Peter Binney Part 24

"I certainly shouldn't think of doing so again. And it was mother who asked you last vacation. I had nothing to do with it."

"Then it _was_ you. Betty, you are a dar----"

"Now, then, be quiet, please."

"You and John are coming to us in town for a week, directly after term."

"Poor old John. I wonder whatever he would say if he saw me now!"

They had now pa.s.sed Clare again, and were gliding slowly along between the pleasant meadow and the great lawn towards King's bridge.

"I say, Betty," said Lucius, "I don't want to frighten you, but who is that on the bridge?"

"I should think the Vice-Chancellor and Princ.i.p.al of Newnham waiting for us," answered Betty without turning round.

"No, but really, I do believe it is John."

Betty turned round and saw a man in a straw hat with a green and black ribbon leaning over the bridge.

"Yes, it is," she said, blus.h.i.+ng scarlet, but speaking quite unconcernedly, "he ought to be working. I shall blow him up for it."

"Shall we turn round? He hasn't spotted us yet."

"Turn round? Whatever for? You don't suppose I'm frightened of John, do you?"

"I don't know. You look rather as if you were."

"Of course I'm not. But I don't know what he will think, and I should look so idiotic if I began to explain."

"What about that backwater?"

"Is it very pretty?"

"Yes, very. Hold your umbrella towards the bridge as we go round the corner and he won't see you. I'll pull my hat over my face."

So the canoe glided under the little wooden bridge and into the still, shaded water beyond.

The other girl, who was still walking about along the river bank, and had seen it disappear, waited for an hour, and then went away furious, half intending to report Miss Betty Jermyn to the authorities of her college. Directly she had gone, the canoe came sliding out into the river again.

Betty was speaking.

"I shouldn't much mind if John did see us now, should you, Lucius?"

"Not a bit, darling," answered the happy Lucius. "But it wasn't John at all. I looked when you were holding the umbrella in front of your face."

Our narrative has dwelt so long on a series of painful and discreditable events, that it is hoped that the account of how Lucius and Betty, boy and girl as they were, made up their minds to spend their lives together, may have dissipated the gloom which the sympathetic reader will have experienced in following the chequered career of Mr. Binney. We must now go back a little and fill up the gap which we have left between the end of February and the end of April.

And first let us say that the very time Lucius and Betty were cooing like a pair of young doves in the seclusion of that backwater of the Cam, which now holds for them more tender memories than any other spot in the world, Mr. Binney was still in evidence as an undergraduate member of the University of Cambridge. Lucius's plea had been successful. A week after Mr. Binney's return to Russell Square he had received a letter from Mr. Rimington, to inform him that he might come up again at the beginning of the following term, but that the slightest breach of discipline on his part in the future would mean a sentence of instant dismissal from which there would be no appeal.

But alas! this letter, welcome as its contents were, did not suffice to raise Mr. Binney from the despondency into which he had fallen. After the receipt of Mrs. Higginbotham's mute but eloquent dismissal he had pa.s.sed a week of such black despair that he could never look back upon it in after life without shuddering. He had beaten his wings against the doors of Mrs. Higginbotham's dwelling, but in vain. There was no admittance for him. He had importuned her by post. His letters remained unanswered. He scarcely knew how to bear the hard fate that he had brought upon himself. He was all alone in the house, for Lucius had gone straight from Cambridge to Norfolk, and was now engaged in the Reverend Mr. Jermyn's pleasant rectory house and garden in laying the train which eventually culminated in the scene between him and Betty recounted at the beginning of this chapter. He would have gone down to his place of business, but he was ashamed to face his manager and his clerks. He thought that every one would know he had been sent down from Cambridge.

As a matter of fact, this particular event of his University career never did become known to any but a very few. Even Mrs. Toller did not know it, although Mr. Binney was convinced that she must have done, for she cut him pointedly in Gower Street one afternoon as he crept miserably along taking a little air and exercise, and audibly instructed her daughter to do the same, as Mr. Binney raised his hat.

After that he was not surprised to receive a letter from his fellow deacons of Dr. Toller's chapel requesting him to resign his office, which he did that day with an added pang of shame, and resolved that, as he had now made the Baptist community too hot to hold him, he would become a Wesleyan Methodist, and work his way up to a position of authority in that body. He also made up his mind to let the house in Russell Square, which was far too large for himself and Lucius, and take a flat in Earl's Court, since Mrs. Higginbotham seemed to be made of adamant, and there seemed very little chance now of her ever gracing his establishment. With all these wrenches in his life, actual and imminent, it may be imagined that Mr. Binney was not a happy man at this time.

When Mr. Rimington's letter came, he decided to make one more appeal to Mrs. Higginbotham. He told her that he was going back to Cambridge, and intended to lead a very different life in the future from that of the past. Might he nourish a hope that if he did something to make up for past disgrace, Mrs. Higginbotham would forgive him and smile on him once more?

To his intense relief and tearful joy Mrs. Higginbotham replied to his letter. It appeared that he was not to be debarred from all hope. But he was not to be allowed to see Mrs. Higginbotham again until he had done something definite at Cambridge to atone for his past misconduct.

"I do not mean success in your play-hours, Peter," wrote Mrs.

Higginbotham. "That you have already attained, and it has been the means of leading you astray. Such success as that will never restore my lost confidence in you. You must come to be well spoken of by masters and pupils alike. You must rise to the top of your cla.s.ses, and acquit yourself well in your examinations. When you have done that you may come and see me again. Until then the memory of the dreadful trouble you have brought upon yourself and upon me, who trusted you, must abide with me. I do not wish to load you with reproaches. Your own conscience must be a very heavy burden for you to bear. But I could not bear to see you with the account that one who shall be nameless gave me of your conduct and appearances still fresh in my memory."

Mr. Binney stifled his renewed feelings of remorse and wrote to ask if the pa.s.sing of his Little-go in the following June might be considered a pa.s.sport to Mrs. Higginbotham's society? Mrs. Higginbotham replied, Yes. If he pa.s.sed that examination well and behaved immaculately in the meantime he might consider himself on the old footing with her. So Mr. Binney took heart, re-engaged the useful Minshull and retired to Cornwall for the Easter vacation, where he ploughed away at his studies so energetically that Minshull held out hopes of his attaining a second cla.s.s in one part at least of the examination.

When Lucius paddled his canoe out of the backwater with Betty sitting opposite to him in a flutter of dimples and happiness, there was literally no cloud on his horizon. He had been up at Cambridge now for three weeks and his father had never once given him occasion to wish himself away. Mr. Binney behaved himself irreproachably. In fact, if he had kept himself in the background as he was doing now from the time he had entered the University, Lucius would have had no reason to be ashamed of him at all. Even as it was, the contrast of what Mr. Binney was now and what he had been when he first came up was so great that the relief felt by Lucius almost made up for the distress he had previously undergone. Mr. Binney as a subject for discussion had somewhat lost interest by this time, and Lucius lived much in the same way as he would have done if his father had never come to Cambridge.

Mr. Binney, whose nature was elastic, had recovered a little of his self-importance now that he had nothing to fear from outraged officialdom, and was rather inclined to patronise his son, and generally to a.s.sume the high parental air with which he had treated him before his own arrival in Cambridge.

But Lucius, whose appeal had saved his father from expulsion, took it all in excellent part, and was only too thankful that things were not worse. He could have borne a great deal more and thought nothing of it now that Betty had at last allowed him to put to her the all-important question, and had given him the answer he wanted. He whistled gaily as he walked up to his rooms from the river and thought himself the luckiest fellow in the world.

At the entrance to Whewell's Court he met Dizzy.

"I've done it, old man," he said with a beaming face. "You're the first person I've told about it."

"Then I'm sure I'm extremely flattered," answered Dizzy, "although I haven't the slightest notion what you're talking about."

"I'm going to be married, Dizzy," said Lucius. "Will you be my best man?"

"Well, I'm going to play racquets at two," said Dizzy. "If you could put it off till to-morrow perhaps I could----"

"No, but really, Ben, I asked Betty this morning, and it's all right."

"My dear old man," said Dizzy, grasping him warmly by the hand, while a bright smile lit up his ingenuous features, "I couldn't have been better pleased if I'd done it myself!"

CHAPTER XVI

THIRD TRINITY MAKES A b.u.mP

There never was such a little man as Mr. Binney for getting knocked down flat and picking himself up again as c.o.c.ky as ever. Lucius's announcement of his engagement to his cousin Betty brought him to his feet as pompous as if he had never been fined by a Proctor or rebuked by a Dean.

"I never heard of such a thing," he said indignantly. "Getting engaged to be married at your age! Why, it's ridiculous. I won't have it.

That's flat."

"What won't you have, father?" asked Lucius. "You can't stop my being engaged to her, you know. That's over and done with."