Part 10

Had Scattergood been thirty years older, this strange anxiety on the part of his conscience to establish its claims as a voice from heaven would have put him on his guard; he would have lifted those shining robes and seen the hoofs beneath them. But these precautions had not occurred to him in the days when he and Ethelberta were walking hand in hand. So he listened to that inner voice with awe: he listened until its lying words became an obsession; until they darkened his mind; until they drowned the voices of love and began to find utterance in his manners, and even in his speech, with Ethelberta. She, on her part, did not understand--what woman ever could or would?--and a cloud came between them. "The cloud is from heaven," said the inner voice. "I have sent it; let it grow; you are not good enough for Ethelberta, and it will be a sin to link your life with hers."

So the cloud grew, till one day a woman's wrath shot out of it; there was an explosion, a quarrel, a breach; and the two parted, never to meet again. "You have done your duty," said the false conscience. "You have dealt me a mortal hurt," said the soul. But Scattergood was still convinced that he was not good enough for Ethelberta.

Within a year or two the usual results had followed. Scattergood married a woman who was not good enough for _him_; and that other man, who had been watching his opportunity, like a wolf around the sheepfold, married Ethelberta. And he was not good enough for _her_.

And now many years had passed, and Ethelberta was long since dead. But that made no difference to the aching wound; for Professor Scattergood, who was intelligent about all things, and far too intelligent about Ethelberta, used to reflect that probably she would still be alive had she married him. "They went to Naples for their honeymoon," he would say aloud--for he was in the habit of talking to himself--"they went to Naples for their honeymoon; there she caught typhoid fever, and died six weeks after her marriage. But things would have happened differently had she married _me_. _We_ were not going to Naples for the honeymoon. We were going to Switzerland: we settled it that night after the dance at Lady Brown's--the night I first told her I was not worthy of her. Fool that I was!" Such were the meditations of Professor John Scattergood, D.D., as he trotted under the hedgerow elms and heard the patter of his horse's hoofs falling softly on the withered leaves.

Thus we can understand how it came to pass that Dr Scattergood's imagination was abnormally sensitive to anything which could remind him of Ethelberta. And I have no doubt that his peculiar horse-sense was also involved in the particular reminder with which we have now to deal.

Certain it is that he discerned the resemblance to Ethelberta the moment he cast eyes upon his mare. He was standing in the dealer's yard, and the dealer was leading the animal out of the stable. Suddenly catching sight of the strange black-coated figure, she stopped abruptly, lowered her head, curved her neck, and looked Scattergood straight between the eyes. For a moment he was paralysed with astonishment and thought he was dreaming. The movement, the attitude, the look were all Ethelberta's! Exactly thus had she stopped abruptly, lowered her head, curved her neck, and looked him in the face when thirty-five years ago he had been introduced to her at an Embassy Ball in Vienna. A vision swept over his inner eye: he saw bright uniforms, heard music, felt the presence of a crowd; and so completely was the actuality of things blotted out that he made a low reverence to the animal as though he were being introduced to some highborn dame. The dealer noticed the movement and wondered what "new hanky-panky old Scattergood was trying on the mare."

"Now, that's a mare I raised myself," said the dealer. "I've watched her every day since she was foaled, and I'll undertake to say as there isn't another like her in----"

"In the wide world: I know there isn't," said Scattergood, cutting him short. Then, suddenly, "What's her name?"

"Meg," replied the dealer, who was expecting a very different question.

"Meg--Meg," said the Doctor. "Why, it ought to be----Well, never mind, Meg will do. So you bred her yourself? Will you swear you didn't _steal_ her?"

This was too much even for a horse-dealer. "We're not a firm of horse-thieves," he said, and he was preparing to lead her back into the stable.

"I'm only joking," said Scattergood in a tremulous voice which belied him. "She's the living likeness of one I remember years ago--one that _was_ stolen. Come, bring her back. I'm ready to buy that mare at her full value."

"And what may that be?" replied the dealer, glad that the enemy had made the first move.

"A hundred and twenty."

The dealer was astonished; for his customer had offered the exact sum at which he hoped to sell the mare. For a moment he thought of standing out for a hundred and fifty, but he knew it was useless to bargain with Scattergood, so he said:

"It's giving her away, sir, at a hundred and twenty. But for the sake of quick business, and you being a gentleman as knows a horse when you sees one, I'll take you at your own figure."

"Done," said Scattergood. "I'll send you a cheque round in ten minutes." And without another word he walked out of the yard. He had found the perfect horse.

The dealer stood dumbfoundered, halter in hand--he was unconscious that Meg had already caught his shirt-sleeve between her teeth. Could that retreating figure be the wary Scattergood, Scattergood of the thousand awkward questions, Scattergood the terror of every horse-dealer in the countryside? Never before had he found so prompt, so reckless a customer. Were his eyes deceiving him? Was it a dream? A violent jerk on his right arm, and the simultaneous sound of tearing linen, recalled him to himself. "You she-devil!" he said, "I'll take the skin off you for this. But I hope the old gentleman's well insured."

Meanwhile the Professor was walking home in a state of profound mental perturbation. Visions of the Embassy Ball in Vienna, Buddhist theories of reincarnation, problems of animal psychology, doubts as to the validity of the Inflexible Method, vague and nameless feelings that accompanied the disappearance of his "horse-sense," a yet vaguer joy as of one who has found something precious which he had lost, and beneath all the ever-present subconscious fear that he would find his wife narcotised on the drawing-room sofa, were buzzing and dancing through his mind.

"It's the _likeness_ that puzzles me," he began to reflect. "A universal resemblance, borne by particulars not one of which is really like the original. Quite unmistakable, and yet quite unthinkable. An indubitable fact, and yet a fact which no one who has not seen could ever be induced to believe."

Had anyone half an hour earlier propounded the statement that a woman could bear a closer resemblance to a horse than to her own portrait, he would have treated the proposition as one which no amount of evidence could make good. So far from the evidence proving the proposition true, he would have said, it is the proposition which proves the evidence false. Otherwise, what is the use of the Inflexible Method? But now the thing was flashed on him with the brightness of authentic revelation, and there was no gainsaying its truth. Not once during the five-and-thirty years of his mourning for Ethelberta had anything happened to bring her so vividly to mind; not even among the dreams that haunt the borderland of sleep and waking; no, nor even when he listened to the great singer whose voice had pierced his heart with the sad and angry music of Heine's bitterest song. Professor Scattergood was a firm believer in the efficacy of _a priori_ thought; but though by means of it he had excogitated a system in which the plan of an entire Universe was sufficiently laid down, there was not one of his principles either primary or secondary which could have built a niche for the experience he had just undergone in the horse-dealer's yard.

As he neared his doorstep the confusion of his mind suddenly ranged itself into form and gave birth to an articulate thought. "I'm sure," he said to himself, drawing his latch-key out of his pocket and inserting it in the keyhole--"I'm sure that Ethelberta is not far off. Yes, as sure as I am of anything in this world."

II

The "horse-sense," which gave Professor Scattergood his reputation in the stables, was always accompanied by a well-marked physical sensation--to wit, a continuous tingling at the back of the head, seemingly located at an exact spot in the cortex of the brain. So long as the back of his head was tingling, every horse was completely at Scattergood's mercy; he could do with it whatever he willed. But I have it on his own authority that at the moment he cast eyes on his new mare the sensation suddenly ceased and his horse-sense deserted him.

Accordingly, the first time he took her out he mounted with trepidation, and fear possessed his soul that she would run away with him. Though nothing very serious followed, the fear was not entirely groundless. His daily ride, which usually occupied exactly two hours and five minutes, was accomplished on this occasion in one hour and twenty, and for a week afterwards the Professor's man rubbed liniment into his back three times a day. On the second occasion he had the ill luck to encounter the local Hunt in full career, a thing he would have minded not the least under ordinary circumstances, but extremely disconcerting at a moment when his horse-sense happened to be in abeyance. Before he had time to take in the situation, Meg joined the rushing tide, and for the next forty minutes the field was led by the first Systematic Theologian in Europe, who had given himself up for lost and was preparing for death. And killed he probably would have been but for two things: the first was the fine qualities of his mount, and the second was a literary reminiscence which enabled him to retain his presence of mind. Even in these desperate circumstances, the Professor's habit of talking to himself remained in force. A friend of mine who was riding close behind him told me that he distinctly heard Scattergood repeating the lines of the _Odyssey_ which tell how Ulysses, on the point of suffocation in the depths of the sea, kept his wits about him and made a spring for his raft the instant he rose to the surface. Again and again, as the Professor raced across the open, did he repeat those lines to himself; and whenever a dangerous fence or ditch came in sight he would break off in the middle of the Greek and cry aloud in English, "Now, John Scattergood, prepare for death and sit well back"--resuming the Greek the moment he was safely landed on the other side, and thus proving once more that the blood of the Ironsides still ran in his veins.

Said a farmer to me one day:

"Who's that gentleman as has just gone up the lane on the chestnut mare?"

"That," said I, "is Professor Scattergood--one of our greatest men."

"H'm," said the farmer; "I reckon he's a clergyman--to judge by his clothes."

"He is."

"Well, he's a queer 'un for a clergyman, danged if he isn't. He's allus talking aloud to himself. And what do you think I hear him say when he come through last Thursday? 'John Scattergood,' says he, 'you were a damned fool. Yes, there's no other word for it, John; you were a _damned_ fool!'"

"That," I said, "is language which no clergyman ought to use, not even when he is talking to himself. But perhaps the words were not his own. They may have been used about him by some other person--possibly by his wife, who, people say, is a bit of a Tartar. In that case he would be just repeating them to himself, by way of refreshing his memory."

The farmer laughed at this explanation. "I see you're a gentleman with a kind 'eart," said he. "But a man with a swearin' wife don't ride about the country lanes refreshin' his memory in that way. He knows his missus will do all the refreshin' he wants when he gets 'ome. No, you'll never persuade _me_ as them words weren't the gentleman's own. From the way he said 'em you could see as they tasted good. Why, he said 'em just like this----"

And the farmer repeated the objectionable language, with a voice and manner that entirely disposed of my charitable theory. He then added: "Clergyman or no clergyman, I'll say one thing for him--he rides a good 'oss. I'll bet you five to one as that chestnut mare cost him a hundred and twenty guineas, if she cost him a penny."

From the tone in which the farmer said this I gathered that a gentleman whose 'oss cost him a hundred and twenty guineas was entitled to use any language he liked; and that my explanation, therefore, even if true, was superfluous.

What did the Professor mean by apostrophising himself in the strong language overheard by the farmer? The exegesis of the passage, it must be confessed, is obscure, and, not unnaturally, there is a division of opinion among the higher critics. Some, of whom I am one, argue that the words refer to a long-past error of judgment in the Professor's life; more precisely, to the loss of Ethelberta. Others maintain that this theory is far-fetched and fanciful. The Professor, they say, was plainly cursing himself for the purchase of Meg. For, is there not reason to believe that at the very moment when the obnoxious words were uttered he was again in trouble with the mare, and therefore in a state of mind likely to issue in the employment of this very expression?

Now, although I have always held the first of these two theories, I must hasten to concede the last point in the argument of the other side. It is a fact that at the very moment when the Professor cursed himself for a fool he was again in trouble with Meg. On previous occasions her faults had been those of excess; but to-day she was erring by defect: instead of going too fast she was going too slow, and occasionally refusing to go at all. She would neither canter nor trot; it was with difficulty that she could be induced to walk, and then only at a snail's-pace; apparently she wanted to fly. In consequence of which the Professor's daily ride promised to occupy at least three hours, thereby causing him to be twenty-five minutes late for his afternoon lecture.

Meg's behaviour that day had been irritating to the last degree. She began by insisting on the wrong side of the road, and before Professor Scattergood could emerge from the traffic of the town he had been threatened with legal proceedings by two policemen and cursed by several drivers of wheeled vehicles. Arrived in the open country, Meg spent her time in examining the fields on either side of the road, in the hope apparently of again discovering the Hunt; she would dart down every lane and through every open gate, and now and then would stop dead and gaze at the scenery in the most provoking manner. Coming to a blacksmith's shop with which she was acquainted, a desire for new shoes possessed her feminine soul, and, suddenly whisking round through the door of the shoeing shed, she knocked off the Professor's hat and almost decapitated him against the lintel. The Professor had not recovered from the shock of this incident when a black Berkshire pig that was being driven to market came in sight round a turn of the road. Meg, as became a highbred horse, positively refused to pass the unclean thing, or even to come within twenty yards of it. She snorted and pranced, reared and curveted, and was about to make a bolt for home when the pig-driver, who had considerately driven his charge into a field where it was out of sight, seized Meg's bridle and led her beyond the dangerous pass.

"Meg, Meg," said the professor, as soon as they were alone and order had been restored--"Meg, Meg, this will never do. You and I will have to part company. I don't mind your _looking_ like Ethelberta, but I can't allow you to _act_ as she did. To be sure, Ethelberta broke my heart thirty-five years ago. But that is no reason why I should suffer _you_ to break my neck to-day. We'll go home, Meg, and I'll take an early opportunity of breaking off the engagement, just as I broke it off with Ethelberta--though, between you and me, Meg, I was a damned fool for doing it."

Professor Scattergood spoke these words in a low, soft, musical voice; the voice he always used when talking to horses or to himself about Ethelberta. Even the obnoxious adjective was pronounced by the Professor with that tenderness of intonation which only a horse or a woman can fully understand. And here I must explain that this particular tone came to him naturally in these two connections only. In all others his voice was high-pitched, hard, and a trifle forced. Years of lecturing on Systematic Theology had considerably damaged his vocal apparatus. He had developed a throat-clutch; he had a distressing habit of ending all his sentences on the rising inflection; and whenever he was the least excited in argument he had a tendency to scream. It was in this voice that he addressed his class. But whenever he happened to be talking to horses, or to himself about Ethelberta--and you might catch him doing so almost any time when he was alone,--you would hear something akin to music, and would reflect what a pity it was that Professor Scattergood had never learned to sing.

It was, I say, in this low, soft, musical voice that he addressed his mare, perhaps with some exceptional sadness, on the day when, sorely tried by her bad behaviour, he had come to the conclusion that the engagement must be broken off. And now I must once more risk my reputation for veracity; and if the pinch comes and I have to defend myself from the charge of lying, I shall appeal for confirmation to my old friend the ostler, who knows a great deal about 'osses, and believes my story through and through. What happened was this.

The moment Professor Scattergood began to address his mare in the tones aforesaid, she stood stock-still, with ears reversed in the direction from which the sounds were coming. When he had finished, a gentle quiver passed through her body. Then, suddenly lowering her head, she turned it round with a quick movement towards the off stirrup, and slightly bit the toe of Professor Scattergood's boot. This done, she recovered her former attitude of attention, and again reversed her ears as though awaiting a response. Taking in the meaning of her act with a swift instinct which he never allowed to mar his treatment of Systematic Theology, the professor said one word--"Ethelberta"; and the word had hardly passed his lips when something began to tingle at the back of his head. Instantly the mare broke into the gentlest and evenest canter that ever delighted a horseman of sixty years; carried him through the remainder of his ride without a single hitch, shy, or other misdemeanour, and brought him to his own doorstep in exactly two hours and five minutes from the time he had left it. Thenceforward, until the last day of his life, he never had the slightest trouble with his mare. That is the story which the ostler believes through and through.

Next day the Professor said to this man:

"Tom, I'm going to change the name of my mare."

"You can't do that, sir. You'll never get her to answer to a new name."

"I mean to try, anyhow. Here"--and he slipped half a sovereign into the man's hand. "You make this mare answer to the name of _Ethelberta_, and I'll give you as much more when it's done."

"Beg your pardon, sir," said the man, slipping the coin into his pocket--"Beg your pardon, sir, but there never was a 'oss with a name like that. It's not a 'oss's name at all, sir."

"Never mind that. Do as I tell you, and you won't regret it. Ethelberta--don't forget."

The groom touched his hat. Professor Scattergood left the stables, and presently the groom and his chief pal were rolling in laughter on a heap of straw.

A fortnight later the groom said:

"The mare answers wonderful well to that new name, sir. Stopped her kicking and biting altogether, sir. Why, the day before we give it her, she tore the shirt off my back and bit a hole in my breeches as big as a mangel-wurzel."

"I'll pay for both of them," said Professor Scattergood.

"Thank 'ee, sir. But since we give her the new name she's not even made as though she _wanted_ to bite anybody. And as for kicking, why, you might take tea with your mother-in-law right under her heels and she wouldn't knock a saucer over. I nivver see such a thing in all my life, and don't expect nivver to see such another! _Wonderful's_ what I calls it! Though, since I've come to think of it, there _was_ once a 'oss named Ethelberta as won the Buddle Stakes. Our foreman says as he remembers the year it won. Maybe as you had a bit yourself, sir, on that 'oss--though beg your pardon for saying so."

"Yes," said the Professor, "I backed Ethelberta for all I was worth, and won ten times as much. Only, some fellow stole the winnings out of my--my inner pocket just before I got home. It was thirty-five years ago."

"So it was a bit o' bad luck after all, sir?"

"It was," said Scattergood, "extremely bad luck."

"Did they ever catch the man, sir?"

"They did. They caught him within a year after the theft."

"I expect they give it 'im 'ot, sir?"

"Yes. He got a life-sentence, the same as mi--the same as that man got who was convicted the other day."

At this lame conclusion the groom looked puzzled, and Scattergood had to extricate himself. "You see, Tom," he went on, "the value of what I lost was enormous."

"It must have been a tidy haul to get the thief a sentence like that," said Tom. "But maybe he give you a tap on the head into the bargain, sir."

"He put a knife into me," said Scattergood, "and the wound aches to this day."

For some reason he felt an unwonted pleasure in pursuing this conversation with the sympathetic groom, and inwardly resolved that he would give him a handsome tip.