Arminell, Vol. 1

He entered the park grounds by a side-gate and was soon on the terrace. There he saw Arminell returning to the house from her stroll in the avenue.

“Mr. Saltren,” she said, “have you also been enjoying the beauty of the night?”

“I have been trying to cool the fever within,” he replied.

“I hope,” she said, misunderstanding him, “that you have not caught the influenza, or whatever it is from Giles.”

“I have taken nothing from Giles. The fever I speak of is not physical.”

“Oh! you are still thinking of what we discussed over the Noah’s Ark.”

“Yes – how can I help it? I who am broken and trodden on at every moment.”

“I am sorry to hear you say this, Mr. Saltren. I also have been talking the matter over with papa, and after he went in, I have been walking up and down under the trees meditating on it – but I get no farther, for all my thinking.”

“Miss Inglett,” said Jingles, “the time of barley-mows is at an end. Hitherto we have had the oats, and the wheat, and the rye, and the clover, and the meadow-grass ricked, stacked separately. All that is of the past. The age of the stack-yard is over with its several distinct classified ricks – this is wheat, that is rye; this is clover, that damaged hay. We are now entering an age of Silo, and inevitably as feudalism is done away with, so will the last relics of distinctions be swept aside also, and we shall all enter an universal and common silo.”

“I do not think I quite understand you.”

“Henceforth all mankind will make one, all contribute to the common good, all be pressed together and the individuality of one pass to become the property of all.”

Arminell shook her head and laughed.

“I confess that I find great sweetness in the old stack-yard, and a special fragrance attaches to each rick. Is all that to be a thing of the past, and the savour of the silo to be the social atmosphere of the future?”

“You strain the illustration,” said Saltren testily.

“You wish to substitute an aggregate of nastiness for diversified sweets.”

“Miss Inglett, I will say no more. I thought you more sympathetic with the aspirations of the despised and down-trodden, with the movement of ideas in the present century.”

“I am sympathetic,” said Arminell. “But I am as bewildered now as I was this morning. I am just as one who has been spun through the spiral tunnel on the St. Gothard line, when one rushes forth into day; you know neither in which direction you are going, nor to what level you are brought. I dislike your similitude of a silo, and so have a right to criticise it.”

“Arminell,” said Jingles, standing still.

“Mr. Saltren!” The girl reared herself haughtily, and spoke with icy coldness.

“Exactly,” laughed the tutor, bitterly. “I thought as much! You will not allow the presumed son of a manganese captain, the humble tutor, to presume an approach of familiarity to the honourable the daughter of a peer.”

“I allow no one to presume,” said she, haughtily, and turned her back on him, and resumed her walk.

“Yet I have a right,” pursued Jingles, striding after her. “Miss Inglett – Arminell listen to me. I am not the man to presume. I know and am made to feel too sharply my inferiority to desire to take a liberty. But I have a right, and I stand on my right. I have a right to call you by your Christian name, a right which you will acknowledge. I am your brother.”

Arminell halted, turned and looked at him from head to foot with surprise mingled with disdain.

“You doubt my words,” he went on. “I am not offended – I am not surprised at that; indeed, I expected it. But what I say is true. We have different mothers, mine” – with bitterness – “of the people, that I allow – of the people, of the common, base lot, who are dirt under your feet; yours is of the aristocracy, made much of, received in society, in the magic circle from which mine would be shut out. But we have one father; I stand to you in precisely the same relation as does the boy Giles, but I am your elder brother, and should be your adviser and closest friend.”

END OF VOLUME I

notes

1

The reader may think this an impossible case. At the present moment an old woman in the author’s immediate neighbourhood is thus defying all the authorities. They have come to a dead lock. She has resisted orders to leave for three years, and is in hourly peril of her life. The only person who could expel her is the landlord, who happens to be poor, and who says that he cannot rebuild the cottage, the woman who has it on a lease is bound to deliver it over at the end of the time in good order, but she is without the means to put the cottage in order. Next equinoctial gale may see her crushed to death.