Chapter: Tibby was now approaching his last year at Oxford. He had moved out of
college, and was contemplating the Universe, or such portions of it as
concerned him, from his comfortable lodgings in Long Wall. He was not
concerned with much. When a young man is untroubled by passions and
sincerely indifferent to public opinion his outlook is necessarily
limited. Tibby wished neither to strengthen the position of the rich nor
to improve that of the poor, and so was well content to watch the elms
nodding behind the mildly embattled parapets of Magdalen. There are
worse lives. Though selfish, he was never cruel; though affected
in manner, he never posed. Like Margaret, he disdained the heroic
equipment, and it was only after many visits that men discovered
Schlegel to possess a character and a brain. He had done well in Mods,
much to the surprise of those who attended lectures and took proper
exercise, and was now glancing disdainfully at Chinese in case he
should some day consent to qualify as a Student Interpreter. To him thus
employed Helen entered. A telegram had preceded her.

He noticed, in a distant way, that his sister had altered.

As a rule he found her too pronounced, and had never come across this
look of appeal, pathetic yet dignified--the look of a sailor who has
lost everything at sea.

"I have come from Oniton," she began. "There has been a great deal of
trouble there."

"Who's for lunch?" said Tibby, picking up the claret, which was warming
in the hearth. Helen sat down submissively at the table. "Why such an
early start?" he asked.

"Sunrise or something--when I could get away."

"So I surmise. Why?"

"I don't know what's to be done, Tibby. I am very much upset at a piece
of news that concerns Meg, and do not want to face her, and I am not
going back to Wickham Place. I stopped here to tell you this."

The landlady came in with the cutlets. Tibby put a marker in the leaves
of his Chinese Grammar and helped them. Oxford--the Oxford of the
vacation--dreamed and rustled outside, and indoors the little fire was
coated with grey where the sunshine touched it. Helen continued her odd
story.

"Give Meg my love and say that I want to be alone. I mean to go to
Munich or else Bonn."

"Such a message is easily given," said her brother.

"As regards Wickham Place and my share of the furniture, you and she are
to do exactly as you like. My own feeling is that everything may just as
well be sold. What does one want with dusty economic books, which have
made the world no better, or with mother's hideous chiffoniers? I have
also another commission for you. I want you to deliver a letter." She
got up. "I haven't written it yet. Why shouldn't I post it, though?" She
sat down again. "My head is rather wretched. I hope that none of your
friends are likely to come in."

Tibby locked the door. His friends often found it in this condition.
Then he asked whether anything had gone wrong at Evie's wedding.

"Not there," said Helen, and burst into tears.

He had known her hysterical--it was one of her aspects with which he had
no concern--and yet these tears touched him as something unusual. They
were nearer the things that did concern him, such as music. He laid down
his knife and looked at her curiously. Then, as she continued to sob, he
went on with his lunch.

The time came for the second course, and she was still crying. Apple
Charlotte was to follow, which spoils by waiting. "Do you mind Mrs.
Martlett coming in?" he asked, "or shall I take it from her at the
door?"

"Could I bathe my eyes, Tibby?"

He took her to his bedroom, and introduced the pudding in her absence.
Having helped himself, he put it down to warm in the hearth. His hand
stretched towards the Grammar, and soon he was turning over the pages,
raising his eyebrows scornfully, perhaps at human nature, perhaps at
Chinese. To him thus employed Helen returned. She had pulled herself
together, but the grave appeal had not vanished from her eyes.

"Now for the explanation," she said. "Why didn't I begin with it? I
have found out something about Mr. Wilcox. He has behaved very wrongly
indeed, and ruined two people's lives. It all came on me very suddenly
last night; I am very much upset, and I do not know what to do. Mrs.
Bast--"

"Oh, those people!"

Helen seemed silenced.

"Shall I lock the door again?"

"No thanks, Tibbikins. You're being very good to me. I want to tell you
the story before I go abroad, you must do exactly what you like--treat
it as part of the furniture. Meg cannot have heard it yet, I think. But
I cannot face her and tell her that the man she is going to marry has
misconducted himself. I don't even know whether she ought to be told.
Knowing as she does that I dislike him, she will suspect me, and think
that I want to ruin her match. I simply don't know what to make of such
a thing. I trust your judgment. What would you do?"

"I gather he has had a mistress," said Tibby.

Helen flushed with shame and anger. "And ruined two people's lives. And
goes about saying that personal actions count for nothing, and there
always will be rich and poor. He met her when he was trying to get rich
out in Cyprus--I don't wish to make him worse than he is, and no doubt
she was ready enough to meet him. But there it is. They met. He goes his
way and she goes hers. What do you suppose is the end of such women?"

He conceded that it was a bad business.

"They end in two ways: Either they sink till the lunatic asylums and the
workhouses are full of them, and cause Mr. Wilcox to write letters to
the papers complaining of our national degeneracy, or else they entrap a
boy into marriage before it is too late. She--I can't blame her."

"But this isn't all," she continued after a long pause, during which the
landlady served them with coffee. "I come now to the business that took
us to Oniton. We went all three. Acting on Mr. Wilcox's advice, the man
throws up a secure situation and takes an insecure one, from which he is
dismissed. There are certain excuses, but in the main Mr. Wilcox is to
blame, as Meg herself admitted. It is only common justice that he should
employ the man himself. But he meets the woman, and, like the cur that
he is, he refuses, and tries to get rid of them. He makes Meg write.
Two notes came from her late that evening--one for me, one for Leonard,
dismissing him with barely a reason. I couldn't understand. Then it
comes out that Mrs. Bast had spoken to Mr. Wilcox on the lawn while we
left her to get rooms, and was still speaking about him when Leonard
came back to her. This Leonard knew all along. He thought it natural he
should be ruined twice. Natural! Could you have contained yourself?"

"It is certainly a very bad business," said Tibby.

His reply seemed to calm his sister. "I was afraid that I saw it out of
proportion. But you are right outside it, and you must know. In a day or
two--or perhaps a week--take whatever steps you think fit. I leave it in
your hands."

She concluded her charge.

"The facts as they touch Meg are all before you," she added; and Tibby
sighed and felt it rather hard that, because of his open mind, he should
be empanelled to serve as a juror. He had never been interested in human
beings, for which one must blame him, but he had had rather too much of
them at Wickham Place. Just as some people cease to attend when books
are mentioned, so Tibby's attention wandered when "personal relations"
came under discussion. Ought Margaret to know what Helen knew the Basts
to know? Similar questions had vexed him from infancy, and at Oxford he
had learned to say that the importance of human beings has been vastly
overrated by specialists. The epigram, with its faint whiff of the
eighties, meant nothing. But he might have let it off now if his sister
had not been ceaselessly beautiful.

"You see, Helen--have a cigarette--I don't see what I'm to do."

"Then there's nothing to be done. I dare say you are right. Let them
marry. There remains the question of compensation."

"Do you want me to adjudicate that too? Had you not better consult an
expert?"

"This part is in confidence," said Helen. "It has nothing to do with
Meg, and do not mention it to her. The compensation--I do not see who is
to pay it if I don't, and I have already decided on the minimum sum.
As soon as possible I am placing it to your account, and when I am in
Germany you will pay it over for me. I shall never forget your kindness,
Tibbikins, if you do this."

"What is the sum?"

"Five thousand."

"Good God alive!" said Tibby, and went crimson.

"Now, what is the good of driblets? To go through life having done one
thing--to have raised one person from the abyss; not these puny gifts of
shillings and blankets--making the grey more grey. No doubt people will
think me extraordinary."

"I don't care an iota what people think!" cried he, heated to unusual
manliness of diction. "But it's half what you have."

"Not nearly half." She spread out her hands over her soiled skirt. "I
have far too much, and we settled at Chelsea last spring that three
hundred a year is necessary to set a man on his feet. What I give will
bring in a hundred and fifty between two. It isn't enough." He could not
recover. He was not angry or even shocked, and he saw that Helen would
still have plenty to live on. But it amazed him to think what haycocks
people can make of their lives. His delicate intonations would not work,
and he could only blurt out that the five thousand pounds would mean a
great deal of bother for him personally.

"I didn't expect you to understand me."

"I? I understand nobody."

"But you'll do it?"

"Apparently."

"I leave you two commissions, then. The first concerns Mr. Wilcox, and
you are to use your discretion. The second concerns the money, and is
to be mentioned to no one, and carried out literally. You will send a
hundred pounds on account to-morrow."

He walked with her to the station, passing through those streets whose
serried beauty never bewildered him and never fatigued. The lovely
creature raised domes and spires into the cloudless blue, and only
the ganglion of vulgarity round Carfax showed how evanescent was the
phantom, how faint its claim to represent England. Helen, rehearsing her
commission, noticed nothing; the Basts were in her brain, and she retold
the crisis in a meditative way, which might have made other men curious.
She was seeing whether it would hold. He asked her once why she had
taken the Basts right into the heart of Evie's wedding. She stopped like
a frightened animal and said, "Does that seem to you so odd?" Her eyes,
the hand laid on the mouth, quite haunted him, until they were absorbed
into the figure of St. Mary the Virgin, before whom he paused for a
moment on the walk home.

It is convenient to follow him in the discharge of his duties. Margaret
summoned him the next day. She was terrified at Helen's flight, and he
had to say that she had called in at Oxford. Then she said: "Did she
seem worried at any rumour about Henry?" He answered, "Yes." "I knew it
was that!" she exclaimed. "I'll write to her." Tibby was relieved.

He then sent the cheque to the address that Helen gave him, and stated
that he was instructed to forward later on five thousand pounds. An
answer came back very civil and quiet in tone--such an answer as Tibby
himself would have given. The cheque was returned, the legacy refused,
the writer being in no need of money. Tibby forwarded this to Helen,
adding in the fulness of his heart that Leonard Bast seemed somewhat a
monumental person after all. Helen's reply was frantic. He was to
take no notice. He was to go down at once and say that she commanded
acceptance. He went. A scurf of books and china ornaments awaited him.
The Basts had just been evicted for not paying their rent, and had
wandered no one knew whither. Helen had begun bungling with her money by
this time, and had even sold out her shares in the Nottingham and Derby
Railway. For some weeks she did nothing. Then she reinvested, and, owing
to the good advice of her stockbrokers, became rather richer than she
had been before.

 Tibby lives in his own world at Oxford, and he clearly doesn't like to be troubled by the lives of others. He's a classic academic, and though he's not a particularly bad person, he never descends from his ivory tower. At present, he's learning Chinese, and it's his principal pastime. Helen turns up one day, after warning Tibby of her arrival with a telegram. She tells him about her adventure in Oniton, and tells him that she's not going back home to Wickham Place. Tibby is more concerned with lunch than with his sister's troubles. Helen goes on, saying that he's to tell Margaret that she just wants to be alone - she's going to Germany. As for the house, her siblings can do what they like about it. Tibby asks if something happened at Evie's wedding, and Helen starts to cry. He doesn't want her to ruin his lunch, so he goes right on eating. Helen pulls herself together, and brings up Mr. Wilcox, hinting ominously that he's done something terrible and ruined lives. She mentions the Basts, and Tibby is exasperated. Tibby assumes correctly that this means that Mr. Wilcox has had a mistress, and Helen launches into an attack on Mr. Wilcox's behavior towards the Basts. She thinks it's his fault that they're paupers. She then explains the Leonard situation. Tibby admits that it's a very unfortunate series of events. Helen wants him to decide what to do about this knowledge about Mr. Wilcox, but Tibby has no opinion on what to do about Margaret's involvement in all of this. He prefers to deal with people in books, not in person. Helen has given up on stopping Margaret's marriage, but now she's worried about compensating the Basts for Mr. Wilcox's wrongs. She wants to give them five thousand pounds. Tibby is taken aback, but his sister is determined to give them this huge sum, and she puts him in charge of doling it out. Tibby walks his sister to the train station, and he is quite affected by her distress - at least, until he gets distracted by a statue on his way home. The next day, Margaret and Tibby meet. She asks if Helen was upset about a rumor about Henry, and Tibby, thankful to be relieved of his duties, says yes. He takes care of the second task Helen set to him by sending a check for the Basts, but it's returned with a civil note that says the money is not needed. Helen is upset, and insists that Tibby go back and force the money upon the Basts. However, the Basts are nowhere to be found - they were evicted, and nobody knows where they went. Helen, dismayed, isn't sure what to do with her money. She takes it out of her stocks, but, not knowing what to do, ends up reinvesting it and becoming even richer than before.

