"It was very foolish; very presumptuous and ridiculous, to think so," Tom pursued; "but I feared you might suppose it possible that I--I--should admire you too much for my own peace; and so denied yourself the slight a.s.sistance you would otherwise have accepted from me. If such an idea has ever presented itself to you," faltered Tom, "pray dismiss it. I am easily made happy; and I shall live contented here long after you and Martin have forgotten me. I am a poor, shy, awkward creature; not at all a man of the world; and you should think no more of me, bless you, than if I were an old friar!"
If friars bear such hearts as thine, Tom, let friars multiply; though they have no such rule in all their stern arithmetic.
"Dear Mr Pinch!" said Mary, giving him her hand; "I cannot tell you how your kindness moves me. I have never wronged you by the lightest doubt, and have never for an instant ceased to feel that you were all--much more than all--that Martin found you. Without the silent care and friendship I have experienced from you, my life here would have been unhappy. But you have been a good angel to me; filling me with grat.i.tude of heart, hope, and courage."
"I am as little like an angel, I am afraid," replied Tom, shaking his head, "as any stone cherubim among the grave-stones; and I don"t think there are many real angels of THAT pattern. But I should like to know (if you will tell me) why you have been so very silent about Martin."
"Because I have been afraid," said Mary, "of injuring you."
"Of injuring me!" cried Tom.
"Of doing you an injury with your employer."
The gentleman in question dived.
"With Pecksniff!" rejoined Tom, with cheerful confidence. "Oh dear, he"d never think of us! He"s the best of men. The more at ease you were, the happier he would be. Oh dear, you needn"t be afraid of Pecksniff. He is not a spy."
Many a man in Mr Pecksniff"s place, if he could have dived through the floor of the pew of state and come out at Calcutta or any inhabited region on the other side of the earth, would have done it instantly. Mr Pecksniff sat down upon a ha.s.sock, and listening more attentively than ever, smiled.
Mary seemed to have expressed some dissent in the meanwhile, for Tom went on to say, with honest energy:
"Well, I don"t know how it is, but it always happens, whenever I express myself in this way to anybody almost, that I find they won"t do justice to Pecksniff. It is one of the most extraordinary circ.u.mstances that ever came within my knowledge, but it is so. There"s John Westlock, who used to be a pupil here, one of the best-hearted young men in the world, in all other matters--I really believe John would have Pecksniff flogged at the cart"s tail if he could. And John is not a solitary case, for every pupil we have had in my time has gone away with the same inveterate hatred of him. There was Mark Tapley, too, quite in another station of life," said Tom; "the mockery he used to make of Pecksniff when he was at the Dragon was shocking. Martin too: Martin was worse than any of "em. But I forgot. He prepared you to dislike Pecksniff, of course. So you came with a prejudice, you know, Miss Graham, and are not a fair witness."
Tom triumphed very much in this discovery, and rubbed his hands with great satisfaction.
"Mr Pinch," said Mary, "you mistake him."
"No, no!" cried Tom. "YOU mistake him. But," he added, with a rapid change in his tone, "what is the matter? Miss Graham, what is the matter?"
Mr Pecksniff brought up to the top of the pew, by slow degrees, his hair, his forehead, his eyebrow, his eye. She was sitting on a bench beside the door with her hands before her face; and Tom was bending over her.
"What is the matter?" cried Tom. "Have I said anything to hurt you? Has any one said anything to hurt you? Don"t cry. Pray tell me what it is.
I cannot bear to see you so distressed. Mercy on us, I never was so surprised and grieved in all my life!"
Mr Pecksniff kept his eye in the same place. He could have moved it now for nothing short of a gimlet or a red-hot wire.
"I wouldn"t have told you, Mr Pinch," said Mary, "if I could have helped it; but your delusion is so absorbing, and it is so necessary that we should be upon our guard; that you should not be compromised; and to that end that you should know by whom I am beset; that no alternative is left me. I came here purposely to tell you, but I think I should have wanted courage if you had not chanced to lead me so directly to the object of my coming."
Tom gazed at her steadfastly, and seemed to say, "What else?" But he said not a word.
"That person whom you think the best of men," said Mary, looking up, and speaking with a quivering lip and flashing eye.
"Lord bless me!" muttered Tom, staggering back. "Wait a moment. That person whom I think the best of men! You mean Pecksniff, of course.
Yes, I see you mean Pecksniff. Good gracious me, don"t speak without authority. What has he done? If he is not the best of men, what is he?"
"The worst. The falsest, craftiest, meanest, cruellest, most sordid, most shameless," said the trembling girl--trembling with her indignation.
Tom sat down on a seat, and clasped his hands.
"What is he," said Mary, "who receiving me in his house as his guest; his unwilling guest; knowing my history, and how defenceless and alone I am, presumes before his daughters to affront me so, that if I had a brother but a child, who saw it, he would instinctively have helped me?"
"He is a scoundrel!" exclaimed Tom. "Whoever he may be, he is a scoundrel."
Mr Pecksniff dived again.
"What is he," said Mary, "who, when my only friend--a dear and kind one, too--was in full health of mind, humbled himself before him, but was spurned away (for he knew him then) like a dog. Who, in his forgiving spirit, now that that friend is sunk into a failing state, can crawl about him again, and use the influence he basely gains for every base and wicked purpose, and not for one--not one--that"s true or good?"
"I say he is a scoundrel!" answered Tom.
"But what is he--oh, Mr Pinch, what IS he--who, thinking he could compa.s.s these designs the better if I were his wife, a.s.sails me with the coward"s argument that if I marry him, Martin, on whom I have brought so much misfortune, shall be restored to something of his former hopes; and if I do not, shall be plunged in deeper ruin? What is he who makes my very constancy to one I love with all my heart a torture to myself and wrong to him; who makes me, do what I will, the instrument to hurt a head I would heap blessings on! What is he who, winding all these cruel snares about me, explains their purpose to me, with a smooth tongue and a smiling face, in the broad light of day; dragging me on, the while, in his embrace, and holding to his lips a hand," pursued the agitated girl, extending it, "which I would have struck off, if with it I could lose the shame and degradation of his touch?"
"I say," cried Tom, in great excitement, "he is a scoundrel and a villain! I don"t care who he is, I say he is a double-dyed and most intolerable villain!"
Covering her face with her hands again, as if the pa.s.sion which had sustained her through these disclosures lost itself in an overwhelming sense of shame and grief, she abandoned herself to tears.
Any sight of distress was sure to move the tenderness of Tom, but this especially. Tears and sobs from her were arrows in his heart. He tried to comfort her; sat down beside her; expended all his store of homely eloquence; and spoke in words of praise and hope of Martin. Aye, though he loved her from his soul with such a self-denying love as woman seldom wins; he spoke from first to last of Martin. Not the wealth of the rich Indies would have tempted Tom to shirk one mention of her lover"s name.
When she was more composed, she impressed upon Tom that this man she had described, was Pecksniff in his real colours; and word by word and phrase by phrase, as well as she remembered it, related what had pa.s.sed between them in the wood: which was no doubt a source of high gratification to that gentleman himself, who in his desire to see and his dread of being seen, was constantly diving down into the state pew, and coming up again like the intelligent householder in Punch"s Show, who avoids being knocked on the head with a cudgel. When she had concluded her account, and had besought Tom to be very distant and unconscious in his manner towards her after this explanation, and had thanked him very much, they parted on the alarm of footsteps in the burial-ground; and Tom was left alone in the church again.
And now the full agitation and misery of the disclosure came rushing upon Tom indeed. The star of his whole life from boyhood had become, in a moment, putrid vapour. It was not that Pecksniff, Tom"s Pecksniff, had ceased to exist, but that he never had existed. In his death Tom would have had the comfort of remembering what he used to be, but in this discovery, he had the anguish of recollecting what he never was. For, as Tom"s blindness in this matter had been total and not partial, so was his restored sight. HIS Pecksniff could never have worked the wickedness of which he had just now heard, but any other Pecksniff could; and the Pecksniff who could do that could do anything, and no doubt had been doing anything and everything except the right thing, all through his career. From the lofty height on which poor Tom had placed his idol it was tumbled down headlong, and
Not all the king"s horses, nor all the king"s men, Could have set Mr Pecksniff up again.
Legions of t.i.tans couldn"t have got him out of the mud; and serve him right! But it was not he who suffered; it was Tom. His compa.s.s was broken, his chart destroyed, his chronometer had stopped, his masts were gone by the board; his anchor was adrift, ten thousand leagues away.
Mr Pecksniff watched him with a lively interest, for he divined the purpose of Tom"s ruminations, and was curious to see how he conducted himself. For some time, Tom wandered up and down the aisle like a man demented, stopping occasionally to lean against a pew and think it over; then he stood staring at a blank old monument bordered tastefully with skulls and cross-bones, as if it were the finest work of Art he had ever seen, although at other times he held it in unspeakable contempt; then he sat down; then walked to and fro again; then went wandering up into the organ-loft, and touched the keys. But their minstrelsy was changed, their music gone; and sounding one long melancholy chord, Tom drooped his head upon his hands and gave it up as hopeless.
"I wouldn"t have cared," said Tom Pinch, rising from his stool and looking down into the church as if he had been the Clergyman, "I wouldn"t have cared for anything he might have done to Me, for I have tried his patience often, and have lived upon his sufferance and have never been the help to him that others could have been. I wouldn"t have minded, Pecksniff," Tom continued, little thinking who heard him, "if you had done Me any wrong; I could have found plenty of excuses for that; and though you might have hurt me, could have still gone on respecting you. But why did you ever fall so low as this in my esteem!
Oh Pecksniff, Pecksniff, there is nothing I would not have given, to have had you deserve my old opinion of you; nothing!"
Mr Pecksniff sat upon the ha.s.sock pulling up his shirt-collar, while Tom, touched to the quick, delivered this apostrophe. After a pause he heard Tom coming down the stairs, jingling the church keys; and bringing his eye to the top of the pew again, saw him go slowly out and lock the door.
Mr Pecksniff durst not issue from his place of concealment; for through the windows of the church he saw Tom pa.s.sing on among the graves, and sometimes stopping at a stone, and leaning there as if he were a mourner who had lost a friend. Even when he had left the churchyard, Mr Pecksniff still remained shut up; not being at all secure but that in his restless state of mind Tom might come wandering back. At length he issued forth, and walked with a pleasant countenance into the vestry; where he knew there was a window near the ground, by which he could release himself by merely stepping out.
He was in a curious frame of mind, Mr Pecksniff; being in no hurry to go, but rather inclining to a dilatory trifling with the time, which prompted him to open the vestry cupboard, and look at himself in the parson"s little gla.s.s that hung within the door. Seeing that his hair was rumpled, he took the liberty of borrowing the canonical brush and arranging it. He also took the liberty of opening another cupboard; but he shut it up again quickly, being rather startled by the sight of a black and a white surplice dangling against the wall; which had very much the appearance of two curates who had committed suicide by hanging themselves. Remembering that he had seen in the first cupboard a port-wine bottle and some biscuits, he peeped into it again, and helped himself with much deliberation; cogitating all the time though, in a very deep and weighty manner, as if his thoughts were otherwise employed.
He soon made up his mind, if it had ever been in doubt; and putting back the bottle and biscuits, opened the cas.e.m.e.nt. He got out into the churchyard without any difficulty; shut the window after him; and walked straight home.
"Is Mr Pinch indoors?" asked Mr Pecksniff of his serving-maid.
"Just come in, sir."
"Just come in, eh?" repeated Mr Pecksniff, cheerfully. "And gone upstairs, I suppose?"
"Yes sir. Gone upstairs. Shall I call him, sir?"
"No," said Mr Pecksniff, "no. You needn"t call him, Jane. Thank you, Jane. How are your relations, Jane?"
"Pretty well, I thank you, sir."