has just achieved one of his annual failures at Cambridge,” said his father. “Yes, I will wait a quarter of an hour, Rupert. I should like to talk to you about him. I am a good deal troubled.”
“Wild oats of some kind?” asked the other. “If so, I should, if I were you, look very steadily in another direction. As one grows older, my dear Sidney, one is apt to look on wild oats as something much more poisonous than they really are—nightshade—deadly nightshade, for instance. But they are only wild oats really.”
Sidney sat down.
“Ah, you don’t expect me to share that view,” he said. “Sin is sin whether you are twenty or sixty. But Martin, as far as I know, has not been——“
“Playing about,” said Lord Flintshire, with the amiable desire to find a periphrasis. But it did not please his brother.
“I can’t discuss things with you in that spirit,” he said. “However, that point is really alien. I have no reason to suspect Martin of such things. But what I deplore is his general slackness. It is to the mind like low physical health to the body: it predisposes to all diseases. I had to speak to him severely about his failure at Cambridge this morning—too severely perhaps—and this evening again he has distressed me very much.”
“What has he done?” asked Rupert.
“Well, you will think it very insignificant, no doubt, but to me it appears most significant of his general state. He was playing croquet with Helen and I heard him say to her, ‘Well, of all the devilish things to do.’ Now, when we were boys, Rupert, we didn’t say that sort of thing at all, and we couldn’t have said it to our sisters.”
Lord Flintshire felt some kindly amusement at this. Sidney was such a dear fellow.
“But it is some years since we were boys,” said he at length, “and rightly or wrongly the world has begun to take things more—how shall I say it—to ride life on the snaffle instead of the curb. What else has Martin done?”
“He has brought into the house ‘The Mill on the Floss.’”
Rupert’s admirable courtesy enabled him not to smile.
“Have you read the book?” he asked.
“No; but I will not have a book of that author in the house. I said so only the other day. Martin must have known it. For all I know, he has given it to his sister to read.”
“I hope so,” said Lord Flintshire, quietly. “Because it is a very beautiful book. Of course his disobedience to your wishes is a different point, and to my mind a more serious one. But am I to understand that you are consulting me as to what general line you should take with Martin, what policy you should pursue?”
“Yes, I am very much puzzled, and I cannot seem to get any guidance about it. It does no good, I am afraid, to pull the poor lad up first here and then there thirty times a day. And it appears to do no good either to talk to him on the general principles of earnestness and industry. But I do so want him to grasp them. All the faults I see in him spring from slackness. He will not think. He did not think what the word he used to his sister means. He never thinks how just a little carelessness about his work repeated and again repeated must lead to a habit of idleness. I am most deeply thankful that our father was strict with us, Rupert. He made industry a habit with one.”
Rupert laughed.
“A habit from which I have succeeded in freeing myself,” he said. “But Martin is not slack about everything. He is not slack about music.”
“Ah, that is a distraction which is responsible for a great deal of his idleness,” said his father. “But I have forbidden him to have a piano in his room next term.”
Lord Flintshire did not pursue this. There was a plot already on foot here, and his brother got up, and with his quick, neat touch put straight a couple of books lying on the table.
“There is this, too,” he said. “Not only does my continual correction of him seem to do no real good, but it certainly does harm to my relations with the boy. He will get to look on me as a continual menace to his pleasure, as a continual school-master. And I want to be kind to the lad, to make him happy, to make a friend of him. But when that which I consider my duty leads me to correct him, and again and again to correct him, I am so afraid that his estimate of the love I bear him will be lowered, eclipsed. And nothing in the world, Rupert, could be sadder to me than that my children should not think of me as their friend.”
His strong, tender voice quivered for a moment as he spoke these words, and he paused a moment to regain the complete control of himself.
“But nothing, not even that,” he said, “must or shall stand in my way or count for anything in regard to the responsibility which God has laid upon me to make my children worthy children of Him. I should be the weakest and most culpable of fathers if for the sake of any human affection, however sweet, I sacrificed one jot or tittle of that.”
Rupert was silent a moment. Though he had always felt great respect and esteem and strong affection for his brother, he had never found him, emotionally speaking, particularly interesting. He had the greatest admiration for his industrious, strenuous life, his undoubted mental gifts, his swift and keen intelligence, the absolute undeviating probity of his character; but his admiration had been somewhat of the sort a mechanician may feel for his bright engine with its rhythmical accuracy, its precise strokes, its clean efficiency and strength. But suddenly the engine had developed a human and a pathetic side: its throbs were not steam-driven only, but they were the throbs of a human heart. True, he had known the wild adoration of Sidney for his girl-wife, but that with its speedy disillusionment had seemed to him the one concession Sidney had made to the flesh. It was human, but it was not high humanity, otherwise he would have made a better recovery, so to speak. His passion had been awakened then, but not the man, and his religion and his passion together had mixed no better than oil and water. The experience had not humanized him.
Lord Flintshire’s strong appreciation of the inimitable comedy of life did not help him here, as he sat silent for a moment before replying. Elements of comedy were not wanting, his brother’s heart-felt distress at the fact of Martin calling his sister devilish, for instance, was ludicrous enough, but these things combined to form nothing to laugh at; the result was tragedy, tragedy in no grand and great style, but a pitiful little tragedy of misunderstanding and estrangement. And Rupert, knowing his brother and knowing Martin, saw no possibility of comedy entering with any unexpected “happy ending.” For Sidney was, so to speak, an irreconcileable: he admitted no sort or shadow of compromise; he would hold no parleying with the enemy, even if the enemy was entrenched in one of his own household. He and Martin, in fact, disagreed vitally and fundamentally; the lad was a good lad accidentally, essentially he was an artist to his finger-tips. Those were the influences which governed him. But to his father all the artists and all the artistic achievements of man were no more than a fringe on the visible garment of God.
“No one can really help you in this,” said Rupert at length, “except yourself and Martin. But I can suggest to you a certain point of view. Do, I beg you, allow for individualism in other people. You yourself, dear Sidney, have a great deal of it. But there is no reason to suppose that Martin has any less. And remember also that the younger generation is always ahead of the elder, and though we can, by using extreme care, influence them a little, yet the reins of government are in their hands, not ours. That is partly why I retired from politics. And as a practical suggestion I offer you this: I beg you to say nothing more about ‘The Mill on the Floss’ to Martin. It is quite impossible that he should agree
