In spite of the amusing defection of his host, Saxonstowe had fully enjoyed the short time he had spent under the Damerels’ roof. Mrs. Berenson had amused him almost as much as if she had been a professional comedian brought there to divert the company; Darlington had interested him as a specimen of the rather reserved, purposeful sort of man who might possibly do things; and Haidee had made him wonder how it is that some women possess great beauty and very little mind. But the recollection which remained most firmly fixed in him was of Sprats, and on the first afternoon he had at liberty he set out to find the Children’s Hospital which she had invited him to visit.
He found the hospital with ease—an ordinary house in Bayswater Square, with nothing to distinguish it from its neighbours but a large brass plate on the door, which announced that it was a Private Nursing Home for Children. A trim maid-servant, who stared at him with reverent awe after she had glanced at his card, showed him into a small waiting-room adorned with steel engravings of Biblical subjects, and there Sprats shortly discovered him inspecting a representation of the animals leaving the ark. It struck him as he shook hands with her that she looked better in her nurse’s uniform than in the dinner-gown which she had worn a few nights earlier—there was something businesslike and strong about her in her cap and cuffs and apron and streamers: it was like seeing a soldier in fighting trim.
‘I am glad that you have come just now,’ she said. ‘I have a whole hour to spare, and I can show you all over the place. But first come into my parlour and have some tea.’
She led him into another room, where Biblical prints were not in evidence—if they had ever decorated the walls they were now replaced by Sprats’s own possessions. He recognised several water-colour drawings of Simonstower, and one of his own house and park at Saxonstowe.
‘These are the work of Cyprian Damerel—Lucian’s father, you know,’ said Sprats, as he uttered an exclamation of pleasure at the sight of familiar things. ‘Lucian gave them to me. I like that one of Saxonstowe Park—I have so often seen that curious atmospheric effect amongst the trees in early autumn. I am very fond of my pictures and my household gods—they bring Simonstower closer to me.’
‘But why, if you are so fond of it, did you leave it?’ he asked, as he took the chair which she pointed out to him.
‘Oh, because I wanted to work very hard!’ she said, busying herself with the tea-cups. ‘You see, my father married Lucian Damerel’s aunt—a very dear, nice, pretty woman—and I knew she would take such great care of him that I could be spared. So I went in for nursing, having a natural bent that way, and after three or four years of it I came here; and here I am, absolute she-dragon of the establishment.’
‘Is it very hard work?’ he asked, as he took a cup of tea from her hands.
‘Well, it doesn’t seem to affect me very much, does it?’ she answered. ‘Oh yes, sometimes it is, but that’s good for one. You must have worked hard yourself, Lord Saxonstowe.’
Saxonstowe blushed under his tan.
‘I look all right too, don’t I?’ he said, laughing. ‘I agree with you that it’s good for one, though. I’ve thought since I came back that—— ’ He paused and did not finish the sentence.
‘That it would do a lot of people whom you’ve met a lot of good if they had a little hardship and privation to go through,’ she said, finishing it for him. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t let them off with a little,’ he said. ‘I’d give them—some of them, at any rate—a good deal. Perhaps I’m not quite used to it, but I can’t stand this sort of life—I should go all soft and queer under it.’
‘Well, you’re not obliged to endure it at all,’ said Sprats. ‘You can clear out of town whenever you please and go to Saxonstowe—it is lovely in summer.’
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I’m going there soon. I—I don’t think town life quite appeals to me.’
‘I suppose that you will go off to some waste place of the earth again, sooner or later, won’t you?’ she said. ‘I should think that if one once tastes that sort of thing one can’t very well resist the temptation. What made you wish to explore?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘I always wanted to travel when I was a boy, but I never got any chance. Then the title came to me rather unexpectedly, you know, and when I found that I could indulge my tastes—well, I indulged them.’
‘And you prefer the desert to the drawing-room?’ she said, watching him.
‘Lots!’ he said fervently. ‘Lots!’
Sprats smiled.
‘I should advise you,’ she said, ‘to cut London the day your book appears. You’ll be a lion, you know.’
‘Oh, but!’ he exclaimed, ‘you don’t quite recognise what sort of book it is. It’s not an exciting narrative—no bears, or Indians, or scalpings, you know. It’s—well, it’s a bit dry—scientific stuff, and so on.’
Sprats smiled the smile of the wise woman and shook her head.
‘It doesn’t matter what it is—dry or delicious, dull or enlivening,’ she remarked sagely, ‘the people who’ll lionise you won’t read it, though they’ll swear to your face that they sat up all night with it. You’ll see it lying about, with the pages all cut and a book-marker sticking out, but most of the people who’ll rave to your face about it wouldn’t be able to answer any question that you asked them concerning it. Lionising is an amusing feature of social life in England—if you don’t like the prospect of it, run away.’
‘I shall certainly run,’ he answered. ‘I will go soon. I think, perhaps, that you exaggerate my importance, but I don’t want to incur any risk—it isn’t pleasant to be stared at, and pointed out, and all that sort of—of——’
‘Of rot!’ she said. ‘No—it isn’t, to some people. To other people it seems quite a natural thing. It never seemed to bother Lucian Damerel, for example. You cannot realise the adulation which was showered upon him when he first flashed into the literary heavens. All the women were in love with him; all the girls love-sick because of his dark face and wondrous hair; he was stared at wherever he went; and he might have breakfasted, lunched, and dined at somebody else’s expense every day.’
‘And he liked—that?’ asked Saxonstowe.
‘It’s a bit difficult,’ answered Sprats, ‘to know what Lucian does like. He plays lion to perfection. Have you ever been to the Zoo and seen a real first-class, AI diamond-of-the-first-water sort of lion in his cage?—especially when he is filled with meat? Well, you’ll have noticed that he gazes with solemn eyes above your head—he never sees you at all—you aren’t worth it. If he should happen to look at you, he just wonders why the devil you stand there staring at him, and his eyes show a sort of cynical, idle contempt, and become solemn and ever-so-far-away again. Lucian plays lion in that way beautifully. He looks out of his cage with eyes that scorn the miserable wondering things gathered open-mouthed before him.’
‘Does he live in a cage?’ asked Saxonstowe.
‘We all live in cages,’ answered Sprats. ‘You had better hang up a curtain in front of yours if you don’t wish the crowd to stare at you. And now come—I will show you my children.’
Saxonstowe followed her all over the house with exemplary obedience, secretly admiring her mastery of detail, her quickness of perception, and the motherly fashion in which she treated her charges. He had never been in a children’s hospital before, and he saw some sights that sent him back to Sprats’s parlour a somewhat sad man.
‘I dare say you get used to it,’ he said, ‘but the sight of all that pain must be depressing. And the poor little mites seem to bear it well—bravely, at any rate.’
Sprats looked at him with the speculative expression which always came into her face when she was endeavouring to get at some other person’s real self.
‘So you, too, are fond of children?’ she said, and responded cordially to his suggestion that he might perhaps be permitted to come again. He went away with a cheering consciousness that he had had a glimpse into a little world wherein good work was being done—it had seemed a far preferable world to that other world of fashion and small things which seethed all around it.
On the following day Saxonstowe spent the better part of the morning in a toy-shop. He proved a good customer, but a most particular one. He had counted heads at the children’s hospital: there were twenty-seven in all, and he wanted twenty-seven toys for them. He insisted on a minute inspection of every one, even to the details of the dolls’ clothing and the attainments of the mechanical frogs, and the young lady who attended upon him decided that he was a nice gentleman and free-handed, but terribly exacting. His bill, however, yielded her a handsome commission, and when he gave her the address of the hospital she felt sure that she had spent two hours in conversation—on the merits of toys—with a young duke, and for the rest of the day she entertained her shopmates with reminiscences of the supposed ducal remarks, none of which, according to her, had been of a very profound nature.
Saxonstowe wondered how soon he might call at the hospital again—at the end of a week he found himself kicking his heels once more in the room wherein Noah, his family, and his animals trooped gaily down the slopes of Mount Ararat. When Sprats came in she greeted him with an abrupt question.
‘Was it you who sent a small cart-load of toys here last week?’ she asked.
‘I certainly did send some toys for the children,’ he answered.
‘I thought it must be your handiwork,’ she said. ‘Thank you. You will now receive a beautifully written, politely worded letter of thanks, inscribed on thick, glossy paper by the secretary—do you mind?’
‘Yes, I do mind!’ he exclaimed. ‘Please don’t tell the secretary—what has he or she to do with it?’
‘Very well, I won’t,’ she said. ‘But I will give you a practical tip: when you feel impelled to buy toys for children in hospital, buy something breakable and cheap—it pleases the child just as much as an expensive plaything. There was one toy too many,’ she continued, laughing, ‘so I annexed that for myself—a mechanical spider. I play with it in my room sometimes. I am not above being amused by small things.’
After this Saxonstowe became a regular visitor—he was accepted by some of the patients as a friend and admitted to their confidences. They knew him as ‘the Lord,’ and announced that ‘the Lord’ had said this, or done that, in a fashion which made other visitors, not in the secret, wonder if the children were delirious and had dreams of divine communications. He sent these new friends books, and fruit, and flowers, and the house was gayer and brighter that summer than it had ever been since the brass plate was placed on its door.
One afternoon Saxonstowe arrived with a weighty-looking parcel under his arm. Once within Sprats’s parlour he laid it down on the table and began to untie the string. She shook her head.
‘You have been spending money on one or other of my children again,’ she said. ‘I shall have to stop it.’
‘No,’ he said, with a very shy smile. ‘This—is—for you.’
‘For me?’ Her eyes opened with something like incredulous wonder. ‘What an event!’ she said; ‘I so seldom have anything given to me. What is it?—quick, let me see—it looks like an enormous box of chocolate.’
‘It’s—it’s the book,’ he answered, shamefaced as a schoolboy producing his first verses. ‘There! that’s it,’ and he placed two formidable-looking volumes, very new and very redolent of the bookbinder’s establishment, in her hands. ‘That’s the very first copy,’ he added. ‘I wanted you to have it.’
Sprats sat down and turned the books over. He had written her name on the fly-leaf of the first volume, and his own underneath it. She glanced at the maps, the engravings, the diagrams, the scientific tables, and a sudden flush came across her face. She looked up at him.
‘I should be proud if I had written a book like this!’ she said. ‘It means—such a lot of—well, of manliness, somehow. Thank you. And it is really published at last?’
‘It is not supposed to be published until next Monday,’ he answered. ‘The reviewers’ copies have gone out to-day, but I insisted on having a copy supplied to me before any one handled another—I wanted you to have the very first.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Because I think you’ll understand it,’ he said; ‘and you’ll read it.’
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I shall read it, and I think I shall understand. And now all the lionising will begin.’
Saxonstowe shrugged his shoulders.
‘If the people who really know about these things think I have done well, I shall be satisfied,’ he said. ‘I don’t care a scrap about the reviews in the popular papers—I am looking forward with great anxiety to the criticisms of two or three scientific periodicals.’
‘You were going to run away from the lionising business,’ she said. ‘When are you going?—there is nothing to keep you, now that the book is out.’
Saxonstowe looked at her. He was standing at the edge of the table on which she had placed the two volumes of his book; she was sitting in a low chair at its side. She looked up at him; she saw his face grow very grave.
‘I didn’t think anything would keep me,’ he said, ‘but I find that something is keeping me. It is you. Do you know that I love you?’
The colour rose in her cheeks, and her eyes left his for an instant; then she faced him.
‘I did not know it until just now,’ she answered, laying her hand on one of the volumes at her side. ‘I knew it then, because you wished me to have the first-fruits of your labour. I was wondering about it—as we talked.’
‘Well?’ he said.
‘Will you let me be perfectly frank with you?’ she said. ‘Are you sure about yourself in this?’
‘I am sure,’ he answered. ‘I love you, and I shall never love any other woman. Don’t think that I say that in the way in which I dare say it’s been said a million times—I mean it.’
‘Yes,’ she said; ‘I understand. You wouldn’t say anything that you didn’t mean. And I am going to be equally truthful with you. I don’t think it’s wrong of me to tell you that I have a feeling for you which I have not, and never had, for any other man that I have known. I could depend on you—I could go to you for help and advice, and I should rely on your strength. I have felt that since we met, as man and woman, a few weeks ago.’
‘Then——’ he began.
‘Stop a bit,’ she said, ‘let me finish. I want to be brutally plain-spoken—it’s really best to be so. I want you to know me as I am. I have loved Lucian Damerel ever since he and I were boy and girl. It is, perhaps, a curious love—you might say that there is very much more of a mother’s, or a sister’s, love in it than a wife’s. Well, I don’t know. I do know that it nearly broke my heart when I heard of his marriage to Haidee. I cannot tell—I have never been able to tell—in what exact way it was that I wanted him, but I did not want her to have him. Perhaps all that, or most of that, feeling has gone. I have tried hard, by working for others, to put all thought of another woman’s husband out of my mind. But the thought of Lucian is still there—it may, perhaps, always be there. While it is—even in the least, the very least degree—you understand, do you not?’ she said, with a sudden note of eager appeal breaking into her voice.
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I understand.’
She rose to her feet and held out her hand to him.
‘Then don’t let us try to put into words what we can feel much better,’ she said, smiling. ‘We are friends—always. And you are going away.’
The children found out that for some time at any rate there would be no more visits from the Lord. But the toys and the books, the fruit and flowers, came as regularly as ever, and the Lord was not forgotten.
During the greater part of that summer Lucian had been working steadily on two things: the tragedy which Mr. Harcourt was to produce at the Athen?um in December, and a new poem which Mr. Robertson intended to publish about the middle of the autumn season. Lucian was flying at high game in respect of both. The tragedy was intended to introduce something of the spirit and dignity of Greek art to the nineteenth-century stage—there was to be nothing common or mean in connection with its production; it was to be a gorgeous spectacle, but one of high distinction, and Lucian’s direct intention in writing it was to set English dramatic art on an elevation to which it had never yet been lifted. The poem was an equally ambitious attempt to revive the epic; its subject, the Norman Conquest, had filled Lucian’s mind since boyhood, and from his tenth year onwards he had read every book and document procurable which treated of that fascinating period. He had begun the work during his Oxford days; the greater part of it was now in type, and Mr. Robertson was incurring vast expense in the shape of author’s corrections. Lucian polished and rewrote in a fashion that was exasperating; his publisher, never suspecting that so many alterations would be made, had said nothing about them in drawing up a formal agreement, and he was daily obliged to witness a disappearance of profits.
‘What a pity that you did not make all your alterations and corrections before sending the manuscript to press!’ he exclaimed one day, when Lucian called with a bundle of proofs which had been hacked about in such a fashion as to need complete resetting. ‘It would have saved a lot of trouble—and expense.’
Lucian stared at him with the eyes of a young owl, round and wondering.
‘How on earth can you see what a thing looks like until it’s in print?’ he said irritably. ‘What are printers for?’
‘Just so—just so!’ responded the publisher. ‘But really, you know, this book is being twice set—every sheet has had to be pulled to pieces, and it adds to the expense.’
Lucian’s eyes grew rounder than ever.
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he answered. ‘That is your province—don’t bother me about it.’
Robertson laughed. He was beginning to find out, after some experience, that Lucian was imperturbable on certain points.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘By the bye, how much more copy is there—or if copy is too vulgar a word for your mightiness, how many more lines or verses?’
‘About four hundred and fifty lines,’ answered Lucian.
‘Say another twenty-four pages,’ said Robertson. ‘Well, it runs now to three hundred and fifty—that means that it’s going to be a book of close upon four hundred pages.’
‘Well?’ questioned Lucian.
‘I was merely thinking that it is a long time since the public was asked to buy a volume containing four hundred pages of blank verse,’ remarked the publisher. ‘I hope this won’t frighten anybody.’
‘You make some very extraordinary remarks,’ said Lucian, with unmistakable signs of annoyance. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, nothing, nothing!’ answered Robertson, who was on sufficient terms of intimacy with Lucian to be able to chaff him a little. ‘I was merely thinking of trade considerations.’
‘You appear to be always “merely thinking” of something extraordinary,’ said Lucian. ‘What can trade considerations have to do with the length of my poem?’
‘What indeed?’ said the publisher, and began to talk of something else. But when Lucian had gone he looked rather doubtfully at the pile of interlineated proof, and glanced from it to the thin octavo with which the new poet had won all hearts nearly five years before. ‘I wish it had been just a handful of gold like that!’ he said to himself. ‘Four hundred pages of blank verse all at one go!—it’s asking a good deal, unless it catches on with the old maids and the dowagers, like the Course of Time and the Epic of Hades. Well, we shall see; but I’d rather have some of your earlier lyrics than this weighty performance, Lucian, my boy—I would indeed!’
Lucian finished his epic before the middle of July, and fell to work on the final stages of his tragedy. He had promised to read it to the Athen?um company on the first day of the coming October, and there was still much to do in shaping and revising it. He began to feel impatient and irritable; the sight of his desk annoyed him, and he took to running out of town into the country whenever the wish for the shade of woods and the peacefulness of the lanes came upon him. Before the end of the month he felt unable to work, and he repaired to Sprats for counsel and comfort.
‘I don’t know how or why it is,’ he said, telling her his troubles, ‘but I don’t feel as if I had a bit of work left in me. I haven’t any power of concentration left—I’m always wanting to be doing something else. And yet I haven’t worked very hard this year, and we have been away a great deal. It’s nearly time for going away again, too—I believe Haidee has already made some arrangement.’
‘Lucian,’ said Sprats, ‘why don’t you go down to Simonstower? They would be so glad to have you at the vicarage—there’s heaps of room. And just think how jolly it is there in August and September—I wish I could go!’
Lucian’s face lighted up—some memory of the old days had suddenly fired his soul. He saw the familiar scenes once more under the golden sunlight—the grey castle and its Norman keep, the winding river, the shelving woods, and, framing all, the gold and purple of the moorlands.
‘Simonstower!’ he exclaimed. ‘Yes, of course—it’s Simonstower that I want. We’ll go at once. Sprats, why can’t you come too?’
Sprats shook her head.
‘I can’t,’ she answered. ‘I shall have a holiday in September, but I can’t take a single day before. I’m sure it will do you good if you go to Simonstower, Lucian—the north-country air will brighten you up. You haven’t been there for four years, and the sight of the old faces and places will act like a tonic.’
‘I’ll arrange it at once,’ said Lucian, delighted at the idea, and he went off to announce his projects to Haidee. Haidee looked at him incredulously.
‘Whatever are you thinking of, Lucian?’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember that we’re cramful of engagements from the beginning of August to the end of September?’ She recited a list of arrangements already entered into, which included a three-weeks’ sojourn on Eustace Darlington’s steam-yacht, and a fortnight’s stay at his shooting-box in the Highlands. ‘Had you forgotten?’ she asked.
‘I believe I had!’ he replied; ‘we seem to have so many engagements. Look here: do you know, I think I’ll back out. I must have this tragedy finished for Harcourt and his people by October, and I can’t do it if I go rushing about from one place to another. I think I shall go down to Simonstower and have a quiet time and finish my work there—I’ll explain it all to Darlington.’
‘As you please,’ she answered. ‘Of course, I shall keep my engagements.’
‘Oh, of course,’ he said. ‘You won’t miss me, you know. I suppose there are lots of other people going?’
‘I suppose so,’ she replied carelessly, and there was an end of the conversation. Lucian explained to Darlington that night that he would not be able to keep his engagement, and set forth the reasons with a fine air of devotion to business. Darlington sympathised, and applauded Lucian’s determination—he knew, he said, what a lot depended upon the success of the new play, and he’d no doubt Lucian wouldn’t feel quite easy until it was all in order. After that he must have a long rest—it would be rather good fun to winter in Egypt. Lucian agreed, and next day made his preparations for a descent upon Simonstower. At heart he was rather more than glad to escape the yacht, the Highland shooting-box, and the people whom he would have met. He cared little for the sea, and hated any form of sport which involved the slaying of animals or birds; the thought of Simonstower in the last weeks of summer was grateful to him, and all that he now wanted was to find himself in a Great Northern express gliding out of King’s Cross, bound for the moorlands.
He went round to the hospital on the morning of his departure, and told Sprats with the glee of a schoolboy who is going home for the holidays, that he was off that very afternoon. He was rattling on as to his joy when Sprats stopped him.
‘And Haidee?’ she asked. ‘Does she like it?’
‘Haidee?’ he said. ‘But Haidee is not going. She’s joining a party on Darlington’s yacht, and they’re going round the coast to his place in the Highlands. I was to have gone, you know, but really I couldn’t have worked, and I must work—it’s absolutely necessary that the play should be finished by the end of September.’
Sprats looked anxious and troubled.
‘Look here, Lucian,’ she said, ‘do you think it’s quite right to leave Haidee like that?—isn’t it rather neglecting your duties?’
‘But why?’ he asked, with such sincerity that it became plain to Sprats that the question had never even entered his mind. ‘Haidee’s all right. It would be beastly selfish on my part if I dragged her down to Simonstower for nearly two months—you know, she doesn’t care a bit for the country, and there would be no society for her. She needs sea air, and three weeks on Darlington’s yacht will do her a lot of good.’
‘Who are the other people?’ asked Sprats.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Lucian replied. ‘The usual Darlington lot, I suppose. Between you and me, Sprats, I’m glad I’m not going. I get rather sick of that sort of thing—it’s too much of a hot-house existence. And I don’t care about the people one meets, either.’
‘And yet you let Haidee meet them!’ Sprats exclaimed. ‘Really, Lucian, you grow more and more paradoxical.’
‘But Haidee likes them,’ he insisted. ‘That’s just the sort of thing she does like. And if she likes it, why shouldn’t she have it?’
‘You are a curious couple,’ said Sprats.
‘I think we are to be praised for our common-sense view of things,’ he said. ‘I am often told that I am a dreamer—you’ve said so yourself, you know—but in real, sober truth, I’m an awfully matter-of-fact sort of person. I don’t live on illusions and ideals and things—I worship the God of the Things that Are!’
Sprats gazed at him as a mother might gaze at a child who boasts of having performed an impossible task.
‘Oh, you absolute baby!’ she said. ‘Is your pretty head stuffed with wool or with feathers? Paragon of Common-Sense! Compendium of all the Practical Qualities! I wonder I don’t shrivel in your presence like a bit of bacon before an Afric sun. Do you think you’ll catch your train?’
‘Not if I stay here listening to abuse. Seriously, Sprats, it’s all right—about Haidee, I mean,’ he said appealingly.
‘If you were glissading down a precipice at a hundred miles a minute, Lucian, everything would be all right with you until your head broke off or you snapped in two,’ she answered. ‘You’re the Man who Never Stops to Think. Go away and be quiet at Simonstower—you’re mad to get there, and you’ll probably leave it within a week.’
In making this calculation, however, Sprats was wrong. Lucian went down to Simonstower and stayed there three weeks. He divided his time between the vicarage and the farm; he renewed his acquaintance with the villagers, and had forgotten nothing of anything relating to them; he spent the greater part of the day in the open air, lived plainly and slept soundly, and during the second week of his stay he finished his tragedy. Mr. Chilverstone read it and the revised proofs of the epic; as he had a great liking for blank verse, rounded periods, and the grand manner, he prophesied success for both. Lucian drank in his applause with eagerness—he had a great belief in his old tutor’s critical powers, and felt that whatever he stamped with the seal of his admiration must be good. He had left London in somewhat depressed and irritable spirits because of his inability to work; now that the work was completed and praised by a critic in whom he had good reason to repose the fullest confidence, his spirits became as light and joyous as ever.
Lucian would probably have remained longer at Simonstower but for a chance meeting with Lord Saxonstowe, who had got a little weary of the ancestral hall and had conceived a notion of going across to Norway and taking a long walking tour in a district well out of the tourist track. He mentioned this to Lucian, and—why, he could scarcely explain to himself at the moment—asked him to go with him. Lucian’s imagination was fired at the mere notion of exploring a country which he had never seen before, and he accepted the invitation with fervour. A week later they sailed from Newcastle, and for a whole month they spent nights and days side by side amidst comparative solitudes. Each began to understand the other, and when, just before the end of September, they returned to England, they had become firm friends, and were gainers by their pilgrimage in more ways than one.
When Lucian went back to town Haidee was winding up a short round of visits in the North; she rejoined him a week later in high spirits and excellent health. Everything had been delightful; everybody had been nice to her; no end of people had talked about Lucian and his new play—she was dreaming already of the glories of the first night and of the radiance which would centre about herself as the wife of the brilliant young author. Lucian had returned from Norway in equally good health and spirits; he was confident about the tragedy and the epic: he and his wife therefore settled down to confront an immediate prospect of success and pleasure. Haidee resumed her usual round of social gaieties; Lucian was much busied with rehearsals at the theatre and long discussions with Harcourt; neither had a care nor an anxiety, and the wheels of their little world moved smoothly.
Saxonstowe, who had come back to town for a few weeks before going abroad again, took to calling a good deal at the little house in Mayfair. He had come to understand and to like Lucian, and though they were as dissimilar in character as men of different temperament can possibly be, a curious bond of friendship, expressed in tacit acquiescence rather than in open avowal, sprang up between them. Each had a respect for the other’s world—a respect which was amusing to Sprats, who, watching them closely, knew that each admired the other in a somewhat sheepish, schoolboy fashion. Lucian, being the less reserved of the two, made no secret of his admiration of the man who had done things the doing of which necessitated bravery, endurance, and self-denial. He was a fervent worshipper—almost to a pathetic extreme—of men of action: the sight of soldiers marching made his toes tingle and his eyes fill with the moisture of enthusiasm; he had been so fascinated by the mere sight of a great Arctic explorer that he had followed him from one town to another during a lecturing tour, simply to stare at him and conjure up for himself the scenes and adventures through which the man had passed. He delighted in hearing Saxonstowe talk about his life in the deserts, and enjoyed it all the more because Saxonstowe had small gift of language and told his tale with the blushes of a schoolboy who hates making a fuss about anything that he has done. Saxonstowe, on his part, had a sneaking liking, amounting almost to worship, for men who live in a world of dreams—he had no desire to live in such a world himself, but he cherished an immense respect for men who, like Lucian, could create. Sometimes he would read a page of the new epic and wonder how on earth it all came into Lucian’s head; Lucian at the same moment was probably turning over the leaves of Saxonstowe’s book and wondering how a man could go through all that that laconic young gentleman had gone through and yet come back with a stiff upper lip and a smile.
‘You and Lucian Damerel appear to have become something of friends,’ Lady Firmanence remarked to her nephew when he called upon her one day. ‘I don’t know that there’s much in common between you.’
‘Perhaps that is why we are friends,’ said Saxonstowe. ‘You generally do get on with people who are a bit different to yourself, don’t you?’
Lady Firmanence made no direct answer to this question.
‘I’ve no doubt Lucian is easy enough to get on with,’ she said dryly. ‘The mischief in him, Saxonstowe, is that he’s too easy-going about everything. I suppose you know, as you’re a sort of friend of the family, that a good deal is being said about Mrs. Damerel and Eustace Darlington?’
‘No,’ said Saxonstowe; ‘I’m not in the way to hear that sort of thing.’
‘I don’t know that you’re any the better for being out of the way. I am in the way. There’s a good deal being said,’ Lady Firmanence retorted with some asperity. ‘I believe some of you young men think it a positive crime to listen to the smallest scrap of gossip—it’s nothing of the sort. If you live in the world you must learn all you can about the people who make up the world.’
Saxonstowe nodded. His eyes fixed themselves on a toy dog which snored and snuffled at Lady Firmanence’s feet.
‘And in this particular case?’ he said.
‘Why was Lucian Damerel so foolish as to go off in one direction while his wife went in another with the man she originally meant to marry?’ inquired Lady Firmanence. ‘Come now, Saxonstowe, would you have done that?’
‘No,’ he said hesitatingly, ‘I don’t think I should; but then, you see, Damerel looks at things differently. I don’t think he would ever give the foolishness of it a thought, and he would certainly think no evil—he’s as guileless as a child.’
‘Well,’ remarked Lady Firmanence, ‘I don’t admire him any the more for that. I’m a bit out of love with grown-up children. If Lucian Damerel marries a wife he should take care of her. Why, she was three weeks on Darlington’s yacht, and three weeks at his place in Scotland (of course there were lots of other people there too, but even then it was foolish), and he was with her at two or three country houses in Northumberland later on—I met them at one myself.’
‘Lucian and his wife,’ said Saxonstowe, ‘are very fond of having their own way.’
Lady Firmanence looked at her nephew out of her eye-corners.
‘Oh!’ she said, with a caustic irony, ‘you think so, do you? Well, you know, young people who like to have their own way generally come to grief. To my mind, your new friends seem to be qualifying for trouble.’
Saxonstowe studied the pattern of the carpet and traced bits of it out with his stick.
‘Do you think men like Damerel have the power of reckoning things up?’ he said, suddenly looking at his aunt with a quick, appealing glance. ‘I don’t quite understand these things, but he always seems to me to be a bit impatient of anything that has to do with everyday life, and yet he’s keen enough about it in one way. He’s a real good chap, you know—kindly natured and open-hearted and all that. You soon find that in him. And I don’t believe he ever had a wrong thought of anybody—he’s a sort of confiding trust in other people that’s a bit amusing, even to me, and I haven’t seen such an awful lot of the world. But——’ He came to a sudden pause and shook his head. Lady Firmanence laughed.
‘Yes, but,’ she repeated. ‘That “but” makes all the difference. But this is Lucian Damerel—he is a child who sits in a gaily caparisoned, comfortably appointed boat which has been launched on a wide river that runs through a mighty valley. He has neither sail nor rudder, and he is so intent on the beauty of the scenery through which he is swept that he does not recognise their necessity. His eyes are fixed on the rose-flushed peak of a far-off mountain, the glitter of the sunshine on a dancing wave, or on the basket of provisions which thoughtful hands have put in the boat. It may be that the boat will glide to its destination in safety, and land him on the edge of a field of velvety grass wherein he can lie down in peace to dream as long as he pleases. But it also may be that it will run on a rock in mid-stream and knock his fool’s paradise into a cocked hat—and what’s going to happen then?’ asked Lady Firmanence.
‘Lots of things might happen,’ said Saxonstowe, smiling triumphantly at the thought of beating his clever relative at her own game. ‘He might be able to swim, for example. He might right the boat, get into it again, and learn by experience that one shouldn’t go fooling about without a rudder. Some other chap might come along and give him a hand. Or the river might be so shallow that he could walk ashore with no more discomfort than he would get from wet feet.’
Lady Firmanence pursed her lips and regarded her nephew with a fixed stare which lasted until the smile died out of his face.
‘Or there might be a crocodile, or an alligator, at hand, which he could saddle and bridle, and convert into a park hack,’ she said. ‘There are indeed many things which might happen; what I’m chiefly concerned about is, what would happen if Lucian’s little boat did upset? I confess that I should know Lucian Damerel much more thoroughly, and have a more accurate conception of him, if I knew exactly what he would say and do when the upsetting happened. There is no moment in life, Saxonstowe, wherein a man’s real self, real character, real quality, is so severely tested and laid bare as that unexpected one in which Fortune seizes him by the scruff of his neck and bundles him into the horsepond of adversity—it’s what he says and does when he comes up spluttering that stamps him as a man or a mouse.’
Saxonstowe felt tolerably certain of what any man would say under the circumstances alluded to by Lady Firmanence, but as she seemed highly delighted with her similes and her epigrams, he said nothing of his convictions, and soon afterwards took his departure.
On a certain Monday morning in the following November, Lucian’s great epic was published to the trade and the world, and the leading newspapers devoted a good deal of their space to remarking upon its merits, its demerits, and its exact relation to literature. Lucian found a pile of the London morning dailies of the superior sort awaiting his attention when he descended to his breakfast-room, and he went through them systematically. When he had made an end of them he looked across the table at Haidee, and he smiled in what she thought a rather queer way.
‘I say, Haidee!’ he exclaimed, ‘these reviews are—well, they’re not very flattering. There are six mighty voices of the press here,—Times, Telegraph, Post, News, Chronicle, and Standard—and there appears to be a strange unanimity of opinion in their pronunciations. The epic poem seems to be at something of a discount.’
The reviews, in fact, were not couched in an enthusiastic vein—taking them as a whole they were cold. There was a ring of disappointment in them. One reviewer, daring to be bold, plain, and somewhat brutal, said there was more genuine poetry in any one page of any of Mr. Damerel’s previous volumes than in the whole four hundred of his new one. Another openly declared his belief that the poem was the result of long years of careful, scholarly labour, of constant polishing, resetting, and rewriting; it smelled strongly of the lamp, but the smell of the lamp was not in evidence in the fresh, free, passionate work which they had previously had from the same pen. Mr. Damerel’s history, said a third, was as accurate as his lines were polished; one learned almost as much of the Norman Conquest from his poem as from the pages of Freeman, but the spontaneity of his earliest work appeared to be wanting in his latest. Each of the six reviewers seemed to be indulging a sentimental sorrow for the Mr. Damerel of the earlier days; their criticisms had an undercurrent of regret that Lucian had chosen to explore another path than that which he had hitherto trodden in triumph. The consensus of opinion, as represented by the critics of the six morning newspapers lying on Lucian’s breakfast-table, amounted to this: that Mr. Damerel’s new work, unmistakably the production of a true poet though it was, did not possess the qualities of power and charm which had distinguished his previous volumes. And to show his exact meaning and make out a good case for himself, each critic hit upon the exasperating trick of reprinting those of Lucian’s earlier lines which made perpetual music in their own particular souls, pointing to them with a proud finger as something great and glorious, and hinting that they were samples of goods which they would have wished Mr. Damerel to supply for ever.
Lucian was disappointed and gratified; amused and annoyed. It was disappointing to find that the incense to which he had become accustomed was not offered up to him in the usual lavish fashion; but it was pleasing to hear the nice things said of what he had done and of what the critics believed him capable of doing. He was amused at the disappointment of the gentlemen who preferred Lucian the earlier to Lucian the later—and, after all, it was annoying to find one’s great effort somewhat looked askance at.
‘I’ve given them too much,’ he said, turning to considerations of breakfast with a certain amount of pity for himself. ‘I ought to have remembered that the stomach of this generation is a weak one—Tennyson was wise in giving his public the Idylls of the King in fragments—if he’d given his most fervent admirers the whole lot all at once they’d have had a surfeit. I should have followed his example, but I wanted to present the thing as a whole. And it is good, however they may damn it with faint praise.’
‘Does this mean that the book won’t sell?’ asked Haidee, who had gathered up the papers, and was glancing through the columns at the head of which Lucian’s name stood out in bold letters.
‘Sell? Why, I don’t think reviews make much difference to the sales of a book,’ answered Lucian. ‘I really don’t know—I suppose the people who bought all my other volumes will buy this.’
But as he ate his chop and drank his coffee he began to wonder what would happen if the new volume did not sell. He knew exactly how many copies of his other volumes had been sold up to the end of the previous half-year: it was no business instinct that made him carry the figures in his mind, but rather the instinct of the general who counts his prisoners, his captured eagles, and his dead enemies after a victory, and of the sportsman who knows that the magnitude of the winnings of a great racehorse is a tribute to the quality of its blood and bone and muscle. He recalled the figures of the last statement of account rendered to him by his publisher, and their comfortable rotundity cheered him. Whatever the critics might say, he had a public, and a public of considerable size. And after all, this was the first time the critics had not burned incense at his shrine—he forgave them with generous readiness, and ere he rose from the breakfast table was as full as ever of confident optimism. He felt as regards those particular reviewers as a man might feel who bids all and sundry to a great feast, and finds that the first-comers are taken aback by the grand proportions of the banquet—he pitied them for their lack of appetite, but he had no doubt of the verdict of the vast majority of later comers.
But if Lucian had heard some of the things that were said of him and his beloved epic in those holes and corners of literary life wherein one may hear much trenchant criticism plainly voiced, he would have felt less cock-sure about it and himself. It was the general opinion amongst a certain class of critics, who exercised a certain influence upon public thought, that there was too much of the workshop in his magnum opus. It was a magnificent block of marble that he had handled, but he had handled it too much, and the result would have been greater if he had not perpetually hovered about it with a hungry chisel and an itching mallet. It was perfect in form and language and proportion, but it wanted life and fire and rude strength.
‘It reminds me,’ said one man, discussing it in a club corner where coffee cups, liqueur glasses, and cigarettes were greatly in evidence, ‘of the statue of Galatea, flawless, immaculate, but neuter,—yes, neuter—as it appeared at the very moment ere Pygmalion’s love breathed into it the very flush, the palpitating, forceful tremor of life.’
This man was young and newly come to town—the others looked at him with shy eyes and tender sympathy, for they knew what it was that he meant to say, and they also knew, being older, how difficult it is to express oneself in words.
‘How very differently one sees things!’ sighed one of them. ‘Damerel’s new poem, now, reminds me of a copy of the Pink ’Un, carefully edited by a committee of old maids for the use of mixed classes in infant schools.’
The young man who used mellifluous words manifested signs of astonishment. He looked at the last speaker with inquiring eyes.
‘You mean——’ he began.
‘Ssh!’ whispered a voice at his elbow, ‘don’t ask him what he means at any time. He means that the thing’s lacking in virility.’
It may have been the man who likened Lucian’s epic to an emasculated and expurgated Pink ’Un to whom was due a subsequent article in the Porthole, wherein, under the heading Lucian the Ladylike, much sympathy was expressed with William the Conqueror at his sad fate in being sung by a nineteenth-century bard. There was much good-humoured satire in that article, but a good many of its points were sharply barbed, and Lucian winced under them. He was beginning to find by that time that his epic was not being greeted with the enthusiasm which he had anticipated for it; the great literary papers, the influential journals of the provinces, and the critics who wrote of it in two or three of the monthly reviews, all concurred that it was very fine as a literary exercise, but each deplored the absence of a certain something which had been very conspicuous indeed in his earlier volumes.
Lucian began to think things over. He remembered how his earlier work had been written—he recalled the free, joyous flush of thought, the impulse to write, the fertility and fecundity which had been his in those days, and he contrasted it all with the infinite pains which he had taken in polishing and revising the epic. It must have been the process of revision, he thought, which had sifted the fire and life out of the poem. He read and re-read passages of it—in spite of all that the critics said, they pleased him. He remembered the labour he had gone through, and valued the results by it. And finally, he put the whole affair away from him, feeling that he and his world were not in accord, and that he had better wrap himself in his cloak for a while. He spoke of the epic no more. But unfortunately for Lucian, there were monetary considerations at the back of the new volume, and when he discovered at the end of a month that the sales were small and already at a standstill, he felt a sudden, strange sinking at the heart. He looked at Mr. Robertson, who communicated this news to him, in a fashion which showed the publisher that he did not quite understand this apparently capricious neglect on the part of the public. Mr. Robertson endeavoured to explain matters to him.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘there is such a thing as a vogue, and the best man may lose it. I don’t say that you have lost yours, but here’s the fact that the book is at a standstill. The faithful bought as a religious duty as soon as we published; those of the outer courts won’t buy. For one thing, your poem is not quite in the fashion—what people are buying just now in poetry is patriotism up-to-date, with extension of the Empire, and Maxim-guns, and deification of the soldier and sailor, and so on.’
‘You talk as if there were fashions in poetry as there are in clothes,’ said Lucian, with some show of scornful indignation.
‘So there are, my dear sir!’ replied the publisher. ‘If you lived less in the clouds and more in the world of plain fact you would know it. You, for instance, would think it strange, if you had ever read it, to find Pollok’s poem, The Course of Time, selling to the extent of thousands and tens of thousands, or of Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy making almost as prominent a figure in the middle-class household as the Bible itself. Of course there’s a fashion in poetry, as there is in everything else. Byron was once the fashion; Mrs. Hemans was once the fashion; even Robert Montgomery was once fashionable. You yourself were very fashionable for three years—you see, if you’ll pardon me for speaking plainly, you were an interesting young man. You had a beautiful face; you were what the women call “interesting”; you aroused all the town by your romantic marriage—you became a personality. I think you’ve had a big run of it,’ concluded Mr. Robertson. ‘Why, lots of men come up and go down within two years—you’ve had four already.’
Lucian regarded him with grave eyes.
‘Do you think of me as of a rocket or a comet?’ he said. ‘If things are what you say they are, I wish I had never published anything. But I think you are wrong,’ and he went away to consider all that had been said to him. He decided, after some thought and reflection, that his publisher was not arguing on sound lines, and he assured himself for the hundredth time that the production of the tragedy would put everything right.
It was now very near to the day on which the tragedy was to be produced at the Athen?um, and both Lucian and Mr. Harcourt had been worried to the point of death by pressmen who wanted to know all about it. Chiefly owing to their persistency the public were now in possession of a considerable amount of information as to what it might expect to hear and see. It was to witness—that portion of it, at any rate, which was lucky enough to secure seats for the first night—an attempt to revive tragedy on the lines of pure Greek art. As this attempt was being made at the close of the nineteenth century, it was quite in accordance with everything that vast sums of money should be laid out on costumes, scenery, and accessories, and it was well known to the readers of the halfpenny newspapers that the production involved the employment of so many hundreds of supernumeraries, that so many thousands of pounds had been spent on the scenery, that certain realistic effects had been worked up at enormous cost, and that the whole affair, to put it in plain language, was a gigantic business speculation—nothing more nor less, indeed, than the provision of a gorgeous spectacular drama, full of life and colour and modern stage effects, which should be enthralling and commanding enough to attract the public until a handsome profit had been made on the outlay. But the words ‘an attempt to revive Tragedy on the lines of pure Greek Art’ looked well in print, and had a highly respectable sound, and the production of Lucian’s second tribute to the tragic muse was looked forward to with much interest by many people who ignored the fact that many thousands of pounds were being expended in placing it upon the stage.
At twelve o’clock on the night that witnessed the production of the tragedy, Lucian found himself one of a group of six men which had gathered together in Harcourt’s dressing-room. There was a blue haze of cigarette smoke all over the room; a decanter of whisky with syphons and glasses stood on a table in the centre; most of the men had already helped themselves to a drink. Lucian found a glass in his own hand, and sipped the mixture in it he recognised the taste of soda, and remembered in a vague fashion that he much preferred Apollinaris, but he said to himself, or something said to him, that it didn’t matter. His brain was whirling with the events of the night; he still saw, as in a dream, the misty auditorium as he had seen it from a box; the stage as he had seen it during a momentary excursion to the back of the dress-circle; the busy world behind the scenes where stage-carpenters sweated and swore, and the dust made one’s throat tickle. He recalled particular faces and heard particular voices; all the world and his wife had been there, and all the first-nighters, and all his friends, and he had spoken to a great many people. They all seemed to swim before him as in a dream, and the sound of their voices came, as it were, from the cylinder of a phonograph. He remembered seeing Mr. Chilverstone and his wife in the stalls—their faces were rapt and eloquent; in the stalls, too, he had seen Sprats and Lord Saxonstowe and Mrs. Berenson; he himself had spent some of the time with Haidee and Darlington and other people of their set in a box, but he had also wandered in and out of Harcourt’s dressing-room a good deal, and had sometimes spoken to Harcourt, and sometimes to his business manager. He had a vague recollection that he had faced the house himself at the end of everything, and had bowed several times in response to cheering which was still buzzing in his ears. The night was over.
He took another drink from the glass in his hand and looked about him; there was a curious feeling in his brain that he himself was not there, that he had gone away, or been left behind somewhere in the world’s mad rush, and that he was something else, watching a semblance of himself and the semblance’s surroundings. The scene interested and amused whatever it was that was looking on from his brain. Harcourt, free of his Greek draperies, now appeared in a shirt and trousers; he stood before the mirror on his dressing-table, brushing his hair—Lucian wondered where he bought his braces, which, looked at closely, revealed a peculiarly dainty pattern worked by hand. All the time that he was manipulating the brushes he was talking in disconnected sentences. Lucian caught some of them: ‘Little cutting here and there—that bit dragged—I’m told that was a fine effect—very favourable indeed—we shall see, we shall see!’—and he wondered what Harcourt was talking about. Near the actor-manager, in an easy-chair, sat an old gentleman of benevolent aspect, white-bearded, white-moustached, who wore a fur-lined cloak over his evening-dress. He was sucking at a cigar, and his hand, very fat and very white, held a glass at which he kept looking from time to time as if he were not quite certain what to do with it. He was reported to be at the back of Harcourt in financial matters, and he blinked and nodded at every sentence rapidly spoken by the actor-manager, but said nothing. Near him stood two men in cloaks and opera-hats, also holding glasses in their hands and smoking cigarettes—one of them Lucian recognised as a great critic, the other as a famous actor. At his own side, talking very rapidly, was the sixth man, Harcourt’s business-manager. Lucian suddenly realised that he was nodding his head at this man as if in intelligent comprehension of what he was saying, whereas he had not understood one word. He shook himself together as a man does who throws drowsiness aside.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I—I don’t think I was paying attention. I don’t know why, but I feel half-asleep.’
‘It’s the reaction,’ said Harcourt, hastily getting into his waistcoat and coat. ‘I feel tired out—if I had my way there should be no such thing as a first night—it’s a most wearing occasion.’
The famous critic turned with a smile.
‘Think of being able to lie in bed to-morrow with a sheaf of newspapers on your counterpane!’ he said pleasantly.
Then somehow, chatting disjointedly, they got out of the theatre. Harcourt and Lucian drove off in a hansom together—they were near neighbours.
‘What do you think?’ asked Lucian, as they drove away.
‘Oh, I think it went all right, as far as one could judge. There was plenty of applause—we shall see what is said to-morrow morning,’ answered Harcourt, with a mighty yawn. ‘They can’t say that it wasn’t magnificently staged,’ he added, with complacency. ‘And everything went like clockwork. I’ll tell you what—I wish I could go to sleep for the next six months!’
‘I believe I feel like that,’ responded Lucian. ‘Well, it is launched, at any rate.’
The old gentleman of the white beard and fur-lined cloak drove off in a private brougham, still nodding and blinking; the actor and the critic, lighting cigars, walked away together, and for some time kept silence.
‘What do you really think?’ said the actor at last. ‘You’re in rather a lucky position, you know, in respect of the fact that the Forum is a weekly and not a daily journal—it gives you more time to make up your mind. But you already have some notion of what your verdict will be?’
‘Yes,’ answered the critic. He puffed thoughtfully at his cigar. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think we have heard some beautiful poetry, beautifully recited. But I confess to feeling a certain sense of incongruity in the attempt to mingle Greek art with modern stage accessories. I think Damerel’s tragedy will read delightfully—in the study. But I counted several speeches to-night which would run to two and three pages of print, and I saw many people yawn. I fear that others will yawn.’
‘What would you give it?’ said the actor. ‘The other ran for twelve months.’
‘This,’ said the critic, ‘may run for one. But I think Harcourt will have to withdraw it within three weeks. I am bearing the yawns in mind.’
Lucian’s tragedy ran for precisely seventeen nights. The ‘attempt to revive Tragedy on the lines of pure Greek Art’ was a failure. Everybody thought the poetry very beautiful, but there were too many long speeches and too few opportunities for action and movement to satisfy a modern audience, and Harcourt quickly discovered that not even magnificent scenery and crowds of supernumeraries arrayed in garments of white and gold and purple and green will carry a play through. He was in despair from the second night onwards, for it became evident that a great deal of cutting was necessary, and on that point he had much trouble with Lucian, who, having revised his work to the final degree, was not disposed to dock it in order to please the gods in the gallery. The three weeks during which the tragedy ran were indeed weeks of storm and stress. The critics praised the poetry of the play, the staging, the scenery, the beauty and charm of everything connected with it, but the public yawned. In Lucian’s previous play there had been a warm, somewhat primitive human interest—it took those who saw it into the market-place of life, and appealed to everyday passions; in the new tragedy people were requested to spend some considerable time with the gods in Olympus amidst non-human characteristics and qualities. No one, save a few armchair critics like Mr. Chilverstone, wished to breathe this diviner air; the earlier audiences left the theatre cold and untouched. ‘It makes you feel,’ said somebody, ‘as if you had been sitting amongst a lot of marble statues all night and could do with something warming to the blood.’ In this way the inevitable end came. All the people who really wanted to see the tragedy had seen it within a fortnight; during the next few nights the audiences thinned and the advance bookings represented small future business, and before the end of the third week Harcourt had withdrawn the attempt to revive tragedy on the lines of pure Greek Art, and announced a revival of an adaptation from a famous French novel which had more than once proved its money-earning powers.
Lucian said little of this reverse of fortune—he was to all appearance unmoved by it; but Sprats, who could read his face as easily as she could read an open book, saw new lines write themselves there which told of surprise, disappointment, and anxiety, and she knew from his subdued manner and the unwonted reticence which he observed at this stage that he was thinking deeply of more things than one. In this she was right. Lucian by sheer force of circumstances had been dragged to a certain point of vantage whereat he was compelled to stand and look closely at the prospect which confronted him. When it became evident that the tragedy was a failure as a money-making concern, he remembered, with a sudden shock that subdued his temperamental buoyancy in an unpleasant fashion, that he had not foreseen such a contingency, and that he had confidently expected a success as great as the failure was complete. He sat down in his study and put the whole matter to himself in commendably brief fashion: for several months he and Haidee had been living and spending money on anticipation; it was now clear that the anticipation was not to be realised. The new volume was selling very slowly; the tragedy was a financial failure; very little in the way of solid cash would go from either to the right side of Lucian’s account at Darlington’s. And on the wrong side there must be an array of figures which he felt afraid to think of. He hurriedly cast up in his mind a vague account of those figures which memory presented to him; when he added the total to an equally vague guess of what Haidee might have spent, he recognised that he must be in debt to the bank to a considerable amount. He had never had the least doubt that the tragedy would prove a gold-mine—everybody had predicted it. Darlington had predicted it a hundred times, and Darlington was a keen, hard-headed business man. Well, the tragedy was a failure—to use the expressive term of the man in the street, ‘there was no money in it.’ It was to have replenished Lucian’s coffers—it left them yawning.
Easy-going and thoughtless though he was, Lucian had a constitutional dislike of owing money to any one, and the thought that he was now in debt to his bankers irritated and annoyed him. Analysed to a fine degree, it was not that he was annoyed because he owed money, but because he was not in a position to cancel the debt with a few scratches of his pen, and so relieve himself of the disagreeable necessity of recognising his indebtedness to any one. He had a temperamental dislike of unpleasant things, and especially of things which did not interest him—his inherited view of life had caused him to regard it as a walk through a beautiful garden under perpetual sunshine, with full liberty to pluck whatever flower appealed to his eye, eat whatever fruit tempted his palate, and turn into whatever side-walk took his fancy. Now that he was beginning to realise that it is possible to wander out of such a garden into a brake full of thorns and tangles, and to find some difficulty in escaping therefrom, his dislike of the unpleasant was accentuated and his irritation increased. But there was a certain vein of method and of order in him, and when he really recognised that he had got somewhere where he never expected to be, he developed a sincere desire to find out at once just where he was. The present situation had some intellectual charm for him: he had never in all his life known what it was to want money; it had always come to his hand as manna came to the Israelites in the desert—he wondered, as these unwonted considerations for the present and the future filled him, what would develop from it.
‘It will be best to know just where one really is,’ he thought, and he went off to find his wife and consult with her. It was seldom that he ever conversed with her on any matter of a practical nature; he had long since discovered that Haidee was bored by any topic that did not interest her, or that she did not understand. She scarcely grasped the meaning of the words which Lucian now addressed to her, simple though they were, and she stared at him with puzzled eyes.
‘You see,’ he said, feeling that his explanation was inept and crude, ‘I’d fully expected to have an awful lot of money out of the book and the play, and now, it seems, there won’t be so much as I had anticipated. Of course there will be Robertson’s royalties, and so on, but I don’t think they will amount to very much for the half-year, and——’
Haidee interrupted him.
‘Does it mean that you have spent all the money?’ she asked. ‘There was such a lot, yours and mine, together.’
Lucian felt powerless in the face of this apparently childish remark.
‘Not such a lot,’ he said. ‘And you know we had heavy expenses at first—we had to spend a lot on the house, hadn’t we?’
‘But will there be no more to spend?’ she asked. ‘I mean, has it all been spent? Because I want a lot of things, if we are to winter in Egypt as you proposed.’
Lucian laughed.
‘I’m afraid we shall not go to Egypt this winter,’ he said. ‘But don’t be alarmed; I think there will be money for new gowns and so on. No; what I just wished to know was—have you any idea of what you have spent since I transferred our accounts to Darlington’s bank?’
Haidee shrugged her shoulders. As a matter of fact she had used her cheque-book as she pleased, and had no idea of anything relating to her account except that she had drawn on it whenever she wished to do so.
‘I haven’t,’ she answered. ‘You told me I was to have a separate account, and, of course, I took you at your word.’
‘Well, it will be all right,’ said Lucian soothingly. ‘I’ll see about everything.’
He was going away, desirous of closing any discussion of the subject, but Haidee stopped him.
‘Of course it makes a big difference if your books don’t sell and people won’t go to your plays,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t bring money, does it?’
‘My dear child!’ exclaimed Lucian, ‘how terribly perturbed you look! One must expect an occasional dose of bad luck. The next book will probably sell by the tens of thousands, and the next play run for a hundred years!’
‘They were saying at Lady Firmanence’s the other afternoon that you had had your day,’ she said, looking inquiringly at him. ‘Do you think you have?’
‘I hope I have quite a big day to come yet,’ he answered quietly. ‘You shouldn’t listen to that sort of thing—about me.’
Then he left her and went back to his study and thought matters over once more. ‘I’ll find out exactly where I am,’ he thought at last, and he went out and got into a hansom and was driven to Lombard Street—he meant to ascertain his exact position at the bank. When he entered, with a request for an interview with Mr. Eustace Darlington, he found that the latter was out of town, and for a moment he thought of postponing his inquiries. Then he reflected that others could probably give him the information he sought, and he asked to see the manager. Five minutes after entering the manager’s private room he knew exactly how he stood with Messrs. Darlington and Darlington. He owed them close upon nine thousand pounds.
Lucian, bending over the slip of paper upon which the manager had jotted down a memorandum of the figures, trusted that the surprise which he felt was not being displayed in his features. He folded the paper, placed it in his pocket, thanked the manager for his courtesy, and left the bank. Once outside he looked at the paper again: the manager had made a distinction between Mr. Damerel’s account and his wife’s. Mr. Damerel’s was about eighteen hundred pounds in debt; Mrs. Damerel’s separate account had been drawn against to the extent of nearly seven thousand pounds. Lucian knew what had become of the money which he had spent, but he was puzzled beyond measure to account for the sums which Haidee had gone through within a few months.
Whenever he was in any doubt or perplexity as to practical matters Lucian invariably turned to Sprats, and he now called a hansom and bade the man drive to Bayswater. He knew, from long experience of her, that he could tell Sprats anything and everything, and that she would never once say ‘I told you so!’ or ‘I knew how it would turn out!’ or ‘Didn’t I warn you?’ She might scold him; she would almost certainly tell him that he was a fool; but she wouldn’t pose as a superior person, or howl over the milk which he had spilled—instead, she would tell him quietly what was the best thing to do.
He found her alone, and he approached her with the old boyish formula which she had heard a hundred times since he had discovered that she knew a great deal more about many things than he knew himself.
‘I say, Sprats, I’m in a bit of a hole!’ he began.
‘And, of course, you want me to pull you out. Well, what is it?’ she asked, gazing steadily at him and making a shrewd guess at the sort of hole into which he had fallen. ‘Do the usual, Lucian, tell everything.’
When he liked to be so, Lucian was the most candid of men. He laid bare his soul to Sprats on occasions like these in a fashion which would greatly have edified a confessor. He kept nothing back; he made no excuses; he added no coat of paint or touch of white-wash. He set forth a plain, unvarnished statement, without comment or explanation; it was a brutally clear and lucid account of facts which would have honoured an Old Bailey lawyer. It was one of his gifts, and Sprats never had an instance of it presented to her notice without wondering how it was that a man who could marshal facts so well and put them before others in such a crisp and concise fashion should be so unpractical in the stern business of life.
‘And that’s just how things are,’ concluded Lucian, ‘What do you advise me to do?’
‘There is one thing to be done at once,’ she answered, without hesitation. ‘You must get out of debt to Darlington; you must pay him every penny that you owe him as quickly as possible. You say you owe him nearly nine thousand pounds: very good. How much have you got towards paying that off?’
Lucian sighed deeply.
‘That’s just it!’ he exclaimed. ‘I don’t exactly know. Let me see, now; well, look here, Sprats—you won’t tell, of course—Mr. Pepperdine owes me a thousand—at least I mean to say I lent him a thousand, but then, don’t you know, he has always been so good to me, that——’
‘I think you had better chuck sentiment,’ she said. ‘Mr. Pepperdine has a thousand of yours. Very well—go on.’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he continued, ‘that I might now ask him for the money which my father left me. He has had full charge of that, you know. I’ve never known what it was. I dare say it was rather heavily dipped into during the time I was at Oxford, but there may be something left.’
‘Has he never told you anything about it?’ asked Sprats.
‘Very little. Indeed, I have never asked him anything—I could trust him with everything. It’s quite possible there may not be a penny; he may have spent it all on me before I came of age,’ said Lucian. ‘Still, if there is anything, it would go towards making up the nine thousand, wouldn’t it?’
‘Well, leave it out of the question at present,’ she answered. ‘What else have you coming in soon?’
‘Harcourt has two hundred of mine, and Robertson about three hundred.’
‘That’s another five hundred. Well, and the rest?’
‘I think that’s the lot,’ he said.
‘There are people who owe you money,’ she said. ‘Come, now, Lucian, you know there are.’
Lucian began to wriggle and to study the pattern of the hearthrug.
‘Oh! ah! well!’ he said, ‘I—I dare say I have lent other men a little now and then.’
‘Better say given,’ she interrupted. ‘I was only wondering if there was any considerable sum that you could get in.’
‘No, really,’ he answered.
‘Very well; then you’ve got fifteen hundred towards your nine thousand. That’s all, eh?’ she asked.
‘All that I know of,’ he said.
‘Well, there are other things,’ she remarked, with some emphasis. ‘There are your copyrights and your furniture, pictures, books, and curiosities.’
Lucian’s mouth opened and he uttered a sort of groan.
‘You don’t mean that I should—sell any of these?’ he said, looking at her entreatingly.
‘I’d sell the very clothes off my back before I’d owe a penny to Darlington!’ she replied. ‘Don’t be a sentimental ass, Lucian; books in vellum bindings, and pictures by old masters, and unique pots and pans and platters, don’t make life! Sell every blessed thing you’ve got rather than owe Darlington money. Pay him off, get out of that house, live in simpler fashion, and you’ll be a happier man.’
Lucian sat for some moments in silence, staring at the hearthrug. At last he looked up. Sprats saw something new in his face—or was it something old? something that she had not seen there for years? He looked at her for an instant, and then he looked away.
‘I should be very glad to live a simpler life,’ he said. ‘I dare say it seems rather sentimental and all that, you know, but of late I’ve had an awfully strong desire—sort of home-sickness, you know—for Simonstower. I’ve caught myself thinking of the old days, and—’ he paused, laughed in rather a forced way, and sitting straight up in the easy-chair in which he had been lounging, began to drum on its arms with his fingers. ‘What you say,’ he continued presently, ‘is quite right. I must not be in debt to Darlington—it has been a most kind and generous thing on his part to act as one’s banker in this fashion, but one mustn’t trespass on a friend’s kindness.’
Sprats flashed a swift, half-puzzled look upon him—he was looking another way, and did not see her.
‘Yes,’ he went on meditatively, ‘I’m sure you are right, Sprats, quite right. I’ll act on your advice. I’ll go down to Simonstower to-morrow and see if Uncle Pepperdine can let me have that thousand, and if there is any money of my own, and when I come back I’ll see if Robertson will buy my copyrights—I may be able to clear the debt off with all that. If not, I shall sell the furniture, books, pictures, everything, and Haidee and I will go to Italy, to Florence, and live cheaply. Ah! I know the loveliest palazzo on the Lung’ Arno—I wish we were there already. I’m sick of England.’
‘It will make a difference to Haidee, Lucian,’ said Sprats. ‘She likes England—and English society.’
‘Yes,’ he answered thoughtfully, ‘it will make a great difference. But she gave up a great deal for me when we married, and she’ll give up a great deal now. A woman will do anything for the man she loves,’ he added, with the air of a wiseacre. ‘It’s a sort of fixed law.’
Then he went away, and Sprats, after spending five minutes in deep thought, remembered her other children and hastened to them, wondering whether the most juvenile of the whole brood were quite so childish as Lucian. ‘It will go hard with him if his disillusion comes suddenly,’ she thought, and for the rest of the day she felt inclined to sadness.
Lucian went home in a good humour and a brighter flow of spirits. He was always thus when a new course of action suggested itself to him, and on this occasion he felt impelled to cheerfulness because he was meditating a virtuous deed. He wrote some letters, and then went to his club, and knowing that his wife had an engagement of her own that night, he dined with an old college friend whom he happened to meet in the smoking-room, and to whom before and after dinner he talked in lively fashion. It was late when he reached home, and he was then more cheerful than ever; the picture of the old palazzo on the Lung’ Arno had fastened itself upon the wall of his consciousness and compelled him to look at it. Haidee had just come in; he persuaded her to go with him into his study while he smoked a final cigarette, and there, full of his new projects, he told her what he intended to do. Haidee listened without saying a word in reply. Lucian took no notice of her silence: he was one of those people who imagine that they are addressing other people when they are in reality talking to themselves and require neither Yea nor Nay; he went on expatiating upon his scheme, and the final cigarette was succeeded by others, and Haidee still listened in silence.
‘You mean to do all that?’ she said at last. ‘To sell everything and go to Florence? And to live there?’
‘Certainly,’ he replied tranquilly; ‘it will be so cheap.’
‘Cheap?’ she exclaimed. ‘Yes—and dull! Besides, why this sudden fuss about owing Darlington money? It’s been owing for months, and you didn’t say anything.’
‘I expected to be able to put the account straight out of the money coming from the book and the play,’ he replied. ‘As they are not exactly gold-mines, I must do what I can. I can’t remain in Darlington’s debt in that way—it wouldn’t be fair to him.’
‘I don’t see that you need upset everything just for that,’ she said. ‘He has not asked you to put the account straight, has he?’
‘Of course not!’ exclaimed Lucian. ‘He never would; he’s much too good a fellow to do that sort of thing. But that’s just why I must get out of his debt—it’s taking a mean advantage of his kindness. I’m quite certain nobody else would have been so very generous.’
Haidee glanced at her husband out of the corners of her eyes: the glance was something like that with which Sprats had regarded him in the afternoon. He had not caught Sprats’s glance, and he did not catch his wife’s.
‘By the bye, Haidee,’ he said, after a short silence, ‘I called at Darlington’s to-day to find out just how we stand there, and the manager gave me the exact figures. You’ve rather gone it, you know, during the past half-year. You’ve gone through seven thousand pounds.’
Haidee looked at him wonderingly.
‘But I paid for the diamonds out of that, you know,’ she said. ‘They cost over six thousand.’
‘Good heavens!—did they?’ said Lucian. ‘I thought it was an affair of fifty pounds or so.’
‘How ridiculous!’ she exclaimed. ‘Diamonds—like these—for fifty pounds! You are the simplest child I ever knew.’
Lucian was endeavouring to recall the episode of the buying of the diamonds. He remembered at last that Haidee had told him that she had the opportunity of buying some diamonds for a much less sum than they were worth. He had thought it some small transaction, and had bidden her to consult somebody who knew something about that sort of thing.
‘I remember now,’ he said. ‘I told you to ask advice of some one who knew something about diamonds.’
‘And so I did,’ she answered. ‘I asked Darlington’s advice—he’s an authority—and he said I should be foolish to miss the chance. And then I said I didn’t know whether I dare draw a cheque for such an amount, and he laughed and said of course I might, and that he would arrange it with you.’
‘There you are!’ said Lucian triumphantly; ‘that’s just another proof of what I’ve been saying all along. Darlington’s such a kind-hearted sort of chap that he never said anything about it to me. Well, there’s no harm done there, any way, Haidee; in fact, it’s rather a relief to know that you’ve locked up six thousand in that way, because you can sell the diamonds and the money will go towards putting the account straight.’
Haidee looked at him narrowly: Lucian’s eyes were fixed on the curling smoke of his cigarette.
‘Sell my diamonds?’ she said in a low voice.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Lucian; ‘it’ll be rather jolly if there’s a profit on them. Oh yes, we must sell them. I can’t afford to lock up six thousand in precious stones, you know, and of course we can’t let Darlington pay for them. I wonder what they really are worth? What a lark if we got, say, ten thousand for them!’
Then he wandered into an account of how a friend of his had once picked up a ring at one of the stalls on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, and had subsequently sold it for just ten times as much as he had given for it. He laughed very much in telling his wife this story, for it had certain amusing points in it, and Haidee laughed too, but if Lucian had been endowed with a better understanding of women he would have known that she was neither amused nor edified.
Lucian came down to breakfast next morning equipped for his journey to Simonstower. He was in good spirits: the day was bright and frosty, and he was already dreaming of the village and the snow-capped hills beyond it. In dressing he had thought over his plans, and had decided that he was now quite reconciled to the drastic measures which Sprats had proposed. He would clear off all his indebtedness to Darlington, pay whatever bills might be owing, and make a fresh start, this time on the lines of strict economy, forethought, and prudence. He had very little conception of the real meaning of these important qualities, but he had always admired them in the abstract, and he now intended to form an intimate acquaintance with them.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, as he faced Haidee at the breakfast-table and spread out the Morning Post, ‘that when I have readjusted everything we shall be much better off than I thought. Those diamonds make a big difference, Haidee. In fact we shall have, or we ought to have, quite a decent little capital, and we’ll invest it in something absolutely safe and sound. I’ll ask Darlington’s advice about that, and we’ll never touch it. The interest and the royalties will yield an income which will be quite sufficient for our needs—you can live very cheaply in Italy.’
‘Then you are still bent on going to Italy—to Florence?’ she asked calmly.
‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘It’s the best thing we can do. I’m looking forward to it. After all, why should we be encumbered as we are at present with an expensive house, a troop of servants, and all the rest of it? We don’t really want them. Has it never occurred to you that all these things are something like the shell which the snail has to carry on his back and can’t get away from? Why should a man carry a big shell on his back? It’s all very well talking about the advantages and comforts of having a house of one’s own, but it’s neither an advantage nor a comfort to be tied to a house nor to anything that clogs one’s action.’
Haidee made no reply to those philosophic observations.
‘How long do you propose to stay in Italy?’ she asked. ‘Simply for the winter? I suppose we should return here for the season next year?’
‘I don’t think so,’ answered Lucian. ‘We might go into Switzerland during the very hot months—we couldn’t stand Florence in July and August. But I don’t intend returning to London for some time. I don’t think I shall ever settle here again. After all, I am Italian.’
Then, finding that it was time he set out for King’s Cross, he kissed his wife’s cheek, bade her amuse and take care of herself during his absence, and went away, still in good spirits. For some time after he had gone Haidee remained where he had left her. She ate and drank mechanically, and she looked straight before her in the blank, purposeless fashion which often denotes intense concentration of thought. When she rose from the table she walked about the room with aimless, uncertain movements, touching this and that object without any reason for doing so. She picked up the Morning Post, glanced at it, and saw nothing; she fingered two or three letters which Lucian had left lying about on the breakfast-table, and laid them down again. They reminded her, quite suddenly, of a letter from Eustace Darlington which she had in her pocket, a trivial note, newly arrived, which informed her that he had made some purchase or other for her in Paris, whither he had gone for a week on business, and that she would shortly receive a parcel containing it. There was nothing of special interest or moment in the letter; she referred to it merely to ascertain Darlington’s address.
After a time Haidee went into the study and sought out a railway guide. She had already made up her mind to join Eustace Darlington, and she now decided to travel by a train which would enable her to reach Paris at nine o’clock that evening. She began to make her preparations at once, and instructed her maid to pack two large portmanteaus. Her jewels she packed herself, taking them out of a safe in which they were usually deposited, and after she had bestowed them in a small handbag she kept the latter within sight until her departure. Everything was carried out with coolness and thoughtfulness. The maid was told that her mistress was going to Paris for a few days and that she was to accompany her; the butler received his orders as to what was to be done until Mrs. Damerel’s return the next day or the day following. There was nothing to surprise the servants, and nothing to make them talk, in Haidee’s proceedings. She lunched at an earlier hour than usual, drove to the station with her maid, dropped a letter, addressed to Lucian at Simonstower vicarage, into the pillar-box on the platform, and departed for Paris with an admirable unconcern. There was a choppy sea in the Channel, and the maid was ill, but Haidee acquired a hearty appetite, and satisfied it in the dining-car of the French train. She was one of those happily constituted people who can eat at the greatest moments of life.
She drove from the Gare du Nord to the H?tel Bristol, and engaged rooms immediately on her arrival. A little later she inquired for Darlington, and then discovered that he had that day journeyed to Dijon, and was not expected to return until two days later. Haidee, in nowise disconcerted by this news, settled down to await his reappearance.
Lucian arrived at the old vicarage towards the close of the afternoon. He had driven over from Oakborough through a wintry land, and every minute spent in the keen air had added to the buoyancy of his spirits. Never, he thought as he was driven along the valley, did Simonstower look so well as under its first coating of snow, and on the rising ground above the village he made his driver stop so that he might drink in the charm of the winter sunset. At the western extremity of the valley a shelving hill closed the view; on its highest point a long row of gaunt fir-trees showed black and spectral against the molten red of the setting sun and the purpled sky into which it was sinking; nearer, the blue smoke of the village chimneys curled into the clear, frosty air—it seemed to Lucian that he could almost smell the fires of fragrant wood which burned on the hearths. He caught a faint murmur of voices from the village street: it was four o’clock, and the children were being released from school. Somewhere along the moorland side a dog was barking; in the windows of his uncle’s farmhouse, high above the river and the village, lights were already gleaming; a spark of bright light amongst the pine and fir trees near the church told him that Mr. Chilverstone had already lit his study-lamp. Every sound, every sight was familiar—they brought the old days back to him. And there, keeping stern watch over the village at its foot, stood the old Norman castle, its square keep towering to the sky, as massive and formidable as when Lucian had first looked upon it from his chamber window the morning after Simpson Pepperdine had brought him to Simonstower.
He bade the man drive on to the vicarage. He had sent no word of his coming; he had more than once descended upon his friends at Simonstower without warning, and had always found a welcome. The vicar came bustling into the hall to him, with no sign of surprise.
‘I did not know they had wired to you, my boy,’ he said, greeting him in the old affectionate way, ‘but it was good of you to come so quickly.’
Lucian recognised that something had happened.
‘I don’t understand you,’ he said. ‘No one wired to me; I came down on my own initiative—I wanted to see my uncle on business.’
‘Ah!’ said the vicar, shaking his head. ‘Then you do not know?—your uncle is ill. He had a stroke—a fit—you know what I mean—this very morning. Your Aunt Judith is across at the farm now. But come in, my dear boy—how cold you must be.’
Lucian went out to the conveyance which had brought him over, paid the driver, and bade him refresh himself at the inn, and then joined the vicar in his study. There again were the familiar objects which spelled Home. It suddenly occurred to him that he was much more at home here or in the farmhouse parlour along the roadside than in his own house in London, and he wondered in vague, indirect fashion why that should be so.
‘Is my uncle dangerously ill, then?’ he asked, looking at the vicar, who was fidgeting about with the fire-irons and repeating his belief that Lucian must be very cold.
‘I fear so, I fear so,’ answered Mr. Chilverstone. ‘It is, I think, an apoplectic seizure—he was rather inclined to that, if you come to think of it. Your aunt has just gone across there. It was early this morning that it happened, and she has been over to the farm several times during the day, but this time I think she will find a specialist there—Dr. Matthews wished for advice and wired to Smokeford for some great man who was to arrive an hour ago. I am glad you have come, Lucian. Did you see Sprats before leaving?’
Lucian replied that he had seen Sprats on the previous day. He sat down, answering the vicar’s questions respecting his daughter in mechanical fashion—he was thinking of the various events of the past twenty-four hours, and wondering if Mr. Pepperdine’s illness was likely to result in death. Mr. Chilverstone turned from Sprats to the somewhat sore question of the tragedy. It was to him a sad sign of the times that the public had neglected such truly good work, and he went on to express his own opinion of the taste of the age. Lucian listened absent-mindedly until Mrs. Chilverstone returned with news of the sick man. She was much troubled; the specialist gave little hope of Simpson’s recovery. He might linger for some days, but it was almost certain that a week would see the end of him. But in spite of her trouble Aunt Judith was practical. Keziah, she said, must not be left alone that night, and she herself was going back to the farm as soon as she had seen that the vicar was properly provided for in respect of his sustenance and comfort. Ever since her marriage Mrs. Chilverstone had felt that her main object in life was the pleasing of her lord; she had put away all thought of the dead hussar, and her romantic disposition had bridled itself with the reins of chastened affection. Thus the vicar, who under Sprats’s régime had neither been pampered nor coddled, found himself indulged in many modes hitherto unknown to him, and he accepted all that was showered upon him with modest thankfulness. He thought his wife a kindly and considerate soul, and did not realise, being a truly simple man, that Judith was pouring out upon him the resources of a treasury which she had been stocking all her life. He was the first thing she had the chance of loving in a practical fashion; hence he began to live among rose-leaves. He protested now that Lucian and himself wanted for nothing. Mrs. Chilverstone, however, took the reins in hand, saw that the traveller was properly attended to and provided for, and did not leave the vicarage until the two men were comfortably seated at the dinner-table, the maids admonished as to lighting a fire in Mr. Damerel’s room, and the vicar warned of the necessity of turning out the lamps and locking the doors. Then she returned to her brother’s house, and for an hour or two Lucian and his old tutor talked of things nearest to their hearts, and the feelings of home came upon the younger man more strongly than ever. He began to wonder how it was that he had settled down in London when he might have lived in the country; the atmosphere of this quiet, book-lined room in a village parsonage was, he thought just then, much more to his true taste than that in which he had spent the last few years of his life. At Oxford Lucian had lived the life of a book-worm and a dreamer: he was not a success in examinations, and he brought no great honour upon his tutor. In most respects he had lived apart from other men, and it was not until the publication of his first volume had drawn the eyes of the world upon him that he had been swept out of the peaceful backwater of a student’s existence into the swirling tides of the full river of life. Then had followed Lord Simonstower’s legacy, and then the runaway marriage with Haidee, and then four years of butterfly existence. He began to wonder, as he ate the vicar’s well-kept mutton, fed on the moorlands close by, and sipped the vicar’s old claret, laid down many a year before, whether his recent life had not been a feverish dream. Looked at from this peaceful retreat, its constant excitement and perpetual rush and movement seemed to have lost whatever charm they once had for him. Unconsciously Lucian was suffering from reaction: his moral as well as his physical nature was crying for rest, and the first oasis in the desert assumed the delightful colours and soft air of Paradise.
Later in the evening he walked over to the farmhouse, through softly falling snow, to inquire after his uncle’s condition. Mrs. Chilverstone was in the sick man’s room and did not come downstairs; Miss Pepperdine received him in the parlour. In spite of the trouble that had fallen upon the house and of the busy day which she had spent, Keziah was robed in state for the evening, and she sat bolt upright in her chair plying her knitting-needles as vigorously as in the old days which Lucian remembered so well. He sat down and glanced at Simpson Pepperdine’s chair, and wished the familiar figure were occupying it, and he talked to his aunt of her brother’s illness, and the cloud which hung over the house weighed heavily upon both.
‘I am glad you came down, Lucian,’ said Miss Pepperdine, after a time. ‘I have been wanting to talk to you.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What about?’
Keziah’s needles clicked with unusual vigour for a moment or two.
‘Simpson,’ she said at last, ‘was always a soft-hearted man. If he had been harder of heart, he would have been better off.’
Lucian, puzzled by this ambiguous remark, stared at Miss Pepperdine in a fashion indicative of his amazement.
‘I think,’ continued Miss Pepperdine, with pointed emphasis, ‘I think it is time you knew more than you know at present, Lucian. When all is said and done, you are the nearest of kin in the male line, and after hearing the doctors to-night I’m prepared for Simpson’s death at any moment. It’s a very bad attack of apoplexy—if he lived he’d be a poor invalid all his life. Better that he should be taken while in the full possession of his faculties.’
Lucian gazed at the upright figure before him with mingled feelings. Miss Pepperdine used to sit like that, and knit like that, and talk like that, in the old days—especially when she felt it to be her duty to reprimand him for some offence. So far as he could tell, she was wearing the same stiff and crackly silk gown, she held her elbows close to her side and in just the same fashion, she spoke with the same precision as in the time of Lucian’s youth. The sight of her prim figure, the sound of her precise voice, blotted out half a score of years: Lucian felt very young again.
‘It may not be so bad as you think,’ he said. ‘Even the best doctors may err.’
Miss Pepperdine shook her head.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s all over with Simpson. And I think you ought to know, Lucian, how things are with him. Simpson has been a close man, he has kept things to himself all his life; and of late he has been obliged to confide in me, and I know a great deal that I did not know.’
‘Yes?’ said Lucian.
‘Simpson,’ she continued, ‘has not done well in business for some time. He had a heavy loss some years ago through a rascally lawyer whom he trusted—he always was one of those easy-going men that will trust anybody—and although the old Lord Simonstower helped him out of the difficulty, it ultimately fell on his own shoulders, and of late he has had hard work to keep things going. Simpson will die a poor man. Not that that matters—Judith and myself are provided for. I shall leave here, afterwards. Judith, of course, is married. But as regards you, Lucian, you lent Simpson some money a few months ago, didn’t you?’
‘My dear aunt!’ exclaimed Lucian, ‘I——’
‘I know all about it,’ she said, ‘though it’s only recently that I have known. Well, you mustn’t be surprised if you have to lose it, Lucian. When all is settled up, I don’t think there will be much, if anything, over; and of course everybody must be paid before a member of the family. The Pepperdines have always had their pride, and as your mother was a Pepperdine, Lucian, you must have a share of it in you.’
‘I have my father’s pride as well,’ answered Lucian. ‘Of course I shall not expect the money. I was glad to be able to lend it.’
‘Well,’ said Miss Pepperdine, with the air of one who deals out justice impartially, ‘in one way you were only paying Simpson back for what he had laid out on you. He spent a good deal of money on you, Lucian, when you were a boy.’
Lucian heard this news with astonished feelings.
‘I did not know that,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I am careless about these things, but I have always thought that my father left money for me.’
‘I thought so too, until recently,’ replied Miss Pepperdine. ‘Your father thought that he did, too, and he made Simpson executor and trustee. But the money was badly invested. It was in a building society in Rome, and it was all lost. There was never a penny piece from it, from the time of your father’s death to this.’
Lucian listened in silence.
‘Then,’ he said, after a time, ‘my uncle was responsible for everything for me? I suppose he paid Mr. Chilverstone, and bought my clothes, and gave me pocket-money, and so on?’
‘Every penny,’ replied his aunt. ‘Simpson was always a generous man.’
‘And my three years at Oxford?’ he said inquiringly.
‘Ah!’ replied Miss Pepperdine, ‘that’s another matter. Well—I don’t suppose it matters now that you should know, though Simpson wouldn’t have told you, but I think you ought to know. That was Lord Simonstower—the old lord. He paid every penny.’
Lucian uttered a sharp exclamation. He rose from his chair and took a step or two about the room. Miss Pepperdine continued to knit with undiminished vigour.
‘So it would seem,’ he said presently, ‘that I lived and was educated on charity?’
‘That is how most people would put it,’ she answered, ‘though, to do them justice, I don’t think either Lord Simonstower or Simpson Pepperdine would have called it that. They thought you a promising youth and they put money into you. That’s why I want you to feel that Simpson was only getting back a little of his own in the money that you lent him, though I know he would have paid it back to the day, according to his promise, if he’d been able. But I’m afraid that he would not have been able, and I think his money affairs have worked upon him.’
‘I wish I had known,’ said Lucian. ‘He should have had no anxiety on my account.’
He continued to pace the floor; Miss Pepperdine’s needles clicked an accompaniment to his advancing and retreating steps.
‘I thought it best,’ she observed presently, ‘that you should know all these things—they will explain a good deal.’
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘it is best. I should know. But I wish I had known long ago. After all, a man should not be placed in a false position even by his dearest friends. I ought to have been told the truth.’
Miss Pepperdine’s needles clicked viciously.
‘So I always felt—after I knew, and that is but recently,’ she answered. ‘But, as I have said to you before, Simpson Pepperdine is a soft-hearted man.’
‘He has been a kind-hearted man,’ said Lucian. He was thinking, as he walked about the room, glancing at the well-remembered objects, that the money which he had wasted in luxuries that he could well have done without would have relieved Mr. Pepperdine of anxiety and trouble. And yet he had never known, never guessed, that the kindly-hearted farmer had anything to distress him.
‘I think we all seem to walk in darkness,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘I never had the least notion of this. Had I known anything of it, Uncle Simpson should have had all that I could give him.’
Miss Pepperdine melted. She had formed rather hard thoughts of Lucian since his marriage. The side-winds which blew upon her ears from time to time represented him as living in a style which her old-fashioned mind did not approve: she had come to consider him as extravagant, frivolous, and unbalanced. But she was a woman of sound common sense and great shrewdness, and she recognised the genuine ring in Lucian’s voice and the sincerity of his regret that he had not been able to save Simpson Pepperdine some anxiety.
‘I’m sure you would, my boy,’ she said kindly. ‘However, Simpson has done with everything now. I didn’t tell Judith, because she frets so, but the doctors don’t think he’ll ever regain consciousness—it will only be a matter of a few days, Lucian.’
‘And that only makes one wish that one had known of his anxieties sooner,’ he said. ‘Five years ago I could have helped him substantially.’
He was thinking of the ten thousand pounds which had already disappeared. Miss Pepperdine did not follow his line of thought.
‘Yes, I’ve heard that you’ve made a lot of money,’ she said. ‘You’ve been one of the lucky ones, Lucian, for I always understood that poets generally lived in garrets and were half-starved most of their time. I’m sure one used to read all that sort of thing in books; but perhaps times have changed, and so much the better. Simpson always read your books as soon as you sent them. Upon my word, I’m sure he never understood what it was all about, except perhaps some of the songs and ballads, but he liked the long words, and he was very proud of these little green books—they’re all in his bureau there, along with his account-books. Well, as I was saying, I understand you’ve made money, Lucian. Take care of it, my boy, for you never know when you may want it, and want it badly, in this world. There’s one thing I want you to promise me. I don’t yet know how things will be when Simpson’s gone, but if he is a bit on the wrong side of the ledger, it must be made up by the family, and you must do your share. It mustn’t be said that a Pepperdine died owing money that he couldn’t pay. I’ve already talked it over with Judith, and if there is money to be found, she and I and you must find it between us. If need be, all mine can go,’ she added sharply. ‘I can get a place as a housekeeper even at my age.’
Lucian gave her his promise readily enough, and immediately began to wonder what it might imply. But he agreed with her reasoning, and assured himself that, if necessary, he would live on a crust in order to carry out her wishes. And soon afterwards he set out for the vicarage, promising to return for news of Mr. Pepperdine’s condition at an early hour in the morning.
As he walked back over the snow Lucian was full of thought. The conversation with Miss Pepperdine had opened a new world to him. He had always believed himself independent: it now turned out that for years and years he had lived at other men’s charges. He owed his very food to the charity of a relative; another man, upon whom he had no claim, had lavished generosity upon him in no unstinted fashion. He was full of honest gratitude to these men, but he wished at the same time that he had known of their liberality sooner. He felt that he had been placed in a false position, and the feeling lowered him in his own estimation. He thought of his father, who earned money easily and spent it freely, and realised that he had inherited his happy-go-lucky temperament. Yet he had never doubted that his father had made provision for him, for he remembered hearing him tell some artist friends one afternoon in Florence that he had laid money aside for Lucian’s benefit, and Cyprian Damerel had been a man of common sense, fond of pleasure and good living and generous though he was. But Lucian well understood the story of the Roman building society—greater folk than he, from the Holy Father downwards, had lost money out of that feverish desire to build which has characterised the Romans of all ages. No doubt his father had been carried away by some wave of enthusiasm, and had put all his eggs into one basket, and they had all been broken together. Still, Lucian wished that Mr. Pepperdine had told him all this on his reaching an age of understanding—it would have made a difference in many ways. ‘I seem,’ he thought, as he plodded on through the snow, ‘I seem to have lived in an unreal world, and to have supposed things which were not!’ And he began to recall the days of sure and confident youth, when his name was being extolled as that of a newly risen star in the literary firmament, and his own heart was singing with the joy of pride and strength and full assurance. He had never felt one doubt of the splendour of his career, never accepted it as anything but his just due. His very certainty on these matters had, all unknown to himself, induced in him an unassuming modesty, at which many people who witnessed his triumphs and saw him lionised had wondered. Now, however, he had tasted the bitterness of reverse; he had found that Fortune can frown as easily as she can smile, and that it is hard to know upon what principle her smiles and frowns are portioned out. To a certain point, life for Lucian had been a perpetual dancing along the primrose way—it was now developing into a tangle wherein were thorns and briars.
He was too full of these thoughts to care for conversation, even with his old tutor, and he pleaded fatigue and went to bed. He lay awake for the greater part of the night, thinking over his talk with Miss Pepperdine, and endeavouring to arrange his affairs so that he might make good his promise to her, and when he slept, his sleep was troubled by uneasy dreams. He woke rather late in the morning with a feeling of impending calamity hanging heavily upon him. As he dressed, Mr. Chilverstone came tapping at his door—something in the sound warned Lucian of bad news. He was not surprised when the vicar told him that Simpson Pepperdine had died during the night.
He walked over to the farm as soon as he had breakfasted, and remained there until noon. Coming back, he overtook the village postman, who informed him that the letters were three hours late that morning in consequence of the heavy fall of snow, which had choked up the roads between Simonstower and Oakborough.
‘It’ll be late afternoon afore I’ve finished my rounds,’ he added, with a strong note of self-pity. ‘If you’re going up to the vicarage, sir, it ’ud save me a step if you took the vicar’s letters—and there’s one, I believe, for yourself.’
Lucian took the bundle of letters which the man held out to him, and turned it over until he found his own. He wondered why Haidee had written to him—she had no great liking for correspondence, and he had not expected to hear from her during his absence. He opened the letter in the vicar’s study, without the least expectation of finding any particular news in it.
It was a very short letter, and, considering the character of the intimation it was intended to make, the phrasing was commendably plain and outspoken. Lucian’s wife merely announced that his plans for the future were not agreeable to her, and that she was leaving home with the intention of joining Eustace Darlington in Paris. She further added that it was useless to keep up pretences any longer; she had already been unfaithful, and she would be glad if Lucian would arrange to divorce her as quickly as possible, so that she and Darlington might marry. Either as an afterthought, or out of sheer good will, she concluded with a lightly worded expression of friendship and of hope that Lucian might have better luck next time.
It is more than probable that Haidee was never quite so much her true self in her relation to Lucian as when writing this letter. It is permitted to every woman, whatever her mental and moral quality, to have her ten minutes of unreasoning romance at some period of her life, and Haidee had hers when she and Lucian fell in love with each other’s beauty and ran away to hide themselves from the world while they played out their little comedy. It was natural that they should tire of each other within the usual time; but the man’s sense of duty was developed in Lucian in a somewhat exceptional way, and he was inclined to settle down to a Darby and Joan life. Haidee had little of that particular instinct. She was all for pleasure and the glory of this world, and there is small wonder that the prospect of exile in a land for which she had no great liking should have driven her to the salvation of her diamonds and herself by recourse to the man whom she ought to have married instead of Lucian. There was already a guilty bond between them; it seemed natural to Haidee to look to it as a means of drawing her away from the dangers which threatened her worldly comfort. It was equally natural to her to announce all these things to Lucian in pretty much the same terms that she would have employed had she been declining an invitation to some social engagement.
Lucian read the letter three times. He gave no sign of whatever emotion it called up. All that he did was to announce in quiet, matter-of-fact tones that he must return to London that afternoon, and to beg the loan of the vicar’s horse and trap as far as Wellsby station. After that he lunched with Mr. and Mrs. Chilverstone, and if they thought him unusually quiet, there was good reason for that in the fact that Simpson Pepperdine was lying dead in the old farmhouse behind the pine groves.