That night, when the last echoes of the village street had died away, and the purple and grey of the summer twilight was dissolving into the deep blue and gold of night, Sprats knelt at the open window of her bedroom, staring out upon the valley with eyes that saw nothing. She was thinking and wondering, and for the first time in her life she wished that a mother’s heart and a mother’s arms were at hand—she wanted to hear the beating love of the one and feel the protecting strength of the other.
Something had come to her that afternoon as she strove to comfort Lucian. The episode of the duel; Lucian’s white face and burning eyes as he bowed to the cynical, polite old nobleman and strode out of the hall with the dignity and grace of a great prince; the agony which had exhausted itself in her own arms; the resolution with which he had at last choked everything down, and had risen up and shaken himself as if he were a dog that throws off the last drop of water;—all these things had opened the door into a new world for the girl who had seen them. She had been Lucian’s other self; his constant companion, his faithful mentor, for three years; it was not until now that she began to realise him. She saw now that he was no ordinary human being, and that as long as he lived he would never be amenable to ordinary rules. He was now a child in years, and he had the heart of a man; soon he would be a man, and he would still be a child. He would be a child all his life—self-willed, obstinate, proud, generous, wayward; he would sin as a child sins, and suffer as a child suffers; and there would always be something of wonder in him that either sin or suffering should come to him. When she felt his head within her protecting and consoling arm, Sprats recognised the weakness and helplessness which lay in Lucian’s soul—he was the child that has fallen and runs to its mother for consolation. She recognised, too, that hers was the stronger nature, the more robust character, and that the strange, mysterious Something that ordains all things, had brought her life and Lucian’s together so that she might give help where help was needed. All their lives—all through the strange mystic To Come into which her eyes were trying to look as she stared out into the splendour of the summer night—she and Lucian were to be as they had been that evening; her breast the harbour of his soul. He might drift away; he might suffer shipwreck; but he must come home at last, and whether he came early or late his place must be ready for him.
This was knowledge—this was calm certainty: it changed the child into the woman. She knelt down at the window to say her prayers, still staring out into the night, and now she saw the stars and the deep blue of the sky, and she heard the murmur of the river in the valley. Her prayers took no form of words, and were all the deeper for it; underneath their wordless aspiration ran the solemn undercurrent of the new-born knowledge that she loved Lucian with a love that would last till death.
Within twelve months Lucian’s recollections of the perfidious Haidee were nebulous and indistinct. He had taken the muse for mistress and wooed her with such constant persistency that he had no time to think of anything else. He used up much manuscript paper and made large demands upon Sprats and his Aunt Judith, the only persons to whom he condescended to show his productions, and he was alike miserable and happy. Whenever he wrote a new poem he was filled with elation, and for at least twenty-four hours glowed with admiration of his own powers; then set in a period of uncertainty, followed by one of doubt and another of gloom—the lines which had sounded so fine that they almost brought tears to his eyes seemed banal and weak, and were not infrequently cast into the fire, where his once-cherished copies of the Haidee sonnets had long since preceded them. Miss Judith nearly shed tears when these sacrifices were made, and more than once implored him tenderly to spare his offspring, but with no result, for no human monster is so savage as the poet who turns against his own fancies. It was due to her, however, that one of Lucian’s earliest efforts was spared. Knowing his propensity for tearing and rending his children, she surreptitiously obtained his manuscript upon one occasion and made a fair copy of a sentimental story written in imitation of Lara, which had greatly moved her, and it was not until many years afterwards that Lucian was confronted and put to shame by the sight of it.
At the age of eighteen Lucian celebrated his birthday by burning every manuscript he had, and announcing that he would write no more verses until he was at least twenty-one. But chancing to hear a pathetic story of rural life which appealed powerfully to his imagination, he began to write again; and after a time, during which he was unusually morose and abstracted, he presented himself to Sprats with a bundle of manuscript. He handed it over to her with something of shyness.
‘I want you to read it—carefully,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ she answered. ‘But is it to share the fate of all the rest, Lucian? You made a clean sweep of everything, didn’t you?’
‘That stuff!’ he said, with fine contempt. ‘I should think so! But this——’ he paused, plunged his hands into his pockets, and strode up and down the room—‘this is—well, it’s different. Sprats!—I believe it’s good.’
‘I wish you’d let my father read it,’ she said. ‘Do, Lucian.’
‘Perhaps,’ he answered. ‘But you first—I want to know what you think. I can trust you.’
Sprats read the poem that evening, and as she read she marvelled. Lucian had done himself justice at last. The poem was full of the true country life; there was no false ring in it; he had realised the pathos of the story he had to tell; it was a moving performance, full of the spirit of poetry from the first line to the last. She was proud, glad, full of satisfaction. Without waiting to ask Lucian’s permission, she placed the manuscript in the vicar’s hands and begged him to read it. He carried it away to his study; Sprats sat up later than usual to hear his verdict. She occupied herself with no work, but with thoughts that had a little of the day-dream glamour in them. She was trying to map out Lucian’s future for him. He ought to be protected and shielded from the world, wrapped in an environment that would help him to produce the best that was in him; the ordinary cares of life ought never to come near him. He had a gift, and the world would be the richer if the gift were poured out lavishly to his fellow-creatures; but he must be treated tenderly and skilfully if the gift was to be poured out at all. Sprats, country girl though she was, knew something of the harshnesses of life; she knew, too, that Lucian’s nature was the sort that would rebel at a crumpled rose-leaf. He was still, and always would be, a child that feels rather than understands.
The vicar came back to her with the manuscript—it was then nearly midnight, but he was too much excited to wonder that Sprats should still be downstairs. He came tapping the manuscript with his fingers—his face wore a delighted and highly important expression.
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘this is a considerable performance. I am amazed, pleased, gratified, proud. The boy is a genius—he will make a great name for himself. Yes—it is good. It is sound work. It is so charmingly free from mere rhetoric—there is a restraint, a chasteness which one does not often find in the work of a young writer. And it is classical in form and style. I am proud of Lucian. You see now the result of only reading and studying the best masters. He is perhaps a little imitative—that is natural; it will wear away. Did you not notice a touch of Wordsworth, eh!—I was reminded of Michael. He will be a new Wordsworth—a Wordsworth with more passion and richer imagery. He has the true eye for nature—I do not know when I have been so pleased as with the bits of colour that I find here. Oh, it is certainly a remarkable performance.’
‘Father,’ said Sprats, ‘don’t you think it might be published?’
Mr. Chilverstone considered the proposition gravely.
‘I feel sure it would meet with great approbation if it were,’ he said. ‘I have no doubt whatever that the best critics would recognise its merit and its undoubted promise. I wonder if Lucian would allow the earl to read it?—his lordship is a fine judge of classic poetry, and though I believe he cherishes a contempt for modern verse, he cannot fail to be struck by this poem—the truth of its setting must appeal to him.’
‘I will speak to Lucian,’ said Sprats.
She persuaded Lucian to submit his work to Lord Simonstower next day;—the old nobleman read, re-read, and was secretly struck by the beauty and strength of the boy’s performance. He sent for Lucian and congratulated him warmly. Later on in the day he walked into the vicar’s study.
‘Chilverstone,’ he said, ‘what is to be done with that boy Damerel? He will make a great name if due care is taken of him at the critical moment. How old is he now—nearly nineteen? I think he should go to Oxford.’
‘That,’ said the vicar, ‘is precisely my own opinion.’
‘It would do him all the good in the world,’ continued the earl. ‘It is a thing that should be pushed through. I think I have heard that the boy has some money? I knew his father, Cyprian Damerel. He was a man who earned a good deal, but I should say he spent it. Still, I have always understood that he left money in Simpson Pepperdine’s hands for the boy.’
Mr. Chilverstone observed that he had always been so informed, though he did not know by whom.
‘Simpson Pepperdine should be approached,’ said Lord Simonstower. ‘I have a good mind to talk to him myself.’
‘If your lordship would have the kindness to do so,’ said the vicar, ‘it would be a most excellent thing. Pepperdine is an estimable man, and very proud indeed of Lucian—I am sure he would be induced to give his consent.’
‘I will see him to-morrow,’ said the earl.
But before the morrow dawned an event had taken place in the history of the Pepperdine family which involved far-reaching consequences. While the earl and the vicar were in consultation over their friendly plans for Lucian’s benefit, Mr. Pepperdine was travelling homewards from Oakborough, whither he had proceeded in the morning in reference to a letter which caused him no little anxiety and perturbation. It was fortunate that he had a compartment all to himself in the train, for he groaned and sighed at frequent intervals, and manifested many signs of great mental distress. When he left Wellsby station he walked with slow and heavy steps along the road to Mr. Trippett’s farm, where, as usual, he had left his horse and trap. Mrs. Trippett, chancing to look out of the parlour window, saw him approaching the house and noticed the drag in his step. He walked, she said, discussing the matter later on with her husband, as if he had suddenly become an old man. She hastened to the door to admit him; Mr. Pepperdine gazed at her with a lack-lustre eye.
‘Mercy upon us, Mr. Pepperdine!’ exclaimed Mrs. Trippett, ‘you do look badly. Aren’t you feeling well?’
Mr. Pepperdine made an effort to pull himself together. He walked in, sat down in the parlour, and breathed heavily.
‘It’s a very hot day, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit overdone.’
‘You must have a drop of brandy and water,’ said Mrs. Trippett, and bustled into the kitchen for water and to the sideboard for brandy. ‘Take a taste while it’s fresh,’ she said, handing him a liberal mixture. ‘It’ll revive you.’
Mr. Pepperdine sipped at his glass and nodded his head in acknowledgment of her thoughtfulness.
‘Thank you kindly,’ said he. ‘I were feeling a bit badly like. Is the master anywhere about? I would like to see him.’
Mrs. Trippett replied that the master was in the fold, and she would let him know that Mr. Pepperdine was there. She went herself to fetch her husband, and hinted to him that his old friend did not seem at all well—she was sure there was something wrong with him. Mr. Trippett hastened into the house and found Mr. Pepperdine pacing the room and sighing dismally.
‘Now then!’ said Mr. Trippett, whose face was always cheery even in times of trouble, ‘th’ owd woman says you don’t seem so chirpy like. Is it th’ sun, or what?—get another taste o’ brandy down your throttle, lad.’
Mr. Pepperdine sat down again and shook his head.
‘John,’ he said, gazing earnestly at his friend. ‘I’m in sore trouble—real bad trouble. I doubt I’m a ruined man.’
‘Nay, for sure!’ exclaimed Mr. Trippett. ‘What’s it all about, like?’
‘It’s all on account of a damned rascal!’ answered Mr. Pepperdine, with a burst of indignation. ‘Ah!—there’s a pretty to-do in Oakborough this day, John. You haven’t heard nothing about Bransby?’
‘What, the lawyer?’
‘Ah, lawyer and rogue and the Lord knows what!’ replied Mr. Pepperdine, groaning with wrath and misery. ‘He’s gone and cleared himself off, and he’s naught but a swindler. They do say there that it’s a hundred thousand pound job.’
Mr. Trippett whistled.
‘I allus understood ’at he were such a well-to-do, upright sort o’ man,’ he said. ‘He’d a gre’t reppytation, any road.’
‘Ay, and seems to have traded on it!’ said Mr. Pepperdine bitterly. ‘He’s been a smooth-tongued ’un, he has. He’s done me, he has so—dang me if I ever trust the likes of him again!’
Then he told his story. The absconded Mr. Bransby, an astute gentleman who had established a reputation for probity by scrupulous observance of the conventionalities dear to the society of a market town and had never missed attendance at his parish church, had suddenly vanished into the Ewigkeit, leaving a few widows and orphans, several tradespeople, and a large number of unsuspecting and confiding clients, to mourn, not his loss, but his knavery. Simpson Pepperdine had been an easy victim. Some years previously he had consented to act as trustee for a neighbour’s family—Mr. Bransby was his co-trustee. Simpson had left everything in Mr. Bransby’s hands—it now turned out that Mr. Bransby had converted everything to his own uses, leaving his careless coadjutor responsible. But this was not all. Simpson, who had made money by breeding shorthorns, had from time to time placed considerable sums in the lawyer’s hands for investment, and had trusted him entirely as to their nature. He had received good interest, and had never troubled either to ask for or inspect the securities. It had now been revealed to him that there had never been any securities—his money had gone into Mr. Bransby’s own coffers. Simpson Pepperdine, in short, was a ruined man.
Mr. Trippett was genuinely disturbed by this news. He felt that his good-natured and easy-going friend had been to blame in respect to his laxity and carelessness. But he himself had had some slight dealings with Mr. Bransby, and he knew the plausibility and suaveness of that gentleman’s manner.
‘It’s a fair cropper!’ he exclaimed. ‘I could ha’ trusted that Bransby like the Bank of England. I allus understood he were doing uncommon well.’
‘So he were,’ answered Mr. Pepperdine, ‘uncommon well—out of fools like me.’
‘I hope,’ said Mr. Trippett, mentioning the subject with some shyness, ‘I hope the gals’ money isn’t lost, an’ all?’
‘What, Keziah and Judith? Nay, nay,’ replied Mr. Pepperdine. ‘It isn’t. What bit they have—matter of five hundred pound each, may be—is safe enough.’
‘Nor the lad’s, either,’ said Mr. Trippett.
‘The lad’s?’ said Mr. Pepperdine questioningly. ‘Oh, Lucian? Oh—ay—of course, he’s all right.’
Mr. Trippett went over to the sideboard, produced the whisky decanter, mixed himself a glass, lighted his pipe, and proceeded to think hard.
‘Well,’ he said, after some time, ‘I know what I should do if I were i’ your case, Simpson. I should go to his lordship and tell him all about it.’
Mr. Pepperdine started and looked surprised.
‘I’ve never asked a favour of him yet,’ he said. ‘I don’t know——’
‘I didn’t say aught about asking any favour,’ said Mr. Trippett. ‘I said—go and tell his lordship all about it. He’s the reppytation of being a long-headed ’un, has Lord Simonstower—he’ll happen suggest summut.’
Mr. Pepperdine rubbed his chin meditatively.
‘He’s a sharp-tongued old gentleman,’ he said; ‘I’ve always fought a bit shy of him. Him an’ me had a bit of a difference twenty years since.’
‘Let bygones be bygones,’ counselled Mr. Trippett. ‘You and your fathers afore you have been on his land and his father’s land a bonny stretch o’ time.’
‘Three hundred and seventy-five year come next spring,’ said Mr. Pepperdine.
‘And he’ll not see you turned off wi’out knowing why,’ said Mr. Trippett with conviction. ‘Any road, it’ll do no harm to tell him how you stand. He’d have to hear on’t sooner or later, and he’d best hear it from yourself.’
Turning this sage counsel over in his mind, Mr. Pepperdine journeyed homewards, and as luck would have it he met the earl near the gates of the Castle. Lord Simonstower had just left the vicarage, and Mr. Pepperdine was in his mind. He put up his hand in answer to the farmer’s salutation. Mr. Pepperdine drew rein.
‘Oh, Pepperdine,’ said the earl, ‘I want to have some conversation with you about your nephew. I have just been talking with the vicar about him. When can you come up to the Castle?’
‘Any time that pleases your lordship,’ answered Mr. Pepperdine. ‘It so happens that I was going to ask the favour of an interview with your lordship on my own account.’
‘Then you had better drive up now and leave your horse and trap in the stables,’ said the earl. ‘Tell them to take you to the library—I’ll join you there presently.’
Closeted with his tenant, Lord Simonstower plunged into his own business first—it was his way, when he took anything in hand, to go through with it with as little delay as possible. He came to the point at once by telling Mr. Pepperdine that his nephew was a gifted youth who would almost certainly make a great name in the world of letters, and that it would be a most excellent thing to send him to Oxford. He pointed out the great advantages which would accrue to Lucian if this course were adopted, spoke of his own interest in the boy, and promised to help him in every way he could. Mr. Pepperdine listened with respectful and polite attention.
‘My lord,’ he said, when the earl had explained his views for Lucian, ‘I’m greatly obliged to your lordship for your kindness to the lad and your interest in him. I agree with every word your lordship says. I’ve always known there was something out of the common about Lucian, and I’ve wanted him to get on in his own way. I never had no doubt about his making a great name for himself—I could see that in him when he were a little lad. Now about this going to Oxford—it would cost a good deal of money, wouldn’t it, my lord?’
‘It would certainly cost money,’ replied the earl. ‘But I would put it to you in this way—or, rather, this is the way in which it should be put to the boy himself. I understand he has some money; well, he can make no better investment of a portion of it than by spending it on his education. Two or three years at Oxford will fit him for the life of a man of letters as nothing else would. He need not be extravagant—two hundred pounds a year should suffice him.’
Mr. Pepperdine listened to this with obvious perplexity and unrest. He hesitated a little before making any reply. At last he looked at the earl with the expression of a man who is going to confess something.
‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell your lordship what nobody else knows—not even my sisters. I’m sure your lordship’ll say naught to nobody about it. My lord, the lad hasn’t a penny. He never had. Your lordship knows that his father sent for me when he was dying in London—he’d just come back, with the boy, from Italy—and he put Lucian in my care. He’d made a will and I was trustee and executor. He thought that there was sufficient provision made for the boy, but he hadn’t been well advised—he’d put all his eggs in one basket—the money was all invested in a building society in Rome, and every penny of it was lost. I did hear,’ affirmed Mr. Pepperdine solemnly, ‘that the Pope of Rome himself lost a deal of money at the same time and in the same society.’
‘That’s quite true,’ said the earl. ‘I remember it very well.
‘Well, there it was,’ continued Mr. Pepperdine. ‘It was gone for ever—there wasn’t a penny saved. I never said naught to my sisters, you know, my lord, because I didn’t want ’em to know. I never said nothing to the boy, either—and he’s the sort of lad that would never ask. He’s a bit of a child in money matters—his father (but your lordship’ll remember him as well as I do) had always let him have all he wanted, and——’
‘And his uncle has followed in his father’s lines, eh?’ said the earl, with a smile that was neither cynical nor unfriendly. ‘Well, then, Pepperdine, I understand that the lad has been at your charges all this time as regards everything—I suppose you’ve paid Mr. Chilverstone, too?’
Mr. Pepperdine waved his hands.
‘There’s naught to talk of, my lord,’ he said. ‘I’ve no children, and never shall have. I never were a marrying sort, and the lad’s been welcome. And if it had been in my power he should have gone to Oxford; but, my lord, there’s been that happened within this last day or so that’s brought me nigh to ruin. It was that that I wanted to see your lordship about—it’s a poor sort of tale for anybody’s ears, but your lordship would have to hear it some time or other. You see, my lord’—and Mr. Pepperdine, with praiseworthy directness and simplicity, set forth the story of his woes.
The Earl of Simonstower listened with earnest attention until his tenant had spread out all his ruined hopes at his feet. His face expressed nothing until the regrettable catalogue of foolishness and wrongs came to an end. Then he laughed, rather bitterly.
‘Well, Pepperdine,’ he said, ‘you’ve been wronged, but you’ve been a fool into the bargain. And I can’t blame you, for, in a smaller way—a matter of a thousand pounds or so—this man Bransby has victimised me. Well, now, what’s to be done? There’s one thing certain—I don’t intend to lose you as a tenant. If nothing else can be done, my solicitors must settle everything for you, and you must pay me back as you can. I understand you’ve been doing well with your shorthorns, haven’t you?’
Mr. Pepperdine could hardly believe his ears. He had always regarded his landlord as a somewhat cold and cynical man, and no thought of such generous help as that indicated by the earl’s last words had come into his mind in telling the story of his difficulties. He was a soft-hearted man, and the tears sprang into his eyes and his voice trembled as he tried to frame suitable words.
‘My lord!’ he said brokenly, ‘I—I don’t know what to say——’
‘Then say nothing, Pepperdine,’ said the earl. ‘I understand what you would say. It’s all right, my friend—we appear to be fellow-passengers in Mr. Bransby’s boat, and if I help you it’s because I’m not quite as much damaged as you are. And eventually there will be no help about it—you’ll have helped yourself. However, we’ll discuss that later on; at present I want to talk about your nephew. Pepperdine, I don’t want to give up my pet scheme of sending that boy to Oxford. It is the thing that should be done; I think it must be done, and that I must be allowed to do it. With your consent, Pepperdine, I will charge myself with your nephew’s expenses for three years from the time he goes up; by the end of the three years he will be in a position to look after himself. Don’t try to give me any thanks. I have something of a selfish motive in all this. But now, listen: I do not wish the boy to know that he is owing this to anybody, and least of all to me. We must invent something in the nature of a conspiracy. There must be no one but you, the vicar, and myself in the secret—no one, Pepperdine, and last of all any womankind, so your mouth must be closed as regards your sisters. I will get Mr. Chilverstone to talk to the boy, who will understand that the money is in your hands and that he must look to you. I want you to preach economy to him—economy, mind you, not meanness. I will talk to him in the same way myself, because if he is anything like his father he will develop an open-handedness which will be anything but good for him. Remember that you are the nominal holder of the purse-strings—everything will pass through you. I think that’s all I wanted to say, Pepperdine,’ concluded the earl. ‘You’ll remember your part?’
‘I shall indeed, my lord,’ said Mr. Pepperdine, as he shook the hand which the earl extended; ‘and I shall remember a deal more, too, to my dying day. I can’t rightly thank your lordship at this moment.’
‘No need, Pepperdine, no need!’ said Lord Simonstower hastily. ‘You’d do the same for me, I’m sure. Good-day to you, good-day; and don’t forget the conspiracy—no talking to the women, you know.’
Mr. Pepperdine drove homewards with what country folk call a heart-and-a-half. He was unusually lightsome in mood and garrulous in conversation that evening, but he would only discourse on one topic—the virtues of the British aristocracy. He named no names and condescended to no particulars—the British aristocracy in general served him for the text of a long sermon which amused Miss Judith and Lucian to a high degree, and made Miss Pepperdine wonder how many glasses of whisky Simpson had consumed at the ‘White Lion’ in Oakborough. It so happened that the good man had been so full of trouble that he had forgotten to take even one—his loquacity that evening was simply due to the fact that while he was preparing to wail De Profundis he had been commanded to sing Te De Laudamus, and his glorification of lords was his version of that p?an of joyfulness.
Lucian received the news which Mr. Chilverstone communicated to him in skilful and diplomatic fashion with an equanimity which seemed natural to him when hearing of anything that appeared to be his just due. He had so far had everything that he desired—always excepting the fidelity of Haidee, which now seemed a matter of no moment and was no longer a sore point—and he took it as a natural consequence of his own existence that he should go to Oxford, the fame of which ancient seat of learning had been familiar to him from boyhood. He made no inquiries as to the cost of this step—anything relating to money had no interest for him, save as regards laying it out on the things he desired. He had been accustomed as a child to see his father receive considerable sums and spend them with royal lavishness, and as he had never known what it was to have to earn money before it could be enjoyed, he troubled himself in nowise as to the source of the supplies which were to keep him at Oxford for three years. He listened attentively to Mr. Pepperdine’s solemn admonitions on the subjects of economy and extravagance, and replied at the end thereof that he would always let his uncle have a few days’ notice when he wanted a cheque—a remark which made Lord Simonstower’s fellow-conspirator think a good deal.
It was impossible at this stage to do anything or say anything to shake Lucian’s confidence in his destiny. He meant to work hard and to do great things, and without being conceited he was sure of success—it seemed to him to be his rightful due. Thanks to the influence of his father in childhood and to that of Mr. Chilverstone at a later stage, he had formed a fine taste and was already an accomplished scholar. He had never read any trash in his life, and it was now extremely unlikely that he ever would, for he had developed an almost womanish dislike of the unlovely, the mean, and the sordid, and a delicate contempt for anything in literature that was not based on good models. Mr. Chilverstone had every confidence in him, and every hope of his future; it filled him with pride to know that he was sending so promising a man to his own university; but he was cast down when he found that Lord Simonstower insisted on Lucian’s entrance at St. Benedict’s, instead of at St. Perpetua’s, his own old college.
The only person who was full of fears was Sprats. She had been Lucian’s other self for six years, and she, more than any one else, knew his need of constant help and friendship. He was full of simplicity; he credited everybody with the possession of qualities and sympathies which few people possess; he lived in a world of dreams rather than of stern facts. He was obstinate, wayward, impulsive; much too affectionate, and much too lovable; he lived for the moment, and only regarded the future as one continual procession of rosy hours. Sprats, with feminine intuition, feared the moment when he would come into collision with stern experience of the world and the worldly—she longed to be with him when that moment came, as she had been with him when the frailty and coquetry of the Dolly kid nearly broke his child’s heart. And so during the last few days of his stay at Simonstower she hovered about him as a faithful mother does about a sailor son, and she gave him much excellent advice and many counsels of perfection.
‘You know you are a baby,’ she said, when Lucian laughed at her. ‘You have been so coddled all your life that you will cry if a pin pricks you. And there will be no Sprats to tie a rag round the wound.’
‘It would certainly be better if Sprats were going too,’ he said thoughtfully, and his face clouded. ‘But then,’ he continued, flashing into a smile, ‘after all, Oxford is only two hundred miles from Simonstower, and there are trains which carry one over two hundred miles in a very short time. If I should chance to fall and bump my nose I shall take a ticket by the next train and come to Sprats to be patched up.’
‘I shall keep a stock of ointments and lotions and bandages in perpetual readiness,’ she said. ‘But it must be distinctly understood, Lucian, that I have the monopoly of curing you—I have a sort of notion, you know, that it is my chief mission in life to be your nurse.’
‘The concession is yours,’ he answered, with mock gravity.
It was with this understanding that they parted. There came a day when all the good-byes had been said, the blessings and admonitions received, and Lucian departed from the village with a pocket full of money (largely placed there through the foolish feminine indulgence of Miss Pepperdine and Miss Judith, who had womanly fears as to the horrible situations in which he might be placed if he were bereft of ready cash) and a light and a sanguine heart. Mr. Chilverstone went with him to Oxford to see his protégé settled and have a brief holiday of his own; on their departure Sprats drove them to the station at Wellsby. She waved her handkerchief until the train had disappeared; she was conscious when she turned away that her heart had gone with Lucian.
About the middle of a May afternoon, seven years later, a young man turned out of the Strand into a quiet street in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden and began looking about him as if endeavouring to locate the whereabouts of some particular place. Catching sight of the name William Robertson on a neighbouring window, with the word Publisher underneath it, he turned into the door of the establishment thus designated, and encountering an office-boy who was busily engaged in reading a comic journal inside a small pen labelled ‘Inquiries,’ he asked with great politeness if Mr. Robertson was at that moment disengaged. The office-boy in his own good time condescended to examine the personal appearance of the inquirer, and having assured himself that the gentleman was worthy his attention he asked in sharp tones if he had an appointment with Mr. Robertson. To this the stranger replied that he believed he was expected by Mr. Robertson during the afternoon, but not at any particular hour, and produced a card from which the office-boy learned that he was confronting the Viscount Saxonstowe. He forthwith disappeared into some inner region and came back a moment later with a young gentleman who cultivated long hair and an ?sthetic style of necktie, and bowed Lord Saxonstowe through various doors into a pleasant ante-room, where he accommodated his lordship with a chair and the Times, and informed him that Mr. Robertson would be at liberty in a few moments. Lord Saxonstowe remarked that he was in no hurry at all, and would wait Mr. Robertson’s convenience. The young gentleman with the luxuriant locks replied politely that he was quite sure Mr. Robertson would not keep his lordship waiting long, and added that they were experiencing quite summer-like weather. Lord Saxonstowe agreed to this proposition, and opened the Times. His host or keeper for the time being seated himself at a desk, one half of which was shared by a lady typist who had affected great interest in her work since Lord Saxonstowe’s entrance, and who now stole surreptitious glances at him as he scanned the newspaper. The clerk scribbled a line or two on a scrap of paper and passed it across to her. She untwisted it and read: ‘This is the chap that did that tremendous exploration in the North of Asia: a real live lord, you know.’ She scribbled an answering line: ‘Of course I know—do you think I didn’t recognise the name?’ and passed it over with a show of indignation. The clerk indited another epistle: ‘Don’t look as if he’d seen much of anything, does he?’ The girl perused this, scribbled back: ‘His eyes and moustache are real jam!’ and fell to work at her machine again. The clerk sighed, caressed a few sprouts on his top-lip, and remarking to his own soul that these toffs always catch the girls’ eyes, fell to doing nothing in a practised way.
Viscount Saxonstowe, quite unconscious of the interest he was exciting, stared about him after a time and began to wonder if the two young people at the desk usually worked with closed windows. The atmosphere was heavy, and there was a concentrated smell of paper, and ink, and paste. He thought of the wind-swept plains and steppes on which he had spent long months—he had gone through some stiff experiences there, but he confessed to himself that he would prefer a bitter cold night in winter in similar solitudes to a summer’s day in that ante-room. His own healthy tan and the clearness of his eyes, his alert look and the easy swing with which he walked, would never have been developed amidst such surroundings, and the consciousness of his own rude health made him feel sorry for the two white slaves before him. He felt that if he could have his own way he would cut the young gentleman’s hair, put him into a flannel shirt and trot him round; as for the young lady, he would certainly send her into the country for a holiday. And while he thus indulged his fancies a door opened and he heard voices, and two men stepped into the ante-room.
He instinctively recognised one as the publisher whom he had come to see; at the other, a much younger man, he found himself staring with some sense of recognition which was as yet vague and unformed. He felt sure that he had met him before, and under some unusual circumstances, but he could not remember the occasion, nor assure his mind that the face on which he looked was really familiar—it was more suggestive of something that had been familiar than familiar in itself. He concluded that he must have seen a photograph of it in some illustrated paper; the man was in all likelihood a popular author. Saxonstowe carefully looked him over as he stood exchanging a last word with the publisher on the threshold of the latter’s room. He noted the gracefulness of the slim figure in the perfectly fashioned clothes, and again he became conscious that his memory was being stirred. The man under observation was swinging a light walking-cane as he chatted; he made a sudden movement with it to emphasise a point, and Saxonstowe’s memory cleared itself. His thoughts flew back ten years: he saw two boys, one the very image of incarnate Wrath, the other an equally faithful impersonation of Amazement, facing each other in an antique hall, with rapiers in hand and a sense of battle writ large upon their faces and figures.
‘And I can’t remember the chap’s name!’ he thought. ‘But this is he.’
He looked at his old antagonist more closely, and with a keener interest. Lucian was now twenty-five; he had developed into a tall, well-knit man of graceful and sinuous figure; he was dressed with great care and with strict attention to the height of the prevalent fashion, but with a close study of his own particular requirements; his appearance was distinguished and notable, and Saxonstowe, little given to sentiment as regards manly beauty, confessed to himself that the face on which he looked might have been moulded by Nature from a canvas or marble of the Renaissance. It was a face for which some women would forget everything,—Saxonstowe, with this thought half-formed in his mind, caught sight of the an?emic typist, who, oblivious of anything else in the room, had fixed all her attention on Lucian. Her hands rested, motionless, on the keys of the machine before her; her head was slightly tilted back, her eyes shone, her lips were slightly parted; a faint flush of colour had stolen into her cheeks, and for the moment she was a pretty girl. Saxonstowe smiled—it seemed to him that he had been privileged to peep into the secret chamber of a girlish soul. ‘She would give something to kiss his hand,’ he thought.
Lucian turned away from the publisher with a nod; his eye caught Saxonstowe’s and held it. A puzzled look came into his face; he paused and involuntarily stretched out his hand, staring at Saxonstowe searchingly. Saxonstowe smiled and gave his hand in return.
‘We have met somewhere,’ said Lucian wonderingly, ‘I cannot think where.’
‘Nor can I remember your name,’ answered Saxonstowe. ‘But—we met in the Stone Hall at Simonstower.’
Lucian’s face lighted with the smile which had become famous for its sweetness.
‘And with rapiers!’ he exclaimed. ‘I remember—I remember! You are Dickie—Dickie Feversham.’ He began to laugh. ‘How quaint that scene was!’ he said. ‘I have often thought that it had the very essence of the dramatic in it. Let me see—what did we fight about? Was it Haidee? How amusing—because Haidee and I are married.’
‘That,’ said Saxonstowe, ‘seems a happy ending to the affair. But I think it ended happily at the time. And even yet I cannot remember your name.’
Mr. Robertson stepped forward before Lucian could reply. He introduced the young men to each other in due form. Then Saxonstowe knew that his old enemy was one of the great literary lions of the day; and Lucian recognised Saxonstowe as the mighty traveller of whose deeds most people were talking. They looked at each other with interest, and Mr. Robertson felt a glow of pride when he remembered that his was the only imprint which had ever appeared on a title-page of Lucian Damerel’s, and that he was shortly to publish the two massive volumes in which Viscount Saxonstowe had given to the world an account of his wondrous wanderings. He rubbed his hands as he regarded these two splendid young men; it did him good to be near them.
Lucian was worshipping Saxonstowe with the guileless adoration of a child that looks on a man who has seen great things and done great things. It was a trick of his: he had once been known to stand motionless for an hour, gazing in silence at a man who had performed a deed of desperate valour, had suffered the loss of his legs in doing it, and had been obliged to exhibit himself with a placard round his neck in order to scrape a living together. Lucian was now conjuring up a vision of the steppes and plains over which Saxonstowe had travelled with his life in his hands.
‘When will you dine with us?’ he said, suddenly bursting into speech. ‘To-night—to-morrow?—the day after—when? Come before everybody snaps you up—you will have no peace for your soul or rest for your body after your book is out.’
‘Then I shall run away to certain regions where one can easily find both,’ answered Saxonstowe laughingly. ‘I assure you I have no intention of wasting either body or soul in London.’
Then they arranged that the new lion was to dine with Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel on the following day, and Lucian departed, while Saxonstowe followed Mr. Robertson into his private room.
‘Your lordship has met Mr. Damerel before?’ said the publisher, who had something of a liking for gossip about his pet authors.
‘Once,’ answered Saxonstowe. ‘We were boys at the time. I had no idea that he was the poet of whose work I have heard so much since coming home.’
‘He has had an extraordinarily successful career,’ said Mr. Robertson, glancing complacently at a little row of thin volumes bound in dark green cloth which figured in a miniature book-case above his desk. ‘I have published all his work—he leaped into fame with his first book, which I produced when he was at Oxford, and since then he has held a recognised place. Yes, one may say that Damerel is one of fortune’s spoiled darlings—everything that he has done has turned out a great success. He has the grand manner in poetry. I don’t know whether your lordship has read his great tragedy, Domitia, which was staged so magnificently at the Athen?um, and proved the sensation of the year?’
‘I am afraid,’ replied Saxonstowe, ‘that I have had few opportunities of reading anything at all for the past five years. I think Mr. Damerel’s first volume had just appeared when I left England, and books, you know, are not easily obtainable in the wilds of Central Asia. Now that I have better chances, I must not neglect them.’
‘You have a great treat in store, my lord,’ said the publisher. He nodded his head several times, as if to emphasise the remark. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘Damerel has certainly been favoured by fortune. Everything has conspired to increase the sum of his fame. His romantic marriage, of course, was a great advertisement.’
‘An advertisement!’
‘I mean, of course, from my standpoint,’ said Mr. Robertson hastily. ‘He ran away with a very beautiful girl who was on the very eve of contracting a most advantageous marriage from a worldly point of view, and the affair was much talked about. There was a great rush on Damerel’s books during the next few weeks—it is wonderful how a little sensation like that helps the sale of a book. I remember that Lord Pintleford published a novel with me some years ago which we could not sell at all. He shot his coachman in a fit of anger—that sold the book like hot cakes.’
‘I trust the unfortunate coachman was not seriously injured,’ said Saxonstowe, who was much amused by these revelations. ‘It is, I confess, an unusual method of advertising a book, and one which I should not care to adopt.’
‘Oh, we can spare your lordship the trouble!’ said Mr. Robertson. ‘There’ll be no need to employ any unusual methods in making your lordship’s book known. I have already subscribed two large editions of it.’
With this gratifying announcement Mr. Robertson plunged into the business which had brought Lord Saxonstowe to his office, and for that time no more was said of Lucian Damerel and his great fame. But that night Saxonstowe dined with his aunt, Lady Firmanence, a childless widow who lived on past scandals and present gossip, and chancing to remark that he had encountered Lucian and renewed a very small acquaintance with him, was greeted with a sniff which plainly indicated that Lady Firmanence had something to say.
‘And where, pray, did you meet Lucian Damerel at any time?’ she inquired. ‘He was unknown, or just beginning to be known, when you left England.’
‘It is ten years since I met him,’ answered Saxonstowe. ‘It was when I was staying at Saxonstowe with my uncle. I met Damerel at Simonstower, and the circumstances were rather amusing.’
He gave an account of the duel, which afforded Lady Firmanence much amusement, and he showed her the scar on his hand, and laughed as he related the story of Lucian’s terrible earnestness.
‘But I have never forgotten,’ he concluded, ‘how readily and sincerely he asked my forgiveness when he found that he had been in the wrong—it rather knocked me over, you know, because I didn’t quite understand that he really felt the thing—we were both such boys, and the girl was a child.’
‘Oh, Lucian Damerel has good feeling,’ said Lady Firmanence. ‘You wouldn’t understand the Italian strain in him. But it is amusing that you should have fought over Haidee Brinklow, who is now Mrs. Lucian. I’m glad he married her, and that you didn’t.’
‘Considering that I am to dine with Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel to-morrow,’ said Saxonstowe, ‘it is a bit odd that I don’t know any more of them than this. She, I remember, was some connection of Lord Simonstower’s; but who is he?’
‘Lucian Damerel? Oh, he was the son of Cyprian Damerel, an Italian artist who married the daughter of one of Simonstower’s tenants. Simonstower was at all times greatly interested in him, and it has always been my firm impression that it was he who sent the boy to Oxford. At any rate, when he died, which was just before Lucian Damerel came of age, Simonstower left him ten thousand pounds.’
‘That was good,’ said Saxonstowe.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lady Firmanence. ‘It has always seemed to me from what I have seen of him—and I keep my eyes open on most things—that it would have been far better for that young man if fortune had dealt him a few sound kicks instead of so many halfpence. Depend upon it, Saxonstowe, it’s a bad thing for a man, and especially for a man of that temperament, to be pampered too much. Now, Lucian Damerel has been pampered all his life—I know a good deal about him, because I was constantly down at Saxonstowe during the last two or three years of your uncle’s life, and Saxonstowe, as you may remember, is close to Simonstower. I know how Lucian was petted and pampered by his own people, and by the parson and his daughter, and by the old lord. His way has always been made smooth for him—it would have done him good to find a few rough places here and there. He had far too much flattery poured upon him when his success came, and he has got used to expecting it, though indeed,’ concluded the old lady, laughing, ‘Heaven knows I’m wrong in saying “got used,” for Damerel’s one of the sort who take all the riches and luxuries of the world as their just due.’
‘He seemed to me to be very simple and unaffected,’ said Saxonstowe.
Lady Firmanence nodded the ribbons of her cap.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he’s sadly too simple, and I wish—for I can’t help liking him—that he was as affected as some of those young upstarts who cultivate long hair and velvet coats on the strength of a slim volume printed on one side of the paper only. No—Lucian Damerel hasn’t a scrap of affectation about him, and he isn’t a poseur. I wish he were affected and that he would pose—I do indeed, for his own sake.’
Saxonstowe knew that his aunt was a clever woman. He held his tongue, asking her by his eyes to explain this desire of hers, which seemed so much at variance with her well-known love of humbug and cant.
‘Oh, of course I know you’re wondering at that!’ she said. ‘Well, the explanation is simple enough. I wish Lucian Damerel were a poseur, I wish he were affected, even to the insufferable stage, for the simple reason that if he were these things it would show that he was alive to the practical and business side of the matter. What is he? A writer. He’ll have to live by writing—at the rate he and Haidee live they’ll soon exhaust their resources—and he ought to be alive to the ￡ s. d. of his trade, for it is a trade. As things are, he isn’t alive. The difference between Lucian Damerel and some other men of equal eminence in his own craft is just this: they are for ever in an attitude, crying out, “Look at me—is it not wonderful that I am so clever?” Lucian, on the other hand, seems to suggest an attitude and air of “Wouldn’t it be curious if I weren’t?”’
‘I think,’ said Saxonstowe, ‘that there may be some affectation in that.’
‘Affectation,’ said Lady Firmanence, ‘depends upon two things if it is to be successful: the power to deceive cleverly, and the ability to deceive for ever. Lucian Damerel couldn’t deceive anybody—he’s a child, the child who believes the world to be an illimitable nursery crammed with inexhaustible toys.’
‘You mean that he plays at life?’
‘I mean that he plays in life,’ said Lady Firmanence. ‘He’s still sporting on his mother’s breast, and he’ll go on sporting until somebody picks him up, smacks him soundly, and throws him into a corner. Then, of course, he will be vastly surprised to find that such treatment could be meted out to him.’
‘Then let us hope that he will be able to live in his world of dreams for ever,’ said Saxonstowe.
‘So he might, if the State were to establish an asylum for folk of his sort,’ said Lady Firmanence. ‘But he happens to be married, and married to Haidee Brinklow.’
‘My publisher,’ remarked Saxonstowe, ‘gloated over the romantic circumstances of the marriage, and appeared to think that that sort of thing was good for trade—made books sell, you know.’
‘I have no doubt that Damerel’s marriage made his books sell, and kept Domitia running at the Athen?um for at least three months longer,’ replied Lady Firmanence.
‘Were the circumstances, then, so very romantic?’
‘I dare say they appealed to the sensations, emotions, feelings, and notions of the British public,’ said the old lady. ‘Haidee Brinklow, after a campaign of two seasons, was about to marry a middle-aged person who had made much money in something or other, and was prepared to execute handsome settlements. It was all arranged when Lucian burst upon the scene, blazing with triumph, youth, and good looks. He was the comet of that season, and Haidee was attracted by the glitter of his tail. I suppose he and she were madly in love with each other for quite a month—unfortunately, during that month they committed the indiscretion of marriage.’
‘A runaway marriage, was it not?’
‘Under the very noses of the mamma and the bridegroom-elect. There was one happy result of the affair,’ said Lady Firmanence musingly; ‘it drove Mrs. Brinklow off to somewhere or other on the Continent, and there she has since remained—she took her defeat badly. Now the jilted gentleman took it in good part—it is said that he is quite a sort of grandpapa in the establishment, and has realised that there are compensations even in being jilted.’
Saxonstowe meditated upon these things in silence.
‘Mrs. Damerel was a pretty girl,’ he said, after a time.
‘Mrs. Damerel is a nice little doll,’ said Lady Firmanence, ‘a very pretty toy indeed. Give her plenty of pretty things to wear and sweets to eat, and all the honey of life to sip at, and she’ll do well and go far; but don’t ask her to draw cheques against a mental balance which she never had, or you’ll get them back—dishonoured.’
‘Are there any children?’ Saxonstowe asked.
‘Only themselves,’ replied his aunt, ‘and quite plenty too, in one house. If it were not for Millie Chilverstone, I don’t know what they would do—she descends upon them now and then, straightens them up as far as she can, and sets the wheels working once more. She is good to them.’
‘And who is she? I have some sort of recollection of her name,’ said Saxonstowe.
‘She is the daughter of the parson at Simonstower—the man who tutored Lucian Damerel.’
‘Ah, I remember—she was the girl who came with him to the Castle that day, and he called her Sprats. A lively, good-humoured girl, with a heap of freckles in a very bright face,’ said Saxonstowe.
‘She is little altered,’ remarked Lady Firmanence. ‘Now, that was the girl for Lucian Damerel! She would have taken care of his money, darned his socks, given him plain dinners, seen that the rent was paid, and made a man of him.’
‘Admirable qualifications,’ laughed Saxonstowe. ‘But one might reasonably suppose that a poet of Damerel’s quality needs others—some intellectual gifts, for example, in his helpmeet.’
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ retorted Lady Firmanence. ‘He wants a good managing housekeeper with a keen eye for the butcher’s bill and a genius for economy. As for intellect—pray, Saxonstowe, don’t foster the foolish notion that poets are intellectual. Don’t you know that all genius is lopsided? Your poet has all his brain-power in one little cell—there may be a gold-mine there, but the rest of him is usually weak even to childishness. And the great need of the weak man is the strong woman.’
Saxonstowe’s silence was a delicate and flattering compliment to Lady Firmanence’s perspicacity.
Lady Firmanence’s observations upon the family history of Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel sent Lord Saxonstowe to their house at seven o’clock the following evening with feelings of pleasant curiosity. He had been out of the world—as that phrase is known by people whose chief idea of life is to live in social ant-heaps—long enough to enjoy a renewed acquaintance with it, and since his return to England had found a hitherto untasted pleasure in studying the manners and customs of his fellow-subjects. He remembered little about them as they had presented themselves to him before his departure for the East, for he was then young and unlicked: the five years of comparative solitude which he had spent in the deserts and waste places of the earth, only enlivened by the doubtful company of Kirghese, Tartars, and children of nature, had lifted him upon an eminence from whence he might view civilised humanity with a critical eye. So far everything had amused him—it seemed to him that never had life seemed so small and ignoble, so mean and trifling, as here where the men and women were as puppets pulled by strings which fate had attached to most capricious fingers. Like all the men who come back from the deserts and the mountains, he gazed on the whirling life around him with a feeling that was half pity, half contempt. The antics of the puppets made him wonder, and in the wonder he found amusement.
Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel, as befitted young people untroubled by considerations of economy, resided in one of those smaller streets in Mayfair wherein one may find a house large enough to turn round in without more than an occasional collision with the walls. Such a house is not so comfortable as a suburban residence at one-tenth the rent, but it has the advantage of being in the middle of the known world, and if its frontage to the street is only one of six yards, its exterior may be made pretty and even taking by a judicious use of flowering plants, bright paint, and a quaint knocker. The interior is usually suggestive of playing at doll’s house; but the absence of even one baby makes a great difference, and in Lucian’s establishment there were no children. Small as it was, the house was a veritable nest of comfort—Lucian and Haidee had the instinct of settling themselves amongst soft things, and surrounding their souls with an atmosphere of ?sthetic delight, and one of them at least had the artist’s eye for colour, and the true collector’s contempt for the cheap and obvious. There was scarcely a chair or table in the rooms sacred to the householders and their friends which had not a history and a distinction: every picture was an education in art; the books were masterpieces of the binder’s craft; the old china and old things generally were the despair of many people who could have afforded to buy a warehouse full of the like had they only known where to find it. Lucian knew, and when he came into possession of Lord Simonstower’s legacy he began to surround himself with the fruits of money and knowledge, and as riches came rolling in from royalties, he went on indulging his tastes until the house was full, and would hold no more examples of anything. But by that time it was a nest of luxury wherein even the light, real and artificial, was graduated to a fine shade, where nothing crude in shape or colour interfered with the delicate susceptibilities of a poetic temperament.
When Lord Saxonstowe was shown into the small drawing-room of this small house he marvelled at the cleverness and delicacy of the taste which could make so much use of limited dimensions. It was the daintiest and prettiest room he had ever seen, and though he himself had small inclinations to ease and luxury of any sort, he drank in the pleasantness of his surroundings with a distinct sense of personal gratification. The room was empty of human life when he entered it, but the marks of a personality were all over it, and the personality was neither masculine nor feminine—it was the personality of a neuter thing, and Saxonstowe dimly recognised that it meant Art. He began to understand something of Lucian as he looked about him, and to conceive him as a mind which dominated its enveloping body to a love of beauty that might easily degenerate into a slavedom to luxury. He began to wonder if Lucian’s study or library, or wherever he worked, were similarly devoted to the worship of form and colour.
He was turning over the leaves of an Italian work, a book sumptuous in form and wonderful in its vellum binding and gold scroll-work, when a rustle of skirts aroused him from the first stages of a reverie. He turned, expecting to see his hostess—instead he saw a young lady whom he instinctively recognised as Miss Chilverstone, the girl of the merry eyes and the innumerable freckles of ten years earlier. He looked at her closely as she approached him, and he saw that the merry eyes had lost some of their roguery, but were still frank, clear, and kindly; some of the freckles had gone, but a good many were still there, adding piquancy to a face that had no pretensions to beauty, but many to the charms which spring from the possession of a kindly heart and a purposeful temperament. Good temper and good health appeared to radiate from Miss Chilverstone; the active girl of sixteen had developed into a splendid woman, and Lord Saxonstowe, as she moved towards him, admired her with a sudden recognition of her feminine strength—she was just the woman, he said to himself, who ought to be the mate of a strong man, a man of action and purpose and determination.
She held out her hand to him with a frank smile.
‘Do you remember me?’ she said. ‘It is quite ten years since that fateful afternoon at Simonstower.’
‘Was it fateful?’ he answered. ‘Yes, I remember quite well. In those days you were called Sprats.’
‘I am still Sprats,’ she answered, with a laugh. ‘I shall always be Sprats. I am Sprats to Lucian and Haidee, and even to my children.’
‘To your children?’ he said wonderingly.
‘I have twenty-five,’ she replied, smiling at his questioning look. ‘But of course you do not know. I have a private orphanage, all of my own, in Bayswater—it is my hobby. If you are interested in babies and children, do come to see me there, and I will introduce you to all my charges.’
‘I will certainly do that,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it hard work?’
‘Isn’t everything hard work that is worth doing?’ she answered. ‘Yes, I suppose it is hard work, but I like it. I have a natural genius for mothering helpless things—that is why I occasionally condescend to put on fine clothes and dine with children like Lucian and Haidee when they entertain great travellers who are also peers of the realm.’
‘Do they require mothering?’ he asked.
‘Very much so sometimes—they are very particular babies. I come to them every now and then to scold them, smack them, straighten them up, and see that they are in no danger of falling into the fire or upsetting anything. Afterwards I dine with them in order to cheer them up after the rough time they have had.’
Saxonstowe smiled. He had been watching her closely all the time.
‘I see,’ he said, ‘that you are still Sprats. Has the time been very rough to-day?’
‘Somewhat rough on poor Haidee, perhaps,’ answered Sprats. ‘Lucian has wisely kept out of the way until he can find safety in numbers. But please sit down and tell me about your travels until our hostess appears—it seems quite funny to see you all in one piece after such adventures. Didn’t they torture you in some Thibetan town?’ she inquired, with a sudden change from gaiety to womanly concern.
‘They certainly were rather inhospitable,’ he answered. ‘I shouldn’t call it torture, I think—it was merely a sort of gentle hint as to what they would do if I intruded upon them again.’
‘But I want to know what they did,’ she insisted. ‘You look so nice and comfortable sitting there, with no other sign of discomfort about you than the usual I-want-my-dinner look, that one would never dream you had gone through hardships.’
Saxonstowe was not much given to conversation—his nomadic life had communicated the gift of silence to him, but he recognised the sympathetic note in Miss Chilverstone’s voice, and he began to tell her about his travels in a somewhat boyish fashion that amused her. As he talked she examined him closely and decided that he was almost as young as on the afternoon when he occasioned such mad jealousy in Lucian’s breast. His method of expressing himself was simple and direct and schoolboyish in language, but the exuberance of spirits which she remembered had disappeared and given place to a staid, old-fashioned manner.
‘I wonder what did it?’ she said, unconsciously uttering her thought.
‘Did what?’ he asked.
‘I was thinking aloud,’ she answered. ‘I wondered what had made you so very staid in a curiously young way—you were a rough-and-tumble sort of boy that afternoon at Simonstower.’
Saxonstowe blushed. He had recollections of his youthfulness.
‘I believe I was an irrepressible sort of youngster,’ he said. ‘I think that gets knocked out of you though, when you spend a lot of time alone—you get no end of time for thinking, you know, out in the deserts.’
‘I should think so,’ she said. ‘And I suppose that even this solitude becomes companionable in a way that only those who have experienced it can understand?’
He looked at her with some surprise and with a new interest and strange sense of kinship.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘That’s it—that is it exactly. How did you know?’
‘It isn’t necessary to go into the deserts and steppes to feel a bit lonely now and then, is it?’ she said, with a laugh. ‘I suppose most of us get some sort of notion of solitude at some time or other.’
At that juncture Haidee entered, and Saxonstowe turned to her with a good deal of curiosity. He was somewhat surprised to find that ten years of added age had made little difference in her. She was now a woman, it was true, and her girlish prettiness had changed into a somewhat luxurious style of beauty—there was no denying the loveliness of face and figure, of charm and colour, he said to himself, but he was quick to observe that Haidee’s beauty depended entirely upon surface qualities. She fell, without effort or consciousness, into poses which other women vainly tried to emulate; it was impossible to her to walk across a room, sit upon an unaccommodating chair, or loll upon a much becushioned sofa in anything but a graceful way; it was equally impossible, so long as nothing occurred to ruffle her, to keep from her lips a perpetual smile, or inviting glances from her dark eyes. She reminded Saxonstowe of a fluffy, silky-coated kitten which he had seen playing on Lady Firmanence’s hearthrug, and he was not surprised to find, when she began to talk to him, that her voice had something of the feline purr in it. Within five minutes of her entrance he had determined that Mrs. Damerel was a pretty doll. She showed to the greatest advantage amidst the luxury of her surroundings, but her mouth dropped no pearls, and her pretty face showed no sign of intellect, or of wit, or of any strong mental quality. It was evident that conversation was not Mrs. Damerel’s strong point—she indicated in an instinctive fashion that men were expected to amuse and admire her without drawing upon her intellectual resources, and Saxonstowe soon formed the opinion that a judicious use of monosyllables would carry her a long way in uncongenial company. Her beauty had something of sleepiness about it—there was neither vivacity nor animation in her manner, but she was beautifully gowned and daintily perfect, and as a picture deserved worship and recognition.
Saxonstowe was presently presented to another guest, Mrs. Berenson, a lady who had achieved great distinction on the stage, and who claimed a part proprietorship in Lucian Damerel because she had created the part of the heroine in his tragedy, and almost worn herself to skin and bone in playing it in strenuous fashion for nearly three hundred nights. She was now resting from these labours, and employing her leisure in an attempt to induce Lucian to write a play around herself, and the project was so much in her mind that she began to talk volubly of it as soon as she entered his wife’s drawing-room. Saxonstowe inspected her with curiosity and amusement. He had seen her described as an embodiment of sinuous grace; she seemed to him an angular, scraggy woman, whose joints were too much in evidence, and who would have been the better for some addition to her adipose tissue. From behind the footlights Mrs. Berenson displayed many charms and qualities of beauty—Saxonstowe soon came to the conclusion that they must be largely due to artificial aids and the power of histrionic art, for she presented none of them on the dull stage of private life. Her hair, arranged on the principle of artful carelessness, was of a washed-out colour; her complexion was mottled and her skin rough; she had an unfortunately prominent nose which evinced a decided partiality to be bulbous, and her mouth, framed in harsh lines and drooping wrinkles, was so large that it seemed to stretch from one corner of an elongated jaw to the other. She was noticeable, but not pleasant to look upon, and in spite of a natural indifference to such things, Saxonstowe wished that her attire had been either less eccentric or better suited to her. Mrs. Berenson, being very tall and very thin, wore a gown of the eighteenth-century-rustic-maiden style, made very high at the waist, low at the neck, and short in the sleeves—she thus looked like a lamp-post, or a bean-stalk, topped with a mask and a flaxen wig. She was one of those women who wear innumerable chains, and at least half-a-dozen rings on each hand, and she had an annoying trick of clasping her hands in front of her and twisting the chains round her fingers, which were very long and very white, and apt to get on other people’s nerves. It was also to be observed that she never ceased talking, and that her one subject of conversation was herself.
As Saxonstowe was beginning to wish that his host would appear, Mr. Eustace Darlington was announced, and he found himself diverted from Mrs. Berenson by a new object of interest, in the shape of the man whom Mrs. Damerel had jilted in order to run away with Lucian. Mr. Darlington was a man of apparently forty years of age; a clean-shaven, keen-eyed individual, who communicated an immediate impression of shrewd hard-headedness. He was very quiet and very self-possessed in manner, and it required little knowledge of human nature to predict of him that he would never do anything in a hurry or in a perfunctory manner—a single glance of his eye at the clock as eight struck served to indicate at least one principal trait of his character.
‘It is utterly useless to look at the clock,’ said Haidee, catching Mr. Darlington’s glance. ‘That won’t bring Lucian any sooner—he has probably quite forgotten that he has guests, and gone off to dine at his club or something of that sort. He gets more erratic every day. I wish you’d talk seriously to him, Sprats. He never pays the least attention to me. Last week he asked two men to dine—utter strangers to me—and at eight o’clock came a wire from Oxford saying he had gone down there to see a friend and was staying the night.’
‘I think that must be delightful in the man to whom you are married,’ said Mrs. Berenson. ‘I should hate to live with a man who always did the right thing at the right moment—so dull, you know.’
‘There is much to be said on both sides,’ said Darlington dryly. ‘In husbands, as in theology, a happy medium would appear to be found in the via media. I presume, Mrs. Berenson, that you would like your husband to wear his waistcoat outside his coat and dine at five o’clock in the morning?’
‘I would prefer even that to a husband who lived on clock-work principles,’ Mrs. Berenson replied. ‘Eccentricity is the surest proof of strong character.’
‘I should imagine,’ said Sprats, with a glance at Saxonstowe which seemed to convey to him that the actress was amusing. ‘I should imagine that Lord Saxonstowe and Mr. Darlington are men of clock-work principles.’
Mrs. Berenson put up her pince-nez and favoured the two men with a long, steady stare. She dropped the pince-nez with a deep sigh.
‘They do look like it, don’t they?’ she said despairingly. ‘There’s something in the way they wear their clothes and hold their hands that suggests it. Do you always rise at a certain hour?’ she went on, turning to Saxonstowe. ‘My husband had a habit of getting up at six in summer and seven in winter—it brought on an extraordinary form of nervous disease in me, and the doctors warned him that they would not be responsible for my life if he persisted. I believe he tried to break the habit off, poor fellow, but he died, and so of course there was an end of it.’
Ere Saxonstowe could decide whether he was expected to reply to the lady’s question as to his own habits, the sound of a rapidly driven and sharply pulled-up cab was heard outside, followed by loudly delivered instructions in Lucian’s voice. A minute later he rushed into the drawing-room. He had evidently come straight out of the cab, for he wore his hat and forgot to take it off—excitement and concern were written in large letters all over him. He began to gesticulate, addressing everybody, and talking very quickly and almost breathlessly. He was awfully sorry to have kept them waiting, and even now he must hurry away again immediately. He had heard late that afternoon of an old college friend who had fallen on evil days after an heroic endeavour to make a fortune out of literature, and had gone to him to find that the poor fellow, his wife, and two young children were all in the last stages of poverty, and confronting a cold and careless world from the insecure bastion of a cheap lodging in an unknown quarter of the town named Ball’s Pond. He described their plight and surroundings in a few graphic sentences, looking from one to the other with quick eager glances, as if appealing to them for comprehension, or sympathy, or assent.
‘And of course I must see to the poor chap and his family,’ he said. ‘They want food, and money, and lots of things. And the two children—Sprats, you must come back with me just now. I am keeping the cab—you must come and take those children away to your hospital. And where is Hoskins? I want food and wine for them; he must put it on top of the hansom.’
‘Are we all to go without dinner?’ asked Mrs. Damerel.
‘By no means, by no means!’ said Lucian. ‘Pray do not wait longer—indeed I don’t know when I shall return, there will be lots to do, and——’
‘But Sprats, if she goes with you, will go hungry,’ Mrs. Damerel urged.
Lucian stared at Sprats, and frowned, as if some deep mental problem had presented itself to him.
‘You can’t be very hungry, Sprats, you know,’ he said, with visible impatience. ‘You must have had tea during the afternoon—can’t you wait an hour or two and we’ll get something later on? Those two children must be brought away—my God! you should see the place—you must come, of course.’
‘Oh, I’m going with you!’ answered Sprats. ‘Don’t bother about us, you other people—angels of mercy are not very pleasant things at the moment you’re starving for dinner—go and dine and leave Lucian to me; I’ll put a cloak or something over my one swell gown and go with him. Now, Lucian, quick with your commissariat arrangements.’
‘Yes, yes, I’ll be quick,’ answered Lucian. ‘You see,’ he continued, turning to Saxonstowe with the air of a child who has asked another child to play with it, and at the last moment prefers an alternative amusement; ‘it’s an awful pity, isn’t it, but you do quite understand? The poor chap’s starving and friendless, you know, and I don’t know when I shall get back, but——’
‘Please don’t bother about me,’ said Saxonstowe; ‘I quite understand.’
Lucian sighed—a sigh of relief. He looked round; Sprats had disappeared, but Hoskins, a staid and solemn butler, lingered at the door. Lucian appealed to him with the pathetic insistence of the man who wants very much to do something, and is not quite sure how to do it.
‘Oh, I say, Hoskins, I want—some food, you know, and wine, and——’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Hoskins. ‘Miss Chilverstone has just given me instructions, sir.’
‘Oh, then we can go!’ exclaimed Lucian. ‘I say, you really mustn’t mind—oh! I am forgetting that I must take some money,’ he said, and hurriedly left the room. His wife sighed and looked at Darlington.
‘I suppose we may now go to dinner,’ she said. ‘Lucian will sup on a sandwich somewhere about midnight.’
In the hall they found Sprats enveloped in an ulster which completely covered her dinner-gown; Lucian was cramming a handful of money, obviously taken at random from a receptacle where paper-currency and gold and silver coins were all mingled together, into a pocket; a footman was carrying a case of food and wine out to the cab. Mrs. Berenson insisted on seeing the two apostles of charity depart—the entire episode had put her into a good temper, and she enlivened the next hour with artless descriptions of her various states of feeling. Her chatter amused Saxonstowe; Darlington and Mrs. Damerel appeared to have heard much of it on previous occasions, and received it with equanimity. As soon as dinner was over she announced that if Lucian had been at home she had meant to spend the rest of the evening in expounding her ideas on the subject of the wished-for drama to him, but as things were she would go round to the Empire for an hour—she would just be in time, she said, to see a turn in which the performer, a contortionist, could tie himself into a complicated knot, dislocate every joint in his body, and assume the most grotesque positions, all without breaking himself in pieces.
‘It is the grimmest performance,’ she said to Saxonstowe; ‘it makes me dream, and I wake screaming; and the sensation of finding that the dream is a dream, and not a reality, is so exquisite that I treat myself to it at least once a week. I think that all great artists should cultivate sensations—don’t you?’
Upon this point Saxonstowe was unable to give a satisfactory answer, but he replied very politely that he trusted Mrs. Berenson would enjoy her treat. Soon after her departure he made his own adieu, leaving Mrs. Damerel to entertain Darlington and two or three other men who had dropped in after dinner, and who seemed in nowise surprised to find Lucian not at home.
Lucian swooped down upon the humble dwelling in which his less fortunate fellow resided, like an angel who came to destroy rather than to save. He took everything into his own hands, as soon as the field of operations lay open to him, and it was quite ten minutes before Sprats, by delicate finesse, managed to shut him up in one room with the invalid, while she and the wife talked practical matters in another. At the end of an hour she got him safely away from the house. He was in a pleasurable state of mind; the situation had been full of charm to him, and he walked out into the street gloating over the fact that the sick man and his wife and children were now fed and warmed and made generally comfortable, and had money in the purse wherewith to keep the wolf from the door for many days. His imagination had seized upon the misery which the unlucky couple must have endured before help came in their way: he conjured up the empty pocket, the empty cupboard, the blank despair that comes from lack of help and sympathy, the heart sickness which springs from the powerlessness to hope any longer. He had read of these things but had never seen them: he only realised what they meant when he looked at the faces of the sick man and his wife as he and Sprats left them. Striding away at Sprats’s side, his head drooping towards his chest and his hands plunged in his pockets, Lucian ruminated upon these things and became so keenly impressed by them that he suddenly paused and uttered a sharp exclamation.
‘By George, Sprats!’ he said, standing still and staring at her as if he had never seen her before, ‘what an awful thing poverty must be! Did that ever strike you?’
‘Often,’ answered Sprats, with laconic alacrity, ‘as it might have struck you, too, if you’d kept your eyes open.’
‘I am supposed to have excellent powers of observation,’ he said musingly, ‘but somehow I don’t think I ever quite realised what poverty meant until to-night. I wonder what it would be like to try it for a while—to go without money and food and have no hope?—but, of course, one couldn’t do it—one would always know that one could go back to one’s usual habits, and so on. It would only be playing at being poor. I wonder, now, where the exact line would be drawn between the end of hope and the beginning of despair?—that’s an awfully interesting subject, and one that I should like to follow up. Don’t you think——’
‘Lucian,’ said Sprats, interrupting him without ceremony, ‘are we going to stand here at the street corner all night while you moon about abstract questions? Because if you are, I’m not.’
Lucian came out of his reverie and examined his surroundings. He had come to a halt at a point where the Essex Road is transected by the New North Road, and he gazed about him with the expression of a traveller who has wandered into strange regions.
‘This is a quarter of the town which I do not know,’ he said. ‘Not very attractive, is it? Let us walk on to those lights—I suppose we can find a hansom there, and then we can get back to civilisation.’
They walked forward in the direction of Islington High Street: round about the Angel there was life and animation and a plenitude of bright light; Lucian grew interested, and finally asked a policeman what part of the town he found himself in. On hearing that that was Islington he was immediately reminded of the ‘Bailiff’s Daughter’ and began to recall lines of it. But Islington and old ballads were suddenly driven quite out of his thoughts by an object which had no apparent connection with poetry.
Sprats, keeping her eyes open for a hansom, suddenly missed Lucian from her side, and turned to find him gazing at the windows of a little café-restaurant with an Italian name over its door and a suspicion of Continental cookery about it. She turned back to him: he looked at her as a boy might look whose elder sister catches him gazing into the pastry-cook’s window.
‘I say, Sprats,’ he said coaxingly, ‘let’s go in there and have supper. It’s clean, and I’ve suddenly turned faint—I’ve had nothing since lunch. Dinner will be all over now at home, and besides, we’re miles away. I’ve been in these places before—they’re all right, really, something like the ristoranti in Italy, you know.’
Sprats was hungry too. She glanced at the little café—it appeared to be clean enough to warrant one in eating, at any rate, a chop in it.
‘I think I should like some food,’ she said.
‘Come on, then,’ said Lucian gaily. ‘Let’s see what sort of place it is.’
He pushed open the swinging doors and entered. It was a small place, newly established, and the proprietor and his wife, two Italians, and their Swiss waiter were glad to see customers who looked as if they would need something more than a cup of coffee and a roll and butter. The proprietor bowed himself double and ushered them to the most comfortable corner in his establishment: he produced a lengthy menu and handed it to Lucian with great empressement; the waiter stood near, deeply interested; the proprietor’s wife, gracious of figure and round of face, leaned over the counter thinking of the coins which she would eventually deposit in her cash drawer. Lucian addressed the proprietor in Italian and discussed the menu with him; while they talked, Sprats looked about her, wondering at the red plush seats, the great mirrors in their gilded frames, and the jars of various fruits and conserves arranged on the counter. Every table was adorned with a flowering plant fashioned out of crinkled paper; the ceiling was picked out in white and gold; the Swiss waiter’s apron and napkin were very stiffly starched; the proprietor wore a frock coat, which fitted very tightly at the waist, and his wife’s gown was of a great smartness. Sprats decided that they were early customers in the history of the establishment—besides themselves there were only three people in the place: an old gentleman with a napkin tucked into his neckband, who was eating his dinner and reading a newspaper propped up against a bottle, and a pair of obvious lovers who were drinking café-au-lait in a quiet corner to the accompaniment of their own murmurs.
‘I had no idea that I was so hungry,’ said Lucian when he and the proprietor had finally settled upon what was best to eat and drink. ‘I am glad I saw this place: it reminds me in some ways of Italy. I say, I don’t believe those poor people had had much to eat to-day, Sprats—it is a most fortunate thing that I happened to hear of them. My God! I wouldn’t like to get down to that stage—it must be dreadful, especially when there are children.’
Sprats leaned her elbows on the little table, propped her chin in her hands, and looked at him with a curious expression which he did not understand. A half-dreamy, half-speculative look came into her eyes.
‘I wonder what you would do if you did get down to that stage?’ she said, with a rather quizzical smile.
Lucian stared at her.
‘I? Why, what do you mean?’ he said. ‘I suppose I should do as other men do.’
‘It would be for the first time in your life, then,’ she answered. ‘I fancy seeing you do as other men do in any circumstances.’
‘But I don’t think I could conceive myself at such a low ebb as that,’ he said.
Sprats still stared at him with a speculative expression.
‘Lucian,’ she said suddenly, ‘do you ever think about the future? Everything has been made easy for you so far; does it ever strike you that fortune is in very truth a fickle jade, and that she might desert you?’
He looked at her as a child looks who is requested to face an unpleasant contingency.
‘I don’t think of unpleasant things,’ he answered. ‘What’s the good? And why imagine possibilities which aren’t probabilities? There is no indication that fortune is going to desert me.’
‘No,’ said Sprats, ‘but she might, and very suddenly too. Look here, Lucian; I’ve the right to play grandmother always, haven’t I, and there’s something I want to put before you plainly. Don’t you think you are living rather carelessly and extravagantly?’
Lucian knitted his brows and stared at her.
‘Explain,’ he said.
‘Well,’ she continued, ‘I don’t think it wants much explanation. You don’t bother much about money matters, do you?’
He looked at her somewhat pityingly.
‘How can I do that and attend to my work?’ he asked. ‘I could not possibly be pestered with things of that sort.’
‘Very well,’ said Sprats, ‘and Haidee doesn’t bother about them either. Therefore, no one bothers. I know your plan, Lucian—it’s charmingly simple. When Lord Simonstower left you that ten thousand pounds you paid it into a bank, didn’t you, and to it you afterwards added Haidee’s two thousand when you were married. Twice a year Mr. Robertson pays your royalties into your account, and the royalties from your tragedy go to swell it as well. That’s one side of the ledger. On the other side you and Haidee each have a cheque-book, and you draw cheques as you please and for what you please. That’s all so, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ answered Lucian, regarding her with amazement, ‘of course it is; but just think what a very simple arrangement it is.’
‘Admirably simple,’ Sprats replied, laughing, ‘so long as there is an inexhaustible fund to draw upon. But seriously, Lucian, haven’t you been drawing on your capital? Do you know, at this moment, what you are worth?—do you know how you stand?’
‘I don’t suppose that I do,’ he answered. ‘But why all this questioning? I know that Robertson pays a good deal into my account twice a year, and the royalties from the tragedy were big, you know.’
‘But still, Lucian, you’ve drawn off your capital,’ she urged. ‘You have spent just what you pleased ever since you left Oxford, and Haidee spends what she pleases. You must have spent a lot on your Italian tour last year, and you are continually running over to Paris. You keep up an expensive establishment; you indulge expensive tastes; you were born, my dear Lucian, with the instincts of an epicure in everything.’
‘And yet I am enjoying a supper in an obscure little café!’ he exclaimed laughingly. ‘There’s not much extravagance here.’
‘You may gratify epicurean tastes by a sudden whim to be Spartan-like,’ answered Sprats. ‘I say that you have the instincts of an epicure, and you have so far gratified them. You’ve never known what it was, Lucian, to be refused anything, have you? No: well, that naturally inclines you to the opinion that everything will always be made easy for you. Now supposing you lost your vogue as a poet—oh, there’s nothing impossible about it, my dear boy!—the public are as fickle as fortune herself—and supposing your next tragedy does not catch the popular taste—ah, and that’s not impossible either—what are you going to do? Because, Lucian, you must have dipped pretty heavily into your capital, and if you want some plain truths from your faithful Sprats, you spend a great deal more than you earn. Now give me another potato, and tell me plainly if you know how much your royalties amounted to last year and how much you and Haidee spent.’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Lucian. ‘I could tell by asking my bankers. Of course I have spent a good deal of money in travel, and in books, and in pictures, and in furnishing a house—could I have laid out Lord Simonstower’s legacy in better fashion? And I do earn large sums—I had a small fortune out of Domitia, you know.’
‘There is no doubt,’ she replied, ‘that you have had enough money to last you for all the rest of your life if it had been wisely invested.’
‘Do you mean to say that I have no investments?’ he said, half angrily. ‘Why, I have thousands of pounds invested in pictures, books, furniture, and china—my china alone is worth two thousand.’
‘Dear boy, I don’t doubt it,’ she answered soothingly, ‘but you know it doesn’t produce any interest. I like you to have pretty things about you, but you have precious little modesty in your mighty brain, and you sometimes indulge tastes which only a millionaire ought to possess.’
‘Well,’ he said, sighing, ‘I suppose there’s a moral at the end of the sermon. What is it, Sprats? You are a brick, of course—in your way there’s nobody like you, but when you are like this you make me think of mustard-plaisters.’
‘The moral is this,’ she answered: ‘come down from the clouds and cultivate a commercial mind for ten minutes. Find out exactly what you have in the way of income, and keep within it. Tell Haidee exactly how much she has to spend.’
‘You forget,’ he said, ‘that Haidee has two thousand pounds of her own. It’s a very small fortune, but it’s hers.’
‘Had, you mean, not has,’ replied Sprats. ‘Haidee must have spent her small fortune twice over, if not thrice over.’
‘It would be an unkind thing to be mean with her,’ said Lucian, with an air of wise reflection. ‘If Haidee had married Darlington she would have had unlimited wealth at her disposal; as she preferred to throw it all aside and marry me, I can’t find it in me to deny her anything. No, Sprats—poor little Haidee must have her simple pleasures even if I have to deny myself of my own.’
‘Oh, did you ever hear such utter rot!’ Sprats exclaimed. ‘Catch you denying yourself of anything! Dear boy, don’t be an ass—it’s bad form. And Haidee’s pleasures are not simple.’
‘They are simple in comparison with what they might have been if she had married Darlington,’ he said.
‘Then why didn’t she marry Darlington?’ inquired Sprats.
‘Because she married me,’ answered Lucian. ‘She gave up the millionaire for the struggling poet, as you might put it if you were writing a penny-dreadful. No; seriously, Sprats, I think there’s a good deal due to Haidee in that respect. I think she is really easily contented. When you come to think of it, we are not extravagant—we like pretty things and comfortable surroundings, but when you think of what some people do——’
‘Oh, you’re hopeless, Lucian!’ she said. ‘I wish you’d been sent out to earn your living at fifteen. Honour bright—you’re living in a world of dreams, and you’ll have a nasty awakening some day.’
‘I have given the outer world something of value from my world of dreams,’ he said, smiling at her.
‘You have written some very beautiful poetry, and you are a marvellously gifted man who ought to feel the responsibility of your gifts,’ she said gravely. ‘And all I want is to keep you, if I can, from the rocks on which you might come to grief. I’m sure that if you took my advice about business matters you would avoid trouble in the future. You’re too cock-sure, too easy-going, too thoughtless, Lucian, and this is a hard and a cruel world.’
‘It’s been a very pleasant world to me so far,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had a care or a trouble; I’ve heaps of friends, and I’ve always got everything that I wanted. Why, it’s a very pleasant world! You, Sprats, have found it so, too.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have found it pleasant, but it is hard and cruel nevertheless, and one realises it sometimes when one least expects to. One may wake out of a dream to a very cruel reality.’
‘You speak as of a personal experience,’ he said smiling. ‘And yet I swear you never had one.’
‘I don’t want you to have one,’ she answered.
‘Is sermonising a cruel reality?’ he asked with a mock grimace.
‘No, it’s a necessary thing; and that reminds me that I have not quite finished mine. Look here, Lucian, here’s a straight question to you. Do you think it a good thing to be so very friendly with Mr. Darlington?’
Lucian dropped his knife and fork and stared at her in amazement.
‘Why on earth not?’ he said. ‘Darlington is an awfully good fellow. Of course, I know that he must have felt it when Haidee ran away with me, but he has been most kind to both of us—we have had jolly times on his yacht and at his Scotch place; and you know, Sprats, when you can’t afford things yourself it’s rather nice to have friends who can give them to you.’
‘Lucian, that’s a piece of worldliness that’s unworthy of you,’ she said. ‘Well, I can’t say anything against Mr. Darlington. He seems kind, and he is certainly generous and hospitable, but it is well known that he was very, very much in love with Haidee, and that he felt her loss a good deal.’
‘Yes, it was awfully hard on him,’ said Lucian, stroking his chin with a thoughtful air; ‘and of course that’s just why one feels that one ought to be nice to him. He and Haidee are great friends, and that’s far better than that he should cherish any bitter feelings against her because she preferred me to him.’
Sprats looked at him with the half-curious, half-speculative expression which had filled her eyes in the earlier stages of their conversation. They had now finished their repast, and she drew on her gloves.
‘I want to go home to my children,’ she said. ‘One of the babies has croup, and it was rather bad when I left. Pay the bill, Lucian, and get them to call a hansom.’
Lucian put his hands in his pockets, and uttered a sudden exclamation of dismay.
‘I haven’t any money,’ he said. ‘I left it all with poor Watson. Have you any?’
‘No,’ she answered, ‘of course I haven’t. You dragged me away in my dinner-dress, and it hasn’t even a pocket in it. What are you going to do?’
‘What an awkward predicament!’ said Lucian, searching every pocket. ‘I don’t know what to do—I haven’t a penny.’
‘Well, you must walk back to Mr. Watson’s and get some money there,’ said Sprats. ‘You will be back in ten minutes.’
‘What! borrow money from a man to whom I have just given it?’ he cried. ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that!’
Sprats uttered an impatient exclamation.
‘Well, do something!’ she said. ‘We can’t sit here all night.’
Lucian summoned the proprietor and explained the predicament. The situation ended in a procession of two hansom cabs, in one of which rode Sprats and Lucian, in the other the Swiss waiter, who enjoyed a long drive westward and finally returned to the heights of Islington with the amount of the bill and a substantial gratuity in his pocket. As Sprats pointed out with force and unction, Lucian’s foolish pride in not returning to the Watsons and borrowing half a sovereign had increased the cost of their supper fourfold. But Lucian only laughed, and Sprats knew that the shillings thrown away were to him as things of no importance.
There had been a moment in Sprats’s life when she had faced things—it was when she heard that Lucian and Haidee had made a runaway marriage. This escapade had been effected very suddenly; no one had known that these two young people were contemplating so remarkable a step. It was supposed that Miss Brinklow was fully alive to the blessings and advantages attendant upon a marriage with Mr. Eustace Darlington, who, as head of a private banking firm which carried out financial operations of vast magnitude, was a prize of much consequence in the matrimonial market: no one ever imagined that she would throw away such a chance for mere sentiment. But Haidee, shallow as she was, had a certain vein of romance in her composition; and when Lucian, in all the first flush of manhood and the joyous confidence of youth, burst upon her, she fell in love with him in a fashion calculated to last for at least a fortnight. He, too, fell madly in love with the girl’s physical charms: as to her mental qualities, he never gave them a thought. She was Aphrodite, warm, rosy-tinted, and enticing; he neither ate, slept, nor drank until she was in his arms. He was a masterful lover; his passion swept Haidee out of herself, and before either knew what was really happening, they were married. They lived on each other’s hearts for at least a week, but their appetites were normal again within the month, and there being no lack of money and each having a keen perception of the joie de vivre, they settled down very comfortably.
Sprats had never heard of Haidee from the time of the latter’s visit to Simonstower until she received the news of her marriage to Lucian. The tidings came to her with a curious heaviness. She had never disguised from herself the fact that she herself loved Lucian: now that she knew he was married to another woman she set herself the task of distinguishing between the love that she might have given him and the love which she could give him. Upon one thing she decided at once: since Lucian had elected Haidee as his life’s partner, Haidee must be Sprats’s friend too, even if the friendship were all on one side. She would love Haidee—for Lucian’s sake, primarily: for her own if possible. But when events brought the three together in London, Sprats was somewhat puzzled. Lucian as a husband was the must curious and whimsical of men. He appeared to be absolutely incapable of jealousy, and would watch his wife flirting under his eyes with appreciative amusement. He himself made love to every girl who aroused any interest or curiosity in him—to women who bored him he was cold as ice, and indifferent to the verge of rudeness. He let Haidee do exactly as she pleased; with his own liberty in anything, and under any circumstances, he never permitted interference. Sprats was never able to decide upon his precise feelings for his wife or his attitude towards her—they got on very smoothly, but each went his or her own way. And after a time Haidee’s way appeared to run in parallel lines with the way of her jilted lover, Eustace Darlington.
Mr. Darlington had taken his pill with equanimity, and had not even made a wry face over it. He had gone so far as to send the bride a wedding present, and had let people see that he was kindly disposed to her. When the runaways came back to town and Lucian began the meteor-like career which brought his name so prominently before the world, Darlington saw no reason why he should keep aloof. He soon made Lucian’s acquaintance, became his friend, and visited the house at regular intervals. Some people, who knew the financier rather well, marvelled at the kindness which he showed to these young people—he entertained them on his yacht and at his place in Scotland, and Mrs. Damerel was seen constantly, sometimes attended by Lucian and sometimes not, in his box at the opera. At the end of two years Darlington was regarded as Haidee’s particular cavalier, and one half their world said unkind things which, naturally, never reached Lucian’s ears. He was too fond of smoothness in life to say No to anything, and so long as he himself could tread the primrose path unchecked and untroubled, he did not care to interfere in anybody’s arrangements—not even in Haidee’s. It seemed to him quite an ordinary thing, an everyday occurrence, that he and she and Darlington should be close friends, and he went in and out of Darlington’s house just as Darlington went in and out of his.
Lucian, all unconsciously, had developed into an egoist. He watched himself playing his part in life with as much interest as the lover of dramatic art will show in studying the performance of a great actor. He seemed to his own thinking a bright and sunny figure, and he arranged everything on his own stage so that it formed a background against which that figure moved or stood with striking force. He was young; he was a success; people loved to have him in their houses; his photograph sold by the thousands in the shop windows; a stroll along Bond Street or Piccadilly was in the nature of a triumphal procession; hostesses almost went down on their knees to get him to their various functions; he might have dined out every night, if he had liked. He very often did like—popularity and admiration and flattery and homage were as incense to his nostrils, and he accepted every gift poured at his shrine as if nothing could be too good for him. And yet no one could call him conceited, or vain, or unduly exalted: he was transparently simple, ingenuous, and childlike; he took everything as a handsome child takes the gifts showered upon him by admiring seniors. He had a rare gift of making himself attractive to everybody—he would be frivolous and gay with the young, old-fashioned and grave with the elderly. He was a butterfly and a man of fashion; there was no better dressed man in town, nor a handsomer; but he was also a scholar and a student, and in whatever idle fashion he spent most of his time, there were so many hours in each day which he devoted to hard, systematic reading and to his own work. It was the only matter in which he was practical; in all other moods he was a gaily painted, light-winged thing that danced and fluttered in the sunbeams. He was careless, thoughtless, light-hearted, sanguine, and he never stopped to think of consequences or results. But through everything that critical part of him kept an interested and often amused eye on the other parts.
Sprats at this stage watched him carefully. She had soon discovered that he and Haidee were mere children in many things, and wholly incapable of management or forethought. It had been their ill-fortune to have all they wanted all their lives, and they lived as if heaven had made a contract with them to furnish their table with manna and their wardrobes with fine linen, and keep no account of the supply. She was of a practical mind, and had old-fashioned country notions about saving up in view of contingencies, and she expounded them at certain seasons with force and vigour to both Lucian and Haidee. But as Lucian cherished an ineradicable belief in his own star, and had never been obliged to earn his dinner before he could eat it, there was no impression to be made upon him; and Haidee, having always lived in the softest corner of luxury’s lap, could conceive of no other state of being, and was mercifully spared the power of imagining one.
In spite of Sprats’s sermon in the little café-restaurant, Lucian made no effort to follow her advice. He was at work on a new tragedy which was to be produced at the Athen?um in the following autumn, and had therefore no time to give to considerations of economy, and when he was not at work he was at play, and play with Lucian was a matter of as much importance, so far as strenuous devotion to it was concerned, as work was. But there came a morning and an occurrence which for an hour at least made him recall Sprats’s counsel and ponder rather deeply on certain things which he had never pondered before.
It was ten o’clock, and Lucian and Haidee were breakfasting. They invariably spent a good hour over this meal, for both were possessed of hearty appetites, and Lucian always read his letters and his newspapers while he ate and drank. He was alternately devoting himself to his plate and to a leading article in the Times, when the footman entered and announced that Mr. Pepperdine wished to see him. Lucian choked down a mouthful, uttered a joyous exclamation, and rushed into the hall. Mr. Pepperdine, in all the glories of a particularly horsy suit of clothes, was gazing about him as if he had got into a museum. He had visited Lucian’s house before, and always went about in it with his mouth wide open and an air of expectancy—there was usually something fresh to see, and he never quite knew where he might come across it.
‘My dear uncle!’ cried Lucian, seizing him in his arms and dragging him into the dining-room, ‘why didn’t you let me know you were coming? Have you breakfasted? Have some more, any way—get into that chair.’
Mr. Pepperdine solemnly shook hands with Haidee, who liked him because he betrayed such ardent and whole-souled admiration of her and had once bought her a pair of wonderful ponies, assured himself by a careful inspection that she was as pretty as ever, and took a chair, but not at the table. He had breakfasted, he said, at his hotel, two hours earlier.
‘Then have a drink,’ said Lucian, and rang the bell for whisky and soda. ‘How is everybody at Simonstower?’
‘All well,’ answered Mr. Pepperdine, ‘very well indeed, except that Keziah has begun to suffer a good deal from rheumatism. It’s a family complaint. I’m glad to see you both well and hearty—you keep the roses in your cheeks, ma’am, and the light in your eyes, something wonderful, considering that you are a townbird, as one may say. There are country maidens with less colour and brightness, so there are!’
‘You said that so prettily that I shall allow you to smoke a cigar, if you like,’ said Haidee. ‘Lucian, your case.’
Mr. Pepperdine shook his head knowingly as he lighted a cigar and sipped his whisky and soda. He knew a pretty woman when he saw her, he said to himself, and it was his opinion that Mrs. Lucian Damerel was uncommonly pretty. Whenever he came to see her he could never look at her enough, and Haidee, who accepted admiration on principle, used to smile at him and air her best behaviour. She was sufficiently woman of the world to overlook the fact that Mr. Pepperdine was a tenant-farmer and used the language of the people—he was a handsome man and a dandy in his way, and he was by no means backward, in spite of his confirmed bachelorhood, of letting a pretty woman see that he had an eye for beauty. So she made herself very agreeable to Mr. Pepperdine and told him stories of the ponies, and Lucian chatted of various things, and Mr. Pepperdine, taking in the general air of comfort and luxury which surrounded these young people, felt that his nephew had begun life in fine style and was uncommonly clever.
They went into Lucian’s study when breakfast was over, and Lucian lighted a pipe and began to chat carelessly of Simonstower and old times there. Mr. Pepperdine, however, changed the subject somewhat abruptly.
‘Lucian, my boy,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what’s brought me here: I want you to lend me a thousand pounds for a twelvemonth. Will you do that?’
‘Why, of course!’ exclaimed Lucian. ‘I shall be only too pleased—for as long as ever you like.’
‘A year will do for me,’ answered Mr. Pepperdine. ‘I’ll explain matters,’ and he went on to tell Lucian the story of the Bransby defalcations, and his own loss, and of the late Lord Simonstower’s generosity. ‘He was very good about it, was the old lord,’ he said: ‘it made things easy for me while he lived, but now he’s dead, and I can’t expect the new lord to be as considerate. I’ve had a tightish time lately, Lucian, my boy, and money’s been scarce; but you can have your thousand pounds back at the twelvemonth end—I’m a man of my word in all matters.’
‘My dear uncle!’ exclaimed Lucian, ‘there must be no talk of that sort between us. Of course you shall have the money at once—that is as soon as we can get to the bank. Or will a cheque do?’
‘Aught that’s of the value of a thousand pounds’ll do for me,’ replied Mr. Pepperdine. ‘I want to complete a certain transaction with the money this afternoon, and if you give me a cheque I can call in at your bank.’
Lucian produced his cheque-book and wrote out a cheque for the amount which his uncle wished to borrow. Mr. Pepperdine insisted upon drawing up a formal memorandum of its receipt, and admonished his nephew to put it carefully away with his other business papers. But Lucian never kept any business papers—his usual practice was to tear everything up that looked like a business document and throw the fragments into the waste-paper basket. He would treasure the most obscure second-hand bookseller’s catalogue as if it had been a gilt-edged security, but bills and receipts and business letters annoyed him, and Mr. Pepperdine’s carefully scrawled sheet of notepaper went into the usual receptacle as soon as its writer had left the room. And as he crumpled it up and threw it into the basket, laughing at the old-fashioned habits of his uncle, Lucian also threw off all recollection of the incident and became absorbed in his new tragedy.
Coming in from the theatre that night he found a little pile of letters waiting for him on the hall table, and he took them into his study and opened them carelessly. There was a long epistle from Mrs. Berenson—he read half of it and threw that and the remaining sheets away with an exclamation of impatience. There was a note from the great actor-manager who was going to produce the new tragedy—he laid that open on his desk and put a paper-weight upon it. The rest of his letters were invitations, requests for autographs, gushing epistles from admiring readers, and so on—he soon bundled them all together and laid them aside. But there was one which he had kept to the last—a formal-looking affair with the name of his bank engraved on the flap of the envelope, and he opened it with some curiosity. The letter which it enclosed was short and formal, but when Lucian had read it he recognised in some vague and not very definite fashion that it constituted an epoch. He read it again and yet again, with knitted brows and puzzled eyes, and then he put it on his desk and sat staring at it as if he did not understand the news which it was meant to convey to him.
It was a very commonplace communication this, but Lucian had never seen anything of its sort before. It was just a brief, politely worded note from his bankers, informing him that they had that day paid a cheque for one thousand pounds, drawn by him in favour of Simpson Pepperdine, Esquire, and that his account was now overdrawn by the sum of ￡187, 10s. 0d. That was all—there was not even a delicately expressed request to him to put the account in credit.
Lucian could not quite realise what this letter meant; he said nothing to Haidee of it, but after breakfast next morning he drove to the bank and asked to see the manager. Once closeted with that gentleman in his private room he drew out the letter and laid it on the desk at which the manager sat.
‘I don’t quite understand this letter,’ he said. ‘Would you mind explaining it to me?’
The manager smiled.
‘It seems quite plain, I think,’ he said pleasantly. ‘It means that your account is overdrawn to the amount of ￡187, 10s. 0d.’
Lucian sat down and stared at him.
‘Does that mean that I have exhausted all the money I placed in your hands, and have drawn on you for ￡187, 10s. 0d. in addition?’ he asked.
‘Precisely, Mr. Damerel,’ answered the manager. ‘Your balance yesterday morning was about ￡820, and you drew a cheque in favour of Mr. Pepperdine for ￡1000. That, of course, puts you in our debt.’
Lucian stared harder than ever.
‘You’re quite sure there is no mistake?’ he said.
The manager smiled.
‘Quite sure!’ he replied. ‘But surely you have had your pass-book?’
Lucian had dim notions that a small book bound in parchment had upon occasions been handed to him over the counter of the bank, and on others had been posted by him to the bank at some clerk’s request; he also remembered that he had once opened it and found it full of figures, at the sight of which he had hastily closed it again.
‘I suppose I have,’ he answered.
‘I believe it is in our possession just now,’ said the manager. ‘If you will excuse me one moment I will fetch it.’
He came back with the pass-book in his hand and offered it to Lucian.
‘It is posted up to date,’ he said.
Lucian took the book and turned its pages over.
‘Yes, but—’ he said. ‘I—do I understand that all the money that has been paid in to my account here is now spent? You have received royalties on my behalf from Mr. Robertson and from Mr. Harcourt of the Athen?um?’
‘You will find them all specified in the pass-book, Mr. Damerel,’ said the manager. ‘There will, I presume, be further payments to come from the same sources?’
‘Of course there will be the royalties from Mr. Robertson every half-year,’ answered Lucian, turning the pages of his pass-book. ‘And Mr. Harcourt produces my new tragedy at the Athen?um in December.’
‘That,’ said the manager, with a polite bow, ‘is sure to be successful.’
‘But,’ said Lucian, with a childlike candour, ‘what am I to do if you have no money of mine left? I can’t go on without money.’
The manager laughed.
‘We shall be pleased to allow you an overdraft,’ he said. ‘Give us some security, or get a friend of stability to act as guarantor for you—that’s all that’s necessary. I suppose the new tragedy will bring you a small fortune? You did very well out of your first play, if I remember rightly.’
‘I can easily procure a guarantor,’ answered Lucian. His thoughts had immediately flown to Darlington. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘I think we shall have a long run—longer, perhaps, than before.’
Then he went away, announcing that he would make the necessary arrangements. When he had gone, the manager, to satisfy a momentary curiosity of his own, made a brief inspection of Lucian’s account. He smiled a little as he totalled it up. Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel had gone through seventeen thousand pounds in four years, and of that amount twelve thousand represented capital.
Lucian carried the mystifying pass-book to his club and began to study the rows of figures. They made his head ache and his eyes burn, and the only conclusion he came to was that a few thousands of pounds are soon spent, and that Haidee of late had been pretty prodigal with her cheques. One fact was absolutely certain: his ten thousand, and her two thousand, and the five thousand which he had earned, were all gone, never to return. He felt somewhat depressed at this thought, but recovered his spirits when he remembered the value of his pictures, his books, and his other possessions, and the prospects of increased royalties in the golden days to be. He went off to seek out Darlington in the city as joyously as if he had been embarking on a voyage to the Hesperides.
Darlington was somewhat surprised to see Lucian in Lombard Street. He knew all the details of Lucian’s business within ten minutes, and had made up his mind within two more.
‘Of course, I’ll do it with pleasure, old chap,’ he said, with great heartiness. ‘But I think I can suggest something far preferable. These people don’t seem to have given you any particular advantages, and there was no need for them to bother you with a letter reminding you that you owed them a miserable couple of hundred. Look here: you had better open two accounts with us; one for yourself and one for Mrs. Damerel, and keep them distinct—after all, you know, women rather mix things up. Give Robertson and Harcourt instructions to pay your royalties into your own account here, and pay your household expenses and bills out of it. Mrs. Damerel’s account won’t be a serious matter—mere pinmoney, you know—and we can balance it out of yours at periodic intervals. That’s a much more convenient and far simpler thing than giving the other people a guarantee for an overdraft.’
‘It seems to be so, certainly,’ said Lucian. ‘Thanks, very many. And what am I to do in arranging this?’
‘At present,’ answered Darlington, ‘you are to run away as quickly as possible, for I’m over the ears in work. Come in this afternoon at three o’clock, and we will settle the whole thing.’
Lucian went out into the crowded streets, light-hearted and joyous as ever. The slight depression of the morning had worn off; all the world was gold again. A whim seized him: he would spend the three hours between twelve and three in wandering about the city—it was an almost unknown region to him. He had read much of it, but rarely seen it, and the prospect of an acquaintance with it was alluring. So he wandered hither and thither, his taste for the antique leading him into many a quaint old court and quiet alley, and he was fortunate enough to find an old-fashioned tavern and an old-world waiter, and there he lunched and enjoyed himself and went back to Darlington’s office in excellent spirits and ready to do anything.
There was little to do. Lucian left the private banking establishment of Darlington and Darlington a few minutes after he had entered it, and he then carried with him two cheque-books, one for himself and one for Haidee, and a request that Mrs. Damerel should call at the office and append her signature to the book wherein the autographs of customers were preserved. He went home and found Haidee just returned from lunching with Lady Firmanence: Lucian conducted her into his study with some importance.
‘Look here, Haidee,’ he said, ‘I’ve been making some new business arrangements. We’re going to bank at Darlington’s in future—it’s much the wiser plan; and you are to have a separate account. That’s your cheque-book. I say—we’ve rather gone it lately, you know. Don’t you think we might economise a little?’
Haidee stared, grew perplexed, and frowned.
‘I think I’m awfully careful,’ she said. ‘If you think——’
Lucian saw signs of trouble and hastened to dispel them.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said hurriedly, ‘I know, of course, that you are. We’ve had such a lot of absolutely necessary expense, haven’t we? Well, there’s your cheque-book, and the account is your own, you know.’
Haidee asked no questions, and carried the cheque-book away. When she had gone, Lucian wrote out a cheque for ￡187, 10s. and forwarded it to his former bankers, with a covering letter in which he explained that it was intended to balance his account and that he wished to close the latter. That done, he put all thoughts of money out of his mind with a mighty sigh of relief. In his own opinion he had accomplished a hard day’s work and acquitted himself with great credit. Everything, he thought, had been quite simple, quite easy. And in thinking so he was right—nothing simpler, nothing easier, could be imagined than the operation which had put Lucian and Haidee in funds once more. It had simply consisted of a brief order, given by Eustace Darlington to his manager, to the effect that all cheques bearing the signatures of Mr. and Mrs. Damerel were to be honoured on presentation, and that there was to be no limit to their credit.