow.”

“My hair has nothing to do with being natural,” said Evereld, fanning herself with a big fern. “How could I help being natural with you, when we have been together all this long time? How I do wish I were a boy and might have gone in for the Indian Civil, too. By-the-by, Ralph, is that to-day’s paper? Is there any news about your exam?”

“They sent the wrong paper,” said Ralph taking it up. “See, it’s last night’s Evening Standard instead of this morning’s; they have been taking a nap down at the bookstall. I wonder if there really is anything in at last. It seems hard lines to keep us on tenterhooks from the 1st June till August.”

“I don’t believe you have worried about it. Your head was full of those private theatricals the moment the exam. was over. How well they went off! I never saw Sir Matthew so nice to you. He really did for once appreciate you.”

“That was because other people praised me” said Ralph. “He would never have said one word of his own accord. You’ll never find him committing himself before he knows whether he will be swimming with the stream.”

“Ralph, do you know I think you are growing rather hard. I hate to hear you say things like that about Sir Matthew. If Fraulein were here she would have a hundred instances of his kindness to tell us.”

“Yes she would,” owned Ralph. “She has been our good angel all these years. Worse luck to that old professor who married her and left us to ourselves. Why, Evereld, just look at it in that way. What should you and I have been like if all this time we had only had the sort of indifferent cold charity which the Mactavishes have given us? Oh, I know there has been money spent on me: do you think I have ever been allowed to forget that for a moment? But Sir Matthew spoils with one hand the good he does with the other. Thank heaven, I shall soon be on my own hook. I wonder what life out in India will be like—and what the chances of getting any cricket are?”

Evereld fell to talking of happy reminiscences of Simla, and they were planning all manner of impossible arrangements for the future, in which they fondly imagined their present brotherly and sisterly relations would be maintained, when Bridget suddenly appeared upon the scene.

“Miss Evereld,” she exclaimed, “you’d best be coming in to change your frock, my dear. Sir Matthew has come down without any warning from London. He’s in the library, Mr. Ralph and they did tell me he was askin’ for you. Geraghty he just passed me the word that he thought Sir Matthew was troubled in his mind about some little matter.”

Ralph flushed.

“You see now,” he exclaimed, turning to Evereld, “if I haven’t gone and failed in that wretched exam! What on earth shall I do if I have?”

“Why, you will go in for it again next year,” said Evereld philosophically. “But who says you have failed? It may be nothing to do with the exam. Besides, you know that your coach and Professor Rosenwald and Fraulein—I mean Frau Rosenwald—all thought you were safe to pass.”

“I know I had worked hard,” said Ralph. “Well, let me go and hear the worst at once.”

“Don’t despair so soon. As for me, I believe you have passed, and that it is only some business matter that’s worrying Sir Matthew. Good luck to you. Don’t stay long in the library. I shall be dressed in ten minutes.”

She waved her hand gaily and ran upstairs, while Ralph, with a great dread hanging over him, went to the library.

With other people he was invariably cheerful and talkative, but with Sir Matthew he was never his best self. To begin with, he was always ill at ease, and by a sort of fate he seemed destined to say and do exactly what would annoy his patron. If he was silent, Sir Matthew was in the habit of rating him for his dulness. If he laughed and talked, he was ordered not to make so much noise. If he hazarded an opinion he was sure to meet with a snub, and at all times and seasons he was hedged in by significant reminders that he was eating the bread of charity. It was well for him that he had seen comparatively little of the Mactavishes, thanks to his life at Winchester and to his friendship with Evereld and her governess; but he had seen enough to do him considerable harm and to plant seeds of pride, and hardness, and distrust of humanity in his heart.

Sir Matthew was sitting at his bureau. He glanced up as the door opened, bestowed a curt nod upon Ralph and went on writing in silence.

“They told me you were inquiring for me,” said Ralph nervously, noting at once the storm signals in Sir Matthew’s face.

“I did send for you,” said the master of the house grimly, as he signed his name with two flourishing M’s, and methodically folded, directed and stamped his dispatch.

Ralph, horribly chafed by the manner of his reception and by the suspense, turned to the window and took up a newspaper which was lying near it.

“Put that down,” thundered Sir Matthew, as though he had been ordering a child of four years old.

“Sir?” said Ralph, in angry astonishment.

“Do you think I don’t understand your game,” said Sir Matthew. “You are pretending to look for news of your examination when all the time you perfectly well know that you have failed.”

“Failed!” cried Ralph turning pale, and realising how little he had believed in failure when he had talked of the possibility with Evereld. “Who says I have failed? Where are the lists?”

He snatched at the paper again, neither heeding Sir Matthew’s orders nor his scoffing laugh. Here was the list of the successful candidates, and with eager eyes he looked down it. The name of Denmead was not there.

Sir Matthew silently watched his expression of bewildered despair, but though it would have appealed to some men it did not appeal to him.

“Now that the newspaper corroborates what I told you, perhaps you believe my word,” he said sarcastically.

“I beg your pardon,” said Ralph, “I did not mean to doubt you—but the shock———”

“Now my good fellow, you may as well be silent, the less said about a shock the better; you know perfectly well that you never deserved to pass that examination. You had idled away your time over cricket and theatricals, and now you have to face the consequences.”

“You are the first person to say that,” said Ralph, resentfully. “They all told me I had an excellent chance and was well prepared.”

“The examiners, however, thought differently,” said Sir Matthew; “your work was miserable. I have this very day been making special inquiries into the matter, that I may not judge you unfairly. You have not only failed, but failed ignominiously. Don’t fidget about while I am talking to you; sit down and listen to me for I have much to say.”

Ralph forced himself to obey in silence.

“I am perfectly well aware,” resumed Sir Matthew, “that nowadays young men think nothing of failing, that they go in for an examination time after time with light hearts while their unfortunate fathers have to pay the piper. You were not in a position to behave in that fashion. And you would have shown, I think, a finer sense of honour if you had worked well.”

“I did work,” said Ralph emphatically. “If you———”

Sir Matthew raised his long hand and waved it downwards in a silencing manner that was peculiarly his own.

“I say nothing,” he continued, in his cool, measured tone, “as to what I might have expected after the large sum I have thrown away on your schooling at Winchester; I say nothing as to the three months in Germany and the special coach I provided for you; I say nothing of the manner in which I took you at once into my own house when there was no one to stand by you; I say nothing as to the fatherly care I have bestowed on you all these——”

He broke off abruptly, for Ralph, with the look of one goaded past bearing, had sprung to his feet.

“No,” he cried passionately, “at least that word you shall not use: there was never anything fatherly about you. All those other things that you cast in my teeth though you say you won’t mention them—they are true enough, and I have tried to be grateful—I—” he half choked in the desperate struggle between his pride and a certain sense of courtesy which still clung to him—“I will try always to be grateful.” He strode across the room to the window, panting for air. A chuckle escaped Sir Matthew.

“You were always a good hand at acting,” he remarked, “but I shall be obliged if you will come down from your high horse and remember that I am talking about a business arrangement. Don’t waste my time, but listen to what I have to say to you.”

Ralph paced back again to the hearthrug and stood there, looking steadily down at his patron. It somehow seemed as if in those few moments he had passed from boyhood altogether, even Sir Matthew noted the change in his look and bearing. “The only thing,” he resumed, “in which I ever saw you really exert yourself was in that play at the end of the season. I quite admit that you learnt the part of Charles Surface at very short notice and that you acted it far better than any amateur I ever had the pain of watching. But to play a part in ‘The School for Scandal’ is one thing, and to be fit to play your part in life is another. You will never, I am convinced, be sharp enough for the Indian Civil Service, I shall not permit you to go in again for it next year. I have already wasted too much upon you and shall not throw good money after bad. That’s always a mistake.”

Ralph could not calmly stand by and hear his whole future overturned without a word; he broke in eagerly, perhaps rashly. “Yet many have failed the first time and afterwards turned out well,” he pleaded. “The standard of age, too, is likely to be raised they say. I would work my hardest. If you will let me try again——” But once more Sir Matthew gave that expressive downward wave of the hand.

“No,” he said peremptorily, “You have had your chance and lost it. Still, I am loth to turn my back altogether on an old friend’s son, and for my own satisfaction I offer you one more opportunity. I will make a parson of you. Do you remember that snug little vicarage up in the north of England where last year we went to call on a Mr. Crosbie? Years ago the Mactavishes owned the living; it had been in the family for generations. My father at a time when he was pressed for money sold it to old Crosbie. I have long wished to have the property again, and only to-day Crosbie happened to be in town and I got him to promise me that if I bought the living he would undertake to retire in four years. You had better not tell it in Gath, for of course the promise to retire is a strictly private matter, but for the rest it’s all legal enough. Next month you will be twenty. In four years you could be ordained priest, and I will undertake to see you through your training and to put you into this living. It’s three hundred and a house; you could be happy enough up there, and for your father’s sake I am willing to do as much as that for you.”

There was something so artificial in those last words that Ralph, whose anger had been rising every moment, now broke forth indignantly.

“Is it for his sake that you put before me a temptation of this sort? You surely know—you must know—that my father would never have accepted a living obtained in that way. Had you offered it him, and had it been worth ten times the money, he would not have touched it with a pair of tongs. Why, the thing is rank simony!”

“You receive offers of help in a somewhat curious fashion, young man,” said Sir Matthew with a sneer. “But in spite of that I still think you are very well cut out for a parson. Your dramatic instincts and your good voice would fit you well enough for the Church, and you are already able, I perceive, to preach to your elders and betters.”

Ralph winced at the sarcasm, but he caught hold of the weak point in his opponent’s argument.

“No,” he said, emphatically, “I am not fit for the work of a clergyman. The only thing that can fit a man for that is a distinct call from God. You are tempting me to go in for the loaves and fishes, and you dare to say that you do this for my father’s sake—my father, who would have starved first!”

“Perhaps he would,” said Sir Matthew coldly. “He was, as all his friends knew, an unpractical fool. You needn’t look as if you could kill me. He had excellent abilities but no power of pushing his way, and he left you a beggar in consequence, proving, according to scripture, that as he had neglected to secure future provision for his family he had denied the faith and was worse than an infidel. Now, to return to business; are you going to accept this offer of mine, or do you intend to be a pig-headed idiot, and affect to be calling a mere matter of business simony?”

Ralph’s eyes lighted up.

“I mean,” he said quietly, “to be true to my father’s ideals.”

Sir Matthew broke into a discordant laugh.

“Did his precious ideals feed you and clothe you and send you to Winchester? Don’t you know by his own confession that he had mismanaged his affairs?”

“I know,” said Ralph indignantly, “that, whatever his faults, he was at least an honest man.”

He had meant no insinuation whatever, but the words galled his companion terribly. Sir Matthew rose to his feet in a towering passion.

“You impertinent, ungrateful fellow, do you dare to insult me in my own house? Go, sir, get out of my sight! I have had enough of you. Let us see now how your ideals will support you! Leave my house and never set foot in it again!”

Ralph, too angry and sore to realise all that the words meant, turned without a word and left the library.