CHAPTER XLVI

A CHAPTER OF UNDERCURRENTS AND SOME SURFACE FLASHES

Thus a round and a good old English practical repartee, worthy a place in England’s book of her historical popular jests; conceived ingeniously, no bit murderously, even humanely, if Englishmen are to be allowed indulgence of a jolly hit back for an injury—­more a feint than a real stroke—­gave the miserly veteran his final quake and cut Chillon’s knot.

Lord Levellier dead of the joke detracted from the funny idea there had been in the anticipation of his hearing the libertine explosion of his grand new powder, and coming out cloaked to see what walls remained upright.  Its cleverness, however, was magnified by the shades into which it had despatched him.  The man who started the ‘rouse for old Griphard’ was named:  nor did he shuffle his honours off.  Chillon accused him, and he regretfully grinned; he would have owned to it eloquently, excited by the extreme ingenuity, but humour at the criminal bar is an abject thing, that has to borrow from metaphysics for the expository words.  He lacked them entirely, and as he could not, fronting his master, supply the defect with oaths, he drew up and let out on the dead old lord, who wanted a few pounds of blasting powder, like anything else in everybody’s way.  Chillon expected the lowest of his countrymen to show some degree of chivalry upon occasions like the present.  He was too young to perceive how it is, that a block of our speech in the needed direction drives it storming in another, not the one closely expressing us.  Carinthia liked the man; she was grieved to hear of his having got the sack summarily, when he might have had a further month of service or a month’s pay.  Had not the workmen’s forbearance been much tried?  And they had not stolen, they had bought the powder, only intending to startle.

She touched her brother’s native sense of fairness and vexed him with his cowardly devil of impatience, which kicked at a simply stupid common man, and behaved to a lordly offender, smelling rascal, civilly.  Just as her father would have—­treated the matter, she said:  ’Are we sorry for what has happened, Chillon?’ The man had gone, the injustice was done; the master was left to reflect on the part played by his inheritance of the half share of ninety thousand pounds in his proper respect for Lord Levellier’s memory.  Harsh to an inferior is a horrible charge.  But the position of debtor to a titled cur brings a worse for endurance.  Knowing a part of Lord Fleetwood’s message to Lord Levellier suppressed, the bride’s brother, her chief guardian, had treated the omission as of no importance, and had all the while understood that he ought to give her his full guess at the reading of it:  or so his racked mind understood it now.  His old father had said:  A dumb tongue can be a heavy liar; and, Lies are usurers’ coin we pay for ten thousand per cent.  His harshness in the past hour to a workman who had suffered with him and had not intended serious mischief was Chillon’s unsounded motive for the resolution to be out of debt to the man he loathed.  There is a Muse that smiles aloft surveying our acts from the well-springs.