_ CHAPTER VII
It chanced, one evening, that I was walking alone through the park. I had been on foot to the village to send a telegram, which I had not cared to trust to a servant. The weather had suddenly cleared, and there had been a sharp frost in the morning; towards midday it had thawed a little, but by the time it was dark everything was frozen hard again. The moon was nearly full, and shone brightly upon the frozen grass, casting queer shadows through the bare branches of the trees; it was very cold, and I walked fast; the brittle, frozen mud of the road broke beneath my feet with a creaking, crunching sound, and startled the deep stillness. As I neared the house the moon was before me, and the mass of buildings cast a dark shadow.
Carvel Place is like many old country houses in England; it is a typical dwelling of its kind, irregular, yet imposing, and though it has no plan, for it has been added to and enlarged, and in part rebuilt, it is yet harmonious and of good proportion. I had often reflected that it was too large for the use of the present family, and I knew that there must be a great number of rooms in the house which were never opened; but no one had ever proposed to show them to me, and I was not sufficiently curious to ask permission to visit the disused apartments. I had observed, however, that a wing of the building ran into an inclosure, surrounded by a wall seven or eight feet high, against which were ranged upon the one side a series of hot-houses, while another formed the back of a covered tennis court. The third wall of the inclosure was covered with a lattice, upon which fruit trees had been trained without any great success, and I had noticed that the lattice now completely covered an old oak door which led into the inclosure. I had never seen the door open, but I remembered very well that it was uncovered the last time I had been at Carvel Place.
When I reached the house I was no longer cold, and the night was so clear and sparkling that I idly strolled round the great place, wandering across the frozen lawn and through the winding paths of the flower garden beyond, till I came to the wall I have described, and stood still, half wondering why the door had been covered over with fruit trees, as though no one would ever wish to enter the house from that side. The space could hardly be so valuable for gardening purposes, I thought, for the slender peach-trees that were bound upon the lattice on each side of the door had not thriven. There was something melancholy about the unsuccessful attempt to cultivate the delicate southern fruit in the unkindly air of England, and the branches and stems, all wrapped in straw against the frost, looked unhappy and unnatural in the cold moonlight. I stood looking at them, with my hands in my pockets, thinking somewhat regretfully of my southern birthplace. I smiled at myself and turned away, but as I went the very faintest echo of a laugh seemed to come from the other side of the wall. It sounded disagreeably in the stillness, and I slowly finished my walk around the house and came back to the front door, still wondering who it was that had laughed at me from behind the wall in the moonlight. There was certainly no original reason in the nature of things why it should not chance that some one should laugh on the other side of the wall just as I happened to be standing before the closed gate. The inclosure was probably in connection with the servants' apartments; or it might be the exclusive privilege of Chrysophrasia to walk there, composing anapaestic verse to the infinite faintness of the moon,--or anything. A quarter of an hour later I was in the drawing-room drinking a cup of tea. I came in when the others had finished reading their evening letters, and there were none for me. The tea was cold. I wished I had walked half an hour longer, and had not come into the drawing-room at all.
"Let me make you a fresh cup, Mr. Griggs," said Hermione; "do,--it will be ready in a moment!"
I politely declined, and the conversation of the rest soon began where it had left off. It appeared that Professor Cutter was expected that night, and the son of the house, with Patoff, on the following day. It was Thursday, and Christmas was that day week. John Carvel seemed unusually depressed; his words were few and very grave, and he did not smile, but answered in the shortest manner possible the questions addressed to him. He thought Cutter might arrive at any moment. Hermione hazarded a remark to the effect that the professor was rather dull.
"No, my dear," answered John, "he is not at all dull."
"But, papa, I thought he was so immensely learned"----
"He is very learned," said her father, shortly, and buried himself in his newspaper, so that hardly anything was visible of him but his feet, encased in exceedingly neat shoes; those nether extremities moved impatiently from time to time. Chrysophrasia was not present, a circumstance which made it seem likely that she might have been the person who had laughed behind the wall. Mary Carvel, like her husband, was unusually silent, and I was sitting not far from Hermione. She looked at me after her father's curt answer to her innocent remark, and smiled faintly.
The drawing-room where we sat exhibited a curious instance of the effect produced upon inanimate things when subjected to the contact of persons who differ widely from each other in taste. You smile, dear lady, at the complicated form of expression. I mean merely that if two people who like very different things live in the same room, each of them will try to give the place the look he or she likes. At Carvel Place there were four to be consulted, instead of two; for John had his own opinions as to taste, and they were certainly sounder than those of his wife and sister-in-law, and at least as clearly defined.
John Carvel liked fine pictures, and he had placed three or four in the drawing-room,--a couple of good Hogarths, a beautiful woman's head by Andrea del Sarto, and a military scene by Meissonnier,--about as heterogeneous a quartette of really valuable works as could be got for money; and John had given a great deal of money for them. Besides the pictures, there stood in the drawing-room an enormous leathern easy-chair, of the old-fashioned type with semicircular wings projecting forward from the high back on each side, made to protect the rheumatic old head of some ancestor who suffered from the toothache before the invention of dentists. Near this stood a low, square, revolving bookcase, which always contained the volumes which John was reading at the time, to be changed from day to day as circumstances required.
Mary Carvel was, and is, an exceedingly religious woman, and her tastes are to some extent the expression of her religious feelings. She has a number of excellent engravings of celebrated pictures, such as Holbein's Madonna, Raphael's Transfiguration, and the Dresden Madonna di San Sisto; she owns the entire collection of chromo-lithographs published by the Arundel Society, and many other reproductions of a similar nature. Many of these she had hung in the drawing-room at Carvel Place. Here and there, also, were little shelves of oak in the common Anglomaniac style of woodwork, ornamented with trefoils, crosses, circles, and triangles, and containing a curious collection of sacred literature, beginning with the ancient volume entitled Wilberforce's View, including the poetry published in a series of Lyras,--Lyra Anglicana, Lyra Germanica, and so on,--culminating at last in the works of Dr. Pusey; the whole perhaps exhibiting in a succinct form the stages through which Mary Carvel had passed, or was still passing, in her religious convictions. And here let me say at once that I am very far from intending to jest at those same convictions of Mary Carvel's, and if you smile it is because the picture is true, not because it is ridiculous. She may read what she pleases, but the world would be a better place if there were more women like her.
There were many other possessions of hers in the drawing-room: for instance, upon the mantel-piece were placed three magnificent Wedgwood urns, after Flaxman's designs, inherited from her father, and now of great value; upon the tables there were several vases of old Vienna, but of a green color, vivid enough to elicit Chrysophrasia's most eloquent disapprobation; there were several embroideries of a sufficiently harmless nature, the work of Mary Carvel's patient fingers, but conceived in a style no longer popular; and on the whole, there was a great number of objects in the drawing-room which belonged to her and by which she set great store, but which bore decidedly the character of English household decoration and furniture at the beginning of the present century, and are consequently abhorrent to the true aesthete.
Chrysophrasia Dabstreak, however, had sworn to cast the shadow of beauty over what she called the substance of the hideous, and to this end and intention, by dint of honeyed eloquence and stinging satire, she had persuaded John and Mary to allow her to insert stained glass in one of the windows, which formerly opened upon and afforded a view of a certain particularly brilliant flower bed. Beneath the many-colored light from this Gothic window--for she insisted upon the pointed arch--Miss Dabstreak had made her own especial corner of the drawing-room. There one might see strange pots and plates, and withered rushes, and fantastic greenish draperies of Eastern weft, which, however, would not fetch five piastres a yard in the bazaar of Stamboul, curious water-colors said to represent "impressions," though one would be shy of meeting, beyond the bounds of an insane asylum, the individual whose impressions could take so questionable a shape; lastly, the centre of the collection, a "polka mazurka harmony in yellow," by Sardanapalus Stiggins, the great impressionist painter of the day. Chrysophrasia paid five hundred pounds for this little gem.
But it was not enough for Miss Dabstreak to have collected so many worthless objects of price in her own little corner of the room. She had encumbered the tables with useless articles of pottery; she had fastened a green plate between the better of the two Hogarths and an Arundel chromo-lithograph, and connected it with both the pictures by a drooping scarf of faint pink silk; she had adorned the engraving of Raphael's Transfiguration with a bit of Broussa embroidery, because it looked so very Oriental; and she had bedizened Mary Carvel's water-color view of Carisbrooke Castle with peacock's feathers, because they looked so very English. There was no spot in the room where Chrysophrasia's hand had not fallen, and often it had fallen heavily. She had respected John Carvel's easy-chair and revolving bookcase, but she had respected nothing else.
There was a fourth person, however, who had set her especial impress on the appearance of the room where all met in common. I mean Hermione Carvel. Educated and brought up among the conflicting tastes and views of her parents and her aunt, she had imbibed some of the characteristics of each, although in widely different degrees. At that time, perhaps, the various traits which were united in her had not yet blended harmoniously so as to form a satisfactory whole. The resultant of so many more or less conflicting forces was prone to extremes of enthusiasm or of indifference. Her heart was capable of feeling the warmest sympathy, but was liable also to conceive unwarrantable antipathies; her mind was of admirable quality, fairly well gifted and sensibly trained; though not marvelously quick to understand, yet tenacious and slow to forget. The constant attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable opinions of her mother and aunt had given Hermione a certain versatility of thought, and a certain capacity to see both sides of the question when not under the momentary influence of her enthusiasm. She is, and was even then, a fine type of the English girl who has grown up under the most favorable circumstances; that is to say, with an excellent education and a decided preference for the country. It is not necessary to allow her any of the privileges and immunities usually granted to exceptional people; in any ordinary position of life she would bear the test of any ordinary difficulty very well. She inherits common sense from her father, an honest country gentleman of the kind now unfortunately growing every day more rare; a man not so countrified as to break his connection with the intelligent world, nor so foolishly ambitious as to abandon a happy life in the country in order to pursue the mirage of petty political importance: a man who holds humbug in supreme contempt, and having purged it from his being has still something to fall back upon. From her mother Hermione inherits an extreme conscientiousness in the things of every-day life; but whereas in Mary Carvel this scrupulous pursuance of what is right is on the verge of degenerating into morbid religionism, in Hermione it is tempered by occasional bursts of enthusiasm, and relieved by a wholesome and natural capacity for liking some people and disliking others.
In the drawing-room I have been describing, Hermione touched everything, and did her best to cast over the various objects some grace, some air of harmony, which should make the contrasted tastes of the rest of her family less glaring and unpleasant to the eye. Her task was not easy, and it was no fault of hers if the room was out of joint. Her love of flowers showed itself everywhere, and she knew how to take advantage of each inch of room on shelf, or table, or window-seat, filling all available spaces with a profusion of roses, geraniums, and blossoms of every kind that chanced to be in season. Flowers in a room will do what nothing else can accomplish. The eye turns gladly to the living plant, when wearied and strained with the incongruities of inanimate things. A pot of pinks makes the lowliest and most dismal cottage chamber look gay by comparison; a single rose in a glass of water lights up the most dusty den of the most dusty student. A bit of climbing ivy converts a hideous ruin into a bower, as the Alp roses and the Iva make a garden for one short month of the roughest rocks in the Grisons. Only that which lives and of which the life is beautiful can reconcile us to those surroundings which would otherwise offend our sense of harmony, or oppress us with a dullness even more deadly than mere ugliness can ever be.
Hermione loves all flowers, and at Carvel Place she was the sweetest blossom of them all. Her fresh vitality is of the contagious kind, and even plants seem to revive and get new life from the touch of her small fingers, as though feeling the necessity of growing like her. Her beauty may not last. It is not of the imperious kind, nor even quite classic, but it has a wonderful fineness and delicacy. Her soft brown hair coils closely on her small, well-shaped head; her gentle, serious blue eyes look tenderly on all that lives and has being within the circle of her sight; her small mouth smiles graciously and readily, though sometimes a little sadly; and her pleasant voice has a frank ring in it that is good to hear. Her slight fingers, neither too long nor too short, are often busy, but her labors are generally labors of love, and she is never weary of them. Of middle height, she has the grace of a taller woman, and the ease in motion which comes only from natural, healthy, elastic strength, not weakened by enforced idleness, not overdeveloped by abominable and unwomanly gymnastic exercises. Everything she does is graceful.
It is very strange and interesting to see in her the combination of such different elements. Even her aunt Chrysophrasia's queer nature is represented, though it needs some ingenuity to trace the resemblance between the two. There are indeed tones of the voice, phrases and expressions, which seem to belong to particular families, and by which one may sometimes discover the relationship. But the modification of leading characteristics in the individual is not so easily detected. Miss Dabstreak is eccentric, but the wild ideas which continue to flourish in the aesthetic cells of Chrysophrasia's brain are softened and made more gentle and delicate in Hermione, so that even if they were inconsequent they would not seem offensive; though one might not admire them, one could not despise them. The young girl loves all that is beautiful: not as Chrysophrasia loves it, by sheer force of habitual affectation, without discernment and without real enjoyment, but from the bottom of her heart, from the well-springs of her own beautiful soul; knowing and understanding the great divisions between the graceful and the clumsy, between the true and the false, the lovely and the unlovely. The extraordinary passion for the eccentric is tempered to an honest and natural craving after the beautiful; the admixture of the gentleness the girl has inherited from her saintly mother and of the genuine common sense which characterizes her father has produced a rational desire and ability to do good to every one. Mary Carvel is sometimes exaggerated in her ideas of charity, and John on rare occasions--very rarely--used to be a little too much inclined to the practice of economy; "near" was the term applied by the village people. It was at first with him but the reminiscence of poorer years, when economy was necessary, and forethought was an indispensable element in his life; but the tendency has remained and sometimes shows itself. All that can be traced of this quality in the daughter is a certain power of keen discernment, which saves her from being cheated by the sham paupers who abound in the neighborhood of Carvel Place, and from being led into spoiling the school-children with too many feasts of tea, jam, and cake.
It is not easy to be brief in describing Hermione Carvel, because in her fair self she combines a great many qualities belonging to contradictory persons, which one would suppose impossible to unite in one harmonious whole; and yet Hermione is one of the most harmonious persons I ever knew. Nothing about her ever offended my sense of fitness. I often used to wonder how she managed to be loved equally by the different members of the household, but there is no doubt of the fact that all the members of her family not only love her, but excuse readily enough those of their own bad qualities which they fancy they recognize in her; for, indeed, nothing ever seems bad in Hermione, and I doubt greatly whether there is not some touch of white magic in her nature that protects her and shields her, so that bad things turn to good when they come near her. If she likes the curious notions of her aunt, she certainly changes them so that they become delicate fancies, and agree together with the gentle charity she has from her mother and the sterling honesty she gets from her father. John sometimes shrugs his shoulders at what he calls his wife's extraordinary faith in human nature, and both he and Mary are sometimes driven to the verge of distraction by Chrysophrasia's perpetual moaning over civilization; but no one is ever out of temper with Hermione, nor is Hermione ever impatient with any one of the three. She is the peace-maker, the one whose sympathy never fails, whose gentleness is never ruffled, and whose fair judgment is never at fault.
When John Carvel answered Hermione's question about Professor Cutter by a simple affirmation to the effect that he was a very learned man, the young girl did not press her father with any more inquiries, but turned to me.
"Do you not think learned people are very often dull, Mr. Griggs?" she asked.
"Oppressively," I answered.
"What makes them so?"
"It is the very low and common view which they take of life," put in Miss Dabstreak, who entered the room while we were speaking, and sank upon the couch with a little sigh. "They have no aspirations after the beautiful,--and what else can satisfy the human mind? The Greeks were never dull."
"What do you call dull?" asked Mrs. Carvel very mildly.
"Oh--anything; parliamentary reports, for instance, and agricultural shows, and the Rural Dean,--anything of that sort," answered Miss Chrysophrasia languidly.
"In other words, civilization as compared with barbarism," I suggested. "It is true that there cannot be much boredom among barbarous tribes who are always scalping their enemies or being scalped themselves; those things help to pass the time."
"Yes, scalping must be most interesting," murmured Chrysophrasia, with an air of conviction.
Hermione laughed.
"I really believe you would like to see it done, aunt Chrysophrasia," said she.
"Hermy, Hermy, what dreadful ideas you have!" exclaimed Mrs. Carvel, in gentle horror. But she immediately returned to her embroidery, and relapsed into silence.
"It is Mr. Griggs, mamma," said Hermione, still laughing. "He agrees with me that learned people are all oppressively dull, and that the only tolerably exciting society is found among scalping Indians."
"Did you not once scalp somebody yourself, Griggs?" asked John, suddenly lowering his newspaper.
"Not quite," I answered; "but I once shaved a poodle with a pocket-knife. Perhaps you were thinking of that?"
While I spoke there was a sound of wheels without, and John rose to his feet. He seemed impatient.
"That must be Cutter at last'" he exclaimed, moving towards the door that led into the hall. "I thought he was never coming."
I rose also, and followed him. It was Cutter. The learned professor arrived wrapped in a huge ulster overcoat, his hands in the deep pockets thereof, and the end of an extinguished cigar between his teeth. He furtively disposed of the remains of the weed before shaking hands with our host. After the first greetings John led him away to his room, and I remained standing in the hall. The professor's luggage was rather voluminous, and various boxes, bags, and portmanteaus bore the labels of many journeys. The men brought them in from the dog-cart; the strong cob pawed the gravel a little, and the moonlight flashed back from the silver harness, from the smooth varnished dashboard, the polished chains, and the plated lamps. I stood staring out of the door, hardly seeing anything. Indeed, I was lost in a fruitless effort of memory. The groom gathered up the reins and drove away, and presently I was aware that Stubbs, the butler, was offering me a hat, as a hint, I supposed, that he wanted to shut the front door. I mechanically covered my head and strolled away.
I was trying to remember where I had seen Professor Cutter. I could not have known him well, for I never forget a man I have met three or four times; and yet his face was perfectly familiar to me, and came vividly before me as I paced the garden walks. Instinctively I walked round the house again, and paused before the door that had attracted my attention an hour earlier. I listened, but heard nothing, and still I tried to recall my former meeting with Cutter. Strange, I thought, that I should seem to know him so well, and that I should nevertheless be unable to connect him in my mind with any date, or country, or circumstance. In vain I went over many scenes of my life, endeavoring to limit this remembrance to a particular period. I argued that our meeting, if we really had met, could not have taken place many years ago, for I recognized exactly the curling gray hairs in the professor's beard, the wrinkles in his forehead, and a slight mark upon one cheek, just below the eye. I recollected the same spectacles; the same bushy, cropped gray hair; the same massive, square head set upon a short but powerful body; the same huge hands, spotlessly clean, the big nails kept closely pared and polished, but so large that they might have belonged to an extinct species of gigantic man. The whole of him and his belongings, to the very clothes he wore, seemed familiar to me and witnesses to his identity; but though I did my best for half an hour, I could not bring back one circumstance connected with him. I grew impatient and returned to the house, for it was time to dress for dinner, and I felt cold as I strolled about in the frosty moonlight.
We met again before dinner, for a few minutes, in the drawing-room. I went near to the professor, and examined his appearance very carefully. His evening dress set off the robust proportions of his frame, and the recollection I had of him struck me more forcibly than ever. I am not superstitious, but I began to fancy that we must have met in some former state, in some other sphere. He stood before the fire, rubbing his hands and answering all manner of questions that were put to him. He appeared to be an old friend of the family, to judge by the conversation, and yet I was positively certain that I had never seen him at Carvel Place. He knew all the family, however, and seemed familiar with their tastes and pursuits: he inquired about John's manufacturing interests, and about Mrs. Carvel's poor people; he asked Hermione several questions about the recent exhibitions of flowers, and discussed with Chrysophrasia a sale of majolica which had just taken place in London. After this round of remarks I suspected that the professor would address himself to me, for his gray eyes rested on me from time to time with a look of recognition. But he held his peace, and we presently went to dinner.
Professor Cutter talked much and talked well, in a continuous, consistent manner that was satisfactory for a time, but a little wearisome in the long run. His ideas were often brilliant, and his expression of them was always original, but he had an extraordinary faculty of dominating the conversation. Even John Carvel, who knew a great deal in his way, found it hard to make any headway against the professor's eloquence, though I could sometimes see that he was far from being convinced. The professor had been everywhere and had seen most things; he talked with absolute conviction of what he had seen, and avoided talking of what he had not seen, doubtless inferring that it was not worth seeing. Nevertheless, he was not a disagreeable person, as such men often are; on the contrary, there was a charm of manner about him that was felt by every one present. I longed for the meal to be over, however, for I intended to seize the first opportunity which presented itself of asking him whether he remembered where we had met before.
I was destined to remain in suspense for some time. We had no sooner risen from dinner than John Carvel came up to me and spoke in a low voice.
"Will you excuse me if I leave you alone, Griggs?" he said. "I have very important business with Professor Cutter, which will not keep until to-morrow. We will join you in the drawing-room in about an hour."
It was nothing to me if the two men had business together; I was sufficiently intimate in the house to be treated without ceremony, and I did not care for anybody's company until I could find what I was searching for in the forgotten corners of my brain.
"Do not mind me," I answered, and I retired into the smoking-room, and began to turn over the evening papers. How long I read I do not know, nor whether the news of the day was more or less interesting and credible than usual; I do not believe that an hour elapsed, either, for an hour is a long time when a man is not interested in what he is doing, and is trying to recall something to his mind. I cannot even tell why I so longed to recollect the professor's face; I only remember that the effort was intense, but wholly fruitless. I lay back in the deep leathern easy-chair, and all sorts of visions flitted before my half-closed eyes,--visions of good and visions of evil, visions of yesterday and visions of long ago. Somehow I fell to thinking about the lattice-covered door in the wall, and I caught myself wondering who had been behind it when I passed; and then I laughed, for I had made up my mind that it must have been Miss Chrysophrasia, who had entered the drawing-room five minutes after I did. I sat staring at the fire. I was conscious that some one had entered the room, and presently the scratching of a match upon something rough roused me from my reverie. I looked round, and saw Professor Cutter standing by the table.
It sometimes happens that a very slight thing will recall a very long chain of circumstances; a look, the intonation of a word, the attitude of a moment, will call up other looks and words and attitudes in quick succession, until the chain is complete. So it happened to me, when I saw the learned professor standing by the table, with a cigar in his mouth, and his great gray eyes fixed upon me from behind his enormous spectacles. I recognized the man, and the little I knew of him came back to me.
The professor is one of the most learned specialists in neurology and the study of the brain now living; he is, moreover, a famous anthropologist. He began his career as a surgeon, and would have been celebrated as an operator had he not one day inherited a private fortune, which permitted him to abandon his surgical practice in favor of a special branch for which he knew himself more particularly fitted. So soon as I recalled the circumstances of our first meeting I realized that I had been in his company only a few moments, and had not known his name.
He came and sat himself down in an easy-chair by my side, and puffed in silence at a big cigar.
"We have met before," I said. "I could not make you out at first. You were at Weissenstein last year. You remember that affair?"
Professor Cutter looked at me curiously for several seconds before he answered.
"You are the man who let down the rope," he said at last. "I remember you now very well."
There was a short pause.
"Did you ever hear any more of that lady?" asked he, presently.
"No, I did not even know her name, any more than I knew yours," I replied. "I took you for a physician, and the lady for your patient."
We heard steps on the polished floor outside the smoking-room.
"If I were you, I would not say anything to Carvel about that matter," said the professor quickly.
The door opened, and John entered the room. He was a little pale and looked nervous.
"Ah," he ejaculated, "I thought you would fraternize over the tobacco."
"We are doing our best," said I.
"It is written that the free should be brothers and equal," said the professor, with a laugh.
"I never knew two brothers who were equal," said Carvel, in reflective tones. "I do not know why the ideal freedom and equality, attaching to the ideal brothers, should not be as good as any other visionary aim for tangible earthly government; but it certainly does not seem so easy of realization, nor so sound in the working, as our good English principle that exceptions prove the rule, and that the more exceptions there are the better the rule will be."
"Is that speech an attack upon American freedom?" asked the professor, laughing a little. "I believe Mr. Griggs is an American."
"No, indeed. Why should I attack American freedom?" said John.
"American freedom is not so easily attacked," I remarked. "It eludes definition and rejects political paradox. No one ever connects our republic with the fashionable liberty-fraternity-and-equality doctrines of European emancipation; still less with the communistic idea that, although men have very different capacities for originating things, all men have an equal right to destroy them."
"Griggs is mounted upon his hobby," remarked John Carvel, stretching his feet out towards the fire. The professor turned the light of his spectacles upon me, and puffed a cloud of smoke.
"Are you a political enthusiast and a rider of hobby-horses, Mr. Griggs?" he asked.
"I do not know; you must ask our host."
"Pardon me. I think you know very well," said the professor. "I should say you belonged to a class of persons who know very well what they think."
"How do you judge?"
"That is, of all questions a man can ask, the most difficult to answer. How do you judge of anything?"
"By applying the test of past experience to present fact," I replied.
"Then past experience is that by which I judge. How can you expect me to tell you the whole of my past experience, in order that you may understand how my judgment is formed? It would take years."
"You are a pair of very singular men," remarked John Carvel. "You seem to take to argument as fish to the water. You ought to be successful in a school of walking philosophers."
John seemed more depressed than I had ever seen him, and only made an observation from time to time, as though to make a show of hospitality. The professor interested me, but I could see that we were boring Carvel. The conversation languished, and before long the latter proposed that we should go into the drawing-room for half an hour before bed-time.
We found the ladies seated around the fire. Their voices fell suddenly as we entered the room, and all of them looked towards John and the professor, as though expecting something. It struck me that they had been talking of some matter which was not intended for our ears.
"We have been making plans for Christmas," said Mrs. Carvel, as though to break the awkward silence that followed our entrance. _