path: root/66617-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 66617 ***

LORD ALISTAIR’S REBELLION




  LORD ALISTAIR’S
  REBELLION

  BY
  ALLEN UPWARD

  In the Pot it is called Scum
  In the Sea it is called Foam:
  In the Sky it is called Light.

  [Illustration]

  MITCHELL KENNERLEY
  NEW YORK      MCMX




  _Copyright 1910 by
  Mitchell Kennerley_




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                              PAGE

      I WESTMINSTER BRIDGE                9

     II BIOGRAPHICAL                     23

    III THE PRODIGAL SON                 45

     IV A FAMILY COUNCIL                 58

      V BEERS COOPERAGE                  70

     VI THE WHOLE DUTY OF WOMAN          94

    VII THE DECADENTS                   109

   VIII A LEGITIMIST DEMONSTRATION      132

     IX MOLLY FINUCANE AT HOME          158

      X A SCIENTIFIC OPINION            175

     XI THE PRETENDER                   197

    XII THE POWERS THAT BE              217

   XIII ROYAL PATRONAGE                 237

    XIV VIRTUE TRIUMPHANT               253

     XV MAGIC CASEMENTS                 264

    XVI NEW LAMPS FOR OLD               274

   XVII A SPOKE IN THE WHEEL            290

  XVIII THE LAST WORD OF SCIENCE        304

    XIX POET’S CORNER                   316

     XX LADY ALISTAIR                   328

    XXI THE HOUSE OF CATILINE           346

   XXII HIGH TREASON                    361

  XXIII A PERSONAL EXPLANATION          374

        AFTERWARDS                      393




LORD ALISTAIR’S REBELLION




CHAPTER I

WESTMINSTER BRIDGE


NIGHT clad the imperial city in a black robe stitched with fire.

The misty river rolled in from the sea through its illuminated bridges
with the subdued swish of some great snake writhing its way through
hoops of gold.

Out in the fog-haunted region between the bridges the movement of the
red and green-eyed steam-tugs, clutching invisible barges and dragging
them away into the darkness, seemed like a shadow-show in which
grotesque demons were hunting the souls of men.

The two banks of the river offered a contrast full of significance.

Along the left bank white lamps that slit the dusk with the hard,
bright glare of diamonds were strung like beads at measured spaces
apart. A broad, smooth-paven road rattled with the wheels of traffic,
and the long bend of the river revealed a sweep of stately buildings
representing the power and splendour of a great civilization.

Education, law, science, government, police, had their homes side by
side along that mighty façade, which thus became an entablature on
which the characters of civilization were legibly impressed. Beside
the ancient universities of the law stood the headquarters of the vast
machinery for the teaching of the populace--that is to say, for the
taming of successive generations of barbarians. The power of wealth was
expressed in luxurious hotels and club-houses, in the mansion of the
noble and the estate-office of the millionaire. The revenues of empire
flowed in and out through the gates of one majestic pile; from another
the guardians of the social order waged war against the restless
ranks of crime. Last in place towered the huge palace of the imperial
Legislature, supreme over all.

Across the river the low mass of the southern shore lay in obscurity.
All that could be distinguished over there was a dark roof-line broken
by a few tall, smokeless chimneys, rising above the water like the
walls and towers of a beleaguered city encompassed by its moat. The
solitary illumination on that side of the river was afforded by a high
square building which broke the gloom from instant to instant with huge
letters of yellow fire, spelling out uncouth, barbaric syllables in
what might have been the jargon of some subterranean race of men. Seen
across the river mist the tower flared out like those burning mosques
beheld from afar by the voyager in the Underworld as he drew near to
the city of Dis.

All night the square, ugly minaret continued to flash its monstrous
hieroglyphs upon the darkness, as though the dwellers on the southern
shore were signalling a message from their camp. And from time to
time, when the rattle of the wheels on the hither side stayed for a
moment, there was borne across the water the low, sullen hum as of a
vast multitude swarming in the narrow streets and stunted houses of the
hidden region beyond.

Thus the two banks of the river faced each other with something of a
mutual threat.

On one side of the gulf, that low, sombre roof-line with its fitful
torch-fires; on the other side, the broad illuminated rampart of
civilization, crowned by its imperial keep.

A light more brilliant than the rest streamed from the summit of the
ponderous clock-tower that guards the foot of Westminster Bridge.

This was the answering signal of the northern shore to that sullen camp
across the river. It burned there to proclaim that the sovereign power
of empire was at work beneath, judging over five hundred millions of
men, and two and a half continents. All the forces of the mightiest
society the world has yet beheld were focused here in the High Court of
Parliament, the Board of the Anglo-Roman Raj.

Here the decrees were shaped in obedience to which invincible fleets
crossed the ocean; armies were transported from one hemisphere to the
conquest of another; kings were dethroned in Africa and other kings
were crowned in Asia; warlike republics were extinguished under the
Southern Pole, and tottering dynasties propped up in the shadow of the
Himalayas; whole races of men, speaking strange tongues, and reckoning
time by other constellations, had their laws and manners and religions
changed for them; immemorial savagery was thrust into the forcing-house
of civilization, and immemorial civilizations were rooted up; from
this centre the hardy freemen of the Baltic North spread the ancient
Mediterranean culture and Semitic folklore wherever the Raj extended
round the globe.

Here throbbed the great piston-rod which drove the myriad wheels
of government and slowly stamped deeper age after age the same
Roman-Semitic imprint upon the subjugated populace at home.

Night after night, as the dwellers on the southern shore gazed across
at the majestic citadel of the Raj, they saw that beacon burning,
the symbol of the unresting watchfulness of their rulers against the
assaults of foes within and without. That steady flame shone out
defiance alike to the foreign invader and the traitor within the gates;
to the rebels who scoured the African veldt, and the more dangerous
rebels who skulked through the streets and alleys of the imperial
capital. On all alike, on the encroaching Tsar as on the plotting
Maharajah, on far-off savages and on felons crouching at the gates,
the Genius of the Raj was seen to keep its never-closing eye.

More than a mile away, round the curving bank of the river, where the
warehouses of Mammon clustered thickly round the temple of Jehovah,
there rose another Symbol, invisible in the night, soaring high above
the intervening territory of squalor.

This Symbol was intended to represent a Roman gibbet, the gibbet on
which a Redeemer had been put to death two thousand years ago, in a
remote corner of that ancient Mediterranean realm of which this modern
civilization was heir.

In the night these two Symbols confronted each other, the Flame and
the Cross, as though they were the warring ensigns of Ahura-Mazda, the
Spirit of Light, and Anru-Mainya, the Spirit of Darkness.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the midmost arch of Westminster Bridge a young man stood alone,
leaning over the parapet, and sounding with his eyes the black depth of
the water below.

His whole air and appearance were out of harmony with the spot where he
found himself, and suggested that he must have strayed there from some
gayer quarter of the town. An opera hat was thrust back on his head,
and a silk-lined overcoat, thrown open in front, allowed his waistcoat,
of white satin, to become soiled by contact with the grime of the
bridge. He held a cane of rich and fanciful design in one hand; the
other hand, resting loosely on the ironwork of the balustrade, showed
more than one curious and valuable ring.

He leaned on the bridge dully, his head drooping as though he were
tired. Although his face was that of a man not yet thirty years of
age, it bore marks which showed that he had lived too eagerly, without
heed to life’s immitigable laws. Already the forehead was crossed with
faint lines, though there was no thinning of the black hair that curled
above. The beauty of the face was marred by the flush of intemperance,
and the sensuous underlip contradicted the refinement of the sensitive
nostrils. The dark, restless eyes and delicate chin completed the
impression of passion and weakness which was left by the whole face.

On the pavement of St. James’s such a figure would have seemed at home.
Seen where it was, like a tropical bird blown ashore on some bleaker
landscape, it provoked the curiosity of the passers-by.

Some of them took offence at the unusual sight. A group of roughs
returning from some haunt of vice on the north side to their dens
across the river eyed the well-dressed loiterer with envious contempt,
and tried to hustle him as they went by. Their leader, a hulking
Irishman, encouraged them in a coarse speech, which still breathed
faintly of the sea-scented glens of Connemara.

Something in the voice or in the words startled the lounger. He turned
his head quickly, and gave the ruffian a questioning look, under
which he slunk to one side, and passed on with his friends. In the
dark streets where their homes lay they might not have been abashed
so easily. But their courage for violence ebbed on the well-lighted
bridge. Few crimes are committed at high noon.

A policeman sauntering on to the bridge shortly afterwards caught sight
of the stranger, and seemed to become interested in his doings. Instead
of pursuing his way when he had reached the farther end of the bridge,
the officer halted, and stood about on the pavement by St. Thomas’s
Hospital, keeping his eyes fixed on the figure that overhung the
balustrade so persistently.

Two shop-boys coming along in their turn had their sense of humour
tickled by the young man’s forlorn attitude. One of them gave vent to a
ribald jest.

“Look,” he said aloud to his comrade, “there’s Jesus Christ.”

So closely wrapped in his own thoughts was the lounger that it was
many seconds after they had been uttered before the words succeeded
in penetrating to his consciousness. The last sound of the youths’
trampling feet had died away at the end of the bridge before he woke up
sufficiently to ask himself with a resentful air: “What made him say
that?”

He found himself unable to dismiss the jeer from his mind, in which it
went on echoing with such tormenting insistence that at last he stood
up and shook himself, unconsciously making a physical effort to change
the pattern in the brain’s kaleidoscope.

But the suggestion which so irritated him was not to be got rid of
in that fashion. It chimed in too well with the whole tenor of his
meditation since he had found his way on to the bridge. The half-formed
questions which had been baffling his attempts to give them definite
shape now all at once began to come together and settle down into one
question, precipitated, as it were, by that profane mockery.

“Why,” he reflected, with a growing sense of anger at the
comparison--“why did he call me that?”

It was not because he attributed any serious intention to the jester
that he argued thus with himself. He was in that mood when everything
around us appears mysterious and fraught with some revelation to which
we only need a key. The words of the shop-boy became for him a hint
from the night itself, like the cryptic utterances of the characters in
a play of Maeterlinck’s.

“What likeness is there between Christ and me?” he went on, putting the
problem before himself more distinctly.

What likeness, indeed, between this spoilt child of civilization, to
whom the world seemed to have given of its best, for whom Christianity
could be no more than a legend, and that buffeted Redeemer hanging on
his gibbet in the Syrian sun of two thousand years ago?

And yet an insult cannot rankle unless it is barbed with truth. From
the inner cells of memory, where they had been stored up in past
days by a religious mother, certain words and phrases were already
coming forth, as though moved by some subtle affinity, to answer that
uncomfortable question.

_Despised and rejected of men_--they ran something like that. And
again: _Stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted_. There were other
words which should have followed, surely, but he tried in vain to draw
them forth.

_Despised and rejected of men._ The flush darkened on the young man’s
cheek as he flung back his head with a rebellious and angry glance at
the river’s northern bank, where the shining walls and towers of the
city of Ormuzd seemed to overhang the gulf--the glance which an exile
gives at the city which has driven him forth.

He had fled to the spot, stunned by one of those buffets which life is
ever waiting to deal to those who have not learnt their lesson aright.
And his ears still smarted with the scream of the newsboys who were
proclaiming in every street that Lord Alistair Stuart had failed.

       *       *       *       *       *

In London men like Alistair Stuart fail every day, and go under,
leaving scarcely a ripple on the smooth surface of a society which
hastens to forget all disagreeable things. But Lord Alistair’s
catastrophe had been able to eclipse for one night the comedy of
politics and the tragedy of war. For he happened to be one of the few
in whom the world is interested, and when the world is interested
in a man it will not suffer him to go down to sheol in peace. Its
hisses are the reaction of its cheers, and those who court its notice
put their lives to the hazard, like Esther when she went to touch the
sceptre of Ahasuerus.

The world knew Alistair Stuart in two characters--as the brother and
heir-presumptive of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay, and as the lover of
Molly Finucane.

To the outer world, for which newspapers are written and formal
histories compiled, he was the brother of one of its most important
citizens. The Duke of Trent was distinguished not only by his rank,
but by his service to the State. By an ironical coincidence the same
_Gazette_ which revealed the fact that Lord Alistair Stuart had
filed his petition also contained the notification that his brother
had kissed hands as Secretary of State. It was impossible that the
moralists of the pulpit and the press should overlook the striking
example of the idle and industrious apprentice, and the younger
brother’s disgrace was deepened by the elder’s triumph.

In that inner world whose newspapers are the boudoirs and the
smoking-rooms, and which goes for its history to memoirs and chronicles
of the back-stairs, the name of Alistair Stuart had gained celebrity in
connection with a personage of whom the pulpit might not know, and the
press might not tell.

Molly Finucane had achieved one of those reputations which have given
certain women a place in history. In the ancient world she might have
had princes to fight for her, and poets to sing her praise. In the
modern world she was a figure of evil, regarded with a feeling like
that which inspired the legends of the succubi. An element of mystery
attached to her extraordinary career. It was said that she could
neither dance nor sing, that she was astonishingly ignorant, and that
her speech and ways smelt of the gutter. Even beauty was denied her.
The men whom she had ruined themselves could not explain the secret of
her power over them; she overcame her victims like a malarial fever.
Some men could meet her day after day without succumbing; others lost
themselves from the first; others again began by despising her as an
ugly little street-girl, and ended by giving her their wives’ jewels.

How many had perished in the maelstrom of desire which she created
none could say. But there was a ghastly story of the young Earl of
St. Luc, who had put an end to his life at the age of twenty because
his trustees refused him the means to set up an establishment for
Molly Finucane. An ineffaceable impression had been made by the two
contrasted pictures of the desolate mother weeping over her boy’s
dead body, as it was dragged all stained and dripping from the moat
surrounding the ancient keep of the St. Lucs, and of the wide-mouthed,
stupid Irish girl, planted in a reek of tobacco smoke on a table
crowded by tipsy youths, repeating to them in her cracked, shameless
voice the latest and most brutally coarse refrain of the street.

It was a year, perhaps two years, since the tongue of scandal had first
singled out the name of Alistair Stuart from among the rest of those
who singed their wings in this fatal flame. Gradually it became known
that Molly Finucane had given him a devotion which no other man had
ever been able to buy with gold or blood or tears. For his sake she
had refused at the last moment to take possession of the miniature
palace furnished for her by the great Brazilian broker, Mendes; who had
simply shrugged his shoulders and ordered the house to be kept vacant
and ready for her. Stuart and she had gone to live together in a faded
corner of Chelsea, in a house surrounded by elms with black trunks and
yellow leaves.

The house in Chelsea loomed large in the mind of the new generation.
It was regarded as a citadel of sin, as the headquarters of a cult
which gloried in its moral degeneracy. Alistair Stuart assumed the
character of a high-priest among the pagans, as they chose to call
themselves--poets whose verses echoed still more faintly the faint
autumnal sighs of Verlaine; wits whose epigrams were brilliant with the
phosphorescence of corruption; men in whom genius was a vice, and vice
an affectation. Hatred of the middle classes was the watchword of this
sect, which was recruited from penniless younger sons, from university
failures, from a whole class for whom the Protestant Church has no
refuge, but who in Catholic countries end often in the monastery. They
waged war on the Victorian Age, on its religion, on its art, on its
commercialism, but, above all, on its Puritanism.

In the eyes of this brotherhood of the unfit bankruptcy was rather
meritorious than disgraceful, and the fifty thousand pounds which
Stuart had spent without possessing represented so much spoil taken
from the Philistines. Stuart’s own first proceeding after he had
signed the warrant for his civil degradation had been to send forth
invitations for a supper to celebrate the event.

His bankruptcy had been in one sense voluntary. Although he had cut
himself off from intercourse with his family when he took the house in
Chelsea, he knew that Trent would have helped him to make terms with
his creditors. But he knew also that Trent would have required him to
give up Molly Finucane. He had filed his petition with a light heart,
in the belief that the disgrace would fall more heavily on his brother
than on himself.

For the éclat resulting from his act he had been prepared, but not for
the effect of the éclat on his own mind.

He had been on his way to a club in Piccadilly overlooking the Green
Park, which served as a meeting-ground for those members of the cult
who kept on terms with respectability. Almost on the club steps he was
arrested by the sight of his name in large letters on a news-bill,
bringing the sharp reminder that he had forfeited his right of entry.

It was a shock to him to find that his exploit had suddenly lost its
charm. He bought a paper as he walked on, and read of his brother’s
promotion to the Cabinet. The unforeseen coincidence intensified his
discomfiture. This brother of his, whom he had always looked on as
a dullard and a prig, whom he had so often sneered at among his own
friends, was standing there crowned in front of the footlights, while
he, Alistair, was being hissed off the stage. In a flash he saw the
ruin he had made of his life, and was dismayed.

And as he wandered miserably through the streets the question that
had risen and struggled for expression in his mind was--Why? Why had
his brother so far surpassed him in the race? Why were the honours
and rewards of life bestowed on some and not on others? Why had he,
Alistair, steered his bark upon the rocks?

Standing there between that visible theatre of his brother’s triumph,
on the north side of the river, and the unknown hooligan realm upon the
south, with which there stole upon him a daunting sense of affinity, he
pondered the question; and while he pondered it, the feeling grew upon
him that it would not be answered by itself, that it was a part of a
more tremendous issue, that the meaning of life was involved in it, and
the eternal mystery of the world.

Alistair looked back for some clue to the tangled skein of his career;
and by-and-by the vista of the past took on distinctness, like one of
those marvellous canvases of Rembrandt from whose dingy surface there
gradually peeps out a whole magical landscape charged with light.




CHAPTER II

BIOGRAPHICAL


THE lustre of the rain was over the grey lochs and green Hebrides.

The broad sound that stretched between the Island of Oig and the
mainland was crinkled in furrows, on whose torn edges the foam-spit
flickered like driving snowflakes. Whenever the indigo folds of the
rolling rain parted for a minute the white beaches of Kesteven gleamed
out like a picked bone. Away to the southward, where the fishing-boats
were slowly reaching round the Mull of Oig, their taut sails glistened
like new-washed tiles in the sunshine; then, as they twisted about
and came up into the wind, the light emptied out of their sails like
water being spilt, and each boat in turn became a murky phantom gliding
forward along leaden grooves.

When the rain-wreaths closed round again, the mainland was blotted out
with its hills and pine-forests, and the fishing-boats were no longer
anything but blurred hints of things behind a screen. The mist wrapped
the Island of Oig round with a great stillness, as though it had been
removed a thousand miles off into the midst of the sea.

When at last the heavy cloud phalanxes broke and drifted overhead, and
the lochs and isles lay in clear day, something new had crossed into
the magic ring of the horizon.

Down in the south-east, in the far-off corner of the landscape, where
the pale rose-purple of the hills melted into the dark slate-purple
of the waves, a low black smudge had come like a flake of soot on a
glorious stained-glass window. Seen at first as a mere speck on the
picture, it swiftly spread and grew till it became a great dingy smear
trailing across the heavens. And there was something about this new
presence in the landscape which made it seem strange and hostile to
the rest. It was as though a harsh, unexpected note had been struck in
the middle of a symphony. All the other things there--the clouds and
the sunlight, the hills and the sea--seemed to have grown used to one
another during the ages, and to keep up a stately accord together; but
this smoke giant forced himself in amongst them, like an upstart that
had not learnt their ways--an ugly gnome of the underworld breaking
into the haunts of the fairies and the nixies.

Beneath the inky banner a small black steamer lifted its hull above the
wave-line and came on obstinately, beating defiance with its paddles to
the mother elements. The fishing-boats that for thousands of years had
put in and out from the little haven of Oig had never done aught but
coax the elemental forces in order to turn them to service. For them
the winds and the tides had been instruments on which they searched,
as it were, for the right chords. But this masterful intruder snapped
the strings in careless discord; compared with the others, it seemed
to be a burglar breaking the locks of Nature with a crowbar instead of
opening them with a key.

Fussing and fretting as it came, the steamboat struck right through
the fleet of fishing-boats, and hurried on. It churned its way noisily
into the harbour, driving small rowing-boats to right and left like
frightened birds, and took up its berth against the pier with the air
of an invading column taking up its quarters in a surrendered town. At
the same time everything seemed to wake up to meet it: the old men who
leant all day against the harbour wall started out of their dreams to
handle the ropes flung to them from the steamer’s deck; the harbour
master and the factor of the company hastened along the quay, and all
the folk of the little town issued from their houses and swarmed down
to the water’s edge. The whole Island of Oig roused itself from its six
days’ peace, and began to bustle for its life.

Having taken fast hold of the pier with its rope tentacles, the
masterful black monster rapped out a wooden gangway, down which there
walked quickly a passenger who looked as much estranged from the
surroundings as the floating machine which had transported him from the
mainland.

The strangeness was not so much in his black clothes as in his gait and
bearing. He walked jerkily, with short, quick steps, casting glances
to right and left through his spectacles, as though he were moving
through a crowd, on the lookout for hindrances. His feet struck the
ground in the helpless, violent fashion of one who wore boots and used
his feet merely as the ferrules of his legs on the pavement, instead of
as claws to grasp the ground with. The muscles of his neck had suffered
a similar atrophy; a long course of high collars and top-heavy hats had
drilled his head into a fixed pose, and it moved on the socket of the
neck stiffly and jerkily within certain narrow limits. That his eyes
had also become cramped by gazing at books instead of fields and clouds
was shown plainly enough, for this man of the town wore glasses. He had
only to open his mouth to speak, and you saw that his very teeth were
no longer Nature’s handiwork.

The townsman’s speech was as outlandish in the Island of Oig as were
his dress and gait. He stopped half-way down the pier, before a group
of boys, who had left their play to come and see the steamer, and put a
question in English.

“Can one of you boys direct me to the house of Mr. Duncan Gilderoy?”

Now, nearly everyone on the Island of Oig bore the name of Gilderoy;
and this was all the more noteworthy because Gilderoy was not their
real name, but one which the whole clan to which the islanders belonged
had taken to hide their own, in order to escape the enmity of other
and more powerful clans on the mainland, which had sworn to wipe them
out. This wholesale exchange had taken place more than three hundred
years before, and only a few of the very old islanders, living in the
most out-of-the-way corners of the isle, any longer remembered what
their real name was; and they were not believed by the rest, because
the story sounded so strange beside the sober narratives of events told
in the books written by people in Edinburgh, and called the “History of
Scotland.” Therefore, though the _Pax Britannica_ was now established
in Oig, the inhabitants still clung to their cloak-name, so that all
of them but those whose families had come into the island since the
sixteenth century called themselves Gilderoy. And of these Gilderoys
every third man had been baptized Duncan, because Duncan was the lucky
name of the island, and it was well known that if you were baptized
by that name you could not be drowned, unless the nixies made a
mistake;--though even that was not known to the present generation, who
had been brought up on the Edinburgh books, and who therefore thought
they had their children baptized Duncan because it was the custom.

So when the outlander put his question the boys stood dumb at first,
staring at him and wondering at his stupidity. The invader on his part
wondered at theirs.

“Don’t you speak English?” he demanded crossly, as though ignorance of
that tongue were wrong in itself, a sign of natural depravity which
even the benighted heathen must know in their hearts they ought to be
ashamed of.

The boys seemed to feel the force of the rebuke. They turned their eyes
to one who stood in the forefront of the little group, as if calling on
him to defend them. The leader answered instantly:

“What Duncan Gilderoy is that?”

He spoke the outlander’s tongue as easily as the outlander himself,
though each of them sounded his words in a way that seemed a little
strange in the other’s ears. The man from the mainland crowded his
words in that habit of hurried speech which towns beget. The boy
intoned his words with a slight shrillness caught from the winds and
waves that battle round the Hebrides. The boy had already learnt from
the stranger’s speech that he was an Englishman; the Englishman thought
he learnt from the boy’s that he was not a Scotchman. To the Englishman
a Scotchman was a person who spoke the dialect of old Northumbria. He
had expected to find the islanders of Oig speaking either Gaelic or the
speech of Burns.

“Are you English?” he exclaimed.

The boy flushed darkly.

“No,” he said, and held his tongue.

This time the invader looked at him closer. He was a handsome boy of
eleven or twelve years of age, tall, and rather slender, and although
he wore old, worn clothes, he did not look in the least humble or
ashamed of them, a thing which struck the Londoner’s mind as reckless
and a little bad. Below his kilt of dark green tartan, variegated with
stripes of black and white, the boy’s legs and feet were bare, like
those of his companions. Above the kilt he had on a shabby jacket of
black velvet with tarnished silver buttons, and a round bonnet set on
the back of his black curls made a frame for his face.

The man repeated his first question in another form.

“Do you know Mr. Duncan Gilderoy?”

“Do you mean Duncan Gilderoy of the Old House? Or is it the minister?”
asked the boy.

“No, it’s not the minister. He is a farmer, and they told me his house
was just outside the town.”

He said “town,” because he had heard it called that on the steamer. But
his London eye called it “village.” Two rows of squat houses struggling
up from the harbour’s edge to a small kirk just under the ridge of the
hill--that was all he could see.

“Then that is Duncan Gilderoy of the Old House,” put in another of the
boys.

The man turned to him.

“Has he a young gentleman living with him, named Stuart?” he asked.

All eyes were turned to the boy who had been the first to speak. This
boy gave a distrustful, searching glance at the stranger.

“If that is the Duncan Gilderoy you want, I can take you to him,” he
said, rather unwillingly.

“Come on, then.”

The other boys fell back, staring hard, as their comrade walked
off beside the man in the English clothes. The man carried a small
travelling-bag in one hand, and before they had gone many yards he
offered it to his guide.

“Would you like to earn a sixpence?” he said pleasantly.

The boy flushed again and frowned angrily. Then he stopped dead, and,
turning round, shouted back to the group they had just left:

“Here, Jock, carry his bag, and he’ll give you sixpence.”

Jock proved to be the boy who had guessed which Duncan Gilderoy the
stranger wanted. He darted from the rest, and ran up to seize the bag,
and then, having taken possession of it, fell in on the other side of
its owner.

The Londoner felt he had made a mistake of some kind. The boy who had
refused an offer of sixpence commanded his respect. Gazing at him
again, it began to dawn upon him that this bare-footed young Highlander
carried himself with dignity, and that he held up his head in a way
that is not taught in Board-schools. The next moment the boy, aware
that he was being studied, lowered his head with a defensive instinct,
and glanced at the man out of the corner of his dark eyes. The glance
was at once sly and naïve, like that of some bright, wicked bird.

“And what is your name, my boy?” the Englishman asked, with a touch of
middle-class patronage. He could not quite get the bare feet out of his
mind.

“I am Alistair Stuart.”

The stranger uttered a sound of surprise.

“The Stuart who lives with Mr. Duncan Gilderoy?”

“Yes.” The answer came unwillingly again.

“Then you are the boy I have come here for.”

“I knew that,” said Stuart. And a slightly cunning look came into his
eyes.

The man was baffled. He could not quite make up his mind whether the
boy had been playing a practical joke on him from the first, or had
been merely too dull to explain himself. Londoner-like, he leant a
little towards the second supposition, for he was managing clerk to a
firm of solicitors in Theobald’s Road, and firmly believed that human
nature contained no depths which he had not sounded to their very
bottom. He believed that all men were animated by one supreme motive,
the making of money, that they were distracted and impeded in their
progress towards the goal by the counter-attractions of woman and wine,
and that he was the wisest who best withstood these allurements, and
kept his gaze steadily fixed on that yellow bull’s-eye of endeavour. He
regarded the law as the rules of the game, and knew to a hair exactly
how far it was possible to go without breaking them. There was only one
irrational element in the man’s life: he was a Wesleyan, and holding it
for certain that the doctrine of that sect amounted to an immediate
communication to himself from his Maker, of whom he was a good deal
afraid, he paid in reluctantly but largely to the Church funds, which
he regarded as a species of blackmail levied by God on business men.

The three walked up through the narrow street together. The street was
paved with cobble-stones, and ascended in layers or great steps, with
one or more houses to a step. The houses themselves would have been
called hovels in London, and looking at them, the law-clerk considered
that he was walking through a slum. He wondered almost mournfully how
human creatures could submit to pass their lives in such miserable
conditions. The sight of the bare-footed lads and lasses with their
red cheeks and shapely legs woke actual pity in his breast; for he was
naturally kind, and his kindness could only find expression in the
benevolent wish to take control of all these lives which he understood
so little, and shape them into the image of his own.

Stuart had been looking forward to the coming of this man ever since
he could remember. He had always known that Duncan Gilderoy was only
his foster-father, and that his life would not be lived out on Oig.
They had told him that his father and mother lived in France, and
that his father was too ill to have his children with him. He could
not recollect these legendary parents, who were only known to him by
portraits which he religiously cherished, and by letters which came
to him regularly from his mother. His father, from whom he received
only occasional messages, was the object of a devotion that filled his
whole heart; his yearning for that unknown father’s love was one of
those passions of childhood which are never told, and which are never
forgotten. There was more of awe than love in his thoughts about his
mother; she was an Englishwoman, and the tenderness that her letters
expressed was overlaid with pious monitions and references to Bible
texts. He learned that he had an elder brother, James, who was being
educated at a school in England under the casual supervision of the
head of the family, who had never noticed Alistair. At some time or
other--he was doubtful when--the perception had come that the character
of his upbringing was at least partly due to lack of money. The islands
and moorlands, the castles and broad acres that made up the great
inheritance of Trent and Colonsay were all tributary to certain men of
law in London and in Edinburgh, whom the clansmen of Oig hated as a
conquered nation hates the invader encamped upon its soil.

Alistair knew also--for these things were the history and politics of
Oig--that his father stood next in succession to the dukedom, and that
his brother’s favour with the reigning Duke was in right of his exalted
destiny as heir.

Thus the boy, reared in the society of herdsmen and fishers, who were
to him as kinsmen of a lower rank, had had always before his eyes the
vision of the great world in which he was one day to play a part.
Civilization shone for him afar off, as it shines for the native of
some colonial wilderness, in all the hues of hope and wonder. How often
had he climbed to the top of the cliff that overlooked the Sound of
Oig, and laid himself down on the wind-mown grass, looking and longing
for the first peep of that sooty feather which he had taken for the
signal of emancipation. No instinct had ever warned him that the little
noisy packet was a slaveship, the galley of the great Anglo-Roman Raj,
coming to make him captive, and carry him off to be tamed and trained
into a citizen of the Raj, to speak its tongue and wear its dress,
and learn its manners, and its laws, till the innermost pulse of his
being should be timed to the Anglo-Roman time, and the ancient Pictish
blood in his veins should forget its source, and run as if through
Anglo-Roman ducts.

Looking back across his life to this point of departure, it seemed to
Alistair that he had found the clue of his tangled skein, and that he
might in time achieve a complete answer to the riddle of his fate. For
a moment the longing of his heart returned to that green islet in its
grey sea, and he bitterly regretted that he had not been left to live
out his life there among the clansmen whom he loved, and by whom he was
beloved, who esteemed him as a prince among them, and would have still
esteemed and shielded him had he become the outlaw of the Raj. He was
an exile--surely it was this, he told himself--he was an outlander
adrift amongst a race to which he did not belong; which he never could
understand, and by which he never could be understood.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first great misunderstanding with his captors had come when he was
a boy. There was a Velasquez-looking portrait on the walls of Colonsay
House of a lad of fifteen, long-legged and slim, with eyes like the
night--a night haunted by the slumber of wild beasts that the first
footfall will disturb. The dress of this boy was touched with the
girlish delicacy that betrays a mother’s darling: the collar was of
lace, the jacket was of velvet, the straw hat, thrust back from his
forehead, was costlier than lace or velvet. At night he slept in silk,
in a tapestried chamber. His days were passed within the stately walls,
or in roaming through the glorious demesne, of one of the historic
homes of England, watched over with all the care that love and wealth
could afford.

He had lived with his mother ever since his father’s death. It was not
until she had clasped him in her arms that she had told him of his
loss, and she had never suspected the bitterness of the boy’s grief.
The father whom he had never known remained a sacred memory still, all
the more sacred because his mother never talked to him about the dead.
By this time the old Duke was dead as well, and James had succeeded
him, so that the days of hardship were over, and the inheritance was
being nursed back into something like its former splendour.

A fond yearning to regain some of the lost years of their childhood had
caused their mother to keep both her boys beside her, giving them a
tutor instead of a school. But she had another motive which she tried
to believe was paramount--the desire to bring them early into her own
religious fold.

During four years Alistair had had his mind steeped day after day
in the emotional atmosphere of primitive Christianity. This was his
mother’s native air, and she could not have been brought to believe
that it might be drawn with difficulty and pain by any human creature.
If the knowledge had been forced upon her that such a training was
unwholesome for either of her sons, her universe would have become a
maze without a plan; her God would have been shattered like Dagon.

To both the boys this training came as part of the yoke which age
imposes on youth. Boyhood is always surrendering its secret convictions
at the bidding of authority; the process called education is one long
defeat of the barbarians by the legions. Their mother heard them repeat
the phrases which she had taught them, and believed in her work.

A cold temper and unimaginative mind enabled the elder boy to take this
religion in the formal spirit in which it has been taken by a great
part of mankind for two thousand years. As a theory of the universe
it received his unquestioning assent; as a life-motive it left him
practically untouched. He became the unconscious hypocrite whom the
Gospel was written to make us loathe, and who has governed the Church
ever since the Gospel was written.

On Alistair his mother’s teaching had another effect. A poet’s
sensitiveness on the score of words made him shrink at times from
the familiar language of his mother’s creed. But his temperament
responded readily to the exciting influence of religious emotion, and
the cunning which usually accompanies hysteria taught him to use this
faculty for his own protection. When he had been naughty during the
day--and Alistair was already marked out as the naughty one of the
two brothers--it was his mother’s habit to come into his room after
he had gone to bed, and try to soften him. She knelt beside the bed,
and talked and prayed with him till the boy melted in a confession of
wrongdoing, and the two made it up with kisses and tears.

These scenes had endeared Alistair to his mother, whose tenderness for
her younger son aroused the elder’s secret jealousy. They had been
ruinous to the boy himself, whom they made an emotional debauchee. He
spent his sincerity in spasms of repentance which left him worse than
before. There were yet other consequences: the nervous organization is
a sensitive instrument, which ignorant fingers do not touch for nothing.

For a year past Alistair had inspired his mother with hopes that he was
ripening for the change of mind which she called conversion. He had
become more serious; his gaiety was sometimes dashed with melancholy;
he wrote verses which she treasured up as evidences of the direction
his intelligence was taking. The verses were echoes of the poets whom
she had placed in his hands, and her favourite poets were Miss Havergal
and Dr. Bonar. He had taken to wandering much by himself in the park;
sometimes on returning from these rambles he posed her with strange
questions about the nature of the Deity and the contradictions that
abound in every positive system of the universe.

The mother drew happy auguries. Like Hannah, she dedicated her son
to the Lord, and wrote to the Archbishop who was his godfather, to
interest him in the boy.

All this time one half of life had been carefully hidden from Alistair.
Of the great mystery of life he knew less than an animal knows.
For him, as for all his generation, the divine lore which was once
communicated in solemn temples and amid consecrated groves, which
is still given the character of a revelation among the worshipping
millions beneath the Himalayas, lay under the blight of the great
ascetic frenzy which spread round the Mediterranean zone two thousand
years ago. The temple had long been a stew, the revelation a vulgar
jest bandied about on furtive lips; the groves were cut down, the
torches were blown out, the musical instruments were broken, and the
rite of initiation had passed from the holy places into the sewers. The
road of darkness was esteemed the road of safety; and Alistair walked
upon it in ignorance alike of the law of Heaven and of the taboo of
man.

The Garden of Eden is like that flying island of Arabian geography
which descends unawares in front of the adventurer, and tempts him
to tread its enamelled turf, surrendering his senses to the hymeneal
music of its birds, and the perfume of its myriad flowers. The earth
was changed for Alistair by a keeper’s daughter, a girl of his own
age, with a face fair as an apple-blossom, in whose heart the seed of
ambition had been early sown by a vain mother’s hand. All through one
summer-tide they met by stealth among the woods of Trent; while she,
intoxicated by the young lord’s notice, listened with uncomprehending
ears to that passionate romance which youth pours out at the first
touch of love: and for him the sunshine sprinkled all the air with
orange-blossoms through the green network overhead, the silver
birch-stems rose like rejoicing fountains in the glimmering shade,
the hum of insects lapped his enamoured ear like the vague music of a
shell, the very ground distilled a rapturous scent, and all his pulses
sang within him as his life swept into the great throb of the universal
world.

The retribution which followed on discovery tortured him still in
the remembrance. What such a discovery must have cost a mother like
his, he could not gauge. He only knew that every sacred feeling in
his own breast had been outraged, the innermost sanctuary had been
profaned, the delicate blossoms had been uprooted and trampled in the
mire. He had a recollection of hideous scenes, of questions that were
intolerable insults, of a visit from the Archbishop, who came too late
to mediate, and, finally, of a term of penal servitude passed in an
institution abroad, from which Alistair returned a Roman Catholic.

In his mother’s eyes this was a moral bankruptcy. Fresh influences were
brought to bear on the perverted one; the rest of his youth was passed
in drifting from one guardianship to another, under a perpetual cloud,
and manhood found him without faith and without a career.

That his mother had loved him throughout Alistair knew well, though
even he did not know how much she loved him. Perhaps the love between
them had been strengthened by the tragedy of the past. It seemed to
Alistair now to have been the old story of the hen that has hatched
out a duckling from the shell. He thought of his mother with a painful
mingling of wrath and tenderness, believing her to have been cruel to
him, and knowing that she had been cruel to herself for his sake. The
mother whom his instinct taught him to demand was one of those mothers
of the passionate races, who live only to be the slaves of their sons,
to hear their confessions, to soothe their remorse, to abet them in
their worst crimes. His grievance against his own mother was that she
had not taken him for what he was. The changeling had been tormented
in the hope of giving it a human soul.

When he came of age he took the problem out of her hands. “You do not
understand me,” he told her one day; “I must live my own life.”

His brother, Trent, had granted him an allowance of a thousand a year,
which his tradesmen raised to five thousand. The contents of every shop
in London were at the command of the brother of the Duke of Trent and
Colonsay, on condition that the brother of the Duke paid double for
them. The shopkeepers began by cheating him, as though they foresaw
that he would end by cheating them.

Stuart hardly knew that he was extravagant. Most of the ways in which
he spent money were ways in which he heard other men praised for
spending it. He collected miniatures; he bought old cabinets, which
were repaired for him by skilful workmen; he published tiny volumes
with his own poems, in which a strain of southern passion mingled with
the dreamy melancholy of the northern seas. His pleasures were those
of a poet, not a man about town. He lent money to those about him, to
the poets whose names were unknown to the readers of magazines, to the
painters whose pictures were abhorred by the Royal Academy, to the
musicians who could not make bright tunes. Such men have no right to
live; but Stuart fed them at his table, and rejoiced in the incense of
their praise.

It was the difference between Lord Alistair Stuart and the men who
surrounded him which had first fascinated Molly Finucane. He had been
for her a mystery which she was bent on exploring. When after a time
she found that this intellectual side of her lover’s character was out
of her reach, she became jealous, and sought to choke it. It was of
such as she that a certain acquaintance of Stuart’s in those days wrote
that all men kill the thing they love.

In her own way, and with what truth was left to her, Molly Finucane did
love Alistair Stuart. That was the part of it which others could not
be expected to allow for. The life in the house in Chelsea had been
as regular as that of any married pair. The only visitors received
were Stuart’s friends. Molly had discarded all her old associates
as completely as though she had been really married--always with
the exception of Mendes, whom Alistair sometimes asked to dinner.
She had practised what in her eyes was economy, playing the novel
part of housekeeper, enjoying the strange experience of giving
orders to tradesmen, and calculating the prices of household stuff.
Unfortunately, she could not shake off at once the habits of reckless
expense which she had been taught. Her nature had come to crave for
excitement as an opium-eater’s craves for the drug, and the only
amusements she knew were costly ones. The play, for Molly, meant a
brougham, a little dinner at a smart restaurant, a private box, and
a supper at some Bohemian night-club--in short, the spending of five
or ten pounds. She went to the theatres and music-halls very often.
On the nights when she did not go she felt disastrously bored, and
wished herself dead. Then she had to have flowers every day, and a new
bracelet or some such trifle every week, or she felt herself neglected.
She had acquired the fatal idea that the love of men was only to be
gauged by the money they spent on her. An unbroken stream of these
offerings was necessary to convince her that Stuart had not tired of
her.

In reality, it was the attempt to live within his means which destroyed
Lord Alistair’s credit. As soon as his tradesmen heard of the house
in Chelsea they began to send in their bills, and as soon as the
money-lenders heard that he was paying his debts they refused to help
him. It was the Duke of Trent whom they had trusted to, and now they
recollected that the Duke’s estates had come to him heavily mortgaged.
They told Lord Alistair to apply to his brother, and his brother told
him to leave Molly Finucane. Like the rest of the world, he believed
that it was the house in Chelsea which had brought his brother down.

Alistair had retorted by filing his petition. It was to be open war at
last, he told himself. If the head of his house would not heed him,
neither would he heed the honour of the house.

And now, as he stood on the bridge and gazed at the spectacle of the
night, it was borne in upon him more fully and more clearly that he was
not without companions; that his case was not a solitary case, but
that other houses besides the house of Trent and Colonsay had their
younger sons and their failures; that other lands besides Oig had given
their children to be devoured by the minotaur called Civilization; that
his was only one of those broken lives which underlie the pageantry of
empire, like the rubble underneath rich palace walls.

       *       *       *       *       *

He turned once more to regard the spectacle of the night, and his eye
swept over the two edifices that confronted each other immediately
above the bridge, the palace, and the hospital; the chosen of the race
gathered in the one, its victims in the other, as if civilization were
an army whose headquarters and whose ambulance stood side by side. His
eye rested long where the road leading down into the dark purlieus of
poverty and crime flared and roared like the mouth of sheol; then it
returned to the northern side, where the roof of a great mansion was
just visible above the trees.

What he saw there was the form of a grey-haired woman seated alone,
thinking of her prodigal son, perhaps praying for him, perhaps
expecting him. He threw one last backward glance towards the city of
Ahriman, and then, with a shudder, he set his face towards the gates of
Ormuzd, and walked swiftly off the bridge.

All the time he had been standing there a prayer had been going up to
Heaven: “Give me back my son, O Lord! Give me back my son!”




CHAPTER III

THE PRODIGAL SON


ALISTAIR walked past the lights of Palace Yard, and turned into the
broad avenue of Parliament Street, bordered by the vast offices of the
British Empire. When he had gone half-way to Charing Cross, he turned
aside again, and presently found himself in front of a high and sombre
house, one of a row whose windows overlooked the river and the bridge.
It stood back in a bleak garden enclosed in tall iron railings, where
nothing grew but grass and trees and ivy, all of the same shade of
soot-encrusted green. This was Colonsay house, a relic of the days when
the Thames had been a glorious highway between the cities of London and
Westminster, a highway lined with the dwellings of great nobles, and
bright with painted barges and fluttering banners.

Now a slight air of decay hung over the old house, and it seemed
conscious that it had outlived its generation. The tide no longer
washed the foot of its lawn, and rich brocades and jewelled sword-hilts
no longer sparkled under its trees. It stood there with its few
neighbours, isolated among the encroaching buildings of a newer age,
and waiting its own turn to be devoured.

Stuart hesitated for a moment as he stood outside the door. There had
been a time when he would have walked through that door as of right.
But it was long since he had lived under his brother’s roof, and more
than a year since he had passed this doorway last. During the time that
he had been living in Chelsea he had shunned all intercourse with his
family. His mother had written to him more than once, but her letters
had remained unanswered. The letters were entreaties to him to abandon
the woman who was dragging him down, and he had not abandoned her.

He raised his hand to the bell, and jerked it roughly. Then he stood
waiting, half ashamed to encounter the gaze of his brother’s servants,
and resenting their curiosity in advance.

“Is the Duke in?” he asked of the man who opened the door. He had no
wish to meet his brother that night.

In the first moment the footman did not recognize his questioner. The
next his face lit up with an expression of respectful sympathy.

“No, my lord; his Grace is at the House of Lords. But will your
lordship come in?”

As he threw the door wider the butler, an old family retainer, stepped
forward. His face wore the same expression as the footman’s, a little
less subdued, and he ventured on a word of welcome.

“I hope I see your lordship well? Her Grace is upstairs, and I believe
would be very glad to see your lordship.”

“Very well, Stokes,” said Stuart shortly, giving the footman his hat
and stick. “I’ll go up.”

The servants fell back with faces of demure congratulation as he passed
between them to the foot of the staircase. It was evident that they
viewed this home-coming of the prodigal as the pleasant and appropriate
ending to a deeply interesting history. Perhaps Lord Alistair’s
transgressions had aroused in their breasts a secret fellow-feeling
such as they could never have for their upright, decorous master. The
conduct which had disgraced Lord Alistair in the eyes of his equals had
made him a hero in theirs. Disgrace, after all, is a relative term;
what is ignominy in the schoolroom is often glory in the playground.

Alistair reached the first floor, and took his way to the
well-remembered little drawing-room, where his mother always sat when
she was alone. Tapping softly on the panel, he opened the door and went
in.

It was an old-fashioned room with narrow Georgian windows, and the
walls were decorated with painted panels, set in elaborate gilt
scrollwork, with small tail-pieces underneath, in the style of an
Italian altar-piece. A picture of sportsmen in a coppice was completed
by a dead pheasant below, and a sea-piece was similarly finished off
with a group of shells. In contrast with this eighteenth-century
elegance the furniture was of that ungraceful, stereotyped pattern
which has not yet been out of date long enough to be esteemed for its
curiosity. It was the work of an age which valued the useful above the
beautiful, and preferred the accurate production of machinery to the
irregular handiwork of the craftsman. It was the age of the political
economists, when Free Trade was the gospel of humanity, and the world’s
ideal took shape in a huge bazaar. It was an age in which England ruled
the world, and the shopkeeper ruled England, and men deemed that the
millennium could not be far away.

The religion of this age was Evangelical Christianity. The work
of Wellesley and Whitefield still leavened the national life from
the cottage to the throne. The Catholic conspiracy had not become
formidable; the rising tide of knowledge had not yet sapped the
foundations of the old beliefs. A miscellany of Hebrew literature, half
savage, half sublime, bound up with the cryptic legends of the Roman
catacombs, and rendered into English by the intellect of the sixteenth
century, was accepted as the personal composition of the Creator,
inspired, infallible, and irrevocable, from the first letter in the
word _Genesis_ to the last in the word _Amen_. Salvation by faith was
the watchword of the Churches; the unbeliever was assured that his
best actions were but additional sins until he had gone through that
spiritual experience which brought him within the pale of the redeemed.

Yet this strait, remorseless creed educated women who were gracious
and beautiful in their lives, and of such women Caroline, Duchess
of Trent, was one. She accepted her creed, as the scientist accepts
the law of cause and effect, without understanding it, but her logic
was able to reconcile it with hope and charity, and with a tireless
devotion to the good of all about her.

They who are willing to sacrifice themselves will never want those who
are willing to accept the sacrifice. In her girlhood Caroline had been
a maid of honour in the Court of Queen Victoria, and she had ever since
been one of that small circle whom the widowed monarch counted as her
personal friends. The needs of selfish parents had forced her into an
early marriage with a sickly old man whom she nursed faithfully and
kindly, but whom she could not love. He died before she was thirty,
leaving her with enough wealth to attract Lord Alexander Stuart, the
penniless younger son of a great but impoverished house.

To this man, as handsome as he was worthless, she gave her heart and
her fortune, in accordance with the common law which mates the best
with the worst, and he had become the father of her children before she
made the discovery that he was an irreclaimable drunkard and gambler.
For their own sakes she consented to part with her children, and she
passed the next ten years of her life in accompanying the man to whom
she believed herself bound, from Continental hotel to hotel, keeping up
a hopeless struggle against the vices which were dragging him down to
the grave.

Her loyalty, and perhaps some relic of her love, survived him, and no
word of hers had ever betrayed his memory to his sons. In the face of
the younger she found a resemblance to his father which had insensibly
gained on her affection, and although she had tried to disguise it from
them, and from herself, both the boys soon knew that Alistair was their
mother’s favourite. When the courtesy rank of Duchess was conferred on
her by royal patent, she did not value the distinction for herself,
but her mother’s heart felt a secret pride that her handsome, naughty
Alistair should be given the style of Lord.

The catastrophe which opened her eyes to the meaning of heredity
rendered her frantic with grief and shame. That likeness between
Alistair and his father which had fascinated her for so long now became
a source of terror. The handsome boyish face, with its ruddy cheeks and
bright eyes and clustering curls, which had gladdened her sight, was
now a dreadful chart in which she read prophecies of evil to come.

Under the stress of panic she took that step which she had since
bitterly regretted, which had cost Alistair his religion, and had cost
her his confidence. Ever since that miserable time mother and son had
remained apart, gazing at each other wistfully across a chasm which
neither could bridge.

The life which he had been leading since his manhood seemed to her a
dangerous, if not an evil one. She saw him moving in a world which was
wholly strange to her, a world in which her own ideals of conduct were
ignored or despised. She heard that he had written poems which she was
advised not to see. Trent told her they were unfit for any decent woman
to read, and the Archbishop added that they were blasphemous. When she
ventured on a remonstrance with Alistair he replied by telling her that
art was above morality, and that a poet must be a law unto himself.

Like all the mothers of her generation, she would fain have shut her
eyes to one side of her son’s life. But even she could not help but
hear of such a portent as Molly Finucane. The Archbishop felt it
his duty to warn her. Trent openly complained that his brother was
disgracing the family, and threatened to forbid him the house. He might
have carried out the threat if Alistair had not ceased his visits of
his own accord.

By this time sorrow had helped her sixty years to make the Duchess an
old woman. Her figure was still upright, but her hair was silvered. Her
face, at once sweet and venerable, was marked by a settled sadness. Her
elder son had been as great a comfort to her as his brother had been a
trial, and she had learned to value him more and more. Yet not all her
pride in Trent’s career could soothe her inward grief and yearning over
the marred life of the son who had gone astray.

Alistair came in softly, and found his mother in tears. At the sound
of his footstep on the threshold her face flushed, and she rose up,
breathing fast, and went quickly to meet him, with a great joy shining
in her eyes.

“My boy!” she cried hysterically. “My boy Alistair!”

They stood there silently for a space, with their arms round one
another’s necks, and both felt comforted, for these two loved each
other very tenderly, and they had not met for a long time.

Such moments do not last. The first gush of affection spent, they were
left face to face, two natures belonging to different worlds.

While Alistair led his mother to a seat he asked anxiously:

“When is Trent likely to be back? I don’t want to see him.”

The Duchess looked troubled.

“He won’t be in till late, I expect. He is introducing a Bill in the
House to-night, and he told me not to sit up for him. I think there is
another debate on first, about the Church.”

Alistair heard her listlessly. The doings of the House of Lords sounded
in his ears just then like the fretting of phantoms on a stage. He had
struck his foot for the first time against reality. What does anyone
know of life who has never risen in the morning wondering under what
roof he shall lay his head at night?

“But you ought to see him,” the mother went on to say. “He is your
brother--neither of you should ever forget that. You want his help,
dear, and I am sure he will help you if you will only let him.”

“He should have helped me before,” Alistair returned in a resentful
tone. “I know Trent; he would not lift a finger to save me from being
hanged unless he were afraid of what people would say.”

“Don’t be bitter,” the mother pleaded. “Your brother means well by you,
I am sure.”

“Nonsense, mother; he would be only too glad to get rid of me
altogether. I have always been a thorn in his side. He looks upon me
as the black sheep of the family, and always will. Trent would like to
pack me off to the Klondike for the next ten years, I expect.”

As this was one of the suggestions which had actually fallen from the
Duke’s lips that day, when the news of his brother’s insolvency had
been brought to the house, the Duchess found it difficult to answer.

“Klondike would be better for you than the life you have been leading
here,” she said as gently as she could. “Don’t you think it would be
better for you to leave London and go abroad for a time out of the
reach of temptation?”

The young man frowned. He knew very well what was meant by the word
“temptation.”

“I can’t go without money,” he said shortly.

“I could let you have a little, dear, and James, I know, will let
you have as much as you want, as long as he knows that it won’t be
spent”--she hesitated an instant--“in bad ways.”

Alistair scowled.

“What business is it of his how I spend my money?”

His mother raised her hand with a certain quiet dignity.

“It is my business, at all events, to know what kind of life my boy is
living, and to sorrow when I know that he is living in open sin and
shame.”

To this speech Alistair made no answer. He could have made none that
would not have added to his mother’s pain.

“How much do you want?” the Duchess asked presently in a weary tone. It
was not the first conversation between them that had ended at the same
point.

The young man started up.

“Look here, mother, I didn’t come here to ask for money; I’m past that
now. It doesn’t matter to me whether I stay in London or go abroad.
Trent can decide for himself about that. Anyway, I must go under for
a time, I suppose, and I don’t much care if I ever come up again. I
was out on Westminster Bridge just now, wondering whether it wouldn’t
be the easiest way to drop over, and put an end to it all; and then I
thought of you, and felt sorry for your sake more than my own; and so I
made up my mind to come and see you--and here I am.”

The poor lady shook a good deal as she listened to this speech; and,
remembering her prayer just before Alistair came in, she breathed a
silent thanksgiving, and the tears came back into her eyes.

“Oh, my poor boy, can’t you see that all this is the result of the life
you have chosen!” She would have liked to make a more direct reference
to her religious belief, but feared to do so. She had learnt by this
time that her son and she had no common ground in that direction.
“Why--why don’t you leave that wicked woman, and start a new life? She
is ruining you, body and soul.”

Alistair frowned impatiently.

“I can’t let you say that, mother. It’s not her fault, Heaven knows!
The poor little thing has tried to do her best for me. She is a great
deal better than some of your good women, who would draw their skirts
aside if they passed her in the street.”

He spoke roughly, but not disrespectfully.

The Duchess sighed heavily.

“My unhappy boy, you know nothing about good women. You never meet
them; you might be a different man if you did. If I could only bring
you under the influence of some really good, devoted girl, such as I
know”--a name rose to the Duchess’s lips, but she deemed it wiser not
to pronounce it at that moment--“who would love you well enough to
overlook the past, she might redeem you even now.”

Alistair sighed, too, at the picture called up by his mother’s words.
He thought of poor little neurotic Molly, with her spasms of utter
wretchedness, her hysterical fits, her occasional drunken outbreaks
in which all the gutter in her blood came to the surface; he thought
of her perpetual, feverish craving for excitement, of her secret
hatred of his intellectual pursuits, of their ill-managed, disorderly
household, with insolent servants going and coming every month. And
then he contrasted the portrait with that of some sweet and gracious
maiden--such a girl as his mother must have been in her youth--who
would bring peace into his life, whose presence would be soothing as
the sound of church bells heard at evening across the autumn fields,
who would guide and rule their home through happy years of wedded
friendship. Alistair sighed.

His mother heard and drew courage from the sigh. Already her mind was
busy in working out a scheme for her boy’s salvation. Her eagerness led
her to make a false step at the outset.

“If you will go away even for a short time I shall feel happier,” she
pleaded. “Won’t you try to separate yourself from this woman? If you
like to go abroad I could come with you, perhaps. You have often said
that you should like to visit Rome?”

Alistair shook his head stubbornly.

“I cannot go away without Molly.”

The Duchess of Trent flushed. It seemed to her that this answer was an
insult, even though she had in a manner forced it from him.

“I wonder that you dare say that to me,” she said, with a touch of
anger.

“I beg your pardon, mother. But it’s no good our discussing such
things. I can’t expect you to understand how I feel about her. She has
given up everything--you may say she has reformed--for my sake, and if
I were to send her adrift now I should feel myself a blackguard. Why,
God help me, I believe the poor little thing’s been selling her jewels
to pay the housekeeping bills for the last few months. If she’d been my
wife she couldn’t have done more than that.”

His mother started, and a look of dreadful apprehension came into her
eyes.

“Don’t talk like that, Alistair! I’m getting old, and it frightens me.
Promise me, promise me, my own dear son, that you will never _marry_
her?”

In her agitation the poor lady rose and went to him, laying a pleading
hand on his shoulder as she looked into his face.

“No, I don’t suppose I shall ever do that,” he said.

But he spoke in a tone of dejection, like a man not certain of himself,
and the mother’s fear was not relieved.




CHAPTER IV

A FAMILY COUNCIL


THE Duke of Trent and Colonsay, after shaking hands with the Prime
Minister, and receiving the congratulations of several colleagues on
his first appearance as a Minister in charge of an important measure,
was walking out of the House, when he felt himself tapped familiarly on
the shoulder from behind.

He turned round in some annoyance, for he was careful of his dignity,
but the look of rebuke was exchanged for one of respectful pleasure
as he perceived that the hand which had touched him was the Duke of
Gloucester’s.

“Are you going back to Colonsay House?” the Prince inquired.

“I _was_ going,” the Minister returned, conveying by the change of
tense that his movements were for the Prince to dispose of.

“That’s right; then I’ll walk round with you, if I shan’t put you out,”
Prince Herbert said, linking his arm in friendly fashion in the Duke’s.

The two companions were old acquaintances; they might almost be called
friends. They had been boys together, in so far as a Prince is allowed
to be a boy. Their houses were in the same part of the country, and the
cordial relations between the Duchess Caroline and her royal mistress
had been renewed by their descendants.

At that time, indeed, Prince Herbert had been more intimate with
Alistair Stuart than with James. The younger boy’s merry, versatile
disposition had made him a favourite, while his brother was rather a
dull companion. But the course of their later lives had tended to keep
up the intercourse between the Prince and the Duke, while Alistair had
gradually drifted away into paths in which it was impossible for his
royal friend to keep him company.

The new Home Secretary expected to receive some compliment as they
passed out under the vast vault of the Victoria Tower and turned
eastward. His speech that night had been a marked success. The Bill
he had just introduced was one to provide the punishment of flogging
for the gangs of street-boys who infested the southern side of the
river. He had denounced the enemies of order with conviction, and the
House had cordially endorsed his righteous anger. No one had been
weak enough to think, or bold enough to suggest, that there was any
better way to deal with the hooligan than to flog him. There had been
a time when England could export her savages to savage lands, but, by
some wonderful political alchemy, no sooner did she cast her convict
colonies on the shores of America and Australia than they rose up
mighty states, and with the zeal of renegades refused to harbour the
next criminal generation. Even the army, so long the last refuge of
the blackguard, was become respectable. Science was already lifting a
confident voice to preach extermination for the unfit, and society,
puzzled between the old creed and the new, found itself too weak to
crucify, but not too weak to scourge.

It was with a sense of disappointment that the young Minister found
that their walk was to be a silent one. The Prince said nothing till
they were in Colonsay House.

“I suppose the Duchess is not up so late as this?” the Prince asked, as
they entered the hall.

“My mother generally goes on about this time, but I will ask. Stokes,
go and see if her Grace is in her room, and if so tell her his Royal
Highness has asked for her.”

The Duke led the way into a Japanese smoking lounge which opened
off the stairs. A large bow-window revealed the panorama of the
night-enchanted river, the reflections of the bridge lamps veining the
tide with molten gold.

Prince Herbert walked to the window and gazed out speechless for
several minutes, during which his host strewed a lacquered table with
cigars of a rare brand, named after the Prince himself.

“The grandest view in Europe, I always think,” the Prince observed,
as he turned reluctantly from the window. “And yet there is something
dreadful in it. It is so utterly removed from Nature. It makes one
think of the underground life which we are told the race will one day
have to take to.”

“We have taken to it already, it seems to me,” Trent answered. “We
travel underground, our light and water come to us underground, our
food is cooked underground, and I am told there are underground stables
in some parts of London.”

Prince Herbert closed his lips as he walked across to choose a cigar.
It was not the first time that he had found James Stuart a heavy person
to talk to. He could not help comparing this commonplace mind, with
its prim grasp of daily life and its impotence to rise to any higher
plane, with the brilliant and sensitive imagination of Alistair, like
a soaring bubble, one moment glowing with the reflected radiance of a
thousand stars, the next moment smashed against the coarse paling of
the roadway.

Yet it was this man who enjoyed honour and favour, while the other was
become an outcast. It was to this man that he himself was about to sue
for some toleration of the other.

He had just struck a light when the door opened to admit Alistair’s
mother. With the quick instinct of sympathy she had divined the object
of the royal visit, and she pressed a warm kiss on the Prince’s
forehead as he came forward to greet her.

“My dear aunt,” he exclaimed, using the title which he had given her in
his boyish days, “I hope you haven’t come downstairs on my account. I
ought to have gone up to you.”

“I would much rather sit here, and see you smoke,” she said, with an
affectionate smile. “That is, if an old woman is not in the way of two
young men.”

Prince Herbert hastened to draw forward a chair, but the Duchess
refused to sit down till the visitor had lit his cigar. As soon as some
servants who had brought in a tray of spirits had left the room, the
Prince opened his appeal.

“I am very sorry about Alistair,” he said.

A frown passed quickly over the Duke’s face at this allusion to the
family trouble, but his mother looked up gratefully.

“I was sure you would be,” she responded. “Poor foolish boy! If only I
could find a way to save him!”

“Couldn’t this have been prevented?” inquired Prince Herbert, glancing
at the elder brother.

James shook his head decisively.

“It was impossible. My mother will tell you I did everything I could.
Twice I have got him to give me an account of his debts, and settled
them, as I thought. But I don’t believe now that he ever let me know
one half of what he really owed. It is like pouring water into a sieve
to try and help Alistair.”

“Do you know what the amount is now?”

“Fifty or sixty thousand, I understand. I don’t suppose he knows within
ten thousand or so himself. It is two years’ revenue of the property.
Everything is entailed; I can only mortgage my life interest, and that
means paying a heavy premium for life insurance. Ever since he came of
age I have given him a thousand a year, and of course he could have his
rooms here if he chose to lead a decent life. My mother knows that that
is the very utmost I can do for him if I mean to keep up the estates as
they ought to be kept up. I have to think of a jointure for my wife, if
I should ever marry, and some provision for my own children.”

The Duke delivered his defence in an injured tone, as though he felt
that the sympathy of his audience was against him. Prince Herbert, in
his quiet way, returned to the attack.

“I have really no right to ask you, but I should have thought your
properties brought you in a great deal more.”

“They are still heavily encumbered,” was the answer. “There are
mortgages on nearly everything except the Scotch land, and that brings
in nothing. I might let the moors, I suppose, but in my opinion that
would be another disgrace. I am very strongly opposed to giving these
Americans and stockbrokers the pick of all the historic places in Great
Britain. I blame Cantire for letting Mull.”

This time the Duke spoke with undisguised warmth. It was a relief to
him to silence the misgivings from which his own mind was not entirely
free on the subject of Alistair.

“After all, I owe a duty to my people, as well as to Alistair,” he
continued. “I am the head of the clan as well as the landlord. I regard
myself as a constitutional monarch on my own estate, and I have no
right to sacrifice my tenants in order to enrich Molly Finucane.”

Prince Herbert felt himself rebuked. He doubted no more than others
that the house in Chelsea had been Alistair’s undoing.

“Is there no hope of rescuing him?” He looked hesitatingly at the
Duchess.

“I have just seen Alistair,” she confessed, not without some fear of
her elder son’s resentment. “He came here to see me to-night.”

“To ask for money, I suppose,” said the Duke.

The Duchess was wounded by the taunt.

“He did not ask for any, and I did not give him any,” she said with
dignity. “I told him I was sure that you would help him if he would
only leave that woman.”

“And what did he say?”

“I don’t think he meant what he said; I can’t think so. But he talked
about her in such a way that for a moment I thought he wanted to marry
her.”

A fierce exclamation broke from the Minister, a milder one from Prince
Herbert.

“If he does that, he shall never have another farthing from me; I will
never acknowledge him again!”

“His infatuation for her is terrible,” the mother went on. “He even
defended her to me. He told me that she had made sacrifices for
him--that she was paying for the house.”

The two men exchanged glances. This was a deeper depth than either of
them had suspected. Perhaps the Duchess would have suppressed this part
of her information if she had understood how it would strike a man.

“Is there no chance that the woman herself may give him up now?”

The Duchess shook her head doubtfully.

“I should think not, from what he says. I hardly know what it is best
to do. I think perhaps he might be induced to give an undertaking not
to marry her, in return for some assistance.”

The Home Secretary made a face of disgust.

“So I am to be blackmailed, am I? I have to bribe my brother not to
make a street-girl the next Duchess of Colonsay.”

Prince Herbert looked distressed.

“Are you sure that is the right way to go to work with Alistair?” he
asked gently. “I have always believed that there was good in him, you
know. Perhaps if you tried to appeal to his generosity you might do
more than you suppose.”

Alistair’s mother gave the speaker a grateful look.

“Thank you, Bertie. It is very good of you to plead for my poor
boy. I think, James dear, you may have been a little harsh with him
sometimes.”

“If you were to go to him now,” the Prince pursued, “not to scold him
at all, but just to say, ‘Well, old fellow, you’re in a mess; let’s see
if I can get you out,’ I think you would find him very different to
deal with.”

The elder brother still frowned.

“You don’t know Alistair as well as I do. He would most likely insult
me. The last time I wrote to him, nearly a year ago, enclosing his
allowance, and pointing out to him how the life he was leading was
bound to end, he wrote back to me--my mother saw the note: ‘Dear Jim,
your cheques are better than your sermons. Affectionately, Alistair.’”

Prince Herbert by a severe effort checked the smile which rose to his
lips.

“After all, he is your brother,” he reminded the aggrieved senior.

“I’m sure I don’t know why he should be,” the Duke muttered, but he let
his voice drop at the sight of his mother’s sorrowful face.

“I would see him myself,” the Prince added, “only I have to leave for
Birmingham to-morrow to lay the foundation stone of a cathedral, and
I am under engagements which will keep me in the district for several
days.”

The Duchess rose and walked across the room to where her son was
seated, tapping a fretful foot upon the floor. She laid her hand on his
arm, and looked him beseechingly in the face.

“My son, my eldest son!” she murmured softly. “You need not be jealous
of the poor prodigal. Say that you will go?”

And James said that he would go.

       *       *       *       *       *

That night Alistair’s mother did not sleep.

The bankrupt himself slept heavily after emptying a bottle of
champagne, at whose expense he no longer hesitated. The new Minister
tossed to and fro till the excitement of debate had evaporated, and
then sank into a calm, health-giving slumber. Prince Herbert slept too;
if he had passed a troubled night the wires would have flashed the news
next day from Auckland to Vancouver.

But the Duchess of Trent could not sleep. She spent a night of fear and
sorrow, her mind haunted by the terrible word that spelt the wreck of
her darling--the word _wife_.

Rather than see her son married to Molly Finucane she could have prayed
that he might be taken from the world. To her apprehension such a
marriage meant ruin final and irretrievable, ruin social, moral and
religious, ruin in this life and the next.

As the first streak of dawn slanted through the window the poor lady
crept from her bed, and throwing a dressing-gown round her shoulders,
sat down at a small writing-table to write a letter.

She began by addressing the envelope, with fingers that shook partly
from cold and partly from anguish: _Miss Finucane, Elm Side, Chelsea_.

She had made up her mind to take the desperate step of writing to
Molly Finucane to implore her not to marry Alistair.

She had first entertained the idea of going to Molly to make the appeal
in person, but she had found herself unable to face the reception which
she feared was possible. Molly Finucane’s reputation daunted her.
The courage of this gentle, pious, pure-minded woman was not great
enough to brave the scoffs of a girl whom common fame reported as more
foul-mouthed than a bargeman.

The letter took a long time to write. The words came slowly, and more
than once the writer felt inclined to drop the pen in despair. But at
last it was finished.

The letter ran like this:

  “DEAR MADAM:

  “Will you pardon the liberty I take in addressing you? I write on
  behalf of my son Alistair. I hardly know how to express myself
  without seeming unkind, but you will understand what a shock it has
  been to his mother to see him in the Bankruptcy Court. He was here
  last night, and from what he has said to me I feel sure that you do
  not wish him ill. His only chance of salvation is an entire change
  of life, and that can only be brought about by your influence. The
  tremendous hold you have over him is my only excuse for appealing to
  you like this. I have no doubt you see as clearly as I do how his
  present life is likely to end--in misery and distress. Nothing I
  could do would be too much to show my gratitude if you would consent
  to let his friends extricate him from his present way of life, and
  give him a fresh start. He is still a young man, and unmarried, and
  therefore we hope it is not too late to save him. If you are really
  his friend you will yourself be anxious to do nothing that would
  drag him deeper down into the abyss. In his present state of mind
  I fear for him; he is hardly master of his actions, and might be
  led in a thoughtless moment to take some step which he could never
  recall. It is even possible that he might contemplate marrying you,
  which--forgive my saying so--would entail certain misery on you both.
  He would lose all his friends, and as soon as the awakening came he
  would regard you as his bitterest enemy, and the cause of his ruin.
  I hope you will not resent my speaking thus plainly; I need not say
  I do so solely out of the natural anxiety of a mother for her boy,
  and not out of any desire to say anything harsh or unkind toward you
  personally. Most earnestly I implore you, I appeal to you in the name
  of your own mother, to let me save my boy! With many apologies for
  thus addressing you, believe me,

                                      “Yours very sincerely,

                                          “CAROLINE TRENT AND COLONSAY.”

The letter finished, the Duchess betook herself to her praying-closet,
where she remained till her maid appeared.




CHAPTER V

BEERS COOPERAGE


THE Duchess of Trent would never call the little chamber which she used
for her devotions an oratory, thinking that term savoured of Romanism.
The furniture of the praying-closet was as downright and old-fashioned
as its name. There was a little table against the wall, supporting a
plain cross of silver, a Bible, a Book of Common Prayer, a small book
of devotions called Bogatzky’s “Golden Treasury,” containing portions
of Scripture, with hymns and prayers for each day. An armchair and a
kneeling-cushion were the only other articles in the closet, except on
the walls, which were hung with a few illuminated texts of Scripture,
and a fine engraving of one of Holman Hunt’s pictures. It was such
a room as might have been used by the pious Countess of Huntingdon,
or one of those saintly dames who kept alive the lamp of Evangelical
Christianity through the days of the Regency.

Here the Duchess was accustomed to spend many hours in pious
meditation. Her nature was inclined to the tenets of the Quakers, but,
like the royal mistress whom she had formerly served, she deemed that
questions of ecclesiastical forms and government were unimportant,
provided they did not come between the soul and its Maker. Her horror
of Romanism had its root in the natural strength of her character; she
revolted from the devotional practices of that communion as a healthy
man might revolt from the use of crutches. Her education had taught
her to consider that the claims of the Roman Church were a deliberate
imposture, but she was too charitable to think evil of the individual
members of its priesthood. The great wave of medieval reaction which
was now sweeping over the English Church, and in a lesser degree
over the Nonconformist bodies, had passed her by. The ecclesiastical
subtleties which had exercised the mind of Newman and his followers
were meaningless to her. She lived, as she humbly believed, in direct
communion with God, whose Holy Spirit afforded her what light was
necessary to salvation, and the Sacraments she regarded as mere outward
tokens of a spiritual allegiance.

Believing thus, her piety overflowed, not in the observance of fasts,
nor in attendance at public services, but in works of benevolence. In
the country parish where she had formerly lived she had discharged all
the duties of a curate, except those connected with public worship.
The cottagers believed in her more than in the Rector; on several
occasions she had been asked to baptize some new-born infant whose
little life seemed to be guttering out. Those of such children who
survived were regarded as singularly blest, and their parents showed
great reluctance to let the ceremony be repeated in the church with the
proper forms. She had been in still greater request as a peacemaker;
no quarrel ever outlived her interference in that office. Yet she
never scolded the people, and seldom rebuked them. Her method was to
take the causes of mutual offence upon herself, and ask forgiveness
from each in turn. It became imprudent for her to speak severely to
any of the villagers, even when rebuke was called for. She found out
once that a drunkard whom she had sternly reproved for ill-treatment
of his children was set upon in consequence by the entire village and
beaten dangerously. Her removal to London was felt like death. The
whole country-side was downcast. She arranged to keep up the payment
of all her alms by the hands of the Rector, but this was not felt as
a consolation. Half the population of the parish followed her on the
day she went away from them, the mothers crying and holding up their
babes to take a last look at her, the children silent and hanging their
heads. The fathers at work in the fields cast down their tools as the
carriage went by, and came and stood in the road, with bared heads,
till it had disappeared.

Afterwards the Rector, himself a well-meaning but dull man, meeting one
of the men on his way home, said that he was glad to see so much love
shown by the people for her Grace.

The man stared at him.

“Us love she, sir? Why, that’s nought. ’Twere her as loved we, sir,
better than us love each other.”

When the Duchess settled in her son’s London house, she sought at
once for the spot where such service as hers was most needed. She
did not apply to the minister of the parish in which Colonsay House
was situated, lest, tempted by her great rank, he might exaggerate
the claims of his own district, and perhaps push out some humbler
worker. For though every Calvinist is something of a republican, and
the Duchess of Trent made it a point of conscience not to set value
on the title she bore, a wise prudence taught her never to forget the
importance attached to it by others, and the unwholesome influence
it was likely to have over a certain class of minds. She knew how
to distinguish with perfect clearness between the courtship paid to
her rank and the love which she inspired on her own account; in this
respect again resembling the monarch who was her friend.

After a careful investigation, carried out quietly by herself, the
Duchess chose for her sphere of charitable labour a district lying
in the south of the Thames, between Lambeth and Westminster Bridges.
Here, under the shadow of the Archbishop’s Palace, she found heathendom
as utter as, and vice more rank than that the Church was sending out
missionaries to cope with in China and Hindustan.

The Vicar of the parish in which this region was included, whose name
was Dr. Coles, was a pious, learned, and zealous divine, but he was
believed to construe his ordination vows according to a code of honour
more Roman than English. The services at St. Jermyn’s bore little
resemblance to those of a Protestant place of worship, and it was
suspected that they were but the outward and visible signs of a still
deeper cleavage between the Doctor’s private beliefs and those affirmed
in the articles of religion which he had subscribed. The Vicarage
was the resort of a great number of young men from the theological
colleges, among whom the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s appeared to enjoy an
authority not explained by his rank in the Church.

Being a man advanced in years, and not being able to afford more than
one curate, Dr. Coles was glad to avail himself of the services of
helpers from outside the parish. Most of these were women of wealth
and position, who came from their homes in the fashionable quarter to
minister to the dwellers in the back streets of Lambeth. The reader of
the society paragraphs in the daily press sometimes little suspected
that the women whose names he saw in the list of guests at a grand
dinner-party or dance the night before had spent their morning going
about the slums of St. Jermyn’s.

The Duchess of Trent and Colonsay went to work without fuss, calling
herself at the homes of the poor, and winning an easy entrance by
her own kindly and modest demeanour. The sullen drudges of these
dark precincts soon learned to look for her coming, not as that of a
patroness, but as that of a dear friend, who was interested in the
small details of their daily lives, and ever ready to sympathize if a
drunken husband overnight had left a black bruise on the poor thin arm,
or a ne’er-do-well son had been sent to the cells for fighting in the
streets. They never knew how closely their own stories often tallied
with the experience of the lady who listened to them so wistfully, and
who found in soothing their sorrows the means of living down her own.

It was to this district that the Duchess took her way on the morning
after she had seen her son.

The carriage set her down at the corner of a small street, called, as
if in mockery of a more splendid region, Little Bond Street. Walking
down this street, where she was well known, and nodding pleasantly to
those of its inmates who were at their doors, the Duchess presently
came to a small court or yard, which bore on the wall of the archway
opening out of the street the legend “Beers Cooperage.”

Beers Cooperage no longer retained any trace of the manufacture of
casks and barrels which some departed cooper had doubtless carried on
there in bygone days. It consisted of a row of half a dozen very small
cottages, with still smaller enclosures in front, which looked as
though they might once have been meant for gardens. A last reminder of
the time when Beers Cooperage had considered itself to be in a rural
neighbourhood lingered on the window-sills of some of these cottages,
which were ornamented with miniature wooden railings and five-barred
gates, a touch of rustic fancy of which the modern Londoner has become
incapable. Yet though the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage could not have
originated these quaint decorations, and had probably never seen the
country sights they were meant to recall, they took a pathetic pride
in possessing them, and as soon as one of the railings or gates showed
signs of decay it was carefully repaired.

Who knows what influence such trifles have over all of us? It is
certain that the dwellers in Beers Cooperage were generally quieter
and more decent in their lives than most of their neighbours. One
or two of them kept singing-birds, instead of terriers to kill rats
with. The inmate of one house, a poor cripple, had even set himself
resolutely to make his front garden a reality instead of a name, by
planting a row of wallflowers, bought full-grown from a coster-monger,
in what he evidently considered a bed. These plants, which perished
periodically, and were regularly renewed, were regarded with reverence
by the neighbours, and attracted pilgrims to view them from two or
three streets away. But on the rare occasions when they burst into
bloom of their own accord, no profane hand was allowed to come too near
them. After being reverently smelled at a distance by the dwellers in
the Cooperage, the blossoms were culled with anxious pride by their
proprietor, and made into a nosegay for the Duchess, who carried them
home with her, and set them on the table of her oratory. They were the
only flowers ever seen on that simple altar.

There was one house in Beers Cooperage, however, which differed
strikingly from the rest. This was the hovel at the upper end, where
the yard terminated in a high blank wall. There were no five-barred
gates on the window-sills here; nothing but fragments, which hung
rotting over the edge. Half the panes in the window were broken, and
stuffed with dirty scraps of paper. The paling before the house was
also fast disappearing, and the space in front was littered with broken
tins and refuse not sufficiently noisome to attract the notice of the
sanitary inspector. In the corner stood a kennel tenanted by a mongrel
bulldog, the terror of the small children in the Cooperage. The door
of this cottage generally stood half open, and through it came all
day and night long sounds of angry scolding, or of oaths and drunken
yells. The inside of the place matched with its outside. The floors and
stairs looked as if they were never washed; the germs of a dozen fevers
might have lurked in the dirt which was thickly piled everywhere. The
miserable crockery and kitchen stuff was in as deplorable a condition
as the windows. The bedding chiefly consisted of heaps of unwashed rags.

This was the one house in Beers Cooperage into which the Duchess had
never yet ventured to go. It was tenanted by an Irishman, who had
threatened to wring the neck of any ---- Protestant who came meddling
inside his doors.

For the last fortnight the Cooperage had enjoyed a blessed spell of
relief from the presence of this man, whose formidable strength, added
to his choleric temper, rendered him the terror of his neighbours.
He had been taken in the act of kicking an old man whom he had first
knocked down. The magistrate before whom he was brought, who had just
previously imposed a sentence of six months on a boy for the theft of
a pair of boots, desirous, perhaps, to show that he could be merciful
on occasion, sent the hooligan to prison for fourteen days, thereby
releasing the rest of the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage for that exact
length of time.

On this morning, as soon as the Duchess came out from under the archway
which formed the entrance to the Cooperage, she saw that something was
amiss.

Several of the cottages showed broken windows, and in one or two places
even the cherished gates and rails had been damaged or destroyed. A
broken birdcage lay on the ground in the far corner of the yard beside
the dog’s kennel. All the doors of the houses were closed, except the
Irishman’s, through which shrill screams were issuing. Lastly, the poor
lame gardener was standing in his little plot disconsolately regarding
the wreck of his cherished flowers, which looked as though they had
been trampled over by a regiment.

“Mike Finigan done it,” he explained, in answer to the Duchess’s
sympathetic exclamation. “’E got outer prison yisterday, and ’e come
in drunk lorst night with ’is crew, and played old ’Arry all over the
place.”

As if the presence of the Duchess had instantly become known, by what
is called mental telepathy, to every resident in the Cooperage, all
the other doors were thrown open, and the women crowded about her,
recounting the tale of the Irishman’s misdeeds, and denouncing their
author. The owner of the broken birdcage pointed to it, not without a
certain melancholy pride in her pre-eminence of wrong.

“’E broke it ’isself, and ’is mates killed my bird; and there I’m going
to let it lie till I ’aves the law of ’im, the roughing.”

Whether the woman believed that the continuance of the broken cage on
its present spot would be a strong confirmation of her story, like the
bricks in Jack Cade’s chimney, or whether she had some obscure feeling
like that which causes a Brahmin creditor to starve himself to death,
in a spirit of revenge, on his debtor’s doorstep, and considered the
wrecked cage as a talisman which would work harm to the wrongdoer,
she failed to explain. But the threat of legal proceedings was not
taken seriously by her neighbours, the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage
regarding an appeal to the constituted authorities with much the same
feeling as schoolboys do a complaint to a master. The poor have an
instinct which teaches them that the State is their enemy; they are a
subject population within the borders of the Raj.

While the group round the Duchess were still shrilly vociferating,
evidently with the object of making their reflections reach the ears of
the Irishman in his retreat, they were interrupted by the appearance of
two figures in the mouth of the archway.

One of these new-comers was a man, the other a girl of nineteen
or twenty. At the sight of the first the Duchess of Trent frowned
slightly, but her face brightened again as she caught sight of his
companion, whom she had come out this morning in the secret hope of
meeting.

There is a type of womanhood known all over the world as English,
and in that bright and gracious type Hero Vanbrugh was completely
moulded. It is not a type of classical perfection, like that associated
with the Roman virgin; it does not cast that intoxicating spell over
the passions of men which Southern poets mean by love. The Southern
language has no word for this type; it is only the dear old Northern
names of maid and sweetheart and wife which express its tender charm.

Hero Vanbrugh, as she stood framed in the archway, was a picture to
gladden the eyes. It was not only that her features were delicately
chiselled, and her body a harmony of slenderness and strength; there
were men who declared that at some moments she seemed to them to be
actually plain; but the freshness of the rain was in her face, and the
laughter of the wind in her hair, and the blue breath of the sea in
her eyes, and there were other men to whom at many moments she seemed
the fairest sight that they had ever looked upon.

The dress which she wore was of that unpretending serviceable pattern
which would have been deemed almost masculine a few years before. In
the eyes of a man the simple coat with its white collar, and the plain
skirt, might have appeared homely, but the eye of another woman would
have been quick to note the marks of an artist’s hand in the cut of
each garment, and would have credited the wearer with perfect taste,
coupled with the means to gratify it.

The man who stood beside her in the archway was as unlike her as it was
possible to be.

If Hero Vanbrugh might have been taken as a type of all that was best
in English humanity, the same could scarcely have been said of her
companion. Big and bull-necked, with coarse, flushed features, small,
deep-set eyes, and a round fleshy chin, he might have passed, in a
different dress, for a comrade of Mike Finigan himself. His costume
would have marked him out in any other country as a Roman priest. He
wore the shovel hat, with a long brim projecting before and behind,
which is associated with the stage priest of comic opera, and his whole
figure, from the neck to the ankles, was enveloped in a long black robe
of design similar to that worn by Noah and his family in the toy arks.
The priests of Rome in this country being in the habit of adopting a
dress corresponding with the character of that worn by the people
among whom they live, this outlandish disguise served to indicate that
the wearer was in Anglican Orders. He was, in fact, the Rev. Aloysius
Grimes, curate of St. Jermyn’s parish.

The Rev. Aloysius was one of that class which has flowed into the
ranks of the clergy of late years in increasing numbers, to fill the
gap created by the falling off in the supply of graduates from the
Universities, a falling off due as much to the decline in the value of
the Church’s preferments, perhaps, as to the decline of belief in her
doctrines. The son of a small tradesman in the suburbs, he had passed
from a higher-grade Board School into a theological college. He had
entered the college an ordinary sharp London lad of the lower orders,
and left it the social equal of dukes.

Such a youth, strongly conscious of the importance of the step he had
gained, was not likely to listen with reluctant ears to any doctrine
which exaggerated the dignity of his profession. The Rev. Aloysius came
out into the world firmly impressed that he was a priest, commissioned
by the Maker of the Universe to teach and to rule mankind, endowed
with power to bestow the absolution and remission of sins, and
supernaturally enabled to work the awful miracle of Transubstantiation.

Between the Duchess of Trent and Mr. Grimes there was an instinctive
antagonism, which each strove to veil beneath the outward forms of
courtesy, the Duchess because she respected the curate’s cloth,
the curate because he respected her Grace’s rank. To the Duchess
the doctrines held and taught by the Rev. Aloysius were simply and
literally blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits. She supposed that
they had been abandoned as such at the Reformation, and she understood
them so to be condemned by the Articles of the English Church. Yet she
perceived that they were now freely tolerated within its pale by those
to whom the government of the Church was committed, and she shrank
with real pain from setting up her own judgment against that of the
Episcopal Bench.

What added to her distress was the fact that she was unable to credit
the head of that Bench with any belief in what she had always regarded
as the cardinal doctrine of Christianity. That doctrine in her mind was
the Atonement. The great truth which Catholicism images in the crucifix
seemed to her the central one of Christianity, and those who doubted it
became in her view mere Deists, with a reverence for Jesus of Nazareth.
Such a Deist she believed Dr. Dresden, the then Primate, to be, and,
believing it, she regarded even the Rev. Aloysius as more worthy of his
place in the Church than the Archbishop.

Mr. Grimes glided in front, fawning over the hand of the Duchess,
before Hero could come up.

“I am so delighted to meet you here, Duchess. It is so good of you to
do so much for our poor people. They are always singing your praises.”

The Duchess made the briefest response to these compliments as she
turned to greet Hero.

“My dear, how well you are looking! One would think that St. Jermyn’s
was a health-resort, to see you. Now I wonder whether you will take
compassion on a poor old woman, and let me carry you home to lunch with
me presently?”

Hero blushed as she listened to these old-fashioned compliments.

“You are exceedingly kind, Duchess. I shall be delighted. I came here
in the brougham to-day, so that I shall be able to send a message to
my father to let him know where I am. But what is all this about?” She
turned to the excited women who were now repeating the tale of Mike
Finigan’s outrages in the ears of Mr. Grimes.

The Rev. Aloysius was listening with a troubled brow. In his secret
heart he had a great respect for Finigan, partly because he knew
that the Irishman had no respect at all for him, and regarded him as
an impostor, dressed in plumes borrowed from his own clergy, partly
because of the superior example which the Finigans showed to his own
flock in the matter of reverence for the priesthood. The hooligan and
his family in their wildest moments treated their own priest as being
invested with dreadful sanctity and tremendous powers. They firmly
believed that Father Molyneux could strike any one of them dead without
moving an eyelash; if one of them had been betrayed into lifting a hand
against the Father’s person, they would have expected to see it wither
to a stump. Yet Father Molyneux was a very insignificant-looking little
man, with a jolly smile, and a brogue like the scent of an onion, who
went about dressed in a shabby overcoat and a disreputable hat of the
ordinary chimney-pot shape. He said “Sorr” to Mr. Grimes when that
gentleman condescended to greet him in the street, and never showed by
a word or look that he did not regard him as a superior by whose notice
he was honoured. It was true that the little priest had a reputation
for humour among his own friends; a sound as of laughter was sometimes
heard issuing from the presbytery as the Rev. Aloysius passed by; a
book entitled “The Secret History of the Romish Conspiracy” had been
found by the priest’s housekeeper in the cupboard where his reverence
kept his whisky and his slippers; but those things were mercifully
hidden from the curate of St. Jermyn’s.

Mr. Grimes turned towards Hero, as she came forward, shaking his head.

“I’m afraid it’s a sad business, Miss Vanbrugh. Finigan has broken
out again. I can’t understand how it is that a man so well conducted
in some respects, with such genuine faith in his religion, schismatic
though it may appear to us, should be guilty of outrages like this.”

Hero flushed up. She did not share the elder woman’s deep-rooted
prejudice against the Catholicizing movement, which attracted her
strongly on its æsthetic side, but her English common sense remained
to her.

“The man is a drunken brute, who ought to have been sent to penal
servitude for fourteen years, instead of being let off with a paltry
fourteen days!” she exclaimed. “What are prisons for, I should like to
know, except to protect peaceful folk from ruffians like that?”

The Rev. Aloysius shook his head doubtfully. He was inclined to read
the text, “Thy faith hath made thee whole,” in a very broad sense, and
to consider that Mike Finigan’s admirable loyalty to his creed ought to
atone for any trifling disregard of his neighbours’ peace and comfort.

But the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage, whose rude minds failed to
appreciate the beauty of Mr. Finigan’s theological attitude, in the
face of their broken flower-pots and slaughtered pets, were quick to
perceive that Hero was the champion of whom they stood in need. They
deserted the curate to besiege her with their complaints; the owner of
the birdcage renewed her direful malediction, and another woman, who
could boast no injury on her own account, drew the sympathetic young
lady to the scene of the trampled wallflowers.

The sight aroused Miss Vanbrugh’s wrath in real earnest.

“I have a great mind to send for the police myself,” she declared. “I
only wish I had seen him do it, so that I could give evidence.”

The women shrank back at these words. Their anger against Finigan,
already partly relieved by the mere exertion of denouncing him, was
cooled at once by Miss Vanbrugh’s threat.

“That ’ud only mike it wuss, miss,” the lame man responded dolefully.
“’E’d come out again at the end of a week like a mad Calico, an’ not
leave a roof over our ’eads.”

Before Hero had time to resolve this extraordinary expression into an
allusion to the late Khalifa of the Soudan there was a stir among the
little group behind, caused by the sudden appearance of Mike Finigan
himself at the door of his abode.

Now that the women perceived that their clamour had achieved its
purpose of rousing the evildoer, they suddenly became silent. Finigan
lounged forward, with a masterful air, his hands in his pockets, and
surveyed his neighbours disdainfully.

It said, in the history-books out of which the small Britons of Beers
Cooperage were taught in the Board School, that Ireland had been
conquered by England in the year of grace 1172. The history-books said
nothing about the conquest of Beers Cooperage by Mike Finigan.

Seen close at hand, the Irishman did not look a remarkably vicious or
ill-disposed creature. His face was of the dark, heavy, animal type
to be met with in some of the western counties of England itself.
He represented that mixed remnant of old, forgotten races which is
found washed up in out-of-the-way corners of the land, the relics of
prehistoric wanderings and subjugations, the rubble of European man.

Because his ancestors during a thousand years or so had spoken a
Gaelic dialect, learned language-mongers called Mike Finigan a Celt.
His name might have told them that he was a mongrel Finn, between whom
and the fair-haired, blue-eyed Gauls who took Rome there was no more
kinship than between the Chinaman and the Greek. The traditions of his
own land, had the language-mongers cared to study them, would have
disclosed to them the existence of half a dozen strange older races,
some of whom in all likelihood were still speaking Neolithic dialects
of their own when the armies of Cæsar landed in Britain.

This primitive savage had been brought from his native bogs, and set
down among a peaceable town-dwelling population, chiefly of Dutch
descent, by the economic machinery of the Raj. The Raj had taught him
to speak its language, and bestowed upon him a voice in the choice of
its administrators.

Now the Raj was trying to digest Mike Finigan.

In his own country, dwelling on some bare hillside beaten by the rains
of the Atlantic, the Irishman might have seemed a picturesque figure.
Living the life that was natural to him, digging his native peat, and
finding an outlet for his brutal instincts in the folk-fights that
formed the immemorial pastime of the country-side, he would have been a
harmless subject.

In the streets of London he was a dangerous criminal. The civilized
life brought out all that was worst in this wild nature. It galled him
with its manifold restraints. It stunned him with its monotony of work.
It teased him with its decorum. It stifled him with its lack of air and
space. Finally, it drove him to the public-house.

If dirt be matter in the wrong place, so is crime conduct in an unfit
historical or geographical environment. If the hooligan had lived a
few thousand years earlier he would have been a hero. He would have
refreshed himself with his native mead before going into battle, and
his strength becoming as the strength of ten, he would have been deemed
of supernatural birth. His exploits would have become the theme of
bards, divine honours would have been rendered to his memory, and,
his figure shining through the mist of saga like a demigod’s, learned
students would have been engaged to-day in identifying him with the
solar orb.

As it was, Mike Finigan’s history was already written to its end. After
a long or short series of savage atrocities, after wounding and maiming
a certain number of peaceable citizens, and being punished by sentences
ranging from a small fine to six months’ hard labour, according to the
magistrate before whom he happened to be brought, one of Mike Finigan’s
kicks some day, probably by pure accident, would cause a death; when
society, seizing the excuse for which it had been waiting all along,
would hang Mike Finigan. A pity that you could not have passed the
sentence before the murder, and commuted it to transportation, back
to the little shieling in the potato-patch from which you dragged his
father, Your Majesty the public!

The effect of alcohol is different on different constitutions, a truism
which fanatics forget. On Finigan its effect was to make him a raging
wild beast. His unfortunate neighbours would have been the first to
bear witness that when the drink was not in him the Irishman was
harmless enough. His speech was always coarse, and he was a stranger
to soap and water, but those were venial faults in the light of his
drunken frolics. At such moments the appearance of the Khalifa himself
in their archway would have struck less consternation into the dwellers
in the Cooperage than Mike Finigan’s.

After one of these outbursts the Irishman was usually sullen and silent
for a day or two, during which period his neighbours found it wisest to
leave him alone. He was in that condition, surly, but not dangerous, as
he strode forth to silence his assailants.

At the sight of the Duchess he paused, uncertain. Though he had uttered
a coarse threat against any Protestant who should invade his own home,
he had acquired a tacit respect for the quiet lady who visited his
neighbours, and perhaps there were times when he would not have been
sorry if the Duchess had disregarded his words, and included his wife
and family in her friendly ministrations. A secret shame at having
disgraced himself in her eyes caused him to assume a defiant and
insolent air as he demanded of the women:

“And what have yez got to say agin me, now I’m here?”

The women shrank back terrorized.

The Duchess thought it useless for her to speak. But Mr. Grimes,
anxious to show her Grace how well he could administer a priestly
reproof, rashly undertook to answer the bully.

“I wonder you are not ashamed to ask the question, Finigan. You have
been behaving in a shocking, scandalous manner. Do you consider what
disgrace you bring, not merely on yourself as a man, but on the Church
to which you belong?”

The Irishman turned red.

“Here, Mister, yez lave me Church alone, an’ I’ll lave yours,” he
muttered.

The Rev. Aloysius smiled at the success with which he had touched the
man’s weak spot.

“I am not blaming your Church,” he said impressively. “The teaching you
have received is good enough for you to know when you have done wrong.
I am pointing out to you that your neighbours here, who do not know
and understand the Church of Rome as I know and understand it, are not
likely to have their opinion of it raised by such conduct as yours last
night.”

The curate was warming to his work, and would have gone on to inflict
further stabs on the sensitive place, when suddenly the Irishman
clenched his fists, and stepped towards him.

“Say another word about me Church, good or bad, and, be the Howly
Moses, I’ll knock yer teeth down yer Protestant throat!”

The Rev. Aloysius fairly recoiled, stunned, to do him justice, as much
by the insult conveyed in the description of himself as a Protestant as
by the threat of personal violence. It was too bitter; the serpent of
schism had raised its baleful crest, and stung him in the very midst of
his flock.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, no one suspected the true cause of his
agitation. Before he could frame a suitable retort an unexpected ally
came to his rescue.

Hero Vanbrugh had listened impatiently to the curate’s attempted
admonition of the hooligan. Her indignation at the brutalities whose
effects she had just seen was still hot within her, and the Irishman’s
hectoring demeanour made it boil over.

She walked up quickly, and confronted him with blazing eyes.

“You coward! How dare you stand there and bluster! How dare you come
out and show yourself, in the face of all the mean, silly, brutal,
wicked things you did last night! Where is the bird you and your
friends killed? There is its cage! Look at it, and stay here and brazen
it out if you dare! Look at that poor man’s flowers all trodden down
and broken! I wonder you can bring yourself to pass them! To rob a
poor lame man! a cripple! I suppose you will beat him next, or murder
him if you are not afraid of the police. I tell you, you are a coward,
nothing but a big hulking coward, who goes about bullying women and
children--and cripples! Go! Don’t stay out here! Go and hide yourself,
lest a man should come along and see you!”

Then a great thing happened. For Mike Finigan, the tyrant of Beers
Cooperage and the terror of the police, raised his finger to his
forelock, and with a muttered--“Beg pardon, miss,” turned round, and
shrank back into his house like a thoroughly ashamed man.

The Duchess turned to Hero with a look of grateful admiration.

“You did that splendidly, my dear. Thank you.”

The women, relieved of the presence of their enemy, would have burst
out in a triumphant chorus, but Hero restrained them with a gesture,
and the next minute they were surprised to see her turn white and
totter against the side of the Duchess, who hastened to draw her away.




CHAPTER VI

THE WHOLE DUTY OF WOMAN


AS the two ladies passed under the archway from Beers Cooperage into
the street they were followed by Mr. Grimes, anxious to efface the
rather humiliating figure he had cut in his encounter with Mike Finigan.

“I wonder if we may have the honour of seeing you at our bazaar this
week, Duchess?” he said smirkingly.

“What bazaar is that? I don’t think I have heard of it,” the Duchess
responded, with indifference.

“The Legitimist bazaar--to obtain funds on behalf of the cause,” the
curate explained.

The Duchess of Trent knitted her brows.

“I am afraid I don’t understand. What cause is that, if you please?”

The Rev. Aloysius faltered somewhat in his speech as he answered:

“It is the cause of the legitimate monarchs who have been excluded from
their thrones by--ah--popular insurrections, and--ah--constitutions
and republics, and so on. The Duke of Orleans is one of our principal
objects,” he went on rather hurriedly, observing a significant frown
come over her Grace’s brow at the word constitution--“rightfully Louis
XIX of France; and then there is Don Carlos of Spain, and the Duke of
Cumberland, and others. Many of us consider that the Bishop of Rome has
been wrongfully deprived of his sovereign rights by the House of Savoy.”

“Any more?” asked the Duchess, with some scorn. “I shall be glad to
know whether you consider the Queen as a usurper, because I have served
in her household as a girl, and I have no desire to conspire against
her in my old age.”

The curate of St. Jermyn’s cast down his eyes.

“Oh, I dare say there are a few members of the Guild who hold, in an
academical spirit, of course, that the elder branch of the Stuarts
are entitled to our allegiance, but that is really more a pose than
anything else. No one intends the slightest disrespect towards Queen
Victoria. But the French Republic is very different; its intolerance
towards the religious orders must make every Christian wish to see its
downfall.”

“I am afraid that I do not sympathize with your views sufficiently to
care to come to your bazaar,” the Duchess said dryly. “It appears to
me that Legitimism, according to your account of it, is another name
for Roman Catholicism, and I am a Protestant.” The Rev. Aloysius looked
pained. “Besides,” her Grace went on severely, “even if this nonsense
about the Stuarts is only a pose, as you say, it seems to me in very
bad taste. I only trust it is not actually treasonable.”

Mr. Grimes bit his lip. Then he put on a touch of bravado as he replied:

“I am sorry you should think so harshly of us, Duchess. I should not
have ventured to broach the subject, only Lord Alistair Stuart is among
our patrons, and we hope to see him on Saturday. Miss Vanbrugh also
held out a hope that she might drop in for an hour.”

“I was only coming out of curiosity, remember; I told you that, Mr.
Grimes,” put in Hero promptly. “As it is, I think I shall follow the
Duchess’s lead, and boycott you. I have no objection to Louis XIX, but
I think I must draw the line at Mary III.”

It was under this name that the Bavarian Princess whom the Legitimist
Guild honoured with their homage, figured in their recently published
calendar of true and lawful Sovereigns. It must not be supposed
that in so styling her the Legitimists were inconsistent enough to
acknowledge the title of the wife of William of Orange to a place in
the list of British monarchs. The Mary II recognized by them was the
ill-starred rival of Queen Elizabeth. Further back than the martyr of
Fotheringay their genealogical inquiries did not too curiously extend,
lest, perhaps, they should find themselves confronted with that direct
descendant of the Plantagenets who plied the trade of a chimney-sweeper
in the last generation, and who, as a base Protestant mechanic, would
have been ill-deserving of the sympathy accorded to such illustrious
figures as Don Carlos and Leo XIII.

But a change had come over the face of the Duchess while Hero was
speaking. Now she said to her:

“After all, I expect it is a mistake to treat Mr. Grimes’s friends
seriously. Suppose we agree to look in on the conspirators together? I
should like you to meet my boy Alistair.”

And without waiting for the expression of the curate’s exuberant
delight at this decision, the elder woman gave the signal to enter the
carriage that was to convey them to Colonsay House.

On the way thither the Duchess made no further reference to what was in
her mind. But while they were waiting for lunch to be served, she took
her guest into the little drawing-room where Alistair had found her the
night before.

“I want to talk to you about my boy,” she said, making Hero sit down
beside her on the couch. “I dare say you know he is in sad trouble just
now.”

This was by no means Hero’s first visit to Colonsay House. The
friendship between her and the Duchess was of some standing.
Encountering each other among the squalid byways of St. Jermyn’s
parish, a mutual liking had quickly sprung up between them, which
rested on no more occult base than the simple goodness of heart which
was common to the two. The older woman admired Hero Vanbrugh for her
courage and plain good sense, and Hero on her part revered the Duchess
for her antique piety and single-mindedness. Thus it came about that
the two were constant companions, visiting in the same district and
helping in each other’s work.

It was a source of secret regret to the Duchess that Hero did not
share her own old-fashioned prejudice against the Catholic practices
and teachings of Mr. Grimes and his Vicar. Hero had an æsthetic
appreciation of the ritual of St. Jermyn’s, with its banners and
processions, its incense and its worship of the consecrated elements,
and this led her to listen with outward tolerance to the utterances of
Dr. Coles and his disciple on the subject of the Catholic doctrines
which lay behind these outward symbols. But the native strength of her
mind forbade her to make that surrender of her own judgment to priestly
authority which is the real test of the Catholic temper.

Perhaps this obstinacy was due more largely than she suspected to
the personal antipathy inspired in her by the Rev. Aloysius. A young
woman’s religion is generally coloured by her personal relations with
the man who is her religious teacher; and Hero secretly despised Mr.
Grimes as a man, though she tried to respect him as a clergyman. A
suggestion from the curate that Miss Vanbrugh would derive spiritual
benefit from a visit to his confessional had been so discouragingly
received that he never ventured to renew it.

The curate did not help himself in Hero’s eyes by his rather too
evident admiration of her as a woman. If he had not been vowed to
celibacy it might have been supposed that he was courting her; and even
as it was, there were jealous eyes, belonging to older and plainer
women in the St. Jermyn’s flock, which watched him with distrust, and
jealous minds which dwelt upon the fact that Anglican vows of celibacy
are a poor security. Perhaps it is not doing much injustice to Mr.
Grimes to suppose that there were moments when he himself recollected
with some satisfaction that in his Church such vows resemble the
treaties of civilized Powers, and are liable to be repudiated the
moment they become inconvenient.

Be that as it may, it is certain that Hero Vanbrugh was heart-whole as
far as her clerical admirer was concerned. Lord Alistair Stuart she had
never met, her intimacy at Colonsay House dating since the separation
due to Molly Finucane.

She was familiar with Lord Alistair’s story, in so far as it had become
a social scandal, but this was the first time his mother had pronounced
Alistair’s name in her presence, and her interest was strongly roused.

She gave the Duchess a nod of sympathy and understanding.

“I saw what had happened in the papers. I was very sorry. It must have
been a great blow to you and to the Duke.”

“It is a crushing blow,” the mother answered. “Not only in itself, but
because of what lies behind it. My boy would never have come to this if
he had not fallen under the influence of that dreadful woman.”

In saying this the poor mother spoke quite sincerely. In spite of
Alistair’s disclaimer, in spite of her own experience with him in the
past, she could not bring herself to forego the mother’s consolation
of laying her darling’s sins upon another’s shoulders. In the eyes of
a true mother the whole world is full of wicked men and women busied
in laying snares for the destruction of her child; she never deems it
possible that her child may be himself the tempter of others.

Hero did not doubt that the Duchess spoke perfect truth. What woman
likes to think that another woman’s influence is otherwise than hurtful
to a man in whom she is interested?

“I am sure of it,” Miss Vanbrugh said with conviction. “But perhaps
what has happened”--they both shrank from the word “bankruptcy”--“may
be the best thing in the end, if it compels him to leave her.”

The Duchess shook her head despondently.

“I hardly know what will happen yet. I hinted that his brother might
come to his help if he would give up his present life, and he refused.
Do you know what I am actually afraid of? I believe that woman is
scheming to make him marry her!”

Hero Vanbrugh was as much shocked by this suggestion as the Duchess
could have desired. Her training had not been severely Puritanical,
but an instinct older than copybooks and Sunday schools taught her
to look on Molly Finucane as her natural enemy. Such women as Molly
were traitors to their sex; they were the blacklegs of the feminine
trades-union. The wage which the others had worked from time immemorial
to establish--honour, a home, the half of all a man’s possessions, and
the chief place in his life--all this the free-lance had foregone, to
snatch the miserable gains of adventure.

The announcement that lunch was on the table did not interrupt the
conversation. But it added another interlocutor in the person of the
Duke of Trent.

The new Minister had passed a busy morning at the Home Office. His
first care had been to send for his solicitor, to consult him about
Lord Alistair’s affairs. The lawyer told him that, though the nominal
amount of his brother’s indebtedness was not less than fifty thousand
pounds, the creditors would probably be willing to accept one-half to
cancel the proceedings. Twenty-five thousand was a large sum to a man
circumstanced as the Duke was; nevertheless, he had made up his mind
that it should be forthcoming, and he had instructed the solicitor to
open the negotiations on his behalf.

The most important item of official business had been a call from the
Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who reported a fresh
piece of hooligan violence from the neighbourhood of Bermondsey. A
policeman was again the victim, and the Force were beginning to show a
dangerous temper, and to demand permission to carry revolvers for their
own protection.

The Home Secretary privately sympathized with this demand, but he
foresaw that such a departure would be the signal for a storm of
protest in the workmen’s papers and in the House of Commons. The
particular quarter of London where the latest outrage had occurred was
represented in the House by a sturdy demagogue who was not likely to
sit with his mouth closed while his constituents were threatened with
what he had already described in advance as martial law. The very gangs
which were now defying the police were believed to have done effective
work during the last election, and on one memorable occasion their
popular representative had led them to an armed encounter with the
forces of law and order in the heart of the capital.

These considerations had to be weighed by the Home Secretary. A Cabinet
Minister in these days holds the position of a buffer between the
permanent heads of his department, who really govern the Raj, and
the assembly elected by the populace to supervise them. The first
duty of the Minister, no doubt, was to support his staff, but it was
also imperative to take no step that might endanger the popularity of
his party in the constituencies. In this dilemma the Duke of Trent
had reserved his decision till he should have had an opportunity of
consulting Major Berwick, the trusted chief of the electoral machine.

A smile of pleasure betrayed his gratification at the entrance of Miss
Vanbrugh, who greeted him with the ease of old friendship. He told his
mother briefly of the steps he had already taken on Alistair’s behalf.

The Duchess gave him a grateful look.

“Thank you, dear; I knew you would do what you could. I was just
talking to Hero about the poor boy. The one thing we have to try for
now is to make this trouble a means of rescuing him from his present
life.”

“I ought to make that condition, of course,” the elder brother observed
doubtingly; “but from what you told me last night he would only refuse
it if I were to.”

“It is very difficult,” the Duchess admitted. “I am afraid you are
right. Perhaps if you say nothing about conditions, and simply let him
know that you are helping him generously, he will feel ashamed not to
make a return.”

The Duke of Trent had his own opinion as to his brother’s sense of
shame, but he did not care to express it before Miss Vanbrugh.

“What I want most,” the Duchess proceeded, “is to induce him to come
here again. I dread the consequence of his always being with that
woman. If I could get hold of him sometimes, and bring him into contact
with women of a different kind, I feel sure that the contrast between
them and the woman he is living with would soon disgust him with her.”

Even if the Duchess had not stolen a glance at Hero Vanbrugh as she
spoke, her drift could hardly have been misunderstood by the girl. The
Duke failed to see the personal application of his mother’s remark.

“If you could find some decent woman who would overlook the past, and
get him to marry her, she might be able to keep him straight,” he said
bluntly. “On the other hand, she might not.”

“I feel sure that he might be saved by the right woman,” the Duchess
said earnestly. “I am convinced that the poor boy is secretly sick of
the life he has been leading, and only his pride keeps him from giving
it up. A noble, pure-minded girl, who really cared for him, would be
able to do anything she liked with Alistair.”

This time the allusion was too plain to be mistaken. The Home Secretary
intercepted the blush on Hero’s face, and his eyes were opened. A look
of dissatisfaction replaced his indifferent air, as he replied with
some bitterness:

“I am not so sure of it. Many a good woman has sacrificed her life
before now in the effort to reclaim a man who was unworthy of her, and
the sacrifice has been in vain.”

In saying this he was thinking of the history of his own father and
mother, of which he had learned more than his mother suspected. He had
sometimes felt surprised, as well as mortified, that he should have
had such a parent as Lord Alexander. Never having seen his father since
early childhood, and being free from any tendency to romantic idealism,
the Duke was able to judge the dead man quite impartially, and to think
of him as if he had been some remote ancestor, whose virtues and vices
were merely matter of curiosity for his descendants.

“I wonder my mother’s own experience has not taught her the folly of
thinking that a worthless man can be redeemed by a good wife,” he
reflected impatiently. “Alistair takes after his father; no doubt
that is why she has always loved him better than me. Her whole soul
is absorbed in trying to save him from the consequences of his own
follies, and I am merely a pawn in the game. Now she wants to enlist
Hero Vanbrugh in the same task, as if a girl like that were fit for
nothing better than to be the keeper of a drunken prodigal.”

The Duchess observed the frown on her eldest son’s brow with wondering
dismay. It did not occur to her that he could be moved by any other
feeling than fraternal jealousy. Old-fashioned in her ideas on this
subject, as on most others, she had never contemplated it as possible
that the Duke of Trent and Colonsay could marry out of his own
class. And the class in which, with perfectly unconscious pride, she
placed her young friend was that middle one which appeared to have
been created to supply doctors and lawyers and men of business for
the service of the aristocracy. In her eyes the girl’s father, Sir
Bernard Vanbrugh, was simply a successful medical man. The scientific
achievements which had made him a European personage, greater than any
Secretary of State, were outside her ken.

If she had come to entertain the project of marrying Hero Vanbrugh to
her prodigal son as a last means of averting the terrible catastrophe
of Molly Finucane, she did so honestly, considering that she offered a
privilege to Hero, corresponding with the greatness of the interest at
stake. It was in the perfect simplicity of this conviction that she had
so candidly revealed her design. In the same spirit she had been ready
to take Alistair’s brother into her confidence without any apprehension
that she might be applying the spur of rivalry to a slumbering
admiration.

She was familiar with the Duke’s expressed views on matrimony, which
she respected, although they struck a little cold on her own more
emotional nature. She knew that he had made up his mind from an early
age to two things--that he was one of the best matches in Great
Britain, and that marriage was the most important card he had to play
in the game of life. It had long been understood between them that
Trent was in no hurry; that what he required in a wife was a great
fortune, accompanied by those social graces which count for so much
in politics; and that when he found a possessor of both these gifts
who pleased him she would become his Duchess. The mother lived in the
mild expectation of hearing some day that her young sultan had thrown
the handkerchief to a fitting aspirant, whom it would be her part to
welcome with what tenderness was permitted, and in whose favour she
would cheerfully resign her place in Colonsay House.

Thus it lay altogether outside her calculations that her eldest
son could take any interest in Hero Vanbrugh warmer than a passing
friendship. The prudent young statesman was the last person in the
world whom anyone acquainted with him would have believed capable of a
romantic passion. And the last person in the world to believe it would
have been the young Minister himself.

A man who has lived to the age of thirty without ever losing his head
in the company of a woman naturally regards himself as love-proof, and
perhaps insensibly relaxes his self-defence. But Hero Vanbrugh enjoyed
one great advantage over almost every unmarried girl whom Trent had
ever met, inasmuch as she had not come before him as a candidate for
the orange-blossoms.

If he had met her in one of those crowded ballrooms where her sisters
are paraded nightly in the London season for the allurement of
intending purchasers, Trent would have carefully guarded himself from
giving her a second thought. He had met her for the first time at his
own table, lunching in outdoor costume with his mother, who introduced
her as a helper in her charitable work. The Duke, presuming that
Miss Vanbrugh came from some humble clerical circle, unbent from his
ordinary reserve in the desire to put her at her ease. He was rewarded
for this kindly effort by the discovery that she was beautiful and
charming.

It was not until afterwards that he learned from his mother, who
rallied him playfully on his fascination, that he had been entertaining
the daughter of the great Vanbrugh. It was chance, therefore--one
of those chances that every now and then take over the control of
our lives and change them for us--that had caused Trent to meet Hero
Vanbrugh on this easy footing instead of in the cankered atmosphere
of fashion. But the ice, once broken, could not be re-formed, and the
relations between Hero and her host at Colonsay House had developed
into intimacy.

Up to this time the Duke’s mental attitude had been that of a man who
views a tempting object in a shop-window, and stands hesitating, purse
in hand, wishful to buy, but unable to make up his mind to give the
price. Now he suddenly became aware that another possible purchaser was
coming up, and that if he wanted to make sure of the bargain, he must
lose no more time.

An embarrassing silence was broken by Hero, who undertook to divert the
thoughts of the Home Secretary by asking:

“What do they think in the Home Office of the Legitimist Guild?”




CHAPTER VII

THE DECADENTS


IT was some time after dinner when the Duke of Trent, faithful to his
promise to their mother, drove up to the gate of Alistair’s house in
Chelsea.

On the way James considered what line it would be best for him to take.
He reckoned on finding the prodigal in a despondent mood, perhaps half
estranged from the temptress already, under the stress of poverty and
disgrace. If so, it should prove an easy task to appeal to him by the
picture of the welcome awaiting him in Colonsay House. Alistair could
not but be touched by his brother’s generosity--and James meant to be
generous. He meant to say--to say a little condescendingly, perhaps,
but kindly: “I take your debts on myself. Your name is cleared. Your
mother and I only ask you not to forget that you have a home to come to
when you like.”

By the time he had reached the house the Duke had half persuaded
himself that he should be able to bring the repentant one away with him
that very night.

The house was surrounded on all sides by a high brick wall, pierced at
the entrance by a tall narrow gateway, the gate of Georgian ironwork.
Ordering his coachman to wait, the Minister strode up a covered pathway
that led to the door of the house, and knocked.

As he did so he was aware that the lower part of the house was
brilliantly lit up. He caught a murmur of voices coming through the
windows of a room which overlooked the front garden, and even heard
what sounded like applause.

Before he could frame any explanation to himself of these sights and
sounds the door was opened by a smart lad in a rather untidy page’s
livery, who stared at the visitor with the vulgar impertinence of a
servant who does not respect his employers.

At the same instant a loud burst of laughter came from the interior of
the building.

“Is Lord Alistair at home?” the Duke demanded sharply, incensed by this
reception.

“He’s engaged,” said the boy glibly, giving the Duke a cautious look.
“What name, please?”

“The Duke of Trent. I am his lordship’s brother,” returned the Home
Secretary, frowning.

“Oh, that’s all right, my lord--I mean Your Grace,” the page responded,
with an air of relief. “Come in, please.”

And, scarcely giving the visitor time to remove his hat, he threw
open the door of the room from whence the sounds had proceeded, and
announced him.

The new-comer took two steps through the doorway, and stopped
astounded.

He had arrived on the scene of a festivity. Around a dining-table,
crowded with a confusion of dessert-dishes, champagne-bottles,
coffee-cups, cigar-boxes, and spirit-stands, with the ashes of
innumerable cigars and cigarettes soaking in the spilt wine and coffee
on the tablecloth, were seated some seven or eight men, most of them
young, all wearing evening dress, and seeming to be in the highest
spirits. At the head of the table, facing the Duke as he came in, the
woman he had come to snatch his brother away from lolled back in her
chair, puffing a cigarette, her hands monstrously encumbered with
coloured stones, and her powdered bosom resplendent with five or six
chains of jewellery. At the foot of the table, beside the door by which
James had just entered, the brother he had come to pardon and to redeem
turned languidly in his seat, and, rising with studied nonchalance,
removed a cigar from his lips to say:

“That you, Trent? So good of you to join us.” And, turning to the
company again, he added the careless introduction: “My brother.”

His second glance round the room had warned the angry Duke that,
however he might be disposed to treat Molly Finucane, her guests were
not men whom he had any right to object to meet. Too well-bred to make
a scene under the circumstances, he choked down his indignation, and,
after a haughty bow, which neither included nor excluded the lady of
the house, he accepted the chair which someone offered him. It was with
a sense of satisfaction not unmingled with surprise that the Secretary
of State discovered on sitting down that his neighbour was a personal
acquaintance, the great Mendes, head of the South American Bank, and a
financier with whom Cabinet Ministers were obliged to reckon.

Lord Alistair vouchsafed a light word of explanation.

“Been having a little feed to celebrate my smash,” he said, waving
his hand over the dirty table. “These are my friends. You see before
you the members of the Dishonourable Brotherhood of Decadents, an
association for the spread of corruption among the upper classes.
Dishonourable Brother St. John, I call upon you for a speech.”

“What on earth is all this?” the Duke demanded in a whisper of his
neighbour.

The millionaire shrugged his shoulders, as though he were slightly
ashamed of his company.

“I suppose they intend it for humour,” he answered in the same key.
“It’s one of your brother’s ideas. He’s always starting something
of the kind. It used to be a Chinese Guild, and they all dressed as
mandarins and wore pigtails. Last year it was an anti-Semite show,
and Stuart had the cheek to ask me to join it.” The Jew’s smile as
he said this was a trifle threatening. “They parody everything. That
Frenchman opposite, Des Louvres”--he nodded towards a man with a thin,
wicked-looking face and small dark beard and moustache--“he is at the
bottom of it, I believe. They may know something about him in your
Office.”

The Home Secretary was staggered. Possessed of too little imagination
to see anything in the proceedings but a rather scandalous jest of
the kind that undergraduates indulge in at places like Cambridge and
Oxford, he felt that the mere fact of the jest being carried out by
grown men made it doubly unbecoming. And he felt personally aggrieved
that these men should be making merry over an event which had cast a
shadow on the house of which he was the head. He recalled his mother’s
grief, Prince Herbert’s gracious interest, the money sacrifice which he
himself was preparing to make; and his heart swelled with inward wrath
and shame.

He could not help wondering privately what Mendes was doing in such
company. The keen, remorseless man of business who had executed a
masterpiece of legal robbery, and thereby made himself one of the new
world powers which were taking the place of Kings and Cabinets, seemed
strangely out of place among that crew of mockers. The Brazilian sat
for the most part silent, his lips set in an ironical smile. But from
time to time his glance wandered in the direction of Molly Finucane,
who moved restively in, her chair whenever she caught Mendes’s black
eyes fixed on hers.

The rest of the revellers were all excited in different degrees by the
wine they had been drinking, and their remarks and interruptions formed
a sort of ground-bass to the speech which Alistair had called for. Mr.
Gerald St. John, whom the “Court Guide,” more tender of his dignity
than he seemed to be himself, described as “Honourable,” was a man of
about the same age as Stuart, though his bald forehead gave him the
appearance of being older. He had some little reputation as an amateur
in music and painting; he had composed songs which were occasionally
sung, and painted pictures which the New Gallery did not disdain.

Addressing his friends as “Dishonourable Brethren,” he hailed them as
the missionaries of a new gospel. Theirs was the task to purge society
of Puritanism and propriety. They were to set the example of becoming
artists in Beautiful Sin. It was impossible for Trent to tell how far
he was serious. His speech mingled echoes of the cant of a certain
class of literary and artistic critics with what appeared to be broad
farce.

But two passages in the address made an impression on the Minister, by
their curious connection with his recent interests. The first was a
surprising compliment to the Church of Rome; the second was a panegyric
in a much broader vein of the hooligans.

Of the Roman Church the speaker said that it was the only form of
Christianity which deserved their toleration and respect. He regarded
it as the true Church of the Decadence, and as such he called upon the
Brotherhood to support it. He was not himself a Catholic; he was a
polytheist. But he considered that, next to polytheism, the Church of
Rome afforded the best rallying-point for all that was beautiful and
corrupt in the art and life of the age.

This extraordinary eulogy was received with vociferous applause,
especially by the French Count, whose air was that of a man enjoying
a personal triumph. Molly Finucane, who had not been to Mass or
Confession for many years, but who had not quite shaken off her early
impressions, tried to disguise her nervousness by hammering the table
with her wineglass till it broke--an accident which she was half
disposed to interpret as the work of an offended Power.

The Duke of Trent, who entertained a vague respect for the Roman Church
as a venerable institution whose influence was generally exerted on
the side of the Conservative party, hardly knew what to think of this
equivocal homage to its merits. The Honourable Gerald St. John passed
on to the question of hooliganism, not without a shy glance in the
direction of the Home Secretary, which showed how much the jest was
enhanced by the presence of hooliganism’s official adversary.

The hooligans, he declared, were crusaders fighting for the same
cause as that Dishonourable Brotherhood. They were martyrs of the new
individualism. Their so-called outrages constituted a protest--the
only form of protest which dull and hidebound statesmen could
understand--against the iron yoke of Socialist civilization, under
which they were all groaning. He regarded the hooligans as saviours. It
was significant that so far the man whom they had selected for attack
was that embodiment of everything vulgar and virtuous, the suburban
ratepayer. When they had exterminated the ratepayer, he hoped they
would go on to the millionaire. He had always regretted that their
fellow-workers, the Anarchists, should show so much antipathy to Kings.
It was an unreasonable prejudice. Kings were picturesque survivals in
the midst of the hideous monotony of modern life. Kings were rarely
respectable, and were not seldom steeped in crime; and this applied
particularly to those romantic claimants--he, the speaker, preferred
the dear old name “Pretender”--whom their Dishonourable Brother on the
left was seeking to restore.

This allusion was accepted by Des Louvres with eager manifestations of
approval. Once more the Secretary of State felt an obscure uneasiness
as he compared these mocking utterances with the recent experience
of his own department, and he began to ask himself if he was indeed
listening to the first whispers of a coming storm.

Hero Vanbrugh’s question about the Legitimist Guild had not fallen on
deaf ears. He had had the curiosity to ask his permanent staff if they
knew anything of the Legitimists, and he found they knew very little.
There is nothing Government Departments dislike so much as information,
except the trouble of acting on it. No one in the Home Office could say
exactly who the Legitimists were, or how they had come into existence
as a guild. Their very number was unknown, but it was believed to be
insignificant. They were wholly without influence or following, and
would never have been heard of but for the fact that the newspapers
regarded their proceedings as a good joke. Every sensible person put
them down as a clique of vain and foolish young men who made themselves
supremely ridiculous by trying to revive a cause which had been dead
for a hundred and fifty years.

Such was the official view. Sixty or seventy years before a similar
view had been taken of the action of a little clique of Oxford men who
were setting themselves to undo the work of the Protestant Reformation.
That little clique had undertaken to break up a settlement which had
taken root for two hundred and fifty years, and had survived twelve
reigns and six rebellions. In the course of a single reign they had
come within sight of their goal. They had driven the word “Protestant”
out of polite conversation, and made it a synonym for everything base,
ignorant and malicious. They had made it dangerous for a Protestant to
object publicly to Catholic practices which were still forbidden by the
letter of the law. They had sent an informal embassy to the Vatican to
negotiate the re-entry of England into the Roman obedience; and they
had delivered the first open attack on the legislative bars which still
hindered that consummation.

Fresh from the assurances of the Home Office, it was a shock to the
Minister to find himself for the second time that day confronted with
this ridiculous but offensive movement. It was true that Mr. St. John’s
remarks bordered on satire, but the serious-minded are apt to resent
satire at the expense of what they fear, as much as at the expense of
what they revere; the only notes they wish to hear are the snap of
cavil and the rumble of denunciation.

If the Duke of Trent had consulted his own inclination he would have
risen and protested against this trifling with treason. But, like most
men who are deprived of the sense of humour, James Stuart was keenly
sensitive to ridicule, and he dared not expose himself to the merciless
wit of this crew of profligates. He bitterly repented the false step he
had taken in sitting down amongst them, but he sought in vain for any
means of extrication.

Meanwhile the orator concluded with a felicitous reference to the
occasion of the feast.

One Dishonourable Brother--in fact, the founder of their Order, he
said--had shown that it was possible to emulate, if not to surpass,
the exploits of the humble hooligan. By his magnificent defiance of
the day before he had struck dismay into the mercenary ranks of their
hereditary foes--he need not say he meant the trading class, whose
shameful supremacy had made England unfit to live in. Their gallant
host had plundered the hostile camp of a sum which represented one of
the greatest triumphs ever achieved over the Philistine. He called
upon him, in their name, not to pay this _canaille_ a farthing in the
pound. And he called upon them to drink confusion to the respectable
classes, coupled with the name of their Arch Decadent!

Everyone rose to his feet to drink the toast, with the exception of the
bankrupt himself, and his brother, who tried to conceal his disgust
under an air of amused tolerance.

Alistair Stuart was conscious of his brother’s real feeling, and
resented it all the more because he was half ashamed of his own part in
the buffoonery. His tone became louder and more insolent as he gulped
down glass after glass of spirits, and called upon one or other of his
guests to keep up the entertainment.

Nobody dared call upon the Secretary of State. They all knew enough to
feel that he was a stranger in the camp, if not a spy, and only the
emphasized indifference of Stuart to his brother’s presence gave them
courage to go on. The presence of this representative of all that they
professed to loathe and despise, looking on with chill disapproval,
dashed their spirits unexpectedly, and even to their own ears their
customary jests took on a hollow sound.

Presently it came to the turn of a youth seated opposite to the Duke.
He was of a pale and sickly countenance, the whiteness of his face
being accentuated by the black locks which he allowed to grow down to
his neck. His tie was a black sash with flowing ends like that worn by
French Art students in the quarter of Batignolles. He did not appear
to be much more than twenty, and answered to the name of Egerton Vane.

“Who is he?” Trent asked his neighbour.

“The lunatic with the scarf round his neck? That’s a minor poet.
I don’t suppose you have ever come across his works. He publishes
two volumes every year, at his own expense, of course, with about
twenty poems in each. No one ever reads them, except the provincial
reviewers. He has got an album filled with cuttings from papers like
the _Pembrokeshire News_ and the _Berwick-on-Tweed Gazette_. ‘A volume
of verse from the graceful pen of Mr. Egerton Vane’--that’s the kind
of incense he feeds on. Once he got a puff in a paper called the
_Librarian_, and carried it about with him for months. He said to me
with tears in his eyes: ‘This is recognition!’”

Everyone in the room seemed to have some literary or artistic vocation,
except Mendes himself. The motive which brought the South American
there remained unguessed by Trent, but it was clear that he extracted
some amusement from his strange associates.

“That other young fool over there is his brother, Wickham Vane,” the
millionaire continued, indicating a boy of eighteen or thereabouts, at
the other end of the table.

“Does he write poetry, too?”

“No, he doesn’t do anything so material as write. He thinks beautifully
about old tapestry.”

Wickham Vane might have been pursuing his peculiar vocation at that
moment from his absorbed expression. But he roused himself from his
abstraction to pay the homage of attention to his elder brother.

Egerton Vane held a large sheet of paper in his hand, but before
reading from it he prepared his hearers’ minds by a short allocution.

“The poem I am about to read you strikes an entirely new note in
literature, the note of the unreal. It is a ‘Sonnet to a Drawer in a
Japanese Cabinet.’ I have come to the conclusion that all the poets
who have preceded me have been mistaken in thinking that Nature was
poetical. The artificial only is poetical, because only Art can be
artistic. Nature is incapable of symbolism, and the symbol alone is
truly beautiful. All the glorious sins which reveal themselves crudely
and grossly in mere human beings are latent in exquisite suggestion in
the divinely precious works of Art. Even the handicrafts of the East
are steeped in the splendid sensuality of its peoples. In this poem
I have attempted to do justice to the subtle and elusive vice which
clings like the aroma of putrefying rose-leaves to the workmanship of a
Japanese cabinet in my possession.”

The poet proceeded to read:

  SONNET

  TO A DRAWER IN A JAPANESE CABINET

  What shadow of dead secrets, lemon-eyed,
    Lurks in thy black recesses, frightful drawer,
    Crowned with the Pagan scent of delicate gore
  Fresh from the veins of some green suicide?

  Behold thy lacquered sins are glorified
    In frantic fowls that round thy handle soar,
    Mad with obscure desires, like those that tore
  Unclean blue Mænads by the Phrygian tide!

  And horrors like vermilion rats awake
    And crawl about thee, crooning in my ears
  Dim, vampire songs of shrivelled souls that ache

  With the strange lust for torture-baths of pain;
  Sick with the thirst of poison drunk in vain,
    And bleeding with the clammy blood of tears.

The new note thus successfully struck in literature was applauded with
a vehemence that concealed some jealousy on the part of the other poets
present. Only Molly Finucane, who was beginning to feel herself left
out in the cold, asked the author impertinently what his work meant.

“Nothing!” was the rapt reply. “All Art is quite meaningless.”

The Duke of Trent turned to Mendes.

“And is that absurd and disgusting rubbish the sort of thing which
passes for poetry to-day?”

“Not to-day, perhaps, but it will pass for it to-morrow. If Egerton
Vane goes on long enough, I have no doubt he will found a school. But I
have noticed that most young fellows who begin like that end by going
into a monastery.”

The Duke began to see a new usefulness in the institutions which he had
been brought up to regard with aversion.

The Brazilian, who knew the weak spot in most of his fellow-men,
maliciously threw an apple of discord among the company by asking
Egerton Vane across the table what he thought of the poems of Rowley
Drummer.

The quarrel which instantly arose and raged over the merits of this
distinguished writer showed that envy of a rival’s renown may be a
stronger passion than hatred of the middle classes.

The chief apologist for the poet was a man who had recently achieved
a scandalous success with a novel in which he dealt faithfully with
the vices of all his most intimate friends. The terror inspired by
this performance had made him for the moment the most courted man in
London society, and persons like the brothers Vane followed him about
everywhere in the hope of finding themselves pilloried to fame in Basil
Dyke’s next libel.

Dyke, who found his antipathy to the _bourgeoisie_ sensibly diminished
by every cheque which reached him from his publisher, and who was
already meditating desertion from the decadent ranks in favour of
marriage with an heiress, put forward a claim on behalf of his client
which it did not seem easy to refute.

“He has made vice popular in the person of the British soldier,” he
urged. “He has stamped with brazen hoofs upon the Gordons and the
Havelocks and the prayer-meeting heroes of the Victorian Age, and has
called upon the drudging taxpayer to bow down and worship a swearing,
drinking blackguard. His patriotism is nauseous in itself, I grant,
but then he has made it patriotic to break the Ten Commandments. He has
identified Imperialism with immorality.”

“And therefore, I suppose, you would say with Art?” retorted Egerton
Vane, with ill-concealed annoyance. “All Art is immoral, but it does
not follow that all immorality is artistic.”

“Vulgarity is never artistic,” added the thinker about old tapestry,
coming to his brother’s support. “Rowley Drummer has no sense of the
unreal. He sees life in all its blinding vulgarity, and therefore the
better he paints it, the worse is the result.”

Dyke saw that he had gone too far. It is always bad manners to praise
one poet in the hearing of another. He tried to qualify his praise.

“I do not defend him as an artist,” he explained, “but as a demagogue.
I say that the coarse passion called patriotism, in his hands, has been
turned to a good purpose. After he has taught the public to acclaim the
hooligans of the barrack-room, they cannot very well flog the hooligans
of the street.”

To the Minister, fresh from his legislative essay, this remark sounded
like a challenge. Once more a doubt invaded his mind as to whether all
that he was listening to was sheer ribaldry, or whether there were not
underlying it some serious purpose, or at least some serious tendency,
of which Cabinet Ministers one day might have to take heed.

Molly Finucane had been feeling bored for some time, and, what was
worse, feeling that her exclusion from the conversation reflected on
her position as the lady of the house. She seized this opportunity to
assert her prerogative.

“Who talks of flogging the hooligans?” she asked, with a good deal of
scorn. “They’ll have to catch ’em first.”

She stopped short, warned by the uneasy looks of the rest that she had
committed herself in some way. Molly did not read the papers, and so
was ignorant of the recent proceedings of the House of Lords. But she
was aware that Lord Alistair’s brother was identified in some way with
the Government, and therefore with the cause of law and order, and she
guessed that her expressions might contain some element of offence.

There had been a time when Molly would have enjoyed nothing so much as
shocking a Cabinet Minister by telling him across her own table that
her brother was a corner-boy. But for the past year a great change
had come over her disposition, as great as that which transforms the
roystering medical student into the serious family practitioner. It had
not needed the letter from Lord Alistair’s mother to put before her
the idea of becoming Lord Alistair’s wife, nor to teach her the way in
which his friends would take such an alliance. To become Lady Alistair
without at the same time obtaining the social honours which other Lady
Alistairs enjoyed would do little to satisfy that yearning for other
women’s respect which is the torment appointed for such as Molly
Finucane. And there was enough good in Molly to make her anxious for
Alistair’s sake not to be a permanent blight on his career. It was for
his sake as much as for her own that she had been striving painfully
for the last twelve months to acquire the habitudes of a lady.

The unexpected arrival of the Duke of Trent had caused her a thrill of
pleasurable excitement. To make a good impression on the head of the
family, she felt, would bring her half-way to the goal. Now, at the
thought that she had been so near to disgracing herself, she could have
bitten her tongue.

Molly’s preoccupations were not shared by Alistair, who took it for
granted that his brother had come to reproach him, and resented what
seemed to him an impertinent intrusion. By this time he had drunk too
much to care what he said or did, and the desire was strong upon him to
wreak his bitter feelings on the head of his favoured elder.

Staggering to his feet, and casting a disdainful look at the silent and
annoyed Duke, he burst out:

“I am a hooligan. I’ve been trying to disguise it ever since I was a
boy, but I’m not going to try any more. I hate your law and order; I
hate your respectability; I hate your civilization. Our forefathers
were thieves and murderers, and I envy them. They lived a jolly life
among the heather and the hills, and they were gentlemen. They didn’t
cringe to cobblers and butchers for votes, and go to church on Sundays
to please their grocer. They swore and drank and diced as much as
they liked, and never asked what the Dissenters thought of them. I
am sick of the strait-waistcoat; I am sick of swallow-tail coats and
prayer-books. Why should I torture myself in the effort to lead your
unnatural life? I protest against it all. Life is one long persecution
of men like me, by men like you. Why can’t you leave me alone, as I
leave you alone? I don’t force you to drink and gamble, and lead what
you are pleased to call an immoral life. Why do you try to force me to
lead a moral one?”

He paused for a moment, and then, as if the overflow of his wrath had
sobered him, went on in a more serious vein:

“What is your ideal? Show me the man you honour, and I will show you
the value of your morality. The hero of to-day is the successful cheat,
the tradesman who has made a million by selling rotten food to the
poor or to your own soldiers in South Africa; the bandit of the Stock
Exchange; the monopolist who has broken the hearts and ruined the lives
of a hundred struggling rivals, and who three hundred years ago would
have been hanged as an engrosser. That is the man to whom you kneel,
for whom all the doors of all the churches are thrown open, in whose
name I am ordered to reform my ways.”

The speaker seemed to feel the need of pointing his denunciation with a
personal application.

“I am your victim. I am the man whose life is ground out beneath the
Juggernaut wheels of what you call your social system. Why? Because
I cannot become hard and selfish and stupid like your model. It is
monotony that you want; it is originality that you hate. Go to the
tombs of your martyrs--most of them are buried in Westminster Abbey
or St. Paul’s--Goldsmith the bankrupt, Nelson the adulterer, Pitt
the drunkard, Shakespeare the debauchee. Those are the men whom you
are trying to exterminate, and you have nearly succeeded. I--I had
something here, perhaps”--he smote his forehead with his hand--“and
I might have done something if I had ever had the chance. But you
have killed me. All the bright instincts, all the golden wings that
fluttered in the dawn, all the magic whispers, all the reveries and
dreams--they are dead and still and silent now. Your work is done.”

A slight shiver went round the room and touched even the Cabinet
Minister, who had been more than once on the point of rising and taking
his departure.

Suddenly Alistair Stuart broke into a loud laugh.

“Thank you, my Dishonourable friends--thank you for your support
to-night. You see before you a bankrupt, but a merry one. You will hear
of me again before long. I think of taking a house on the south side of
the river, and turning hooligan. I invite you to become members of my
band. I hope to give some trouble to the authorities. We are fortunate
in having one of them here to-night. I invite you to drink his health,
gentlemen--my brother, the Home Secretary, author of a Bill to punish
the hooligans by flogging. In your name I defy him, and drink damnation
to his Bill!”

The thickness of his speech and the increasing wildness of his
behaviour relieved Lord Alistair’s hearers from the necessity of
treating this as anything but the utterance of an intoxicated man. But
it was clearly necessary to put an end to the scene.

Mendes and the Duke of Trent rose together, but the financier was the
first to speak.

“Gentlemen, it is time we were going. Stuart, sit down! You don’t know
what you are doing!”

He thrust Lord Alistair down into a chair and held him there, while the
others made their hasty farewells and streamed out into the hall.

“I am obliged to you, Mendes,” said the Duke. “Do you think,” he added
in a whisper, “you could get that girl out of the way?”

“It’s her house, I believe, but I’ll try to send her to bed,” was the
answer.

The Brazilian went up to Molly, who sat looking rather frightened at
her end of the table. He said a few words in a low voice which appeared
to produce the right effect. Molly Finucane glanced timidly at the
Duke, and then came towards him with an evident desire to propitiate.

“I’ll leave him with you, if you like,” she said, “but you won’t find
it much good talking to him to-night, I expect. You’d better come again
in the morning, if it’s any business.”

Trent confined himself to bowing silently, and Mendes accompanied Miss
Finucane out of the room, leaving the brothers together.

Alistair had remained still, with his head resting in his hands, as
though exhausted by his passion. Hearing the door close, he looked up
sullenly.

“Well, what do you want with me?” he asked.

Faithful to his resolve to be gracious, in spite of the provocations he
had received, the Duke made a mild answer.

“I want you to come home, Alistair.”

“This is home.”

“My house is your home,” said James, not unkindly; and, with a tact of
which he was not always capable, he added: “Our mother’s house is the
home of both of us.”

Alistair reddened.

“How is she?” he muttered.

“She is very anxious and unhappy about you. I have promised her to save
you, if you will let me.”

This time the elder brother’s words were not so well chosen. It always
grated on Alistair to be reminded that he was dependent on James.

“I can’t leave my friends,” he said stubbornly.

Trent thought of the company he had just seen depart, and his
indignation got the better of him.

“Friends!” he repeated. “Friends who have landed you in the Bankruptcy
Court!”

“Well, you didn’t keep me out of it!”

Trent made a strong effort to keep his temper.

“I have seen my solicitor to-day with the object of preventing the
adjudication. Alistair, I will do it, if you will only pull yourself
together, and make it possible for your mother and me to help you. I
will pay your debts once more, though I can ill afford it, and start
you again with a clean sheet, if you will only take advantage of it.
Come! I have got the brougham waiting outside. Why shouldn’t you get up
now, and let me take you straight away with me?”

He tried to speak cheerfully and confidently. But there was no
encouragement in the bleared eyes that looked up at him.

“What! and leave Molly after she’s stuck to me all this time? D’you
think I’m a cad, Trent?”

“You called yourself a hooligan just now.”

Trent regretted the retort the moment it had passed his lips. But it
was too late. Alistair started up angrily.

“And, damn it! I’ll _be_ a hooligan before I will sell the little woman
for a few miserable thousands, like that! Go to the devil, you and your
clean sheet! I’m sorry for the old mater, if she feels it, but I can’t
stand your patronage, and I won’t have your moralizing; so you can just
leave me alone.”

“I will leave you alone!” exclaimed his brother. “God forgive me, I
sometimes wonder what I have done to deserve being cursed with such a
brother as you!”

He turned and strode out of the room, leaving Alistair to sway and sink
down with his head upon the table among the ashes and wine-stains of
the extinguished revel.




CHAPTER VIII

A LEGITIMIST DEMONSTRATION


THE carriage which brought the Duchess of Trent and Miss Vanbrugh to
the Legitimist bazaar set them down at the door of a mean-looking,
brick-built schoolroom, over the door of which was a niche containing
the statue of a woman holding a babe in her arms.

This woman was intended for a Jewish peasant, wife of the carpenter
Joseph of Nazareth. This babe was her Divine Son, the second person of
the Christian Triad.

The woman wore an emblem of glory in the form of a crown on her
head. The babe’s head was undecorated. The group was copied without
alteration from the ancient pagan idols of the Great Mother and her
Child, worshipped for countless ages in the Mediterranean zone.

Beneath the niche four letters were cut. They were the four initials,
A.M.D.G., of the Latin words, _Ad majorem Dei gloriam_--“To the greater
glory of God.”

It was the motto of the famous Society of Jesus, set up over a building
in which the children of Protestant Churchmen were being educated.
Only the Jesuit motto was not set out in full; it was merely hinted at
by those cryptic letters. This was a touch that Ignatius Loyola would
have admired.

Neither of the two ladies observed the unobtrusive initials, nor,
if they had done so, would they have understood their significance.
But they could scarcely avoid seeing the idol in its niche; and
just as they were stepping out of the carriage a bright little lad,
attractively robed in a white gown with a red vest above, evidently a
singing-boy from the church hard by, passed through the doorway, bowing
reverently to the sacred image as he went up the steps.

The Duchess of Trent was amazed. Her works of charity had never brought
her into this part of the parish, and she had always kept herself from
contact with the religious activities of St. Jermyn’s.

“If that is not Popery, I should like to know what is?” she exclaimed
bluntly to her young friend. “Did you see that boy bowing to the Virgin
Mary? I have no doubt they are taught to pray to her as well.”

This surmise was perfectly just. Such slight control as the episcopate,
or at least the lay judges of the Privy Council, exercised over the
services in St. Jermyn’s Church, appeared to cease altogether on the
threshold of the school. Within that building Dr. Coles was supreme,
and taught what religion he pleased. If it had suited him to set up
an image of Siva for the adoration of his scholars, or to inculcate
the most degrading beliefs of primitive savagery, no one would have
interfered with his discretion. Thus, while the Vicar maintained
some of the forms of Anglican worship in the parish church, in the
schoolroom he had long laid them aside. The catechism taught to the
boys was one prepared by a clerical secret society, and was carefully
contrived to fill the learner’s mind with hatred for the Protestant
heresy, and to turn it in the direction of Catholic Unity.

A special liturgy, compiled by the same hands, was also provided
for the use of the scholars. In it the Mother of God figured as the
principal, though not the sole, object of worship, the Apostle Peter
taking the second place. Among the prayers, precedence was given to
one for the Patriarch of the West--“Thy servant Leo, that he may be
inspired rightly to define and zealously to defend the faith once
delivered to Thy saints.” After this came petitions on behalf of a
personage discreetly referred to as “the lawful Sovereign of these
realms,” the souls of the dead “now awaiting Thy judgment,” and the
reunion, “under one visible Head on earth,” of all branches of the Holy
Catholic Church. Dr. Coles himself was responsible for a supplementary
prayer in which “our blessed patron, Saint Jermyn,” was complimented on
his influence with the Mother of God, due to the continence of his life
on earth, and implored to use that influence on behalf of the area for
which he was, as it were, the spiritual County Councillor.

It was a document breathing the spirit of the Dark Ages, when God
figured in men’s minds as a sort of Byzantine Emperor, surrounded by a
court of heavenly chamberlains and eunuchs, each dispensing favours to
his own train of followers, and none incapable of being bribed.

Miss Vanbrugh, regarding the symbolical sculpture with the indifference
born of ignorance, smiled at her friend’s indignation.

“Let us go in,” she said; “I don’t think it’s so bad inside.”

The whitewashed walls of the room in which they found themselves
offered a curious medley of science and religion, evidencing a painful
struggle in the mind of Dr. Coles between proselytizing zeal and a
desire to earn the grants of an heretical Government. A large crucifix
over the teacher’s desk was flanked by a geological map of Great
Britain, and a glass case containing silk in various stages from the
cocoon to the finished skein. The Ten Commandments on one wall were
faced by the two hemispheres on the other; and an illuminated calendar
of Holy Days was half concealed by a chart depicting screws, wedges,
levers, and other mechanical appliances. The cloven, or at least the
clerical, hoof peeped out in a series of cartoons illustrative of
English history, the scenes chosen being all in one category--the
landing of Augustine, the martyrdom of Edmund, Thomas à Becket defying
Henry II., and Langton, with a formidable crozier, extorting Magna
Charta from King John apparently by the threat of physical violence,
while the barons respectfully looked on.

On this particular occasion the eye was quickly distracted from these
mural decorations by the exhibition beneath. The room, which was
large enough to contain one or two hundred people, was lined round
three sides by stalls loaded with that extraordinary description of
articles which are manufactured specially for sale at bazaars, and in
which the greatest possible uselessness is combined with the greatest
possible fragility. Children’s frocks, which no child could wear for
an hour without damaging them, embroidered tobacco-pouches sufficient
to dismay the most stout-hearted smoker, weird contrivances of paper
and cheap ribbon described as toilet-tidies, ridiculous pin-cushions,
and impossible patchwork quilts formed the staple of the display. In
one corner a lottery was being conducted by the Rev. Aloysius Grimes,
happy in that immunity from the law which newspaper editors cannot
obtain; and pretty little choristers, in their sacred vestments, were
passing to and fro among the ladies doing a roaring trade in the sale
of tickets. But the great attraction of the afternoon was the theatre,
which had been organized in an adjoining classroom, and in which it was
announced that a Miracle Play would be produced at four o’clock, under
the direction of Egerton Vane, Esq.

As soon as Mr. Grimes caught sight of the Duchess of Trent and her
companion, he handed over the care of the lottery to a young lady
assistant, and hastened forward to greet them. He was just shaking
hands, when a stir in the doorway announced the arrival of Dr. Coles.

In appearance the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s contrasted very favourably
with his curate. It was easy to see that he was a man of education and
refinement, and his white hairs gave him a certain dignity. His face
was that of a sensualist, but the benevolent smile, which had become
almost stereotyped on his lips, produced an impression of cordiality
and goodness of heart. The Doctor’s career had not been quite
untroubled by the voice of scandal. But any bygone slips on the part of
a saintly man had been forgotten or forgiven. The reverent murmur which
welcomed his appearance among his flock was a striking testimony to the
influence he had secured over those among whom he worked.

The Rev. Aloysius, breaking away from the two ladies in the middle of a
sentence, without apology, was the first to cast himself on both knees
before his employer, and respectfully kiss a large ring on the Vicar’s
extended forefinger.

“What in the name of goodness does that mean?” the astonished Duchess
asked of Hero.

She spoke loudly enough to be heard by several persons in the throng,
who turned and cast rebuking glances at her. Directly afterwards she
saw a number of well-dressed women advance one after the other and
salute the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s with the same ceremonial as that
observed by Mr. Grimes.

“Are they all mad, or what is it?” the Duchess whispered. “I have
never seen such a thing before in my life, except when I was abroad,
in Roman Catholic society. But even they don’t kneel to their priests,
only to a Bishop.”

Hero blushed guiltily. She was better informed than the Duchess,
but she was not sure that her knowledge might not damage her in her
friend’s eyes.

“Perhaps these people regard Dr. Coles as a Bishop,” she suggested
timidly. “Have you never heard it whispered that he had been secretly
consecrated by--an Armenian Bishop, I think?”

The Duchess stared at her in honest bewilderment.

“How could that be? I don’t understand. Why should an English clergyman
go to Armenia to be consecrated?”

Hero saw that she must make her revelation complete.

“I understand the object was to renew the Apostolical Succession in the
Church of England.”

“It has never been broken,” said the Duchess, with decision. She had
been told so as a girl, and had never given the subject a second
thought. To her devout mind, too candid to be taken in logical
snares, the presence or absence of one or two or three Bishops at
the consecration of another could not seem a matter of real concern.
To attribute to such details the awful consequences they possess for
Catholic minds would have seemed to her to attribute the technical
instincts of a small attorney to the Maker of the sun and stars.

“The Pope of Rome refuses to recognize Anglican Orders, you know,”
Hero explained gently. “The application was made to him the other day
by Lord Bargreave on behalf of a third of the clergy, and he told them
that the English Church had no Bishops, no priests, and no Sacraments.”

The Duchess flushed to the roots of her hair.

“When I was a girl,” she said sternly, “the Church of England would
have refused to recognize the Pope of Rome. I was brought up to believe
that the Roman communion was a half-pagan, half-political body, which
had corrupted the Gospel with idolatry and superstition, and forfeited
its right to be called a Christian Church.”

It was Hero’s turn to be astonished as she listened to the language
of an extinct generation. Brought up in the age which had witnessed
the triumph of the Ritualist propaganda, it was news to her that the
national Church had ever occupied any attitude but one of envious
imitation or suppliant apology towards that of Rome. And yet Hero
Vanbrugh was a girl who had read a good deal, travelled much, and used
her own powers of observation and reasoning. She had seen the ignorant
priesthoods of Spain and Italy, and their brutish flocks, the most
degraded element in the European population. The sight of the Rev.
Aloysius Grimes cringing to Mike Finigan had roused her indignation.
And yet the spectacle of a great society of Grimeses cringing to
Mike Finigan’s master, in the name of Elizabeth’s and Cromwell’s
countrymen, had scarcely moved her to a passing sigh.

“Times have changed,” she murmured to the Duchess.

And times had. Even the Duchess realized dimly that it had become
unsafe to utter aloud her sentiments of loyalty to the English Church
or to the English Throne in a Church of England schoolroom, while it
had ceased to be unsafe for Dr. Coles to parade openly his treason
to both. His episcopal character was no secret in the theological
colleges from which a steady stream of young men like the Rev. Aloysius
turned their steps to the obscure Lambeth Vicarage in search of those
supernatural powers which they deemed the neighbouring Archbishop had
no power to bestow. In this way the whole Church was being gradually
leavened, so that the time was at hand when some portion of the
mysterious virtue brought from Armenia would have found its way into
all the channels of ordination, and obstinate Evangelicals would be
receiving Armenian Orders unknown to themselves, and would be working
the great Transubstantiation miracle in which they personally did not
believe.

For the sake of achieving this object Dr. Coles had put on one side the
prospect of promotion in the English Church. With abilities sufficient
to have raised him perhaps to the House of Lords, he had deliberately
accepted the part of priest of an obscure parish, content if his
underground revolution was allowed to proceed without interference.
His motives were mixed, perhaps, but great revolutions are the result
of mixed motives, and never of wholly small and base ones. The Vicar of
St. Jermyn’s was blinded to the degrading character of his methods by
the loftiness of his aims. He took the guilt of fraud and perjury on
his conscience, and he did so contentedly, looking forward to the time
when the Church he served would re-enter the Catholic unity, and the
Body of Christ be made whole.

As soon as he had finished receiving the homage of his peculiar
adherents, the old priest went up to the Duchess of Trent, for whom
he had a warm regard. In spite of the theological gulf that sundered
them, she commanded his sympathy far more than the vain and hysterical
women who grovelled in his confessional, and her simple and unselfish
piety displayed in those good works which all religions enjoin had
won his gratitude and respect. Had he been able to make a convert
of the Duchess he would have felt it as great a triumph as when the
State-appointed Bishop of Linchester, laying aside his jewelled crozier
and mitre, came and knelt in the humble study of St. Jermyn’s Vicarage
to receive them again at the hands of the “Bishop of Lambeth.”

On her side the Duchess was not blind to the merits of Dr. Coles,
his indefatigable zeal, unworldliness, and kindly temper. They met
as friends meet, seated in different trains, and going in opposite
directions, who exchange a brief word of greeting before they pass out
of each other’s sight.

The Duchess had never referred to the religious aberrations of the
Doctor, but she thought she might safely challenge him on the subject
of loyalty to the Throne.

“I had no idea that you sympathized with the Legitimists,” she observed.

The Vicar smiled indulgently.

“This bazaar, I suppose you mean? It is more Father Grimes’s doing than
mine. I hold entirely aloof from politics.”

“But you have lent your schoolroom.”

Dr. Coles frowned.

“My schoolroom, as you call it, is a public building,” he said, with
a touch of anger. “I find I am expected to lend it for the purposes
of political meetings, even to the party which almost openly aims at
Disestablishment. I sometimes wonder I don’t receive an application to
lend it for an infidel lecture.”

The Duchess was impressed. Dr. Coles had struck the one note which
brought them into perfect accord, in his reference to infidelity.

In the view of the Duchess this was the one thing worse than Popery.
Her religious scale was made up of five degrees. At the very bottom
came Infidelity, in which term she was disposed to include the
Unitarian denomination and those divines of her own Church whose Hebrew
studies had led them to take different views as to the authorship of
the Old Testament books from those at one time prevalent. The second
head, Popery, covered practically the whole Christian Church during the
ages between the death of Paul and the conversion of Martin Luther, and
two-thirds of existing Christendom. The third division, under the word
Idolatry, embraced the religions of the rest of mankind, including the
stern monotheists of Islam. The Jews formed a class apart; the Duchess
was too good a Conservative to blame that ancient race severely for
their stubbornness in resisting even a Divine reform; she regarded them
as a species of embryo Christians, whose development had been arrested
in the caterpillar stage. Her fifth division, Protestantism, applied to
the sects dating from the Lutheran revolt, and to stray heretics of the
past, such as the Socialist Lollards and the freethinking Albigeois,
who possessed the merit of having been persecuted by Rome. Among these,
of course, she distinguished between the converted Christian and the
much larger class of sinners for whom she wished to take for granted a
death-bed repentance.

It was not an unimportant matter that the Duchess of Trent should
have held these views. Money is always important, and the Duchess was
one of a very large moneyed class who were always ready to open their
purses on behalf of their favourite propaganda. The infidel and the
sinner were supposed to be reached by the ordinary machinery of the
Church, and the Papist and the Jew had been wellnigh abandoned as
hopeless, though a few Englishmen of the lower class still prowled
through countries like Spain and Portugal, distributing Protestant
tracts and increasing the dislike felt for their nation. But the great
field for missionary effort, of course, was that section of mankind
labelled idolaters or heathen. In the spirit of the hymn which singles
out the inoffensive Buddhists of Ceylon to brand them with the epithet
vile, the good Duchess firmly believed that to thrust, not merely
the theology, but the morals, social customs, marriage institutions,
language, manners, and even clothing of her own age and country upon
all the peoples of the earth was a Divine injunction to be neglected at
her peril.

This generous zeal had long been encouraged by the statesmen of the
Raj, who saw its possessions widened without the expense of arms. The
British Empire resembles no other that has ever existed in having come
into existence unconsciously. England has sent forth her outlaws on
the shores of distant continents, and they have come back soldiers for
her. Her merchants have gone forth seeking merchandise, and realms
Alexander sighed for have fallen like ripe fruit into their hands. Her
missionaries have Anglicized where they should have Christianized;
the bigoted worshippers of Allah and Vishnu imitate the language of
Macaulay, and every new church in Africa gives a new cotton-mill to
Lancashire.

Dr. Coles had a more personal argument in store for the Duchess of
Trent.

“Surely you cannot be very bigoted against the Legitimists,” he urged.
“I thought that all the old Scotch families were Jacobites at heart.
And Lord Alistair Stuart is a member of the Guild.”

“I have heard my mistress, the Queen, say: ‘I am the greatest Jacobite
of them all,’” the Duchess responded. “But I don’t think she ever
expected to hear of real Jacobites in the twentieth century. I don’t
take your friends very seriously, Dr. Coles, and I dare say my son
doesn’t either.”

Before the discussion could be carried further Alistair himself came
into view. His mother watched him anxiously, half afraid of seeing him
accord the same homage to Dr. Coles as the others. But whether because
he was wanting in reverence for Armenia, or because he was ashamed to
show greater respect to a man than to his own mother, Stuart contented
himself with shaking hands with the priest, after he had previously
greeted his parent.

He was surprised at first to see her at such a function. But the
diplomacy of the Duchess was very transparent. She at once turned to
Hero, and pronounced the formula which entitles two people in English
society to know of each other’s existence.

It was the first time Alistair had seen Miss Vanbrugh, but not the
first time he had heard her name. The eyes of society are very keen
where a man like the Duke of Trent and Colonsay is concerned, and its
whispering-gallery is very wide. Although the Duke himself had never
given any significance to his intercourse with Hero, the correct
significance had already been given to it by others, and the rumour
had reached Lord Alistair. For him the girl who stood before him was
the girl who was on the point of becoming his brother’s betrothed.

He raised his eyes to her face, and when he saw that picture of calm,
sweet maidenhood, with all the bloom of youth and purity upon it, and
those eyes radiant with high and happy thoughts, and when he recalled
that other face he had just quitted, with the paint peeling off under
the haggard eyes, and the cracked lips set in a querulous scowl because
he had not dared to bring her into the company of reputable women, and
when he compared his own lot, cast with that unhappy creature, with
the life that lay before his brother, blest in so dear a wife, then
his heart failed him, and he had to turn away his eyes to hide the
unexpected smart.

On her part Hero was not much less moved. She saw standing before her
the figure around which her imagination had already woven its romance,
and he was handsomer than the hero of her romance. The gracefully-knit
form, with its statuesque neck and curling dark hair, breathed the
very spirit of the lays of Oisin. The swish of the heather was still
in his elastic tread, the sunlight of the rain-washed Hebrides was in
his glance. She seemed to see him in his kilt and plaid, the eagle’s
feather nodding in his bonnet, and the claymore by his side, a young
chieftain of the glens, starting at daybreak from his bed among the
fern, and setting forth perhaps to woo a maiden like herself with
the immemorial charms of song and dance. In the strait garb of the
decorous capital he seemed to her like a shorn Samson, and she thought
of violets fading in a city garret, and skylarks caged in a dark cellar
beating their wings in want of light and air.

She, also, drew her comparison, and the cold and perfect courtier of
Colonsay House suffered by it. For the first time she felt in its full
strength that instinct of self-sacrifice which lies at the core of
every noble nature. The task which Stuart’s mother had offered to her,
and in which she had only taken a sentimental interest, now became a
fascination. The longing to save this glorious soul, fallen among weeds
and briars, to lift it up and wipe away its stains, and set it on its
true path again, overcame her like the touch of love; the touch of
love overcame her like the longing to save, and her hand trembled in
Alistair Stuart’s.

The two Vanes sidled up, anxious to be recognized by their chief.

“So glad you have turned up, Stuart,” bleated the elder. “It’s quite a
demonstration, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Wickham echoed, “it is a blow. I think we are striking a blow.”

He meant at the hated middle classes. It was the only kind of a blow he
was ever likely to strike against that or any other enemy.

Stuart heard them with impatience. Somehow the presence of Hero made
the two brothers look tawdry and ridiculous with their decadent cant,
their untidy hair, and their silly, outlandish neckties. He answered
with irony:

“No doubt the middle classes will be frightened when they hear of this
bazaar. But you must see that it gets into the papers, otherwise the
effect will be lost. Are there any reporters here?”

The brothers looked around a little nervously.

“I hope so,” said Egerton, whose vanity was slightly greater than his
cowardice.

“It might vulgarize the thing,” suggested Wickham whose cowardice was
slightly greater than his vanity.

Stuart understood their fears, and played on them by way of distraction
from his secret emotion.

“I expect the place is crammed with detectives,” he observed. “I
fancied I saw one or two suspicious-looking fellows with notebooks as I
came in.”

Hero grasped the situation, and smiled.

“No; do you think so?” exclaimed the elder Vane in a tone of
exultation, tempered by alarm. “But surely there is nothing they can
take hold of--nothing illegal, I mean--in a bazaar?”

“They may shadow us after this, though,” muttered the junior, in whom
alarm had got the better of exultation.

“They may treat the bazaar as evidence of a conspiracy,” Stuart
suggested cheerfully. “But here comes St. Maur; you had better ask him.”

He turned, and led Hero away through the crowd, to escape from the
person he had indicated, leaving the brothers in a state of cruel
apprehension.

But Mr. St. Maur was not to be shaken off so easily. This gentleman,
who had spelt his name “Maher” in his native city of “Dahblin”
(as he was accustomed to pronounce it), was the son of a decent
butter-merchant, who had put him to the Bar. Coming over to the Temple,
in accordance with old custom to keep his terms, the ambitious youth
was surprised and charmed to find that his membership of the Roman
Church, which had stood somewhat in his light in the society of the
Irish capital, was here a fashionable distinction. To drink the Roman
Pontiff’s health before that of the British Sovereign appeared to be in
some mysterious way a passport to Court favour, and a Roman missionary
had just been given precedence over the heads of the English Church.
The policy of the Primrose League had been adapted to the purposes of
proselytism, and a club had been founded in the West End in which the
middle-class aspirant could enjoy the privilege of lunching in the
same room as a Roman Cabinet Minister and receiving the _Times_ fresh
from the hands of a Roman Duke. Unfortunately the Duke and the Cabinet
Minister failed to play their parts with sufficient zeal, or else there
were not enough of them to go around, and St. Bridget’s Club gradually
sunk from depth to depth till not merely Protestants, but Jews,
profaned its portals, and it became a refuge for all the suspicious
characters whom other clubs refused.

Young Maher was not long in deciding to forsake the Irish Bar for the
English, and a slight alteration in the spelling of his name enabled
him to pose as an offshoot of one of the greatest families in Britain.
The difficulty of an accent which clove obstinately to his tongue was
met by a well-constructed legend of an Irish branch of the family in
question, supposed to have settled in the Emerald Isle about the time
of Strongbow. On the strength of this genealogy, which would have done
credit to the Heralds’ College in its best remunerated moments, Mr. St.
Maur was in the habit of referring to a nobleman of lofty rank as “the
head of our house,” thereby causing intolerable anguish to his friends,
the Vanes, who were only nephews of a baronet. Unfortunately they were
prevented from questioning the genuineness of St. Maur’s pedigree,
inasmuch as they had laid every stress upon it in introducing him to
their acquaintance. But they had an uneasy sense that the Irishman was
an impostor who had beaten them by mere bluff.

On his part the barrister having, as he conceived, surpassed the Vanes,
was seeking for loftier heights to scale. As soon as he met Lord
Alistair Stuart in the brothers’ flat he promptly marked him out for
attack. Undaunted by Stuart’s evident dislike for him, the Irishman
persistently forced himself on his notice. With this object he had
thrown himself heart and soul into the Legitimist cause, as he would
have thrown himself into the Independent Labour Party the day after if
the leaders of that movement had been members of the peerage.

Having come to the bazaar chiefly in order to push his acquaintance
with Lord Alistair, Mr. St. Maur was not the man to be balked of his
prey.

“Grand success, this, isn’t it, Stuart?” he bawled out from afar, as he
hustled his way through the throng.

Much as Stuart disliked his follower, he failed to give him credit
for the naked singleness of his aims. Had he fully understood the
Irishman’s character, he would have got rid of him before this by the
easy expedient of introducing him to his brother. Once anchored to the
coat-tails of a Duke, St. Maur would have left a mere younger brother
severely alone. As it was, Lord Alistair saw no way of repelling the
intruder except by a harshness which was not in his nature.

Mr. St. Maur shook hands effusively, and then, finding he was not going
to be introduced to Lord Alistair’s companion, began enlarging on the
prospects of the movement.

“I consider this affair will launch us as a serious party,” he
declared. “The public will begin to reckon with us. It will soon be
time to think of a Parliamentary candidature. What do you say, Stuart?”

Alistair shrugged his shoulders.

“I should think you would get about ten votes in any constituency in
England.”

“Ah, but what about Scotland? There is a feeling up there that might be
appealed to. If a man like yourself, now, a member of an old Highland
family, were to stand in your own part of the country, don’t you think
the clansmen would rally round you?”

“You forget that I should have my brother’s influence dead against me.
He is a member of the Government.”

“He would have to disavow you officially, of course. But privately, you
know? Don’t you think the Duke might be brought to show some sympathy
for the movement?”

“He would simply laugh at it, I expect,” said Stuart.

“The Duke of Gloucester does not laugh at it,” returned the other.

Alistair’s face darkened at the name, and he cast down his eyes.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

St. Maur swelled with importance.

“I happen to have private information that he watches the proceedings
of the Guild with the closest attention. He has everything that appears
in the press about us sent him by a press-cutting agency.”

“I wish I had known that before,” said Alistair. And, turning to Hero,
he explained: “I have let them have an autograph letter of the Prince’s
to sell at one of the stalls.”

The absurdity of this did not strike Hero so much as its ingratitude.

“A letter from the Prince to you, do you mean?” she asked, with an
accent of reproach.

“Yes; I used to know him very well when we were boys. I came across it
the other day among some old papers. But I shouldn’t like him to hear
that I had let it be sold.”

A purpose had swiftly formed in Hero’s mind.

“Whereabouts is the stall?” she inquired.

“Over here.”

Turning his back on Mr. St. Maur with unwonted rudeness, he conducted
Hero to a stall presided over by a pretty, overdressed little woman,
who had been persuaded by Mr. Grimes in the confessional that she would
thus atone for certain errors to which pretty, overdressed little women
are prone. Prince Herbert’s autograph had been entrusted to her for
sale, and by good luck it had not been disposed of when the two came up.

“What is the price of this letter?” Miss Vanbrugh asked quickly.

“One guinea,” the stallkeeper simpered. “It is from His Royal Highness
the Duke of Gloucester to Lord Alistair Stuart,” she added in ignorance
of who stood before her.

“Let me buy it, and give it to you!” cried Alistair, guessing Hero’s
design.

She took up the letter. It was a short schoolboy’s note, and contained
a misspelt word.

  “DEAR ALISTAIR:

  “I cannot meet you to-morrow, as the Crown Prince of Austria is
  coming, but I will go out fishing on Saturday if you like. Come over
  here at ten o’clock--mind, be punctual.

                                         “Yours affectionately,
                                                               “HERBERT.

  “P.S.--Sorry to break my promise, but they made me. Mind, bring your
  fishing-rod.”

Hero handed the letter to her companion.

“I would rather you let me buy it, and give it back to you,” she said.

She handed the money to the lady of the stall, who was looking
considerably astonished.

Alistair understood the delicate rebuke. His glance took in the
contents of the friendly, boyish note afresh, and he felt ashamed that
he had parted with it.

“I am very grateful to you, Miss Vanbrugh, believe me,” he said
earnestly, as he slipped the letter into his pocket. “I ought not to
have let it go into strange hands. But I hope I needn’t count you as a
stranger. You are often at Colonsay House, aren’t you?”

“I have never met you there,” said Hero pointedly.

And Alistair was silent.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Miracle Play was a great success, though not, perhaps, in the way
anticipated by Dr. Coles.

The Vicar had understood that the text of the Ober-Ammergau
performance was to furnish the basis of a version only slightly
modified by Mr. Egerton Vane. But Mr. Vane, being deeply imbued with
the spirit of Maeterlinck, had allowed his adaptation to become
tinctured to an unforeseen extent by the vein of symbolism peculiar to
the work of the Belgian master. The orthodox Christian interpretation
being repugnant to his feelings as a Pagan, he had, moreover, boldly
replaced it by something more congenial to his own sympathies.

The result was somewhat as though a conscientious Buddhist should
rewrite “Paradise Lost,” endeavouring to make it illustrate the
doctrine of metempsychosis.

In the opening scene Mary was introduced as the Spirit of Form,
receiving the Annunciation from the Angel Gabriel as the representative
of Creative Genius. The dialogue, which was fortunately unintelligible
to nine-tenths of the audience, turned on the sterility of the Jewish
nation in the department of the plastic arts. Mary was informed
that her Son would remove the prohibition contained in the Second
Commandment, thereby opening the way for the Christian school of
statuary and painting.

The whole of the sacred narrative was dealt with from the same
standpoint. The Wise Men were presented as the exponents of the three
arts of Poetry, Music, and Painting, whose respective merits were
discussed at some length. The dispute of the child Christ in the Temple
was made to turn on Keats’s famous identification of Truth with
Beauty. Satan, in the scene of the Temptation, appeared as the genius
of Utilitarianism and the middle classes, urging the Christ to abandon
the principle of Art for Art’s sake. Towards the end of the drama
Byron’s jest about Barabbas was almost literally incorporated, Barabbas
being designed as a type of commercial success in literature--a Jewish
Tennyson or Ruskin.

Every allusion to the Jews as a people was barbed with the bitterest
malignity. The Semitic spirit was branded, with some historical
confusion, as that of Philistinism _par excellence_; and Isaiah and
other prophets were ingeniously represented as having fallen martyrs to
their literary excellence rather than to their reforming energy.

The allegory was so vague and the dialogue so obscure that most of
those present entirely failed to grasp the enormity of the author’s
transgression. But it was otherwise with Dr. Coles. The Armenian
proselyte was a learned and thorough-going medievalist, and he had
taken it for granted that medieval traditions would be strictly adhered
to. He had left the work of superintending the rehearsals to his
curate, never deeming that Mr. Grimes was capable of betraying the
trust. Nor was he, had he been sufficiently intelligent to perceive
that he was being made a cat’s-paw by his pagan librettist. The actors
in the piece, being the choir-boys, were even less capable of judging
of the drift of the performance.

The deeply mortified Vicar restrained his wrath till the moment when
the High-Priest Caiaphas came upon the scene in the thinly-disguised
character of the proprietor of a morning paper with an enormous
circulation, when it became impossible to mistake the dramatist’s
intentions. Rising from his seat in the front row of the audience, Dr.
Coles gave a peremptory order for the curtain to be let down, and the
thoroughly mystified spectators seized the opportunity to escape.




CHAPTER IX

MOLLY FINUCANE AT HOME


AS he turned away from St. Jermyn’s schoolroom, after putting his
mother and Miss Vanbrugh into their carriage, Lord Alistair Stuart made
a curious discovery. Thrusting his hands into his pocket in the act of
nodding to a cabdriver, he found that he had no money.

The brother of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay had often known what it
was to want a thousand pounds, but he had never been without sovereigns
in his pocket, and it took him some moments to realize that this state
of things was not accidental, but natural in his new circumstances.

Much to his own surprise, he felt the first cold touch of poverty
distinctly exhilarating, like a bather’s first plunge into the sea. It
was not hardship so far; it was merely adventure. He apologized to the
disappointed cabman, and set off to walk to Chelsea, with that sense of
superiority to fortune which Aristippus may have felt when he bade his
tired slave throw away the bag of gold.

Voluntary suffering has always exercised a powerful charm over a
certain order of mankind. The starvation, the confinement, and the
self-torture of the Hindu fakir and the Catholic saint have not been
practised solely with a business-like view to reward in a future life;
they have satisfied a need--morbid, perhaps, but real, since it is
found among races that have scarcely risen to the conception of another
world. It is as if diseased human nature instinctively sought its own
remedy, as the suffering animal seeks out the herb possessed of healing
powers.

As Alistair Stuart took his way through the mean streets of Lambeth
and Vauxhall, with their narrow dirty pavements, their scanty shops
at the street-corners and their taverns in which the only touches of
brightness and prosperity seemed concentrated, he felt the temptation
growing strong upon him.

“After all, it would not be so bad to live this life,” he said
to himself. “One might be very cosy in one of these small old
houses, tucked up against some great dead wall, with unknown things
taking place on the other side of it, or buried beneath some huge
railway arch, with trains thundering overhead all night to unknown
destinations. I seem to be an outlaw; why shouldn’t I live among
outlaws? I could loaf about in flannel shirts and dressing-gowns all
day long, and Molly would fetch me my beer from the public-house. I
should smoke long clay pipes, and write an epic poem, like the ‘City of
Dreadful Night.’”

But the recollection of Thomson and his poem turned the current of his
thoughts into a darker channel.

“How many men of genius has London brained with her paving-stones!” he
reflected bitterly. “The poet asks for nothing but liberty to sing, and
the world will not give it to him. ‘Give me money’s worth for my bread
and raiment and shelter’ is her harsh demand; and she drags the poet
from his fountain in the wilderness to sweep the dust of the bazaar.”

His fellow-feeling for the poor drunken schoolmaster rested on
sentiment. In Alistair the seed of genius, delicate from the first,
had been choked, not by the pressure of physical needs, but by a
profound moral discouragement. During the years in which genius begins
to recognize itself, to try its wings, and point its first shy flight
towards the empyrean, he had found himself living the life of a
criminal on a ticket-of-leave. He had been kept in a state of spiritual
starvation, deprived of the food for which his nature pined, and choked
with the dry bread of Calvinism. The budding tendrils of his mind had
shrivelled, vainly searching for the air of sympathy and the warm sun
of praise. He had been made to feel afraid of his own intelligence,
his dreams and guesses after truth and beauty were imputed to him as
iniquity; and if he ever sought to give them expression, he wrote as
Crusoe might have written on his desert isle--for the ears of savages.

His genius had emerged from this ordeal maimed for life. If he sang
now, it was not as the birds sang, rejoicing in their Maker’s gift to
them, but stealthily, as prisoners sing in dungeons, apprehensive of
the passing warder’s tread. Even the desire for fame was now a broken
spring. He had tasted too deeply of the bitter cup of disapproval to
hope to cleanse his mouth with the honey of applause. He felt vaguely
that he had been sent into the world to teach his fellow-men to rejoice
with him in all its beauty and its wonder, and that they had struck
him brutally across the lips, and bidden him become dull and timid and
mean-hearted, like themselves.

A whole generation in England had endured an experience more or less
like Alistair’s, and the literature of the age still breathes a
suppressed bitterness against the cruelties of Evangelicalism. The
persecution was all the more oppressive because it was not sanctioned
by any public authority, nor embodied in any law. It was carried on
privately, around every hearth, and in every hour of family life,
poisoning the springs of truthfulness and self-respect, and breaking
the hearts of the young. It was the memory of such wrongs that had made
easy the triumph of the Catholic reaction; the Protestant tyranny had
fallen, as other tyrannies fall, more by its own abuses than by the
strength of its assailants. The fires of Smithfield were forgotten,
and the little pagan group who surrounded Alistair Stuart patronized
the Roman Church as their most powerful ally against the Nonconformist
conscience.

But Alistair was beginning to look deeper. The play he had just
witnessed, in spite of its absurdities, had embodied certain sentiments
of his own. “There is no cure,” he reflected as he walked along. “There
is no help for men like me; the crowd will always persecute us. They
have set up the image of the Crucified One that they might crucify
others in his name. The memory of Otway did not save Chatterton; the
sufferings of Chatterton did not redeem Poe. Their flattery of the
dead is only a deeper insult to the living. They kneel at the tomb of
Shakespeare, and if Shakespeare rose again they would cast him into
Reading Gaol.”

It was Alistair Stuart’s misfortune to be only a half-hearted sinner.
The world likes its men to be thorough-going. Confronted with a mixed
individuality it is disconcerted and annoyed, like a reviewer called
upon to judge a poem by a prose-writer, or a serious volume from a
humorist’s pen. Alistair’s natural instincts had been cowed by his
boyish experience. Without sharing the convictions of the righteous,
he lacked the courage to despise them utterly. He would have had them
pardon him, though he could not repent.

His embittered mood lasted till he came in sight of the river below
Battersea Park. The sunlight sparkling on the water, and the fresh
breeze blowing over the trees of the park, refreshed him for the
moment, and his thoughts turned to Hero Vanbrugh.

A sigh rose to his lips.

“If I had only met her a year ago!”

The rebuke which Hero had administered so delicately in the matter of
the royal autograph had moved him to the heart. It had been an appeal
to his self-respect, a proof that she credited him with honourable
instincts like her own, and at this crisis in his life the compliment
was like the touch of balm upon a sore. With such a hand as Hero’s
to restrain him, that plunge into the social underworld which he
was contemplating lost its fascination. How was it that in all the
years they had known him neither his mother nor his brother had ever
been able to strike the chord which this girl’s finger had touched
unerringly at their first meeting?

In searching for the answer to this riddle, he recollected whither his
steps were bound. The figure of Molly Finucane rose before him like a
faded portrait over which a breath of discoloration had passed, leaving
it tarnished and dingy, and he shivered slightly, and unconsciously
relaxed the quickness of his pace.

His heart sank within him as he ascended the familiar path, and let
himself in with his latchkey. Missing the expected figure of the page,
he hung up his hat himself, and passed into the drawing-room.

“Where’s Tom?” he inquired, not without some foreboding of the reply he
should receive.

Molly was lying on the sofa in a low-necked dress, pulling a cigarette,
and trying to amuse herself with an illustrated ladies’ paper, which
did not amuse her at all--it was much too severe in its decorum. She
sat up yawning at Stuart’s entrance, and frowned as he put his question.

“I had to get rid of him for insolence,” she replied, with still
smouldering wrath. “I told him my shoes hadn’t been cleaned this
morning, and the young brat contradicted me to my face, and said he
couldn’t do them any better. The lazy little wretch hadn’t touched
them. I asked him if he knew who he was talking to, and he became
insolent. So I just ordered him to pack up and leave the house.”

Stuart listened without much interest to this story, the counterpart
of which he had often heard before. Somehow Molly’s servants were
perpetually incurring dismissal for similar behaviour. It was rare for
her to keep them more than a couple of months, and it was not uncommon
for them to be sent away the day after they arrived; and always for the
same cause--disrespect to the mistress of the house.

“I can’t think what’s the matter with the servants nowadays,” Molly
complained. She was not the only mistress to whom it had never occurred
that there could be, by any possibility, a servants’ side to the great
question. “I had a Scotchwoman here to-day, applying for the cook’s
place”--the cook had been under notice to leave for some time--“and she
was most impertinent.”

Molly stopped rather unexpectedly, as though she had been going to give
particulars of the impertinence, but had suddenly thought better of it.
The Scotchwoman, in fact, had presumed so far as to inquire into the
character of the relationship between the lady of the house and the
Lord Alistair Stuart who was indicated as its master, and had withdrawn
her candidature for the situation on learning that the tie was merely
one of friendship. Being told rather fiercely by Miss Finucane that
this was not her business, the offender had replied uncompromisingly:
“Excuse me, miss, I don’t set up to blame you, but I have my character
to think of, and if it was known that I had taken a place in a house
that wasn’t respectable, I might not be able to suit myself elsewhere.”

It was no doubt the irritation caused by this plain speaking which had
vented itself on the unlucky page. Alistair shrugged his shoulders as
though in sympathy, but inwardly the question suggested itself whether
Miss Vanbrugh ever had to encounter insolence on the part of servants.
He did not think it likely.

He had to go upstairs to dress for dinner, this being a point about
which Miss Finucane was very particular. If ever a man ventured to
present himself at her dinner-table in morning dress she was apt to
take it as a carefully studied reflection on her character. Her own
time hung so heavily on her hands that she spent half her day over
her wardrobe. She breakfasted in a fur-lined dressing-gown, put on a
walking-dress during the morning, lunched in a third costume, wore an
æsthetic tea-gown in the afternoon, made a grand toilet for dinner,
and exchanged it for a loose night-robe in which she drank whisky
and water before going to bed. In all these changes of costume jewels
played a great part. Diamonds and sapphires meant to Molly much what
a table well covered with briefs means to a barrister, or the strips
of ribbon on his breast to a soldier; they were the tangible tokens of
success.

When Stuart came downstairs there was no sign of dinner. He sat down
and tried to talk to Molly about the bazaar, but she listened sulkily,
offended because he had not ventured to take her with him.

“There were lots of women there, I suppose?” she asked, in a grumbling
voice.

“Yes, a good many. Women belonging to the Church, most of them, I
expect.”

“Was there anyone you knew?”

She fixed a shrewdly questioning glance on him, and noted the momentary
hesitation that preceded his reply.

“No, no one.”

Molly gave a scornful smile.

“That’s a lie, Alistair. Was your mother there?”

“I prefer not to talk about my mother,” returned Alistair, who dreaded
Molly’s coarse tongue.

“Do you think I didn’t know why you wouldn’t take me?” Molly retorted.
“Who else was there?”

“No one I had ever met before.”

Molly pounced on the concealed admission.

“Your mother introduced you to someone. Who was it?”

Stuart rose to his feet, beginning to get angry.

“The only woman I spoke to the whole afternoon was a young lady who, I
believe, is going to marry my brother.”

“What’s her name?”

“I decline to tell you.” He walked over to the bell and rang it
impatiently. “What the deuce are they keeping dinner for?”

Molly sat silent, watching him with all the cunning of a narrow
intelligence concentrated on one point. No one in the world was more
ignorant than Molly Finucane was of the things that are written about
in books, but the keenest counsel who ever sifted the evidence of
a lying witness could not have matched the sureness with which she
detected anything in Alistair’s mind that threatened her supremacy over
him. Her instinct now warned her that some danger had arisen for her,
and her fear, overpowering her jealousy for the moment, made her hold
her tongue.

No notice was taken of Lord Alistair’s ring, but after another ten
minutes or so an untidy parlour-maid put her head into the room and
announced that dinner was ready.

The dinner was badly cooked, and not appetising, and the parlour-maid
had neglected to warm the claret. Molly called for champagne.

“There’s none left, ma’am,” the maid retorted, speaking in that hostile
tone which her servants generally assumed towards Miss Finucane.

“Yes, there is, unless you’ve drunk it in the kitchen.”

An altercation between mistress and maid followed, high words being
used on both sides. Stuart went on with his dinner in silent disgust,
trying not to listen. He had sat through similar scenes often enough
before, but they had not made the same impression on him. It was as
though his whole nature had been set throbbing like a bell with a
certain note, with which his surroundings were all out of tune.

The dinner was not only badly cooked, but it quickly appeared that
there was not enough of it. On seeing a few slices of ham set before
her in the place of a joint, the mistress of the house lost her temper.

“Go and tell the cook to make an omelette,” she ordered angrily. “It’s
disgraceful that we can’t have enough to eat.”

The parlour-maid departed. A minute or two afterwards the door was
flung open violently, and the cook advanced into the middle of the
dining-room.

“You can’t have an omelette. I’ve no eggs, and the fire’s gone out,”
she remarked loudly and aggressively.

“What do you mean, cook?” said Molly, evidently rather alarmed.

The cook saw her mistress quailing, and raised her voice.

“I mean that I’ve cooked as much as I mean to, and I’m not going to do
any more. I’m tired of it.”

“This is disgraceful!” exclaimed her mistress, appealing to Stuart.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, to come in and talk like that,
simply because I asked for an omelette.”

“Well, you can’t have it, then,” the cook returned, with a ring of
triumph.

“Very well; that’s enough. Go downstairs!” commanded Molly.

The cook tossed her head, and marched out of the room, slamming the
door behind her.

“Do you owe the woman any wages?” Stuart asked, as soon as she was
gone. He knew by experience that it was useless to interfere in these
periodical scenes between Molly and her household.

“Not a farthing,” Molly protested. “And I’ve always treated her kindly,
too. I can’t think what makes her presume like that.”

The cook went down fuming and snorting into the kitchen, and gave the
explanation to her sympathizing sisters.

“I’ll teach her to send haughty messages out to me, and me a
respectable woman whose father had a farm, and six men under him; and
her out of the gutter, and no better than a street-walker, if you come
to that, though she do ride in her carriage, and wear as many jewels as
a Martinet.”

“You mean a Marchioness, don’t you, Eleanor?” inquired the housemaid,
who had moved in higher spheres.

“I mean a lady, that’s what I mean,” said the cook, with grim emphasis.
“Consequently I don’t mean Miss Finucane, as she calls herself, though
her real name’s Finigan, and she’s low Irish down to her boot-soles.”
She took a long breath, and concluded: “And so I’d have told her to
her face if his lordship hadn’t been there; but he’s a gentleman, when
all’s said and done, and I’m sorry for him.”

The cook spoke for her sex. Most women were sorry for Lord Alistair
Stuart.

When Molly saw Alistair rise from the table immediately after the
cook’s stormy exit, her face fell.

“You’re not going out again?” she protested.

“I’ve got to,” was the answer.

“Take me with you, then,” Molly demanded.

“Can’t. I’m going to see Des Louvres.”

“You’re always going there. What do you want to see him for?”

“It’s on business to do with the Legitimists.”

“Bother the Legitimists!” Molly was not a politician. Beyond the vague
notion that all these pretenders of whom she heard so much enjoyed
the secret patronage of the Pope, and must therefore be in some way
inimical to that Protestantism which it had been her first lesson as
a child to abjure and abhor, she was completely indifferent to their
cause.

“I won’t have you go,” she continued. “You’ve been out all day, and
left me alone with those wretched servants. I want you to take me to
the theatre.”

“I’ve no money,” said Stuart impatiently.

“Can’t you borrow some?”

“Who from?”

A name rose to Molly’s lips, but she hesitated to pronounce it. She
looked at Stuart, and as their eyes met each knew what the other was
thinking of.

“No,” he declared hastily. “I’m sorry, Molly, but I must go. I
promised. There’s to be somebody there that I must meet.”

“Who?”

“Well, it’s a sort of secret. You won’t talk about it?”

“Who have I got to talk to?”

The retort struck painfully on Alistair. That compassion for Molly
which lay at the root of his refusal to leave her was stirred by the
reminder of the poor little woman’s loneliness. She had no friends,
she could have no friends in their present circumstances, and she had
no interests in life apart from him. He felt that he was ill-treating
her by this second absence in one day, and his voice softened as he
explained:

“It’s Don Juan. Des Louvres told me he doesn’t want it to be known that
he’s in England.”

The name was not familiar to Molly.

“Who is he?” she asked, more with the object of detaining Stuart than
from any real curiosity on the subject.

Don Juan, in fact, only ranked as an heir-apparent in the Legitimist
almanac, his father being still alive. He represented one of those
families of decrepit and priest-ridden despots which were everywhere
driven from the thrones of the Mediterranean by the great Liberal
flood of the nineteenth century. Now the flood was beginning to abate,
the wrongs of the past were fading from men’s minds, and the figures of
these discrowned Princes stood forth once more, surrounded by the halo
of romantic misfortune.

But all this did not concern Molly in the least. Don Juan’s only
importance for her was as a new acquaintance for Stuart. She took a
jealous interest in all Alistair’s friends, not as individuals, but as
influences over him which might or might not tend to detach him from
herself.

“Why are you going to meet him?” she asked, hardly waiting for the
answer to her first question.

Alistair gave a half-ashamed smile.

“Well, he is going to give me a decoration, I believe--the Order of the
Holy Sepulchre.”

Molly looked impressed. She was sensitive about Alistair’s social
position, which she was conscious of having compromised, and this
decoration, coming on the morrow of his bankruptcy, seemed a welcome
rehabilitation.

“Then he really is a Prince?” she asked, with floating recollections
of police-court cases in which adventurers had obtained money by
pretending to titles not really theirs.

Stuart laughed good-naturedly.

“Yes, he’s a Prince right enough; at least, he’s as good as the Comte
de Rouen.”

Molly had heard of the Comte de Rouen, whose party had just given
proof of its vitality in a neighbouring country in one of the most
extraordinary episodes recorded in history. A conflict, extending over
years, and threatening at one time to assume the character of a civil
war, had taken place between the heads of the army, on the one hand,
and the civil Government on the other, over the body of an obscure
Jewish officer. If the guilt or innocence of the victim of this famous
persecution had not yet been placed beyond the reach of doubt, at least
it was made clear that his enemies had steeped themselves in perjury,
forgery, and every kind of subornation and conspiracy. It became
equally evident that the motive of their action was rather religious
than political; a chasm was revealed running through the nation, and
sharply dividing the clerical persecutors from the anti-clerical
defenders of the accused man. The army chiefs appeared as the tools of
the priesthood, which was seen in full cry on the trail of a Semitic
victim. The contagion spread to other countries, and prelates of the
Roman Church in England proclaimed their sympathy with the crusade. A
shock ran through Europe and America. It was as if the mask of saintly
meekness under persecution worn so closely by the Roman Church for
a century had been suddenly lifted for a moment, and modern men had
obtained a glimpse of the Fury’s visage underneath, with its writhing
snakes and its teeth gnashing for blood, the visage which they had
almost come to think of as a fable of Protestant historians.

The name of the Comte de Rouen silenced Molly, and Alistair was
allowed to depart without further objection.

As soon as he had left the house she went upstairs, took out his
mother’s letter, and read it through again for the fourth or fifth
time, with her lips tightly pinched and her forehead wrinkled in the
effort to devise some reply calculated at once to teach the Duchess
manners, and yet to neutralize her opposition.

This was what she wrote:

  “DEAR MADAM:

  “Don’t worry about Alistair. You are about as likely to see me marry
  him as you are to see”--she named a sacred personage--“riding down
  Piccadilly on a bicycle.

                                                   “Yours truly,
                                                        “MARY FINUCANE.”




CHAPTER X

A SCIENTIFIC OPINION


THE Duke of Trent and Colonsay sat at his great office table in his
room at the Home Office thinking.

The table was piled high with official papers. The permanent staff
of a Government Department are quick to detect the weakness of each
new chief put over their heads by the changing tide of parliamentary
warfare. The weakness of the new Home Secretary was for details and
statistics. A return of a hundred foolscap pages showing exactly how
many pounds of beef and how many pounds of rice are consumed in the
prisons of the country every year, or how many miles a policeman tramps
over in the same period in the course of his beat, afforded a real
satisfaction to his intellect. His staff catered for this taste as if
they had been the conductors of a popular magazine. They kept their new
chief busy and contented, and he let them alone.

But it was not about his important functions in the State that the
Minister was thinking at this moment, but about a more personal concern.

His discovery of his mother’s project had left him for some time in a
state of indecision, due partly to the fact that his desire was not
so much to marry Hero Vanbrugh as to prevent his brother from marrying
her. The appearance of a rival on the scene is generally sufficient to
decide a hesitating wooer, but then the Duke had not been exactly a
wooer, and this was another cause of embarrassment. Suddenly to begin
paying the attentions of a lover to a girl whom he had been accustomed
to treat familiarly as his mother’s friend seemed to a man of the
Duke’s stiff habit of mind an awkward, and possibly a ridiculous,
proceeding.

On the other hand, he saw that his mother was actively pushing her
design, and he could not shut his eyes to the fact that Alistair was a
rival to be feared.

It is difficult at all times for a man with a strong sense of his own
dignity to make love, and for a man animated by the calm and temperate
regard of the Duke of Trent to try to make love according to the
accepted English convention struck even his imagination as dangerously
foolish.

He condemned in his own mind the national custom which requires the man
to do his own love-making.

“Now, in France,” he reflected, “there would be no trouble about the
matter. I should tell my mother to send for Sir Bernard Vanbrugh, and
they would settle it between them.”

Sir Bernard’s name suggested an alternative which recommended itself
the more the longer he considered it. He would carry his proposal to
Hero’s father, and leave it to him to break the ice with Hero herself.

His acquaintance with the great scientist and physician was of the
slightest, but he could hardly distrust the reception such a son-in-law
as himself was likely to receive, and he might count on the father’s
influence with his daughter to overcome any possible hesitation on her
part.

Desirous to give every possible distinction to his overture, the Home
Secretary drew towards him a sheet of the official notepaper, and
wrote a few lines requesting the physician to name an hour at which he
would receive him on a private matter. The note folded and sealed, he
handed it to his private secretary, with injunctions to send it by a
messenger, and bring back the reply.

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s answer, which arrived within half an hour, was
even more formal than the Duke’s request, simply stating that the
physician would be at liberty that day at five o’clock.

The Duke ordered his carriage, and alighted at Sir Bernard’s door in
Stratford Place punctually at the hour named. Rather to his surprise,
but even more to his relief, he was taken, not into the drawing-room,
but into the physician’s consulting-room, and offered the patient’s
chair.

The man whose grey powerful eyes, under their square wall of forehead,
were turned on him with something of the penetrative power of a
searchlight, across a fragile-looking desk in some decorative wood,
was a man with a remarkable history.

There are some men of whom their friends are accustomed to say that
they should like them better if they were not so clever. Vanbrugh had
started in life with this handicap. He was an intellectual monster,
a brain-giant whose understanding was to the understandings of those
about him what the magnesium light is to a tallow candle.

Those into whose company he was thrown suffered somewhat as they
would have done in a strong light. Moreover, they were conscious that
Vanbrugh silently looked through them and over them, and they resented
the process in proportion to their conceit of themselves.

Thus it happened that the ablest man of his time was the most unpopular.

The unpopularity was the most marked among the members of his own
profession. To Vanbrugh the usages and traditions of his class were
so much rubbish. He saw in the etiquette of medicine nothing but the
precautions of dunces to protect their incapacity from discovery. He
was unable to make allowance for that infirmity of the human mind which
clings to custom through sheer terror of the unknown. Where he ought to
have imputed cowardice he imputed fraud.

He was a revolutionist by sheer force of insight. His mind covered at
a single bound the slow progress of years, and he was too impatient
to wait for the laggards to catch him up. The stupid are in a great
majority at all times, and in all situations, but some men, not less
great than Vanbrugh, have possessed the art of coaxing them, and
leading them on. It was just this art that Vanbrugh lacked. Unconscious
of his own brutality, he trampled on folly and dullness with feet of
iron, and the dull and foolish turned and rent him.

Up to the age of forty Bernard Vanbrugh’s life had been one long record
of disaster.

As a student he had been deeply unpopular, even with his professors,
who saw that they had in him a critic rather than a pupil. While
still walking the hospitals, the young man had ventured to argue
with the great lights of the profession whom he was there to watch
reverently and believe implicitly. He had had the audacity to suggest
to a celebrated gynecologist the use of ice at a critical stage of a
well-known operation; and though the specialist found himself obliged
to act on the advice, and subsequently enhanced his reputation by
adopting the treatment in his private practice, he never forgave the
young man’s presumption.

The medical authorities treated Vanbrugh with strict justice, up to the
point at which justice ceased to be obligatory; that is to say, they
awarded him as examiners every prize for which he chose to enter, but
they refused him a house-surgeoncy. When the astonished and mortified
young man tried to learn the reason for this refusal, he was met by
polite excuses and the recommendation that he should start in practice
as a consultant.

One old professor told him the truth.

“Our honorary staff will not have you,” he said bluntly. “Not because
they haven’t confidence in you, but because they think you haven’t
confidence in them.”

With a bitter smile Vanbrugh acknowledged the justice of the excuse.

He made up his mind that he must accept a house-surgeoncy in the
provinces. But when he came to apply for the usual testimonials from
those who had superintended his education, he received documents so
frigidly worded as to show clearly that they were given as a matter
of obligation merely, and not with any good will. The local doctors
in whose hands the appointments lay discerned the actual disapproval
beneath the formal recommendation. Vanbrugh, the most distinguished
student of his year, or for many years, was not even invited to present
himself for a personal interview when he applied for a post of two
hundred a year in a small country town.

He abandoned this useless attempt without much regret. He knew well
enough that London contained his destiny, and that he had been guilty
of treason to his own powers in seeking to escape it.

His enemies had advised him to become a consultant--that is to say, to
take rooms in an expensive street in the West End, and wait for other
doctors to send him patients as to a superior. Vanbrugh took this
advice, and for fifteen years no patient ever crossed his threshold.

A consultant depends absolutely on the support of his own profession,
and in his own profession Vanbrugh was hated as few men are hated.
There were men who, if they had heard of a patient intending to consult
him, would have walked across London to prevent it.

Vanbrugh was a poor man. The whole of the funds remaining from his
scholarships, together with the remittances doled out grudgingly by his
family, were set aside to pay the rent of the rooms in Brook Street.
His brass-plate, once affixed to the doorpost there, became his flag,
which he would not strike while life remained. In the meantime he had
to live.

After endless trials in all directions, Bernard Vanbrugh succeeded in
getting employment on the staff of one of those bureaus which undertake
to supply information on any subject. Vanbrugh’s was the medical
department, and he was paid at the rate of half a crown an hour. The
work had mostly to be done at the British Museum, and his weekly
earnings averaged about two pounds.

This, then, was the situation. The most brilliant follower of medicine
in Europe, perhaps the keenest intellect of his time, was compelled to
spend the best years of his life among broken-down journalists, and
stranded governesses, and all the sad jetsam of the educated class,
doing drudge’s work for the wages of a drudge. The celebrated Huxley
had a narrow escape from the same fate. How many other Huxleys and
Vanbrughs are to-day dreeing the same weird, while the millions of
philanthropy roll about the gutters, and the billions of endowments
pass into the pockets of the dunce?

Vanbrugh divided his scanty earnings into two equal portions. Fifty
pounds a year paid for his food and clothes and the rare holidays
conceded to health, with the other fifty he bought books and scientific
instruments.

The subject he had chosen to investigate was the cells of the brain.

At the age of forty he completed his work on the brain, and the
fifteen years’ penal servitude to which he had been sentenced by human
stupidity and spite approached its term.

He carried the manuscript to an important publisher, and solicited a
personal interview.

Strange to say, the publisher granted it. Vanbrugh’s name was well
known to him. Some hints of his researches had leaked out from time to
time, and the hospitals were already trembling. The meteoric career of
the student had not been forgotten. Every now and then his brethren
spoke of Vanbrugh as of a man from whom the world was certain to hear
sooner or later. While he was toiling in the dust he was already
reluctantly recognized as the coming man.

Vanbrugh placed his book in the publisher’s hands with something of
his old arrogance, which half a lifetime of hardship had not been able
to crush.

“This is a book which will, directly it appears, supersede every other
book on the brain. But if your reader sees my name on the title-page,
he will tell you it is rubbish. I ask you to submit it to him without
allowing him to know whom it is by, and then he may tell you the truth.”

The publisher smiled. He glanced from his caller’s proud, harsh
countenance to his shabby clothes and patched boots, and thought he
could understand. “The man is a crank,” he said to himself. “His
troubles have unhinged him.”

Nevertheless, he gave the required promise. He even went beyond his
word. Lest his English reader should suspect the authorship of the book
and be prejudiced in consequence, he took the trouble to forward the
manuscript to Vienna, to a renowned specialist in that capital, saying
that his usual advisers differed as to the merit of the work, and
requesting an impartial opinion. This was the first stroke of fortune
in Vanbrugh’s favour.

In less than a month the publisher was astonished by receiving back
the manuscript with a letter in which the Viennese authority repeated
Vanbrugh’s very words.

“I cannot understand what you tell me about your advisers,” the
Austrian wrote. “This is one of the greatest works I have ever had the
good fortune to read. It will supersede every existing work on the
brain. The author has done you a high honour in offering this book to
your house.”

The great publisher winced. It so happened that he had in the
press a voluminous book on this very subject by a baronet and
physician-in-ordinary to the Court, a book on whose preparation he had
already spent a considerable sum. It was clear that one of these two
books must kill the other. In either case he must be at a loss. On the
other hand, if he were to refuse Vanbrugh’s work, it might be taken by
the great rival house which divided the trade with his.

In this uncertainty he decided to submit the manuscript to his reader
in the ordinary way. Scarcely had he sent it off when he received a
second call from Vanbrugh.

The Austrian specialist, not dreaming that his opinion could be
disregarded, and filled with enthusiasm for Vanbrugh’s achievement, had
addressed a letter to him, congratulating him in the warmest terms. The
letter did not elate Vanbrugh in the least, but it brought him round to
the publisher to find out what was being done with his book.

He came, taking it for granted that its acceptance was now out of
doubt. The publisher, compelled to give a definite answer, made up his
mind on the spot, and proposed terms which Vanbrugh accepted.

Two days later his reader returned the manuscript with a brief note,
dismissing it as the work of a charlatan. Vanbrugh had beaten this man
in one of the hospital examinations.

When the book came out, the medical reviewers were staggered. They
dared not attack, and they would not praise it; it was therefore
allowed to fall dead from the press. The distinguished baronet, whose
book had been thrown over by the publisher, was furious. He threatened
to have Vanbrugh’s name taken off the register as a quack.

The publisher was wringing his hands, when suddenly an offer arrived
from Leipzig for the German rights of the book, an offer larger in
amount than what he had paid Vanbrugh for the copyright. Similar offers
came tumbling in from Paris, from Rome, and from St. Petersburg. Rival
editions appeared in New York and Chicago, the publishers of which,
more honest than their legislators, sent considerable sums to the
author. The scientific press on both sides of the Atlantic rang with
the name of Bernard Vanbrugh, and the popular journals followed suit.

As Vanbrugh had foretold, his book superseded every existing treatise
on the brain.

The first part of the work was a careful and exhaustive monograph
on the brain-cells, their morphology and physiology. Vanbrugh had
applied every available tool of scientific investigation in his
experiments--chemical agents, electric discharges, the microscope, and
the photograph. The reaction under the different rays of the spectrum
had been tested separately and in combination, and results of the
highest interest obtained. But the epoch-making character of the book
was given to it by the second part.

Here Vanbrugh had boldly essayed the feat of building a bridge between
physiology and what is called psychology. He had explored what are
known as mental phenomena in the light of his physical analysis. Into
this dim and distrusted region of knowledge Vanbrugh had projected the
searchlight of his merciless intellect, and had made it scientific
ground.

Even the lay reader could follow him here, and understand most of his
conclusions. Vanbrugh disdained the hieroglyphic vocabulary of the new
priesthood of science, and forced the words of daily life into the
service. In this part of the book occurred his famous comparison of the
brain to a biograph, with the process of thought carried on by a series
of films, succeeding each other with inconceivable rapidity, but yet
with a gap of pure annihilation after each.

“Science is measured knowledge,” was the keynote of his triumphant
peroration.

“Science is measured knowledge, and the only measures we can apply are
physical ones, and we can only apply them to physical phenomena. Slowly
but surely, as we succeed in identifying these processes called mental
with the processes of the brain-cells, we shall be enabled to reduce
them to a plan, to evolve order out of confusion, and to regulate human
passion and intelligence as we regulate the secretions of the stomach
and the circulation of the blood, the alternation of the harvests, and
the courses of the tides.”

Such thorough-going materialism shocked and terrified not a few
readers, but the day was gone by for any objection to be raised on that
score in scientific circles. Before the book had been out a year it was
the recognized authority on the subject with which it dealt in every
civilized country, and the London colleges were obliged to give it a
place upon their shelves.

Honours and distinctions flowed in upon the author from abroad.
Vienna was the first to offer him the honorary membership of her
first learned society, and other capitals hastened to do the same. A
great foreign ruler, who considered it a part of his own greatness to
befriend greatness in others, sent his most coveted Order to the poor
English doctor, of whom his Ambassador in London had never so much as
heard till he was directed to call upon him with the decoration. Not
content with that, the Emperor wrote privately to the English Court,
remonstrating with it warmly on its neglect of so illustrious a subject.

The English Court took the hint, and Sir Bernard Vanbrugh figured in
the next list of birthday honours. Then at last the sullen opposition
of the profession gave way. His brethren realized that they were
compromising their own reputation in the eyes of the world, and on the
next vacancy Vanbrugh was offered, and he accepted, the Presidency of
his College.

He was now sixty years of age; his appointment-book was filled up for
weeks in advance, and his only child was an heiress.

The Duke of Trent, with all the prestige of his rank and office,
yielded to the same involuntary fear that Vanbrugh always inspired, and
sat down like a schoolboy in the master’s presence.

“I don’t think we have met very often,” he began, “but I dare say you
know that Miss Vanbrugh is a great friend of my mother’s.”

At the mention of his daughter the scientist moved slightly, and his
expression became less severe.

“I have had many opportunities of seeing her at Colonsay House,” the
Minister pursued, his tone unconsciously betraying his intimate sense
of a favour about to be conferred, “and, so far as I am able to judge,
she is disposed to like me. I will come to the point at once, and say
that the object of my visit is to ask you to give her to me. I don’t
suppose it is necessary for me to say anything to you on the subject of
my own feelings. I show them sufficiently by my proposal. I am not a
sentimental schoolboy, but you may believe me when I say that, should
your daughter honour me by becoming my wife, I shall do the utmost in
my power to make her happy.”

Sir Bernard listened without any further sign of emotion to this
speech, the formality of which did the wooer less harm in his eyes than
it might have done in Hero’s.

“What does Hero say?” was his sole observation in reply.

“I have not spoken to her yet. In fact, I have never given her any
reason to expect this proposal. We have been friends, and nothing more,
so far. I confess I have felt some difficulty about approaching her. I
have had no experience in love-making, and it occurred to me that you
might be willing to sound Miss Vanbrugh on my behalf.”

The physician made no objection to this suggestion. He remained
thinking for some little time, and then answered deliberately:

“You have done me an honour, of which I am entirely sensible, in asking
for my daughter’s hand. As your wife her position would be a very proud
one, and perhaps most fathers in my place would accept your offer
without a moment’s hesitation. But Hero is my only child, and I am a
man who has always held strong views on the question of marriage. I
trust you will not think me wanting in appreciation of your high claims
to consideration if I put exactly the same questions to you which I
have always intended to put to any man who came to me in the character
of a future son-in-law.”

The Secretary of State was a little surprised by this reception of his
offer, but on the whole he was pleased by it. He told himself that few
candidates for matrimony would be better able to withstand a father’s
scrutiny than he.

“I shall be very pleased to answer any questions you wish to put to me.
You are most fully entitled to know everything I can tell, and I have
nothing to conceal.”

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh nodded. Opening a drawer in his desk, he took out
a large printed form and spread it out in front of him.

“I had better begin, perhaps,” the suitor suggested, “by giving you the
names of my solicitor and banker. They will give you every information
with regard to my financial circumstances.”

The physician shook his head slightly.

“I do not doubt that your means are ample, and my daughter will not be
a portionless girl. I am the medical adviser to a number of insurance
companies, and this paper contains the questions it is my duty to put
to a person who desires to insure his life. In my view, I ought not to
have to say, marriage is an infinitely more important step than the
granting of a policy. Are you willing for me to examine you with the
same care as if you were asking my employers to insure you for a few
thousand pounds?”

The Duke opened his eyes. Not even Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s
reputation for originality--eccentricity it is called in Government
departments--had prepared him for such a proposition. But any momentary
irritation was quickly swallowed up in the comforting reflection: What
sort of reception would this man give to Alistair!

“I am at your disposal, Sir Bernard!”

The physician began his methodical examination exactly as if he were
dealing with an ordinary patient. He weighed the Cabinet Minister, he
measured him, he took his pulse and temperature, and sounded his heart
and lungs. As test after test was applied the examiner did not conceal
his interest and satisfaction, and at the close of the ordeal his
manner became almost enthusiastic.

“I can congratulate you,” he reported, “on being an almost perfect
life--I may say, a remarkable life. Do you know that you are as nearly
as possible a normal man?”

The twelfth subject of the Queen looked ever so slightly disconcerted
by the compliment.

“You don’t understand, I see,” said Vanbrugh. “I must explain to you
that scientific anthropologists have arrived at certain standards of
bodily proportion, of the energy of the vital functions, and so on,
which they have fixed as constituting the norm of humanity--that is
to say, the perfect balance which ought to be found in every member
of the species. The normal man is therefore a scientific abstraction:
he is the imaginary type with which actual individuals are to be
compared, and to which they should as far as possible conform. Now
I find that you fulfil to an extraordinary degree every requirement
which anthropological science has laid down for the species. You are,
therefore, a normal man--the first I have ever been fortunate enough to
come across.”

The Duke of Trent tried to persuade himself that this was a flattering
report, though in his ear the word “normal” sounded disagreeably like
commonplace.

“At all events, you are satisfied?” he asked.

“I am more than satisfied so far. Now as to your family history----”

For the first time a misgiving stole into the Duke’s mind, as he
remembered Lord Alexander Stuart’s career. Surely this scientific
inquisitor was not going to visit the sins of the father on the son, as
his words foreboded?

“Is your father living?”

“No; I have the title,” the Duke reminded him.

“True. At what age did he die?”

“As far as I can recollect, at about thirty-eight or forty. I could
easily ascertain.”

“That may not be necessary. What did he die of?”

The Duke’s cheeks burned. But he saw the folly of temporizing with a
man like Vanbrugh. The story of Lord Alexander was perfectly well known
in London.

“Of _delirium tremens_, I am afraid.”

Sir Bernard’s eyebrows lifted, and he shot a painful glance at the
unfortunate son.

“Your mother,” he hastened to say, “I know is alive. What is her state
of health?”

The Duke was glad to be able to reply altogether satisfactorily. He was
beginning to breathe again when the scientist put the fatal question:

“Have you any brothers or sisters?”

“One brother.” As the admission escaped him all his old bitterness
against his junior returned with ten-fold force.

“Living?”

“Yes, he is living.”

“Surely I have heard something about him lately?” Sir Bernard said
reflectively. “What is he called?”

“Lord Alistair Stuart.”

The words might have been red-hot coals on the Duke’s lips and not have
given him a greater wrench to utter.

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh laid down his paper and leant back in his chair.

“I cannot congratulate you on your family history,” he said gravely.

“Surely, sir, you will not hold me responsible because I had an
unworthy father, and have a brother who takes after him? I am not like
them. Ask anyone who has ever known me, and they will tell you that
my life has been absolutely free from reproach. I neither drink nor
gamble; I have never indulged in any kind of vice----”

The physician interrupted him with a quiet gesture.

“I am not a priest, Duke, but a scientist. I am not here to deal in
moral blame or praise, but to decide whether you are a man whom I can
welcome as the father of my grandchildren. Your family history is
against you.”

“Every family has its black sheep,” the unfortunate suitor urged.

“Every existing family is the result of ill-assorted marriages,
brought about by any consideration rather than the desire to have
healthy offspring. You must forgive my saying that Lord Alistair Stuart
is a very black sheep indeed.”

“Alistair is not hopeless,” said the Duke, astonished to find himself
defending his brother. “He is young yet, and he may settle down and
marry some respectable woman.”

“Heaven forbid!” Sir Bernard Vanbrugh noted his listener’s bewilderment
at this unexpected rejoinder. “The greatest service a man like your
brother can render to society is to lead the life he is leading. Nature
understands these things better than we do. She takes a man like that
and unites him with a woman like Molly Finucane in order that the
vicious strain may die out. To take your brother away and marry him to
a healthy woman, in order that they might have diseased children, would
be the worst of crimes.”

James Stuart shuddered as he listened to the voice of the new morality
preaching its relentless gospel.

“But you didn’t find any strain of disease in me?” he pleaded.

“These things often pass over a generation. The law of heredity is
still mysterious. It is the most important of all the problems awaiting
scientific solution. You ask me to take a risk--a tremendous risk. I
can only promise to consider it carefully.”

Of his own accord Sir Bernard added:

“As far as you are personally concerned, I could not hope to meet a
man to whom I should give my daughter with greater confidence. Your
temperament is exactly what she needs to correct her own tendency to
emotionalism. You see, I am frank with you, Duke, as frank as you have
been with me. I have watched over my daughter with all the powers of
observation I possess from her earliest years, and I cannot shut my
eyes to her weakness.”

“Miss Vanbrugh is as near perfection as any girl I have seen!”
exclaimed the wooer, with unwonted enthusiasm. “If she has a weakness
it is in being too ready to sacrifice herself for others.”

“That is the weakness I mean,” the scientist resumed calmly. “Her
attraction towards Catholicism has given me some anxiety, and would
give me more if I thought it went below the surface.”

“But you are not a Protestant?”

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh smiled at the old-fashioned word.

“There are no more Protestants,” he pronounced. “There is Science
and there is Superstition. Religion, as I understand it, is a form
of hysteria, skilfully exploited in the interests of the clerical
class. To me as a physician this Catholic revival is the symptom of
a widespread cerebral disease which attacks individuals of morbid
temperament. I have watched the class of persons who exhibit the
symptom, and I have seldom failed to trace the disease. On the whole I
am inclined to diagnose it as an obscure form of sexual perversion.
A woman does not want to go to confession unless she has something to
confess.”

The Home Secretary shivered, as he listened to this brutal analysis,
with the same sense of discomfort as a thinly-clad man exposed to a
cold blast of air. He was not the first man who had experienced the
same sensation in listening to Bernard Vanbrugh.

A week later he received the scientist’s decision.

“It gives me great pain,” Sir Bernard wrote, “not to be able to accept
your proposal for my daughter’s hand, but your family history is too
bad. Personally, you are everything that a father could desire, but
my grandchildren must not have in their veins the same blood as Lord
Alistair Stuart.”




CHAPTER XI

THE PRETENDER


THAT mood of deep dissatisfaction with his life which had been growing
upon Alistair Stuart of late was strongly with him as he left the
Underground Railway-station at Westminster, and walked across the
bridge on his way to see Des Louvres.

The night was misty, but not dark, the lamps were lit, and the Palace
showed up grey and spectral beside the water, while farther on there
stretched a dim line of river-shore unillumined by any spark of light,
as though night and slumber had overcome and blotted out that quarter
of the city, while the other parts were still awake with feverish life.

As Alistair reached the southern foot of the bridge all the lights and
sounds of Lambeth burst upon him with an effect of squalid but stirring
energy.

He plunged into the bustling thoroughfare, with its noisy
street-stalls, its jostling tramcars, and its hurrying passengers,
as a bather plunges into the sea, and took his way along the road
which branches southwards in the direction of Kennington. The sense
of bankruptcy and failure no longer affected him disagreeably as it
still did in the region he had just quitted. Here his poverty seemed
to bring him into touch with the life about him, and he looked at
everything with pleased, expectant eyes, like a traveller wandering
through the picturesque slums of some romantic town of Spain or Italy
in which he thinks of settling for a time.

He drew a deep breath of anticipation, like a man about to be released
from prison, as he reflected that the poverty which he had been afraid
of might become a glorious incognito, under which his nature would
have freer play than it had ever had in the world which had held him
hitherto. The thought of this new, strange freedom caused his blood to
tingle. Strange, formless instincts and yearnings began to stir within
him. He glanced curiously to right and left as he walked along, down
dark, narrow turnings with narrower courts and alleys leading out of
them, and the impulse grew upon him to throw off the ways and hampering
conventions of his class, and mingle in the mysterious, half-naked life
of this underground world of which he seemed to catch glimpses all
around him.

“There are adventures to be met with here!” he whispered to himself.
“There are men who commit crimes!”

All the old lawless blood of a hundred generations of highland
manslayers and freebooters surged up into his brain, and he fidgeted
in his civilized bonds as a boy on a hot summer’s day fidgets in his
clothes before the splash and sparkle of the sea.

For a moment he stopped in front of a house which was to let, but a
glance at his watch caused him to move on at a quickened pace. He was
amused with the idea that the watch, which he had bought in Paris,
would pay for a year’s rent of the house.

By this time the character of the thoroughfare had begun to change. He
was passing by terraces of lodging-houses standing back behind long
narrow strips that had once been gardens. In some of them the sickly
grass still struggled for existence, in others it had frankly given up
the ghost and been replaced by gravel. Decayed notice-boards behind
the railings announced the various ways in which the tenants of these
houses struggled for a livelihood; one aspired to be a coal-merchant,
one deemed himself a dentist, others would have liked to give lessons
in shorthand or book-keeping; none of them, it was to be feared, got
much beyond the stage of expectation.

Presently Stuart came to a street in which the houses seemed to be of a
better class; it was a street which still preserved some features from
the time when this neighbourhood had ranked as a residential suburb for
the prosperous middle class, on a level with Dulwich or Finchley of
to-day. The name painted on the side-wall was Chestnut-Tree Walk, and
the first house in the street was detached, and surrounded by a high
wall, over which a few straggling shoots of dirty ivy hung their heads,
while at the side of the house rose up one or two trees which, if the
thick black crust upon their limbs and stunted foliage could have been
washed off, might have proved even to be chestnuts.

This house was the end of Alistair’s walk. It was the residence of the
Comte des Louvres.

The situation was happily chosen for privacy. The neighbourhood was
not quite poor enough for a well-dressed man to be conspicuous,
and not quite respectable enough to possess an organized social
vehmgericht, while it was altogether off the track of the ordinary
foreign outlaw. Such of his neighbours as had noticed his existence
at all supposed the tenant of Chestnut-Tree House, known simply as
“Monsieur,” to be a teacher of the French language, who had seen better
days. The last supposition was not very wide of the mark, but the
better days were those of the Count’s ancestors, real and fictitious.
His great-grandfather, a wealthy furniture-maker, had conferred the
title on himself in the confusion of the great Revolution, after the
last of the true Des Louvres had perished by the guillotine. Similar
occupations of vacant honours were too common at the time for this one
to attract much attention, and the furniture-maker’s son, by a great
display of zeal for the Bourbons and for Holy Church, had succeeded in
firmly establishing his position in the aristocratic sphere. It was the
grandson who had dissipated the family fortune, leaving the present
Count only the inheritance of a good name.

The merits of his ancestors, or his own Legitimist zeal, had secured
for Des Louvres the patronage of the Pretender who passed as the Comte
de Rouen, but whom the Count invariably referred to in private as His
Most Christian Majesty Louis XIX. In the service of this personage Des
Louvres filled a position half-way between that of a press-agent and a
chargé d’affaires, supplying the English newspapers with paragraphs in
the Count’s interest, and generally watching the course of events on
his behalf.

Des Louvres had made no mystery of these functions, but a certain
obscurity hung over whatever other transactions he was engaged in. Some
persons believed him to be in the employment of a Government celebrated
for its elaborate secret police organized in every capital of the
world; others suspected the Count of rendering services even less
creditable to a certain foreign potentate, and hinted that the house in
Chestnut-Tree Walk, if it could speak, would be able to tell some very
strange stories indeed.

Among these activities of Des Louvres which he took less pains to hide
was his connection with the English Legitimists. It was he who kept
them in touch with the more important organizations abroad--in France,
in Spain, in Italy, and in Portugal. He cheered their flagging spirits,
oppressed by the sense of their insignificance at home, by making them
feel that the Guild was taken seriously on the Continent, and that
they themselves were persons of note in Paris and Madrid. It brought
consolation and refreshment to Egerton and Wickham Vane to know that
their toy conspiracy bulked largely in the columns of such trusted
organs of the Papacy as the _Osservatore Romano_ or the _Paris Univers_.

Des Louvres was one of those who know human nature only by its
weaknesses. Such men seldom come to grief, though they never come
to greatness. He had been the first to perceive that Lord Alistair
Stuart’s bankruptcy would change his point of view in certain respects,
and to lay his plans accordingly.

As soon as Stuart touched the bell-knob of Chestnut-Tree House--the
door abstained from the indiscretion of a knocker--he was admitted by
the Count’s confidential servant, a fellow whom it did not require the
science of M. Bertillon to identify as a hardened criminal. Leclerc,
as this respectable felon was called, received Lord Alistair with an
exaggeration of his customary deference, and ushered him towards what
Des Louvres called his cabinet.

On the way he observed respectfully:

“You will find Monsieur le Comte alone. His Royal Highness has not yet
arrived.”

He spoke in a sort of church whisper, as though the coming princeling
already cast a shadow of awe before.

Des Louvres came out to receive his visitor, whom he greeted with
enthusiasm.

“I am delighted you have managed to get here. Don Juan is most anxious
to make your acquaintance.”

Stuart had come to keep the appointment with a certain feeling of
interest in the romance of Don Juan’s exalted claims, tempered with
an insular distrust of foreign royalties and foreign decorations. His
prejudice softened insensibly under the Count’s blandishments.

“Has his father much of a party left?” he asked.

“Undoubtedly a very strong one. The priesthood has never taken kindly
to the constitutional dynasty, and you know that in those countries the
Church is still a power.”

“I suppose there is no prospect of his taking the field?” Stuart said
wistfully, as he thought of what a glorious escape it would be from the
ruins of his present life to take part in a romantic expedition to a
sunburnt land, to recover a lost crown.

The watchful Frenchman caught the note of yearning in Alistair’s voice,
and his answer was tuned in sympathy.

“On the contrary, there is every prospect just now. Not the father
himself, of course--he is too old--but Don Juan as his representative.
His father intends to abdicate in his favour, I believe.”

“And you think he has a real chance?” asked Alistair. His eyes lit
up as he pictured himself lying out on the wild sierras, making the
camp-fire under the cork-trees at night, and in the daytime taking part
in that great game whose stakes are death and renown. Already he was
marching, crowned with myrtle, through Gothic cities bedight in flags
and flowers, his ears deafened with the clang of joy bells and the
roar of exultant throngs, and his veins throbbing with the intoxication
of victory.

“If I did not think so I should not have asked you to meet him,”
answered Des Louvres, following up the impression he had made. “The
Prince has come to England in order to organize an expedition. All
he requires are the necessary funds to arm his followers with modern
weapons. As soon as he succeeds in landing the first shipload of
magazine rifles and ammunition the country will be in flames--I ought
to say that I mention this for your ear alone. You are the only person
in England beside myself whom the Prince is willing to take into his
confidence.”

Alistair received this compliment with satisfaction not unmixed with
surprise. Hitherto he had not been very serious in his support of
the Legitimist cause, for Alistair was one of those who are wiser
in judgment than in action, and it did not escape him that a party
which rallied to it such adherents as the two Vanes contained no very
formidable menace for existing institutions. To find himself thus
singled out as the one English partisan whom Don Juan considered worthy
of his confidence was therefore as unexpected as it was gratifying.

“If Don Juan would care to have me, I should like to volunteer for the
expedition,” he said eagerly.

“I know that you could not please him more than by such an offer,” Des
Louvres responded. “He will certainly invite you to serve as one of his
aides-de-camp. This will make it especially appropriate for him to
give you the Holy Sepulchre.”

Alistair could not resist a slight grimace. He was unable to overcome
the fear that by his acceptance of this doubtful honour he might be
making himself ridiculous. He had recently been forced to contrast
himself rather sharply with his elder brother; the contrast would be
sharp indeed between the Garter which Trent expected soon to receive
and this mock badge bestowed by a foreign adventurer.

Des Louvres was aware of Stuart’s feeling, which he had manœuvred
skilfully to overcome.

“Of course, the Prince recognizes that in the present state of his
affairs it is you who confer a favour on him by consenting to take this
decoration,” he said. “You must not suppose that he does not understand
the difference between you and a man like Egerton Vane.”

Alistair smiled.

“I shouldn’t think you would have much difficulty in persuading either
of the Vanes to accept the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.”

Des Louvres shrugged his shoulders.

“I have promised them the second or third class, as a matter of fact.
They are gentlemen, and it will make a good impression abroad if the
Prince appears to have a strong connection in England.”

He had scarcely finished his explanation when the faithful Leclerc
opened the door to admit the two brothers.

As Stuart had judged, Des Louvres had encountered no misgiving on their
part. At the first mention of the Pretender and his decoration their
flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes had betrayed the eagerness within.
In fact, their feelings had been so unmistakable that Don Juan’s agent
thought he might safely slip in an intimation that there were fees in
connection with the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, as in the case of
better known and more highly coveted distinctions. The fees payable
by a Chevalier, he informed Egerton, amounted to sixty pounds in
English money, while Wickham might compound for the lower dignity of a
Companion with forty pounds. This disagreeable preliminary had caused
much anguish to the brothers, who were both misers at heart; but after
a severe struggle vanity triumphed over avarice, and they handed their
cheques to the Count as Chancellor of the Order, on his assurance that
the sums named represented little more than the actual cost of the
jewels they would receive from His Royal Highness.

The sight of Lord Alistair Stuart in the Count’s study came as a
considerable shock to the Vanes, who had looked forward to patronizing
Stuart on the strength of their new honour. “In foreign Courts they
attach more importance to a decoration than to a mere courtesy title,”
Egerton had already laid it down to his admiring brother. “I am not
sure that, as a Chevalier of the Holy Sepulchre, I am not entitled to
take precedence of Alistair Stuart.” The study of ancient tapestry
not throwing any light on this important problem, Wickham received the
observation with that soothing docility which his brother had been
accustomed to exact from their nursery days.

But a bitterer stroke awaited the Chevalier Vane, as Egerton had now
instructed his servants to call him. For scarcely had the new-comers
exchanged greetings with the rival they found before them when a
confident ring at the front-door was followed by the entrance of the
one man whom they had most wished to crush with their newly-acquired
rank--in short, Mr. St. Maur.

Neither of the Vanes could conceal his chagrin at this turn of affairs,
and Des Louvres perceived that all his tact would be required to
smooth them down. As soon as the intruder had planted himself, with
his customary simple strategy, beside Lord Alistair as the person
of highest rank present, their host put his lips to the ear of the
Chevalier.

“It is a thousand pities that we have no better Irishman among us
than this fellow,” he whispered. “His Royal Highness insisted on my
presenting some representative of Ireland to him; and what could I do?”

“I think you should have declined,” the Chevalier Vane returned acidly.
“I consider that the dignity of the Order will be lowered if the Prince
bestows it on a man like that.”

“His family is very ancient and illustrious,” Des Louvres suggested.

The Chevalier Vane put on a pitying smile.

“I am afraid his family doesn’t much appreciate the connection. I have
never heard of St. Maur’s being asked to----” He named the ducal seat
to which St. Maur was in the habit of referring as if it had been his
childhood’s home.

“I am a foreigner; I do not understand these things,” said the
Frenchman. “But I have met this man in your flat, and I have heard you
introduce him to others as a relative of the Duke’s.”

The charge was a true one, and Egerton winced. The Count pursued
pitilessly:

“Besides, it is a very common thing in this country, is it not, for the
elder branch to ignore the existence of the younger ones?”

This was hitting Vane on a raw place. The abiding sorrow of the
brothers’ lives was that their titled relative, a vulgar Philistine
immersed in field-sports and such coarse pleasures, had never taken the
slightest notice of a cousinship which should have been his pride.

Further discussion was prevented by the sound of wheels outside. Des
Louvres instantly excused himself to his guests, and went out to the
front-door to receive his royal guest with fitting honour.

The personage who now alighted from a hansom-cab, and walked up the
steps to where the Count stood waiting with bowed head, was a tall,
swarthy young man of a rather heavy type of face, and sombre eyes. The
face and figure were not lacking in distinction, though they could
scarcely be called handsome. Their chief defect, however, was an air of
listlessness and lifelessness, as though the unfortunate bearer of a
great name had been crushed beneath its weight from his birth.

Life had, in fact, had nothing to offer Don Juan that he could accept
as compensation for what his forefathers had possessed and lost. The
misery of opposition, the misery of exile, and the misery of ruin
had accumulated their shadows over his cradle. The secret of earthly
happiness is to have found the work we are best fitted for, and to be
doing it with all our might. The only work for which this young man had
been formed by birth or circumstance was to saunter in black velvet
beneath the shade of cedar-trees, in a park wide as a province, with
a falcon on his wrist, and silk-clad favourites on each side of him,
while behind a curtain a queen and a confessor played chess for his
kingdom. It was thus that his ancestors had discharged their office for
two centuries; it was thus that he himself would have discharged it had
the kingdom been still to lose.

It is unhappiness to gaze too long at the unattainable. The memory of
the past had been to Don Juan what a glimpse of London is sometimes
to a savage, unfitting him to take up his daily task, and rendering
his life a dull ache of longings for the remote and unachieved. In
understudying the great part he was never likely to play he had missed
the chance of success in some humbler rôle.

The poor Royal Highness mounted the steps of Chestnut-Tree House and
greeted Des Louvres in a tone of intimacy.

“I am not too soon, am I? Those gentlemen have come?” he asked, using
the French language.

“They are awaiting you, sir,” the Count returned with a nice mixture of
cordiality and deference. “Leclerc, marshal His Royal Highness to the
audience-room.”

Leclerc, looking more like a gaolbird than ever, led the way upstairs,
while his master walked respectfully in the visitor’s rear. They
entered a large drawing-room in which the furniture had been disposed
with some care, so that an armchair stood by itself against one wall in
the manner of a throne.

“This chair is for you, sir,” the Count said persuasively, as the
Pretender stood hesitating. “If I may venture to advise, it will be
better to rise to receive Lord Alistair Stuart, as he is the heir to
a dukedom. The others are simply gentlemen, and you may receive them
seated. It will do good to maintain a little reserve with them, but
of course that does not apply to Lord Alistair, who is, or has been,
intimate with the Royal Family in this country. In his case I have
ventured to waive the question of fees.”

Don Juan’s face fell slightly at this last intimation, the exchequer
of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre being a not unimportant item in the
princely civil list.

“I have never given the Order to any one for nothing,” he objected.
“The price of the Grand Cordon is two thousand francs.”

Des Louvres put on his most conciliating air.

“You remember, sir, that you are going to ask Lord Alistair to render
you an important service. It is well to establish a claim on him
beforehand.”

“Still, Des Louvres, I think he should pay something. As a favour I am
willing to let him have the collar for a thousand francs.”

“I am afraid in that case he would decline it. I must tell Your Royal
Highness frankly that there is a very strong prejudice amongst the
British nobility against foreign decorations, no matter of what kind. I
had almost to urge Lord Alistair to accept your Order.”

The poor Pretender winced at this plain speaking.

“I trust, Count, you have not degraded my family Order,” he said, with
a flash of pride.

“On the contrary, Prince, I have given it prestige in British eyes.
Lord Alistair Stuart belongs to the highest nobility; his brother is
Minister of the Interior. Permit me to assure you that the moment it
becomes known that he has accepted the Order of the Holy Sepulchre its
value will be greatly increased. You will be able to sell as many of
the second and third classes as you like.”

“Of course, if you tell me that”--muttered the disappointed Prince.

“But I do tell you,” Des Louvres returned, with some impatience. He
was used to dealing with these waifs and strays of royalty, and their
airs and pretensions frequently tried his temper. “You have brought the
jewels with you, I suppose?”

Don Juan fished in his pockets, and brought out four small boxes
covered with imitation leather, and lined with cheap plush.

The boxes on being opened revealed small badges in different
metals--gold, silver, and bronze--in the form of a cross enamelled with
a Latin motto. The one intended for Lord Alistair was attached to a
neck-ribbon, and the intrinsic value of the four together might have
been about five pounds.

As soon as Des Louvres had arranged these gimcracks on a small table
beside the Prince he withdrew to summon the four candidates. On the way
he passed into his dressing-room, and selected his own collar and badge
from a number of other decorations more or less real.

Entering the room where the others were waiting, he drew a paper from
his pocket, from which he read aloud with perfect gravity, for though
Des Louvres was a rascal he was a Frenchman, and perhaps took the
proceedings more seriously than any of his English puppets.

“This is the protocol approved by His Royal Highness,” he explained.
“We shall enter the room in the following order: myself, as Chancellor;
Lord Alistair Stuart; Mr. Vane; Mr. St. Maur; and Mr. Wickham Vane.
I shall present you in the same order, and as I pronounce each name
you will advance, bowing low, and kiss the Prince’s hand. As soon
as the presentations are finished I shall recall you to receive your
decorations. Each of you will then advance in turn, and go down on
one knee, the Prince rising. His Royal Highness will throw the Collar
of the Order over Lord Alistair’s neck, and kiss him on one cheek; he
will fasten the Chevalier’s badge on Mr. Vane’s breast, and hand the
Companion’s badges to the other two.”

No one raising any objections to the ceremonial indicated, the Count
led the way upstairs, where his man was waiting to throw open the door.

As Stuart approached him, bearing himself with the dignity of one who
was himself a descendant of kings, Don Juan rose instinctively, and,
departing from the protocol, courteously shook hands. He sat down again
to receive the other three in the manner prescribed. The Vanes showed
their superior acquaintance with Court etiquette by merely approaching
their lips to the royal hand; the Irishman’s smack betrayed the warmth
of his nation.

The bestowal of the decorations followed, causing a disagreeable
surprise to the two brothers as they perceived the difference between
the value of their jewels as bullion and the substantial sums they had
paid for them.

The formalities happily accomplished, Don Juan, who had played his part
with a mixture of pride and uneasiness, at once put aside his state,
and invited the company to treat him as a friend.

St. Maur instantly clutched the chair nearest to the Prince’s, and drew
it forward, cleverly cutting off the new-made Chevalier, while Des
Louvres rang the bell for champagne and cigars.

The Pretender at once began to talk about the prospects of his cause,
not saying anything directly about the proposed expedition, but giving
his listeners to understand that he hoped before very long to receive
them more suitably in the palace of his ancestors.

The Prince’s French being rather too fluent for some of his British
hearers, and theirs not quite fluent enough, Des Louvres helped out the
conversation with hints and explanations of his own, now throwing in a
respectful question, and now reminding Don Juan of some point he had
passed over.

Alistair had suffered from a sense of awkwardness during the previous
ritual, and he still felt half ashamed whenever he glanced at the
gaudy ribbon on his shoulders. But as the conversation went forward
his reserve melted away, his eyes began to sparkle, and he questioned
the Pretender, as eagerly as good manners allowed, on the state of the
country and the chances of a campaign.

Don Juan noticed the interest he had aroused, and his tone towards Lord
Alistair Stuart became evidently more friendly, while the Chevalier
Vane as evidently bored him by disquisitions on the art and literature
of the promised land.

Finally, after throwing a look at Des Louvres, and receiving an
imperceptible nod in return, the Prince rose to his feet, saying, as he
did so:

“I shall hope to receive you again before long, gentlemen. Will you
remain behind a few minutes, Milord Stuart? I have something to ask
you.”

The others were obliged to take their leave, the Chevalier remarking
with some bitterness to his brother on their way home that even royalty
in these days is tainted with the Philistinism of the triumphant middle
class.

Another bottle of champagne was opened, and as soon as Stuart had
emptied his glass, Des Louvres approached the real object of the
conference.

“The Prince wants to buy arms for his partisans, as I told you, and he
is over here in order to raise the money. I have taken the liberty of
saying that I think you may be willing to assist him.”

“I!” exclaimed the astonished Alistair.

The Frenchman bent forward, and murmured softly:

“I ventured to tell His Royal Highness that you were on intimate terms
with the head of the South American Bank.”

“Mendes!”

“Exactly. The suggestion is that you should sound Mendes on the
Prince’s behalf.”

Alistair sat as one dumbfounded, and for some moments the other two
watched him without speaking a word.

A repugnance, which he could hardly explain to himself, battled
within him against yielding to the Pretender’s request. Mendes was his
intimate acquaintance; Mendes sat at his table, and entertained him in
return. He was a banker; it was his business to grant loans, and this
was a loan for an object which Alistair heartily sympathized with. And
yet he felt he would have gone to anyone rather than Mendes.

Des Louvres understood the silent struggle better, perhaps, than
Alistair himself. He also knew the way to end it.

“You are not taking any champagne,” said the tempter, refilling his
glass for him.

Mechanically, weakly, Alistair lifted the glass to his lips, and
drained it. As he set it down again a flush overspread his face, and he
cried out thickly:

“Why not? I’ll tackle old Mendes with pleasure. He’s not a bad sort; he
would like to oblige me, I know.”

An hour later the Frenchman and his servant were helping Lord Alistair
Stuart into a cab, to the driver of which the Count gave the necessary
directions, while the sober Prince looked on with a face of regretful
dismay.




CHAPTER XII

THE POWERS THAT BE


WHEN Alistair woke up on the morning after his promise to Don Juan, he
did not feel happy.

Apart from the headache left by his overnight excess, he suffered from
the recollection of the pledge extorted from him. He owed nothing
whatever to Mendes, and yet it put a strain upon his sense of honour to
ask a favour of the Brazilian.

Mendes and he had been friendly for a long time, without being friends.
Their acquaintance had begun and continued, so to speak, along two
parallel lines. Molly Finucane had brought them together. And Molly
Finucane kept them apart.

Molly had known the financier longer than she had known Alistair
Stuart. When she gave way to that touch of real sentiment which united
her to Stuart, Mendes had shown no resentment and made no unpleasant
scenes. Perhaps it was partly for that reason, out of a kind of mild
remorse, that Molly had continued to receive him as a friend, and even
to encourage his visits; although with the new sense of honour which
had been developed in her by her passion for Stuart, the little woman
steadily refused to accept the smallest gift from the millionaire.
Perhaps, also, she saw that the presence of Mendes, seated at their
dinner-table day after day, bland, reserved, and calmly expectant, like
a player whose turn to play has not yet come, acted as a talisman on
Alistair, who was made to see that another was waiting to snatch the
prize from him if he once loosened his grasp.

It was noon by the time Alistair got down to the breakfast-table, and
he sat picking at some tough, half-cold kidneys, and grumbling to
Molly, who was in a dressing-gown pouring out his coffee.

“These things are not fit to eat,” he complained crossly, pushing away
his plate.

Molly reminded him that the cook was under notice to leave.

“Our servants generally are,” he retorted. “But we don’t seem to get
any better ones in their place.”

“I know I am a bad housekeeper,” was the meek response. Complaints
of this kind on Alistair’s part were a new symptom, and Molly was
frightened by it. “Good servants expect such high wages nowadays,” she
added.

“They expect their wages to be paid regularly, you mean. No wonder they
won’t do their work properly when they don’t get paid for it.”

“We have no money.”

Alistair coloured up as he was again recalled to his position.

“Well, we can’t get any now, at all events,” he said. “I don’t suppose
Trent will be such a cad as to stop my allowance, but the next cheque
won’t be due till Christmas, and we can’t very well borrow any more.
What about Carter’s?”

Carter’s was the establishment from which they were accustomed to get
their household supplies, one of those huge bazaars which deal in
everything from a landed estate to a packet of pins.

“I paid them a hundred pounds the other day,” Molly answered. “I expect
they’ll give us credit for a time.”

Alistair said nothing, but sat tapping the table with his fork, and
thinking.

“I must sell some of my jewels, I suppose,” said Molly bravely, after a
short silence.

Alistair looked up and studied her face.

“Why not sell the furniture and everything, and let’s clear out of this
place? We can’t go on like this much longer, any way. What should you
say to disappearing for a time?”

“Where to?” asked Molly, startled.

“Somewhere over on the south side. I thought of Lambeth. If we’re going
to be poor, it’s best to live where everybody else is poor around us.”

Molly stared at him in consternation. In her ears the proposal, if
it were serious, sounded like the end of everything. Molly had been
born and bred in Lambeth. She knew what life there was. The idea of
returning to it, after her experience of luxury, struck her as a
dismal form of suicide. And not being able to divine the curious,
half-romantic attraction which the scheme had come to possess for
Alistair, she credited him with her own feeling of repulsion. The
suspicion quickly followed that this suggestion covered a design to
give her up. Stuart meant to demonstrate that it was impossible for
them to live together any longer, and on that pretext to accept the
offers of his family to rescue him.

The spectre of parting, never really laid, always peeping out at odd
moments to grin at her, now showed its haunting features plainly, and
she cried out with passion:

“No, no! Don’t talk like that! Don’t talk like that, Alistair!”

Alistair shrugged his shoulders as he rose from the table. He had not
expected his proposition to be very eagerly welcomed at first, and he
was content to let the idea rest in her mind.

“Well, I’ve got to go into the City this morning,” he said.

Molly glanced at him inquiringly, but thought it wiser not to ask whom
he was going to see.

He took a third-class ticket on the Underground Railway, in accordance
with his resolution to experiment with poverty. But he had donned a
frock-coat from Savile Row in order to give his mission a serious
character, and he noticed that this incongruous dress seemed to be a
cause of offence to his fellow-passengers. Two workmen with a roll of
leaden piping, whom he found in his compartment, stared at him with
resentful scorn, and made remarks to one another in an undertone which
he could see were disparaging.

Alistair had to discover that to be the outcast of the aristocracy does
not of itself constitute one a member of the democracy. To acquire a
low position in life something more is necessary than to have lost a
high one.

He got out at the Mansion House Station, and made his way towards the
great whirlpool of traffic formed by the eight streets which debouch in
front of the Royal Exchange.

Here he could not resist the inclination to stand still for a minute on
one of the small islets of pavement which divide the stream. He told
himself that this was the centre of the world’s business, the heart
of that vast invisible machine which steadily converts the labour of
fifteen hundred millions of men into the wealth of a prosperous few.
The low brown building, blackened with London grime, which faced him
with such solid immovability, needed no letters on its front to tell
that it was the Bank of England. It was here, surely, and not in that
pretentious palace further west beside the river, that the true centre
of gravity resided; this really was the core of that political and
social system with whose genius his genius was at war; it was for the
men whom that brown square of building sheltered, and not for anyone
else, that the legislators travailed, and the police went their daily
rounds, as the soldiers fought on far-off continents and the sailors
adventured in uncharted seas. In the interest of wealth it was, in the
last analysis, that the Raj had been built up, that the firm framework
of society had been compacted, and that such outlaws as himself were
held in check. Not Yahveh, and not Christ, neither Ormuzd nor Ahriman,
but Mammon was the God of the Anglo-Roman Raj--Mammon, whom that Syrian
Redeemer had so much hated; Mammon, who had built all the churches ever
since unto this day.

Alistair’s head drooped on his breast as he moved slowly on. He found
himself presently in a narrow turning off Lombard Street, a sunless
retreat giving no outward indication that the great spiders of finance
set their webs within.

It was the quarter of bankers’ bankers. A clerk from the head office of
some limited company with branches in half the towns of England would
walk in quickly through a swing-door, pass through an outer office
without stopping, and approach a long table at which two or three men
were seated side by side. A name would be mentioned, a bundle of bills
exhibited, and some figure pronounced. The two or three heads would
turn and exchange glances; one would give a nod across the table, and
the clerk would walk out again. The nod had meant the loan of a million
for twenty-four hours.

It was the first time that Alistair had visited Mendes in his business
quarters, and it took him a minute or two to discover the brass-plate
which bore the name of the South American Bank. Even then he had to
grope his way through what seemed to him a maze of stairs and passages
before he reached a small wired counter, protecting a pale clerk who
asked him his business.

“I have called to see Mr. Mendes.”

He handed in his card with a patronage of which he was quite
unconscious. The clerk received it respectfully enough, and passed out
of sight round a partition. A minute then elapsed before a man in sober
livery came out from a side-door and asked his lordship to be good
enough to follow him.

He showed Lord Alistair into a small, comfortably-furnished room,
in which a man of forty or thereabouts, well dressed and fully
self-possessed, was seated at a writing-table.

He rose politely as Alistair entered, and offered him a chair.

“Mr. Mendes has someone with him at the moment,” he said, speaking
courteously, but without any particular deference. “Perhaps it may save
time if you can tell me what you wish to see him about.”

“I am a personal friend of Mr. Mendes,” returned Stuart haughtily.

The other did not seem to feel rebuked.

“If you have not called on business it might be better for you to go to
his private house,” he said quietly. “Mr. Mendes is a very busy man,
and it is against his rule to receive his private friends here, except
by appointment.”

The last words seemed to be underlined with meaning. Was it possible
that this courteous intermediary was already aware that Lord Alistair
had no appointment, and was taking it on himself to refuse him an
interview with the principal?

“I have business of an important character with Mr. Mendes,” Stuart
declared in a tone of resentment.

“In that case I think you had better let me send in a message of some
kind,” persisted his questioner.

Alistair flushed up.

“Does Mr. Mendes know I am here?” he demanded.

The other shook his head slightly.

“Mr. Mendes’ orders are very strict, and I am obliged to respect them.
I am not authorized to send in a visitor’s card without some intimation
of the business on which he has come.”

Alistair sat dismayed. A sense of impotence stole over him, at the same
time that the figure of the man with whom he had been familiar for so
long began to grow larger and more formidable of outline before his
awakened eyes. All these precautions interposed between him and the
millionaire taught him a new estimate of their respective positions
in the world. He, Alistair Stuart, might be called a lord, but which
of the two really was lord? His courtesy title, his historic lineage,
his royal friendships--all these things might give him a sentimental
prestige in the eyes of women struggling on the fringe of society,
and still cherishing the delusions of the snob. But in this grim
City office, where only realities counted, what was he but a needy
insolvent, regarded with suspicion as a probable would-be borrower?
The feudal age was past, and the trappings of feudalism stood revealed
for the worthless, threadbare frippery they were, as if a strong beam
of daylight had suddenly fallen on the painted canvas of a theatrical
scene. The feudal age was past, the old Viking race, whose stone keeps
dot the English shires, had gone down, never to rise again, and to-day
the barons of steel were being broken in pieces by the barons of gold.

While these reflections were passing in one compartment of his brain in
another the decision formed itself to accept the conditions.

“My business is confidential,” he ventured first.

The intermediary bowed.

“I am in Mr. Mendes’ confidence.”

“Well, I have come on behalf of Don Juan.” And seeing that the
Pretender’s name made but a faint impression on the confidential
secretary, or whatever he should be styled, Lord Alistair entered
earnestly into the history of the Prince, his claims, his hopes, and
his prospects of success, winding up with the explanation that Don Juan
had authorized him to negotiate a loan.

“Do you offer security?” was the confidential man’s sole comment on
this appeal.

The question dragged Alistair promptly down from the height of his
enthusiasm.

“The Prince would guarantee repayment out of the taxes, I suppose,”
he said a little doubtfully. “Or couldn’t he give concessions for
railways, or mines, or something? He would leave that to Mr. Mendes, I
should think.”

A very faint smile creased the mouth of the City man. He took a slip of
cardboard from a stand in front of him, and wrote a few words on it:
“Lord A. Stuart. Loan for Pretender. No security.”

With this in his hand he rose and passed into an adjoining room.

In less than a minute he returned, accompanied by a younger man, who
bowed respectfully to Lord Alistair as he said:

“Will you come to Mr. Mendes, my lord?”

Alistair rose eagerly and followed him, feeling pretty sure that the
banker had been disengaged the whole time. But the barriers he had
had to surmount had considerably weakened his self-confidence, and he
experienced a sensible relief when Mendes, rising at his entrance,
shook hands with his accustomed friendliness, and offered him an
easy-chair.

“I hope my people haven’t bothered you too much,” the millionaire
said. “But you find me here with my armour on, keeping guard over my
money-bags. Who is your royal friend?”

Alistair repeated the story he had just told in the other room, but in
a distinctly lower key of enthusiasm.

“You met him with Des Louvres?” remarked the Brazilian. “Why didn’t Des
Louvres come here, or, better still, the Prince himself?”

“He will come, I have no doubt, if you are willing to entertain his
proposals.”

“I can hardly say that till I have seen him.” Mendes touched a bell,
and the young man who had introduced Alistair promptly appeared in the
doorway.

“Ascertain what is known in Rome about Prince Don Juan de Bourbon, and
let me know when I come back from lunch.”

The young man hesitated an instant.

“The telephone does not go beyond Paris, sir,” he said, speaking with
just perceptible hesitation.

“Our agent there can telegraph on. Cipher.”

Mendes spoke quietly. As soon as the door had closed on the young
secretary, his employer made a mark upon a sheet of paper.

“You won’t see that youth next time you come here,” he observed to
Stuart. “That is the second time this week he has asked me to think for
him.”

Alistair shivered as he heard the ruthless sentence. A picture rose
before him of a young man proud in his employer’s favour, and filled
with ambitious dreams for the future, going home to an old mother, or
perhaps a newly-married bride, in some pleasant little suburban home,
and breaking the news that he was ruined. It was in this way that
money-bags were guarded.

Mendes sat considering for a moment.

“You don’t know why Rothschilds refused them, I suppose?” he threw out.

“I didn’t know they had applied to Rothschilds!” exclaimed Alistair in
astonishment.

“All these people do, as a rule. Rothschilds have the name, you know.
Every financial scheme that gets floated in London goes there first. We
smaller men have to subsist on their leavings.”

He sat up to his desk, and wrote a short note, which he sealed up and
addressed himself. Then he touched the bell again, and handed it to the
doomed young man, whom Alistair gazed on with a fascinated interest.

“Take it yourself. They may see you. Now,” he said, turning to Stuart,
“come and have lunch.”

Mendes conducted his guest to a big club-house behind the church at the
corner of Lombard Street. In the hall he stopped and wrote down Lord
Alistair’s name in the visitors’ book with satisfaction. Regard for
race is a sentiment deeply rooted in the Semitic mind, and Mendes took
a genuine pleasure in the thought that his companion was a descendant
of Scottish Kings.

They took their seats at a small table in the midst of a vast room
filled with similar ones, nearly all of them inconveniently crowded.
The lunchers were mostly middle-aged men of prosperous appearance, and
their talk seemed to run chiefly on gambling as it is carried on at the
legalized Monte Carlo in Chapel Court. They all spoke to each other
without formality, and a man who came and sat down at the same table
as Mendes and Stuart at once plunged into a story of some speculator
who had been gambling in copper, and owing to an unexpected desertion
of the market by other speculators found himself suddenly left with
some hundreds of tons of ore on his hands, which were actually brought
in waggons to his office in Billiter Buildings, where he had one small
room and a boy. The idea that a buyer and seller of anything should be
called upon actually to handle it evidently appealed to the narrator as
a superb joke.

Generally speaking the lunches were of a very substantial description,
and champagne seemed to be the only wine in much demand. Mendes catered
liberally for his guest, and over their coffee offered him a cigar
which the Duke of Trent and Colonsay could not have afforded to smoke.
But most of the men round them were smoking similar cigars. It was
impossible to think that everyone in that crowd was as rich as Mendes.
Alistair could only suppose that they represented the winners of the
moment, who were spending their gains with a gambler’s recklessness in
the belief that their luck would never turn.

In this judgment he was not wholly right. The world of the Stock
Exchange is as small as other worlds, and those who inhabit it have to
consult the opinions of their neighbours. If anything, the keeping up
of appearances was more important to these gold-hunters than it is to
the village tradesman or the retired officer in his seaside villa. To
have ordered a modest lunch or a cheap cigar would have been to hoist
a signal of distress, perhaps to bring an unstable fortune tumbling to
the ground.

Among these earthen pots the solid vessels of wealth floated calmly,
sure sooner or later to crush the greater part of their venturesome
rivals. As they rose from the table, Mendes moved his head slightly in
the direction of the story-teller.

“That man will not last six months,” he whispered. “He has gone in for
American rails.”

“Are they going down, then?” asked the ignorant Stuart, attempting to
adopt the jargon he had heard around him.

Mendes smiled good-naturedly.

“It doesn’t matter whether they go up or down. Dealing in American
rails is playing roulette against a croupier who can make the ball roll
where he likes.”

The spectacle of all these men feverishly engaged in the hunt for gold
had excited Alistair in sympathy. For a moment he felt a pale reflex
of their passion, and wished that he too could be among the winners
instead of the losers.

“How do men make money?” he asked wistfully of the millionaire.

“No one can make money,” the rich man replied grimly, “in this world.
He can only take it. And the only way to take it is to be a little
more greedy and cunning than the man you take it from.”

It was the gospel of Mammon. And Alistair Stuart knew that here at
least he could never find salvation.

On their return to George Yard, Mendes was stopped in the outer office
by the gentleman who had interviewed Alistair. He excused himself to
Stuart for a few minutes, and nearly a quarter of an hour elapsed
before Alistair again found himself in the financier’s room.

“Well, I have heard something about your friend,” Mendes said grimly,
as he sat down.

Alistair’s heart sank at the Brazilian’s tone. He waited for him to
speak.

Mendes went on deliberately.

“Perhaps I ought to say I have heard something about his father. I
don’t suppose this young fellow is anything more than a tool.”

“What have you heard?”

“I have heard this: that the last time he got a quarter of a million
out of a confiding Greek in order to make a descent on his kingdom,
as he calls it, he spent the whole of the money on his own pleasures,
without ever going within five hundred miles of the frontier.”

“I don’t think Don Juan would do that,” Alistair protested.

“He will not get the chance,” the other said brutally. “We are going
to lend no more money to these kings of the hooligans.”

“You think he has no chance of success?”

“I don’t think those who are behind him want him to succeed, if you are
speaking of Don Juan.”

“But whom do you mean? Who are behind him?” asked the bewildered Stuart.

The South American gave him a doubtful glance.

“You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”

“No,” said Alistair.

“Half a one, I suspect. All you people cling together, I notice.
Decadents, Legitimists, or whatever you call yourselves, it comes to
much the same thing. I haven’t watched you all this time for nothing.”

“I am not a Christian at all,” said Alistair.

“What has that got to do with it? That man Des Louvres is about as
much of a Christian as this table, but he is a very good son of the
Church--one of the best agents they have got, I fancy.”

“I can assure you that you are mistaken if you think I have any
Catholic sympathies,” Alistair protested emphatically. “I am a Pagan,
pure and simple.”

“So is the Roman Church, according to the Protestants,” sneered Mendes.
“But I am quite ready to take your word for it. I don’t suppose Des
Louvres has told you any more than he was obliged to.”

Alistair remained silent, too much offended to reply.

Mendes went on in a tone of quiet deliberation:

“The day of these Pretenders is over. A King who has been driven from
the throne by a rival or by a foreigner may have some chance of getting
back again. But these Latin princelets were turned out because their
own subjects were sick of their misgovernment, and no one wants to try
them again. After all, people are not such fools as to prefer tyranny
to freedom. The sort of abject superstition on which they rely is very
strong, no doubt, till it is shaken, but after it has once been upset
you can no more restore it than you can set up Humpty-Dumpty again.
Legitimism, as you call it, is not a popular sentiment; it is only the
fad of a clique of aristocrats who are played out themselves. Such men
do not make revolutions.”

Stuart made no attempt to resist this reasoning.

“Then you consider that Don Juan would have no chance?”

“I never thought he had a chance of making himself King, if that is
what you mean. The only question I have to consider is whether it
would pay me to give him a run.” And seeing Stuart’s bewilderment,
the financier added: “I haven’t been thinking of the mines and the
railways. An attempt of this kind, if it looked at all serious, would
send down the price of every investment in the country, and if I knew
of it beforehand, I should be able to make enough out of my knowledge
to repay whatever I gave your friend. I should never expect to get it
back from him.”

“Then why won’t you give him the run?”

“I will tell you why. Because those who are behind him, those from whom
Des Louvres is pretty sure to have his instructions, are simply putting
this poor young fellow forward to gain something for themselves, and
they will push him on or call him back to suit their own purpose.”

“Whom do you mean?”

“I mean what Disraeli meant--and he was not altogether a fool--when
he said there were only two powers at the bottom of everything that
happened in Europe--the Church and the secret societies. In this case
it is not the Freemasons.”

“Then what do you suggest the Church has to gain?”

“I don’t think it matters. Perhaps there is some quarrel on between
the Pope and the reigning dynasty; perhaps there has been a movement
to suppress the monasteries or to expel the Jesuits--I don’t know. I
haven’t been following their recent history. But you may take it from
me that the Vatican has some motive for putting pressure on somebody or
some party in the country, and that Don Juan is to be used as the red
light.”

Alistair could not resist the conviction that Mendes was probably
right. He did not feel any personal interest in the matter one way
or the other, except as it affected the chance of his being able to
take part in an interesting adventure. He had, perhaps, a slight
friendliness left for the Church of Rome; at all events, he would have
felt no reluctance to fight its battles as long as in so doing he was
fighting against the social system for which Mendes stood.

“Even if you are right,” he urged as a last appeal, “I don’t see what
difference it need make to you, as long as the expedition takes place.”

“I cannot be sure that it will take place.” The Brazilian paused a
moment, and then added gravely: “You know that I am a Jew.”

Alistair looked at him inquiringly.

“I am not disposed to let myself be used as a puppet by the friends of
Monsieur des Louvres. We have seen rather too much lately of the true
feeling of the Roman Church towards our race. The Dreyfus case has been
a revelation of more things than the innocence of Captain Dreyfus. We
now know what treatment we have to expect from Rome if she ever does
regain power, and no penny of my money shall ever be given to help her.”

“Rome is not so bad as Russia,” said Stuart.

“Russia’s turn is coming,” was the reply. “There is a curse on those
who persecute our race.”

And Alistair shivered again.

Alistair went home feeling as though he had been in possession for a
brief moment of the magic bell of northern folklore, which enables its
wearer to descend into the bowels of the earth and see the gnomes at
their work. He had a vision in which he seemed to have been walking
below the surface of the great city among the foundations of palaces.
On either hand the tremendous walls rose up, immovable, forbidding,
and dank with the underground slime. These were the mighty bases of the
powers of wealth, against which he had set his feeble shoulder in the
foolish expectation that he could make them rock. And the puny effort
had left him beating out his life down there in the subterranean mire
at the foot of those sunless piles among the forgotten pauper rubbish
of the world.




CHAPTER XIII

ROYAL PATRONAGE


ON his arrival at the house, weighed down by this new and dreary sense
of discomfiture, Alistair found Molly in a state of pleased excitement.

“There’s a letter for you from Easterthorpe. It’s from the Duke of
Gloucester!” was her greeting.

Alistair flushed as he recognized Prince Herbert’s handwriting. He had
not forgotten the bazaar, and he tore open the envelope with some fear
of encountering a reproach.

The Duke addressed him as “Dear Alistair,” just as in their boyish
days, and begged him to come down to Gloucester Lodge for the week-end.

“There will be no one here but my wife and children,” the royal note
ended, “and we can talk about old times.”

Left to himself, Alistair would have declined the invitation, in spite
of the courtly theory that invitations from such a quarter are in the
nature of commands. He was too much disgusted with the way in which
life had dealt with him, and he with life, to have any more heart in
the struggle. It would be simpler to go under, to efface himself, and
cease to keep before the world.

But he found that Molly was determined that he should go. She had made
up her mind that the Prince’s invitation was a repudiation of the Duke
of Trent, and an intimation that Stuart’s irregular connection with
herself had not lowered him in the royal estimation.

Alistair, of course, knew better. He saw perfectly well that Prince
Herbert’s reference to his family was a delicate way of saying that the
visit must be a private one. The _Court Circular_ would not know of
Lord Alistair’s presence at Gloucester Lodge.

For this reason his acceptance was a little stiffer than the Prince’s
invitation. He began it “My dear Prince,” and signed himself “Yours
ever.” The Prince had written “Yours affectionately.”

Nevertheless, Alistair was a good deal more touched by the overture
than he was willing to betray.

He had not yet been adjudicated a bankrupt. But the Duke of Trent had
suspended negotiations on his behalf, and he was to meet his creditors
on the Monday to undergo the customary useless cross-examination as to
how he had managed to get rid of the money.

At the very moment of departure he was confronted with the new
difficulty of cash. Neither he nor Molly found themselves in possession
of the price of a first-class ticket, and Alistair was too proud to go
on such a visit unless he could do so in the way befitting his rank.

He solved the problem by ordering a cab to drive him to the
railway-station, and making it stop at a famous pawnbroker’s on the
way. It was his first visit to such an establishment, but the prospect
of the journey put him in good spirits, and he tendered his French
watch to the shopman with a certain enjoyment of the situation.

“I am going down to stay with the Duke of Gloucester, and I haven’t got
my railway-fare,” he said, with perfect self-possession.

The shopman grinned at what appeared to him a lively witticism, and
after examining the piece, offered ten pounds.

“What name shall I put?” he inquired, as Alistair signified his
consent, preparing to write “Jackson” or “Thompson,” at his customer’s
pleasure.

“Stuart--Lord Alistair Stuart,” came in the same assured tone.

This time the pawnbroker laughed out.

“You will have your joke, sir. I’ll put ‘Mr. Stuart.’”

“But I have told you my name,” said Alistair. “You can see it on my
coat if you like.”

He slipped off the light overcoat he was wearing, and gravely exhibited
to the eyes of the wondering shopman the tailor’s parchment label, on
which his name and rank were clearly legible.

“I beg your lordship’s pardon, I’m sure,” stammered the man. “It’s so
seldom that our clients give us their real names that I thought your
lordship was pretending. The address, please?”

“Care of Miss Finucane, Elm Side, Chelsea.”

The shopman, scarcely able to believe his ears, wrote down the address
with an amazement which he made no attempt to conceal. As he handed
over the ticket he asked:

“Would your lordship like a cheap watch to wear while this is with us?”

“Thanks, no,” said Alistair, with easy indifference. “Time is of no
consequence to me just now--I am a bankrupt.”

He strolled out of the shop, charmed with his victory over the hateful
traditions of hypocrisy and self-shame embodied in the pawnbroker. In
his exhilaration he could have challenged the whole middle class.

His spirits rose steadily as he came to the terminus, and he lavished
half a crown on the porter who carried his light dressing-case to the
railway-carriage.

He found himself intruding on the privacy of a stout, vulgar-looking
man of sixty or thereabouts, whose name was too freely displayed over
all his belongings, from a giant portmanteau down to a rug-strap, to
leave the least observant fellow-passenger ignorant of his identity. It
was the great Sir Gilbert Lawthorn, whose discovery that pickles could
be sold three-halfpence a bottle cheaper than the prevailing price,
and still be made to yield a profit, had earned him seven hundred
thousand pounds and a baronetcy.

This great personage scowled on the inspector who admitted Stuart
into his compartment, and then, after a scornful glance at the modest
dressing-case, he remarked rudely:

“I generally have a carriage reserved for me, but this time I thought
no one would be in the train. Are you going far?”

“I am going to Easterthorpe,” said Alistair, lowering a window.

The pickle-seller gazed at him in displeasure.

“I live there,” he announced, with conscious superiority. “My place
is close to the Prince’s. I don’t think I have seen you in the
neighbourhood.”

“I am going down to stay with friends,” said Stuart carelessly, as he
took up a paper.

“Do your friends know the Prince?” Sir Gilbert inquired, with
patronage. “He called on me last week.”

Alistair lowered his paper and looked at the fat baronet over with
unfeigned surprise.

“I have not the honour of your acquaintance, sir,” he said
deliberately, beginning to read again.

“I am Sir Gilbert Lawthorn!” burst out the indignant magnate.

“Thank you. Your pickles are excellent,” replied Alistair. And this
time he was allowed to read his paper in peace.

When the train stopped at Easterthorpe a groom in neat black livery
appeared at the door of the carriage, and touched his hat. Sir Gilbert,
who evidently recognized him, took the salute to himself.

“His Royal Highness is not in here,” he proclaimed pompously. “Did you
expect him by this train?”

The groom, without replying, took the case which Lord Alistair passed
out to him.

“This way, my lord, if you please,” he said deferentially, as Alistair
prepared to follow his luggage.

The baronet turned crimson.

“I--I beg your pardon,” he stammered awkwardly, half holding out his
hand. “I had no idea that you were going to stay with the Prince.”

But Alistair was not in a merciful mood as far as the middle class was
concerned.

“Who the devil do you suppose cares what you think, or who you are, or
anything about you? I wish I had come third class.”

He followed the secretly delighted servant out to a smart dogcart, and
Sir Gilbert Lawthorn’s fat coachman meekly drew a heavy barouche and
two fat horses out of the way of the royal conveyance.

It was with a slight sense of embarrassment that Alistair entered the
pleasant dwelling in which the Duke of Gloucester and his wife were
able to enjoy some of the pleasures of English home life. But his
uneasiness was quickly dispelled by the reception he found waiting for
him. The Prince himself sprang up from a lounge chair in the bright
little hall, and grasped him cordially by the hand, exclaiming as he
did so:

“Ada, my dear, here is my old chum, Alistair Stuart.”

A woman some years younger than her husband, with a face in which
womanly grace and keen intelligence were harmoniously united, rose from
the midst of a group of small children, and offered her hand with equal
friendliness.

“I am so glad you have come. I have heard so much about you from Bertie
that I hope you will let me treat you as an old friend. Do you like
children?”

It was evident that children liked Alistair, for almost before he had
sat down two youngsters of five or six, in white sailors’ suits, were
romping round him, while a small girl of three, safely sheltered by her
mother’s skirts, regarded him with grave but friendly curiosity.

“I know something about you,” the elder boy said presently, with an
amusing note of condescension in his voice. “You used to go fishing
with father when he was a boy.”

Alistair remembered the unfortunate letter he had sent to the
Legitimist bazaar, and was ashamed.

The tactful Princess gave him no time to indulge in such thoughts. She
poured him out a cup of tea, and bade her eldest son carry a plate of
toast to the visitor--an order which he obeyed with an evident sense
that he was conferring a considerable favour.

Lord Alistair was not long in awakening in the mind of the Duchess of
Gloucester the same feeling that he awakened in most good women--a
regret that such a life should be running to waste, and a desire to
save him. It happened that the Duchess had literary tastes, she had
heard of Stuart’s poems, and she engaged him in conversation on that
ground.

“Have you given up writing?” she asked. “I don’t think you have
published anything for a long time.”

“Everyone has given up writing,” Alistair returned with a bitterness
that surprised himself. It had grown up in his mind unconsciously; his
literary disappointments had become part of his general feud with the
successful order of mankind.

The look on the face of the Princess made him hasten to explain himself.

“The English public will not tolerate literature; that is the simple
truth. The publishers will not publish it, the booksellers will not
sell it, the public will not read it, and the police have orders to
suppress it. My old publisher told me plainly the other day that it was
a waste of time to print anything but four-and-sixpenny novels. He said
the booksellers have got used to making up their accounts in items of
four-and-sixpence, and they consider it a nuisance to handle anything
else. And even the novels are falling more and more into a stereotyped
pattern; they must be exactly the same length--a hundred thousand
words, I think he said--and be written well down to the level of the
vulgar provincial mind.”

“Surely things are not quite so bad as that?”

“Very nearly. The worst of it is that the persecution of literature
is purely for reasons of hypocrisy. The public likes what it calls
immorality--will have it, in fact: no book that is really pure has
much chance of success--but it insists on the writer pandering to
the proprieties. Either he must slobber over his adulteress in the
Nonconformist vein, or else he must tell the whole thing in an
epigrammatic falsetto. It is a choice between ‘East Lynne’ and ‘The
Innocence of Henrietta.’”

“But are there no writers before the public now whom you look upon as
on a higher level?” And the Princess suggested one or two names.

Stuart shook his head.

“What is their position?” he said. “Granted that they have genius, the
conditions of the age give them no chance. Unless they go on producing,
and keeping themselves constantly before the public, they are cast on
one side. The greatest genius, as a rule, can only give the world one
or two masterpieces. Coleridge wrote three short poems, Poe a dozen
short stories. Dante and Cervantes each wrote one book--their other
work is of no account. Everyone of them would have starved to-day,
just as they starved in their own day, while the vulgar novelists
made fortunes round them. Writers such as you speak of have to go on
writing worse and worse, conscious of their own degradation, and freely
reminded of it by the press, and by their publishers’ accounts. It is
the torture of the damned.”

“It seems to me there ought to be some remedy,” the Princess said
thoughtfully. “I know so many rich men who seem to me only anxious to
find some way of doing good with their money.”

Alistair shrugged his shoulders.

“A man of genius does not like to accept charity. The rich men would
expect too much gratitude. They prefer building cathedrals--each
poem of Coleridge is worth a cathedral--but you could not expect a
millionaire to see that.”

“There are pensions, and literary funds, are there not?”

“Pensions, yes, for the bad writers who have fallen below the level of
even the British public. And there are literary funds, yes. I was once
asked to act as a steward at one of their annual dinners. The secretary
sent me the rules, by which I saw that no grant was ever made to
writers whose lives or whose works were open to objection on religious
or moral grounds. I wrote back to say that I did not see my way to
support a literary fund from whose benefits Shakespeare and Shelley
would have been excluded.”

The Princess saw that she was handling a sore. She sighed, and changed
the conversation.

After dinner Prince Herbert played billiards with his guest, and their
talk ran on the past. Alistair was softened by the boyish memories
recalled by his old playfellow, and when he went to bed it was with
more peaceful and happier thoughts than had come to him for a long time.

He was sipping his cup of tea in bed the next morning when he heard
light footsteps, followed by excited whispering, outside his door. The
next moment the handle was turned cautiously, and then the door was
thrust open with a bang, and two small boys invaded the room.

“May we come in?” demanded the elder. And satisfied with the expression
on Lord Alistair’s face, he turned and beckoned through the doorway.

“It’s all right; don’t be afraid, Tissy.”

The apprehension felt by the unseen Tissy communicated itself to
Alistair, who hastened to say:

“Hadn’t you better go away till I’ve dressed?”

“We want to stay and see you dress,” the leader responded.

“I’m not worth seeing, I assure you,” said Alistair. “I dress very
badly.”

It seemed doubtful whether the excuse would be accepted, when
fortunately a warning cry was heard from the doorway, and a voice as of
one speaking with authority called out: “Come here directly!”

The head of the invading party cast a hasty glance round the room, and
only remarking regretfully to his brother: “I can’t _see_ his teeth,”
withdrew in good order.

Stuart did not offer to accompany his hosts to their little country
church. But the sight of the family party setting out across the park,
and the far-off sound of the bell, had a soothing effect upon his
spirit. Contrast is the secret of all beauty, and perhaps the prodigal
had never considered how much of their charm would depart from the
rocks and valleys of Bohemia were there no Puritan plain without.

In the afternoon he found himself left alone with the Princess, after
they had taken tea in the garden. The scent of the roses was all about
them, and the bees drummed restlessly as they went by. It was a perfect
piece of English landscape, and the perfect type of English womanhood
fitted into it like a picture in its natural frame.

“Lord Alistair,” she said, with quiet seriousness, “I want to ask you
if you will let the Prince help you. He has never forgotten your boyish
friendship; he is attached to you still, and he only wants to see his
way clear to do something for you.”

Alistair murmured an expression of gratitude.

“I hope you will look on me as a friend too,” the Duchess of Gloucester
went on. “Will you let me speak to you frankly, and will you be frank
with me in return?”

“Will you pardon me if I am?” asked Alistair. “It is easy for some men
to be frank; but when I am frank I find I only shock good people.”

“But why should that be so? Are you sure that when you are shocking
good people, as you put it, it is your true self that is speaking?”

“Madam, I do not know what is my true self; or if I have got one any
longer. I used to have one when I was a boy, but twenty years of
enforced hypocrisy have pretty well knocked it out of me.”

The Princess sighed, and paused for a moment.

“Perhaps I can help you to find it. Do you really love the woman you
are living with?”

“No.” The truth came up from the depth of his consciousness, exploded
by surprise.

“Then why don’t you leave her?”

It was Alistair’s turn to pause.

“She has given up everything for me. Sometimes I think I ought to marry
her.”

“What had she to give up?”

This question offered a new light to Alistair, and he took time to
consider it. He might have answered superficially that Molly had, in
fact, given up the offers of Mendes; and latterly she had given up a
great many pleasures that almost ranked as necessities for her. But
he saw the point of Princess Adelaide’s question. What Molly had done
was to quit the life of a courtesan for that of a concubine, with some
prospect of becoming a wife. Now, a swimmer who climbs on to a raft to
save him from exhaustion can hardly be said to give up the sea.

“Do you consider that she has a greater claim on you than your mother?”
the Princess unfortunately added.

This time Alistair answered deliberately.

“Yes. I do not consider that my mother has any claim on me whatever.
In my opinion the obligations of a child towards its parents are
trifling beside those of the parent to the child. My mother has been
the worst enemy I have had. She has been to me the ordinary type of the
Christian persecutor, the race of the Inquisitors and Nonconformists
and Churchmen of every church. I have forgiven her because she does
not know how wicked she has been. Her crimes are the crimes of her
creed. Her brain has been warped and maimed by the training she herself
received, as much as the foot of a Chinese girl is warped and maimed
by bandages to make it small. I forgive her, and I think I love her,
but I should no more think of trying to shape my life according to
her prejudices than if she were a cannibal and wanted me to eat human
flesh.”

The Duchess of Gloucester felt that she had bound herself in honour not
to show any disapproval of these outspoken utterances. But she began to
see what Lord Alistair meant by saying that it is not equally easy for
all men to be frank.

She returned to the subject of Molly Finucane.

“It seems to me that you must leave this woman sooner or later, and
that you will never have a better opportunity than now. If you really
feel that you owe her anything, I don’t think you would find it
impossible to get your friends to make some provision for her, if she
needs it.”

Alistair remembered Mendes and his empty house. He did not think Molly
was likely to be in need if he left her.

“And what should I do?” he asked.

The unexpected question baffled the Princess for a moment. She had not
heard of Hero Vanbrugh.

“Return to your literary work,” she suggested. “You have not the excuse
of being obliged to write something that will sell. Write to please
yourself, and in time you will find your audience.”

“If I were to write to please myself, the world and my own family
in particular would think worse of me than they do at present.” And
seeing that the Princess was not disposed to interrupt him, he went on:
“The supreme sin in English eyes is truthfulness. Truthful thinking,
truthful speaking, and truthful living are all equally under the ban.
And the worst of it is that those who clamour most for freedom of
thought are most severe on freedom of life, and those who live most
freely are the least tolerant of free speech. The Dissenter persecutes
the sportsman, and the sportsman persecutes the sage. All the racing
men I have ever met have been bigoted High Churchmen, who would have
cheerfully burnt Darwin and the late Mr. Spurgeon. And if they had
begun with Darwin, they would have had Spurgeon’s help.”

Princess Adelaide sat silent for some time. The task of rescuing
Alistair Stuart seemed to be more difficult than she and her husband
had foreseen.

“I wish we could help you,” she said gently, at last.

“I am afraid I am not to be helped,” Alistair confessed sadly. “When I
look back over my life, it seems to me that ever since I was twelve
years old I have been surrounded by people knocking me over the head,
and saying to me: ‘Don’t be Alistair Stuart.’ I have tried not to be
Alistair Stuart, but I have failed. And the worst of it is that I am no
longer ashamed of being Alistair Stuart. It seems to me that all these
complaints ought to be addressed to my Creator. I did not make myself:
God made me; let Him repent, not me.”




CHAPTER XIV

VIRTUE TRIUMPHANT


THE Prince and Princess were obliged to confess to each other,
when Lord Alistair was gone, that they had failed to find a way of
unravelling the tangle of his life.

In reality they had done more than they knew. Their kindly treatment of
him, coming just at the moment when he felt himself a social Ishmael,
rejected by all classes in turn, had given him back no small portion of
his self-respect. He could not help contrasting the delicate attentions
of Prince Herbert, the representative of the greatest House in Europe,
and an English gentleman to boot, with the pretentious compliments of
the poor waif of royalty from the Mediterranean whose bogus honours he
had stooped to accept a day or two before.

Nor could he resist the incense to his pride offered by the clumsy
abasement of the pickle-selling baronet. It was something to feel that
he still excited the envy of the Lawthorns and the Mendes. He might
be a bankrupt, but he was still Lord Alistair Stuart, and heir to one
of the greatest titles of Britain. The highest in the land still felt
affection for him; the noblest women thought him worthy of their
concern.

These reflections accompanied him on the way up to town the next
morning, and prepared him to face his public examination with a lighter
heart. After all, bankruptcy was not fatal to a man in his position. He
had nothing to lose. His creditors could not take the allowance made
him by his brother. But for Molly, indeed, he need not be a bankrupt
at all. But for her, and his quixotic refusal to abandon her, the
proceedings against him would have been dropped already, and he himself
would be enjoying the traditional honours of the returned prodigal.

Why had he refused to leave Molly? After all, was it not true that he
had exaggerated Molly’s claim on him? She had preferred him to Mendes,
doubtless, but her choice had not been taken from any exalted motive
of self-sacrifice. If it had been inspired by the hope that he would
marry her, it was a selfish choice enough. She knew pretty well that
Mendes would never do that. Yes, his refusal to leave her had been
quixotic--that was the right word. For her own sake, since it was
evident that she shrank from facing poverty with him, for her own sake
it would have been better to say good-bye.

The public examination did not turn out to be a very formidable ordeal.
Lord Alistair, who was at his best when he was on his defence against
the Philistines, came through it with flying colours. The advocate
engaged by his creditors to bully him in the approved professional
style bullied in vain. The bankrupt’s answers were in the lightest vein
of good-natured irresponsibility. He declared that he kept no accounts,
had no idea what he spent, only bought the things his tradesmen teased
him to buy, and felt confident of his ability to pay for everything if
these unwise proceedings had not been sprung upon him. The creditors
present began to fear they were unwise, it being evident that they
could not hope to recover from Lord Alistair even enough to pay
their demolished barrister. In the end they were glad to adjourn the
examination in the hope that the Duke of Trent might yet be induced to
make an offer on his brother’s behalf.

Before he went home Alistair had the gratification of seeing his name
once more on the news-bills of the evening papers, but this time
accompanied by editorial compliments, such as “Insolvent’s Witty
Replies,” “Calls his Creditors Unwise,” and so on. It was a brilliant
victory, and the middle class had never been made to look more
ridiculous.

Alistair got back to Chelsea sooner than he expected, and found the
house empty. After letting himself in with his latchkey, he rang the
bell to ask if the mistress of the house had left any message for him,
but no one answered the summons.

The household arrangements were so irregular that there was nothing
very surprising in all the servants being out together. Nevertheless,
one of those subtle sensations which we call presentiments warned
Alistair that the emptiness of the house was a sign of crisis.

He took the trouble to go down into the kitchens. There, as he had
already foreboded, he found everything lying about in disorder. The
dirty plates and dishes from lunch were heaped up in the sink, and the
fire in the range had died out. He could find no shoes or umbrellas or
other belongings of the servants, such as they would be likely to keep
downstairs.

Already convinced that the servants had deserted the house, or been
dismissed in a body, he mounted to the top floor, and had his judgment
confirmed by the state of the attics. All the trunks were gone. The
beds had been made, no doubt in the forenoon, before the crash,
but everything else wore an untidy and dismantled air. The homely
dressing-tables looked bare without the presence of brushes, and there
was dirty water in one of the wash-stand basins. Several drawers stood
half out of the various chests, showing bits of paper, broken buttons,
and an odd glove.

It was the first time Lord Alistair had ever visited this part of the
house, and the whole spectacle depressed him. He found himself pitying
the departed servants who had had to occupy such mean and desolate
quarters. Why should it be necessary for these fellow-creatures to pass
their lives so shabbily? Why should one man be worse off than another?
And that sensation of a spiritual kinship between himself and all the
underlings of the world, which had first come to him as he stood on
Westminster Bridge, returned like a wave of melancholy over his heart.

Instead of going downstairs again, he went to the window of the attic
in which he happened to find himself, and looked out. It was a glimpse
of back-door London--that unknown London which hides behind the stately
squares and fashionable terraces and busy rows of shops. At that hour
a mist breathed on the roofs and gables of the houses, making them
beautiful. Each particular chimney was invested with a romantic air,
and had a character of its own. There were two, a tall one with a
little one beside it, at the end of a long roof-comb, and the group
suggested a stately lady leading her child by the hand. Behind them
came a short squat chimney that might have been the maid carrying a
bundle. Farther along a pair of slender, crooked chimney-pots bent
towards each other, like two beaux of the eighteenth-century meeting
and bowing on the Pantiles.

Looking lower down, another world revealed itself. Here were small
yards in which a little grass grew of its own accord, and tall, gaunt
clothes-props were the substitutes for trees. Strange barrels that
could have nothing in them were stacked against a wall to rot away.
The backs of the next row of houses were divided from these yards by a
mysterious lane that led nowhere. To the right there was just visible
a little branch street, with houses on only one side of it. Such small
houses they were, with a door and three windows to each, and yet in
the ground-floor window of one of them there was actually a card, as if
it had lodgings to let.

More interesting than the houses in the side-street were those just
opposite, across the mysterious lane. By looking closely it was
possible to see something of the life that went on in them. People
came out of their back-doors into the little yards which opened into
the lane. Watching these people was like watching the inhabitants of
another planet; they might live there for years, and you live in your
house for years, and you might watch each other every day all that
time, and yet you would never become anything to them, nor they to you.
They might be born, and grow up, and marry, and die, and you would
never know so much as their names.

Compared with the commonplace sights of the front streets, this was
like a peep into the wonder-world. The sky was turning from yellow
to violet under the enchantment of sunset, and all the air seemed to
be full of a deep sigh. Wicked faces began to peer from the bricks
of the houses, and the chimneys, if they were looked at long enough,
really moved and nodded to each other as if they were communicating
secrets overhead. Even the clothes-props down below felt the influence,
and came to life, and the clothes on the lines changed into ghostly
people whispering to and nudging one another as the darkness gave them
courage. It was impossible to believe that this was London, that the
Underground Railway ran beneath, and that the hospital stood not far
off. It was easier to think that you had strayed into the heart of some
haunted town, thousands of years ago, wherein dwelt a mystic folk,
worshipping strange gods, and going about the streets of their doomed
city, noiseless and hushed.

The sudden stopping of wheels outside, and the instant clamour of
a bell, broke Alistair’s trance. With the dazed feeling of a man
just recalled from sleep he stumbled down the stairs, and opened the
front-door to Molly.

She marched in, dressed in her most extravagant clothes, with a hat,
which Alistair could not remember seeing before, on her head, and a
more than usually profuse display of jewels on her arms and hands.
Her cheeks were bright with rouge and powder, and there was a hard,
metallic glint in her eyes which warned him that she had been drinking.

“Well, old boy, how did you get on?” she burst out, in a voice tainted
with huskiness. “I had a row with the servants while you were away,
and sacked the whole lot of them, and a good thing too. Jump into my
carriage, and we’ll go off and have a nice little dinner at the Savoy
or wherever you like, and a box at the theatre after. Cheer up!”

While she was rattling on with an evident anxiety not to give him time
to think, Alistair was glancing from her painted face to her jewelled
fingers, and from the new hat to the coupé which had brought her to the
house.

“Come in here,” he said, in a quiet tone of authority, at the same time
closing the front-door.

He led the way into the drawing-room, Molly following with reluctant
steps, and a look of defiance.

“Well, what is it? What do you want to say now?” she demanded.

“Where have you come from?” asked Alistair.

“Where have I come from? What business is that of yours? I can go where
I like, can’t I? I’ve been shopping, if you want to know.”

“Where did you get the money?”

“Never mind! What money? Can’t I have a little money of my own? I’ve
been giving you money lately.”

“I know you have. And I’m very sorry I let you. But that was money you
got on your jewels, and I gave you some of them myself. You have been
getting some more since I went away, and I want to know where you got
it.”

“Suppose I borrowed it; what’s that to you?”

“Who lent it to you?”

“I shan’t tell you. You’ve no right to ask.”

“No, I know I have no right over you. But I have the right to say I
won’t eat a dinner without knowing who is paying for it.”

“I shall pay for it; isn’t that enough?”

“With whose money? You have just admitted that you had been borrowing.”

“I borrowed it from Carter’s--there!”

Stuart shrugged his shoulders disdainfully.

“Where did you think I got it from, then?”

“From Mendes. I don’t know anyone else who would be likely to lend you
money.”

For a moment Molly wavered between wrath and fear. Then something in
Alistair’s face overcame her, and she broke down in a whimper.

“Don’t be angry with me, Alistair! Don’t look like that. I didn’t know
what to do. The servants all left me, I had nowhere to go, and we’ve
been so hard up lately. I thought you wanted money badly. It was for
you more than for myself, really. I was afraid you would get tired of
living with me if we were poor. You threatened to give up the house and
everything only the other day; you know you did. I didn’t think you
would mind my borrowing a little from him--he’s your friend as well as
mine. I didn’t go to his house, only to his office in the City; and he
was awfully good, and gave me a hundred pounds at once, and told me to
come again when I wanted more.”

Alistair remembered his own reception in Mendes’ office.

“He wouldn’t have given the hundred pounds to me,” was all he said.

“No!--you’re not going!” Molly screamed, as she saw him turning from
her. “Alistair! Alistair!”

She cast herself on the ground before him and caught him by the foot,
in a paroxysm of sobs and wails.

“I’m very sorry for you, Molly. I’m not angry with you at all; I’ve
no right to be; but I can’t live with you any longer; you must see
that. I fancied it would come to this sooner or later. I don’t blame
you; I dare say I ought to blame myself. But I can’t live on money that
another man gives you; you must know that well enough.”

“I’ll give it back to him. I haven’t spent half of it. I’ll take it all
back to him to-morrow. I’ll sell something to make it up.”

She began desperately tearing off bracelets and rings and dropping them
on the floor.

But Alistair’s mind was made up. He was surprised to find how perfectly
easy it was for him to act now that the moment had come. He had not
known that he should be so glad to be free.

“Nothing that you could do now would alter the fact that you have taken
money from Mendes,” he said. “We may as well make up our minds to what
has happened. It was bound to come sooner or later. It is better to
part like this than to drag on till we should be both sick of each
other. It’s good-bye.”

“I will never speak to Mendes again. I will never see him,” sobbed
Molly.

Stuart took a step towards the door of the room. She sprang to her feet
and got in front of him, clinging round him to prevent his going. The
scene became dreadful and ugly. He had to struggle step by step out of
the room and into the hall. It was a fight to get his hat off the stand
and put it on. He felt that it was imperative that he should get away
there and then. Another hour spent with Molly would be irretrievable
dishonour. At the front-door the miserable woman made a still more
frantic struggle. He had to unclasp her fingers by main force, and to
thrust her back with one hand while he turned the latch with the other.
If he had not promptly slipped his foot in between door and doorpost
she would have slammed the door to again before he could open it. And
all the time she kept up an incessant wailing appeal to him for mercy.
For the first time in his life Alistair felt that he was doing a cruel
thing.

He was still shuddering from the sound of Molly’s last moan as he got
into a cab at the street-corner and gave the direction:

“Colonsay House.”




CHAPTER XV

MAGIC CASEMENTS


LORD ALISTAIR stood on the deck of a Channel steamer and watched the
coast of England melt into the night.

His mood was burthened with that indignant melancholy which swelled
the heart of Byron and of Whistler, and many another exile whom the
builders of the Raj have rejected from their midst. In the Tate Gallery
hangs a painting which he had often gazed upon, a symbolic masterpiece
of Watts’. It represents hard-heartedness sitting crowned with gold
and robed in scarlet on the throne of the world. The painter has
called his figure “Mammon”; it came before Alistair just then as the
image of England--the England that stones her prophets and worships
her swindlers; the England that made Burns a gauger and one Perceval
Prime Minister; that chained the dying Napoleon on an ocean rock, and
rejected the last prayer of Nelson; England, with her shop-keeper’s
conscience, where art is a sin and generosity a crime.

A sense of exultation and relief accompanied his thoughts. He was
escaping from the Puritan prison against whose bars his spirit had
so often bruised its wings. In the obtuse self-satisfaction, in the
unctuous mercy, of its keepers he had felt something more merciless
than in all the recorded cruelties of furious saints and frantic
Emperors. Not the snow-peaks of Switzerland, he told himself, not
the Shakespearean cadences of Venice, nor Rome with her memories and
marbles, afforded that zest to wandering which greets us like a scent
on foreign soil. It was the sense of freedom from that chain of custom
and convention which we forge upon ourselves. The Mediterranean filled
her coasts with pleasure cities which were cities of refuge from the
middle class. The Niagara of gold that poured from England was the
price the English tradesman pays for his vindictive respectability. It
was the tax on spite.

A moist wind thick with delicious sea-smells, that mounted in the
brain like wine, lifted him out of his vexed meditation as the steamer
drew clear of the tangled lights of Spithead and came out on the wide
moonlit pavement of the sea. His mother joined him on the deck, and
they sat and watched the broad moon sail aloft like a luminous balloon
scattering glory.

“I should like it to be like this always,” Alistair sighed in ecstasy.

A sense of utter peace had fallen on his spirit, worn out with
striving. The molten orb, lifting beyond the shadow of the earth,
seemed to drag his soul upward as a spar is sucked in the wake of a
great ship. He looked up and longed after that visible Elysium, that
floating Island of the Blest on which the happy dead voyaged in light
for ever across a sea buoyed with stars. That ship of souls, on what
far coasts did it touch? within what magic roadsteads anchor? What
wondrous cities went forth to greet the mariners of that immortal
Odyssey?

The yearnings of a thousand generations who have spelled in the heavens
for some divine boding of the fates of men; the mystic soundings of
devout astronomers in temple labyrinths beside old Nile; the vision
conned upon the starlit terraces of Babylonian towers--all these
forgotten intimations from his pre-natal life surged in upon him in
waves of deep emotion, and floated his consciousness from its moorings
among the things of every day.

Caroline sat beside her son and did not break the silence. She, too,
was happy. Her prayers had been granted; the prodigal had found his way
home. Within the compass of her simple mind there was room for only one
ending to the story. Conversion would follow on repentance, and a happy
marriage would insure a regular and fortunate career.

Her agitated joy over his return to Colonsay House had moved Alistair,
if not to repentance, to a wish that he could change his nature in
accordance with the life his mother wanted him to lead. In the first
moments of united tenderness he even persuaded himself that this might
be so. He was wearied and disheartened by his warfare with society, and
he hoped that the truce might ripen into a peace.

The Duke of Trent’s reception of his brother had been courteous,
if not very cordial. He bade him welcome to the house, and on the
following evening informed him in their mother’s presence that the
family solicitor had taken charge of his affairs.

Alistair saw that he was expected to be grateful, and he succeeded
in appearing so, though in his heart he was half sorry to accept his
brother’s favours for the sake of his creditors.

“If it were not for you I would not let Trent give a penny to these
people,” he told his mother when they were by themselves.

“It is not only us you have to think of,” the Duchess seized the
opportunity to suggest. “We hope you may find a wife who will make your
life happy, and you would not like to go to her with any mark against
your name.”

The Home Secretary had never spoken of Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s refusal.
His repulse had mortified him deeply, but he took it sedately as he
took most other things. He blamed himself for not having made sure of
Hero in the first place, and with a certain obstinacy he still clung to
the idea that she would sooner or later be his.

Sir Bernard had been equally silent on his side. He did not know which
way his daughter’s inclination went, and wanted to avoid a disagreement.

The Duchess, whose diplomacy was of the simplest order, went on to say
to Alistair:

“Don’t you think you would like to come abroad for a little time? The
Vanbrughs have a house at Dinard, and it would be very pleasant if you
would take me over there.”

Alistair gazed at his mother in doubt. He could hardly misunderstand
her drift, and the light in his eyes was a sufficient revelation to her
of his own wishes. But the gossip which had reached him concerning his
brother and Hero Vanbrugh held him back.

“What about Trent?” he said.

“He can’t leave town till Parliament rises, of course. He may join us
afterwards, perhaps.”

Alistair was puzzled by his mother’s indifferent tone.

“Will he like me to be there in his absence?” he asked.

The Duchess was equally puzzled.

“Why, what difference does it make to him?” she returned.

“Isn’t there something? I thought--I heard that he and Miss
Vanbrugh----”

The Duchess looked at him in surprise.

“Oh, no!” she declared with confidence. “There has never been any idea
of that kind. He likes her very much as a friend, but he would not
think of anything more. I know exactly what his views are; he has often
told me. He means to marry a great fortune. Hero will have money, no
doubt,” she was quick to add. “Her father is rich for a professional
man, I believe. But, of course, he could not give her enough for
Trent.”

Alistair received the assurance with a throb of delight, as his
mother’s project suddenly shone out to him in the bright light of
hope. But a misgiving of another kind assailed him, and one which he
found it more difficult to explain to her. He found himself ashamed
to pass straight from the side of Molly Finucane to such a girl as
Hero Vanbrugh. It would be almost an insult, he thought; it would be
acting as though he sought Hero, not for her own sake, but as a sort of
refuge, a substitute for the woman he had left.

The sense of shame which Hero alone had been able to rouse in him
returned in its full force at the idea of presenting himself before her
with all the stains of his past life still showing, with Molly’s kisses
fresh upon his lips. He felt a desire to go away first and purge his
life in other scenes, to renew himself in some atmosphere of sweet and
strong endeavour from which he could hope to emerge fitter for Hero’s
love.

Alistair wondered that his mother did not perceive the indelicacy of
such a course as she had proposed, and Caroline on her part wondered at
the strange embarrassment with which Alistair at last gave his consent
to her plans. It was not easy for these two to understand each other.

During the few days that elapsed before their departure the Duchess
did succeed in getting a glimpse at what was weighing on Alistair’s
mind. She saw with secret concern that he really did doubt if he
were worthy of such a girl as Hero, and that this doubt might even
prove an obstacle to the fulfilment of her desires. It was necessary
to encourage him, and give him confidence in himself, and the
conscientious mother was surprised to find herself in the strange
part of an apologist, extenuating instead of aggravating her son’s
misdoing. Her first faltering attempts in this direction brought about
a beautiful change in the whole intercourse between the pair. Caroline
was deeply touched to see how the prodigal son’s nature softened and
expanded under this rare indulgence. They began to be happy together;
the poor woman secretly feared that she must be doing wrong.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Alistair rose on the first morning in their new home, and stepped
out of his bedroom window on to the little balcony that overlooked the
Emerald Coast, he repeated to himself the two lines of Keats in which
the essence of all poetry is distilled:

  “Magic casements opening on the foam
  Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,”

The house, which had been Hero’s choice for them, stood on the far
edge of a little headland dividing a sandy bay from the broad haven of
the Rance. The surrounding sea was ringed with a crescent of rocks and
islets in the midst of which green Cézembre glowed--

  “The captain jewel in the carcanet.”

Something, that seemed the mast of a wrecked ship, rose up in
melancholy memorial from one seaweed-covered ledge on which the waves
were now foaming softly, like a child that tries to kiss away the
recollection of its passion. On his right hand, across the shallow
glistening tides of the estuary, the tall spire of St. Malo lifted
itself like a more stately mast above the white walls of the islet city
of the corsairs. Far to the west the grey cape of Freher watched the
Atlantic billows, like a grim warder of the Breton coast. And over all
the summer haze lay like a spell of strong imagination, and conjured up
a legendary world.

It was a leaf of poetry that lay outspread before him, and he read it
with a poet’s eye. The faculty of toil, the long labour of the midnight
lamp, the fortunate strategy of words, had been denied to Alistair
Stuart, and therefore he was not a poet. Remained the gift of wonder
and of worship, and by that talisman he still had power to people the
sweeping landscape with mysterious life; the Tritons rose and called
each other from the waves, old Proteus lifted a slumbering head and
listened from his cave, and on the rocks the Sirens sang.

He had risen in that happy mood when every little thing becomes a
spring of joy. The coffee foaming in its thick white cup, that woke
him with its fragrance, and the shell-like bread, were delightful
reminders that he had come to a lighter-hearted land. He dressed
himself in pearl-grey flannels, and wandered out into the garden with
a wide-rimmed panama over his brows, and drank the scent of roses and
carnations, intoxicated by all the beauty round him, like a man risen
from a sick-bed. His thoughts went back to the life he had just left,
and he wondered that he could have lived it for so long. All the dark
speculations, the impulses that had moved him to go down into sheol,
seemed to have suddenly become as unreal as the imaginary dangers of
the night forest are to the traveller coming out on the broad highway
at dawn.

When the Duchess joined him in the garden walk that overlooked the
sea, she gazed on her boy with secret pride. As he stood there in the
sunshine, the light breeze playing in his hair, and in his eyes the
dawn of joy and hope, he seemed to her mother’s heart a Prince Charming
who had only to stretch out his hand and pluck the fairest flower in
the garden of love.

Alistair found himself too much excited to remain at home waiting for
the advent of the Princess. With a lover’s superstition he believed
that the way to hasten her coming was to go out himself. He kissed
his mother, and went down a rock-hewn stairway at the foot of which a
wooden gate let him out on the sands.

The little Plage, enclosed between the two headlands which Dinard
thrusts out into the sea like a snail’s horns, was bustling like a
fair. The French had made a miniature village of the beach, with
streets of little huts in which they read, and sewed, and called upon
each other, and carried on their family life. Children were burrowing
in the sand like rabbits, and bathers clad in the bright hues of
butterflies fluttered on the sea’s edge.

“And I might live this life always!” Alistair murmured, with a sort
of wonder at his own past blundering, as he stepped among this glad
throng, as glad as they.

Hero came towards him, walking beside her father, dressed in white with
one blue flower at her throat and a red flower in her heart.

“We were just coming to see you!” she cried gaily.

“I could not wait for you, you see!” cried Alistair.

And they two looked at each other through the magic casement of love.




CHAPTER XVI

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD


DURING the next few days a thing happened that surprised everyone. Sir
Bernard Vanbrugh and Lord Alistair became great friends.

Alistair had motives that were plain enough to three members of the
little party for his goodwill towards Hero’s father. But it puzzled the
two women to account for the pleasure which Sir Bernard evidently found
in the society of the young man.

To the Duchess the development did not bring unmixed satisfaction.
Her own acquaintance with the scientist had begun with some secret
trepidation on her part. She knew that Vanbrugh held opinions which
she had been accustomed to hear described in the venomous language of
her creed as infidelity, and which she had been taught to attribute to
moral perversity rather than to mental aberration. Such a man was not
the father-in-law she would have chosen for her son, though she had
resigned herself to the relationship as an inevitable evil, the flaw
inseparable from all human arrangements. While it pleased her to see
that he liked Alistair, she watched with secret uneasiness Alistair’s
unaffected liking for him.

To Vanbrugh the young man presented himself as an intelligent
companion, a rare exception among the crowd of contemporary youths with
minds ranging from bridge to polo, and from horses to ballet-girls. It
could not have occurred to him in any case that the Duke of Trent’s
brother was a probable aspirant to the prize which the Duke had failed
to gain, and, in fact, his mind was so thoroughly armed against the
possibility of Lord Alistair as a son-in-law that he never thought of
him in any such connection.

He spoke of him freely to Hero, as he might have spoken of a character
in some play which they had both seen.

“I like that scapegrace because he is so sincere,” he confided to
her one evening after Stuart had left them. “He never seems to have
acquired the habit of hypocrisy. I suppose it is because he has always
had the world at his feet. If he had ever had to earn his living he
would have had to pretend like the rest.”

Vanbrugh’s brow contracted as he added:

“The Queen said to me once: ‘I like you, Sir Bernard, because you
always tell me the exact truth.’ I replied to her: ‘That is the reason,
Madam, why it has taken me forty years to come into your presence.’”

The physician’s long and stern fight with society, as represented
by his own profession, had qualified him to sympathize with another
Ishmael, though one of a very different order. His indulgence for Lord
Alistair did not spring from any flexibility in his own standard of
conduct; but for the shams of European morality, for the decorum which
consists in keeping one’s wife in London, and one’s concubines in
Paris, he had as strong a contempt as Alistair’s own. The proprieties
of the cupboard-door were equally loathsome to both; the hackneyed
dance of society, for ever whirling giddily round on the skirts of the
Divorce Court maelstrom, was equally repellent.

The attitude of the scientist contained an enigma for Alistair, whose
intellect, wavering and searching like a flame in the wind, contrasted
with Vanbrugh’s as the strength of fire contrasts with the strength of
steel. To him there appeared something stubborn and unreasonable in the
scientist’s morality, which substituted collective Teutonic instinct
for the voice of God. The Haeckelian vision of a world of Unitarian
ministers and their wives leading uniform lives in a Prussian barrack
struck cold on his imagination. In the new ethics he found the Puritan
prison-house without the window.

There was one difference, however, for which he could only be grateful.
His new friend appeared to reverse the common practice, and to be
strict with himself only that he might be merciful with others. His
programme did not include the conversion of the sinner, and for the
first time in his life Alistair found himself associating with a
righteous man who did not want to do him good.

This unique toleration would have refreshed him under any other
circumstances. But at such a moment, and in such a quarter, it
disconcerted him. When, with some idea of softening the judgment of
Hero’s father, Alistair attempted a plea that he had sown his wild
oats, he was taken aback by the answer:

“The evil is sometimes not in sowing wild oats, but in sowing tame oats
among them. Mixed oatmeal is good for neither horse nor man.”

“I am not sure that I understand you,” Stuart faltered.

“I mean that it is a dangerous idea that the really diseased can become
good members of society. In my experience a man who tries to change his
nature often changes it for the worse. The reformed drunkard is apt to
become an insane teetotaller, and the reformed rake makes the worst
possible father.”

Alistair dared not pursue the subject. He had some ground for hoping
that Sir Bernard’s practice might be less inexorable than his
principles.

Soon after their meeting, the Duchess, overcoming her dread of the
scientist for Alistair’s sake, ventured to ask him what he thought of
her boy. Vanbrugh, with his habitual bluntness, had terrified her by
responding:

“I think he drinks too much. You ought to try to stop him.”

The poor mother had already noticed, and tried to shut her eyes to,
this weakness of Alistair’s, new in her experience of him. It was due,
she told herself, to the influence of Molly Finucane, and would pass
away now that he had escaped from that evil atmosphere.

Something of this she tried to plead to Sir Bernard.

“He never used to take too much,” she said. “But he is easily
influenced by his companions. He needs someone to watch over and
strengthen him.”

“Yes.” Even Vanbrugh shrank from speaking his whole mind about Lord
Alistair to the trembling mother. “If you can persuade him to stay with
you it may check him.”

The Duchess was afraid to carry her soundings further. For the first
time it dawned upon her that Sir Bernard was capable of taking a
critical view of such a son-in-law.

She had conveyed the physician’s judgment to Alistair, and Alistair
had rejoiced her by a promise of amendment which had so far been kept.
To help him, the Duchess had insisted on sacrificing her own glass of
wine, and as both the Vanbrughs were water-drinkers, all intoxicants
had silently disappeared from the tables of both households.

Alistair was touched by his mother’s self-denial on his behalf, and
cheered by Hero’s delicate sympathy. In the first flush of his new
resolution, amid the distractions of his changed life, and buoyed up by
the inspiration of his love, the path of reformation was made smooth
for him. The gloomy feelings that had haunted him in London returned
into the remote recesses of consciousness. The bright constellation of
Ormuzd rose beckoning before him, and the dark Sign of the Suffering
One sank below the horizon of life.

The only reminders he had of the past were the letters that reached him
from Molly Finucane.

At first the letters had come every day, passionate, reproachful,
entreating him to return to her. Molly protested that she had seen
no more of Mendes; that she was selling everything in the house
at Chelsea; that they would still have enough to go on with till
Alistair’s allowance from his brother became due; that she would follow
him and live with him where and how he would. When Alistair wrote back
what he intended for a final farewell, and sent a banknote given him by
his mother, Molly returned the note torn into a dozen pieces. Then the
letters became fewer and more pleading and pitiful. At last there came
one telling him that Molly had taken refuge with her brother, whose
address she gave him, in some Lambeth slum. After that there were no
more letters. The little woman had sunk in despair.

Alistair tried hard to forget Molly Finucane, and for a time it seemed
to him that he had succeeded. His love, if the passion she had aroused
in him deserved that name, had died out of itself, his compassion had
been put to sleep by the influences brought to bear upon him. If these
good women, if one so filled with the spirit of Christian charity
as his mother, could see nothing blameworthy in his desertion of
Molly--indeed, nothing that was not wholly praiseworthy--surely it was
absurd for him, the prodigal and the bankrupt, the unbeliever and the
misanthrope, to let himself be tormented by misgivings. To ruin what
was left of his own life for the sake of one whom no human sacrifice
could redeem--surely this were madness rather than heroism.

In this mood he became a ready listener to the philosophy of Sir
Bernard Vanbrugh; and Sir Bernard expounded his philosophy with some of
that proselytizing zeal which marked the last generation of scientists,
the Huxleys and the Tyndalls, before Science had laid down her arms
at the feet of the great Sphynx, and confessed that she had found no
better symbol to replace the old.

It would have surprised and alarmed the Duchess if she had been told
that the topic most frequently discussed between Sir Bernard Vanbrugh
and her son was religion. It would have more than surprised her, it
would have found her utterly incredulous, if anyone had told her that
Alistair had an intensely religious nature.

To her unnaturally stunted mind the word “religion” had only one
meaning, and unbelief only one excuse. Alistair had heard the Gospel.
In his boyhood he had shown signs of yielding to its influence; it
followed, therefore, that his later rejection of it was a deliberate
surrender to Satan. Everything in his troubled life that had resulted
from his having been violently robbed of his own religion she
attributed to his wilful and wicked refusal to embrace hers.

In reality, ever since the evangelical tutors employed by the Duchess
had succeeded in convincing Alistair that the Catholic creed was false,
without convincing him that their own creed was true, he had been
groping in a spiritual twilight. The religious instinct, though wounded
and defaced, was not dead.

He still cherished a more kindly feeling for the Roman Church than
for any other, as the one which he had found most indulgent to the
sinner, or, at all events, most intelligent and tactful in dealing
with himself. To his intellect the language of both creeds sounded
incredible. But whereas the teachers of his mother’s confession
seemed to share the darkness of their most ignorant disciples, he had
found among the priests of Rome some whom he could listen to without
impatience.

“Our Church,” they declared, “has never claimed that her formulas
should be taken literally like mathematical propositions. The Catholic
word for ‘creed’ is ‘symbol.’ We offer our dogma, not as the truth
itself, but as a symbol of the truth--an allegory, if you will. It is
the best statement of the relations between the Unseen and man that the
human mind is capable of receiving, and we offer it as nothing more.”

This comfortable language would have gone far to satisfy Alistair
if he had not observed on the part of his Catholic friends a
certain reticence and subservience to authority which alarmed his
liberty-loving instincts.

The answer to his demand for freedom was the answer of all priesthoods.

“Only a few minds are strong enough to stand alone. Our Church does
not forbid inquiry. She does not punish freethought. What she forbids
and punishes is the attempt to disturb the ignorant, to rob them of
the faith which is the best for them, without giving them anything
in exchange. You may persuade the peasant-woman to give up her
Christian Catechism, but you will not persuade her to replace it by the
Synthetical Philosophy.”

Alistair felt that this was still the old situation. He was to be
silenced lest others might be shocked. He was to be bound that they
might be free--to suffer that they might be strong.

While he thus found himself cut off from the communion of the orthodox,
the Christian religion continued to fascinate him. His spirit felt the
presence of a living truth concealed in these formulas which his mind
could not accommodate, like a beautiful face hidden beneath an ugly
mask.

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s theology was of the new scientific kind which
calls itself anthropology. The analysis of myths and the genesis of
beliefs had formed his favourite study, outside the range of his
profession, and he found a missionary’s satisfaction in imparting his
lore to Alistair Stuart.

“Christianity,” Vanbrugh proclaimed, “is a synthesis of all the ancient
beliefs of the Mediterranean, some of them comparatively enlightened,
others purely barbarous. We are now able to trace every one of its
rites and dogmas to an origin in some older state of society. Its
evolution has been as entirely natural as that of man himself.”

“Is not that rather in its favour than against it?” Alistair suggested.
“Is it not possible to view the primitive beliefs as the gradual
unfolding of a great truth?”

Vanbrugh frowned. This was not language that he liked to hear.

“That is what the orthodox would say, no doubt. But I am not concerned
with apologetics. No serious thinker will ever again waste his time in
controversy with that class of person.”

“I am afraid the orthodox would not think one view any better than
the other,” replied Alistair, thinking of his mother. “Isn’t it the
orthodox view that all the resemblances to Christianity found in other
religions are blasphemous parodies contrived by the devil in order to
discredit the true faith?”

Sir Bernard smiled, reassured of his pupil.

“Yes, I suppose that is the sound explanation. But there is a school
of reconcilers abroad, men who want to retain positions in the Church
without wholly forfeiting the respect of educated men, and their
favourite cry just now is the evolution of religion.”

“But the religious instinct itself? How do you account for that?”

“In the beginning it was nothing but the savage’s fear of
Nature, as Lucretius observed. In our days it is an atavistic
survival--practically a disease.”

Alistair trembled.

“Is it a disease that can be cured?”

“Every disease can be cured as soon as it is understood, or if not
cured in the individual it can be eliminated in the race. Where
religion is due to a mere obstruction in the brain, we shall in time be
able to remove it by trepanning; but where it is a hysterical symptom,
the only remedy will be to isolate the sufferers, as we now isolate the
insane, and allow them to die out.”

A strange light broke on Alistair.

“Is not that what the Catholic Church does?” he said eagerly. “Her
monks and nuns--are they not really hysterical patients who are
voluntarily adopting the very course that science would prescribe for
them?”

The scientist grudgingly conceded that this was so.

“Unfortunately the convents soon became mere refuges for the idle,” he
observed. “And healthy girls were forced into them by selfish parents
in order to save their dower. Still, no doubt the Protestants made
a mistake in shutting up the monasteries altogether and condemning
celibacy as a vice. There are plenty of cases in which it ought to be
compulsory.”

“Why compulsory?” Alistair pleaded. “Surely it is far better that they
should take a vow of their own accord, inspired by the thought that
they are helping to save the race?”

The scientist shrugged his shoulders.

“All that is sentiment,” he said--“one of the things for which the
healthy have no use.”

Alistair sighed.

“How monotonous the world will be when everyone is perfect! You will
have to preserve a few criminals as curiosities, like the lions and
tigers in the Zoological Gardens.”

Sir Bernard smiled good-humouredly.

“That won’t be necessary. We shall preserve some of the savage tribes
instead. They are documents of priceless value to the anthropologist.”

“When does a man cease to be a priceless document, and become a
criminal?” Stuart asked, with secret bitterness.

The other reflected for a moment.

“I suppose the answer is given by Johnson’s definition of dirt: When he
is in the wrong place.”

It was the answer which Alistair had given to himself that night on
Westminster Bridge. He was in the wrong place. But was there any right
place in the world for him?

He lifted his eyes and looked away. They were sitting on the verandah
of Vanbrugh’s house in the Malounine, facing eastward. The sun was just
leaving the sky, and the red glow of the western horizon, caught full
on the white walls and windows of St. Malo, bathed the city in fire.
Alistair’s heart beat painfully as he strained his eyes on the flaming
town. There was his world, there the vision that called to his soul.
O, not in dingy lanes, not on the cold, grey pavements of reality, but
amid those vermilion glories, his spirit should have dwelt and burned
itself away.

He was an exile. Not from the Island of Oig, nor any other island of an
earthly sea, but from that far-off sphere of which the sunset-smitten
town reminded him. He was an exile from some world of which love, and
not hate, was the keynote, banished for what fault he could not tell,
condemned to mortal life as to a penance, but tormented and consoled by
intimations from that happier state.

The soul has her imperial moments when she exercises a prerogative that
reason cannot take away; when the toilsome knowledge gathered together
by the senses falls into shards under her feet, and she enters into
possession of herself, freed from the bonds and trammels cast about her
by the material brain. In that moment Alistair did not think--he knew,
knew well, more surely than if a voice from the beyond had spoken it in
his ear, that he was an immortal spirit inhabiting eternity.

When his attention returned to the voice beside him, he found that the
agnostic was expounding the folklore of the crucifixion.

“The whole subject has been illuminated by Dr. Frazer’s book ‘The
Golden Bough,’” he was saying. “The sacrifice of a human victim in the
spring, at the time of the seed-sowing, is one of the oldest rites in
the world. The victim was originally conceived of as the corn-god, and
was put to death in order that his spirit might enter into the seed.
His body was buried in the field, and he was supposed to rise again in
the form of the harvest. In that way the dogma of Transubstantiation
had once a reasonable meaning--the bread was the flesh of the slain god
in his new avatar.”

Alistair listened like one awakening from sleep who has not yet caught
the sense of what is going on around him.

“Christianity, in short, is the old Adonis worship, adapted according
to Jewish ideas. The Old Testament is full of allusions to this
cult--‘women weeping for Tammuz,’ and so on.”

“You were speaking of a human victim,” murmured Alistair.

“Yes; it was customary to select a man at Easter, usually in later
times a condemned criminal, who was sacrificed as a scapegoat for the
sins of the people. The Jewish mob appear to have claimed a victim
in accordance with this custom. Two were released, in fact, one to
be sacrificed, and the other to be honoured as the representative of
spring.”

Alistair felt there was some confusion in this statement.

“For the sins of the people,” he repeated thoughtfully. “You say the
victim was sacrificed for the sins of the people?”

“That was one form of the cult,” the scientist assented. “The idea of
the sin-bearer is a very ancient superstition. Even the details of the
New Testament narrative follow the lines of what we know to have been
the customary ceremonial in Babylon and elsewhere. The scourging and
the crown of thorns were both familiar practices. They are alluded to
in Isaiah--‘He was wounded for our transgressions.’”

“‘With his stripes we are healed.’” Alistair finished the sentence with
a start of surprise. They were the words he had tried and failed to
remember on the night of his disgrace.

“At an earlier stage in the history of the cult the king of the tribe
had been sacrificed,” Vanbrugh went on, “So, when a criminal was
substituted, he was still called the king for the occasion.”

“It was a fine end for the criminal,” was Alistair’s comment.

His mind presented him with two contrasted pictures--the felon of
civilization, in his dreadful garb, numbered and branded like a
chattel, drudging in the stone quarries under the warder’s eye; and
that sufferer of the antique world, drawn out of some fetid Eastern
gaol, clad in the royal robe and crown, and marched in solemn
priest-led procession to the top of a Syrian hill to be put to death
for the salvation of the people. The sin-bearer, the redeemer--surely
every criminal was such! “Don’t you see,” he said suddenly to the
astonished anthropologist, “that they were right? They were simply
saying what modern science is saying, only they said it far more
beautifully. The criminal is the sin-bearer; he _is_ crucified for the
good of the people even to-day. He is imprisoned and hanged that our
lives and purses may be safe. By his stripes we are healed.”

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh told his daughter that night that he was a little
disappointed in Lord Alistair.

“He is brilliant enough in his own way,” was the scientist’s verdict,
“but not practical. I am afraid he is a dreamer.”

It was the dreamer that Hero loved.




CHAPTER XVII

A SPOKE IN THE WHEEL


THE assurance that Hero loved him was not conveyed to Alistair in
words. It stole in upon him like faint scents rising from the earth
after a shower, and thrilled him almost unawares.

The note of passion was overlaid by higher and more intricate
harmonies. In Hero’s thoughts of Alistair there was a protecting
tenderness, like a mother’s for a child that has suffered some hurt;
and in Alistair’s thoughts of her there was a reverence and spiritual
yearning that made it seem profane to offer her the common coin of love.

When he sat beside her on some lonely stretch of sand or grass-clad
promontory, and saw the sea reflected in her eyes, like the star in the
wine-cup of Hafiz, he shrank instinctively from the thoughts that other
women had roused in him. For the first time he saw into the mind of the
ascetic, and shared its rebellion against Nature--Nature that roots
the flower of life in earth. A silence often fell on him in Hero’s
presence. He dreaded certain stages on the way in front of them, and
wished that they could have fallen asleep together, and waked up man
and wife.

The marriage of true minds, so rare and so desirable, made formal
marriage vulgar. There was something impossible in that astounding
ceremony by which society revealed its strain of primitive savagery.
How could a man and woman, sensitive to beautiful things, their hearts
vibrating with the awful music of creation, prank themselves out like
negroes at a fair, and march into a public building to advertise
mankind of what they were about to do? The marriage of true minds did
not admit impediments like these.

The thorns of life pressed less roughly against his spirit as he talked
with Hero. He opened his heart to her, and the bitterness within seemed
to be changed and softened under the tender light of sympathy. A
process of reconciliation went on without his understanding whither he
was being led.

And Hero found in Alistair that which her life had lacked hitherto--a
motive and an aim. For in the view of life in which she had been
trained there was, as Alistair told himself, no window; and Hero had
missed the window. She had sought it at St. Jermyn’s, and found only
the pale altar-lights of a past age guttering in their sockets. For
a brave, truthful heart like hers that was not enough. In Alistair’s
discontent, in his revolt against the social order that had condemned
him, she discerned his latent faith in a more beautiful order, of which
this triumphant one was the enemy.

Her woman’s instinct told her that every man’s life depends for
one-half of its happiness or its misery on the women he meets with.
The man who has met the right woman for him cannot be utterly cast
down. And so, as Alistair’s mother had foreseen, Hero’s love was
strengthened by the idea of devotion. She had the power to help this
wounded soldier, perhaps to nurse him back to strength again, and such
a mission was the best thing that life had yet offered her.

All this became part of their mutual consciousness as the days
stretched into weeks of happy summer, and Alistair still lingered, in
wayward mood, unwilling to exchange delicious expectation for dull
security. For the poet waking life has nothing that can quite match the
exquisite texture of his dream. And when at last he spoke he did so
rather sorrowfully, like one who says farewell.

Without having made any compact with each other, the lovers kept their
secret for a time.

Even Alistair’s mother, though she was watching and praying for the
end, could not feel sure that it had been reached. But there is one eye
keener than a mother’s, and that is a rival’s. The Home Secretary had
read with angry jealousy the letters in which the Duchess described the
growing intimacy between Alistair and Hero, and innocently indulged
her hopeful anticipations. He sought and obtained the Prime Minister’s
permission, and on the day that Parliament was prorogued he left
England for France.

Alistair went across to St. Malo to meet the English boat, and the
moment he saw him the Duke guessed the truth. The brothers had not been
really cordial for many years, though for their mother’s sake both
tried to keep up a conventional friendliness. But on this occasion
Alistair greeted his brother with an unaffected kindliness which sprang
from the new happiness in his heart. He was at peace with the world;
he wished to be at peace with Trent as well. He wanted to forget past
grudges, and to view his brother’s character and conduct towards him in
the most favourable light.

“I am so glad you have come, Trent,” he said heartily. “This place is
fairyland itself, without the ogres.”

“What about Sir Bernard Vanbrugh?”

“He is quite well. Do you mean, is he an ogre?”

Trent nodded. He knew something about the scientist.

“I have not found him very formidable so far,” Alistair said cheerfully.

His brother’s hint had made an impression on him nevertheless. He had
suspected for some time that it would not be all plain sailing with
Sir Bernard Vanbrugh, and this confirmation of his fears from another
quarter depressed him considerably.

Trent was satisfied. He saw that his brother had not yet spoken to
Hero’s father, although he might have spoken to Hero.

The Duchess was waiting at the villa to welcome her eldest son. Almost
the first thing she said to him was:

“I have asked the Vanbrughs to dine here to-night. I thought you would
like to see your old friend Hero.”

“Yes, I should like to see her,” the Home Secretary replied impassively.

The suspicious glance which Alistair darted at him was met and repelled
by the Minister’s reserve.

“I shouldn’t wonder if you liked Sir Bernard too,” the Duchess added.
“He is an extraordinary man. He seems to know almost all about
everything.”

“I have met him,” Trent said, with the same cold indifference. “He
impressed me as an extremely able man--a man of strong character.”

The Duchess waited till she and Trent were alone to broach the topic
that was engrossing her thoughts.

“I think all is going well,” she said. “They seem quite wrapped up in
each other. But I am still a little anxious about Alistair. The poor
boy seems to be so much ashamed of his disgrace; he has told me that he
does not think he is good enough for a girl like Hero Vanbrugh.”

“The question is what she thinks, isn’t it?”

“Yes; that is what I want you to tell him. You can put it better than I
can. A little encouragement from you just now might turn the scale. We
can save him--and you will help me, dear?”

“You haven’t said anything to her father, I suppose?”

“No.” The Duchess looked a little troubled. “He is not a man I should
find it easy to be confidential with. I think I am a little afraid of
him.”

“I think you are right,” pronounced the rejected suitor.

All the old bitterness had welled up again as his mother spoke. He, the
eldest son, the credit to the family, was welcomed by his mother simply
as an ally in the salvation of the young prodigal who had brought
disgrace upon their house. He was to encourage this ne’er-do-weel, who
at last showed some slight sense of his own worthlessness--to pat him
on the back, and bid him go forward and win the bride whom he, Trent,
had been refused.

“I wish you would sound Sir Bernard,” said the innocent Duchess.

Trent started. The suggestion chimed in so exactly with certain
dark suggestions of his own secret mind that he nearly betrayed his
exultation.

“I will do so if you wish,” he said, measuring out his words carefully,
so as to give his conscience no possible excuse thereafter for
reproaching him with treachery to his brother.

The Vanbrughs had not been in the house five minutes that night before
the Duke saw more than anyone else had seen. Every look that passed
across the table between Alistair and Hero told him that they had
nothing more to tell each other. He saw also that the physician had as
little suspicion of what had happened as if he had been a thousand
miles off all the time.

After dinner was over the lovers wandered down the garden paths and
the Duchess retired to her drawing-room. The Duke and Vanbrugh were
left sitting on the verandah over the coffee and cigars, of which only
Trent partook. The physician dealt as severely with himself as with his
patients, and the abstemious habits so long enforced by poverty had not
been departed from in prosperity.

The Home Secretary considered how he could make his attack most
crushing. An ingenious idea suggested itself.

“Do you think you have treated me quite fairly, Sir Bernard?” he asked
in an accent of mild reproach.

The physician turned and stared at him.

“In what way do you mean, Duke?”

“Am I not correct in saying that you declined me for a son-in-law
principally on the ground that I had the misfortune to be the brother
of Lord Alistair Stuart?”

“That was one of my strongest reasons, certainly--perhaps the
strongest. Well?”

“Well!”

The Duke waved his hand in the direction in which the lovers had
disappeared.

“I never said anything implying that I should object to make a friend
of your brother,” protested Sir Bernard hastily, trying to ward off the
unwelcome suggestion.

The Minister treated this evasion with contempt.

“My brother has been wiser than I, it appears. He has made sure of Miss
Vanbrugh’s consent before asking for yours.”

“I hope you are mistaken!” cried the father, now seriously alarmed. “I
am sure you must be. I know every thought in my daughter’s mind.”

“Is it possible that you, a wise man, can believe that?”

“I am certain that she has never had a secret from me before.”

“Then it is serious indeed.”

The justice of the remark silenced Vanbrugh. He struggled in vain to
resist the conviction that the Duke of Trent was right. A hundred
trifling indications of the understanding between the lovers returned
upon his mind, like water pouring in through a leak.

“Damn the young blackguard!” he growled. “He is just the sort that
attracts good women. They think that they can ‘save’ him. I ought to
have remembered that.”

Trent listened, anxious for some assurance that his warning would not
be thrown away.

“If I have made a mistake in speaking to you----” He spoke slowly, to
let the other interrupt him.

“You could not have done me a greater service, Duke. Even if you are
mistaken in thinking there is anything in it, I shan’t be the less
obliged to you for the warning.”

“I should not like Miss Vanbrugh or my brother to know that I had
interfered.”

“No one shall know. It is a matter entirely between ourselves.” The
Home Secretary breathed easily again. “After all, it was a mere
accident. You naturally thought I had seen as much as you.”

“I am afraid I spoke under the influence of jealousy,” Trent said,
determined to do the handsome thing by his conscience, now that all was
safe. “My mother had actually asked me to sound you as to the match.”

The word stung Sir Bernard.

“There will be no match,” he said decisively. “I will see to that.”

And Trent was satisfied.

When the Vanbrughs were leaving, an hour later, Sir Bernard declined,
a little curtly, Lord Alistair’s offer to walk round with them. He
watched the parting between Hero and Alistair, and made up his mind
that he must interfere at once.

In order to give greater weight to his action he formally told his
daughter before going to bed that he desired to speak to her before she
went out the next morning. Hero’s start and blush at the request showed
that she guessed its meaning.

The boast which the scientist had made, that he knew every thought
in his daughter’s mind, might have been made with more truth by Hero
about her father. She had never deluded herself about the view which
he would take of such a suitor as Lord Alistair Stuart. Now she spent
a restless night revolving in her mind how best to defend the man she
loved.

Sir Bernard passed a restless night also. The task of a father whose
daughter is motherless is a responsible and delicate one; and though
the physician had accustomed himself to speak more plainly to Hero than
most fathers speak to their daughters, he would have given a great deal
to have had a woman’s aid at this crisis.

Their conversation took place the next morning in the drawing-room of
the villa. The scientist missed his study, but the French seaside house
is built on the principle of parsimony in living-rooms and extravagance
in bedrooms. The villa contained sleeping accommodation for upwards of
twenty persons and a dining-room comfortably seating six.

“We have seen a great deal lately of Lord Alistair,” the father began
gravely, “and I am afraid I have been to blame in not noticing how much
you and he were together. I will not ask you whether you have seen his
evident admiration for you, but I hope it is not too late to caution
you against any serious inclination for him.”

“Who has been speaking to you about us?” demanded Hero, with a bright
spot on her cheeks.

Sir Bernard had not allowed for womanly intuition when he promised to
keep the Duke’s interference a secret.

He shook his head gravely as he answered:

“I see no good in discussing that. It is for you to tell me how matters
stand.”

“It was the Duke, of course,” Hero returned. “Paragons are always mean.
There was a time when I might have accepted him if he had asked me to.
But he is like the dog in the manger: he would not ask me himself, and
yet he grudges me to his brother.”

The scientist was weak enough to accept the gambit offered by his
adversary.

“You are doing the Duke an injustice,” he said. “As a matter of fact he
called on me some time ago in London, and asked me for your hand.”

Hero opened her eyes. It was a shock, and it could not be a
disagreeable one, to know that she had had such a suitor. In the light
of this revelation the tale-bearer was less harshly judged.

“What did you say to him? Why didn’t you tell me?” she exclaimed.

“I declined his proposal on medical grounds,” her father answered. “The
family stock is unsound.”

Hero began to see what she had to face, and her heart sank.

“I think you might have told me,” she said reproachfully.

“He came to ask my consent, not yours, and I told him I would not give
it. There was no reason that I could see for telling you.”

Hero looked her father in the face.

“Suppose he had come to me first, and I had accepted him?” she said.

The physician answered gravely:

“I should have had to ask you to choose between him and me.”

The clash of these two strong wills had come at last, and both were
silent for a time.

Vanbrugh was the first to resume.

“Every objection I had against the Duke of Trent, of course, applies
with ten-fold force to his brother. The Duke is physically sound;
he has personally escaped the taint of his family stock, and it is
possible that it may disappear in his descendants. But Lord Alistair
has inherited his father’s vices. He is an idler, a profligate, and I
might say a drunkard.”

“He has ceased to drink,” Hero protested. “I do not believe the life he
has been leading is his natural one. I am sure that if he were to marry
a woman who understood him he would become a changed man.”

“I do not believe in changed men,” her father answered. “But that is
not the point. I am not condemning Lord Alistair for the life he has
led up to the present. On the contrary, from my point of view of an
enlightened sociology, the sooner such a man exhausts his vital energy
the better.”

“You would have him commit suicide!” Hero exclaimed, with flashing eyes.

“I would have him commit suicide rather than marry, yes,” the scientist
responded firmly.

“I have promised to marry him.” Hero said the words with a calmness
which alarmed her father.

“Even if such a man could reform his conduct, he could not reform his
physical constitution,” the physician said, turning his eyes away from
his daughter’s face. “His children would be doomed, before their birth,
to disease and insanity. To bring such beings into the world is a crime
worse than murder, and will be dealt with as such as soon as society
has escaped from the thraldom of the priests.”

It was not the first time that Hero had heard her father express
similar sentiments. It was the personal application that was new--and
terrifying.

“If I do not marry Alistair I shall never marry anyone else,” she said,
after a tragic pause.

Sir Bernard glanced at her face, and saw it pale with resolution. He
became afraid.

“That would be a crime on your part. It is the duty of the sound to
marry, as much as it is the duty of the unsound to refrain.”

“Duty to whom?” asked Hero.

The question opened Vanbrugh’s eyes to the gulf that had come into
existence during the past few weeks between him and his daughter.
Hitherto Hero had been his child, and had looked at the world through
his eyes. Now she loved another better than him, and had learned to
look at the world through the eyes of the man she loved.

His answer was given without confidence.

“To society. To the order of Nature of which you are a part.”

“Society!” Hero’s tone breathed some of that scorn which she had caught
from Alistair in their intimate communion with one another. “Society!
that is the man in the street, isn’t it? Or is it the public?--the
British public expects every man to do his duty!” Some of the bitter
expressions that she had heard Alistair use came back to her with
unexpected force, and half unconsciously she defended him in his own
language. “The whole duty of man is to be one of a horde of drudges
toiling to make a millionaire. That is civilization, isn’t it?--the
social order to which we are all expected to conform. And the new
religion is that we are to marry and have healthy children, that this
great organized stupidity may go on for ever.”

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh recognized Lord Alistair’s voice, and bowed his
head in despair. “My daughter is lost to me,” he told himself. “I have
lost my daughter.”

Aloud he said:

“And your father? I have tried to be a good father to you, my dear.”

Hero was smitten to the heart. She went over to where her father sat,
and put an arm round his neck.

“I love you just the same,” was all she found it in her heart to say.
“I love you just the same.”




CHAPTER XVIII

THE LAST WORD OF SCIENCE


SIR BERNARD VANBRUGH knew that he had failed to shake his daughter’s
resolution.

He did not believe that Hero would marry Lord Alistair Stuart while he
forbade her to. But what he feared was that she would refuse to give
him up. He was getting on in years, he had not spared himself, and
sooner or later Hero must be free. In the meanwhile he saw before him
the prospect of her celibacy, a state abhorrent to his feelings whether
as father or as physician.

In his own mind he had a husband chosen for Hero--an engineer; one of
that class to whom the future seems to be assigned; sane, strong, and
self-reliant; a water-drinker, like himself; a man of orderly life and
wholesome instincts; an ideal father, for whom what science calls the
mechanism of life was really mechanism, and nothing more; a man in
whose eyes poetry-books and prayer-books were alike contemptible; one
who found no weakness in himself, and tolerated none in others.

Vanbrugh compared the husband whom he had chosen for his daughter
with the husband she had chosen for herself, and was bewildered and
impatient.

In those days a certain obscure writer of Jewish blood, who had tried,
and failed, to write poems, plays, and novels, had taken vengeance on
his more successful brethren by publishing a malignant libel in which
he pried with some pruriency into their private lives, and proved for
his own consolation that genius is a form of vice, if not a positive
crime. Some scraps of scientific language picked out of the works of
Professor Lombroso had served to disguise the critic’s rancour, and
the mixture had proved more palatable to the public than the author’s
literary efforts. The sentiment coarsely vented in this work was that
which inspired Sir Bernard Vanbrugh when he thought of Lord Alistair as
a husband for his only child.

From the envy and more or less feigned Pharisaism of the libeller
Vanbrugh’s mind, of course, was free. He had liked Lord Alistair, and
been interested by him. In the life that he had led hitherto he had
been harmless in the scientist’s view, or, at all events, not harmful
enough to call for harsh measures. But now everything was changed. If
by the lifting of a finger Sir Bernard could have terminated the young
man’s existence, and with it the spell which he had flung over Hero,
he would have lifted the finger without an instant’s hesitation or an
instant’s remorse.

And yet he judged better of Lord Alistair than of some of those
splendid types of healthy manhood whom the modern world goes forth
to worship, as they practise foul play against each other for a few
pounds upon the football field. For he decided to appeal from Hero to
her betrothed. He was going to ask the young man to give up voluntarily
the prize within his grasp; and somehow he did not think that he should
ask in vain.

He left the house about the time Lord Alistair usually came round, and
met him strolling up the road.

“My daughter is at home,” he said, in answer to Stuart’s inquiry. “But
before you see her I should like to speak to you. Is there anywhere
where we can go and have a quiet talk?”

The request was ominous enough in itself, and the physician’s manner
made it more so. Alistair’s heart sank as he answered:

“I expect the club would be the best place. We should not find anyone
in the card-room at this hour.”

He turned and walked silently side by side with the arbiter of his
happiness, past the crowd that bustled in front of the Plage, and up
the short street that conducted them to the club door.

As he went a great despondency settled on him. Without knowing what
Sir Bernard meant to say to him, he felt that there was little that he
could say for himself. What account of himself could he give that would
be considered satisfactory by the father of an only daughter? It was
only his mother who had encouraged him to lift his eyes to Hero. He
ought to have asked his mother to plead his cause with Hero’s father.

Even in his most buoyant moments during the past few weeks he had never
felt quite sure of his happiness. A sense of unreality came upon him
ever and anon; he had felt like a man dreaming a delicious dream, and
dreading the awakening he knows must come.

Now the awakening had come, and could not be put off.

He found himself seated in the deserted card-room facing Hero’s father
across a small green table, on which two packs of used cards and three
or four scoring-blocks awaited the return of the bridge-players.

The sight of the soiled packs affected him painfully. He knew that
this economy was due to the exorbitant French tax, but yet it struck
upon him as a note of squalor. The cards themselves were small and
badly made, like most things made by Governments. He drew one of the
packs towards him, and began shuffling it nervously while he waited for
Vanbrugh to speak.

Vanbrugh noted the action with a physician’s eye.

“I expect you have guessed what I want to speak to you about,” he said
quietly.

Alistair lifted his eyes from the cards and stole a glance at his
questioner, a glance not free from the cunning of his Pictish blood.
But he said nothing.

“My daughter tells me that you have asked her to become your wife.”

For a moment Alistair made no response. Keeping his head down he cut
four cards in rapid succession--a club, a spade, a diamond, and then
another diamond. He took it as a bad omen.

“Has she told you anything more?” he asked.

“Only that she had given you her consent.” Vanbrugh hesitated; he found
it harder than he had expected to tell this young man the truth about
himself.

“You will understand naturally,” he began again, “that Hero is my chief
interest in life. Her happiness is dearer to me than anything else in
the world.”

“And to me, too,” Alistair put in swiftly, raising his head and looking
Sir Bernard in the face.

“That is what I hoped you would say,” Sir Bernard answered gravely. “I
want to discuss the matter with you from that point of view.”

Alistair lowered his head again.

“I am not good enough for her--you need not tell me that. But if she
loves me?” He spoke in low tones, which only just reached the father’s
ears.

“You must let me speak plainly, Lord Alistair, as plainly as I spoke to
your brother when he came to me with the same request.”

“Trent! Did he come to you on my behalf?” cried Alistair in
astonishment.

“He came on his own. He has known Hero longer than you have.”

It took Alistair a moment or two to grasp the situation.

“Did you refuse Trent?” he exclaimed.

“Yes.” In his own mind Vanbrugh was beginning to doubt the wisdom of
that refusal. Had he not been over cautious? His objection to the Duke
of Trent had been more or less hypothetical: the Duke himself was
sound; it was possible that he might not transmit the family taint. He
might have done well to consider the danger of leaving his daughter to
follow her own fancy. When there were so few perfect husbands, and so
many undesirables, it would have been wiser, perhaps, to close with one
who had so much in his favour.

“Why, in the name of Heaven, did you object to him?”

“Partly because he was your brother. I told him I could not let my
daughter marry a man of diseased stock.”

The words stunned Alistair. He had been prepared to have his own
misdeeds brought up against him; to be told, perhaps, that it was too
late for him to reform; or at least that he must give proofs that the
reformation was thorough and lasting, before he could be trusted with
Hero. But this was cutting away the very foundations.

“I never heard of such a thing!” he stammered, letting the cards fall
from his fingers. “Do you condemn us for the sins of our ancestors?”

“It is not I who condemn you. Nature does that, and I am only her
student and interpreter.”

Alistair put his hand to his head.

“And is that the latest gospel of science?” he said bitterly. “The
fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on
edge.”

“It is not a very recent gospel, and you are not quoting from a
scientific work,” Sir Bernard reminded him. “All that science does is
to add the corollary that those who have eaten sour grapes ought not to
become fathers.”

Alistair made no answer for a time. He sat toying with the cards,
cutting them at random and speculating vaguely as to who were the
Argine and the Hogier after whom certain picture cards were named. It
struck him that men were like cards; the gods must have created them of
different values for their own amusement, and be playing some Olympian
game among themselves, in the chances of which it was his, Alistair’s,
destiny to fall a loser of the trick.

Sir Bernard watched him with a pity he did not try to quench. He liked
this young man very much--so much that he could have wished for his
sake that Nature was less inexorable.

“How merciless science is!” Alistair observed presently.

“Science is not so merciless as the old religion,” the scientist was
not sorry to respond. “At least, it does not reproach you for what
you cannot help. Its sentence is not pronounced vindictively, like
a bad-tempered judge denouncing crimes which he himself was never
tempted to commit. And when it forbids you to pass on your evil
inheritance to the unborn, it is acting, not without mercy for you, but
with greater mercy for them.”

And then, while Alistair remained quiet, listening dully without the
power of resistance, the other went on to draw the picture of tainted
life passing from generation to generation, the terrible theme of
the dramatists from Æschylus to Ibsen, figured by superstition as a
curse from the gods, traced by science to the cruel thoughtlessness
of men. He described the great army of the victims, as he himself
had reviewed it in his medical practice. In addition to those whose
misfortunes were the subject of public notice and public charity,
there were the innumerable secret sufferers, the cause and meaning of
whose sufferings was most often unknown to themselves. There were the
drunkards, the gamblers, the adulterers, with whom the world dealt so
much more harshly than with its cripples and consumptives. There were
the neuropaths and hysterical subjects, little better than maniacs,
yet struggling to keep their place among the sane, endowed with the
gift of reason, held responsible as reasonable beings, and yet tortured
with the consciousness that their infirmity betrayed them at every
moment into conduct which only madness could excuse. He touched on
the terrible case of those who go through life with the dark shadow
of paralysis hanging over them, never knowing at what day or hour it
will strike them down. And all these evils, and the lesser ones, as
they are called, though it may be doubted if they are really lesser,
the infirmities of temper, of idleness, of defective memory--in short,
every human frailty and affliction, except the insignificant damage of
war and accident and pestilence--truly insignificant in comparison--he
traced to the one cause. And in a world of healthy, rational men
there would be no war and no pestilence, and very few accidents. So
that true religion and true science, the religion of Humanity and the
science of Nature, were at one in denouncing as the greatest of all
crimes--indeed, the only real crime--the bringing of unhealthy children
into the world.

When he had finished the listener gave him a questioning look.

“But if there are no children?”

Vanbrugh frowned for the first time, and his voice hardened.

“I have lived a hard and abstemious life,” he said; “I have been
stricter with myself than with anyone else. My reward is to have
a child in whom I have never detected a weak spot. I have a right
that she shall make a happy marriage, and receive a woman’s crown of
honour--a happy motherhood.”

Alistair bowed his head again, and scattered the cards from his hand.

“And what is to become of me?”

The mournful question deeply moved Sir Bernard. He was asking this
young man to surrender the sweetest form of earthly happiness; what
could he offer him in exchange?

“Has science nothing else to say to me? You are a physician; if I am
diseased, cannot you cure me?”

Vanbrugh was disconcerted.

“We are only groping our way as yet,” he answered mildly. “Remember
that all knowledge was forbidden by the priesthood for a thousand
years. We are only in the beginning of a better age.”

“The age in which there will be no men like me!” Alistair commented.
“And in the meantime science has no gospel for me.”

“It is your father whom you have to blame,” Sir Bernard said
reluctantly.

Alistair trembled.

“You mean that I ought not to have been born?”

The physician was silent.

“I am a waste product, for which science has no use. O, why not? You
have found beautiful dyes in coal-tar; can you find nothing in me?”

Vanbrugh was a father fighting for his child, a zealot fighting for his
faith. But he was touched by this appeal.

“I have not said that. I have only told you that you ought not to
become a father. It is not your fault if you have received an evil
inheritance, but it will be your fault if you pass it on.”

Alistair hid his face in his hands for a time.

“Be honest with me, Sir Bernard,” he said presently, in a husky voice,
without lifting his head. “You are the priest of science, and I am in
the confessional. You think I ought to commit suicide?”

The scientist was profoundly moved. He held his breath for an instant,
and his forehead grew damp. He found his resolution failing him.

“No,” he said, in faltering tones--“no, don’t think that. I have told
you science is still groping her way. I believe it would be happier for
some of the poor victims of heredity--the hopelessly insane, the deaf
and dumb, and perhaps the criminal and paralytic--if a painless death
were provided for them. But a man with your gifts should find something
worth living for.”

Alistair looked at him earnestly.

“I want to live,” he said simply. “I don’t want to die. I can’t feel
that I have any less right to live than you. Perhaps the criminals and
paralytics can’t feel that either. I never feel unfit; I never knew
that there was anything wrong about me till other people told me so.
When I was a boy the world was a beautiful place to me; it would be
so still if there were no good people in it. It is they who will not
let me live. You are only saying to me in more honest language what
they have been saying to me, what my own mother has been saying to me,
ever since I can remember. I don’t know why I am condemned. Ever since
I was a boy I have loved beautiful things as other men love gold; I
have walked through life with my eyes fixed on the stars, and my feet
tripped up by every ditch. My mother thinks that I am wicked, and
you say that I am diseased. And to me--yes, to me--you all seem blind
people burrowing in the earth and refusing to be happy.”

Vanbrugh shook his head.

“I am not responsible for what others have said to you. In my eyes you
are simply a victim of heredity. I do not want my daughter’s children
to be victims in their turn; that is all. If you love her----”

“I do love her,” Alistair interrupted fiercely. “I thought you
understood. I only want now to know what I can do for her sake. If I
were a Catholic, I would go into a monastery, so as to leave her free.
That is the last word of Christianity for a man like me. The last word
of science is the lethal chamber.”

Sir Bernard had an inspiration.

“Why don’t you go back to Molly Finucane?”

Alistair fell back in his chair as if he had received a blow. He woke
out of his dream. Sir Bernard was right, and his mother had been wrong.
He had no business to unite his wrecked career with such a life as
Hero Vanbrugh’s. Molly Finucane was the true match for him. She was a
scapegoat like himself. The figure of the poor little painted creature
had haunted his memory even during these last days of courtship, and he
had never felt quite satisfied that he had acted honourably in leaving
her.

He rose to his feet.

“Yes,” he said, “I can do that. That will set Hero free. Good-bye, Sir
Bernard. I am going back to London to marry Molly Finucane.”




CHAPTER XIX

POETS’ CORNER


THE September sun was shining on Beers Cooperage, shining as brightly
on the dingy London yard as on the glittering emerald seas of France.

The inhabitants of the Cooperage were rejoicing in the light and
warmth. The cripple had brought out a rocking-chair, with its cane seat
patched up with string, and was swinging himself with half-shut eyes in
front of the little row of flowers which assiduous watering had kept
alive during the summer drouth. A new canary in the mended cage of its
predecessor chirruped gaily from the open window of one of the tiny row
of cottages; the window of another revealed a trophy of travel, a box
bearing on its lid a photograph of Southend Pier, framed in polished
mussel-shells, which its owner, with an altruism not often found in the
denizens of lordlier neighbourhoods, had disposed so that its beauty
could be enjoyed by the passer-by at the expense of the inmates of the
house themselves.

Over the whole of the Cooperage there was an atmosphere of freshness
and content. The little gates and palings on the window-sills were
newly painted in artistic green and white. Many of them now revealed
their inner utility by guarding pots of musk or mignonette, with here
and there a bright red geranium. The pavement of the yard was clean
beyond its former wont, and the refuse heap that had once marked the
abode of Mike Finigan had disappeared.

It was over Mike Finigan’s house that the greatest change of all had
come. Not a single broken window was any longer to be seen in the
front of the dwelling. The door had been painted green to match the
five-barred gates, and decorated with a handsome old brass knocker that
shone like an imitation sun. The window of the ground-floor was open,
and through it could be seen a perfectly æsthetic kitchen--a kitchen
after the heart of South Kensington, with a high-backed settle, a
Cromwellian table and armchairs, all of the finest black oak, a dresser
lined with willow-pattern plates of deepest blue, and a mantelshelf
glorious with copper saucepans scoured to the grain.

The transformation had extended to, or rather it had begun with, the
inhabitants of the regenerated hovel. The bewildered dwellers in the
Cooperage dated their present era of peacefulness and brightness from
the appearance of a remarkable announcement in the _Times_:

  “On Monday, the 14th instant, at the registry office, Lambeth, Lord
  Alistair Fingal Stuart Campbell-Stuart, brother of the Duke of Trent
  and Colonsay, to Miss Molly Finucane, daughter of the late Jeremiah
  Finucane, of Beers Cooperage, Lambeth, S. W.”

Following on the step thus disclosed to the world Lord and Lady
Alistair had taken up their residence in what might have been
described with truthfulness as the home of her ladyship’s family,
vacated beforehand by her brother.

Stuart had not attempted to reform Mike Finigan. He had adopted the
easier and simpler plan of reforming Mike Finigan’s surroundings by
obtaining him a post as water-bailiff to a friend who rented some
fishing in the heart of the Finigan country. Mike was now living his
natural life among his own people, breaking their heads and getting his
own broken to their mutual contentment, and earning the character of
the best water-bailiff in green Connacht.

Alistair would have been glad to adjust his own life as successfully as
he had adjusted his brother-in-law’s.

In the first flush of her joy at his return, and gratitude for the rank
he had given her, he had found it easy to persuade Molly to try the
experiment of life in Beers Cooperage. He allowed the little woman to
consider the scheme as a sort of practical joke, one of those slaps in
the face to the hated middle class which she had learned to relish as a
proof of aristocratic feeling.

To their humble neighbours the invasion of such a spot as the Cooperage
by such a figure as Lord Alistair--Mr. Stuart, he called himself to
them--could only be understood in the light of those settlements and
missions by which the well-disposed had recently striven to irradiate
the gloom of darkest London. One of the great public schools had
planted a hall in adjacent Battersea, the Wesleyans had a settlement
somewhere Walworth way, the Church of England was bestirring itself in
Southwark. The Cooperites were convinced that the new resident had come
amongst them on evangelizing thoughts intent. They accepted the green
paint and the flowers as a preliminary sop, and awaited with stolid
resignation the tracts and the lectures on wireless telegraphy and the
Andaman Islands that would surely follow.

Alistair himself was surprised to find how little was changed in
his life by the transmigration. The brief episode which lay behind
him at Dinard took its place as a dream from which he had awakened.
Respectable society, as represented by the Secretary of State for
the Home Department, had dropped him once more, and his old friends
had welcomed him back. The marriage announcement had been hailed in
the circle of which he was the acknowledged chief as a masterpiece,
reflecting more glory on him even than the bankruptcy which was now
formally complete. If Alistair Stuart had gone under he had proved
himself, like Samson, most formidable to the Philistines in his end.

He was able to estimate the greatness of his triumph when he found that
his first visitor was the Chevalier Vane.

It was true that the Chevalier came as to the house of mourning, to
condole and patronize rather than to congratulate, but Stuart knew him
well enough to be sure that he would not have come at all unless he
considered that there was still some distinction to be drawn from the
association.

Vane’s restless vanity had just stimulated him to make a bid for
notoriety on his own account, on lines more congenial to his cautious
temper. Inspired by the example of certain distinguished writers of
the French decadent school who had exchanged the Bacchic ivy for the
Christian palm with evident benefit to their reputations, he had
conceived the felicitous idea of publicly entering the Church of Rome.
He had already in the press a volume of hymns composed in honour of
various medieval saints, collectively entitled “A Rosary of Twilight,”
and he trusted that the contrast between its mystic piety and the
erotic breathings of his unregenerate muse would at last stir the
reviewers out of their apathy.

He had cherished the hope that a man of his importance would be deemed
a proper subject for conversion by a Bishop. But the Roman authorities
had taken, as usual, a severely practical view of the situation, and
had intimated that the reception of a convert, however illustrious, was
a matter to be regulated, like other ecclesiastical ceremonies, by the
mundane consideration of fees. The cost of an episcopal welcome proved
too severe a wrench for the mercenary instincts of the poet, but after
a good deal of haggling he secured a monsignor, whose violet stockings
made the function a moderate success in the dearth of by-elections and
divorce suits.

Wickham Vane, after a severe internal struggle, revolted on this
occasion from his allegiance, and struck out a line of his own by
embracing the tenets of the Theosophists. But the two brothers
continued to live together in the same harmony as before, and it was
remarkable that the priests who came from time to time to confirm
the new Catholic in his faith found Wickham a much more interested
listener, while the yogis and mahatmas who visited Wickham went away
under the firm impression that it was his brother who was their
disciple.

The author of “A Rosary of Twilight” brought with him a presentation
copy as an inexpensive form of wedding-present. Molly received it with
gratification as a homage offered to her in the serious character of a
Christian matron. But the page containing the inscription to Lord and
Lady Alistair was the one that she read with most pleasure; indeed, it
was the only one that she could understand.

Her promotion had not wrought much change in Molly’s manners; there
was no reason why it should, having regard to the tone of the
most fashionable circles; but it had infused a distinct shade of
condescension into her treatment of such of her acquaintance as were
commoners. To the Chevalier Vane she accorded the courtesy due to his
rank, but the untitled Wickham found himself almost snubbed.

Stuart showed the brothers over his new dwelling. The front-door
opened directly into the art kitchen, behind which there was a tiny
wash-house, where real cooking could be accomplished on a gas-stove.
Lady Alistair volunteered the information that they usually dined out,
and that the household work was attended to by a plebeian neighbour.
Overhead there were two small bedrooms, one of which Alistair had had
fitted up as a dressing-room and study for himself.

The Vanes were charmed with the whole establishment, Egerton merely
advising a cuckoo clock for the foot of the stairs as a finishing
touch, and Wickham inclining to think old tapestry more suitable than
wallpapers for the rooms upstairs. In his enthusiasm the Chevalier even
expressed himself as seriously disposed to install himself in the house
adjoining.

“We might set a fashion,” he declared, with that naïve vanity by which
Alistair hardly knew whether he was more amused or annoyed. “In time
we might draw other men of letters round us, and have the whole court
occupied.”

“Then it would have to be called Poet’s Corner,” Alistair observed.

“That is just what I was going to say,” Vane snapped back, becoming
almost rude in his greediness to appropriate the suggestion. “Such a
settlement would be like a lighthouse of civilization.”

“I hope not,” Stuart retorted. “We have had too many attempts to
civilize the slums. I have come here to barbarize them.”

This time the Chevalier was compelled to acknowledge the master’s
superiority.

“You are right,” he heroically confessed. “But I am certain my idea is
a good one. It will make a sensation. We shall have pilgrims coming to
visit us from all parts of Europe and America.”

And already in his egoistic fancy he pictured himself receiving a
stream of reporters in his own cottage, seated in state in some exotic
garb, and dictating interviews on the subject of the poetry of the
Catholic renascence, which would be wired to the ends of the earth.

Stuart read his thoughts, and smiled rather sadly. Vane’s proposal had
pleased him at first, corresponding as it did more or less with the
project dimly shaping in his own mind. He had always had a soft corner
in his heart for the two brothers. He knew his own need of intellectual
fellowship, and both the Vanes, under their absurd affectations,
possessed some real taste. Egerton could be a pleasant enough companion
on those too rare occasions when he was not iterating the tedious
personal note, and Wickham shone as a mildly agreeable moon. Stuart
was not blind to their faults, but, then, no master has ever found
faultless disciples. If the disciple were equal to the master there
would be no masterhood.

As it is natural for a leader to crave for followers, so it is natural
that he should bear much from those who seem disposed to follow him.
Stuart, without analyzing his motives, had made many efforts to attach
the Vanes to himself. He had tried to melt the adamantine selfishness
of the elder by generous praise of all in him that was possible to
praise. He had tried to fan what little sparks of individuality he
had detected in the younger. He had shut his eyes as much as he could
to their humiliating vanity and meanness, vices which he hoped might
exhale in the sunshine of a little success.

Now he was moved to despair of them. It was evident that the real
attraction for Egerton in the project he had embraced so feverishly was
not the companionship of congenial minds, but the notoriety conferred
by reporters. His soul thirsted not after the praise of the judicious,
but after the paragraphs of Fleet Street. Regretfully Alistair made up
his mind to abandon the half-formed scheme, unless the two brothers
could be persuaded to abandon him. The participation of such a man
as Egerton Vane would degrade any movement in which he played a part
to the level of his own vanity. It did not deserve even to be called
vanity--it was vulgarity. Instead of the vanity of genius, it was the
vulgarity of the charlatan.

Happily unconscious of the reflections passing through Lord Alistair’s
mind, the Chevalier Vane was occupying his mind with the problem of
his neglected volume, which Lady Alistair had laid aside. The poet
of the Catholic renascence was anxious to read some of his work to
the company, unworthy though they seemed to feel themselves of such a
privilege, and he began forcibly turning the conversation towards the
end in view.

“The new poetry will be distinguished from the old by its form not
less than its spirit,” he proclaimed magisterially. “I have come to the
conclusion to discard the sonnet in favor of the acrostic.” (There was
an acrostic in the “Rosary of Twilight.”) “Form is the essence of art,
and the acrostic represents form in its severest limitations.”

“Form _is_ art,” flashed Alistair, who saw through the visitor’s
strategy, and felt maliciously disposed to balk him. It had always
been an honourable understanding among the Decadents that they were
to listen to each other’s poems and look at each other’s pictures, as
some slight mutual compensation for the deafness and blindness of the
middle class. But it seemed scarcely fair to extend the benefit of this
arrangement to the poetry of the Catholic renascence.

Vane blinked, but recovered himself promptly.

“That is what I said. Form is art or its essence. For that reason it
ought not to be concealed. In the acrostic form takes its right place
as the governing condition of the whole.”

Wickham dutifully came to his brother’s reinforcement.

“That is why I find tapestry so far superior to painting,” he murmured.
“The limitations of the needle are so much severer than those of the
brush; their influence over the composition is so much more obvious.
There is something vulgar in dexterity.”

“Is there not something vulgar in expression itself?” Stuart put in.
“Surely the unexpressed is always higher than the expressed?”

This was a wedge driven between the opposing forces. Wickham, whose
claims to consideration rested entirely on the meditations in which he
was believed to indulge, could not reject the principle which justified
his existence. Egerton, fretting with impatience, began to fear that he
should be reduced to the coarse manœuvre of openly seizing his book and
reading unasked.

But even this was not to be permitted him.

“For my part,” Stuart said, “I consider that as the first word of
literature was the riddle, so it must be the last. Poetry is falsehood,
and we should never be allowed to tell the truth. Remember that when
Shakespeare ventured to talk poetry to Ben Jonson in the Mermaid
Tavern, he ‘had to be stopped.’ The poet will always be stopped by
respectable people when he talks prose, and that is why he has to
talk poetry, which they can’t understand. Take my advice, throw your
acrostics overboard, and write riddles. Write them in Sanskrit if
possible, and use a cipher. That will give you all the limitations
you want. And the middle class will form a Vane Society, as they have
formed a Shakespeare Society and a Browning Society, to interpret you;
and when you are dead they will write biographies to prove that you
were fairly orthodox and perfectly respectable.”

The author of the “Rosary of Twilight,” as he walked home in dudgeon,
observed to the fraternal satellite:

“I am afraid Stuart is deteriorating. He seems to be incapable of high
seriousness.”

“He needs to surround himself with pale green tapestry,” was the
melancholy response.

Others of Alistair’s old circle came round him in his new home, and
rejoiced in this fresh defiance to the Victorian proprieties. But there
was one notable absentee. The figure of the Brazilian banker was never
seen in the little high-art kitchen. Since Molly Finucane had become
Lady Alistair, Mendes had been struck off her visiting-list.




CHAPTER XX

LADY ALISTAIR


SIR BERNARD VANBRUGH kept his own counsel about his conversation with
Lord Alistair, as he had done about the Duke of Trent’s proposal.

In a brief letter from London Alistair told Hero the truth.

  “If I am a scapegoat of others” (he wrote), “I cannot let you be my
  scapegoat. My life, I am told, must be a cul-de-sac, and you must
  not think of walking down it with me. I ought to have seen this all
  along; perhaps I did suspect it; but I was forlorn and you made me
  happy. Now I can only do my best not to make you miserable. Forgive
  my mother for her share in the mischief that has been done, and try
  to forgive and forget.

                                                      “ALISTAIR STUART.”

This letter made no difference to Hero whatever. She guessed that her
father had influenced Alistair to write it, but she forbore to speak to
him on the subject. Her mind was made up, and so was his, and further
discussion between them would only make them both unhappy.

She carried the letter to Alistair’s mother, who had been left
wondering and dismayed by his unexplained departure, and the two women
who loved Alistair embraced and shed some tears over it.

“He will come back to you if you will wait for him,” the mother
pleaded. The language of the letter was outside her comprehension, but
she thought she knew what was in Alistair’s heart. “He has drawn back
because he is afraid he cannot make you a good husband. But he has not
really given you up.”

“I have not given him up, at all events,” Hero said quietly.

The Duchess felt greatly comforted. Only her old misgiving came back to
her.

“Suppose he means to marry that woman?” she whispered.

“Then I shall look upon his wife as my sister. I shall try to make a
friend of her for his sake, and I think I shall succeed. After all,
perhaps I have no right to take her place.”

The mother was daunted by this answer. She could not bear to admit that
Molly Finucane had any rights where Alistair was concerned. She would
have liked to see Hero more jealous.

The news of the marriage reached them only through the newspaper.
Alistair had thought it would be affectation to try to soften the blow.

It was a dreadful blow to the Duchess, though she had seen it coming.
She sank under it, and aged visibly. Hero tried in vain to administer
consolation.

“I think Alistair has acted nobly,” she declared. “I am proud of him.
And I should be proud of myself if I thought he had done it to please
me.”

The poor Duchess began to fear that Hero, instead of an ally, was going
to prove a traitor. She could see in her son’s action nothing but
desperation. She had her own settled view as to what would constitute
happiness for her boy, and she wanted to see him happy.

Hero wrote in the same courageous strain to Alistair himself. And she
enclosed a short note to Molly, asking permission as a cordial friend
of Lord Alistair’s to congratulate her on a step which she believed and
hoped would be for the happiness of them both.

When Molly got the letter, she was puzzled and rather alarmed.

“Is Miss Vanbrugh the girl your mother wanted you to marry?” she asked
her husband.

“Yes. But you see I married you instead,” was all Alistair said in
reply.

And Molly did not dare to question him further. She answered Hero’s
letter as ungraciously as she could, though her new sense of dignity
kept her within the bounds of formal civility. She hoped that this
would be the end of all intercourse in that quarter.

Neither Alistair nor his wife had any suspicion that their new
residence was within the charitable rounds of the Duchess of Trent.
The dwellers in Beers Cooperage were equally ignorant that their new
neighbour was her Grace’s son. They had soon given up the notion
that he was among them as a social or religious missionary, and now
cherished the exciting belief that he was in hiding from the police,
who would presently appear on the scene, and drag him off with all
dramatic circumstance.

Alistair had concealed his address from nobody; on the contrary, he had
taken pains to transmit it to the editor of every directory in which
his name was included. The ratification of his bankruptcy had left him
with a pleasing sense of freedom, and the sale of Molly’s furniture had
provided for present needs.

When the Duchess returned to Colonsay House, her first thought was for
Beers Cooperage. She dreaded a meeting with her daughter-in-law so
much that she was tempted to relinquish her visits to the little yard.
But a sense that it would be cowardly to make her poor friends suffer
on this account co-operated with some human curiosity to overcome her
repugnance. She decided to go to the Cooperage as usual, and take her
chance of meeting its new inmates.

Hero disappointed her friend by refusing to accompany her. She made it
her excuse that she intended to call on Lady Alistair, and did not wish
the compliment to be lessened by association with charitable visits.

She had another reason which she did not tell the Duchess. She feared
that Alistair’s mother was incapable of dealing tactfully with such
a woman as Molly Finucane. Indeed, she had shown herself little able
to deal with her own son. Hero was determined to be the friend of
both, and in order to be so she saw that she must not let herself be
identified with the Duchess.

Caroline delayed so long that it was Miss Vanbrugh who first made Lady
Alistair’s acquaintance.

She drove to the Cooperage in her father’s carriage at the fashionable
hour of the afternoon, walked up the yard without noticing its inmates,
except by a nod in passing, and knocked at the bright green door.

It was opened by Alistair himself, who could not restrain an
exclamation of pleasure.

“Is Lady Alistair at home?” Hero asked smilingly.

“You have come to call on her? That is good of you! She is upstairs; I
will fetch her down.”

Hero detained him by a gesture, as she whispered swiftly:

“Don’t tell her that it is good of me. Don’t praise me to her at all.
And leave us together.”

Alistair understood. He placed Hero in one of the Cromwellian
armchairs, and went upstairs wearing a look of indifference.

He found Molly seated on her bed, looking very fierce and flushed. Her
ladyship had inspected the visitor from overhead through the window,
and immediately prepared for battle.

“Who is she?” she demanded.

Alistair shrugged his shoulders with well-assumed carelessness.

“It’s Miss Vanbrugh, the girl who wrote to you, you know.”

“What has she come here for?”

“I suppose it’s a call. She asked if you were at home.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said yes. You hadn’t told me that you didn’t want to receive
callers.”

Molly felt herself baffled. She bit her lip, and looked hard at
Alistair.

“Our marriage was announced in the paper,” he said, pushing his
advantage. “That entitles my friends to call on you, I suppose. In
fact, it would be rather marked if they did not.”

“Your mother hasn’t called.”

“No. That is rather marked.”

Molly saw she was in a dilemma. She would have been glad to cut off all
further acquaintance between her husband and this girl, of whom she
had such good reason to be jealous. But Miss Vanbrugh’s visit offered
an opening into society, that respectable society which had been the
object of her ambition for so long. It was the first opening that had
presented itself, and it might very easily be the last.

Lady Alistair decided to sacrifice jealousy to ambition, and, like
other wives, to make her husband suffer for the sacrifice.

“You know that she has only come to see you,” she said.

“If you think so you can stay up here. I will go down and tell her that
you have a headache.”

“Yes, you would like that, wouldn’t you? Me to stay up here by myself,
while you and her enjoy yourselves without me! I shall come down.”

“You may do as you please. But if you imagine that Miss Vanbrugh or any
other lady would consent to stay and talk with the master of the house
while the mistress keeps out of the room, you have a good deal to pick
up.”

This speech produced an effect on Lady Alistair. She did not resent
receiving lessons in social etiquette.

“You want me as a chaperon, I suppose,” she grumbled, hastily touching
up her toilet and complexion.

“What nonsense! I doubt if I shall stay in the room. You must learn to
entertain your own visitors.”

Incredulous, but silenced, Molly descended and faced the enemy with a
warlike front.

At the first sight and speech of Hero she felt herself half disarmed.
The perfect sincerity, the clear nobility of nature, that shone in
Hero’s face, put every thought of vulgar jealousy instantly to shame.
This woman might be a rival, and a formidable one, in the sense that
a mother or a bachelor friend is the rival of a selfish wife, but she
would never be a rival in any other sense.

“Dear Lady Alistair, I am afraid I have been rather slow in calling,
but we have been abroad, and when we got back I found I had really
nothing to wear. What do you do for your autumn hats?”

One glance at the overdressed and bejewelled little woman had taught
Hero the way to her friendship. Once lured on to the ground of
millinery Molly became interested and animated before she knew it, and
Stuart found himself provided with a good excuse for slipping out of
the room.

The new Lady Alistair had expected to feel embarrassed in talking to
the first lady she had ever met, and she had prepared to carry off
her embarrassment by insolence. It was a surprise, and an agreeable
one, to find herself chatting easily and pleasantly with the new-comer
on topics that she thoroughly understood. Instead of being schooled
and patronized, it was she whose superior knowledge of fashions and
fashionable shops enabled her to impart information, and almost to
condescend.

Hero was not contented with this opening success. She wanted to be
Molly’s friend, and not merely to be friends with Molly.

“What a clever idea to take this little house!” she said, as soon as
the opportunity served. “And what a charming nest you have made of it!”

“It is rather poky,” said Lady Alistair, not quite sure whether her
visitor was speaking sincerely.

“Oh, but how cosy you must find it! Everybody loves cottages, but then
so few of us can afford to live in them. My father, for instance--of
course, as a working professional man he is obliged to consider the
opinion of his patients.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Molly assented. It made her quite gracious to
think that Miss Vanbrugh recognized her own social inferiority.

“I should not wonder if you set the fashion,” Hero pursued. “I am sure
there must be lots of people who are tired of flats.”

Molly was surprised by her visitor’s discernment.

“The Chevalier Vane, a friend of ours, talks of taking the cottage next
door,” she said, with satisfaction.

“That will be just the thing for you, won’t it? I know Lord Alistair
well enough to be sure that he wants plenty of society. I expect you
have hard work sometimes to find distractions for him.”

The hint sank into Molly’s mind. Frivolous and stupid as she was, she
was able to see that this new friend was giving her sound advice, and
she was not ungrateful for it. Alistair had married her, but whether he
would continue to live with her would depend a good deal on how far she
succeeded in making his home a pleasant one.

Poor Molly! She had caged her bird, but she had yet to see if she could
make it sing.

Hero would not go away till she had coaxed Molly into making tea. She
praised the furniture, the copper saucepans, the new cuckoo clock, the
absence of servants--everything about the house, till its mistress
began to think that she must be really a most enviable housewife. When
Alistair rejoined them over the tea, he found Molly in a better humour
than he ever remembered. And he was careful to do nothing to break the
charm.

As he escorted Hero down the yard to her carriage he thanked her
earnestly.

“Your visit has been like an angel’s--only let me hope there will be no
‘far between.’”

“I will come as often as I think your wife wishes me to,” was the
gentle answer. “Be sure you do nothing to make me unwelcome to her.”

The advice was not unnecessary. After Miss Vanbrugh had departed
Molly began to doubt whether she had done well in being so friendly.
She tried the experiment of disparaging the visitor to her husband,
watching him keenly to see the effect of her remarks. But Alistair was
on his guard, and only responded by shrugging his shoulders and saying:

“If you don’t like her you needn’t see any more of her. You have only
not to return the call, and the Vanbrughs will leave us alone. If you
do return it, I suppose they will ask us to dinner. Please yourself. As
long as you don’t interfere with my friendships I won’t interfere with
yours.”

The prospect of going to a real dinner-party--a dinner-party at which
ladies would be present--was a strong temptation to Molly. She decided
that the acquaintance must be kept up.

“Of course I shall return her call,” she said sharply. “What do you
take me for? Do you think I’m jealous of an ordinary girl like that,
who doesn’t even know where to get her gloves?”

During the next few days there was a perceptible change in Molly’s
behaviour towards her husband. She suggested his going to look up some
of his friends, and asked him to choose at what place they should dine.

It was in the midst of this effort of the little creature’s to be a
good wife to Alistair that Alistair’s mother came to see her.

Caroline had found her simple morality confused by the transformation
of Molly Finucane into Lady Alistair Stuart. Ordinarily the marriage
ceremony would have amounted in her view to a complete white-washing
of the sinner. It was the atonement prescribed by all her social and
religious canons. But this particular marriage concerned her as a
mother. She could not but view with jealousy an atonement made at her
son’s expense, and she found an excuse for condemnation in the fact
that the marriage had taken place in a registry office. The Duchess was
not so strong a Churchwoman as to deem it no marriage at all, but she
could, and did, regard it as something short of that reconciliation
with righteousness and respectability which a union blessed by the
Church would have been.

She could not forgive her son’s wife, but she could not quite condemn
her. In this frame of mind she made her way to Beers Cooperage one
morning before lunch, determined to give her first visit a neutral
character.

The appearance of the Duchess after an absence of so many weeks caused
a flutter of excitement in the little court, and all its inhabitants
hastened out of doors to greet her.

As it happened, Lady Alistair was in her house alone, and hearing the
sounds, she went to the window and looked out.

The spectacle of an elderly lady in old-fashioned black silk walking up
the yard amid the throng of her dependents told Molly nothing. It was
an entire surprise to see the visitor advance straight to her own door,
and to hear her say to the people thronging round her: “I am going in
here first. I will see you all again when I come out.”

In the absence of a servant, Molly was half inclined to let the visitor
knock in vain. But, after all, a visit paid at such an hour could
hardly be one of ceremony. Most likely the old thing wanted to ask her
for a subscription: she would surely not presume to talk religion to
her when she was informed of her rank.

Determined to put the intruder in her place at once, Molly went
leisurely to the door and threw it open.

“Do you want to see me?” she asked roughly.

Caroline gazed at the pretty painted face that she had brought herself
to believe had been her boy’s undoing, and there was not much relenting
in the gaze.

“Are you my son’s wife?” she returned, with gravity.

Molly was taken aback. The idea that this old person, evidently a
familiar figure in the court, should be the mother of Lord Alistair
quite confused her for an instant.

“Are you the Duchess of Trent?” she stammered, with a shamefaced
recollection of certain correspondence that had once passed between
them.

“I am Alistair’s mother,” was the response. “Is he here?”

“He has gone out,” said Molly. Then, realizing that she was standing in
the doorway, and that the interview was being watched by a number of
curious eyes, she drew aside hastily. “But won’t you come inside?”

“I will, thank you.”

The Duchess walked in with great deliberation, and seated herself,
upright and stately, in Molly’s own chair, exactly as she was
accustomed to do in one of her poor people’s cottages when about to
admonish a drunken husband or a slatternly wife. The poor people, who
knew that the lecture was really an excuse offered by the Duchess to
her own conscience for the forgiveness and solid kindness that were to
follow, always listened meekly enough. Unfortunately Molly did not know
anything except that she was on her defence. These court martial airs
roused her spirit, and she sailed across the room with a flushed face,
and cast herself down with insolent negligence on the settle.

“I have been a district visitor in this neighbourhood for some years.
I don’t know whether you were aware of it when you took this house.”

“No,” said Molly, “I wasn’t. But I don’t think I should have had any
objection.”

The Duchess frowned. She had come, not prepared to make peace, perhaps,
but disposed to entertain a truce. Now the enemy seemed not to desire
either peace or truce.

“I asked because I could not understand my son’s choice of such a
residence. Does he really mean to stay here?”

“You must ask him that. I suppose he will leave it when I do--not
before.”

The Duchess, routed from her own position, was obliged to accept
Molly’s.

“Why have you brought him here? Do you wish him to forfeit his place in
society altogether?”

“I don’t know what society you mean. Our friends are visiting us here
as usual, and they think the place charming. If it keeps away frumps
and bores, so much the better.”

Caroline was confounded. In her mind the common notions of her
generation on the subjects of piety, morality, and social propriety
were inextricably blended. Quite unconsciously to herself she had
included in her scheme for Alistair’s salvation the possession of a
big Cubitt-built house in Eaton Square, with menservants eating five
substantial meals a day in the basement, and doing little else; a
carriage and pair, conveying him and his wife to an endless round of
serious entertainments in other Cubitt-built houses, wherein similar
menservants ate similar meals; the directorship of some respectable
railway or insurance company to occupy his mind; a seat on a hospital
committee by way of good works; and, above all, a stately pew furnished
with red cushions and hassocks, in which he would be seen regularly
every Sunday morning, carrying the glossiest of silk hats and wearing
the straightest of frock-coats. No doubt she placed first of all
that spiritual change which she deemed necessary to all men, but she
believed that if Alistair were once converted all these other things
would be added unto him, and perhaps she also believed, without being
conscious of it, that if the other things were present the conversion
would be added.

Molly’s own ideal was really very similar. The Cubitt-built life was
the life for which she hankered with all a woman’s thirst for the envy
of other women. If the Duchess had known it she might have found in
Molly a much more trustworthy ally than in Hero Vanbrugh. But she was
never likely to know it. For her Molly embodied every evil influence
at work in Alistair’s life. The evil had triumphed, and the best that
could now be hoped for was some poor salvage from the wreck.

“What sort of friends?” she said, in answer to Molly’s last remarks. “I
am afraid my poor boy’s friendships have done him more harm than good.”

“His relations haven’t done much for him anyway.”

The two women regarded each other with unconcealed hostility as they
exchanged these retorts. It was a new experience for the Duchess to be
defied in this open fashion.

“I am afraid you must take the responsibility for that,” she said
severely. “His brother and I were both trying to save him, but you
prevented us.”

“How did I?”

“How? By marrying him, of course.”

“And why should that prevent your doing anything for him? I know! If he
had married your Miss Vanbrugh, as you wanted, the Duke would have paid
off his debts fast enough. Because he preferred me you wash your hands
of him in revenge.”

“He did not prefer you,” said the Duchess sternly. “He thought that
after living with you as he had done he was unfit to be the husband of
a good woman.”

It was a merciless stab, the stab of a mother fighting for her
offspring. For an instant Molly felt sick. Then, to the dismay of her
adversary, she burst into tears.

“You are a cruel, wicked woman to say a thing like that. You hate me
because I love Alistair, and you know that he loves me. What do you
want me to do?”

The Duchess’s conscience smote her. She sat there unable to make a
reply. After all, now that this wretched marriage had taken place, what
did she want Alistair’s wife to do?

Molly, unconscious of the difficulty, removed it by putting her
question in a different form.

“He came back to me of his own accord,” she sobbed. “I was living
here--with my brother--and he came and asked me to marry him. What
ought I to have done?”

“You knew that such a marriage would be his ruin. You ought to have
saved him from it, if you really did love him.”

“And what about me?” moaned the dejected Molly.

The Duchess felt a momentary shame.

“There are Homes,” she said, with hesitation, “where women who desire
to lead better lives are encouraged and trained to become useful
members of society.”

Molly sat up, and dashed away the tears that were making havoc of her
rouge and powder.

“And is that what you want to do to me? Put me into a reformatory, and
cut my hair, and make me go about in a grey dress and an apron, saying
‘Ma’am’ to a lot of old maids who are too ugly themselves for any man
to want them? and then get me a situation as a servant or something,
where I should always be patronized and watched to see that I didn’t
enjoy myself? No, thank you! I won’t go into your Home! I won’t--I
won’t!”

The Duchess rose to her feet slowly.

“Some other time, when you are calmer----” she began.

“I’m not going to be calm!” Molly cried fiercely. “And I’m not going to
be good either--not in your way. Why should I? Why should I pretend to
be ashamed of myself, and make long faces--repent, as you call it--to
please you? I don’t want your good opinion. I never asked for it. All
I want is for you to leave me alone. You think you are very good and
gracious, I dare say, to talk to a girl like me. I don’t see it. If you
really wanted to be kind, you would be kind to me now, as I am. It is
easy enough to forgive people when they have left off doing what you
don’t like; the thing is to forgive them while they are still doing
it. If I joined the Salvation Army, and wore a poke-bonnet, you would
have nothing to say against me. Bah! You’re like all the rest; I know
you. Get us to go down at your feet and be miserable, and then you take
credit for forgiving us. And that’s what you call Christianity!”

The Duchess had stumbled to the door and escaped before Molly lost her
breath.

Alistair’s mother tottered down the yard, too much agitated to remember
her pensioners, and Alistair’s wife lay on the high-art settle, with
the copper pans gleaming down at her, and wept as if her heart would
break.




CHAPTER XXI

THE HOUSE OF CATILINE


AMONG those friends of Lord Alistair’s who did not neglect him in his
fallen state was the moving spirit of the Legitimist Guild.

The Comte des Louvres visited the house in Beers Cooperage, and
professed himself enchanted with everything about it, but most of all
with its nearness to Chestnut-Tree Walk.

“We are neighbours now,” he declared, “and I shall expect you to look
me up very often. Drop in whenever you have nothing better to do.”

The Frenchman threw a flattering deference into his manner towards
Molly now that her position seemed to be established. He was keen
enough to see the direction in which her ambitions pointed, and he
threw out hints of his ability to help her.

By way of a beginning he invited her to his house to meet some of
the ladies who had held stalls at the famous bazaar. Lady Alistair
did not refuse the invitations. She appeared in the Count’s shabby
drawing-room, flaunting in the extravagance of the past, and scored a
feminine triumph over women whose whole yearly dress allowance would
not have paid for one of her frocks. But Molly was too shrewd to
mistake these gatherings, at which tea was handed round by the two
Vanes, and the conversation turned chiefly on the Legitimist cause and
its prospects, for the kind of society she had aspired to. The women
to whom Des Louvres introduced her were as much outside the pale as
herself, though for different reasons, and in the end they tired her by
their pretentious gentility, and she left off trying to mix with them.

It was borne in upon the poor little woman that her dream of
respectability was never likely to be realized. The cruel frankness of
the Duchess had broken her spirit. The dismal vision of the Home began
to rise up before her as a final destiny. Very often she cried now when
she was alone. It seemed to her that life could never be jolly again.
Nothing had turned out as she had hoped. Marriage seemed to have made
things worse instead of better. Alistair left her to herself as much as
formerly, and when he was with her they had less and less to say to one
another. And they became really poor. The Duke’s intentions as regards
his brother’s allowance remained undeclared. In the meantime the South
Kensington furniture, the copper saucepans, and the Cromwellian oak
had been bought on the hire system, and there was trouble about the
instalments. Once or twice already they had had to dine at home on
slices of ham brought in from a shop in the Westminster Bridge Road,
because they could not afford a meal at a restaurant. And now the
winter was upon them.

After all, Molly had not returned Miss Vanbrugh’s call. And this was
not because she was jealous of her, but because when it came to the
point she found she had not the courage. In Hero’s presence, in the
light of her candid eyes, the pretence of being a lady could not be
kept up. Perhaps Hero guessed how matters stood, for when she found
that Lady Alistair did not come to her she made the experiment of
coming again to Beers Cooperage. And Molly was very glad to see her. To
her own surprise, she found her once dreaded rival was her only friend.
They grew to call each other by their Christian names. And by degrees
Molly opened her heart to Hero, and told her everything; told her one
day, with tears and sobs, the story of her miserable life, and wound up
with the despairing cry:

“I shall never be any better; I know I shan’t. I can’t be sorry. I
can’t repent.”

Hero held out her arms. When she reached home that evening she found
the bosom of her dress all streaked with rouge.

Alistair’s wife was not blinded by the respectful homage of the Comte
des Louvres to his true character. Her instinct told her that the Count
had no friendships which did not serve some purpose of his own, and she
warned Alistair against him.

“Beware of that man,” she said one day after the Frenchman had been to
see them. “He pretends to be your friend, but he is scheming to get
something out of you.”

“Most friends are,” was Alistair’s retort. “Of course, Des Louvres is a
scoundrel, but he is an interesting one. Honest men are such bores.”

And in that remark Alistair expressed more of his character than he
knew. Perhaps the strongest of all the motives that stirred him to
quarrel with the social order in which he had been reared was that he
found it dull. He judged of life like a novel--it is the villain who is
the soul of the plot.

If he had been born fifty years before, Alistair Stuart might have been
happily engaged among those who were struggling for the emancipation of
Europe from the old Legitimist régime. Political liberty, the liberty
that Shelley had hymned, and Mazzini plotted, and Garibaldi fought for,
seemed a Dead Sea fruit to his taste, but yet at least the struggle for
it had been worth waging. To-day nothing interesting, nothing heroic,
was going on in the world. The glorious dawn of the nineteenth century
had been succeeded by a commonplace day. The struggles of the hour were
for markets and mines; the question that moved men’s souls was whether
Mike Finigan should be compelled to hide his glass of beer from the
respectable sight of Mr. Stiggins.

Liberalism was dead, and the social democracy marching over its corpse
had discarded every noble watchword, every lofty ideal, and proclaimed
the naked issue of more wages and less work. They and the millionaires
might fight it out between them as far as such as Alistair were
concerned. Neither side seemed likely to add anything to the beauty of
life.

In the house in Chestnut-Tree Walk he found himself brought into touch
with an altogether different world. It was a strange underground world,
a world of decayed races, and lost causes, and fallen dynasties,
and overthrown gods. Sometimes it seemed to him a world of pure
make-believe, in which everything was pasteboard and tinsel, and at
other times it seemed to him that there was a meaning hidden beneath
the make-believe, that there was a strength in all this decay capable
of assailing and overcoming in time the strength of the world of
triumphant causes and conquering races; that from this concealed and
stagnant source a power of corruption might arise, like the pestilence
that issues from the slums of Canton or the pilgrim-ships of Mecca and
devastates Asia and Europe.

Alistair became a more and more frequent visitor to the house hidden
behind the grimy chestnut-trees. Des Louvres was never a dull
companion. He possessed a unique knowledge of contemporary European
history, especially of that part of history which does not get into
books, and which the underbred provincials who compile scholastic
histories seem never to understand. His memory for royal genealogies
was equal to that of a German Court Chamberlain. And he was not
ignorant of British pedigrees either.

On one occasion he surprised Stuart by asking him:

“You are related to the Earls of Mar, are you not?”

“My grandmother was an Erskine,” Alistair replied. “Why do you ask?”

“Your ancestor headed the first Jacobite rising on behalf of James
III,” said Des Louvres, with a significant glance.

“It is sometimes called the Earl of Mar’s Rebellion,” responded
Alistair. “But I don’t think my ancestor distinguished himself very
much. He made his arrangements very badly, and quarrelled with the
Pretender when he came over.”

The other did not pursue the subject. But his remark had taken effect
on Stuart’s mind.

In addition to Des Louvres there were often other interesting figures
to be met with at Chestnut-Tree House: Frenchmen fresh from the
boulevards; Austrians and Spaniards with the latest gossip of their
capitals; urbane Roman priests, affecting the diplomatist rather than
the cleric, and anxious that the Duke of Trent’s brother should take an
interest in the absorbing question of the Temporal Power.

“There never was a more interesting State than the Pope’s,” Stuart was
told. “It was government by the refined and intellectual class, the
aristocracy of mind and birth combined. There was no public opinion,
which, as you know, always means vulgar middle-class opinion. There
was no Puritan inquisition; Garibaldi and his brigands made it their
chief complaint against us that we did not persecute the sinner. Every
man could do as he pleased, in short, provided that he did not openly
assail the Church. Of course, no Sovereign can tolerate rebellion. For
artists and poets, for all men of taste and originality, the Rome of
the Popes was an almost perfect home.”

Alistair grew more and more inclined to believe it. More and more
he came to feel that he had no quarrel with the Church of Rome. It
had never persecuted him. On the contrary, it had treated him with
consideration at a time when he had received no consideration from
those who owed it to him most.

He would have been glad enough to believe that a restored Papal State
would afford him the city of refuge for which he yearned, and if he
raised objections the tempters easily swept them away.

“Was not the press muzzled?” he would ask. “Was there not a censorship
of books?”

And the answer would be that the democratic press was equally muzzled,
only it was muzzled by a golden muzzle. A paper could not be launched,
except at a cost only within the means of the very rich. It could not
be carried on at all without the revenue derived from the pill-makers
and the soap-makers; and the pill-maker would permit nothing to appear
in it that might by any possibility offend his bilious customers.
The rich man would not tolerate any paper that did not pander to
the passionate greed which was fast becoming more than a disease--a
veritable possession.

And there was a censorship of books as well, a censorship
administered, not by educated men, but by policemen hounded to
their work by rabid zealots in whom sexual perversion took the form
of prudery. There were commercial censorships and voluntary ones.
A tradesman, sitting in his office, held in his hands the fate of
half the books brought out in England. The committees of the Free
Libraries were more intolerant than any Roman congregation. Were not
their shelves choked with the rubbish of evangelical serialists,
and barred to the masterpieces of De Maupassant and D’Annunzio? The
real censorships of books in every age had been exercised by human
stupidity. The Index Expurgatorius of ignorance and spite was vaster
than the British Museum Catalogue.

Stuart found himself more than half committed to the cause already. His
effort on behalf of Don Juan, slight and unsuccessful as it had been,
had brought him a letter of thanks from the Prince, and an invitation
to call on him if Lord Alistair should ever find himself in Rome. Des
Louvres continued to speak hopefully of the Pretender’s prospects. And
in the meanwhile it became more and more clear to Alistair that Don
Juan’s cause, and all these romantic causes and whispering conspiracies
centred in the one supreme cause and the one secular conspiracy
represented by that immemorial figure, crowned with the triple crown of
Ra, grasping the keys of Sheol and Amenti, and pursuing in the name of
the Crucified One the empire of the Conqueror.

In the same measure that Alistair Stuart was attracted to the camp of
these rebels against the established order he was repelled from that
rival camp whose red flag was the symbol of an international Jacquerie.

Every poet is at heart an anarchist, but his vocation bids him be a
transcendental one, perceiving that sympathy is stronger than violence,
and the seed that bursts unseen and silently is a more formidable
engine than the bomb. Alistair found in the proletarian propaganda, so
far as it had come under his notice, a leaven of envy and hatred of
the best. The spirit of Marat’s bloody apostolate lurked under words
like brotherhood and humanity. It was not only against the rich and the
tyrannical that the red flag waved; it menaced equally knowledge and
genius. Archimedes would fare no better at such hands than he had fared
at the hands of the soldier of Marcellus. The policy of these helot
Tarquins was to strike down the tall flowers of the garden, roses and
nettles together.

His three months’ sojourn in Beers Cooperage had taught Alistair that
he could not really be the brother of his humble neighbours. He was
not nearer to them in spirit than if he were dwelling in Colonsay
House. He was too kind-hearted not to wish to befriend them, but he
could only do so as he befriended children and animals--without feeling
himself as one of them. His common sense, or, what is the same thing,
his sense of humour, saved him from trying to elevate them by means of
wireless telegraphy and the Andaman Islands. The simple truth was that
he no more wanted to change their natures than to change his own. He
was that rare thing, an individualist who respected the individuality
of others. He was the only person who had ever bestowed money in the
Cooperage without asking whether it was to be spent on tea or on beer.
In his mother’s opinion he was doing harm to the neighbourhood. Among
the beneficiaries a suspicion had begun to germinate that he must have
his eye on a seat in the County Council. His favourite manifestation
of interest was to call in passing organ-grinders, who played in the
Cooperage by the hour together, while the children danced.

Alistair could make his poor neighbours happy, but they could not make
him happy.

The poet searching for his Eden places it ever in some environment
which he has not yet tried. Whole generations of priest-ridden Italians
had placed the home of freedom in Puritan-ridden England; it was
natural that Alistair should place it in Papal Rome.

Des Louvres, the Catiline of this conspiracy, had just that touch of
the bohemian in his own character which enabled him to understand
Stuart. He did not hope to rouse in him any active enthusiasm for the
small territorial ambitions of the Catholic Pretenders, clerical or
lay. But he saw that what Stuart wanted was a stick with which to beat
society, and the Legitimist stick was as good as any other. Little
by little he drew his proselyte on to the view that all the elements
that made the Victorian Order hateful to him were personified in
the reigning House itself. The Hanoverian dynasty was a Protestant
dynasty--or, at least, it was required to pose as such in public. The
Act of Settlement was the work of the Low Church party, supported by
the Nonconformists; in other words, it was the Puritan settlement.
All English history, all English literature, all English society,
had rested hitherto on the basis that the Low Church party was in
the right, and that its standards ought to govern Great Britain, and
Ireland, and India, and ultimately the whole world.

Alistair himself had been brought up in an atmosphere where that
assumption was not supposed to be even subject to discussion. The whole
world, to his youthful mind, had been divided into two classes--those
who were Low Churchmen, and those who ought to be, and knew it. He,
Alistair, knew it, so did the others, from the General of the Jesuits
to the stone-breaker suspected of being a Plymouth Brother, and from
the condemned murderer to the author of the “Origin of Species.” The
Sultan of Turkey knew it in his heart, and so did every follower of
every other faith, except, possibly, the Grand Lama, protected by
geographical barriers from the enterprise of the Low Church Missionary
Society.

And now all these assumptions were breaking up and melting away so
rapidly that the mere statement of them sounded more like satire than
sober record. Histories of England were being written, and were being
used in the schools, which failed to teach that the Revolution of 1688
was the most glorious event in the annals of the human race. It was no
longer universally deemed an act of oppression on the part of James I.
to permit the peasantry to dance on Sunday. Even the Reformation had
ceased to be the subject of unmitigated eulogy. The rising generation
were being allowed to perceive that some bigotry goes to the making of
a martyr, as well as of a heretic-hunter. The failings of the leading
Reformers were no longer veiled, and the virtues of their opponents
were lovingly conceded.

Every revelation passes through three stages: first, it is a heresy;
next, a commonplace; and last, a superstition. The mind of man revolves
like his planet, and truths rise and set like the stars.

Protestantism had survived into the third stage. The great Protestant
Churches still flourished, but they no longer professed the Protestant
religion. The Church of England was suing for recognition by the
Church of Rome. The Dissenting Churches, founded by men who were more
willing to endure poverty and prison than to wear a surplice, or to
use a ring in the marriage ceremony, were adopting liturgies and
vestments. The evangelical organizations, the Missionary Societies,
the Bible Societies, the Tract Societies, were still in full activity,
but they had ceased to evangelize. Like the Churches, they lived on
their inheritance; they were kept going by the dead hand. Frock-coated
committees were called together by well-salaried secretaries to dispose
of funds too large for the shrunken field of endeavour; but, wiser
than the augurs of old Rome, the secretaries never smiled.

The machinery went on with well-oiled wheels, but the spirit was gone.
The foundation stone of the building had been almost accidentally
mined. The picks of excavators toiling at the dust-heaps beside the
Tigris and Euphrates that once were Nineveh and Babylon, had turned
up a handful of arrow-stamped bricks, and the Protestant Bible had
become a mere human document. The whole of English society was engaged
in a conspiracy to suppress the fact that the world was changing. The
schools and universities went on teaching that it never changed; the
pulpits proved that it could not; the newspapers were positive that
it had not; yet underneath all this loud shouting of the cohorts of
respectability could be heard a murmur like the whisper of Galileo
before the Inquisition--_But it does move_.

It was the close of the Victorian Age. It was an age which had recorded
its own praises on a myriad monuments, and chanted them in thunder
on the days of jubilee. It was an age which had gazed round upon its
mighty works, and boasted itself like Nebuchadnezzar. Nevertheless, in
this age, so glorious in its own conceit, so fruitful in many respects,
one rank weed had been suffered to grow up unchecked, till it poisoned
the breathing-room of the human spirit.

The name of this weed was Cant.

The Victorian world had been satirized unconsciously by the Victorian
poet. In his “Idylls of the King” Tennyson had depicted a man without
passions trying to impose his own cold virtues on men of warmer
temperament, and producing first hypocrisy and deceit, and in the end a
deeper corruption. The Victorian world had been like Arthur’s Court.

In this world Cant became a religion, and hypocrisy was enforced by
law. It was a world whose literature and art were adjusted to the
mental and moral level of the Sunday-school. It was a world in which
a terrible disease, bred of moral corruption, scourged the race, and
every effort to stay its ravages was fought against tooth and nail
by the mænads of social purity. It was a world in which selfishness
was inculcated in a million sermons, and slander and persecution were
reckoned as good works. It was a world in which blackmailing became
a recognized profession. It was a world in which men sent sailors to
be drowned in rotten ships, and built chapels with the proceeds. It
was a world which overthrew kings and set up millionaire monopolists;
which suppressed slavery and invented sweating; which substituted the
prostitute for the concubine; which imposed a curfew on beer at home
and sold opium abroad at the point of the bayonet. A great pirate
Empire ravaged the seas, with a crucifix at the masthead, and stole
pagan continents.

One night when Alistair Stuart went round to the house in Chestnut-Tree
Walk he found its master waiting for him in a state of excited
expectation.

“Have you heard the news?” Des Louvres asked in a whisper, as soon
as Stuart had sat down. “They are trying to keep it out of the papers
as long as possible, but it has reached me from a source that I can
absolutely depend upon. Queen Victoria is dying.”




CHAPTER XXII

HIGH TREASON


“I HAVE my information from a person in the confidence of one of the
Royal Family. The Queen cannot last more than three days.”

Stuart had received the news with a slight shock. For him, as for all
his generation, the venerable figure seated on the throne had almost
a legendary character. It seemed impossible to think of the British
Empire without Queen Victoria; the idea of a new head on the coins and
postage-stamps was strange and incredible.

But, apart from these reflections the Frenchman’s announcement did not
strike him as having any importance for himself, and he was unable to
understand the excitement with which Des Louvres took him by the arm
and drew him towards the door of the room.

“Most of the others are here,” Des Louvres said in a voice lowered to a
whisper. “I telegraphed to them as soon as I heard. They are in there,
waiting for you to take the chair.”

Then for the first time it struck Alistair that the approaching demise
of the Crown was an event likely to prove a crisis, and that Des
Louvres expected him to play a part in keeping with his ancestral
traditions and outlawed state.

Nothing loth, he passed into the room where the committee was
assembled, the strongest feeling in his mind one of amusement at
the thought of the terror likely to be excited in the bosom of the
Chevalier Vane and his brother at the prospect of a serious collision
with the authorities.

He found the Chevalier inside, looking pale and anxious, while
Wickham’s face bore the calmer expression of one whose mind was made
up. Mr. St. Maur was also present, looking little less comfortable than
the Chevalier, and the party was reinforced by the Hon. Gerald St. John
and Mr. Basil Dyke. The Decadents were complete, with the one exception
of Mendes, whose complaisance had never extended to the length of
enrolling himself among the comrades or followers of the Comte des
Louvres.

Stuart had scarcely seated himself when Egerton Vane rose precipitately
to his feet, to explain his position.

Des Louvres had cruelly refrained from assigning anything more definite
than “important business” as the object of the meeting; and when on
their arrival they learned the character of the crisis, the brothers
felt themselves entrapped. This was the moment of all others when they
would have wished the Guild to practise the modesty of self-effacement;
and if the Guild was going, on the contrary, to do anything rash, it
was the moment which they would have chosen silently to sever their
connection with the Guild. They knew better than the Frenchman the
sentiment entertained by her subjects towards the dying Queen, and
they had no desire to face the storm that would be provoked by any
demonstration of disrespect.

“Our secretary has called us together rather hastily,” the Chevalier
began in a plaintive tone. “No doubt the news he has received is very
important, if it is reliable.”

“It is absolutely reliable,” interrupted the Count.

The Chevalier drew a laboured sigh, as he resumed: “In that case,
whatever our political views may be, I am sure we shall all feel that
at such a moment we must share to a certain extent in the national
mourning for the loss of a venerated and respected--er--personage. I
am not sure that our secretary has acted altogether discreetly--though
of course he meant it for the best--in summoning a meeting of the
Guild at such a moment; but as we are here, I suggest that it
would be a graceful act on our part to pass a resolution recording
our--er--respect and--er--sympathy with the family of the--er--the
Queen!”

The speaker brought out the last word with a defiant jerk, and sat down
hastily, hoping to evade a rebuke at the hands of Des Louvres. But he
was agreeably surprised to see that astute schemer rise and second his
proposition. The French Count had the sense to interpret the situation
rightly, and to see that the fears of a man like Egerton Vane were a
useful index to the state of English opinion. Evidently it would be
wise to propitiate the public sentiment by such a resolution as Vane
had suggested.

The Chevalier had the gratification of seeing his proposition carried
unanimously. But this concession made to policy, Des Louvres lost no
time in coming to business.

“In three days from now the throne will be vacant, and the Guild will
have to show whether it is capable of taking action in accordance with
its principles. Since the successful rebellion of 1688 no usurping
Sovereign has ever been allowed to ascend the throne without a protest
being made on behalf of the legitimate heirs. On this occasion it is
clearly our duty to make that protest, and the only question is how we
should proceed.”

This bold challenge was received in chilling silence. Stuart glanced
round the room with a disdain he hardly tried to conceal, and saw one
after the other shrink back.

Without rising from his seat, St. John put a question to the secretary.

“Has the Princess been consulted?”

Des Louvres shook his head.

“Her Majesty’s position is a difficult one,” he explained. “As a German
Princess she is exposed to pressure from Berlin. We cannot expect her
to give us any open countenance. As long as she does not publicly
repudiate us, that is as much as we have any right to ask.”

After a silence full of eloquence, the waverers found a champion
in Mr. Basil Dyke. The novelist was on the eve of completing his
reconciliation with the _bourgeoisie_ by marriage with a lady whose
father’s liver pills enjoyed a celebrity such as literature cannot
attain, although it was part of the understanding that in the future
Mr. Dyke’s productions were to be recommended in the same organs of
publicity as his father-in-law’s. The reformed Decadent looked forward
to entering the House of Commons in the character of a supporter of
Church and Throne; and with such a prospect in view it was evidently
time for him to dissociate himself from the political profligacies of
his youth.

“I cannot agree with the Comte des Louvres that we have any right to
speak on behalf of the Princess, without her express authority,” he
said. “Neither do I see what we have to gain by coming forward at this
particular time. We have proclaimed our principles, the public is
aware of them, and any assertion of them at this moment would be taken
badly. It would be said that we were guilty of bad taste--that we were
advertising ourselves on the occasion of a funeral.”

Alistair smiled. It seemed to him very English, this unctuous horror
of advertisement on the part of a man who had won notoriety with a
treacherous libel and was about to confirm it by an alliance with liver
pills. Basil Dyke was clearly marked out for a knighthood under the
new reign. He was one of those whom England delights to honor.

There was no doubt that the novelist had on his side the majority
of those present. The disappointed Count vainly tried to strike a
responsive chord.

“What is the Guild for, if it is not to act at a crisis like this?” he
demanded.

The Hon. Gerald St. John gave him his answer:

“Our mission is to educate, not to indulge in vulgar demonstrations,
like Socialists and people of that kind. For my part I have never
pretended to take any interest in Mary III. My quarrel is with
respectability and I shall wait to see whether the new Court is
respectable before I condemn it.”

Des Louvres bit his lip. “You English are always respectable,” he
sneered.

“Not at all,” was the good-tempered answer. “Our middle class is always
respectable, I grant you; but our aristocracy is generally wicked. And
we have had lots of disreputable Kings. I have every hope that the
Victorian Age will be succeeded by a Restoration.”

“Charles II. was a Stuart,” protested the Legitimist agent.

“Well, if it comes to that, I don’t know that your German Princess is
any more of a Stuart than the people in possession. There seems to me
very little to choose between Bavaria and Saxe-Coburg. George IV. was a
man with many fine qualities.”

Des Louvres began to lose his temper.

“Of course, if anybody is afraid of the consequences I don’t expect
them to come forward,” he said sneeringly.

The insult that cannot be pardoned is the one that we feel to be
deserved. Egerton Vane, St. Maur, and the bridegroom-elect rose to
their feet together.

“After that I shall go home. Come, Wickham,” cried the Chevalier. Mr.
St. Maur was understood to mutter that if anything did happen the
Comte des Louvres would probably be the first out of the country. Dyke
inquired whether a foreigner was qualified to dictate to Englishmen
their line of conduct at a national crisis.

The hubbub was subdued by the chairman’s voice. Alistair had been
bored by the debate, much as a boy fresh from his first term at school
is bored by the forgotten interests of the nursery. He felt that he
had outgrown all this kind of thing; it was wide of the mark; it led
nowhere, and promised nothing. But he was in just that mood when action
of any kind offered a temptation which it was impossible to resist, and
he felt a keen pleasure in asserting himself for the last time among
those who had been his followers for so long.

“Before Des Louvres talks about being afraid, suppose he tells us what
he wants us to do?”

The mutterings of strife died down, and all eyes were turned on the
Count. His response was ready instantly.

“I consider the Guild ought to issue a formal Assertion of the right of
Queen Mary III. to the throne.”

“Have you got the Assertion there?”

Des Louvres produced it, and read it aloud. It was received in dead
silence.

“Well,” said Alistair, “what next? What do you want to do with that
thing?”

“It ought to be posted up all over London, the moment the death of the
Queen is announced.”

“Who is to post it up?”

This time Des Louvres had no answer ready. He glanced doubtfully round
the uneasy faces of his colleagues, and drew his own conclusions. Dyke
could not resist a sneer.

“Surely that is the secretary’s duty.”

The Frenchman was stung into accepting the challenge.

“I will post up one if everyone else will do the same,” he said.

The chairman looked slowly round him.

“I agree to put up one,” he said deliberately.

There was another silence, during which the two Vanes consulted each
other’s countenances. The same thought had occurred to each. What was
to prevent them from taking a copy of the treasonable document and
discreetly disposing of it in private?

The Hon. Gerald St. John shrugged his shoulders. “If Stuart is going to
post one up, I shall do the same, though I don’t agree with it.”

The Chevalier Vane rose to his feet with considerable emotion.

“Give me a copy, and I will do my duty,” he said sublimely. “I answer
for my brother as well.”

Mr. St. Maur had meanwhile been deciding on his private course of
action. Convinced that the present proceedings must be taken seriously
by the authorities, he had resolved to earn his own pardon by a
whole-souled repentance. He lowered his eyes to the ground, as he said:

“For my part I am compelled to dissociate myself from this manifesto at
such a time. I desire that my protest may be recorded in the minutes of
the Guild.”

The Chevalier and his brother exchanged alarmed glances. The idea that
their courageous undertaking might be recorded in writing had not
occurred to them.

“Surely there will be no record taken of to-night’s meeting!” Egerton
exclaimed. “These proceedings are confidential!”

Des Louvres hastened to reassure him. He had conceived a suspicion from
St. Maur’s manner, and determined to balk him.

“I am in the hands of the committee,” he said. “But in my opinion it
will be best to make no entry beyond the names of those present, and to
state that the proceedings were of a private character.”

Basil Dyke sprang to his feet.

“In that case I shall withdraw at once!” he declared. “I consider you
had no right to bring us here without warning us of what you were going
to propose. This is high treason. I shall resign my membership of the
Guild.”

“I move that Mr. Dyke’s resignation be accepted,” said Alistair
swiftly, going through the necessary formalities, as the irate novelist
made his way to the door.

Wickham Vane cast a reproachful glance at his brother.

“If there is going to be any record of to-night’s meeting, I shall go
as well,” he announced.

Des Louvres saw that he must give way.

“Have it as you please,” he remarked. “As I said, I am in your hands.”
Then, with a warning glance in St. Maur’s direction, he added: “That
concludes the business of the meeting. Those who have undertaken to
post up copies of the Assertion had better remain behind to consult as
to the most appropriate places.”

The informer was obliged to take the hint.

“Very well, gentlemen,” he said, as he rose to go. “Remember that if
this lands you in trouble, I have done my best to save you.”

“That fellow means to betray us,” said Des Louvres, as the door closed
behind the Irishman. “He will turn King’s evidence if the police get on
our track.”

Egerton Vane turned white. But stealing a look at his brother, he was
reassured by the placid expression that stole over Wickham’s face.

In the discussion that followed it was settled that Stuart should put
up the manifesto at the most important spot--the gallery of St. James’s
Palace, from which the new Sovereign is wont to be proclaimed. The
others selected other points about the Metropolis, and Des Louvres
undertook to post copies to members of the Guild in the provinces, with
instructions to affix them to the church doors. The secretary possessed
a typing machine, and each of the volunteers was in possession of his
copy as he came away.

Alistair strolled home slowly, to find his wife in a state of some
excitement.

“Do you know what is happening?” she asked eagerly, as he came in. “The
Queen is dying.”

Alistair stared at her.

“What, is it in the papers already?” he exclaimed.

It was Molly’s turn to stare.

“Then you knew it? Who told you? Oh, of course, that man Des Louvres.”

“Who told you?” demanded Alistair. He noticed that Molly was rouged to
the eyebrows, and that she had been drinking.

“Mr. Mendes told me,” she said in a hard, defiant voice. “He called
here just after you had gone. He wants us to go and dine with him.”

“You can go if you like,” Alistair said listlessly.

The dinner with Mendes took place three nights afterwards. It was
given in London’s most expensive restaurant, and Lord and Lady Alistair
were the only guests. Mendes was as cool and composed as ever, chatting
with his guests as if no interruption had ever occurred in their
intercourse. Molly was voluble and restless, emptying her glass as
often as the waiter filled it with champagne. Alistair ate and drank
little, and hardly spoke except when his host addressed to him a direct
question. He felt strangely out of place, as he sat there, looking
abstractedly from one to the other of his companions, and wondering
what he was doing there between them, and how it was all going to end.

Suddenly, just as the sweets were being brought round, there was a stir
outside, and a man came in hurriedly with a sheaf of papers under his
arm. He went through the long, brilliantly lit saloon, leaving a paper
on each little table, and as he approached Mendes he said in his ear in
a subdued voice:

“The Queen is dead, sir.”

Alistair slowly filled his own glass with wine, lifted it up, and
emptied it.

“It is the end of an age,” he said, as he set it down again, and rose
deliberately to his feet.

Mendes glanced at him curiously.

“Yes, it is the end of some things,” he answered composedly. “Are you
off?”

“I have an engagement,” said Alistair dryly.

The two men shook hands quietly, but not without cordiality. Each of
them had found something in the other to respect.

Alistair was leaving without bestowing more than a nod on Molly, when
she surprised him by getting up.

“You don’t want me?” she said, with the husky accent which came into
her voice when she had been drinking a good deal.

“No,” said Alistair, puzzled.

“Then good-bye.”

She held out a beringed hand, and Alistair took it nervously, inly
afraid of a scene. Then he went without looking back.

It was midnight before he let himself into the little art kitchen in
Beers Cooperage, and saw by the light of the match which he had struck
to show him the way upstairs a white envelope lying on the floor. The
flap bore the printed name of the hotel in which he had dined that
night, and he tore it open, with a sensation of knowing all about it,
and having expected it all along.

  “DEAR ALISTAIR” (said the shaky, badly-formed writing within), “It is
  no good. You don’t want me, and it will never be any better. I have
  gone abroad with Mr. Mendes, and you can get a divorce as soon as you
  like.

                                                        “MOLLY FINUCANE.

  “P.S.--You are a fool if you don’t marry Hero Vanbrugh.”




CHAPTER XXIII

A PERSONAL EXPLANATION


THE great Puritan Queen lay dead--dead, after sixty-three years of
unexampled prosperity and glory. For her, and in her name, heroes
had conquered and statesmen had annexed; laureates had hymned her in
exquisite verse; discoverers had written her name on the map of new
continents and carried it to the mysterious sources of old Nile. On her
the farthest East had showered barbaric pearl and gold, and new realms
had come forth out of the desert to hail her Queen.

The last Protestant Queen lay dead. And before the warmth of life
had ebbed away two hands were lifted to rend the veil of the world’s
reverence. One of these hands affixed a paper to her Palace walls,
proclaiming that she had been a usurper; the other boasted in the
public press that she had been interred with a Catholic emblem upon her
breast.

Both hands were guided, consciously or unconsciously, by the same
motive power. Both actions were symbolical. The mysterious process of
the rise and fall of nations is worked out by and through the change of
minds. The Victorian Age had passed away before Victoria herself. And
her end had been hastened and embittered by the opening revelations of
the anti-Puritan war.

The last man in England who was likely to read aright the signs of the
times, and perceive the true trend of contemporary history was the
man who, naturally enough, found himself occupying the post of Home
Secretary.

The Duke of Trent had been passing the last two days at Osborne, in
obedience to the archaic custom which required him to witness the
Sovereign’s demise. Not less archaic in essence seemed to his eye the
seditious manifesto which was brought to him by an agent of Scotland
Yard, torn down from St. James’s Palace within half an hour of its
being put up. Viewing it, as his character and intellectual limitations
compelled him to view it, as an offensive practical joke, nevertheless
he hastened back to town in a state of uneasiness bordering on alarm.
He did not, of course, apprehend anything in the nature of violence,
but he thought it quite possible that the authors of the Assertion
might be preparing to interrupt the formal proclamation of the new
Sovereign; and he had ordered the ceremony to be deferred till the
police had had time to act.

Privately he had another and still more serious cause of anxiety.
He had not forgotten the Legitimist bazaar, and he feared that the
investigations which had been immediately set on foot might show the
name of his brother as figuring among the authors of the disgraceful
jest.

The task of the police did not prove a difficult one. Late in the
afternoon of the day after the outrage the Chief Commissioner himself
waited upon the Secretary of State at the Home Office to make his
confidential report.

The Duke received him alone, with an air of embarrassment which the
Commissioner found it easy to understand.

“I thought it best to come to your Grace myself, as the matter is one
that seems to call for careful handling.”

“What have you found out?”

“The manifesto--they call it the Assertion--comes from the committee
of a body styling itself the Legitimist Guild. The real instigator,
I suspect, is a Frenchman, the Comte des Louvres, who is a sort of
international agent. He is in the pay of the Duke of ----, the King of
the ----, and even, I believe, of the Vatican.”

The Home Secretary frowned.

“What was his motive?”

“Simply to show that he was earning his money, I expect. There may
be some idea that if they can give trouble to our Royal Family, the
influence of the English Court will be exerted on behalf of the
Royalist cause in France--or the Pope’s temporal power.”

“Well, what have you done?”

“We had very little to do. As soon as the manifesto was found I guessed
whom it came from, and sent a couple of detectives round to the Count’s
house, where they seized the papers of the Guild. That seems to have
frightened them, and within an hour or two more than half of the
committee were round with us volunteering information, and anxious to
be accepted as King’s evidence in case of a prosecution.”

The Duke raised his eyes to the Commissioner’s face.

“The King does not want a prosecution. He prefers that the whole thing
should be hushed up. All we have to do is to give these fools a good
fright, so that they will think twice before repeating their exploit.
What are their names?”

“The first men who came to us were two brothers named Vane, who had
undertaken to post up copies of the Assertion themselves, but thought
better of it--they brought the copies with them to prove their
innocence. Afterwards there was an Irishman who calls himself St. Maur,
but whose real name is Maher, and Basil Dyke, the novelist. Dyke seems
to have protested the whole thing from the first, and resigned from the
Guild in consequence. I don’t think any of the four are likely to give
any more trouble.”

“Who else is there?”

The Commissioner of Police discreetly turned his head.

“The only others are the Comte des Louvres, the Hon. Gerald St. John,
and--Lord Alistair Stuart.”

Lord Alistair’s brother clenched the hand that rested on the desk in
front of him.

“Yes; that is what I expected.” He paused for a moment or two, frowning
and fidgeting in his chair. “Who put up this wretched thing?”

“According to the Vanes, Lord Alistair must have posted the one on the
Palace. The other two were each to put up one somewhere else, but I
believe Mr. St. John was the only one who actually did.”

“In other words, my brother is the ringleader--is that so?”

“I think his lordship is the only one of the whole crew who has any
pluck,” was the response. “He was in the chair when the thing was
decided on.”

The Duke of Trent drew his lips together.

“Do you know where to find him?”

“I have men watching them all. Lord Alistair has stayed indoors all
day.” The Chief Commissioner hesitated, and then went on. “Your Grace
will excuse me if I refer to a private matter which perhaps you would
wish to hear at once. Lady Alistair has deserted his lordship--eloped,
in fact, with Mr. Mendes, the millionaire.”

The Duke looked up, startled.

“When did that happen?”

“Yesterday, I understand. She did not come home last night. His
lordship has been alone all day.”

James Stuart fell into a brown study. The news he had just heard was
both good and bad. It was a relief to know that he would not remain
much longer the brother-in-law of Molly Finucane; but on the other
hand he saw his brother resuming the position of a rival for the hand
of Hero Vanbrugh. With the cold obstinacy of his nature, James still
clung persistently to the belief that sooner or later he would obtain
the woman on whom he had set his heart--or what he deemed to be his
heart. But now the obstacle that had stood between Hero and his brother
had been removed, and unless he could replace it by another, even his
dull mind could perceive how things were likely to go.

He fixed his eyes once more upon his official subordinate.

“What you have told me, Commissioner, alters my position. If my brother
is the person principally guilty, I cannot honourably be responsible
for advising His Majesty to let the affair be hushed up.”

The Commissioner bowed low, deeply impressed by the scrupulous delicacy
of his superior.

“What are your Grace’s instructions?”

“The law must take its course--for the present, at all events. Of
course, I shall communicate again with His Majesty, and with the Prime
Minister.”

“In that case I shall have to arrest his lordship as well as the
others.”

“It will be sufficient if you arrest Lord Alistair. You can give the
others a chance to escape abroad.”

The Chief Commissioner stood for a moment, playing awkwardly with his
hat.

“In cases of high treason,” he observed, in a low voice, “it is
customary for the warrant to be signed by the Home Secretary.”

The Home Secretary drew himself up.

“Have you a warrant with you?”

The necessary form was procured from the criminal branch of the
Department, and James wrote his own name beneath that of his only
brother, with a firm, unfaltering hand.

The next hour was taken up by the Commissioner of Police in personally
effecting the arrest of his distinguished prisoner, and by the
Secretary of State in communicating with the head of the Government.
The Duke went through the form of tendering his resignation, which was
courteously declined.

“I do not believe for a moment that His Majesty will reconsider
his decision, nor should I advise it,” the old Prime Minister said
sensibly. “You had better cancel the warrant at once. Give your brother
a good fright and send him out of the country. Let us hope that this
experience may sober him.”

When James got back to the Home Office he found a note on his desk from
the Chief Commissioner.

“I have his lordship in the next room, but he is hardly in a fit
condition to be questioned. Perhaps your Grace had better see him
to-morrow.”

The Duke rang his bell, and ordered his brother to be brought before
him alone.

Alistair came in, still wearing the evening dress in which he had dined
with Mendes overnight, with his hair unbrushed and his eyes from an
unreposeful sleep.

His brother glanced at him with carefully concealed anxiety; for though
he was scarcely aware of it himself, he was always a little afraid of
Alistair. It was a relief to see that his brother was not apparently
intoxicated: the reckless mood which James dreaded most had given place
to one of depression. At such a moment Alistair might be spoken to
seriously; he might even be reproved without the risk of unpleasant
retorts.

The prisoner, without going through any form of greeting to his
brother, dropped into one of the great spreading leather-covered chairs
which stood round the wall and waited for Trent to speak.

“Is it any use asking you why you have done this?” Trent said, after
regarding him in silence for some time.

Alistair turned on him a lack-lustre eye.

“If you are asking me as Secretary of State, perhaps not.”

The Home Secretary fidgeted with the papers on the writing-table in
front of him. It was a favourite trick of his when he was embarrassed.
Indeed, he generally kept a pile of papers in front of him on purpose.
A little consideration told him that it was not worth while to try to
bluff Alistair.

“Well, no, I’m not.”

“You have arrested me, haven’t you?” The prisoner made his point
quietly, as though moved by a quite impersonal curiosity.

“Yes.” The Duke hesitated again, and again decided that the bluffing
policy would be too risky. “Since I signed the warrant, I’ve seen the
Prime Minister. I tendered him my resignation, of course.”

Alistair began to look ever so little interested.

“I never thought you would do that,” he confessed.

“I don’t suppose you thought anything about it, one way or the other,”
Trent retorted, with some bitterness. “You never do think of me--or
your mother--do you?”

The prisoner straightened himself up for an instant.

“Oh, yes. It is difficult not to think of one’s enemies sometimes.”

Honest astonishment came into Trent’s look and mien.

“Enemies! Your mother and I! What do you mean? If I were to call you my
enemy, I should have some reason. The worst enmity I have ever shown
you has been to give you a thousand a year, and to offer to pay your
debts.”

“Yes, on conditions,” Alistair reminded him. But he did not speak with
any appearance of resentment. The elder brother’s warmth had failed to
rouse any answering warmth in the younger.

“On conditions which, as you must now admit, were for your own good.
At least, I suppose that you are not prepared to defend that wretched
woman any longer.”

“Silence!” Alistair had nearly sprung out of his chair. “Say whatever
you like about me, I shan’t resent it; but leave Molly alone, please.”

Trent looked as bewildered as he felt.

“You know, don’t you?” he began.

Alistair cut him short.

“I know she has just done the greatest thing that any woman can do
for a man. She loved me, she was married to me, she saw that I loved
another woman, and she has deliberately set me free to marry her. By
heavens! I should like to know how many of your Christian women would
do as much as that!”

Trent was staggered. Like the Duchess, he had overlooked the fact that
Molly Finucane was really an ally. Perhaps, if they had been wiser,
Lady Alistair might have been made to take a different view of the
situation in the past. But now it was too late.

He dared not risk a direct question about Hero.

“Well, you can’t marry anyone else yet,” he said, not very delicately.
“The question is, what are you going to do?”

“Isn’t it what are you going to do? I am still under arrest, I believe.”

Trent fell back on his papers again.

“I told you I had seen the Prime Minister. He is willing to let the
matter be hushed up, out of consideration for me.”

After all, he had ventured on a bluff; and, after all, it did not come
off. Alistair merely smiled.

“I am not a fool, Trent, you know. I have never seriously supposed
that I ran any danger of being hanged, drawn and quartered. So the
resignation has been withdrawn?”

“It was declined,” the Minister corrected. “But if the papers get hold
of the business, I shall have to go--for a time, at all events.”

Alistair seemed genuinely concerned.

“Really? I should be sorry if it was so bad as that.”

Trent gazed at him sullenly.

“Can’t you see that everything you do is bad for me? Somehow or
other you seem bent on wrecking my career as well as your own. First
bankruptcy, then that marriage; now, I suppose, divorce--and this
disgraceful outrage on the top of everything else.”

Alistair was surprisingly meek.

“Yes, I dare say you feel it is rather rough on you; but, after all, no
one can blame you for my misdeeds.”

“But they do--they must. You don’t suppose I could remain Home
Secretary with my own brother doing time in one of the prisons under my
control. You just called me your enemy; I should like to know what you
are to me.”

“I could tell you that, if I thought you would understand,” the other
said in low tones.

“What have I done, what has our mother done, that you should make no
effort to spare us all this disgrace?” Trent demanded warmly.

“Ah! what have you done? Have you ever considered me?” returned
Alistair.

“Considered you? We have done nothing else. We have always been trying
to save you, but you have never let us.”

“Save me!--yes, I suppose that is how you would put it to yourself. You
have been trying to save me from disgracing you, as you call it. Has it
ever occurred to either of you that the whole of our joint lives has
been one long persecution of me by you, Trent?”

“Persecution! What do you mean?”

“I am going to tell you what I mean. I dare say I shall never have
another opportunity. We are not likely to see much more of one another.
I am going abroad.”

The unexpected announcement on his brother’s part that he was preparing
to take the very step that Trent almost despaired of making him take
was so welcome that the Duke found himself listening patiently to what
followed.

“Have you ever asked yourself why I am different from you--why I lead a
different life from the one you lived? To begin with, you are the Duke
of Trent and Colonsay; I am a younger son. Do you blame me for that? Do
you blame me for not being a Duke, like you?”

“Of course not. It is nonsense to suggest it.”

“I do not think it is nonsense. On the contrary, I think a great many
people in your position blame people in mine. Not in so many words,
perhaps, but in their whole attitude towards them. You blame a man for
not being a gentleman when you call him a cad. But if he was born a
cad, what fault is it of his? Every time we who are well born boast of
our good blood, surely we are blaming the people who had the bad luck
to be born without pedigrees. And yet we cannot all belong to the Royal
Family.”

“I am not aware that I ever put on side on account of my family,”
protested Trent.

“No. But you would be very much surprised and offended if a tradesman
offered to shake hands with you over the counter. Let us pass on. You
have nearly forty thousand a year; I am a pauper. You must admit that
you have blamed me for that.”

“I? Never! I have blamed you for spending more than your allowance,
that is all.”

Alistair shook his head.

“You don’t see it, of course. But the whole life of a man like you
is a reproach to one like me. You blame me for buying things that
you would not blame a rich man for buying. It is a crime on my part
to drive a motor; it is no crime on yours. And you go much farther
than that, because you tell me, in effect, that I ought to be rich.
In England every rich man is telling that to every poor man all day
long. It is the cry of the press and the pulpit, of the home and of the
Sunday-school. Every millionaire is angry with the man who is not a
millionaire. Why? They tell us that we could become millionaires like
them if we chose; and it is a lie. We cannot all be millionaires.
There are not enough millions to go round. The millionaire himself has
gained his money at someone else’s expense. You have gained your money
at my expense. Instead of the inheritance being divided, you have it
all. If I am not angry with you on that account, why should you be
angry with me?”

“I am not angry,” Trent protested again. But he began to feel a little
shaken.

“If we all became millionaires,” Alistair continued calmly, “you who
are millionaires already would be the first to suffer. You would have
no servants to wait on you, no labourers to toil for you, no clerks to
make and keep your millions for you. Surely it is to your interest that
a large part of mankind should remain poor. Then why be angry with them
on account of their poverty? Why despise them for serving you? If you
like robbing, why abuse those who let themselves be robbed?”

“Does this mean that you are going to turn Socialist?” asked the
puzzled Duke.

Alistair smiled.

“Can’t you see that it means the very opposite? It is you who are
the Socialist--yes, you--because it is you who will not tolerate the
individual. You have never tolerated me. You have always been trying,
as you put it, to reform me. And what do you mean by reforming me? You
mean crushing me out of my natural shape and into your natural shape.
You believe that all men ought to resemble each other like buttons on
a coat--and you are the pattern button.”

Trent made no answer. In his heart he felt that he was the pattern
button, and that Alistair ought to try to resemble him. But he feared
his brother’s sarcastic tongue too much to say so.

“Why?” Alistair continued. “I am sure it has never occurred to you that
I ought to dye my hair the same shade as yours, though men stooped even
to that depth in the days of Louis Quatorze. You have just admitted
that I am not really to blame for having been born after you, or
because you have my share of the property. Then why blame me because my
tastes are different from yours--because I prefer poetry to politics,
and Bohemia to Philistia?”

“It is not a matter of taste only. The common rules of morality are the
same for all.”

“And why should they be the same? Who made the rules? You”--he pointed
an accusing finger--“you, and men like you. When you say morality, you
mean monogamy. Who set up monogamy as the idol that all the human race
ought to fall down and worship? It was not religion--there is not a
word in favour of monogamy in the Bible. It is an Anglo-Saxon fad.”

“Of course, if you repudiate the laws of morality, I cannot argue with
you.”

“I am not arguing. I am trying to make you understand. I want to see
if it isn’t possible to stop all this cruelty--this frantic Puritan
craze for killing everybody who isn’t a Wesleyan. I don’t want to kill
you. I don’t mind your being respectable; why should you mind my being
disreputable? What business is it of yours?”

“You forget that you are my brother, and that I suffer for your
conduct.”

Alistair shook his head.

“That isn’t true, Trent, and you know it isn’t true. Here you are,
Secretary of State, with the Garter in prospect, and a very fair chance
of the Premiership, if no man with brains comes along. If I ever were
to reform, as you are always urging me to do, and go into politics, you
would find me a rather dangerous rival, you know.” Trent thought of
Hero, and winced. There was something in what his brother was saying.
Alistair, in the House of Commons, with his fascinating manner and
sparkling wit, would be a rather dangerous rival. And he had never seen
it, never realized that their mother’s anxiety to make Alistair enter
the House might be another of those projects to save the younger son at
the expense of the elder. While these reflections were passing through
his slow mind, Alistair was still speaking.

“No, Trent, it is the other way about. I don’t suppose that you will
ever see it, but I see it now. Instead of your suffering for me, it is
I who suffer for you. You owe everything you are, and have, and may be,
to me.”

“How on earth can you say that?”

“Because I am the younger son--the younger son in more senses than
one. The law gives you the dukedom and the estates, and gives me
nothing, is a law which makes me suffer for your benefit. And it is
the same with all the other laws under which we live. They are all
laws made in your favour at my expense. The whole social system has
been created to favour you and oppress me. The laws of morality, as
you call them, they are all made by men like you, and against men like
me. You have regulated the world to suit yourself, and the man whom
your regulations do not suit is sacrificed to secure your happiness.
Yes, it is just like the old days when they buried a victim under
the foundation stone, to make the building safe. You and your world,
society, civilization, the British Empire--call it what you like--you
are the builders, and it is the building; and all we whom you hang and
exile and imprison--Jacobites in one century and anarchists in another,
Byron and Shelley above, and the pickpocket and drunkard below--all we
are the foundation victims, whom you sacrifice in order to secure your
State.”

Trent felt out of his depth. In his confusion of mind he said the most
unwise thing he could have said.

“You speak as though there were no such thing as religion. What you are
really attacking is Christianity. You are not a Christian.”

Then Alistair looked at him gravely and steadily, and the thought that
had been growing and taking shape in his mind ever since the night he
had stood on Westminster Bridge came out firm and distinct at last.

“I am a christ!”

“Alistair!” Genuine consternation showed in the listener’s face and
voice. He actually feared that his brother was out of his mind.

“I am your christ. Listen! It is not only the dukedom and the
estates that have come to us from our ancestors. We have inherited
other things--blood, instincts, passions, everything that makes the
difference between one man and another. And that inheritance has been
unfairly divided, too. Our forefathers were half Saxon and half Celtic.
You have inherited the Saxon strain, and I the Celtic; and we live in
a society in which it is well to be a Saxon, and ill to be a Celt. Our
father was a drunkard and our mother a Puritan. You take after her
and I after him, and we live in a world in which it is well with the
Puritan and ill with the drunkard. Some of our forefathers were steady,
plodding money-gatherers, others were wild, reckless adventurers.
Again you have inherited the good strain, and I the bad. You have had
everything, Trent. Everything which the world requires a man to be or
to do, you are, or it is your nature to do. All that the world forbids
a man to be and do, I am, or it is my nature to do. It is as though
a breeder had deliberately bred you with all the good points and me
with all the bad. You know what Sir Bernard Vanbrugh thinks about
these things. What did he tell you?--that you had inherited an evil
strain? The man was blind. I have inherited the evil strain, and by so
doing I have saved you from it; I have carried it off from you, like a
drainpipe. That is how it is. I am your saviour. Vanbrugh doesn’t see
it, but Darwinism and Christianity are saying the same thing. Evolution
is the sacrifice of the unfit on behalf of the fit. The scapegoat
bears away the sins of the righteous. They were quite right to put up
a crucifix in the old Courts of Justice, but it ought to have been
over the dock, and not over the Judge’s head, because the criminal
is the christ; he is the redeemer in whom the old vices and savage
instincts in the blood of mankind are drained off and got rid of, for
the salvation of the world. You may substitute the lethal chamber for
the cross, but you will be still doing what those old Jews were doing,
putting one man to death for the good of the people. Surely that is how
it stands between you and me, Jim. Surely I have borne your sicknesses,
and carried your pains, whereas you did esteem me stricken, smitten of
God, and afflicted. But I was pierced for your transgressions, I was
bruised for your iniquities: the chastisement on behalf of your peace
was upon me; and with my stripes you are healed.”




AFTERWARDS


                                              “ISLE DE ST. PIERRE,
                                                      “LAC DE BIENNE,
                                                           “SWITZERLAND.

“MY DEAR ONE:

“I am writing to you from an island in the least known of the Swiss
lakes, lying beneath the Jura. The island is the size of a small farm.
It is crossed by a thickly-wooded ridge, and there are reed-grown
marshes on one side, and on the other meadows and gardens and a homely
inn. The inn has grown out of an older cottage or farmhouse, and
certain rooms in the more ancient part of the building have become a
place of local pilgrimage. On Sundays and holidays the workmen of the
small neighbouring towns come here to drink and dance. But the foreign
tourist is more rarely seen here, and the English tourist would most
likely shun the spot if he had heard of it. For these rude quarters
were the refuge, more than a hundred years ago, of a man who, more or
less against his will, lit the great bonfire of the feudal system.

“It was during one of those breaks in his life when, like Jonah of old,
he seemed to be trying to flee from his allotted task, that Rousseau
came and hid himself for this little isle. But the feudal society
craved for destruction, and, like all societies in that condition, it
first bred its destroyer and then steadily goaded him to the work. The
young Marat, from his home a few miles away, must have looked on while
the prophet of the Revolution was being hunted out of this retreat by
the Prussian police, and, as it were, ordered to resume his terrible
apostolate.

“If imagination were possible for public bodies, if gratitude were
conceivable on the part of the Socialist democracy, this isle would not
be turned into a restaurant for bank-holiday workmen. It would be made
a fit memorial of Rousseau by being set apart for the benefit of his
heirs. Every man of genius, driven like him into exile by poverty and
love of freedom, would find here a retreat in which he could rest from
the storms of the world. Or if stupidity were not the curse of gold,
the millionaires themselves would raise a voluntary tax to build an
alms-house for Rousseau and Marat, instead of flogging them on to the
work of anarchy with the sharp goads of hunger and contempt.

“I find that my brother’s unexpected death has made no difference
in my feelings towards England, although I find it has made a great
difference in the feeling of England towards me. My godfather, the
Archbishop, has written to me in the most cordial spirit about my
Church patronage, thanking me in advance for my gracious patronage of
Christianity. He hints that I may play an important part in bringing
the Roman and Anglican communions closer together as the sole means of
preserving society. But I do not want to preserve society. The Prime
Minister’s letter of condolence also contains a hint that in a year or
two, if I behave, I may succeed to the Home Secretaryship--I think he
means all the Cabinet offices to become hereditary in course of time.
But I am not going to behave. England expects every man to be a humbug,
but she will be disappointed as far as I am concerned.

“I recollect your father saying to me once that in many persons
the infliction of pain on others--in extreme cases, even on
themselves--gives rise to sensations of enjoyment which are actually
akin to, and have their seat in the same region as, the sensations of
physical lust. Thus the nuns who ill-use children in their orphanages,
and the Puritans who gloat over the sufferings of profligate men and
women, are really indulging in an unnatural form of profligacy. It
is difficult to account on any other principle for what Anglo-Saxon
races call their civilizing mission. It clearly has nothing to do with
Christianity, because the only sins seriously denounced in the Gospel
are love of money and hypocrisy, and those are the supreme Anglo-Saxon
virtues. When we find a nation of swindlers bent on putting down
polygamy in Utah, and a nation of pirates objecting to child-marriages
in Hindustan, we are clearly face to face with some form of insanity.
And it is becoming more difficult every day to escape out of the power
of the maniacs.

“Rousseau rendered greater services to the democracy of Europe and
America than any one man who has ever lived. He is the author of the
Declaration of Independence, and the author of universal suffrage. And
yet if any follower of Rousseau attempted to set up a community to lead
the life which Rousseau lived and advocated, anywhere within reach of
that democracy, it would be put down by force. This isle is now the
property of a hospital--of course, a hospital for the benefit of the
democracy. I have written proposing to acquire the island and build on
it a hospital for men of letters, and even that is more than democracy
can tolerate; my letter has not been acknowledged. Switzerland is
covered with sanatoriums for every kind of disease, but there is no
sanatorium for genius. The Swiss are making millions a year out of
Byron’s praises of their scenery; they grudge the smallest corner of
their soil to be a home for other Byrons.

“As far as I can see, there are only three or four countries which have
still been spared a measure of freedom, and they will not retain it
very long. The Puritans have been howling for the blood of the Turks
for generations, and I doubt if their mutual jealousy will hold them
back much longer from civilizing the whole of Islam. China has been
spared for the moment, but it cannot be saved except on condition that
it follows the Japanese example and becomes as greedy and bloodthirsty
as the Christian Powers.

“However, I shall now visit the countries that have not been annexed up
to the present, and try to find some spot where it may be possible to
set up a city of refuge. I will found a spiritual order like the old
Knights of the Temple. Who knows that we may not be able to preserve
one spot of the planet alike from the millionaire and the Socialist,
the slave-driver and the slave?

“In my monastery, dear Hero, there will be neither marrying nor giving
in marriage, and none need declare himself man or woman unless he
pleases. In all matters we shall strive to obtain freedom without
disorder, and happiness without selfishness. We shall have many guests
who will be refreshed and comforted, and sent upon their way, but only
after long trial and approval will any be admitted to our Order. We
shall have servants, whom we shall treat as brethren without calling
them lay-brothers, and they will do their work, as we shall do ours.

“Such are the thoughts and plans I wished to lay before you, but I dare
not wish that you should make them yours. Doubtless you will consider
them with kindness and with wisdom, and will tell me your decision.

“I shall wait here another week for your answer before setting out for
the East.”




THE NEW WORD

by ALLEN UPWARD

_$1.50 net_


“In this book a man, who in the broader sense of both words is at once
a scientist and a seer, has undertaken an inquiry into the sources of
knowledge and the foundations of faith, a review of the jurisdiction
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iconoclast of intellectual idols has shown himself so conservative and
yet so able an architect of intellectual optimism. Mr. Upward’s inquiry
is developed as an interpretation of a cryptic phrase in the will of
Alfred Nobel, ‘a work of an idealistic tendency.’ Its professed object
is ‘to forge upon the anvil of sense a definition of hope that will
ring true in the ear of the materialist as well as of the idealist.’
And its prosecution is Socratic in its argumentative shrewdness,
its unity of purpose, its unswerving directness and its triumphant
simplicity.”

                                           --_Mr. J. B. Kerfoot in LIFE_

  _At all booksellers or sent postpaid by the publisher on receipt of
  price._

MITCHELL KENNERLEY. Publisher, New York




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 66617 ***