CHAPTER XXX

Tibby was now approaching his last year at Oxford. He had moved
out of college, and was contemplating the Universe, or such
portions of it as concerned him, from his comfortable lodgings in
Long Wall. He was not concerned with much. When a young man is
untroubled by passions and sincerely indifferent to public
opinion his outlook is necessarily limited. Tibby wished neither
to strengthen the position of the rich nor to improve that of the
poor, and so was well content to watch the elms nodding behind
the mildly embattled parapets of Magdalen. There are worse lives.
Though selfish, he was never cruel; though affected in manner, he
never posed. Like Margaret, he disdained the heroic equipment,
and it was only after many visits that men discovered Schlegel to
possess a character and a brain. He had done well in Mods, much
to the surprise of those who attended lectures and took proper
exercise, and was now glancing disdainfully at Chinese in case he
should some day consent to qualify as a Student Interpreter. To
him thus employed Helen entered. A telegram had preceded her.

He noticed, in a distant way, that his sister had altered.

As a rule he found her too pronounced, and had never come across
this look of appeal, pathetic yet dignified--the look of a
sailor who has lost everything at sea.

"I have come from Oniton," she began. "There has been a great
deal of trouble there."

"Who's for lunch?" said Tibby, picking up the claret, which was
warming in the hearth. Helen sat down submissively at the table.
"Why such an early start?" he asked.

"Sunrise or something--when I could get away."

"So I surmise. Why?"

"I don't know what's to be done, Tibby. I am very much upset at a
piece of news that concerns Meg, and do not want to face her, and
I am not going back to Wickham Place. I stopped here to tell you
this."

The landlady came in with the cutlets. Tibby put a marker in the
leaves of his Chinese Grammar and helped them. Oxford--the Oxford
of the vacation--dreamed and rustled outside, and indoors the
little fire was coated with grey where the sunshine touched it.
Helen continued her odd story.

"Give Meg my love and say that I want to be alone. I mean to go
to Munich or else Bonn."

"Such a message is easily given," said her brother.

"As regards Wickham Place and my share of the furniture, you and
she are to do exactly as you like. My own feeling is that
everything may just as well be sold. What does one want with
dusty economic books, which have made the world no better, or
with mother's hideous chiffoniers? I have also another commission
for you. I want you to deliver a letter." She got up. "I haven't
written it yet. Why shouldn't I post it, though?" She sat down
again. "My head is rather wretched. I hope that none of your
friends are likely to come in."

Tibby locked the door. His friends often found it in this
condition. Then he asked whether anything had gone wrong at
Evie's wedding.

"Not there," said Helen, and burst into tears.

He had known her hysterical--it was one of her aspects with which
he had no concern--and yet these tears touched him as something
unusual. They were nearer the things that did concern him, such
as music. He laid down his knife and looked at her curiously.
Then, as she continued to sob, he went on with his lunch.

The time came for the second course, and she was still crying.
Apple Charlotte was to follow, which spoils by waiting. "Do you
mind Mrs. Martlett coming in?" he asked, "or shall I take it from
her at the door?"

"Could I bathe my eyes, Tibby?"

He took her to his bedroom, and introduced the pudding in her
absence. Having helped himself, he put it down to warm in the
hearth. His hand stretched towards the Grammar, and soon he was
turning over the pages, raising his eyebrows scornfully, perhaps
at human nature, perhaps at Chinese. To him thus employed Helen
returned. She had pulled herself together, but the grave appeal
had not vanished from her eyes.

"Now for the explanation," she said. "Why didn't I begin with it?
I have found out something about Mr. Wilcox. He has behaved very
wrongly indeed, and ruined two people's lives. It all came on me
very suddenly last night; I am very much upset, and I do not know
what to do. Mrs. Bast--"

"Oh, those people!"

Helen seemed silenced.

"Shall I lock the door again?"

"No thanks, Tibbikins. You're being very good to me. I want to
tell you the story before I go abroad. you must do exactly what
you like--treat it as part of the furniture. Meg cannot have
heard it yet, I think. But I cannot face her and tell her that
the man she is going to marry has misconducted himself. I don't
even know whether she ought to be told. Knowing as she does that
I dislike him, she will suspect me, and think that I want to ruin
her match. I simply don't know what to make of such a thing. I
trust your judgment. What would you do?"

"I gather he has had a mistress," said Tibby.

Helen flushed with shame and anger. "And ruined two people's
lives. And goes about saying that personal actions count for
nothing, and there always will be rich and poor. He met her when
he was trying to get rich out in Cyprus--I don't wish to make him
worse than he is, and no doubt she was ready enough to meet him.
But there it is. They met. He goes his way and she goes hers.
What do you suppose is the end of such women?"

He conceded that it was a bad business.

"They end in two ways: Either they sink till the lunatic asylums
and the workhouses are full of them, and cause Mr. Wilcox to
write letters to the papers complaining of our national
degeneracy, or else they entrap a boy into marriage before it is
too late. She--I can't blame her."

"But this isn't all," she continued after a long pause, during
which the landlady served them with coffee. "I come now to the
business that took us to Oniton. We went all three. Acting on Mr.
Wilcox's advice, the man throws up a secure situation and takes
an insecure one, from which he is dismissed. There are certain
excuses, but in the main Mr. Wilcox is to blame, as Meg herself
admitted. It is only common justice that he should employ the man
himself. But he meets the woman, and, like the cur that he is, he
refuses, and tries to get rid of them. He makes Meg write. Two
notes came from her late that evening--one for me, one for
Leonard, dismissing him with barely a reason. I couldn't
understand. Then it comes out that Mrs. Bast had spoken to Mr.
Wilcox on the lawn while we left her to get rooms, and was still
speaking about him when Leonard came back to her. This Leonard
knew all along. He thought it natural he should be ruined twice.
Natural! Could you have contained yourself?"

"It is certainly a very bad business," said Tibby.

His reply seemed to calm his sister. "I was afraid that I saw it
out of proportion. But you are right outside it, and you must
know. In a day or two--or perhaps a week--take whatever steps you
think fit. I leave it in your hands."

She concluded her charge.

"The facts as they touch Meg are all before you," she added; and
Tibby sighed and felt it rather hard that, because of his open
mind, he should be empanelled to serve as a juror. He had never
been interested in human beings, for which one must blame him,
but he had had rather too much of them at Wickham Place. Just as
some people cease to attend when books are mentioned, so Tibby's
attention wandered when "personal relations" came under
discussion. Ought Margaret to know what Helen knew the Basts to
know? Similar questions had vexed him from infancy, and at Oxford
he had learned to say that the importance of human beings has
been vastly overrated by specialists. The epigram, with its faint
whiff of the eighties, meant nothing. But he might have let it
off now if his sister had not been ceaselessly beautiful.

"You see, Helen--have a cigarette--I don't see what I'm to do."

"Then there's nothing to be done. I dare say you are right. Let
them marry. There remains the question of compensation."

"Do you want me to adjudicate that too? Had you not better
consult an expert?"

"This part is in confidence," said Helen. "It has nothing to do
with Meg, and do not mention it to her. The compensation--I do
not see who is to pay it if I don't, and I have already decided
on the minimum sum. As soon as possible I am placing it to your
account, and when I am in Germany you will pay it over for me. I
shall never forget your kindness, Tibbikins, if you do this."

"What is the sum?"

"Five thousand."

"Good God alive!" said Tibby, and went crimson.

"Now, what is the good of driblets? To go through life having
done one thing--to have raised one person from the abyss; not
these puny gifts of shillings and blankets--making the grey more
grey. No doubt people will think me extraordinary."

"I don't care an iota what people think!" cried he, heated to
unusual manliness of diction. "But it's half what you have."

"Not nearly half." She spread out her hands over her soiled
skirt. "I have far too much, and we settled at Chelsea last
spring that three hundred a year is necessary to set a man on
his feet. What I give will bring in a hundred and fifty between
two. It isn't enough."
He could not recover. He was not angry or even shocked, and he
saw that Helen would still have plenty to live on. But it amazed
him to think what haycocks people can make of their lives. His
delicate intonations would not work, and he could only blurt out
that the five thousand pounds would mean a great deal of bother
for him personally.

"I didn't expect you to understand me."

"I? I understand nobody."

"But you'll do it?"

"Apparently."

"I leave you two commissions, then. The first concerns Mr.
Wilcox, and you are to use your discretion. The second concerns
the money, and is to be mentioned to no one, and carried out
literally. You will send a hundred pounds on account to-morrow."

He walked with her to the station, passing through those streets
whose serried beauty never bewildered him and never fatigued. The
lovely creature raised domes and spires into the cloudless blue,
and only the ganglion of vulgarity round Carfax showed how
evanescent was the phantom, how faint its claim to represent
England. Helen, rehearsing her commission, noticed nothing; the
Basts were in her brain, and she retold the crisis in a
meditative way, which might have made other men curious. She was
seeing whether it would hold. He asked her once why she had taken
the Basts right into the heart of Evie's wedding. She stopped
like a frightened animal and said, "Does that seem to you so
odd?" Her eyes, the hand laid on the mouth, quite haunted him,
until they were absorbed into the figure of St. Mary the Virgin,
before whom he paused for a moment on the walk home.

It is convenient to follow him in the discharge of his duties.
Margaret summoned him the next day. She was terrified at Helen's
flight, and he had to say that she had called in at Oxford. Then
she said: "Did she seem worried at any rumour about Henry?" He
answered, "Yes." "I knew it was that!" she exclaimed. "I'll
write to her." Tibbv was relieved.

He then sent the cheque to the address that Helen gave him, and
stated that he was instructed to forward later on five thousand
pounds. An answer came back very civil and quiet in tone--such an
answer as Tibby himself would have given. The cheque was
returned, the legacy refused, the writer being in no need of
money. Tibby forwarded this to Helen, adding in the fulness of
his heart that Leonard Bast seemed somewhat a monumental person
after all. Helen's reply was frantic. He was to take no notice.
He was to go down at once and say that she commanded acceptance.
He went. A scurf of books and china ornaments awaited him. The
Basts had just been evicted for not paying their rent, and had
wandered no one knew whither. Helen had begun bungling with her
money by this time, and had even sold out her shares in the
Nottingham and Derby Railway. For some weeks she did nothing.
Then she reinvested, and, owing to the good advice of her
stockbrokers, became rather richer than she had been before.

Read next: CHAPTER XXXI

Read previous: CHAPTER XXIX

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