Arminell, Vol. 1. Baring-Gould Sabine

in that Sunday-school is a sort of mental garrotting,” said Arminell. “I wonder whether a teacher always feels as if his brains were being measured for a hat when he is giving instruction.”

      “Only when there is non-receptivity in the minds of those he teaches, or tries to teach. May I ask if you are not going to church, Miss Inglett?”

      “I have done the civil by attending the Sunday-school, and the articles disapprove of works of supererogation. I am going to worship under the fresh green leaves, and to listen to the choir of the birds – blackbird, thrush, and ouzel. I am too ruffled in temper to sit still in church and listen to the same common-places in the same see-saw voice from the pulpit. Do you know what it is to be restless, Mr. Saltren, and not know what makes you ill at ease? To desire greatly something, and not know what you long after?”

      The young man was walking beside her, a little in the rear, respectfully, not full abreast. He was a pale man with an oval face, dark eyes and long dark lashes, and a slight downy moustache.

      “I can in no way conceive that anything can be lacking to Miss Inglett,” he said. “She has everything to make life happy, an ideally perfect lot, absolutely deficient in every element that can jar with and disturb tranquillity and happiness.”

      “You judge only by exterior circumstances. You might say the same of the bird in the egg – it fits it as a glove, it is walled round by a shell against danger, it is warmed by the breast of the parent, why should it be impatient of its coiled up, comatose condition? Simply because that condition is coiled up and comatose. Why should the young sponge ever detach itself from the rock on which it first developed by the side of the great absorbent old sponge? It gets enough to eat, it is securely attached by its foot to the rock; it is in the oceanic level that suits its existence. Why should it let go all at once and float away, rise to the surface and cling elsewhere? Because of the monotony of its life of absorption and contraction, and of its sedentary habits. But, there, – enough about myself; I did not intend to speak of myself. You have brambles clinging to you. Show me them, that I may put my foot on them and free you.”

      “You know, Miss Inglett, who I am – the son of the captain of the manganese mine, and that his wife is an old lady’s maid from the park. You know that I was a clever boy, and that his lordship most generously interested himself in me, and when it was thought I was consumptive, sent me for a couple of winters to Mentone. You know that he provided for my schooling, and sent me to the University, and then most kindly took me into Orleigh as tutor to your half-brother Giles, till I can resolve to enter the Church, when, no doubt, he will some day give me a living. All that you know. Do not suppose I am insensible to his lordship’s kindness, when I say that all this goodness shown me has sown my soul full of brambles, and made me the most miserable of men.”

      “But how so?” Miss Inglett looked at him with unfeigned surprise. “As you said to me, so say I to you, and excuse the freedom. Mr. Saltren has everything to make life happy, education, comfortable quarters, kind friends, an assured future, an ideally perfect lot, absolutely deficient in disturbing elements.”

      “Now you judge by the outside. I admit to the full that Lord Lamerton has done everything he could think of to do me good, but can one man calculate what will suit another? Will a bog plant thrive in loam, or a heath in clay?”

      “You do not think that what has been done for you is well done?”

      “I am not inclined for the Church, I have a positive distaste for the ministry, and yet Lord Lamerton is bent on my being a parson. If I do not become one, what am I to be? I cannot go back to the life whence I have been taken; I cannot endure to be with those who hold their knives by the middle when eating, and drink their tea out of their saucers, and take their meals in their shirt sleeves. Remember I have been translated from the society to which by birth I belong, to another as different from it as is that of Brahmins from Esquimaux; I cannot accommodate myself again to what was once my native element. Baron Munchausen, in one of his voyages, landed on an island made of cream cheese, and only discovered it by the fainting of a sailor who had a natural antipathy to cream cheese. I have come ashore on an island the substance of which is altogether different from the soil where I was born. I cannot say I have an ineradicable distaste for it, but that at first I found a difficulty in walking on it. The specific gravity of cream cheese is other than that of clay. Now that I have acquired the light and trippant tread that suits, if I return to my native land, my paces will be criticised, and regarded as affected, and myself as supercilious, for not at once plodding from my shoulders like a ploughboy in marl. How was it with poor Persephone who spent half her time in the realm of darkness and half in that of light? She carried to the world of light her groping tentative walk, and was laughed at, and when in Hades, she trod boldly as if in day and got bruises and bloody noses. Even now I am in a state of oscillation between the two spheres, and am at home in neither, miserable in both. When I am in the cream-cheese island I never feel that I can walk with the buoyancy of one born on cream-cheese. I can never quite overcome the sense of inhaling an atmosphere of cheese, never quite find the buttermilk squeezed out of it taste like aniseed water.”

      Arminell could not refrain from a laugh. “Really, Mr. Saltren, you are not complimentary to our island.”

      “Call it the Isle of Rahat la Koum, Turkish Delight, or Guava Jelly – anything luscious. One who has eaten salt pork and supped vinegar cannot at once tutor his palate to everything saccharine to a syrup.”

      “But what really troubles you in the Isle of Guava?”

      “I am not a native but a stranger. Your tongue is by me acquired. There are even tones and inflexions of voice in you I cannot attain because my vocal organs got set in another world. A man like myself taken up and carried into a different sphere by another hand is inevitably so self-conscious that his self-consciousness is a perpetual torment to him. According to the apocryphal tale, an angel caught Habakkuk by the hair and carried him with a mess of pottage in his hands through the air, and deposited him in Daniel’s den of lions. Your father has been my angel, who has taken me up and transported me, and now I am in a den of lordly beasts who stalk round me and wonder how I came among them, and turn up their noses at the bowl I carry in my shaking hands.”

      “And you want to escape from us lions?”

      “Pardon me – I am equally ill at ease elsewhere, I have associated with lions till I can only growl.”

      “And lash yourself raw,” laughed Arminell; “you know a lion has a nail at the end of his tail, wherewith he goads himself.”

      “I can torture myself – that is true,” said Saltren, in a disquieted tone. “My lord will give me a living and provide for me if I will enter the Church, but that is precisely an atmosphere I do not relish – and what am I to do? I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed.”

      “Mr. Saltren, you are not at ease in the lions’ den, but suppose you were to crawl out and get into the fields?”

      “I should lose my way, having been carried by the angel out of my own country. You see the wretchedness of my position, I am uncomfortable wherever I am. In my present situation I imagine slights. Anecdotes told at table make me wince, jokes fret me. Conversation on certain subjects halts because I am present. Yet I cannot revert to my native condition; that would be deterioration, now I have acquired polish, and have progressed.”

      “I should not have supposed, Mr. Saltren, that you were so full of trouble.”

      “No – looking on a rose-pip, all smoothness, you do not reckon on its being full of choke within. And now – Miss Inglett, you see at once an instance of my lack of tact and knowledge. I am in doubt whether I have done well to pour out my pottle of troubles in your ear, or whether I have behaved like a booby.”

      “I invited you to it.”

      “Precisely, but in the language of the Isle of Guava, words do not mean what they are supposed to mean in the Land of Bacon. I may have transgressed those invisible bounds which you recognise by an instinct of which I am deficient. There are societies which have laws and signs of fellowship known only to the initiated. You belong to one, the great Freemasonry of Aristocratic Culture. You all know one another in it, how – is inconceivable to me,