Part 25 (1/2)
”One moment more of your precious time,” interrupted Arthur. ”What is the exact career that you propose to adorn? Something foreign, I think--Indian Civil Service?”
”No, as I have told you a dozen times, Indian Army.”
”The army has points--possibly in the future it might give a man an opportunity of departing from the world in a fas.h.i.+on that is generally, if in error, considered to be decent. India, too, has still more points, for there anyone with intelligence might study the beginnings of civilisation, which, perhaps, are also its end. My friend, I, too, will enter the Indian Army, that is if I can pa.s.s the examination.
Provide me at once with the necessary books and, Mrs. Parsons, be good-hearted enough to bring some of your excellent coffee, brewed double strong. Do not imagine, young man, who ought, by the way, to have been born fifty years earlier and married my aunt, that you are the only one who can face and conquer facts, even those advanced by that most accursed of empty-headed bores, the man or the maniac called Euclid.”
So the pair of them studied together, and by dint of private tuition in the evening, for at Sc.o.o.nes' where his talent for caricature was too much for him, Arthur would do little or nothing, G.o.dfrey dragged his friend through the examination, the last but one in the list. Even then a miracle intervened to save him. Arthur's Euclid was hopeless. He hated the whole business of squares and angles and parallelograms with such intensity that it made him mentally and morally sick. To his, as to some other minds, it was utter nonsense devised by a semi-lunatic for the bewilderment of mankind, and adopted by other lunatics as an appropriate form of torture of the young.
At length, in despair, G.o.dfrey, knowing that Arthur had an excellent memory, only the night before the examination, made him learn a couple of propositions selected out of the books which were to be studied, quite at hazard, with injunctions that no matter what other propositions were set he should write out these two, pretending that he had mistaken the question. This Arthur did with perfect accuracy, and by the greatest of good luck one of the two propositions was actually that which he was asked to set down, while the other was allowed to pa.s.s as an error.
So he b.u.mped through somehow, and in the end the Indian Army gained a most excellent officer. It is true that there were difficulties when he explained to his aunt and his trustees that in some inexplicable manner he had pa.s.sed for Sandhurst instead of into the Diplomatic Service. But when he demonstrated to them that this was his great and final effort and that nothing on earth would induce him to face another examination, even to be made a king, they thought it best to accept the accomplished fact.
”After all, you have pa.s.sed something,” said his aunt, ”which is more than anyone ever expected you would do, and the army is respectable, for, as I have told you, my grandfather was killed at Waterloo.”
”Yes,” replied Arthur, ”you have told me, my dear Aunt, very often. He broke his neck by jumping off his horse when riding towards or from the battlefield, did he not? and now I propose to follow his honoured example, on the battlefield, if possible, or if not, in steeplechasing.”
So the pair of them went to Sandhurst together, and together in due course were gazetted to a certain regiment of Indian cavalry, the only difference being that G.o.dfrey pa.s.sed out top and Arthur pa.s.sed out bottom, although, in fact, he was much the cleverer of the two. Of the interval between these two examinations there is nothing that need be reported, for their lives and the things that happened to them were as those of hundreds of other young men. Only through all they remained the fastest of friends, so much so that by the influence of General Cubitte, as has been said, they managed to be gazetted to the same regiment.
During those two years G.o.dfrey never saw his father, and communicated with him but rarely. His winter vacations were spent at Mrs. Parsons'
house in Hampstead, working for the most part, since he was absolutely determined to justify himself and get on in the profession which he had chosen. In the summer he and Arthur went walking tours, and once, with some other young men, visited the Continent to study various battlefields, and improve their minds. At least G.o.dfrey studied the battlefields, while Arthur gave most of his attention to the younger part of the female population of France and Italy. At Easter again they went to Scotland, where Arthur had some property settled on him--for he was a young man well supplied with this world's goods--and fished for salmon and trout. Altogether, for G.o.dfrey, it was a profitable and happy two years. At Sandhurst and elsewhere everyone thought well of him, while old General Cubitte became his devoted friend and could not say enough in his praise.
”d.a.m.n it! Sir,” he exclaimed once, ”do you mean to tell me that you never overdraw your allowance? It is not natural; almost wrong indeed.
I wonder what your secret vices are? Well, so long as you keep them secret, you ought to be a big man one day and end up in a very different position to George Cubitte--called a General--who never saw a shot fired in his life. There'll be lots of them flying about before you're old, my boy, and doubtless you'll get your share of gunpowder--or nitro-glycerine--if you go on as you have begun. If I weren't afraid of making you c.o.c.ky, I'd tell you what they say about you down at that Sandhurst shop, where I have an old pal or two.”
Shortly after this came the final examination, through which, as has been said, G.o.dfrey sailed out top, an easy first indeed--a position to which his thorough knowledge of French and general apt.i.tude for foreign languages, together with his powers of work and application, really ent.i.tled him. All his friends were delighted, especially Arthur, who looked on him as a kind of _lusus naturae_, and from his humble position at the bottom of the tree, gazed admiringly at G.o.dfrey perched upon its topmost bough. The old Pasteur, too, with whom G.o.dfrey kept up an almost weekly correspondence, continuing his astronomical studies by letter, was enraptured and covered him with compliments, as did his instructors at the College.
All of this would have been enough to turn the heads of many young men, but as it happened G.o.dfrey was by nature modest, with enough intelligence to appreciate the abysmal depths of his own ignorance by the light of the little lamp of knowledge with which he had furnished himself on his journey into their blackness. This intense modesty always remained a leading characteristic of his, which endeared him to many, although it was not one that helped him forward in life. It is the bold, self-confident man, who knows how to make the most of his small gifts, who travels fastest and farthest in this world of ours.
When, however, actually he received quite an affectionate and pleased letter from his father, he did, for a while, feel a little proud. The letter enclosed a cutting from the local paper recording his success, and digging up for the benefit of its readers an account of his adventure on the Alps. Also, it mentioned prominently that he was the son of the Rev. Mr. Knight, the inc.u.mbent of Monk's Abbey, and had received his education in that gentleman's establishment; so prominently, indeed, that even the unsuspicious G.o.dfrey could not help wondering if his father had ever seen that paragraph before it appeared in print. The letter ended with this pa.s.sage:
”We have not met for a long while, owing to causes to which I will not allude, and I suppose that shortly you will be going to India.
If you care to come here I should like to see you before you leave England. This is natural, as after all you are my only child and I am growing old. Once you have departed to that far country who knows whether we shall ever meet again in this world?”
G.o.dfrey, a generous-hearted and forgiving person, was much touched when he read these words, and wrote at once to say that if it were convenient, he would come down to Monk's Abbey at the beginning of the following week and spend some of his leave there. So, in due course, he went.
As it happened, at about the same time Destiny had arranged that another character in this history was returning to that quiet Ess.e.x village, namely Isobel Blake.
Isobel went to Mexico with her uncle and there had a most interesting time. She studied Aztec history with her usual thoroughness; so well, indeed, that she became a recognised authority on the subject. She climbed Popocatepetl, the mysterious ”Sleeping Woman” that overhands the ancient town, and looked into its crater. Greatly daring, she even visited Yucatan and saw some of the pre-Aztec remains. For this adventure she paid with an attack of fever which never quite left her system. Indeed, that fever had a peculiar effect upon her, which may have been physical or something else. Isobel's fault, or rather characteristic, as the reader may have gathered, was that she built too much upon the material side of things. What she saw, what she knew, what her body told her, what the recorded experience of the world taught--these were real; all the rest, to her, was phantasy or imagination. She kept her feet upon the solid ground of fact, and left all else to dreamers; or, as she would have expressed it, to the victims of superst.i.tion inherited or acquired.
Well, something happened to her at the crisis of that fever, which was sharp, and took her on her return from Yucatan, at a horrible port called Frontera, where there were palm trees and _zopilotes_--a kind of vile American vulture--which sat silently on the verandah outside her door in the dreadful little hotel built upon piles in the mud of the great river, and mosquitoes by the ten million, and sleepy-eyed, crushed-looking Indians, and horrible halfbreeds, and everything else which suggests an earthly h.e.l.l, except the glorious suns.h.i.+ne.
Of a sudden, when she was at her worst, all the materiality--if there be such a word--which circ.u.mstances and innate tendency had woven about her as a garment, seemed to melt away, and she became aware of something vast in which she floated like an insect in the atmosphere--some surrounding sea which she could neither measure nor travel.
She knew that she was not merely Isobel Blake, but a part of the universe in its largest sense, and that the universe expressed itself in miniature within her soul. She knew that ever since it had been, she was, and that while it existed she would endure. This imagination or inspiration, whichever it may have been, went no further than that, and afterwards she set it down to delirium, or to the exaltation that often accompanies fever. Still, it left a mark upon her, opening a new door in her heart, so to speak.
For the rest, the life in Mexico City was gay, especially in the position which she filled as the niece of the British Minister, who was often called upon to act as hostess, as her aunt was delicate and her cousin was younger than herself and not apt at the business. There were Diaz and the foreign Diplomatic Ministers; also the leading Mexicans to be entertained, for which purpose she learned Spanish. Then there were English travellers, distinguished, some of them, and German n.o.bles, generally in the Diplomatic Service of their country, whom by some peculiar feminine instinct of her own, she suspected of being spies and generally persons of evil intentions. Also there was the British colony, among whom were some very nice people that she made her friends, the strange, adventurous pioneers of our Empire who are to be bound in every part of the world, and in a sense its cream.
Lastly, there were the American tourists and business men, many of whom she thought amusing. One of these, a millionaire who had to do with a ”beef trust,” though what that might be she never quite understood, proposed to her. He was a nice young fellow enough, of a real old American family whose ancestors were supposed to have come over in the _Mayflower_, and possessed of a remarkable vein of original humour; also he was much in love. But Isobel would have none of it, and said so in such plain, unmistakable language that the millionaire straightway left Mexico City in his private railway car, disconsolately to pursue his beef speculations in other lands.