A PRINCE OF SINNERS — CHAPTER II — CHAPTER III — CHAPTER IV — CHAPTER V — CHAPTER VI — CHAPTER VII — CHAPTER VIII — CHAPTER IX — CHAPTER X — CHAPTER XI — CHAPTER XII — CHAPTER XIII — CHAPTER XIV — CHAPTER XV — CHAPTER XVI — CHAPTER XVII — CHAPTER XVIII — CHAPTER XIX — CHAPTER XX
E-text prepared by MRK
by
E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
Contents
PART I.
I. Mr. Kingston Brooks, Political Agent
II. The Bullsom Family at Home
III. Kingston Brooks has a Visitor
IV. A Question for the Country
V. The Marquis of Arranmore
VI. The Man who went to Hell
VII. A Thousand Pounds
VIII. Kingston Brooks makes Inquiries
IX. Henslow speaks out
X. A Tempting Offer
XI. Who the Devil is Brooks?
XII. Mr. Bullsom gives a Dinner-party
XIII. Charity the "Crime"
XIV. An Awkward Question
XV. A Supper-party at the "Queen's"
XVI. Uncle and Niece
XVII. Fifteen Years in Hell
XVIII. Mary Scott pays an Unexpected Call
XIX. The Marquis Mephistopheles
XX. The Confidence of Lord Arranmore
PART II.
I. Lord Arranmore's Amusements
II. The Heckling of Henslow
III. Mary Scott's Two Visitors
IV. A Marquis on Matrimony
V. Brooks enlists a Recruit
VI. Kingston Brooks, Philanthropist
VII. Brooks and his Missions
VIII. Mr. Bullsom is Staggered
IX. Ghosts
X. A New Don Quixote
PART III.
I. An Aristocratic Recruit
II. Mr. Lavilette interferes
III. The Singular Behaviour of Mary Scott
IV. Lord Arranmore in a New Role
V. Lady Sybil lends a Hand
VI. The Reservation of Mary Scott
VII. Father and Son
VIII. The Advice of Mr. Bullsom
IX. A Question and an Answer
X. Lady Sybil says "Yes"
XI. Brooks hears the News
XII. The Prince of Sinners speaks out
A Prince of Sinners
PART I
CHAPTER I
MR. KINGSTON BROOKS, POLITICAL AGENT
Already the sweepers were busy in the deserted hall, and the lights burned low. Of the great audience who had filled the place only half-an-hour ago not one remained. The echoes of their tumultuous cheering seemed still to linger amongst the rafters, the dust which their feet had raised hung about in a little cloud. But the long rows of benches were empty, the sweepers moved ghostlike amongst the shadows, and an old woman was throwing tealeaves here and there about the platform. In the committee-room behind a little group of men were busy with their leave-takings. The candidate, a tall, somewhat burly man, with hard, shrewd face and loosely knit figure, was shaking hands with every one. His tone and manner savoured still of the rostrum.
"Good-night, sir! Good-night, Mr. Bullsom! A most excellent introduction, yours, sir! You made my task positively easy. Good-night, Mr. Brooks. A capital meeting, and everything very well arranged. Personally I feel very much obliged to you, sir. If you carry everything through as smoothly as this affair to-night, I can see that we shall lose nothing by poor Morrison's breakdown. Good-night, gentlemen, to all of you. We will meet at the club at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning. Eleven o'clock precisely, if you please."
The candidate went out to his carriage, and the others followed in twos and threes. A young man, pale, with nervous mouth, strongly-marked features and clear dark eyes, looked up from a sheaf of letters which he was busy sorting.
"Don't wait for me, Mr. Bullsom," he said. "Reynolds will let me out, and I had better run through these letters before I leave."
Mr. Bullsom was emphatic to the verge of gruffness.
"You'll do nothing of the sort," he declared. "I tell you what it is, Brooks. We're not going to let you knock yourself up. You're tackling this job in rare style. I can tell you that Henslow is delighted."
"I'm much obliged to you for saying so, Mr. Bullsom," the young man answered. "Of course the work is strange to me, but it is very interesting, and I don't mean to make a mess of it."
"There is only one chance of your doing that," Mr. Bullsom rejoined, "and that is if you overwork yourself. You need a bit of looking after. You've got a rare head on your shoulders, and I'm proud to think that I was the one to bring your name before the committee. But I'm jolly well certain of one thing. You've done all the work a man ought to do in one day. Now listen to me. Here's my carriage waiting, and you're going straight home with me to have a bite and a glass of wine. We can't afford to lose our second agent, and I can see what's the matter with you. You're as pale as a ghost, and no wonder. You've been at it all day and never a break."
The young man called Brooks had not the energy to frame a refusal, which he knew would be resented. He took down his overcoat, and stuffed the letters into his pocket.
"You're very good," he said. "I'll come up for an hour with pleasure."
They passed out together into the street, and Mr. Bullsom opened the door of his carriage.
"In with you, young man," he exclaimed. "Home, George!"
Kingston Brooks leaned back amongst the cushions with a little sigh of relief.
"This is very restful," he remarked. "We have certainly had a very busy day. The inside of electioneering may be disenchanting, but it's jolly hard work."
Mr. Bullsom sat with clasped hands in front of him resting upon that slight protuberance which denoted the advent of a stomach. He had thrown away the cigar which he had lit in the committee-room. Mrs. Bullsom did not approve of smoking in the covered wagonette, which she frequently honoured with her presence.
"There's nothing in the world worth having that hasn't to be worked for, my boy," he declared, good-humoredly.
"By other people!" Brooks remarked, smiling.
"That's as it may be," Mr. Bullsom admitted. "To my mind that's where the art of the thing comes in. Any fool can work, but it takes a shrewd man to keep a lot of others working hard for him while he pockets the oof himself."
"I suppose," the younger man remarked, thoughtfully, "that you would consider Mr. Henslow a shrewd man?"
"Shrewd! Oh, Henslow's shrewd enough. There's no question about that!"
"And honest?"
Mr. Bullsom hesitated. He drew his hand down his stubbly grey beard.
"Honest! Oh, yes, he's honest! You've no fault to find with him, eh?"
"None whatever," Brooks hastened to say. "You see," he continued more slowly, "I have never been really behind the scenes in this sort of thing before, and Henslow has such a very earnest manner in speaking. He talked to the working men last night as though his one desire in life was to further the different radical schemes which we have on the programme. Why, the tears were actually in his eyes when he spoke of the Old Age Pension Bill. He told them over and over again that the passing of that Bill was the one object of his political career. Then, you know, there was the luncheon to-day—and I fancied that he was a little flippant about the labour vote. It was perhaps only his way of speaking."
Mr. Bullsom smiled and rubbed the carriage window with the cuff of his coat. He was very hungry.
"Oh, well, a politician has to trim a little, you know," he remarked. "Votes he must have, and Henslow has a very good idea how to get them. Here we are, thank goodness." The carriage had turned up a short drive, and deposited them before the door of a highly ornate villa. Mr. Bullsom led the way indoors, and himself took charge of his guest's coat and hat. Then he opened the door of the drawing-room.
"Mrs. Bullsom and the girls," he remarked, urbanely, "will be delighted to see you. Come in!"
THE BULLSOM FAMILY AT HOME
There were fans upon the wall, and much bric-a-brac of Oriental shape but Brummagem finish, a complete suite of drawing-room furniture, incandescent lights of fierce brilliancy, and a pianola. Mrs. Peter Bullsom, stout and shiny in black silk and a chatelaine, was dozing peacefully in a chair, with the latest novel from the circulating library in her lap; whilst her two daughters, in evening blouses, which were somehow suggestive of the odd elevenpence, were engrossed in more serious occupation. Louise, the elder, whose budding resemblance to her mother was already a protection against the over-amorous youths of the town, was reading a political speech in the Times. Selina, who had sandy hair, a slight figure, and was considered by her family the essence of refinement, was struggling with a volume of Cowper, who had been recommended to her by a librarian with a sense of humour, as a poet unlikely to bring a blush into her virginal cheeks. Mr. Bullsom looked in upon his domestic circle with pardonable pride, and with a little flourish introduced his guest.
"Mrs. Bullsom," he said, "this is my young friend, Kingston Brooks. My two daughters, sir, Louise and Selina." The ladies were gracious, but had the air of being taken by surprise, which, considering Mr. Bullsom's parting words a few hours ago, seemed strange.
"We've had a great meeting," Mr. Bullsom remarked, sidling towards the hearthrug, and with his thumbs already stealing towards the armholes of his waistcoat, "a great meeting, my dears. Not that I am surprised! Oh, no! As I said to Padgett, when he insisted that I should take the chair, 'Padgett,' I said, 'mark my words, we're going to surprise the town. Mr. Henslow may not be the most popular candidate we've ever had, but he's on the right side, and those who think Radicalism has had its day in Medchester will be amazed.' And so they have been. I've dropped a few hints during my speeches at the ward meetings lately, and Mr. Brooks, though he's new at the work, did his best, and I can tell you the result was a marvel. The hall was packed—simply packed. When I rose to speak there wasn't an empty place or chair to be seen."
"Dear me!" Mrs. Bullsom remarked, affably. "Supper is quite ready, my love."
Mr. Bullsom abandoned his position precipitately, and his face expressed his lively satisfaction.
"Ah!" he exclaimed. "I was hoping that you would have a bite for me. As I said to Mr. Brooks when I asked him to drop in with me, there's sure to be something to eat. And I can tell you I'm about ready for it."
Brooks found an opportunity to speak almost for the first time. He was standing between the two Misses Bullsom, and already they had approved of him. He was distinctly of a different class from the casual visitors whom their father was in the habit of introducing into the family circle.
"Mr. Bullsom was kind enough to take pity on an unfortunate bachelor," he said, with a pleasant smile. "My landlady has few faults, but an over-love of punctuality is one of them. By this time she and her household are probably in bed. Our meeting lasted a long time."
"If you will touch the bell, Peter," Mrs. Bullsom remarked, "Ann shall dish up the supper."
The young ladies exchanged shocked glances. "Dish up." What an abominable phrase! They looked covertly at their guest, but his face was imperturbable.
"We think that we have been very considerate, Mr. Brooks," Selina remarked, with an engaging smile. "We gave up our usual dinner this evening as papa had to leave so early."
Mr. Brooks smiled as he offered his arm to Mrs. Bullsom—a courtesy which much embarrassed her.
"I think," he said, "that we shall be able to show you some practical appreciation of your thoughtfulness. I know nothing so stimulating to the appetite as politics, and to-day we have been so busy that I missed even my afternoon tea."
"I'm sure that we are quite repaid for giving up our dinner," Selina remarked, with a backward glance at the young man. "Oh, here you are at last, Mary. I didn't hear you come in."
"My niece, Miss Scott," Mr. Bullsom announced. "Now you know all the family."
A plainly-dressed girl with dark eyes and unusually pale cheeks returned his greeting quietly, and followed them into the dining-room. Mrs. Bullsom spread herself over her seat with a little sigh of relief. Brooks gazed in silent wonder at the gilt-framed oleographs which hung thick upon the walls, and Mr. Bullsom stood up to carve a joint of beef.
"Plain fare, Mr. Brooks, for plain people," he remarked, gently elevating the sirloin on his fork, and determining upon a point of attack. "We don't understand frills here, but we've a welcome for our friends, and a hearty one."
"If there is anything in the world better than roast beef," Brooks remarked, unfolding his serviette, "I haven't found it."
"There's one thing," Mr. Bullsom remarked, pausing for a moment in his labours, "I can give you a good glass of wine. Ann, I think that if you look in the right-hand drawer of the sideboard you will find a bottle of champagne. If not I'll have to go down into the cellar."
Ann, however, produced it—which, considering that Mr. Bullsom had carefully placed it there a few hours ago, was not extraordinary—and Brooks sipped the wine with inward tremors, justified by the result.
"I suppose, Mr. Brooks," Selina remarked, turning towards him in an engaging fashion, "that you are a great politician. I see your name so much in the papers."
Brooks smiled.
"My political career," he answered, "dates from yesterday morning. I am taking Mr. Morrison's place, you know, as agent for Mr. Henslow. I have never done anything of the sort before, and I have scarcely any claims to be considered a politician at all."
"A very lucky change for us, Brooks," Mr. Bullsom declared, with the burly familiarity which he considered justified by his position as chairman of the Radical committee. "Poor Morrison was past the job. It was partly through his muddling that we lost the seat at the last election. I'd made up my mind to have a change this time, and so I told 'em."
Brooks was tired of politics, and he looked across the table. This pale girl with the tired eyes and self-contained manner interested him. The difference, too, between her and the rest of the family was puzzling.
"I believe, Miss Scott," he said, "that I met you at the Stuarts' dance."
"I was there," she admitted. "I don't think I danced with you, but we had supper at the same table."
"I remember it perfectly," he said. "Wasn't it supposed to be a very good dance?"
She shrugged her shoulders.
"I believe so," she answered. "There was the usual fault—too many girls. But it was very pretty to watch."
"You do not care for dancing, yourself, perhaps?" he hazarded.
"Indeed I do," she declared. "But I knew scarcely any one there. I see a good deal of Kate sometimes, but the others I scarcely know at all."
"You were in the same position as I was, then," he answered, smiling.
"Oh, you—you are different," she remarked. "I mean that you are a man, and at a dance that means everything. That is why I rather dislike dances. We are too dependent upon you. If you would only let us dance alone."
Selina smiled in a superior manner. She would have given a good deal to have been invited to the dance in question, but that was a matter which she did not think it worth while to mention.
"My dear Mary!" she said, "what an idea. I am quite sure that when you go out with us you need never have any difficulty about partners."
"Our programmes for the Liberal Club Dance and the County Cricket Ball were full before we had been in the room five minutes," Louise interposed.
Mary smiled inwardly, but said nothing, and Brooks was quite sure then that she was different. He realized too that her teeth were perfect, and her complexion, notwithstanding its pallor, was faultless. She would have been strikingly good-looking but for her mouth, and that—was it a discontented or a supercilious curl? At any rate it disappeared when she smiled.
"May I ask whether you have been attending a political meeting this evening, Miss Scott?" he asked. "You came in after us, I think."
She shook her head.
"No, I have a class on Wednesday evening."
"A class!" he repeated, doubtfully.
Mr. Bullsom, who thought he had been out of the conversation long enough, interposed.
"Mary calls herself a bit of a philanthropist, you see, Mr. Brooks," he explained. "Goes down into Medchester and teaches factory girls to play the piano on Wednesday evenings. Much good may it do them."
There was a curious gleam in the girl's eyes for a moment which checked the words on Brooks' lips, and led him to precipitately abandon the conversation. But afterwards, while Selina was pedalling at the pianola and playing havoc with the expression-stops, he crossed the room and stood for a moment by her chair.
"I should like you to tell me about your class," he said. "I have several myself—of different sorts."
She closed her magazine, but left her finger in the place.
"Oh, mine is a very unambitious undertaking," she said. "Kate Stuart and I started it for the girls in her father's factory, and we aim at nothing higher than an attempt to direct their taste in fiction. They bring their Free Library lists to us, and we mark them together. Then we all read one more serious book at the same time—history or biography—and talk about it when we meet."
"It is an excellent idea," he said, earnestly. "By the bye, something occurs to me. You know, or rather you don't know, that I give free lectures on certain books or any simple literary subject on Wednesday evenings at the Secular Hall when this electioneering isn't on. Couldn't you bring your girls one evening? I would be guided in my choice of a subject by you."
"Yes, I should like that," she answered, "and I think the girls would.
It is very good of you to suggest it."
Louise, with a great book under her arm, deposited her dumpy person in a seat by his side, and looked up at him with a smile of engaging candour.
"Mr. Brooks," she said, "I am going to do a terrible thing. I am going to show you some of my sketches and ask your opinion."
Brooks turned towards her without undue enthusiasm.
"It is very good of you, Miss Bullsom," he said, doubtfully; "but I never drew a straight line in my life, and I know nothing whatever about perspective. My opinion would be worse than worthless."
Louise giggled artlessly, and turned over the first few pages.
"You men all say that at first," she declared, "and then you turn out such terrible critics. I declare I'm afraid to show them to you, after all."
Brooks scarcely showed that desire to overcome her new resolution which politeness demanded. But Selina came tripping across the room, and took up her position on the other side of him.
"You must show them now you've brought them out, Louise," she declared. "I am sure that Mr. Brooks' advice will be most valuable. But mind, if you dare to show mine, I'll tear them into pieces."
"I wasn't going to, dear," Louise declared, a little tartly. "Shall I begin at the beginning, Mr. Brooks, or—"
"Oh, don't show those first few, dear," Selina exclaimed. "You know they're not nearly so good as some of the others. That mill is all out of drawing."
Mary, who had been elbowed into the background, rose quietly and crossed to the other end of the room. Brooks followed her for a moment with regretful eyes. Her simple gown, with the little piece of ribbon around her graceful neck, seemed almost distinguished by comparison with the loud-patterned and dressier blouses of the two girls who had now hemmed him in. For a moment he ignored the waiting pages.
"Your cousin," he remarked, "is quite unlike any of you. Has she been with you long?"
Louise looked up a little tartly.
"Oh, about three years. You are quite right when you say that she is unlike any of us. It doesn't seem nice to complain about her exactly, but she really is terribly trying, isn't she, Selina?"
Selina nodded, and dropped her voice.
"She is getting worse," she declared. "She is becoming a positive trouble to us."
Brooks endeavoured to look properly sympathetic, and considered himself justified in pursuing the conversation. "Indeed! May I ask in what way?"
"Oh, she has such old-fashioned ideas," Louise said, confidentially. "I've quite lost patience with her, and so has Selina; haven't you, dear? She never goes to parties if she can help it, she is positively rude to all our friends, and the sarcastic things she says sometimes are most unpleasant. You know, papa is very, very good to her."
"Yes, indeed," Selina interrupted. "You know, Mr. Brooks, she has no father and mother, and she was living quite alone in London when papa found her out and brought her here—and in the most abject poverty. I believe he found her in a garret. Fancy that!"
"And now," Louise continued, "he allows her for her clothes exactly the same as he does us—and look at her. Would you believe it, now? She is like that nearly every evening, although we have friends dropping in continually. Of course I don't believe in extravagance, but if a girl has relations who are generous enough to give her the means, I do think that, for their sake, she ought to dress properly. I think that she owes it to them, as well as to herself."
"And out of doors it is positively worse," Selina whispered, impressively. "I declare," she added, with a simper, "that although nobody can say that I am proud, there are times when I am positively ashamed to be seen out with her. What she does with her money I can't imagine."
Brooks, who was something of a critic in such matters, and had recognized the art of her severely simple gown, smiled to himself. He was wise enough, however, not to commit himself.
"Perhaps," he suggested, "she thinks that absolute simplicity suits her best. She has a nice figure."
Selina tossed her much-beaded slipper impatiently.
"Heaven only knows what Mary does think," she exclaimed, impatiently.
"And Heaven only knows what I am to say about these," Brooks groaned inwardly, as the sketch-book fell open before him at last, and its contents were revealed to his astonished eyes.
KINGSTON BROOKS HAS A VISITOR
Kingston Brooks was twenty-five years old, strong, nervous, and with a strenuous desire to make his way so far as was humanly possible into the heart of life. He was a young solicitor recently established in Medchester, without friends save those he was now making, and absolutely without interest of any sort. He had a small capital, and already the beginnings of a practice. He had some sort of a reputation as a speaker, and was well spoken of by those who had entrusted business to him. Yet he was still fighting for a living when this piece of luck had befallen him. Mr. Bullsom had entrusted a small case to him, and found him capable and cheap. Amongst that worthy gentleman's chief characteristics was a decided weakness for patronizing younger and less successful men, and he went everywhere with Kingston Brooks' name on his lips. Then came the election, and the sudden illness of Mr. Morrison, who had always acted as agent for the Radical candidates for the borough. Another agent had to be found. Several who would have been suitable were unavailable. An urgent committee meeting was held, and Mr. Bullsom at once called attention to an excellent little speech of Kingston Brooks' at a ward meeting on the previous night. In an hour he was closeted with the young lawyer, and the affair was settled. Brooks knew that henceforth the material side of his career would be comparatively easy sailing.
He had accepted his good fortune with something of the same cheerful philosophy with which he had seen difficulty loom up in his path a few months ago. But to-night, on his way home from Mr. Bullsom's suburban residence, a different mood possessed him. Usually a self-contained and somewhat gravely minded person, to-night the blood went tingling through his veins with a new and unaccustomed warmth. He carried himself blithely, the cool night air was so grateful and sweet to him that he had no mind even to smoke. There seemed to be no tangible reason for the change. The political excitement, which a few weeks ago he had begun to feel exhilarating, had for him decreased now that his share in it lay behind the scenes, and he found himself wholly occupied with the purely routine work of the election. Nor was there any sufficient explanation to be found in the entertainment which he had felt himself bound to accept at Mr. Bullsom's hands. Of the wine, which had been only tolerable, he had drunk, as was his custom, sparingly, and of Mary Scott, who had certainly interested him in a manner which the rest of the family had not, he had after all seen but very little. He found himself thinking with fervor of the desirable things in life, never had the various tasks which he had set himself seemed so easy an accomplishment, his own powers more real and alive. And beneath it all he was conscious of a vague sense of excitement, a nervous dancing of the blood, as though even now the time were at hand when he might find himself in touch with some of the greater forces of life, all of which he intended some day to realize. It was delightful after all to be young and strong, to be stripped for the race in the morning of life, when every indrawn breath seems sweet with the perfume of beautiful things, and the heart is tuned to music.
The fatigue of the day was wholly forgotten. He was surprised indeed when he found himself in the little street where his rooms were. A small brougham was standing at the corner, the liveries and horse of which, though quiet enough, caused him a moment's surprise as being superior to the ordinary equipages of the neighborhood. He passed on to the sober-fronted house where he lived, and entering with his latch-key made his way to his study. Immediately he entered he was conscious of a man comfortably seated in his easy-chair, and apparently engrossed in a magazine.
He advanced towards him inquiringly, and his visitor, carefully setting down the magazine, rose slowly to his feet. The young man's surprise at finding his rooms occupied was increased by the appearance of his visitor. He was apparently of more than middle age, with deeply-lined face, tall, and with an expression the coldness of which was only slightly mitigated by a sensitive mouth that seemed at once cynical and humorous. He was of more than ordinary height, and dressed in the plainest dinner garb of the day, but his dinner jacket, his black tie and the set of his shirt were revelations to Brooks, who dealt only with the Medchester tradespeople. He did not hold out his hand, but he eyed Brooks with a sort of critical survey, which the latter found a little disconcerting.
"You wished to see me, sir?" Brooks asked. "My name is Kingston Brooks, and these are my rooms."
"So I understood," the new-comer replied imperturbably. "I called about an hour ago, and took the liberty of awaiting your return."
Brooks sat down. His vis-a-vis was calmly selecting a cigarette from a capacious case. Brooks found himself offering a light and accepting a cigarette himself, the flavour of which he at once appreciated.
"Can I offer you a whisky-and-soda?" he inquired.
"I thank you, no," was the quiet reply.
There was a short pause.
"You wished to see me on some business connected with the election, no doubt?" Brooks suggested.
His visitor shook his head slowly. He knocked the ash from his cigarette and smiled whimsically.
"My dear fellow," he said, "I haven't the least idea why I came to see you this evening."
Brooks felt that he had a right to be puzzled, and he looked it. But his visitor was so evidently a gentleman and a person of account, that the obvious rejoinder did not occur to him. He merely waited with uplifted eyebrows.
"Not the least idea," his visitor repeated, still smiling. "But at the same time I fancy that before I leave you I shall find myself explaining, or endeavouring to explain, not why I am here, but why I have not visited you before. What do you think of that?"
"I find it," Brooks answered, "enigmatic but interesting."
"Exactly. Well, I hate talking, so my explanation will not be a tedious one. Your name is Kingston Brooks."
"Yes."
"Your mother's name was Dorothy Kenneir. She was, before her marriage, the matron of a home in the East End of London, and a lady devoted to philanthropic work. Your father was a police-court missionary."
Brooks was leaning a little forward in his chair. These things were true enough. Who was his visitor?
"Your father, through over-devotion to the philanthropic works in which he was engaged, lost his reason temporarily, and on his partial recovery I understand that the doctors considered him still to be mentally in a very weak state. They ordered him a sea voyage. He left England on the Corinthia fifteen years ago, and I believe that you heard nothing more of him until you received the news of his death—probably ten years back."
"Yes! Ten years ago.
"Your mother, I think, lived for only a few months after your father left England. You found a guardian in Mr. Ascough of Lincoln's Inn Fields. There my knowledge of your history ceases.
"How do you know these things?" Brooks asked.
"I was with your father when he died. It was I who wrote to you and sent his effects to England."
"You were there—in Canada?"
"Yes. I had a dwelling within a dozen miles of where your father had built his hut by the side of the great lake. He was the only other Englishman within a hundred miles. So I was with him often."
"It is wonderful—after all these years," Brooks exclaimed. "You were there for sport, of course?"
"For sport!" his visitor repeated in a colourless tone.
"But my father—what led him there? Why did he cut himself off from every one, send no word home, creep away into that lone country to die by himself? It is horrible to think of."
"Your father was not a communicative man. He spoke of his illness. I always considered him as a person mentally shattered. He spent his days alone, looking out across the lake or wandering in the woods. He had no companions, of course, but there were always animals around him. He had the look of a man who had suffered."
"He was to have gone to Australia," Brooks said. "It was from there that we expected news from him. I cannot see what possible reason he had for changing his plans. There was no mystery about his life in London. It was one splendid record of self-denial and devotion to what he thought his duty."
"From what he told me," his vis-a-vis continued, handing again his cigarette-case, and looking steadily into the fire, "he seems to have left England with the secret determination never to return. But why I do not know. One thing is certain. His mental state was not altogether healthy. His desire for solitude was almost a passion. Towards the end, however, his mind was clear enough. He told me about your mother and you, and he handed me all the papers, which I subsequently sent to London. He spoke of no trouble, and his transition was quite peaceful."
"It was a cruel ending," Brooks said, quietly. "There were people in London whom he had befriended who would have worked their passage out and faced any hardships to be with him. And my mother, notwithstanding his desertion, believed in him to the last."
There was a moment's intense silence. This visitor who had come so strangely was to all appearance a man not easily to be moved. Yet Brooks fancied that the long white fingers were trembling, and that the strange quiet of his features was one of intense self-repression. His tone when he spoke again, however, was clear, and almost indifferent.
"I feel," he said, "that it would have been only decently courteous of me to have sought you out before, although I have, as you see, nothing whatever to add to the communications I sent you. But I have not been a very long time in England, and I have a very evil habit of putting off things concerning which there is no urgency. I called at Ascough's, and learned that you were in practice in Medchester. I am now living for a short time not far from here, and reading of the election, I drove in to-night to attend one of the meetings—I scarcely cared which. I heard your name, saw you on the platform, and called here, hoping to find you."
"It was very kind," Brooks said.
He felt curiously tongue-tied. This sudden upheaval of a past which he had never properly understood affected him strangely.
"I gathered from Mr. Ascough that you were left sufficient means to pay for your education, and also to start you in life," his visitor continued. "Yours is considered to be an overcrowded profession, but I am glad to understand that you seem likely to make your way."
Brooks thanked him absently.
"From your position on the platform to-night I gather that you are a politician?"
"Scarcely that," Brooks answered. "I was fortunate enough to be appointed agent to Mr. Henslow owing to the illness of another man. It will help me in my profession."
The visitor rose to his feet. He stood with his hands behind him, looking at the younger man. And Brooks suddenly remembered that he did not even know his name.
"You will forgive me," he said, also rising, "if I have seemed a little dazed. I am very grateful to you for coming. I have always wanted more than anything in the world to meet some one who saw my father after he left England. There is so much which even now seems mysterious with regard to his disappearance from the world."
"I fear that you will never discover more than you have done from me," was the quiet reply. "Your father had been living for years in profound solitude when I found him. Frankly, I considered from the first that his mind was unhinged. Therein I fancy lies the whole explanation of his silence and his voluntary disappearance. I am assuming, of course, that there was nothing in England to make his absence desirable."
"There was nothing," Brooks declared with conviction. "That I can personally vouch for. His life as a police-court missionary was the life of a militant martyr's, the life of a saint. The urgent advice of his physicians alone led him to embark upon that voyage; I see now that it was a mistake. He left before he had sufficiently recovered to be safely trusted alone. By the bye," Brooks continued, after a moment's hesitation, "you have not told me your name, whom I have to thank for this kindness. Your letters from Canada were not signed."
There was a short silence. From outside came the sound of the pawing of horses' feet and the jingling of harness.
"I was a fellow-traveller in that great unpeopled world," the visitor said, "and there was nothing but common humanity in anything I did. I lived out there as Philip Ferringshaw, here I have to add my title, the Marquis of Arranmore. I was a younger son in those days. If there is anything which I have forgotten, I am at Enton for a month or so. It is an easy walk from Medchester, if your clients can spare you for an afternoon. Good-night, Mr. Brooks."
He held out his hand. He was sleepy apparently, for his voice had become almost a drawl, and he stifled a yawn as he passed along the little passage. Kingston Brooks returned to his little room, and threw himself back into his easy-chair. Truly this had been a wonderful day.
A QUESTION FOR THE COUNTRY
For the first time in many years it seemed certain that the Conservatives had lost their hold upon the country. The times were ripe for a change of any sort. An ill-conducted and ruinous war had drained the empire of its surplus wealth, and every known industry was suffering from an almost paralyzing depression—Medchester, perhaps, as severely as any town in the United Kingdom. Its staple manufactures were being imported from the States and elsewhere at prices which the local manufacturers declared to be ruinous. Many of the largest factories were standing idle, a great majority of the remainder were being worked at half or three-quarters time. Thoughtful men, looking ten years ahead, saw the cloud, which even now was threatening enough, grow blacker and blacker, and shuddered at the thought of the tempest which before long must break over the land. Meanwhile, the streets were filled with unemployed, whose demeanour day by day grew less and less pacific. People asked one another helplessly what was being done to avert the threatened crisis. The manufacturers, openly threatened by their discharged employees, and cajoled by others higher in authority and by public opinion, still pronounced themselves helpless to move without the aid of legislation. For the first time for years Protection was openly spoken of from a political platform.
Henslow, a shrewd man and a politician of some years' standing, was one of the first to read the signs of the times, and rightly to appreciate them. He had just returned from a lengthened visit to the United States, and what he had seen there he kept at first very much to himself. But at a small committee meeting held when his election was still a matter of doubt, he unbosomed himself at last to some effect.
"The vote we want," he said, "is the vote of those people who are losing their bread, and who see ruin and starvation coming in upon them. I mean the middle-class manufacturers and the operatives who are dependent upon them. I tell you where I think that as a nation we are going wrong. We fixed once upon a great principle, and we nailed it to our mast—for all time. That is a mistake. Absolute Free Trade, such as is at present our national policy, was a magnificent principle in the days of Cobden—but the times have changed. We must change with them. That is where the typical Englishman fails. It is a matter of temperament. He is too slow to adapt himself to changing circumstances."
There was a moment's silence. These were ominous words. Every one felt that they were not lightly spoken. Henslow had more behind. A prominent manufacturer, Harrison by name, interposed from his place.
"You are aware, Mr. Henslow," he said, "that many a man has lost an assured seat for a more guarded speech than that. For generations even a whisper of the sort has been counted heresy—especially from our party."
"Maybe," Henslow answered, "but I am reminded of this, Mr. Harrison. The pioneers of every great social change have suffered throughout the whole of history, but the man who has selected the proper moment and struck hard, has never failed to win his reward. Now I am no novice in politics, and I am going to make a prophecy. Years ago the two political parties were readjusted on the Irish question. Every election which was fought was simply on these lines—it was upon the principle of Home Rule for Ireland, and the severance of that country from the United Kingdom, or the maintenance of the Union. Good! Now, in more recent times, the South African war and the realization of what our Colonies could do for us has introduced a new factor. Those who have believed in a doctrine of expansion have called themselves 'Imperialists,' and those who have favoured less wide-reaching ideals, and perhaps more attention to home matters, have been christened 'Little Englanders.' Many elections have been fought out on these lines, if not between two men absolutely at variance with one another on this question, still on the matter of degree. Now, I am going to prophesy. I say that the next readjustment of Parties, and the time is not far ahead, will be on the tariff question, and I believe that the controversy on this matter, when once the country has laid hold of it, will be the greatest political event of this century. Listen, gentlemen. I do not speak without having given this question careful and anxious thought, and I tell you that I can see it coming."
The committee meeting broke up at a late hour in the afternoon amidst some excitement, and Mr. Bullsom walked back to his office with Brooks. A fine rain was falling, and the two men were close together under one umbrella.
"What do you think of it, Brooks?" Bullsom asked anxiously.
"To tell you the truth, I scarcely know," the younger answered. "Ten years ago there could have been but one answer—to-day—well, look there."
The two men stood still for a moment. They were in the centre of the town, at a spot from which the main thoroughfares radiated into the suburbs and manufacturing centres. Everywhere the pavements and the open space where a memorial tower stood were crowded with loiterers. Men in long lines stood upon the kerbstones, their hands in their pockets, watching, waiting—God knows for what. There were all sorts, of course, the professional idlers and the drunkard were there, but the others—there was no lack of them. There was no lack of men, white-faced, dull-eyed, dejected, some of them actually with the brand of starvation to be seen in their sunken cheeks and wasted limbs. No wonder that the swing-doors of the public-houses, where there was light and warmth inside, opened and shut continually.
"Look," Brooks repeated, with a tremor in his tone. "There are thousands and thousands of them—and all of them must have some sort of a home to go to. Fancy it—one's womankind, perhaps children—and nothing to take home to them. It's such an old story, that it sounds hackneyed and commonplace. But God knows there's no other tragedy on His earth like it."
Mr. Bullsom was uncomfortable.
"I've given a hundred pounds to the Unemployed Fund," he said.
"It's money well spent if it had been a thousand," Brooks answered. "Some day they may learn their strength, and they will not suffer then, like brute animals, in silence. Look here. I'm going to speak to one of them."
He touched a tall youth on the shoulder. "Out of work, my lad?" he asked. The youth turned surlily round. "Yes. Looks like it, don't it?"
"What are you?" Brooks asked.
"Clicker."
"Why did you leave your last place?"
"Gaffer said he's no more orders—couldn't keep us on. The shop's shut up. Know of a job, guv'nor?" he asked, with a momentary eagerness. "I've two characters in my pocket—good 'uns."
"You've tried to get a place elsewhere?" Brooks asked.
"Tried? D'ye suppose I'm standing here for fun? I've tramped the blessed town. I went to thirty factories yesterday, and forty to-day. Know of a job, guv'nor? I'm not particular."
"I wish I did," Brooks answered, simply. "Here's half-a-crown. Go to that coffee-palace over there and get a meal. It's all I can do for you."
"Good for you, guv'nor," was the prompt answer. "I can treat my brother on that. Here, Ned," he caught hold of a younger boy by the shoulder, "hot coffee and eggs, you sinner. Come on."
The two scurried off together. Brooks and his companion passed on.
"It is just this," Brooks said, in a low tone, "just the thought of these people makes me afraid, positively afraid to argue with Henslow. You see—he may be right. I tell you that in a healthily-governed country there should be work for every man who is able and willing to work. And in England there isn't. Free Trade works out all right logically, but it's one thing to see it all on paper, and it's another to see this—here around us—and Medchester isn't the worst off by any means."
Bullsom was silent for several moments.
"I tell you what it is, Brooks," he said. "I'll send another hundred to the Unemployed Fund to-night."
"It's generous of you, Mr. Bullsom," the young lawyer answered. "You'll never regret it. But look here. There's a greater responsibility even than feeding these poor fellows resting upon us to-day. They don't want our charity. They've an equal right to live with us. What they want, and what they have a right to, is just legislation. That's where we come in. Politics isn't a huge joke, or the vehicle for any one man's personal ambition. We who interest ourselves, however remotely, in them, impose upon ourselves a great obligation. We've got to find the truth. That's why I hesitate to say anything against Henslow's new departure. We're off the track now. I want to hear all that Henslow has to say. We must not neglect a single chance whilst that terrible cry is ever in our ears."
They parted at the tram terminus, Mr. Bullsom taking a car for his suburban paradise. As usual, he was the centre of a little group of acquaintances.
"And how goes the election, Bullsom?" some one asked him.
Mr. Bullsom was in no hurry to answer the question. He glanced round the car, collecting the attention of those who might be supposed interested.
"I will answer that question better," he said, "after the mass meeting on Saturday night. I think that Henslow's success or failure will depend on that."
"Got something up your sleeve, eh?" his first questioner remarked.
"Maybe," Mr. Bullsom answered. "Maybe not. But apart from the immediate matter of this election, I can tell you one thing, gentlemen, which may interest you."
He paused. One thumb stole towards the armhole of his waistcoat. He liked to see these nightly companions of his hang upon his words. It was a proper and gratifying tribute to his success as a man of affairs.
"I have just left," he said, "our future Member."
The significance of his speech was not immediately apparent.
"Henslow! Oh, yes. Committee meeting this afternoon, wasn't it?" some one remarked.
"I do not mean Henslow," Mr. Bullsom replied. "I mean Kingston
Brooks."
The desired sensation was apparent.
"Why, he's your new agent, isn't he?"
"Young fellow who plays cricket rather well."
"Great golfer, they say!"
"Makes a good speech, some one was saying."
"Gives free lectures at the Secular Hall." "Rather a smart young solicitor, they say!"
Mr. Bullsom looked around him.
"He is all these things, and he does all these things. He is one of these youngsters who has the knack of doing everything well. Mark my words, all of you. I gave him his first case of any importance, and I got him this job as agent for Henslow. He's bound to rise. He's ambitious, and he's got the brains. He'll be M.P. for this borough before we know where we are."
Half-a-dozen men of more or less importance made a mental note to nod to Kingston Brooks next time they saw him, and Mr. Bullsom trudged up his avenue with fresh schemes maturing in his mind. In the domestic circle he further unburdened himself.
"Mrs. Bullsom," he said, "I am thinking of giving a dinner-party. How many people do we know better than ourselves?"
Mrs. Bullsom was aghast, and the young ladies, Selina and Louise, who were in the room, were indignant.
"Really, papa," Selina exclaimed, "what do you mean?"
"What I say," he answered, gruffly. "We're plain people, your mother and I, at any rate, and when you come to reckon things up, I suppose you'll admit that we're not much in the social way. There's plenty of people living round us in a sight smaller houses who don't know us, and wouldn't if they could—and I'm not so sure that it's altogether the fault of your father and mother either, Selina," he added, breaking ruthlessly in upon a sotto-voce remark of that young lady's.
"Well, I never!" Selina exclaimed, tossing her head.
"Come, come, I don't want no sauce from you girls," he added, drifting towards the fireplace, and adopting a more assured tone as he reached his favourite position. "I've reasons for wishing to have Mr. Kingston Brooks here, and I'd like him to meet gentlefolk. Now, there's the Vicar and his wife. Do you suppose they'd come?"
"Well, I should like to know why not," Mrs. Bullsom remarked, laying down her knitting, "when it's only three weeks ago you sent him ten guineas for the curates' fund. Come indeed! They'd better."
"Then there's Dr. Seventon," Mr. Bullsom continued, "and his wife.
Better drop him a line and tell him to look in and see me at the office.
I can invent something the matter with me, and I'd best drop him a hint.
They say Mrs. Seventon is exclusive. But I'll just let him know she's
got to come. Now, who else, girls?"
"The Huntingdons might come—if they knew that it was this sort of an affair," Selina remarked, thoughtfully.
"And Mr. Seaton," Louise added. "I'm sure he's most gentlemanly."
"I don't want gentlemanly people this time," Mr. Bullsom declared, "I want gentle-people. That's all there is about it. I let you ask who you like to the house, and give you what you want for subscriptions and clothes and such-like. You've had a free 'and. Now let's see something for it. Half-a-dozen couples'll be enough if you can't get more, but I Won't have the Nortons, or the Marvises, or any of that podgy set. You understand that? And, first of all, you, Selina, had better write to Mr. Brooks and ask him to dine with us in a friendly way one night the week after next, when the election is over and done with."
"In a friendly way, pa?" Selina repeated, doubtfully. "But we can't ask these other people whom we know so slightly like that—and, besides, Mr. Brooks might not dress if we put it like that."
"A nice lot you know about gentle-people and their ways," Mr. Bullsom remarked, with scorn. "A young fellow like Brooks would tog himself out for dinner all right even if we were alone, as long as there were ladies there. And as for the dinner, you don't suppose I'm such a mug as to leave that to Ann. I shall go to the Queen's Hotel, and have 'em send a cook and waiters, and run the whole show. Don't know that I shan't send to London. You get the people! I'll feed 'em!"
"Do as your father says, Selina," Mrs. Bullsom said, mildly. "I'm sure he's very considerate."
"Where's Mary?" Mr. Bullsom inquired. "This is a bit in her line."
Selina tossed her head.
"I'm sure I don't know why you should say that, papa," she declared. "Mary knows nothing about society, and she has no friends who would be the least use to us."
"Where is she, anyway?" Mr. Bullsom demanded. No one knew. As a matter of fact she was having tea with Kingston Brooks.
THE MARQUIS OF ARRANMORE
They had met almost on the steps of his office, and only a few minutes after he had left Mr. Bullsom. Brooks was attracted first by a certain sense of familiarity with the trim, well-balanced figure, and immediately afterwards she raised her eyes to his in passing. He wheeled sharply round, and held out his hand.
"Miss Scott, isn't it? Do you know I have just left your uncle?"
She smiled a little absently. She looked tired, and her boots and skirt were splashed as though with much walking.
"Indeed! I suppose you see a good deal of him just now while the election is on?"
"I must make myself a perfect nuisance to him," Brooks admitted. "You see the work is all new to me, and he has been through it many times before. Are you just going home?"
She nodded.
"I have been out since two o'clock," she said.
"And you are almost wet through, and quite tired out," he said. "Look here. Come across to Mellor's and have some tea with me, and I will put you in a car afterwards."
She hesitated—and he led the way across the Street, giving her no opportunity to frame a refusal. The little tea-place was warm and cosy. He found a comfortable corner, and took her wet umbrella and cape away.
"I believe," he said, sitting down opposite her, "that I have saved your life."
"Then I am not sure," she answered, "that I feel grateful to you. I ought to have warned you that I am not in the least likely to be a cheerful companion. I have had a most depressing afternoon."
"You have been to your tailor's," he suggested, "and your new gown is a failure—or is it even worse than that?"
She laughed dubiously. Then the tea was brought, and for a moment their conversation was interrupted. He thought her very graceful as she bent forward and busied herself attending to his wants. Her affinity to Selina and Louise was undistinguishable. It was true that she was pale, but it was the pallor of refinement, the student's absence of colour rather than the pallor of ill-health.
"Mr. Brooks," she said, presently, "you are busy with this election, and you are brought constantly into touch with all classes of people. Can you tell me why it is that it is so hard just now for poor people to get work? Is it true, what they tell me, that many of the factories in Medchester are closed, and many of those that are open are only working half and three-quarter time?"
"I am afraid that it is quite true, Miss Scott," he answered. "As for the first part of your question, it is very hard to answer. There seem to be so many causes at work just now.
"But it is the work of the politician surely to analyze these causes.
"It should be," he answered. "Tell me what has brought this into your mind."
"Some of the girls in our class," she said, "are out of work, and those who have anything to do seem to be working themselves almost to death to keep their parents or somebody dependent upon them. Two of them I am anxious about. I have been trying to find them this afternoon. I have heard things, Mr. Brooks, which have made me ashamed—sick at heart—ashamed to go home and think how we live, while they die. And these girls—they have known so much misery. I am afraid of what may happen to them."
"These girls are mostly boot and shoe machinists, are they not?"
"Yes. But even Mr. Stuart says that he cannot find them work."
"It is only this afternoon that we have all been discussing this matter," he said, gravely. "It is serious enough, God knows. The manufacturer tells us that he is suffering from American competition—here and in the Colonies. He tells us that the workpeople themselves are largely to blame, that their trades unions restrict them to such an extent that he is hopelessly handicapped from the start. But there are other causes. There is a terrible wave of depression all through the country. The working classes have no money to spend. Every industry is flagging, and every industry seems threatened with competition from abroad. Do you understand the principles of Free Trade at all?"
"Not in the least. I wish I did."
"Some day we must have a talk about it. Henslow has made a very daring suggestion to-day. He has given us all plenty to think about. We are all agreed upon one thing. The crisis is fast approaching, and it must be faced. These people have the right to live, and they have the right to demand that legislation should interfere on their behalf."
She sighed.
"It is a comfort to hear you talk like this," she said. "To me it seems almost maddening to see so much suffering, so many people suffering, not only physically, but being dragged down into a lower moral state by sheer force of circumstances and their surroundings, and all the time we educated people go on our way and live our lives, as though nothing were happening—as though we had no responsibility whatever for the holocaust of misery at our doors. So few people stop to think. They won't understand. It is so easy to put things behind one."
"Come," he said, cheerfully, "you and I, at least, are not amongst those. And there is a certain duty which we owe to ourselves, too, as well as to others—to look upon the brighter side of things. Let us talk about something less depressing."
"You shall tell me," she suggested, "who is going to win the election."
"Henslow!" he answered, promptly.
"Owing, I suppose—"
"To his agent, of course. You may laugh, Miss Scott, but I can assure you that my duties are no sinecure. I never knew what work was before."
"Too much work," she said, "is better than too little. After all, more people die of the latter than the former."
"Nature meant me," he said, "for a hazy man. I have all the qualifications for a first-class idler. And circumstances and the misfortune of my opinions are going to keep me going at express speed all my life. I can see it coming. Sometimes it makes me shudder."
"You are too young," she remarked, "to shrink from work. I have no sympathy to offer you."
"I begin to fear, Miss Scott," he said, "that you are not what is called sympathetic."
She smiled—and the smile broke into a laugh, as though some transient idea rather than his words had pleased her.
"You should apply to my cousin Selina for that," she said. "Every one calls her most delightfully sympathetic."
"Sympathy," he remarked, "is either a heaven-sent joy—or a bore. It depends upon the individual."
"That is either enigmatical or rude," she answered. "But, after all, you don't know Selina."
"Why not?" he asked. "I have talked with her as long as with you—and I feel that I know you quite well."
"I can't be responsible for your feelings," she said, a little brusquely, "but I'm quite sure that I don't know you well enough to be sitting here at tea with you even."
"I won't admit that," he answered, "but it was very nice of you to come.
"The fact of it was," she admitted, "my headache and appetite were stronger than my sense of the conventions. Now that the former are dissipated the latter are beginning to assert themselves. And so—"
She began to draw on her gloves. Just then a carriage with postilions and ladies with luggage came clattering up the street. She watched it with darkening face.
"That is the sort of man I detest," she said, motioning her head towards the window. "You know whose carriage it is, don't you?"
He shook his head.
"No, I did not know that any one round here drove with positions."
"It is the Marquis of Arranmore. He has a place at Enton, I believe, but he is only here for a few months in the year."
Brooks started and leaned eagerly forward.
"Why do you hate him?" he asked. "What has he done?"
"Didn't you hear how he treated the Mayor when he went out for a subscription to the Unemployed Fund?"
Brooks shook his head.
"No! I have heard nothing."
"Poor old Mr. Wensome went out all that way purposely to see him. He was kept waiting an hour, and then when he explained his errand the Marquis laughed at him. 'My dear fellow,' he said, 'the poor people of Medchester do not interest me in the least. I do not go to the people who are better off than I am and ask them to help support me, nor do I see the least reason why those who are worse off than I am should expect me to support them.' Mr. Wensome tried to appeal to his humanity, and the brute only continued to laugh in a cynical way. He declared that poor people did not interest him. His tenants he was prepared to look after—outside his own property he didn't care a snap of the fingers whether people lived or died. Mr. Wensome said it was perfectly awful to hear him talk, and he came away without a penny. Yet his property in this country alone is worth fifty thousand a year.
"It is very surprising," Brooks said, thoughtfully. "The more surprising because I know of a kind action which he once did."
"Sh! they're coming here!" she exclaimed. "That is the Marquis."
The omnibus had pulled up outside. A tall footman threw open the door, and held an umbrella over the two ladies who had descended. The Marquis and two other men followed. They trooped into the little place, bringing with them a strange flavour of another world. The women wore wonderful furs, and one who had ermine around her neck wore a great bunch of Neapolitan violets, whose perfume seemed to fill the room.
"This is a delightful idea," the taller one said, turning towards her host. "An eight-mile drive before tea sounded appalling. Where shall we sit, and may we have muffins?"
"There is nothing about your youth, Lady Sybil, which I envy more than your digestion," he answered, motioning them towards a table. "To be able to eat muffins with plenty of butter would be unalloyed bliss. Nevertheless, you shall have them. No one has ever called me selfish. Let us have tea, and toast, and bread-and-butter and cakes, and a great many muffins, please, young lady," he ordered. "And will you send out some tea to my servants, please? It will save them from trying to obtain drinks from the hotel next door, and ensure us a safe drive home."
"And don't forget to send out for that pack of cards, Arranmore," the elder lady said. "We are going to play bridge driving home with that wonderful little electric lamp of yours.
"I will not forget," he promised. "We are to be partners, you know."
He was on the point of sitting down when he saw Brooks at the next table. He held out his hand.
"How do you do, Mr. Brooks?" he said. "I am glad to see that you are going to get your man in.
"Thank you," Brooks answered, rising and waiting for his companion, who was buttoning her gloves. "I was afraid that your sympathies would be on the other side."
"Dear me, no," the Marquis answered. "My enemies would tell you that I have neither sympathy nor politics, but I assure you that at heart I am a most devout Radical. I have a vote, too, and you may count upon me.
"I am very glad to hear it," Brooks answered. "Shall I put you down on the list 'to be fetched'?"
The Marquis laughed.
"I'll come without," he declared. "I promise. Just remind me of the day."
He glanced towards Mary Scott, and for a moment seemed about to include her in some forthcoming remark. But whatever it might have been—it was never made. She kept her eyes averted, and though her self-possession was absolutely unruffled she hastened her departure. "I am not hurrying you, Mr. Brooks?" she asked. "Not in the least," he assured her.
He raised his hat to the Marquis and his party, and the former nodded good-humouredly. There was silence until the two were in the street. Then one of the men who had been looking after them dropped his eye-glass.
"I tell you what," he said to his vis-a-vis. "There's some chance for us in Medchester after all. I don't believe Arranmore is popular amongst the ladies of his own neighbourhood."
The Marquis laughed softly.
"She has a nice face," he remarked, "and I should imagine excellent perceptions. Curiously enough, too, she reminded me of some one who has every reason to hate me. But to the best of my belief I never saw her before in my life. Lady Caroom, that weird-looking object in front of you is a teapot—and those are teacups. May I suggest a use for them?"
THE MAN WHO WENT TO HELL
The Hon. Sydney Chester Molyneux stood with his cue in one hand, and an open telegram in the other, in the billiard-room at Enton. He was visibly annoyed.
"Beastly hard luck," he declared. "Parliament is a shocking grind anyway. It isn't that one ever does anything, you know, but one wastes such a lot of time when one might have been doing something worth while."
"Do repeat that, Sydney," Lady Caroom begged, laying down her novel for a moment. "It really sounds as though it ought to mean something."
"I couldn't!" he admitted. "I wish to cultivate a reputation for originality, and my first object is to forget everything I have said directly I have said it, in case I should repeat myself."
"A short memory," Arranmore remarked, "is a politician's most valuable possession, isn't it?"
"No memory at all is better," Molyneux answered.
"And your telegram?" Lady Caroom asked.
"Is from my indefatigable uncle," Molyneux groaned. "He insists upon it that I interest myself in the election here, which means that I must go in to-morrow and call upon Rochester."
The younger girl looked up from her chair, and laughed softly.
"You will have to speak for him," she said. "How interesting! We will all come in and hear you."
Molyneux missed an easy cannon, and laid down his cue with an aggrieved air.
"It is all very well for you," he remarked, dismally, "but it is a horrible grind for me. I have just succeeded in forgetting all that we did last session, and our programme for next. Now I've got to wade through it all. I wonder why on earth Providence selected for me an uncle who thinks it worth while to be a Cabinet Minister?"
Sybil Caroom shrugged her shoulders.
"I wonder why on earth," she remarked, "any constituency thinks it worth while to be represented by such a politician as you. How did you get in, Sydney?"
"Don't know," he answered. "I was on the right side, and I talked the usual rot."
"For myself," she said, "I like a politician who is in earnest. They are more amusing, and more impressive in every way. Who was the young man you spoke to in that little place where we had tea?" she asked her host.
"His name is Kingston Brooks," Arranmore answered. "He is the agent for
Henslow, the Radical candidate."
"Well, I liked him," she said. "If I had a vote I would let him convert me to Radicalism. I am sure that he could do it."
"He shall try—if you like," Arranmore remarked.
I am going to ask him to shoot one day."
"I am delighted to hear it," the girl answered. "I think he would be a wholesome change. You are all too flippant here."
The door opened. Mr. Hennibul, K.C., inserted his head and shoulders.
"I have been to look at Arranmore's golf-links," he remarked. "They are quite decent. Will some one come and play a round?"
"I will come," Sybil declared, putting down her book.
"And I," Molyneux joined in. "Hennibul can play our best ball."
Lady Caroom and her host were left alone. He came over to her side.
"What can I do to entertain your ladyship?" he asked, lightly. "Will you play billiards, walk or drive? There is an hour before lunch which must be charmed away."
"I am not energetic," she declared. "I ought to walk for the sake of my figure. I'm getting shockingly stout. Marie made me promise to walk a mile to-day. But I'm feeling deliciously lazy."
"/Embonpoint/ is the fashion," he remarked, "and you are inches short of even that yet. Come and sit in the study while I write some letters." She held out her hands.
"Pull me up, then! I am much too comfortable to move unaided."
She sprang to her feet lightly enough, and for a moment he kept her hands, which rested willingly enough in his. They looked at one another in silence. Then she laughed.
"My dear Arranmore," she protested, "I am not made up half carefully enough to stand such a critical survey by daylight. Your north windows are too terrible."
"Not to you, dear lady," he answered, smiling. "I was wondering whether it was possible that you could be forty-one."
"You brute," she exclaimed, with uplifted eyebrows. "How dare you? Forty if you like—for as long as you like. Forty is the fashionable age, but one year over that is fatal. Don't you know that now-a-days a woman goes straight from forty to sixty? It is such a delicious long rest. And besides, it gives a woman an object in life which she has probably been groping about for all her days. One is never bored after forty."
"And the object?"
"To keep young, of course. There's scope for any amount of ingenuity. Since that dear man in Paris has hit upon the real secret of enamelling, we are thinking of extending the limit to sixty-five. Lily Cestigan is seventy-one, you know, and she told me only last week that Mat Harlowe—you know Harlowe, he's rather a nice boy, in the Guards had asked her to run away with him. She's known him three months, and he's seen her at least three times by daylight. She's delighted about it."
"And is she going?" Arranmore asked.
"Well, I'm not sure that she'd care to risk that," Lady Caroom answered, thoughtfully. "She told him she'd think about it, and, meanwhile, he's just as devoted as ever."
They crossed the great stone hall together—the hall which, with its wonderful pillars and carved dome, made Enton the show-house of the county. Arranmore's study was a small octagonal room leading out from the library. A fire of cedar logs was burning in an open grate, and he wheeled up an easy-chair for her close to his writing-table.
"I wonder," she remarked, thoughtfully, "what you think of Syd
Molyneux?"
"Is there anything—to be thought about him?" he answered, lighting a cigarette.
"He's rather that way, isn't he?" she assented. "I mean for Sybil, you know."
"I should let Sybil decide," he answered.
"She probably will," Lady Caroom said. "Still, she's horribly bored at having to be dragged about to places, you know, and that sort of thing, just because she isn't married, and she likes Syd all right. He's no fool!"
"I suppose not," Arranmore answered. "He's of a type, you know, which has sprung up during my—absence from civilization. You want to grow up with it to appreciate it properly. I don't think he's good enough for Sybil."
Lady Caroom sighed.
"Sybil's a dear girl," she said, "although she's a terrible nuisance to me. I shouldn't be at all surprised either if she developed views. I wish you were a marrying man, Arranmore. I used to think of you myself once, but you would be too old for me now. You're exactly the right age for Sybil."
Arranmore smiled. He had quite forgotten his letters. Lady Caroom always amused him so well.
"She is very like what you were at her age," he remarked. "What a pity it was that I was such a poverty-stricken beggar in those days. I am sure that I should have married you."
"Now I am beginning to like you," she declared, settling down more comfortably in her chair. "If you can keep up like that we shall be getting positively sentimental presently, and if there's anything I adore in this world—especially before luncheon—it is sentiment. Do you remember we used to waltz together, Arranmore?"
"You gave me a glove one night," he said. "I have it still."
"And you pressed my hand—and—it was in the Setons' conservatory—how bold you were."
"And the next day," he declared, in an aggrieved tone, "I heard that you were engaged to Caroom. You treated me shamefully."
"These reminiscences," she declared, "are really sweet, but you are most ungrateful. I was really almost too kind to you. They were all fearfully anxious to get me married, because Dumesnil always used to say that my complexion would give out in a year or two, and I wasted no end of time upon you, who were perfectly hopeless as a husband. After all, though, I believe it paid. It used to annoy Caroom so much, and I believe he proposed to me long before he meant to so as to get rid of you."
"I," Arranmore remarked, "was the victim."
She sat up with eyes suddenly bright.
"Upon my word," she declared, "I have an idea. It is the most charming and flattering thing, and it never occurred to me before. After all, it was not eccentricity which caused you to throw up your work at the Bar—and disappear. It was your hopeless devotion to me. Don't disappoint me now by denying it. Please don't! It was the announcement of my engagement, wasn't it?"
"And it has taken you all these years to find it out?
"I was shockingly obtuse," she murmured. "The thing came to me just now as a revelation. Poor, dear man, how you must have suffered. This puts us on a different footing altogether, doesn't it?" "Altogether," he admitted.
"And," she continued, eyeing him now with a sudden nervousness, "emboldens me to ask you a question which I have been dying to ask you for the last few years. I wonder whether you will answer it."
"I wonder!" he repeated.
A change in him, too, was noticeable. That wonderful impassivity of feature which never even in his lighter moments passed altogether away, seemed to deepen every line in his hard, clear-cut face. His mouth was close drawn, his eyes were suddenly colder and expressionless. There was about him at such times as—these an almost repellent hardness. His emotions, and the man himself, seemed frozen. Lady Caroom had seen him look like it once before, and she sighed. Nevertheless, she persevered.
"For nearly twenty years," she said, "you disappeared. You were reported at different times to be in every quarter of the earth, from Zambesia to Pekin. But no one knew, and, of course, in a season or two you were forgotten. I always wondered, I am wondering now, where were you? What did you do with yourself?
"I went down into Hell," he answered. "Can't you see the marks of it in my face? For many years I lived in Hell—for many years."
"You puzzle me," she said, in a low tone. "You had no taste for dissipation. You look as though life had scorched you up at some time or other. But how? where? You were found in Canada, I know, when your brother died. But you had only been there for a few years. Before then?"
"Ay! Before then?"
There was a short silence. Then Arranmore, who had been gazing steadily into the fire, looked up. She fancied that his eyes were softer.
"Dear friend," he said, "of those days I have nothing to tell—even you. But there are more awful things even than moral degeneration. You do me justice when you impute that I never ate from the trough. But what I did, and where I lived, I do not think that I shall ever willingly tell any one."
A piece of burning wood fell upon the hearthstone. He stooped and picked it up, placed it carefully in its place, and busied himself for a moment or two with the little brass poker. Then he straightened himself.
"Catherine," he said, "I think if I were you that I would not marry Sybil to Molyneux. It struck me to-day that his eyeglass-chain was of last year's pattern, and I am not sure that he is sound on the subject of collars. You know how important these things are to a young man who has to make his own way in the world. Perhaps, I am not sure, but I think it is very likely I might be able to find a husband for her."
"You dear man," Lady Caroom murmured. "I should rely upon your taste and judgment so thoroughly."
There was a discreet knock at the door. A servant entered with a card.
Arranmore took it up, and retained it in his fingers.
"Tell Mr. Brooks," he said, "that I will be with him in a moment. If he has ridden over, ask him to take some refreshment."
"You have a visitor," Lady Caroom said, rising. "If you will excuse me
I will go and lie down until luncheon-time, and let my maid touch me up.
These sentimental conversations are so harrowing. I feel a perfect
wreck."
She glided from the room, graceful, brisk and charming, the most wonderful woman in England, as the Society papers were never tired of calling her. Arranmore glanced once more at the card between his fingers.
"Mr. Kingston Brooks."
He stood for a few seconds, motionless. Then he rang the bell.
"Show Mr. Brooks in here," he directed.
A THOUSAND POUNDS
Brooks had ridden a bicycle from Medchester, and his trousers and boots were splashed with mud. His presence at Enton was due to an impulse, the inspiration of which he had already begun seriously to doubt. Arranmore's kindly reception of him was more than ordinarily welcome.
"I am very glad to see you, Mr. Brooks," he said, holding out his hand.
"How comes it that you are able to take even so short a holiday as this?
I pictured you surrounded by canvassers and bill-posters and
journalists, all clamouring for your ear."
Brooks laughed, completely at his ease now, thanks to the unspoken cordiality of the other man. He took the easy-chair which the servant had noiselessly wheeled up to him.
"I am afraid that you exaggerate my importance,—Lord Arranmore," he said. "I was very busy early this morning, and I shall be again after four. But I am allowed a little respite now and then."
"You spend it very sensibly out of doors," Arranmore remarked. "How did you get here?"
"I cycled," Brooks answered. "It was very pleasant, but muddy."
"What will you have?" Lord Arranmore asked. "Some wine and biscuits, or something of that sort?"
His hand was upon the bell, but Brooks stopped him.
"Nothing at all, thank you, just now."
"Luncheon will be served in half-an-hour," the Marquis said. "You will prefer to wait until then?"
"I am much obliged to you," Brooks answered, "but I must be getting back to Medchester as soon as possible. Besides," he added, with a smile, "I am afraid when I have spoken of the object of my visit you may feel inclined to kick me out."
"I hope not," Arranmore replied, lightly. "I was hoping that your visit had no object at all, and that you had been good enough just to look me up.
"I should not have intruded without a purpose," Brooks said, quietly, "but you will be almost justified in treating my visit as an impertinence when I have disclosed my errand. Lord Arranmore, I am the secretary for the fund which is being raised in Medchester for the relief of the Unemployed."
Arranmore nodded.
"Oh, yes," he said. "I had a visit a few days ago from a worthy
Medchester gentleman connected with it."
"It is concerning that visit, Lord Arranmore, that I have come to see you," Brooks continued, quietly. "I only heard of it yesterday afternoon, but this morning it seems to me that every one whom I have met has alluded to it."
The Marquis was lounging against the broad mantelpiece. Some part of the cordiality of his manner had vanished.
"Well?"
"Lord Arranmore, I wondered whether it was not possible that some mistake had been made," Brooks said. "I wondered whether Mr. Wensome had altogether understood you properly—"
"I did my best to be explicit," the Marquis murmured.
"Or whether you had misunderstood him," Brooks continued, doggedly. "This fund has become absolutely necessary unless we wish to see the people starve in the streets. There are between six and seven thousand operatives and artisans in Medchester to-day who are without work through no fault of their own. It is our duty as citizens to do our best for them. Nearly every one in Medchester has contributed according to their means. You are a large property-owner in the town. Cannot you consider this appeal as an unenforced rate? It comes to that in the long run."
The Marquis shrugged his shoulders.
"I think," he said, "that on the subject of charity Englishmen generally wholly misapprehend the situation. You say that between six and seven thousand men are out of work in Medchester. Very well, I affirm that there must be a cause for that. If you are a philanthropist it is your duty to at once investigate the economic and political reasons for such a state of things, and alter them. By going about and collecting money for these people you commit what is little short of a crime. You must know the demoralizing effect of charity. No man who has ever received a dole is ever again an independent person. Besides that, you are diverting the public mind from the real point of issue, which is not that so many thousand people are hungry, but that a flaw exists in the administration of the laws of the country so grave that a certain number of thousands of people who have a God-sent right to productive labour haven't got it. Do you follow me?"
"Perfectly," Brooks answered. "You did not talk like this to Mr.
Wensome."
"I admit it. He was an ignorant man in whom I felt no interest whatever, and I did not take the trouble. Besides, I will frankly admit that I am in no sense of the word a sentimentalist. The distresses of other people do not interest me particularly. I have been poor myself, and I never asked for, nor was offered, any sort of help. Consequently I feel very little responsibility concerning these unfortunate people, whose cause you have espoused."
"May I revert to your first argument?" Brooks said. "If you saw a man drowning then, instead of trying to save him you would subscribe towards a fund to teach people to swim?"
"That is ingenious," Lord Arranmore replied, smiling grimly, "but it doesn't interest me. If I saw a man drowning I shouldn't think of interfering unless the loss of that man brought inconvenience or loss to myself. If it did I should endeavour to save him—not unless. As for the fund you speak of, I should not think of subscribing to it. It would not interest me to know that other people were provided with a safeguard against drowning. I should probably spend the money in perfecting myself in the art of swimming. Don't you see that no man who has ever received help from another is exactly in the same position again? As an individual he is a weaker creature. That is where I disagree with nearly every existing form of charity. They are wrong in principle. They are a debauchment."
"Your views, Lord Arranmore," Brooks said, "are excellent for a model world. For practical purposes I think they are a little pedantic. You are quite right in your idea that charity is a great danger. I can assure you that we are trying to realize that in Medchester. We ask for money, and we dispense it unwillingly, but as a necessary evil. And we are trying to earnestly see where our social system is at fault, and to readjust it. But meanwhile, men and women and children even are starving. We must help them."
"That is where you are wholly wrong, and where you retard all progress," Arranmore remarked. "Can't you see that you are continually plugging up dangerous leaks with putty instead of lead? You muffle the cry which but for you must ring through the land, and make itself heard to every one. Let the people starve who are without means. Legislation would stir itself fast enough then. It is the only way. Charity to individuals is poison to the multitude. You create the criminal classes with your charities, you blindfold statesmen and mislead political economists. I tell you that the more you give away the more distress you create."
Brooks rose from his seat.
"Charity is older than nations or history, Lord Arranmore," he said, "and I am foolish enough to think that the world is a better place for it. Your reasoning is very excellent, but life has not yet become an exact science. The weaknesses of men and women have to be considered. You have probably never seen a starving person."
Lord Arranmore laughed, and Brooks looked across the room at him in amazement. The Marquis was always pale, but his pallor just then was as unnatural as the laugh itself.
"My dear young man," he said, "if I could show you what I have seen your hair would turn grey, and your wits go wandering. Do you think that I know nothing of life save its crust? I tell you that I have been down in the depths, aye, single-handed, there in the devil's own cauldron, where creatures in the shape of men and women, the very sight of whom would turn you sick with horror, creep like spawn through life, brainless and soulless, foul things who would murder one another for the sake of a crust, or—Bah! What horrible memories."
He broke off abruptly. When he spoke again his tone was as usual.
"Come," he said, "I mustn't let you have this journey for nothing. After all, the only luxury in having principles is in the departing from them. I will give you a cheque, Mr. Brooks, only I beg you to think over what I have said. Abandon this doling principle as soon as it is possible. Give your serious attention to the social questions and imperfect laws which are at the back of all this distress."
Brooks felt as though he had been awakened from a nightmare. He never forgot that single moment of revelation on the part of the man who sat now smiling and debonair before his writing-table.
"You are very kind indeed, Lord Arranmore," he said. "I can assure you that the money will be most carefully used, and amongst my party, at any rate, we do really appreciate the necessity for going to the root of the matter."
Arranmore's pen went scratching across the paper. He tore out a cheque, and placing it in an envelope, handed it to Brooks.
"I noticed," he remarked, thoughtfully, "that a good many people coming out of the factories hissed my carriage in Medchester last time I was there. I hope they will not consider my cheque as a sign of weakness. But after all," he added, with a smile, "what does it matter? Let us go in to luncheon, Brooks."
Brooks glanced down at his mud-splashed clothes and boots.
"I must really ask you to excuse me," he began, but Arranmore only rang the bell.
"My valet will smarten you up," he said. "Here, Fritz, take Mr. Brooks into my room and look after him, will you. I shall be in the hall when you come down."
As he passed from the dressing-room a few minutes later, Brooks paused for a moment to look up at the wonderful ceiling above the hall. Below, Lord Arranmore was idly knocking about the billiard balls, and all around him was the murmur of pleasant conversation. Brooks drew the envelope from his pocket and glanced at the cheque. He gave a little gasp of astonishment. It was for a thousand pounds.
KINGSTON BROOKS MAKES INQUIRIES
At luncheon Brooks found himself between Sybil Caroom and Mr. Hennibul.
She began to talk to him at once.
"I want to know all about your candidate, Mr. Brooks," she declared.
"You can't imagine how pleased I am to have you here. I have had the
feeling ever since I came of being shut up in a hostile camp. I am a
Radical, you know, and these good people, even my mother, are rabid
Conservatives."
Brooks smiled as he unfolded his serviette.
"Well, Henslow isn't exactly an ornamental candidate," he said, "but he is particularly sound and a man with any amount of common-sense. You should come and hear him speak."
"I'd love to," she answered, "but no one would bring me from here. They are all hopeless. Mr. Molyneux there is going to support Mr. Rochester. If I wasn't sure that he'd do more harm than good, I wouldn't let him go. But I don't suppose they'll let you speak, Sydney," she added. "They won't if they've ever heard you."
Molyneux smiled an imperturbable smile.
"Personally," he said, "I should prefer to lend my moral support only, but my fame as an orator is too well known. There is not the least chance that they will let me off."
Sybil looked at Brooks.
"Did you ever hear such conceit?" she remarked, in a pitying tone. "And
I don't believe he's ever opened his mouth in the House, except to shout
'Hear, hear'! Besides, he's as nervous as a kitten. Tell me, are you
going to return Mr. Henslow?"
"I think so," Brooks answered. "It is certain to be a very close contest, but I believe we shall get a small majority. The Jingo element are our greatest trouble. They are all the time trying to make people believe that Conservatives have the monopoly of the Imperial sentiment. As a matter of fact, I think that Henslow is almost rabid on the war question."
"Still, your platform—to use an Americanism," Mr. Hennibul interposed, "must be founded upon domestic questions. Medchester is a manufacturing town, and I am given to understand is suffering severely. Has your man any original views on the present depression in trade?"
Brooks glanced towards the speaker with a smile.
"You have been reading the Medchester Post!" he remarked.
The barrister nodded.
"Yes. It hinted at some rather surprising revelation."
"You must read Henslow's speech at the mass meeting to-morrow night,"
Brooks said. "At present I mustn't discuss these matters too much,
especially before a political opponent," he remarked, smiling at Mr.
Molyneux. "You might induce Mr. Rochester to play our trump card."
"If your trump card is what I suspect it to be," Mr. Hennibul said, "I don't think you need fear that. Rochester would be ready enough to try it, but some of his supporters wouldn't listen to it."
The conversation drifted away from politics. Brooks found himself enjoying his luncheon amazingly. Sybil Caroom devoted herself to him, and he found himself somehow drawn with marvellous facility into the little circle of intimate friends. Afterwards they all strolled into the hall together for coffee, and Arranmore laid his hand upon his arm.
"I am sorry that you will not have time to look round the place," he said. "You must come over again before long."
"You are very kind," Brooks said, dropping his voice a little. "There are one or two more things which I should like to ask you about Canada."
"I shall always be at your service," Lord Arranmore answered.
"And I cannot go," Brooks continued, "without thanking you—"
"We will take that for granted," Arranmore interrupted. "You know the spirit in which I gave it. It is not, I fear, one of sympathy, but it may at any rate save me from having my carriage windows broken one dark night. By the bye, I have ordered a brougham for you in half-an-hour. As you see, it is raining. Your bicycle shall be sent in to-morrow."
"It is very kind of you indeed," Brooks declared.
"Molyneux has to go in, so you may just as well drive together,"
Arranmore remarked. "By the bye, do you shoot?"
"A little," Brooks admitted.
"You must have a day with us. My head keeper is coming up this afternoon, and I will try and arrange something. The election is next week, of course. We must plan a day after then."
"I am afraid that my performance would scarcely be up to your standard," Brooks said, "although it is very kind of you to ask me. I might come and look on."
Arranmore laughed.
"Hennibul is all right," he said, "but Molyneux is a shocking duffer.
We'll give you an easy place. We have some early callers, I see."
The butler was moving towards them, followed by two men in hunting-clothes.
"Sir George Marson and Mr. Lacroix, your lordship," he announced.
For a second Arranmore stood motionless. His eyes seemed to pass through the man in pink, who was approaching with outstretched hand, and to be fastened upon the face of his companion. It chanced that Brooks, who had stepped a little on one side, was watching his host, and for the second time in one day he saw things which amazed him. His expression seemed frozen on to his face—something underneath seemed struggling for expression. In a second it had all passed away. Brooks could almost have persuaded himself that it was fancy.
"Come for something to eat, Arranmore," Sir George declared, hungrily. "My second man's gone off with the sandwich-case—hunting on his own, I believe. I'll sack him to-morrow. Here's my friend Lacroix, who says you saved him from starvation once before out in the wilds somewhere. Awfully sorry to take you by storm like this, but we're twelve miles from home, and it's a God-forsaken country for inns."
"Luncheon for two at once, Groves," Lord Arranmore answered. "Delighted to meet you again, Mr. Lacroix. Last time we were both of us in very different trim."
Lady Caroom came gliding up to them, and shook hands with Sir George.
"This sounds so interesting," she murmured. "Did you say that you met
Lord Arranmore in his exploring days?" she asked, turning to Mr.
Lacroix.
"I found Lord Arranmore in a log hut which he had built himself on the shores of Lake Ono," Lacroix said, smiling. "And when I tell you that I had lost all my stores, and that his was the only dwelling-place for fifty miles around, you can imagine that his hospitality was more welcome to me then even than to-day."
Brooks, who was standing near, could not repress a start. He fancied that Lord Arranmore glanced in his direction.
Lady Caroom shuddered.
"The only dwelling-house for fifty miles," she repeated. "What hideous misanthropy."
"There was no doubt about it," Lacroix declared, smiling. "My Indian guide, who knew every inch of the country, told me so many times. I can assure you that Lord Arranmore, whom I am very pleased to meet again, was a very different person in those days."
The butler glided up from the background.
"Luncheon is served in the small dining-room, Sir George," he announced.
* * * * *
Molyneux and Brooks drove in together to Medchester, and the former was disposed—for him to be talkative.
"Queer thing about Lacroix turning up," he remarked. "I fancy our host looked a bit staggered."
"It was enough to surprise him," Brooks answered. "From Lake Ono to
Medchester is a long way."
Molyneux nodded.
"By Jove, it is," he affirmed. "Queer stick our host. Close as wax.
I've known him ever since he dropped in for the title and estates, and
I've never yet heard him open his mouth on the subject of his travels."
"Was he away from England for very long?" Brooks asked.
"No one knows where he was," Molyneux replied. "Twenty years ago he was reading for the Bar in London, and he suddenly disappeared. Well, I have never met a soul except Lacroix to-day who has seen anything of him in the interval between his disappearance and his coming to claim the estates. That means that for pretty well half a lifetime he passed completely out of the world. Poor beggar! I fancy that he was hard up, for one thing." To Brooks the subject was fascinating, but he had an idea that it was scarcely the best of form to be discussing their late host with a man who was comparatively a stranger to him. So he remained silent, and Molyneux, with a yawn, abandoned the subject.
"Where does Rochester hang out, do you know?" he asked Brooks. "I don't suppose for a moment I shall be able to find him."
"His headquarters are at the Bell Hotel," Brooks replied. "You will easily be able to come across him, for he has a series of ward meetings to-night. I am sorry that we are to be opponents."
"We shan't quarrel about that," Molyneux answered. "Here we are, at Medchester, then. Better let him put you down, and then he can go on with me. You're coming out to shoot at Enton, aren't you?"
"Lord Arranmore was good enough to ask me," Brooks answered, dubiously, "but I scarcely know whether I ought to accept. I am such a wretched shot."
Molyneux laughed.
"Well, I couldn't hit a haystack," he said, "so you needn't mind that. Besides, Arranmore isn't keen about his bag, like some chaps. Are these your offices? See you again, then."
Brooks found a dozen matters waiting for his attention. But before he settled down to work he wrote two letters. One was to the man who was doing his work as Secretary to the Unemployed Fund during the election, and with a brief mention of a large subscription, instructed him to open several relief stations which they had been obliged to chose a few days ago. And the other letter was to Victor Lacroix, whom he addressed at Westbury Park, Sir George Marson's seat.
"DEAR SIR,
"I should be exceedingly obliged if you would accord me a few minutes' interview on a purely personal matter. I will wait upon you anywhere, according to your convenience.
"Yours faithfully,
"KINGSTON BROOKS."
HENSLOW SPEAKS OUT
The bomb was thrown. Some ten thousand people crowded together in the market-place at Medchester, under what seemed to be one huge canopy of dripping umbrellas, heard for the first time for many years a bold and vigorous attack upon the principles which had come to be considered a part of the commercial ritual of the country. Henslow made the best of a great opportunity. He spoke temperately, but without hesitation, and concluded with a biting and powerful onslaught upon that class of Englishmen who wilfully closed their eyes to the prevailing industrial depression, and endeavoured to lure themselves and others into a sense of false security as to the well-being of the country by means of illusive statistics. In his appreciation of dramatic effect, and the small means by which an audience can be touched, Henslow was a past master. Early in his speech he had waved aside the umbrella which a supporter was holding over him, and regardless of the rain, he stood out in the full glare of the reflected gaslight, a ponderous, powerful figure.
"No one can accuse me," he cried, "of being a pessimist. Throughout my life I have striven personally, and politically, to look upon the brightest side of things. But I count it a crime to shut one's eyes to the cloud in the sky, even though it be no larger than a man's hand. Years ago that cloud was there for those who would to see. To-day it looms over us, a black and threatening peril, and those who, ostrich-like, still hide their heads in the sand, are the men upon whose consciences must rest in the future the responsibility for those evil things which are even now upon us. Theories are evil things, but when theory and fact are at variance, give me fact. Theoretically Free Trade should—I admit it—make us the most prosperous nation in the world. As a matter of fact, never since this country commenced to make history has our commercial supremacy been in so rotten and insecure a position. There isn't a flourishing industry in the country, save those which provide the munitions of war, and their prosperity is a spasmodic, and I might almost add, an undesirable thing. Now, I am dealing with facts to-night, not theories, and I am going to quote certain unassailable truths, and I am going to give you the immediate causes for them. The furniture and joinery trade of England is bad. There are thousands of good hands out of employment. They are out of work because the manufacturer has few or no orders. I want the immediate cause for that, and I go to the manufacturer. I ask him why he has no orders. He tells me, because every steamer from America is bringing huge consignments of ready-made office and general furniture, at such prices or such quality that the English shopkeepers prefer to stock them. Consequently trade is bad with him, and he cannot find employment for his men. I find here in Medchester the boot and shoe trade in which you are concerned bad. There are thousands of you who are willing to work who are out of employment. I go to the manufacturer, and I say to him, 'Why don't you find employment for your hands?' 'For two reasons,' he answers. 'First, because I have lost my Colonial and some of my home trade through American competition, and secondly, because of the universally depressed condition of every kindred trade throughout the country, which keeps people poor and prevents their having money to spend.' Just now I am not considering the question of why the American can send salable boots and shoes into this country, although the reasons are fairly obvious. They have nothing to do with my point, however. We are dealing to-night with immediate causes!
"And now as to that depression throughout the country which keeps people poor, as the boot manufacturer puts it, and prevents their having money to spend. I am going to take several trades one by one, and ascertain the immediate cause of their depression—"
He had hold of his audience, and he made good use of his advantage. He quoted statistics, showing the decrease of exports and relative increase of imports. How could we hope to retain our accumulated wealth under such conditions?—and finally he abandoned theorizing and argument, and boldly declared his position.
"I will tell you," he concluded, "what practical means I intend to bring to bear upon the situation. I base my projected action upon this truism, which is indeed the very kernel of my creed. I say that every man willing and able to work should have work, and I say that it is the duty of legislators to see that he has it. To-day there are one hundred thousand men and women hanging about our streets deteriorating morally and physically through the impossibility of following their trade. I say that it is time for legislators to inquire into the cause of this, and to remedy it. So I propose to move in the House of Commons, should your votes enable me to find myself there, that a Royal Commission be immediately appointed to deal with this matter. And I propose, further, to insist that this Commission be composed of manufacturers and business men, and that we dispense with all figure-heads, and I can promise you this, that the first question which shall engage the attention of these men shall be an immediate revision of our tariffs. We won't have men with theories which work out beautifully on paper, and bring a great country into the throes of commercial ruin. We won't have men who think that the laws their fathers made are good enough for them, and that all change is dangerous, because Englishmen are sure to fight their way through in the long run—a form of commercial Jingoism to which I fear we are peculiarly prone. We don't want scholars or statisticians. We want a commission of plain business men, and I promise you that if we get them, there shall be presented to Parliament before I meet you again practical measures which I honestly and firmly believe will start a wave of commercial prosperity throughout the country such as the oldest amongst you cannot remember. We have the craftsmen, the capital, and the brains—all that we need is legislation adapted to the hour and not the last century, and we can hold our own yet in the face of the world."
* * * * *
Afterwards, at the political club and at the committee-room, there was much excited conversation concerning the effect of Henslow's bold declaration. The general impression was, this election was now assured. A shouting multitude followed him to his hotel, popular Sentiment was touched, and even those who had been facing the difficulty of life with a sort of dogged despair for years were raised into enthusiasm. His words begat hope.
In the committee-room there was much excitement and a good deal of speculation. Every one realized that the full effect of this daring plunge could not be properly gauged until after it had stood the test of print. But on the whole comment was strikingly optimistic. Brooks for some time was absent. In the corridor he had come face to face with Mary Scott. Her eyes flashed with pleasure at the sight of him, and she held out her hand frankly.
"You heard it all?" he asked, eagerly.
"Yes—every word. Tell me, you understand these things so much better than I do. Is this an election dodge, or—is he in earnest? Was he speaking the truth?
"The honest truth, I believe," he answered, leading her a little away from the crowd of people. "He is of course pressing this matter home for votes, but he is very much in earnest himself about it."
"And you think that he is on the right track?"
"I really believe so," he answered. "In fact I am strongly in favour of
making experiments in the direction he spoke of. By the bye, Miss
Scott, I have something to tell you. You remember telling me about Lord
Arranmore and his refusal to subscribe to the Unemployed Fund?"
"Yes!"
"He has been approached again—the facts have been more fully made known to him, and he has sent a cheque for one thousand pounds."
She received the news with a coldness which he found surprising.
"I think I can guess," she said, quietly, "who the second applicant was."
"I went to see him myself," he admitted.
"You must be very eloquent," she remarked, with a smile which he could not quite understand. "A thousand pounds is a great deal of money."
"It is nothing to Lord Arranmore," he answered.
"Less than nothing," she admitted, readily. "I would rather that he had stopped in the street and given half-a-crown to a hungry child."
"Still—it is a magnificent gift," he declared. "We can open all our relief stations again. I believe that you are a little prejudiced against Lord Arranmore."
"I?" She shrugged her shoulders. "How should I be? I have never spoken a word to him in my life. But I think that he has a hard, cynical face, and a hateful expression."
Brooks disagreed with her frankly.
"He seems to me," he declared, "like a man who has had a pretty rough time, and I believe he had in his younger days, but I do not believe that he is really either hard or cynical. He has some odd views as regards charity, but upon my word they are logical enough."
She smiled.
"Well, we'll not disagree about him," she declared. "I wonder how long my uncle means to be."
"Shall I find out?" he asked.
"Would it be troubling you? He is so excited that I dare say he has forgotten all about me."
Which was precisely what he had done. Brooks found him the centre of an animated little group, with a freshly-lit cigar in his mouth, and every appearance of having settled down to spend the night. He was almost annoyed when Brooks reminded him of his niece.
"God bless my soul, I forgot all about Mary," he exclaimed with vexation. "She must go and sit somewhere. I shan't be ready yet. Henslow wants us to go down to the Bell, and have a bit of supper."
"In that case," Brooks said, "you had better allow me to take Miss Scott home, and I will come then to you."
"Capital, if you really don't mind," Mr. Bullsom declared. "Put her in a cab. Don't let her be a bother to you."
Brooks found her reluctant to take him away, but he pleaded a headache, and assured her that his work for the night was over. Outside he led her away from the centre of the town to a quiet walk heading to the suburb where she lived. Here the streets seemed strangely silent, and Brooks walked hat in hand, heedless of the rain which was still sprinkling. "Oh, this is good," he murmured. "How one wearies of these crowds."
"All the same," she answered, smiling, "I think that your place just now is amongst them, and I shall not let you take me further than the top of the hill."
Brooks looked down at her and laughed.
"What a very determined person you are," he said. "I will take you to the top of the hill—and then we will see."
A TEMPTING OFFER
The small boy brought in the card and laid it on Brooks' desk with a flourish.
"He's outside, sir—in Mr. Barton's room. Shall I show him in?"
Brooks for a moment hesitated. He glanced at a letter which lay open upon the desk before him, and which he had read and re-read many times. The boy repeated his inquiry.
"Yes, of course," he answered. "Show him in at once."
Lord Arranmore, more than usually immaculate, strolled in, hat in hand, and carefully selecting the most comfortable chair, seated himself on the other side of the open table at which Brooks was working.
"How are you, Brooks?" he inquired, tersely. "Busy, of course. An aftermath of work, I suppose."
"A few months ago," Brooks answered, "I should have considered myself desperately busy. But after last week anything ordinary in the shape of work seems restful."
Lord Arranmore nodded.
"I must congratulate you, I suppose," he remarked. "You got your man in."
"We got him in all right," Brooks assented. "Our majority was less than we had hoped for, though."
Lord Arranmore shrugged his shoulders.
"It was large enough," he answered, "and after all it was a clear gain of a seat to your party, wasn't it?"
"It was a seat which we Radicals had a right to," Brooks declared. "Now that the storm of Imperialism is quieting down and people are beginning to realize that matters nearer home need a little attention, I cannot see how the manufacturing centres can do anything save return Radicals. We are the only party with a definite home policy."
Lord Arranmore nodded.
"Just so," he remarked, indifferently. "I needn't say that I didn't come here to talk politics. There was a little matter of business which I wished to put before you."
Brooks looked up in some surprise.
"Business!" he repeated, a little vaguely.
"Yes. As you are aware, Mr. Morrison has had the control of the Enton estates for many years. He was a very estimable man, and he performed his duties so far as I know quite satisfactorily. Now that he is dead, however, I intend to make a change. The remaining partners in his firm are unknown to me, and I at once gave them notice of my intention. Would you care to undertake the legal management of my estates in this part of the world?"
Brooks felt the little colour he had leave his cheeks. For a moment he was quite speechless.
"I scarcely know how to answer, or to thank you, Lord Arranmore," he said at last. "This is such a surprising offer. I scarcely see how you can be in earnest. You know so little of me."
Lord Arranmore shrugged his shoulders.
"Really," he said, "I don't see anything very surprising in it. Morrisons have a large practice, and without the old man I scarcely see how they could continue to give my affairs the attention they require. You, on the other hand, are only just starting, and you would be able to watch over my interests more closely. Then—although I cannot pretend that I am much influenced by sentimental reasons—still, I knew your father, and the strangeness of our few years of life as neighbours inclines me to be of service to you provided I myself am not the sufferer. As to that I am prepared to take the risk. You see mine is only the usual sort of generosity—the sort which provides for an adequate quid pro quo. Of course, if you think that the undertaking of my affairs would block you in other directions do not hesitate to say so. This is a matter of business between us, pure and simple."
Brooks had recovered himself. The length of Lord Arranmore's speech and his slow drawl had given him an opportunity to do so. He glanced for a moment at the letter which lay upon his desk, and hated it.
"In an ordinary way, Lord Arranmore," he answered, "there could be only one possible reply to such an offer as you have made me—an immediate and prompt acceptance. If I seem to hesitate, it is because, first—I must tell you something. I must make something—in the nature of a confession."
Lord Arranmore raised his eyebrows, but his face remained as the face of a Sphinx. He sat still, and waited.
"On the occasion of my visit to you," Brooks continued, "you may remember the presence of a certain Mr. Lacroix? He is the author, I believe, of several books of travel in Western Canada, and has the reputation of knowing that part of the country exceedingly well."
Brooks paused, but his visitor helped him in no way. His face wore still its passive expression of languid inquiry.
"He spoke of his visit to you," Brooks went on "in Canada, and he twice reiterated the fact that there was no other dwelling within fifty miles of you. He said this upon his own authority, and upon the authority of his Indian guide. Now it is only a few days ago since you spoke of my father as living for years within a few miles of you."
Lord Arranmore nodded his head thoughtfully.
"Ah! And you found the two statements, of course, irreconcilable.
Well, go on!"
Brooks found it difficult. He was grasping a paperweight tightly in one hand, and he felt the rising colour burn his cheeks.
"I wrote to Mr. Lacroix," he said.
"A perfectly natural thing to do," Lord Arranmore remarked, smoothly.
And his answer is here!
"Suppose you read it to me," Lord Arranmore suggested.
Brooks took up the letter and read it.
"TRAVELLERS' CLUB, December 10.
"DEAR SIR,
"Replying to your recent letter, I have not the slightest hesitation in reaffirming the statement to which you refer. I am perfectly convinced that at the time of my visit to Lord Arranmore on the bank of Lake Quo, there was no Englishman or dwelling-place of any sort within a radius of fifty miles. The information which you have received is palpably erroneous.
"Why not refer to Lord Arranmore himself? He would certainly confirm what I say, and finally dispose of the matter.
"Yours sincerely,
"VICTOR LACROIX."
"A very interesting letter," Lord Arranmore remarked. "Well?"
Brooks crumpled the letter up and flung it into the waste-paper basket.
"Lord Arranmore," he said, "I made this inquiry behind your back, and in a sense I am ashamed of having done so. Yet I beg you to put yourself in my position. You must admit that my father's disappearance from the world was a little extraordinary. He was a man whose life was more than exemplary—it was saintly. For year after year he worked in the police-courts amongst the criminal classes. His whole life was one long record of splendid devotion. His health at last breaks down, and he is sent by his friends for a voyage to Australia. He never returns. Years afterwards his papers and particulars of his death are sent home from one of the loneliest spots in the Empire. A few weeks ago you found me out and told me of his last days. You see what I must believe. That he wilfully deserted his wife and son—myself. That he went into lonely and inexplicable solitude for no apparent or possible reason. That he misused the money subscribed by his friends in order that he might take this trip to Australia. Was ever anything more irreconcilable?"
"From your point of view—perhaps not," Lord Arranmore answered. "You must enlarge it."
"Will you tell me how?" Brooks demanded.
Lord Arranmore stifled a yawn. He had the air of one wearied by a profitless discussion.
"Well," he said, "I might certainly suggest a few things. Who was your trustee or guardian, or your father's man of business?
"Mr. Ascough, of Lincoln's Inn Fields."
"Exactly. Your father saw him, of course, prior to his departure from
England."
"Yes."
"Well, is it not a fact that instead of making a will your father made over by deed of gift the whole of his small income to your mother in trust for you?"
"Yes, he did that," Brooks admitted.
Lord Arranmore shrugged his shoulders.
"Think that over," he remarked. "Doesn't that suggest his already half-formed intention never to return?"
"It never struck me in that way," Brooks answered. "Yet it is obvious," Lord Arranmore said. "Now, I happen to know from your father himself that he never intended to go to Australia, and he never intended to return to England. He sailed instead by an Allan liner from Liverpool to Quebec under the name of Francis. He went straight to Montreal, and he stayed there until he had spent the greater part of his money. Then he drifted out west. There is his history for you in a few words."
A sudden light flashed in Brooks' eyes.
"He told you that he left England meaning never to return? Then you have the key to the whole thing. Why not? That is what I want to know. Why not?"
"I do not know," Lord Arranmore answered, coolly. "He never told me."
Brooks felt a sudden chill of disappointment. Lord Arranmore rose slowly to his feet.
"Mr. Brooks," he said, "I have told you all that I know. You have asked me a question which I have not been able to answer. I can, however, give you some advice which I will guarantee to be excellent—some advice which you will do well to follow. Shall I go on?"
"If you please!"
"Do not seek to unravel any further what may seem to you to be the mystery of your father's disappearance from the world. Depend upon it, his action was of his own free will, and he had excellent reasons for it. If he had wished you to know them he would have communicated with you. Remember, I was with your father during his last days—and this is my advice to you."
Brooks pointed downward to the crumpled ball of paper.
"That letter!" he exclaimed.
Lord Arranmore shrugged his shoulders.
"I scarcely see its significance," he said. "It is not even my word against Lacroix'. I sent you all your father's papers, I brought back photographs and keepsakes known to belong to him. In what possible way could it benefit me to mislead you?"
The telephone on Brooks' table rang, and for a moment or two he found himself, with mechanical self-possession, attending to some unimportant question. When he replaced the receiver Lord Arranmore had resumed his seat, but was drawing on his gloves.
"Come," he said, "let us resume our business talk. I have made you an offer. What have you to say?"
Brooks pointed to the waste-paper basket.
"I did a mean action," he said. "I am ashamed of it. Do you mean that your offer remains open?"
"Certainly," Lord Arranmore answered. "That little affair is not worth mentioning. I should probably have done the same."
"Well, I am not altogether a madman," Brooks declared, smiling, "so I will only say that I accept your offer gratefully—and I will do my very best to deserve your confidence."
Lord Arranmore rose and stood with his hands behind him, looking out of the window.
"Very good," he said. "I will send for Ascough to come down from town, and we must meet one day next week at Morrisons' office, and go into matters thoroughly. That reminds me. Busher, my head bailiff, will be in to see you this afternoon. There are half-a-dozen leases to be seen to at once, and everything had better come here until the arrangements are concluded."
"I shall be in all the afternoon," Brooks answered, still a little dazed.
"And Thursday," Lord Arranmore concluded, "you dine and sleep at Enton. I hope we shall have a good day's sport. The carriage will fetch you at 6:30. Good-morning."
Lord Arranmore walked out with a little nod, but on the threshold he paused and looked back.
"By the bye, Brooks," he said, "do you remember my meeting you in a little tea-shop almost the day after I first called upon you?"
"Quite well," Brooks answered.
"You had a young lady with you."
"Yes. I was with Miss Scott."
Lord Arranmore's hand fell from the handle. His eyes seemed suddenly full of fierce questioning. He moved a step forward into the room.
"Miss Scott? Who is she?"
Brooks was hopelessly bewildered, and showed it.
"She lives with her uncle in Medchester. He is a builder and timber merchant."
Lord Arranmore was silent for a moment.
"Her father, then, is dead?" he asked.
"He died abroad, I think," Brooks answered, "but I really am not sure.
I know very little of any of them."
Lord Arranmore turned away.
"She is the image of a man I once knew," he remarked, "but after all, the type is not an uncommon one. You won't forget that Busher will be in this afternoon. He is a very intelligent fellow for his class, and you may find it worth your while to ask him a few questions. Until Thursday, then."
"Until Thursday," Brooks repeated, mechanically.
WHO THE DEVIL IS BROOKS?
"To be tired," declared Sydney Molyneux, sinking into a low couch, "to be downright dead dog-tired is the most delightful thing in the world. Will some one give me some tea?"
Brooks laughed softly from his place in front of the open fire. A long day in the fresh north wind had driven the cobwebs from his brain, and brought the burning colour to his cheeks. His eyes were bright, and his laughter was like music.
"And you," he exclaimed, "are fresh from electioneering. Why, fatigue like this is a luxury."
Molyneux lit a cigarette and looked longingly at the tea-tray set out in the middle of the hall.
"That is all very well," he said, "but there is a wide difference between the two forms of exercise. In electioneering one can use one's brain, and my brain is never weary. It is capable of the most stupendous exertions. It is my legs that fail me sometimes. Here comes Lady Caroom at last. Why does she look as though she had seen a ghost?"
That great staircase at Enton came right into the hall. A few steps from the bottom Lady Caroom had halted, and her appearance was certainly a little unusual. Every vestige of colour had left her cheeks. Her right hand was clutching the oak banisters, her eyes were fixed upon Brooks. He was for a moment embarrassed, but he stepped forward to meet her.
"How do you do, Lady Caroom?" he said. "We are all in the shadows here, and Mr. Molyneux is crying out for his tea."
She resumed her progress and greeted Brooks graciously. Almost at the same moment a footman brought lamps, and the tea was served. Lady Caroom glanced again with a sort of curious nervousness at the young man who stood by her side.
"You are a little earlier than we expected," she remarked, seating herself before the tea-tray. "Here comes Sybil. She is dying to congratulate you, Mr. Brooks. Is Arranmore here?"
"We left him in the gun-room," Molyneux answered. "He is coming directly."
Sybil Caroom, in a short skirt and a jaunty hat, came towards Brooks with outstretched hand.
"Delightful!" she exclaimed. "I only wish that it had been nine thousand instead of nine hundred. You deserved it."
Brooks laughed heartily.
"Well, we were satisfied to win the seat," he declared.
Molyneux leaned forward tea-cup in hand.
"Well, you deserved it," he remarked. "Our old man opened his mouth a bit, but yours knocked him silly. Upon my word, I didn't think that any one man had cheek stupendous enough to humbug a constituency like Henslow did. It took my breath away to read his speeches."
"Do you really mean that?" asked Brooks.
"Mean it? Of course I do. What I can't understand is how people can swallow such stuff, election after election. Doesn't every Radical candidate get up and talk in the same maudlin way—hasn't he done so for the last fifty years? And when he gets into Parliament is there a more Conservative person on the face of the earth than the Radical member pledged to social reform? It's the same with your man Henslow. He'll do nothing! He'll attempt nothing! Silly farce, politics, I think."
Lady Caroom laughed softly.
"I have never heard you so eloquent in my life, Sydney," she exclaimed. "Do go on. It is most entertaining. When you have quite finished I can see that Mr. Brooks is getting ready to pulverize you."
Brooks shook his head.
"Lady Sybil tells me that Mr. Molyneux is not to be taken seriously," he answered.
Molyneux brought up his cup for some more tea.
"Don't you listen to Lady Sybil, Brooks," he retorted. "She is annoyed with me because I have been spoken of as a future Prime Minister, and she rather fancies her cousin for the post. Two knobs, please, and plenty of cream. As a matter of fact I am in serious and downright earnest. I say that Henslow won his seat by kidding the working classes. He promised them a sort of political Arabian Nights. He'll go up to Westminster, and I'm open to bet what you like that he makes not one serious practical effort to push forward one of the startling measures he talked about so glibly. I will trouble you for the toast, Brooks. Thanks!"
"He is always cynical like this," Sybil murmured, "when his party have lost a seat. Don't take any notice of him, Mr. Brooks. I have great faith in Mr. Henslow, and I believe that he will do his best."
Molyneux smiled.
"Henslow is a politician," he remarked, "a professional politician.
What you Radicals want is Englishmen who are interested in politics.
Henslow knows how to get votes. He's got his seat, and he'll keep
it—till the next election."
Brooks shook his head.
"Henslow has rather a platform manner," he said, "but he is sound enough. I believe that we are on the eve of important changes in our social legislation, and I believe that Henslow will have much to say about them. At any rate, he is not a rank hypocrite. We have shown him things in Medchester which he can scarcely forget in a hurry. He will go to Westminster with the memory of these things before him, with such a cry in his ears as no man can stifle. He might forget if he would—but he never will. We have shown him things which men may not forget."
Lord Arranmore, who had now joined the party, leaned forward with his arm resting lightly upon Lady Caroom's shoulder. An uneasy light flashed in his eyes.
"There are men," he said, "whom you can never reach, genial men with a ready smile and a prompt cheque-book, whose selfishness is an armour more potent than the armour of my forefather there, Sir Ronald Kingston of Arranmore. And, after all, why not? The thoroughly selfish man is the only person logically who has the slightest chance of happiness."
"It is true," Molyneux murmured. "Delightfully true."
"Lord Arranmore is always either cynical or paradoxical," Sybil Caroom declared. "He really says the most unpleasant things with the greatest appearance of truth of any man I know."
"This company," Lord Arranmore remarked lightly, "is hostile to me. Let us go and play pool."
Lady Caroom rose up promptly. Molyneux groaned audibly.
"You shall play me at billiards instead," she declared. "I used to give you a good game once, and I have played a great deal lately. Ring for Annette, will you, Sybil? She has my cue."
Sybil Caroom made room for Brooks by her side.
"Do sit down and tell me more about the election," she said. "Sydney is sure to go to sleep. He always does after shooting."
"You shall ask me questions," he suggested. "I scarcely know what part of it would interest you."
They talked together lightly at first, then more seriously. From the other end of the hall came the occasional click of billiard balls. Lady Caroom and her host were playing a leisurely game interspersed with conversation.
"Who is this young Mr. Brooks?" she asked, pausing to chalk her cue.
"A solicitor from Medchester," he answered. "He was Parliamentary agent for Henslow, and I am going to give him a management of my estates."
"He is quite a boy," she remarked.
"Twenty-six or seven," he answered. "How well you play those cannons.
"I ought to. I had lessons for years. Is he a native of Medchester?"
Lord Arranmore was blandly puzzled. She finished her stroke and turned towards him.
"Mr. Brooks, you know. We were talking of him."
"Of course we were," he answered. "I do not think so. He is an orphan.
I met his father in Canada."
"He reminds me of some one," she remarked, in a puzzled tone. "Just now as I was coming downstairs it was almost startling. He is a good-looking boy."
"Be careful not to foul," he admonished her. "You should have the spider-rest."
Lady Caroom made a delicate cannon from an awkward place, and concluded her break in silence. Then she leaned with her back against the table, chalking her cue. Her figure was still the figure of a girl she was a remarkably pretty woman. She laid her slim white fingers upon his coat-sleeve.
"I wonder," she said, softly, "whether you will ever tell me."
"If you look at me like that," he answered, smiling, "I shall tell you—a great many things."
Her eyes fell. It was too absurd at her age, but her cheeks were burning.
"You don't improve a bit," she declared. "You were always too apt with your tongue."
"I practiced in a good school," he answered.
"Dear me," she sighed. "For elderly people what a lot of rubbish we talk."
He shivered.
"What a hideous word," he remarked. "You make me feel that my chest is padded and my hair dyed. If to talk sense is a sign of youth, let us do it."
"By all means. When are you going to find me a husband for Sybil?"
"Well—is there any hurry?" he asked.
"Lots! We are going to Fernshire next week, and the place is always full of young men. If you have anything really good in your mind I don't want to miss it."
He took up his cue and scored an excellent break. She followed suit, and he broke down at an easy cannon. Then he came over to her side.
"How do you like Mr. Brooks?" he asked, quietly.
"He seems a nice boy," she answered, lightly. He remained silent. Suddenly she looked up into his face, and clutched the sides of the table.
"You—you don't mean that?" she murmured, suddenly pale to the lips.
He led her to a chair. The game was over.
"Some day," he whispered, "I will tell you the whole story."
* * * * *
"Even to think of these things," Sybil said, softly, "makes us feel very selfish."
"No one is ever hopelessly selfish who is conscious of it," he answered, smiling. "And, after all, it would not do for every one to be always brooding upon the darker side of life."
"In another minute," Molyneux exclaimed, waking up with a start, "I should have been asleep. Whatever have you two been talking about? It was the most soothing hum I ever heard in my life."
"Mr. Brooks was telling me of some new phases of life," she answered.
"It is very interesting, even if it is a little sad."
Molyneux eyed them both for a moment in thoughtful silence.
"H'm!" he remarked. "Dinner is the next phase of life which will interest me. Has the dressing-bell gone yet?"
"You gross person," she exclaimed. "You ate so much tea you had to go to sleep."
"It was the exercise, he insisted.
"You have been standing about all day. I heard you ask for a place without any walking, and where as few people as possible could see you miss your birds."
"Your ears are a great deal too sharp," he said. "It was the wind, then."
"Never mind what it was," she answered, laughing. "You can go to sleep again if you like."
Molyneux put up his eyeglass and looked from one to the other. He saw that Sybil's interest in her companion's conversation was not assumed, and for the first time he appreciated Brooks' good looks. He shook off his sleepiness at once and stood by Sybil's side.
"Have you been trying to convert Lady Sybil?" he asked.
"It is unnecessary," she answered, quickly. "Mr. Brooks and I are on the same side."
He laughed softly and strolled away. Lord Arranmore was standing thoughtfully before the marking-board. He laid his hand upon his arm.
"I say, Arranmore," he asked, "who the devil is Brooks?"
MR. BULLSOM GIVES A DINNER-PARTY
"God bless my soul!" Mr. Bullsom exclaimed. "Listen to this." Mrs. Bullsom, in a resplendent new dress, looking shinier and fatter than ever, was prepared to listen to anything which might relieve the tension of the moment. For it was the evening of the dinner-party, and within ten minutes of the appointed time. Mr. Bullsom stood under the incandescent light and read aloud "The shooting-party at Enton yesterday consisted of the Marquis of Arranmore, the Hon. Sydney Molyneux, Mr. Hennibul, K.C., and Mr. Kingston Brooks. Notwithstanding the high wind an excellent bag was obtained."
"What! Our Mr. Kingston Brooks?" Selina exclaimed.
"It's Brooks, right enough," Mr. Bullsom exclaimed. "I called at his office yesterday, and they told me that he was out for the day. Well, that licks me."
Mary, who was reading a magazine in a secluded corner, looked up.
"I saw Mr. Brooks in the morning," she remarked. "He told me that he was going to Enton to dine and sleep."
Selina looked at her cousin sharply.
"You saw Mr. Brooks?" she repeated. "Where?"
"I met him," Mary answered, coolly. "He told me that Lord Arranmore had been very kind to him."
"Why didn't you tell us?" Louise asked.
"I really didn't think of it," Mary answered. "It didn't strike me as being anything extraordinary."
"Not when he's coming here to dine to-night," Selina repeated, "and is a friend of papa's! Why, Mary, what nonsense."
"I really don't see anything to make a fuss about," Mary said, going back to her magazine.
Mr. Bullsom drew himself up, and laid down the paper with the paragraph uppermost.
"Well, it is most gratifying to think that I gave that young man his first start," he remarked. "I believe, too, that he is not likely to forget it."
"The bell!" Mrs. Bullsom exclaimed, with a little gasp. "Some one has come."
"Well, if they have, there's nothing to be frightened about," Mr. Bullsom retorted. "Ain't we expecting them to come? Don't look so scared, Sarah! Take up a book, or something. Why, bless my soul, you're all of a tremble."
"I can't help it, Peter," Mrs. Bullsom replied, nervously. "I don't know these people scarcely a bit, and I'm sure I shall do something foolish. Selina, be sure you look at me when I'm to come away, and—"
"Mr. Kingston Brooks."
Brooks, ushered in by a neighbouring greengrocer, entered upon a scene of unexpected splendour. Selina and her sister were gorgeous in green and pink respectively. Mr. Bullsom's shirt-front was a thing to wonder at. There was an air of repressed excitement about everybody, except Mary, who welcomed him with a quiet smile.
"I am not much too early, I hope," Brooks remarked.
"You're in the nick of time," Mr. Bullsom assured him.
Brooks endeavoured to secure a chair near Mary, which attempt Selina adroitly foiled.
"We've been reading all about your grandeur, Mr. Brooks," she exclaimed. "What a beautiful day you must have had at Enton."
Brooks looked puzzled.
"It was very enjoyable," he declared. "I wanted to see you, Miss Scott," he added, turning to Mary. "I think that we can arrange that date for the lecture now. How would Wednesday week do?"
"Admirably!" Mary answered.
"Do you know whom you take in, Mr. Brooks?" Selina interrupted.
Brooks glanced at the card in his hand.
"Mrs. Seventon," he said. "Yes, thanks."
Selina looked up at him with an arch smile.
"Mrs. Seventon is most dreadfully proper," she said. "You will have to be on your best behaviour. Oh, here comes some one. What a bother!"
There was an influx of guests. Mrs. Bullsom, reduced to a state of chaotic nervousness, was pushed as far into the background as possible by her daughters, and Mr. Bullsom, banished from the hearth where he felt surest of himself, plunged into a conversation with Mr. Seventon on the weather. Brooks leaned over towards Mary.
"Wednesday week at eight o'clock, then," he said. "I want to have a chat with you about the subject."
"Not now," she interposed. "You know these people, don't you, and the
Huntingdons? Go and talk to them, please."
Brooks laughed, and went to the rescue. He won Mrs. Bullsom's eternal gratitude by diverting Mrs. Seventon's attention from her, and thereby allowing her a moment or two to recover herself. Somehow or other a buzz of conversation was kept up until the solemn announcement of dinner. And when she was finally seated in her place, and saw a couple of nimble waiters, with the greengrocer in the back, looking cool and capable, she felt that the worst was over.
The solemn process of sampling doubtful-looking entries and eating saddle of mutton to the tune of a forced conversation was got through without disaster. Mrs. Bullsom felt her fat face break out into smiles. Mr. Bullsom, though he would like to have seen everybody go twice for everything, began to expand. He had already recited the story of Kingston Brooks' greatness to both of his immediate neighbours, and in a casual way mentioned his early patronage of that remarkable young man. And once meeting his eye he raised his glass.
"Not quite up to the Enton vintage, Brooks, eh? but all right, I hope."
Brooks nodded back, and resumed his conversation. Selina took the opportunity to mention casually to her neighbour, Mr. Huntingdon, that Mr. Brooks was a great friend of Lord Arranmore's, and Louise, on her side of the table, took care also to disseminate the same information. Everybody was properly impressed. Mr. Bullsom decided to give a dinner-party every month, and to double the greengrocer's tip, and by the time Selina's third stage whisper had reached her mother and the ladies finally departed, he was in a state of geniality bordering upon beatitude. There was a general move to his end of the table. Mr. Bullsom started the port, and his shirt-front grew wider and wider. He lit a cigar, and his thumb found its way to the armhole of his waistcoat. At that moment Mr. Bullsom would not have changed places with any man on earth.
"What sort of a place is Enton to stay at, Brooks, eh?" he inquired, in a friendly manner. "Keeps it up very well, don't he, the present Marquis?"
Brooks sighed.
"I really don't know much about it," he answered, "I was only there one night."
"Good day's sport?"
"Very good indeed," Brooks answered. "Lord Arranmore is a wonderful shot."
"A remarkable man in a great many ways, Lord Arranmore," Dr. Seventon remarked. "He disappeared from London when he was an impecunious young barrister with apparently no earthly chance of succeeding to the Arranmore estates, and from that time till a few years ago, when he was advertised for, not a soul knew his whereabouts. Even now I am told that he keeps the story of all these years absolutely to himself. No one knew where he was, or how he supported himself."
"I can tell you where he was for some time, at any rate," Brooks said. "He was in Canada, for he met my father there, and was with him when he died."
"Indeed," Dr. Seventon remarked. "Then I should say that you are one of the only men in England to whom he has opened his lips on the subject. Do you know what he was doing there?"
"Fishing and shooting, I think." Brooks answered. "It was near Lake
Ono, right out west, and there would be nothing else to take one there."
"It was always supposed too that he had spent most of the time in a situation in New York," Mr. Huntingdon said.
"I know a man," Mr. Seaton put in, "who can swear that he met him as a sergeant in the first Australian contingent of mounted infantry sent to the Cape."
"There are no end of stories about him," Dr. Seventon remarked. "If I were the man I would put a stop to them by telling everybody exactly where I was during those twenty years or so. It is a big slice of one's life to seal up."
"Still, there is not the slightest reason why he should take the whole world into his confidence, is there?" Brooks expostulated. "He is not a public man."
"A peer of England with a seat in the House of Lords must always be a public man to some extent," Mr. Huntingdon remarked.
"I am not sure," Brooks remarked, "that the lives of all our hereditary legislators would bear the most searching inquiry."
"That's right, Brooks," Mr. Bullsom declared. "Stick up for your pals."
Brooks looked a little annoyed.
"The only claim I have upon Lord Arranmore's acquaintance," he remarked, "is his kindness to my father. I hope, Dr. Seventon, that you are going to press the matter of that fever hospital home. I have a little information which I think you might make use of."
Brooks changed his place, wine-glass in hand, and the conversation drifted away. But he found the position of social star one which the Bullsoms were determined to force upon him, for they had no sooner entered the drawing-room than Selina came rushing across the room to him and drew him confidentially on one side.
"Mr. Brooks," she said, "do go and talk to Mrs. Huntingdon. She is so anxious to hear about the Lady Caroom who is staying at Enton."
"I know nothing about Lady Caroom," Brooks replied, without any overplus of graciousness.
Selina looked at him in some dismay.
"But you met her at Enton, didn't you?" she asked.
"Oh, yes, I met her there," Brooks answered, impatiently. "But I certainly don't know enough of her to discuss her with Mrs. Huntingdon. I rather wanted to speak to your cousin."
Selina's thin little lips became compressed, and for a moment she forgot to smile. Her cousin indeed! Mary, who was sitting there in a plain black gown without a single ornament, and not even a flower, looking for all the world like the poor relation she was! Selina glanced downwards at the great bunch of roses and maidenhair fern in her bosom, at the fancy and beaded trimming which ran like a nightmare all over her new gown, and which she was absolutely certain had come from Paris; at the heavy gold bracelets which concealed some part of her thin arms; she remembered suddenly the aigrette in her hair, such a finish to her costume, and her self-confidence returned.
"Oh, don't bother about Mary now. Mrs. Huntingdon is dying to have you talk to her. Please do and if you like—I will give you one of my roses for your button-hole."
Brooks stood the shock gallantly, and bowed his thanks. He had met Mrs. Huntingdon before, and they talked together for a quarter of an hour or so.
"I wish I knew why you were here," was almost her first question.
"Isn't it all funny?
"Mr. Bullsom has always been very decent to me," he answered. "It is through him I was appointed agent to Mr. Henslow."
"Oh, business! I see," she answered, shrugging her shoulders. "Same here. I'm a doctor's wife, you know. Did you ever see such awful girls! and who in the name of all that's marvellous can be their dressmaker?"
"Bullsom is a very good sort indeed," Brooks answered. "I have a great respect for him."
She made a little face.
"Who's the nice-looking girl in black with her hair parted in the middle?" she asked. "Mr. Bullsom's niece. She is quite charming, and most intelligent."
"Dear me!" Mrs. Huntingdon remarked. "I had no idea she had anything to do with the family. Sort of a Cinderella look about her now you mention it. Couldn't you get her to come over and talk to me? I'm horribly afraid of Mrs. Bullsom. She'll come out of that dress if she tries to talk, and I know I shall laugh."
"I'm sure I can," Brooks answered, rising with alacrity. "I'll bring her over in a minute."
Mary had just finished arranging a card-table when Brooks drew her on one side.
"About that subject!" he began.
"We shall scarcely have time to talk about it now, shall we?" she answered. "You will be wanted to play cards or something. We shall be quite content to leave it to you."
"I should like to talk it over with you," he said. "Do tell me when I may see you."
She sat down, and he stood by her chair. "Really, I don't know," she answered. "Perhaps I shall be at home when you pay your duty call."
"Come and have some tea at Mellor's with me to-morrow."
She seemed not to hear him. She had caught Mrs. Seventon's eye across the room, and rose to her feet.
"You have left Mrs. Seventon alone all the evening," she said. "I must go and talk to her."
He stood before her—a little insistent.
"I shall expect you at half-past four," he said.
She shook her head.
Oh, no. I have an engagement."
"The next day, then."
"Thank you! I would rather you did not ask me. I have a great deal to do just now. I will bring the girls to the lecture."
"Wednesday week," he protested, "is a long way off."
"You can go over to Enton," she laughed, "and get some more cheques from your wonderful friend."
"I wonder," he remarked, "why you dislike Lord Arranmore so much."
"Instinct perhaps—or caprice," she answered, lightly.
"The latter for choice," he answered. "I don't think that he is a man to dislike instinctively. He rather affected me the other way."
She was suddenly graver.
"It is foolish of me," she remarked. "You will think so too, when I tell you that my only reason is because of a likeness."
"A likeness!" he repeated.
She nodded.
"He is exactly like a man who was once a friend of my father's, and who did him a great deal of harm. My father was much to blame, I know, but this man had a great influence over him, and a most unfortunate one. Now don't you think I'm absurd?"
"I think it is a little rough on Lord Arranmore," he answered, "don't you?"
"It would be if my likes or dislikes made the slightest difference to him," she answered. "As it is, I don't suppose it matters."
"Was this in England?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"No, it was abroad—in Montreal. I really must go to Mrs. Seventon.
She looks terribly bored."
Brooks made no effort to detain her. He was looking intently at a certain spot in the carpet. The coincidence—it was nothing more, of course—was curious.
CHARITY THE "CRIME"
There followed a busy time for Brooks, the result of which was a very marked improvement in his prospects. For the younger Morrison and his partner, loth to lose altogether the valuable Enton connection, offered Brooks a partnership in their firm. Mr. Ascough, who was Lord Arranmore's London solicitor, and had been Brooks' guardian, after careful consideration advised his acceptance, and there being nothing in the way, the arrangements were pushed through almost at once. Mr. Ascough, on the morning of his return to London, took the opportunity warmly to congratulate Brooks.
"Lord Arranmore has been marvellously kind to me," Brooks agreed. "To tell you the truth, Mr. Ascough, I feel almost inclined to add incomprehensibly kind."
The older man stroked his grey moustache thoughtfully.
"Lord Arranmore is eccentric," he remarked. "Has always been eccentric, and will remain so, I suppose, to the end of the chapter. You are the one who profits, however, and I am very glad of it."
"Eccentricity," Brooks remarked, "is, of course, the only obvious explanation of his generosity so far as I am concerned. But it has occurred to me, Mr. Ascough, to wonder whether the friendship or connection between him and my father was in any way a less slight thing than I have been led to suppose."
Mr. Ascough shrugged his shoulders.
"Lord Arranmore," he said, "has told you, no doubt, all that there is to be told."
Brooks sat at his desk, frowning slightly, and tapping the blotting-paper with a pen-holder.
"All that Lord Arranmore has told me," he said, "is that my father occupied a cabin not far from his on the banks of Lake Ono, that they saw little of each other, and that he only found out his illness by accident. That my father then disclosed his name, gave him his papers and your address. There was merely the casual intercourse between two Englishmen coming together in a strange country."
"That is what I have always understood," Mr. Ascough agreed. "Have you any reason to think otherwise?
"No definite reason—except Lord Arranmore's unusual kindness to me," Brooks remarked. "Lord Arranmore is one of the most self-centred men I ever knew—and the least impulsive. Why, therefore, he should go out of his way to do me a kindness I cannot understand."
"If this is really an enigma to you," Mr. Ascough answered, "I cannot help you to solve it. Lord Arranmore has been the reverse of communicative to me. I am afraid you must fall back upon his lordship's eccentricity."
Mr. Ascough rose, but Brooks detained him.
"You have plenty of time for your train," he said. "Will you forgive me if I go over a little old ground with you—for the last time?"
The lawyer resumed his seat.
"I am in no hurry," he said, "if you think it worth while."
"My father came to you when he was living at Stepney—a stranger to you."
"A complete stranger," Mr. Ascough agreed. "I had never seen him before in my life. I did a little trifling business for him in connection with his property."
"He told you nothing of his family or relatives?"
"He told me that he had not a relation in the world."
"You knew him slightly, then?" Brooks continued, "all the time he was in
London? And when he left for that voyage he came to you."
"Yes."
"He made over his small income then to my mother in trust for me. Did it strike you as strange that he should do this instead of making a will?"
"Not particularly," Mr. Ascough declared. "As you know, it is not an unusual course."
"It did not suggest to you any determination on his part never to return to England?"
"Certainly not."
"He left England on friendly terms with my mother?"
"Certainly. She and he were people for whom I and every one who knew anything of their lives had the highest esteem and admiration."
"You can imagine no reason, then, for my father leaving England for good?"
"Certainly not!"
"You know of no reason why he should have abandoned his trip to
Australia and gone to Canada?"
"None!"
"His doing so is as inexplicable to you as to me?"
"Entirely."
"You have never doubted Lord Arranmore's story of his death?"
"Never. Why should I?"
"One more question," Brooks said. "Do you know that lately I have met a traveller—a man who visited Lord Arranmore in Canada, and who declared to his certain knowledge there was no other human dwelling-house within fifty miles of Lord Arranmore's cabin?"
"He was obviously mistaken."
You think so?
"It is certain."
Brooks hesitated.
"My question," he said, "will have given you some idea of the uncertainty I have felt once or twice lately, owing to the report of the traveller Lacroix, and Lord Arranmore's unaccountable kindness to me. You see, he isn't an ordinary man. He is not a philanthropist by any means, nor in any way a person likely to do kindly actions from the love of them. Now, do you know of any facts, or can you suggest anything which might make the situation clearer to me?"
"I cannot, Mr. Brooks," the older man answered, without hesitation. "If you take my advice, you will not trouble yourself any more with fancies which seem to me—pardon me—quite chimerical. Accept Lord Arranmore's kindness as the offshoot of some sentimental feeling which he might well have entertained towards a fellow-countryman by whose death-bed he had stood in that far-away, lonely country. You may even yourself be mistaken in Lord Arranmore's character, and you can remember, too, that after all what means so much to you costs him nothing—is probably for his own advantage."
Brooks rose and took up his hat.
"I am very much obliged to you, Mr. Ascough," he said. "Yours, after all, is the common-sense view of the affair. If you like I will walk up to the station. I am going that way. . . ."
So Brooks, convinced of their folly, finally discarded certain uncomfortable thoughts which once or twice lately had troubled him. He dined at Enton that night, and improved his acquaintance with Lady Caroom and her daughter, who were still staying there. Although this was not a matter which he had mentioned to Mr. Ascough, there was something which he found more inexplicable even than Lord Arranmore's transference of the care of his estates to him, and that was the apparent encouragement which both he and Lady Caroom gave to the friendship between Sybil and himself. They had lunched with him twice in Medchester, and more often still the Enton barouche had been kept waiting at his office whilst Lady Caroom and Sybil descended upon him with invitations from Lord Arranmore. After his talk with Mr. Ascough he put the matter behind him, but it remained at times an inexplicable puzzle.
On the evening of this particular visit he found Sybil alone in a recess of the drawing-room with a newspaper in her hand. She greeted him with obvious pleasure.
"Do come and tell me about things, Mr. Brooks," she begged. "I have been reading the local paper. Is it true that there are actually people starving in Medchester?"
"There is a great deal of distress," he admitted, gravely. "I am afraid that it is true."
She looked at him with wide-open eyes.
"But I don't understand," she said. "I thought that there were societies who dealt with all that sort of thing, and behind, the—the workhouse."
"So there are, Lady Sybil," he answered, "but you must remember that societies are no use unless people will subscribe to them, and that there are a great many people who would sooner starve than enter the workhouse."
"But surely," she exclaimed, "there is no difficulty about getting money—if people only understand."
He watched her for a moment in silence—suddenly appreciating the refinement, the costly elegance which seemed in itself to be a part of the girl, and yet for which surely her toilette was in some way also responsible. Her white satin dress was cut and fashioned in a style which he was beginning to appreciate as evidence of skill and costliness. A string of pearls around her throat gleamed softly in the firelight. A chain of fine gold studded with opals and diamonds reached almost to her knees. She wore few rings indeed, but they were such rings as he had never seen before he had come as a guest to Enton. And there were thousands like her. A momentary flash of thought carried him back to the days of the French Revolution. There was a print hanging in his room of a girl as fair and as proud as this one, surrounded by a fierce rabble mad with hunger and the pent-up rage of generations, tearing the jewels from her fingers, tearing even, he thought, the trimming from her gown.
"You do not answer me, Mr. Brooks," she reminded him.
He recovered himself with a start.
"I beg your pardon, Lady Sybil. Your question set me thinking. We have tried to make people understand, and many have given most generously, but for all that we cannot cope with such distress as there is to-day in Medchester. I am secretary for one of the distribution societies, and I have seen things which are enough to sadden a man for life, only during the last few days."
"You have seen people—really hungry?" she asked, with something like timidity in her face.
He laughed bitterly.
"That we see every moment of the time we spend down amongst them," he answered. "I have seen worse things. I have seen the sapping away of character—men become thieves and women worse—to escape from starvation. That, I think, is the greatest tragedy of all. It makes one shudder when one thinks that on the shoulders of many people some portion of the responsibility at any rate for these things must rest."
Her lips quivered. She emptied the contents of a gold chain purse into her hands.
"It is we who are wicked, Mr. Brooks," she said, "who spend no end of money and close our ears to all this. Do take this, will you; can it go to some of the women you know, and the children? There are only five or six pounds there, but I shall talk to mamma. We will send you a cheque."
He took the money without hesitation.
"I am very glad," he said, earnestly, "that you have given me this, that you have felt that you wanted to give it me. I hope you won't think too badly of me for coming over here to help you spend a pleasant evening, and talking at all of such miserable things."
"Badly!" she repeated. "No; I shall never be able to thank you enough for telling me what you have done. It makes one feel almost wicked to be sitting here, and wearing jewelry, and feeling well off, spending money on whatever you want, and to think that there are people starving. How they must hate us."
"It is the wonderful part of it," he answered. "I do not believe that they do. I suppose it is a sort of fatalism—the same sort of thing, only much less ignoble, as the indifference which keeps our rich people contented and deaf to this terribly human cry."
"You are young," she said, looking at him, "to be so much interested in such serious things."
"It is my blood, I suppose," he answered. "My father was a police-court missionary, and my mother the matron of a pauper hospital."
"They are both dead, are they not?" she asked, softly.
"Many years ago," he answered.
Lady Caroom and Lord Arranmore came in together. A certain unusual seriousness in Sybil's face was manifest.
"You two do not seem to have been amusing yourselves," Lady Caroom remarked, giving her hand to Brooks.
"Mr. Brooks has been answering some of my questions about the poor people," Sybil answered, "and it is not an amusing subject."
Lord Arranmore laughed lightly, and there was a touch of scorn in the slight curve of his fine lips and his raised eyebrows. He stood away from the shaded lamplight before a great open fire of cedar logs, and the red glow falling fitfully upon his face seemed to Brooks, watching him with more than usual closeness, to give him something of a Mephistopheles aspect. His evening clothes hung with more than ordinary precision about his long slim body, his black tie and black pearl stud supplied the touch of sombreness so aptly in keeping with the mirthless, bitter smile which still parted his lips.
"You must not take Mr. Brooks too seriously on the subject of the poor people," he said, the mockery of his smile well matched in his tone. "Brooks is an enthusiast—one, I am afraid, of those misguided people who have barred the way to progress for centuries. If only they could be converted!"
Lady Caroom sighed.
"Oh, dear, how enigmatic!" she exclaimed. "Do be a little more explicit."
"Dear lady," he continued, turning to her, "it is not worth while. Yet I sometimes wonder whether people realize how much harm this hysterical philanthropy—this purely sentimental faddism, does; how it retards the natural advance of civilization, throws dust in people's eyes, salves the easy conscience of the rich man, who bargains for immortality with a few strokes of the pen, and finds mischievous occupation for a good many weak minds and parasitical females. Believe me, that all personal charity is a mistake. It is a good deal worse than that. It is a crime."
Sybil rose up, and a little unusual flush had stained her cheeks.
"I still do not understand you in the least, Lord Arranmore," she said. "It seems to me that you are making paradoxical and ridiculous statements, which only bewilder us. Why is charity a crime? That is what I should like to hear you explain."
Lord Arranmore bowed slightly.
"I had no idea," he said, leaning his elbow upon the mantelpiece, "that I was going to be inveigled into a controversy. But, my dear Sybil, I will do my best to explain to you what I mean, especially as at your age you are not likely to discover the truth for yourself. In the first place, charity of any sort is the most insidious destroyer of moral character which the world has ever known. The man who once accepts it, even in extremes, imbibes a poison from which his system can never be thoroughly cleansed. You let him loose upon society, and the evil which you have sown in him spreads. He is like a man with an infectious disease. He is a source of evil to the community. You have relieved a physical want, and you have destroyed a moral quality. I do not need to point out to you that the balance is on the wrong side."
Sybil glanced across at Brooks, and he smiled back at her.
"Lord Arranmore has not finished yet," he said. "Let us hear the worst."
Their host smiled.
"After all," he said, "why do I waste my breath? From the teens to the thirties sentiment smiles. It is only later on in life that reason has any show at all. Yet you should ask yourselves, you eager self-denying young people, who go about with a healthy moral glow inside because you have fed the poor, or given an hour or so of your time to the distribution of reckless charity-you should ask yourselves: What is the actual good of ministering to the outward signs of an internal disease? You are simply trying to renovate the outside when the inside is filthy. Don't you see, my dear young people, that to give a meal to one starving man may be to do him indeed good, but it does nothing towards preventing another starving man from taking his place to-morrow. You stimulate the disease, you help it to spread. Don't you see where instead you should turn—to the social laws, the outcome of which is that starving man? You let them remain unharmed, untouched, while you fall over one another in frantic efforts to brush away to-day's effect of an eternal cause. Let your starving man die, let the bones break through his skin and carry him up—him and his wife and their children, and their fellows—to your House of Commons. Tell them that there are more to-morrow, more the next day, let the millions of the lower classes look this thing in the face. I tell you that either by a revolution, which no doubt some of us would find worse than inconvenient, or by less drastic means, the thing would right itself. You, who work to relieve the individual, only postpone and delay the millennium. People will keep their eyes closed as long as they can. It is you who help them to do so."
"Dinner is served, my lord," the butler announced.
Lord Arranmore extended his arm to Lady Caroom.
"Come," he said, "let us all be charitable to one another, for I too am starving."
AN AWKWARD QUESTION
"You think they really liked it, then?"
"How could they help it? It was such a delightful idea of yours, and I am sure all that you said was so simple and yet suggestive. Good-night, Mr. Brooks."
They stood in the doorway of the Secular Hall, where Brooks had just delivered his lecture. It seemed to him that her farewell was a little abrupt.
"I was going to ask," he said, "whether I might not see you home."
She hesitated.
"Really," she said, "I wish you would not trouble. It is quite a long way, and I have only to get into a car.
"The further the better," he answered, "and besides, if your uncle is at home I should like to come in and see him."
She made no further objection, yet Brooks fancied that her acquiescence was, to some extent, involuntary. He walked by her side in silence for a moment or two, wondering whether there was indeed any way in which he could have offended her.
"I have not seen you," he remarked, "since the evening of your dinner-party."
"No!"
"You were out when I called."
"I have so many things to do—just now. We can get a car here."
He looked at it.
"It is too full," he said. "Let us walk on for a little way. I want to talk to you."
The car was certainly full, so after a moment's hesitation she acquiesced.
"You will bring your girls again, I hope?" he asked.
"They will come I have no doubt," she answered. "So will I if I am in
Medchester."
"You are going away?"
"I hope so," she answered. "I am not quite sure."
"Not for good?" Possibly."
"Won't you tell me about it?" he asked.
"Well—I don't know!"
She hesitated for a moment.
"I will tell you if you like," she said, doubtfully. "But I do not wish anything said about it at present, as my arrangements are not complete."
"I will be most discreet," he promised.
"I have been doing a little work for a woman's magazine in London, and they have half promised me a definite post on the staff. I am to hear in a few days as to the conditions. If they are satisfactory—that is to say, if I can keep myself on what they offer—I shall go and live in London."
He was surprised, and also in a sense disappointed. It was astonishing to find how unpleasant the thought of her leaving Medchester was to him.
"I had no idea of this," he said, thoughtfully. "I did not know that you went in for anything of the sort."
"My literary ambitions are slight enough," she answered. "Yet you can scarcely be surprised that I find the thought of a definite career and a certain amount of independence attractive."
He stole a sidelong glance at her. In her plainly made clothes and quiet hat she was scarcely, perhaps, a girl likely to attract attention, yet he was conscious of certain personal qualities, which he had realized and understood from the first. She carried herself well, she walked with the free graceful movements of a well-bred and healthy girl. In her face was an air of quiet thought, the self-possession of the woman of culture and experience. Her claim to good looks was, after all, slight enough, yet on studying her he came to the conclusion that she could if she chose appear to much greater advantage. Her hair, soft and naturally wavy, was brushed too resolutely back; her smile, which was always charming, she suffered to appear only at the rarest intervals. She suggested a life of repression, and with his knowledge of the Bullsom menage he was able to surmise some glimmering of the truth.
"You are right," he declared. "I think that I can understand what your feeling must be. I am sure I wish you luck."
The touch of sympathy helped her to unbend. She glanced towards him kindly.
"Thank you," she said. "Of course there will be difficulties. My uncle will not like it. He is very good-natured and very hospitable, and I am afraid his limitations will not permit him to appreciate exactly how I feel about it. And my aunt is, of course, merely his echo."
"He will not be unreasonable," Brooks said. "I am sure of that. For a man who is naturally of an obstinate turn of mind I think your uncle is wonderful. He makes great efforts to free himself from all prejudices."
"Unfortunately," she remarked, "he is very down on the independent woman. He would make housekeepers and cooks of all of us."
"Surely," he protested, with a quiet smile, "your cousins are more ambitious than that. I am sure Selina would never wear a cooking-apron, unless it had ribbon and frilly things all over it."
She laughed.
"After all, they have been kind to me," she said. "My mother was the black sheep of the family, and when she died Mr. Bullsom paid my passage home, and insisted upon my coming to live here as one of the family. I should hate them to think that I am discontented, only the things which satisfy them do not satisfy me, so life sometimes becomes a little difficult."
"Have you friends in London?" he asked.
"None! I tried living there when I first came back for a few weeks, but it was impossible."
"You will be very lonely, surely. London is the loneliest of all great cities."
"Why should I not make friends?"
"That is what I too asked myself years ago when I was articled there," he answered. "Yet it is not so easy as it sounds. Every one seems to have their own little circle, and a solitary person remains so often just outside. Yet if you have friends—and tastes—London is a paradise. Oh, how fascinating I used to find it just at first—before the chill came. You, too, will feel that. You will be content at first to watch, to listen, to wonder! Every type of humanity passes before you like the jumbled-up figures of a kaleidoscope. You are content even to sit before a window in a back street—and listen. What a sound that is—the roar of London, the voices of the street, the ceaseless hum, the creaking of the great wheel of humanity as it goes round and round. And then, perhaps, in a certain mood the undernote falls upon your ear, the bitter, long-drawn-out cry of the hopeless and helpless. When you have once heard it, life is never the same again. Then, if you do not find friends, you will know what misery is."
They were both silent for a few minutes. A car passed them unnoticed.
Then she looked at him curiously.
"For a lawyer," she remarked, "you are a very imaginative person."
He laughed.
"Ah, well, I was talking just then of how I felt in those days. I was a boy then, you know. I dare say I could go back now to my old rooms and live there without a thrill."
She shook her head.
"What one has once felt," she murmured, "comes back always."
"Sometimes only the echo," he answered, "and that is weariness."
They walked for a little way in silence. Then she spoke to him in an altered tone.
"I have heard a good deal about you during the last few weeks," she said. "You are very much to be congratulated, they tell me. I am sure I am very glad that you have been so fortunate."
"Thank you," he answered. "To tell you the truth, it all seems very marvellous to me. Only a few months ago your uncle was almost my only client of importance."
"Lord Arranmore was your father's friend though, was he not?"
"They came together abroad," he answered, "and Lord Arranmore was with my father when he died in Canada."
She stopped short.
Where?
"In Canada, on the banks of Lake Ono, if you know where that is," he answered, looking at her in surprise.
She resumed her usual pace, but he noticed that she was pale.
"So Lord Arranmore was in Canada?" she said. "Do you know how long ago?"
"About ten years, I suppose," he answered. "How long before that I do not know."
She was silent for several minutes, and they found themselves in the drive leading to the Bullsom villa. Brooks was curious.
"I wonder," he asked, "whether you will tell me why you are interested in Lord Arranmore—and Canada?"
"I was born in Montreal," she answered, "and I once saw some one very much like Lord Arranmore there. But I am convinced that it could only have been a resemblance."
"You mentioned it before—when we saw him in Mellor's," he remarked.
"Yes, it struck me then," she admitted. "But I am sure that Lord Arranmore could not have been the person whom I am thinking about. It is ridiculous of me to attach so much importance to a mere likeness."
They stood upon the doorstep, but she checked him as he reached out for the bell.
"You have seen quite a good deal of him," she said. "Tell me what you think of Lord Arranmore." His hand fell to his side. He stood under the gas-bracket, and she could see his face distinctly. There was a slight frown upon his forehead, a look of trouble in his grey eyes.
"You could not have asked me a more difficult question," he admitted. "Lord Arranmore has been very kind to me, although my claim upon him has been of the slightest. He is very clever, almost fantastic, in some of his notions; he is very polished, and his manners are delightful. He would call himself, I believe, a philosopher, and he is, although it sounds brutal for me to say so, very selfish. And behind it all I haven't the faintest idea what sort of a man he is. Sometimes he gives one the impression of a strong man wilfully disguising his real characteristics, for hidden reasons; at others, he is like one of those brilliant Frenchmen of the last century, who toyed and juggled with words and phrases, esteeming it a triumph to remain an unread letter even to their intimates. So you see, after all," he wound up, "I cannot tell you what I think of Lord Arranmore."
"You can ring the bell," she said. "You must come in for a few minutes."
Their entrance together seemed to cause the little family party a certain amount of disturbed surprise. The girls greeted Brooks with a great show of pleasure, but they looked doubtfully at Mary.
"Did you meet at the front door?" Selina asked. "I thought I heard voices." Brooks was a little surprised.
"Your cousin brought her class of factory girls to my lecture to-night at the Secular Hall."
Selina's eyes narrowed a little, and she was silent for a moment. Then she turned to her cousin.
"You might have told us, Mary," she exclaimed, reproachfully. "We should so much have liked to come, shouldn't we, Louise?"
"Of course we should," Louise answered, snappishly. "I can't think why
Mary should go off without saying a word."
Mary looked at them both and laughed. "Well," she said, "I have left the house at precisely the same time on 'Wednesday evenings all through the winter, and neither of you have said anything about coming with me."
"This is quite different," Selina answered, cuttingly. "We should very much have enjoyed Mr. Brooks' lecture. Do tell us what it was about."
"Don't you be bothered, Brooks," Mr. Bullsom exclaimed, hospitably. "Sit down and try one of these cigars. We've had supper, but if you'd like anything—"
"Nothing to eat, thanks," Brooks protested. "I'll have a cigar if I may."
"And a whisky-and-soda, then," Mr. Bullsom insisted. "Say when!"
Brooks turned to Selina. Mary had left the room. "You were asking about the lecture," he said. "Really, it was only a very unpretentious affair, and to tell you the truth, only intended for people whose opportunities for reading have not been great. I am quite sure it would not have been worth your while to come down. We just read a chapter or so from A Tale of Two Cities, and talked about it."
"We should have liked it very mulch," Selina declared. "Do tell us when there is another one, will you?"
"With pleasure," he answered. "I warn you, though, that you will be disappointed."
"We will risk that," Selina declared, with a smile. "Have you been to
Enton this week?"
"I was there on Sunday," he answered.
"And is that beautiful girl, Lady Sybil Caroom, still staying there?
"Yes," he answered. "Is she very beautiful, by the bye?"
"Well, I thought men would think so," Selina said, hastily. "I think that she is just a little loud, don't you, Louise?"
Louise admitted that the idea had occurred to her.
"And her hair—isn't it badly dyed?" Selina remarked. "Such a pity.
It's all in patches."
"I think girls ought not to make up in the street, either," Louise remarked, primly. "A little powder in the house is all very well"—(Louise had a nose which gave her trouble)—"but I really don't think it looks respectable in the street."
"I suppose," Selina remarked, "you men admire all that sort of thing, don't you?
"I really hadn't noticed it with Lady Sybil," Brooks admitted.
Selina sighed.
"Men are so blind," she remarked. "You watch next time you are close to her, Mr. Brooks."
"I will," he promised. "I'll get her between me and a window in a strong north light."
Selina laughed.
"Don't be too unkind," she said. "That's the worst of you men. When you do find anything out you are always so severe."
"After all, though," Louise remarked, with a sidelong glance, "it must be very, very interesting to meet these sort of people, even if one doesn't quite belong to their set. I should think you must find every one else quite tame, Mr. Brooks."
"I can assure you I don't," he answered, coolly. "This evening has provided me with quite as pleasant society as ever I should wish for."
Selina beamed upon him.
"Oh, Mr. Brooks, you are terrible. You do say such things!" she declared, archly.
Louise laughed a little hardly.
"We mustn't take too much to ourselves, dear," she said. "Remember that
Mr. Brooks walked all the way up from the Secular Hall with Mary."
Mr. Bullsom threw down his paper with a little impatient exclamation.
"Come, come!" he said. "I want to have a few words with Brooks myself, if you girls'll give me a chance. Heard anything from Henslow lately, eh?"
Brooks leaned forward.
"Not a word!" he answered.
Mr. Bullsom grunted.
"H'm! He's taken his seat, and that's all he does seem to have done. To have heard his last speech here before polling time you would have imagined him with half-a-dozen questions down before now. He's letting the estimates go by, too. There are half-a-dozen obstructors, all faddists, but Henslow, with a real case behind him, is sitting tight. 'Pon my word, I'm not sure that I like the fellow."
"I ventured to write to him the other evening," Brooks said, "and I have sent him all the statistics we promised, he seems to have regarded my letter as an impertinence, though, for he has never answered it."
"You mark my words," Mr. Bullsom said, doubling the paper up and bringing it down viciously upon his knee, "Henslow will never sit again for Medchester. There was none too mulch push about him last session, but he smoothed us all over somehow. He'll not do it again. I'm losing faith in the man, Brooks."
Brooks was genuinely disturbed. His own suspicions had been gathering strength during the last few weeks. Henslow had been pleasant enough, but a little flippant after the election. From London he had promised to write to Mr. Bullsom, as chairman of his election committee, mapping out the course of action which, in pursuance of his somewhat daring pledges, he proposed to embark upon. This was more than a month ago, and there had come not a single word from him. All that vague distrust which Brooks had sometimes felt in the man was rekindled and increased, and with it came a flood of bitter thoughts. Another opportunity then was to be lost. For seven years longer these thousands of pallid, heart-weary men and women were to suffer, with no one to champion their cause. He saw again that sea of eager faces in the market-place, lit with a sudden gleam of hope as they listened to the bold words of the man who was promising them life and hope and better things. Surely if this was a betrayal it was an evil deed, not passively to be borne.
Mr. Bullsom had refreshed himself with whisky-and-water, and decided that pessimism was not a healthy state of mind.
"I tell you what it is, Brooks," he said, more cheerfully. "We mustn't be too previous in judging the fellow. Let's write him civilly, and if nothing comes of it in a week or two, we will run up to London, you and me, eh? and just haul him over the coals."
"You are right, Mr. Bullsom," Brooks said. "There is nothing we can do for the present."
"Please don't talk any more horrid politics," Selina begged. "We want
Mr. Brooks to give us a lesson at billiards. Do you mind?"
Brooks rose at once.
"I shall be charmed!" he declared.
Mr. Bullsom rose also.
"Pooh, pooh!" he said. "Brooks and I will have a hundred up and you can watch us. That'll be lesson enough for you."
Selina made a little grimace, but they all left the room together. In the hall a housemaid was speaking at the telephone, and a moment afterwards she laid the receiver down and came towards them.
"It is a message for Mr. Brooks, sir, from the Queen's Hotel. Lord
Arranmore's compliments, and the ladies from Enton are at the theatre
this evening, and would be glad if Mr. Brooks would join them at the
Queen's Hotel for supper at eleven o'clock."
Brooks hesitated, but Mr. Bullsom spoke up at once.
"Off you go, Brooks," he said, firmly. "Don't you go refusing an invitation like that. Lord Arranmore is a bit eccentric, they say, and he isn't the sort of man to like refusals. You've just got time."
"They had the message two hours ago, and have been trying everywhere to find Mr. Brooks," the housemaid added.
Selina helped him on with his coat.
"Will you come another evening soon and play billiards with us?" she asked, dropping her voice a little.
"With pleasure," Brooks answered. "Do you mind saying good-bye to your cousin for me? I am sorry not to see her again."
A SUPPER-PARTY AT THE "QUEEN'S"
Brooks was shown into a private room at the Queen's Hotel, and he certainly had no cause to complain of the warmth of his welcome. Lady Sybil, in fact, made room for him by her side, and he fancied that there was a gleam of reproach in her eyes as she looked up at him.
"Is Medchester really so large a place that one can get lost in it?" she asked. "Lord Arranmore has been sending messengers in every direction ever since we decided upon our little excursion.
"I telephoned to your office, sent a groom to your rooms and to the club, and at last we had given you up," Lord Arranmore remarked.
"And I," Sybil murmured, "was in a shocking bad temper."
"It is very good of you all," Brooks remarked, cheerfully. "I left the office rather early, and have been giving a sort of lecture to-night at the Secular Hall. Then I went up to have a game of billiards with Mr. Bullsom. Your telephone message found me there. You must remember that even if Medchester is not a very large place I am a very unimportant person."
"Dear me, what modesty," Lady Caroom remarked, laughing. "To us, however, you happened to be very important. I hate a party of three."
Brooks helped himself to a quail, and remembered that he was hungry.
"This is very unusual dissipation, isn't it?" he asked. "I never dreamed that you would be likely to come into our little theatre."
"It was Sybil's doings," Lady Caroom answered. "She declared that she was dull, and that she had never seen A /Message from Mars./ I think that all that serious talk the other evening gave her the blues."
"I am always dull in the winter when there is no hunting," Sybil remarked. "This frost is abominable. I have not forgotten our talk either. I feel positively wicked every time I sip champagne."
"Our young philanthropist will reassure you," Arranmore remarked, drily.
Lady Caroom sighed.
"I wonder how it is," she murmured, "that one's conscience and one's digestion both grow weaker as one grows old. You and I, Arranmore, are content to accept the good things of the earth as they come to us."
"With me," he answered, "it is the philosophy of approaching old age, but you have no such excuse. With you it must be sheer callousness. You are in an evil way, Lady Caroom. Do have another of these quails."
"You are very rude," she answered, "and extremely unsympathetic. But I will have another quail."
"I do not Want to destroy your appetite, Mr. Brooks," Lady Sybil said, "but this is—if not a farewell feast, something like it."
He looked at her with sudden interest.
"You are going away?" he exclaimed.
"Very soon," she assented. "We were so comfortable at Enton, and the hunting has been so good, that we cut out one of our visits. Mamma developed a convenient attack of influenza. But the next one is very near now, and our host is almost tired of us."
Lord Arranmore was for a moment silent.
"You have made Enton," he said, "intolerable for a solitary man. When you go I go."
"I wish you could say whither instead of when," Lady Caroom answered. "How bored you would be at Redcliffe. It is really the most outlandish place we go to."
"Why ever do we accept, mamma?" Sybil asked. "Last year I nearly cried my eyes out, I was so dull. Not a man fit to talk to, or a horse fit to ride. The girls bicycle, and Lord Redcliffe breeds cattle and talks turnips."
"And they all drink port after dinner," Lady Caroom moaned; "but we have to go, dear. We must live rent free somewhere during these months to get through the season."
Sybil looked at Brooks with laughter in her eyes.
"Aren't we terrible people?" she whispered. "You are by way of being literary, aren't you? You should write an article on the shifts of the aristocracy. Mamma and I could supply you with all the material. The real trouble, of course, is that I don't marry."
"Fancy glorying in your failure," Lady Caroom said, complacently. "Three seasons, Arranmore, have I had to drag that girl round. I've washed my hands of her now. She must look after herself. A girl who refuses one of the richest young men in England because she didn't like his collars is incorrigible."
"It was not his collars, mother," Sybil objected. "It was his neck. He was always called 'the Giraffe.' He had no head and all neck—the most fatuous person, too. I hate fools."
"That is where you lack education, dear," Lady Caroom answered. "A fool is the most useful person—for a husband."
Sybil glanced towards Brooks with a little sigh, and, catching a glimpse of his expression, burst out laughing.
"Mother, you must really not let your tongue run away with you. Mr. Brooks is believing every word you say. You needn't," she murmured in a discreet undertone. "Mother and I chaff one another terribly, but we're really very nicely-behaved persons—for our station in life."
"Lady Caroom has such a delightfully easy way of romancing," Brooks said.
Sybil nodded.
"It's quite true," she answered. "She ought to write the prospectuses for gold mines and things."
Arranmore smiled across the table at Brooks.
"This," he said, "is what I have had to endure for the last six weeks. Do you wonder that I am getting balder, or that I set all my people to work tonight to try and find some one to suffer with me?"
"He'll be so dull when we've gone," Lady Caroom sighed.
"You've no idea how we've improved him," Sybil murmured. "He used to read Owen Meredith after dinner, and go to sleep. By the bye, where are you going when we leave Enton?"
Lord Arranmore hesitated.
"Well, I really am not sure," he said. "You have alarmed me. Don't go."
Lady Caroom laughed.
"My dear man," she said, "we must! I daren't offend the Redcliffes. He's my trustee, and he'll never let me overdraw a penny unless I'm civil to him. If I were you I should go to the Riviera. We'll lend you our cottage at Lugiano. It has been empty for a year."
"Come and be hostess," he said. "I promise you that I will not hesitate then."
She shook her head towards Sybil.
"How can I marry that down there?" she demanded. "No young men who are really respectable go abroad at this time of the year. They are all hunting or shooting. The Riviera is thronged with roues and invalids and adventurers, and we don't want any of them. Dear me, what sacrifices a grown-up daughter does entail. This coming season shall be your last, Sybil. I won't drag on round again. I'm really getting ashamed of it."
"Isn't she dreadful?" Sybil murmured to Brooks. "I hope you will come to Enton before we leave."
"It is very kind of you, Lady Sybil," Brooks said, "but you must remember that I am not like most of the men you meet. I have to work hard, especially just now."
"And if I were you I would be thankful for it," she said, warmly. "From our point of view, at any rate, there is nothing so becoming to a man as the fact that he is a worker. Sport is an excellent thing, but I detest young men who do nothing else but shoot and hunt and loaf about. It seems to me to destroy character where work creates it. All the same, I hope you will find an opportunity to come to Enton and say good-bye to us."
Brooks was suddenly conscious that it would be no pleasant thing to say good-bye to Lady Sybil. He had never known any one like her, so perfectly frank and girlish, and yet with character enough underneath in her rare moments of seriousness. More than ever he was struck with the wonderful likeness between mother and daughter.
"I will come at any time I am asked," he answered, quietly, "but I am sorry that you are going."
They had finished supper, and had drawn their chairs around the fire.
Arranmore was smoking a cigarette, and Brooks took one from his case.
The carriage was ordered in a quarter of an hour. Brooks found that he
and Sybil were a little apart from the others.
"Do you know, I am sorry too," she declared. "Of course it has been much quieter at Enton than most of the houses we go to, and we only came at first, I think, because many years ago my mother and Lord Arranmore were great friends, and she fancied that he was shutting himself up too much. But I have enjoyed it very much indeed."
He looked at her curiously. He was trying to appreciate what a life of refined pleasure which she must live would really be like—how satisfying—whether its limitations ever asserted themselves. Sybil was a more than ordinarily pretty girl, but her face was as smooth as a child's. The Joie de vivre seemed to be always in her eyes. Yet there were times, as he knew, when she was capable of seriousness.
"I am glad," he said, "Lord Arranmore will miss you."
She laughed at him, her eyebrows raised, a challenge in her bright eyes.
"May I add that I also shall?" he whispered.
"You may," she answered. "In fact, I expected it. I am not sure that I did not ask for it. And that reminds me. I want you to do me a favour, if you will."
"Anything I can do for you," he answered, "you know will give me pleasure."
She laughed softly.
"It is wonderful how you have improved," she murmured. "I want you to go and see Lord Arranmore as often as you can. We are both very fond of him really, mamma especially, and you know that he has a very strange disposition. I am convinced that solitude is the very worst thing for him. I saw him once after he had been alone for a month or two, and really you would not have known him. He was as thin as a skeleton, strange in his manner, and he had that sort of red light in his eyes sometimes which always makes me think of mad people. He ought not to be alone at all, but the usual sort of society only bores him. You will do what you can, won't you?"
"I promise you that most heartily," Brooks declared. "But you must remember, Lady Sybil, that after all it is entirely in his hands. He has been most astonishingly kind to me, considering that I have no manner of claim upon him. He has made me feel at home at Enton, too, and been most thoughtful in every way. For, after all, you see I am only his man of business. I have no friends much, and those whom I have are Medchester people. You see I am scarcely in a position to offer him my society. But all the same, I will take every opportunity I can of going to Enton if he remains there."
She thanked him silently. Lady Caroom was on her feet, and Sybil and she went out for their wraps. Lord Arranmore lit a fresh cigarette and sent for his bill.
"By the bye, Brooks," he remarked, "one doesn't hear much of your man
Henslow."
"Mr. Bullsom and I were talking about it this evening," Brooks answered. "We are getting a little anxious.
"You have had seven years of him. You ought to know what to expect."
"The war has blocked all legislation," Brooks said. "It has been the usual excuse. Henslow was bound to wait. He would have done the particular measures which we are anxious about more harm than good if he had tried to force them upon the land. But now it is different. We are writing to him. If nothing comes of it, Mr. Bullsom and I are going up to see him."
Arranmore smiled.
"You are young to politics, Brooks," he remarked, "yet I should scarcely have thought that you would have been imposed upon by such a man as Henslow. He is an absolute fraud. I heard him speak once, and I read two of his speeches. It was sufficient. The man is not in earnest. He has some reason, I suppose, for wishing to write M.P. after his name, but I am perfectly certain that he has not the slightest idea of carrying out his pledges to you. You will have to take up politics, Brooks."
He laughed—a little consciously.
"Some day," he said, "the opportunity may come. I will confess that it is amongst my ambitions. But I have many years' work before me yet."
Lord Arranmore paid the bill, and they joined the women. As Brooks stood bareheaded upon the pavement Arranmore turned towards him.
"We must have a farewell dinner," he said. "How would to-morrow suit you—or Sunday?"
"I should like to walk over on Sunday, if I might," Brooks answered, promptly.
"We shall expect you to lunch. Good-night."
The carriage drove off. Brooks walked thoughtfully through the silent streets to his rooms.
UNCLE AND NIECE
Mr. Bullsom was an early riser, and it chanced that, as was frequently the case, on the morning following Brooks' visit he and Mary sat down to breakfast together. But when, after a cursory glance through his letters, he unfolded the paper, she stopped him.
"Uncle," she said, "I want to talk to you for a few minutes, if I may."
"Go ahead," he answered. "No fear of our being interrupted. I shall speak to those girls seriously about getting up. Now, what is it?
"I want to earn my own living, uncle," she said, quietly.
He looked over his spectacles at her.
"Eh?"
"I want to earn my own living," she repeated. "I have been looking about for a means of doing so, and I think that I have succeeded."
Mr. Bullsom took off his spectacles and wiped them carefully.
"Earn your own living, eh!" he repeated. "Well! Go on!"
Mary leaned across the table towards him.
"Don't think that I am not grateful for all you have done for me, uncle," she said. "I am, indeed. Only I have felt lately that it was my duty to order my life a little differently. I am young and strong, and able to work. There is no reason why I should be a burden upon any one."
She found his quietness ominous, but she did not flinch.
"I am not accomplished enough for a governess, or good-tempered enough for a companion," she continued, "but I believe I have found something which I can do. I have written several short stories for a woman's magazine, and they have made me a sort of offer to do some regular work for them. What they offer would just keep me. I want to accept."
"Where should you live?" he asked.
"In London!"
"Alone?
"There is a girls' club in Chelsea somewhere. I should go there at first, and then try and share rooms with another girl."
"How much a week will they give you?"
"Twenty-eight shillings, and I shall be allowed to contribute regularly to the magazine at the usual rates. I ought to make at least forty shillings a week."
Mr. Bullsom sighed.
"Is this owing to any disagreement between you and the girls?" he asked, sharply.
"Certainly not," she answered.
"You ain't unhappy here? Is there anything we could do? I don't want to lose you."
Mary was touched. She had expected ridicule or opposition. This was more difficult.
"Of course I am not unhappy," she answered. "You and aunt have been both of you most generous and kind to me. But I do feel that a busy life—and I'm not a bit domestic, you know would be good for me. I believe, uncle, if you were in my place you would feel just like me. If you were able to, I expect you'd want to earn your own living."
"You shall go!" he said, decidedly. "I'll help you all I can. You shall have a bit down to buy furniture, if you want it, or an allowance till you feel your way. But, Mary, I'm downright sorry. No, I'm not blaming you. You've a right to go. I—I don't believe I'd live here if I were you.
"You are very good, uncle," Mary said, gratefully. "And you must remember it isn't as though I were leaving you alone. You have the girls."
Mr. Bullsom nodded.
"Yes," he said, "I have the girls. Look here, Mary," he added, suddenly, looking her in the face, "I want to have a word with you. I'm going to talk plainly. Be honest with me."
"Of course," she murmured.
"It's about the girls. It's a hard thing to say, but somehow—I'm a bit disappointed with them."
She looked at him in something like amazement.
"Yes, disappointed," he continued. "That's the word. I'm an uneducated man myself—any fool can see that—but I did all I could to have them girls different. They've been to the best school in Medchester, and they've been abroad. They've had masters in most everything, and I've had 'em taught riding and driving, and all that sort of thing, properly. Then as they grew up I built this 'ouse, and came up to live here amongst the people whom I reckoned my girls'd be sure to get to know. And the whole thing's a damned failure, Mary. That's the long and short of it."
"Perhaps—a little later on" Mary began, hesitatingly.
"Don't interrupt me," he said, brusquely. "This is the first honest talk I've ever had about it, and it's doing me good. The girls'd like to put it down to your mother and me, but I don't believe it. I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm afraid it's the girls themselves. There's something not right about them, but I'm blessed if I know what it is. Their mother and I are a bit vulgar, I know, but I've done my best to copy those who know how to behave—and I believe we'd get through for what we are anywhere without giving offence. But my girls oughtn't to be vulgar. It's education as does away with that, and I've filled em chock-full of education from the time they were babies. It's run out of them, Mary, like the sands through an hour-glass. They can speak correctly, and I dare say they know all the small society tricks. But that isn't everything. They don't know how to dress. They can spend just as much as they like, and then you can come into the room in a black gown as you made yourself, and you look a lady, and they don't. That's the long and short of it. The only decent people who come to this house are your friends, and they come to see you. There's young Brooks, now. I've no son, Mary, and I'm fond of young men. I never knew one I liked as I like him. My daughters are old enough to be married, and I'd give fifty thousand pounds to have him for a son-in-law. And, of course, he won't look at 'em. He sees it. He'll talk to you. He takes no more notice of them than is civil. They fuss round him, and all that, but they might save themselves the pains. It's hard lines, Mary. I'm making money as no one knows on. I could live at Enton and afford it. But what's the good of it? If people don't care to know us here, they won't anywhere. Mary, how was it education didn't work with them girls? Your mother was my own sister, and she married a gentleman. He was a blackguard, but hang it, Mary, if I were you I'd sooner be penniless and as you are than be my daughters with five thousand apiece."
There was an embarrassed silence. Then Mary faced the situation boldly.
"Uncle," she said, "you are asking my advice. Is that it?"
"If there's any advice you can give, for God's sake let's have it. But
I don't know as you can make black white."
"Selina and Louise are good girls enough," she said, "but they are a little spoilt, and they are a little limited in their ideas. A town like this often has that effect. Take them abroad, uncle, for a year, or, better still, if you can find the right person, get a companion for them—a lady—and let her live in the house."
"That's sound!" he answered. "I'll do it."
"And about their clothes, uncle. Take them up to London, go to one of the best places, and leave the people to make their things. Don't let them interfere. Down here they've got to choose for themselves. They wouldn't care about taking advice here, but in London they'd probably be content to leave it. Take them up to town for a fortnight. Stay at one of the best hotels, the Berkeley or the Carlton, and let them see plenty of nice people. And don't be discouraged, uncle."
"Where the devil did you get your common-sense from?" he inquired, fiercely. "Your mother hadn't got it, and I'll swear your father hadn't."
She laughed heartily.
"Above all, be firm with them, uncle," she said. "Put your foot down, and stick to it. They'll obey you.
"Obey me? Good Lord, I'll make 'em," Mr. Bullsom declared, vigorously. "Mary, you're a brick. I feel quite cheerful. And, remember this, my girl. I shall make you an allowance, but that's nothing. Come to me when you want a bit extra, and if ever the young man turns up, then I've got a word or two to say. Mind, I shall only be giving you your own. My will's signed and sealed."
She kissed him fondly.
"You're a good sort, uncle," she said. "And now will you tell me what you think of this letter?"
"Read it to me, dear," he said. "My eyes aren't what they were."
She obeyed him.
"41, BUCKLESBURY, LONDON, E. C.
"DEAR MADAM,
"We have received a communication from our agents at Montreal, asking us to ascertain the whereabouts of Miss Mary Scott, daughter of Richard Scott, at one time a resident in that city.
"We believe that you are the young lady in question, and if you will do us the favour of calling at the above address, we may be able to give you some information much to your advantage.
"We are, dear madam,
"Yours respectfully,
"JONES AND LLOYD."
Mr. Bullsom stroked his chin thoughtfully.
"Sounds all right," he remarked. "Of course you'll go. But I always understood that your father's relations were as poor as church mice."
"Poorer, uncle! His father—my grandfather, that is—was a clergyman with barely enough to live on, and his uncle was a Roman Catholic priest. Both of them have been dead for years."
"And your father—well, I know there was nothing there," Mr. Bullsom remarked, thoughtfully.
"You cabled out the money to bring me home," Mary reminded him.
"Well, well!" Mr. Bullsom declared. "You must go and see these chaps.
There's no harm in that, at any rate. We must all have that trip to
London. I expect Brooks will be wanting to go and see Henslow. We'll
have to give that chap what for, I know."
Selina sailed into the room in a salmon-coloured wrapper, which should long ago have been relegated to the bath-room. She pecked her father on the cheek and nodded to Mary.
"Don't you see Mr. Brooks, dear?" her father remarked, with a twinkle in his eye and something very much like a wink to Mary.
Selina screamed, and looked fearfully around the room.
"What do you mean, papa?" she exclaimed. "There is no one here."
"Serve you right if there had been," Mr. Bullsom declared, gruffly.
"A pretty state to come down in the morning at past nine o'clock."
Selina tossed her head.
"I am going to dress directly after breakfast," she remarked.
"Then if you'll allow me to say so," her father declared, "before breakfast is the time to dress, and not afterwards. You're always the same, Selina, underdressed when you think there's no one around to see you, and overdressed when there is."
Selina poured herself out some coffee and yawned.
"La, papa, what do you know about it?" she exclaimed.
"What my eyes tell me," Mr. Bullsom declared, sternly. "You've no allowance to keep to. You've leave to spend what you want, and you're never fit to be seen. There's Mary there taking thirty pounds a year from me, and won't have a penny more, though she's heartily welcome to it, and she looks a lady at any moment of the day."
Selina drew herself up, and her eyes narrowed a little.
"You're talking about what, you don't understand, pa," she answered with dignity. "If you prefer Mary's style of dress"—she glanced with silent disparagement at her cousin's grey skirt and plain white blouse—"well, it's a matter of taste, isn't it?
"Taste!" Mr. Bullsom replied, contemptuously. "Taste! What sort of taste do you call that beastly rug on your shoulders, eh? Or your hair rolled round and just a pin stuck through it? Looks as though it hadn't been brushed for a week. Faugh! When your mother and I lived on two pounds a week she never insulted me by coming down to breakfast in such a thing."
Selina eyed her father in angry astonishment.
"Thing indeed!" she repeated. "This wrapper cost me four guineas, and came from Paris. That shows how much you know about it."
"From Paris, did it?" Mr. Bullsom retorted, fiercely. "Then up-stairs you go and take it off. You girls have had your own way too much, and I'm about tired of it."
"I shall change it—after breakfast," Selina said, doubtfully.
Mr. Bullsom threw open the door.
"Up-stairs," he repeated, "and throw it into the rag-bag."
Selina hesitated. Then she rose, and with scarlet cheeks and a poor show of dignity, left the room. Mr. Bullsom drew himself up and beamed upon Mary.
"I'll show'em a bit," he declared, with great good-humour. "I may be an ignorant old man, but I'm going to wake these girls up."
Mary struggled for a moment, but her sense of humour triumphed. She burst out laughing.
"Oh, uncle, uncle," she exclaimed, "you're a wonderful man."
He beamed upon her.
"You come shopping with us in London," he said. "We'll have some fun."
FIFTEEN YEARS IN HELL
"Really," Lady Caroom exclaimed, "Enton is the cosiest large house I was ever in. Do throw that Bradshaw away, Arranmore. The one o'clock train will do quite nicely."
Lord Arranmore obeyed her literally. He jerked the volume lightly into a far corner of the room and came over to her side. She was curled up in a huge easy-chair, and her face caught by the glow of the dancing firelight almost startled him by its youth. There was not a single sign of middle age in the smooth cheeks, not a single grey hair, no sign of weariness in the soft full eyes raised to his.
She caught his glance and smiled.
"The firelight is so becoming!" she murmured.
"Don't go!" he said.
"My dear Arranmore. The Redcliffes would never forgive me, and we must go some time."
"I don't see the necessity," he answered, slowly. "You like Enton.
Make it your home."
She raised her eyebrows.
"How improper!" "Not necessarily," he answered. "Take me too."
She sat up in her chair and regarded him steadily.
"Am I to regard this," she asked, "as an offer of marriage?"
"Well, it sounds like it," he admitted.
"Dear me. You might have given me a little more notice," she said.
"Let me think for a moment, please."
Perhaps their thoughts travelled back in the same direction. He remembered his cousin and his playfellow, the fairest and daintiest girl he had ever seen, his best friend, his constant companion. He remembered the days when she had first become something more to him, the miseries of that time, his hopeless ineligibility—the separation. Then the years of absence, the terrible branding years of his life, the horrible pit, the time when night and day his only prayer had been the prayer for death. The self-repression of years seemed to grow weaker and weaker. He held out his hands. But she hesitated.
"Dear," she said, "you make me very happy. It is wonderful to think this may come after all these years. But there is something which I wish to say to you first."
"Well?"
"You are very, very dear to me now—as you are—but you are not the man I loved years ago. You are a very different person indeed. Sometimes I am almost afraid of you.
"You have no cause to be," he said. "Indeed, you have no cause to be.
So far as you are concerned I have never changed. I am the same man."
She took one of his hands in hers.
"Philip," she said, "you must not think hardly of me. You must not think of me as simply afflicted with the usual woman's curiosity. I am not curious at all. I would rather not know. But remember that for nearly twenty years you passed out of my life. You have come back again wonderfully altered. You do not wish to keep the story of those years for ever a sort of Bluebeards chamber in our lives?"
"Not I," he answered. "I would have you do as I have done, rip them out page and chapter, annihilate them utterly. What have they to do with the life before us? To you they would seem evil enough, to me they are thronged with horrible memories, with memories which, could I take them with me, would poison heaven itself. So let us blot them out for ever. Come to me, Catherine, and help me to forget."
She looked at him with strained eyes.
"Philip," she said, "I must understand you. I must understand what has made you the man you are."
"Fifteen years in hell has done it," he answered, fiercely. "Not even my memory shall ever take me back."
"If I marry you," she said, "remember that I marry your past as well as your future. And there are things—which need explanation."
"Well?"
"You have been married."
"She is dead."
"You have a son."
He reeled as though he had been struck, and the silence between them was as the silence of tragedy.
"You see," she continued, "I am bound to ask you to lift the curtain a little. Fate or instinct, or whatever you may like to call it, has led me a little way. I am not afraid to know. I have seen too much of life to be a hard judge. But you must hold out your hand and take me a little further."
"I cannot."
She held him tightly. Her voice trembled a little. "Dear, you must. I am not an exacting woman, and I love you too well to be a hard judge of anything you might have to tell me. Ignorance is the only thing which I cannot bear. Remember how greatly you are changed, you are almost a stranger to me in some of your moods. I could not have you wandering off into worlds of which I knew nothing. Sit down by my side and talk to me. I will ask no questions. You shall tell me your own way, and what you wish to leave out—leave it out. Come, is this so hard a task?"
He seemed frozen into inanition. His face was like the cast of a dead man's. His voice was cold and hopeless.
"The key," he said, "is gone. I shall never seek for it, I shall never find it. I have known what madness is, and I am afraid. Shall we go into the hall? I fancy that they are serving tea."
She looked at him, half terrified, half amazed.
"You mean this as final?" she said, deliberately. "You refuse to offer any explanation, the explanation which common decency even would require of these things?"
"I expected too much," he answered. "I know it very well. Forgive me, and let us forget."
She rose to her feet.
"I do not know that you will ever regret this," she said. "I pray that you may."
To Brooks she seemed the same charming woman as usual, as he heard her light laugh come floating across the hall, and bowed over her white fingers. But Sybil saw the over-bright eyes and nervous mouth and had hard work to keep back the tears. She piled the cushions about a dark corner of the divan, and chattered away recklessly.
"This is a night of sorrows," she exclaimed, pouring out the tea. "Mr. Brooks and I were in the midst of a most affecting leave-taking—when the tea came. Why do these mundane things always break in upon the most sacred moments?"
"Life," Lady Caroom said, helping herself recklessly to muffin, "is such a wonderful mixture of the real and the fanciful, the actual and the sentimental, one is always treading on the heels of the other. The little man who turns the handle must have lots of fun."
"If only he has a sense of humour," Brooks interposed. "After all, though, it is the grisly, ugly things which float to the top. One has to probe always for the beautiful, and it requires our rarest and most difficult sense to apprehend the humorous."
Lord Arranmore stirred his tea slowly. His face was like the face of a carved image. Only Brooks seemed still unconscious of the shadow which was stalking amongst them.
"We talk of life so glibly," he said. "It is a pity that we cannot realize its simplest elements. Life is purely subjective. Nothing exists except in our point of view. So we are continually making and marring our own lives and the lives of other people by a word, an action, a thought."
"Dear me!" Lady Caroom murmured. "How-ever shall I be able to play bridge after tea if you all try to addle my brain by paradoxes and subtle sayings beforehand! What does Arranmore mean?"
He put down his cup.
"Do not dare to understand me," he said. "It is the most sincere unkindness when one talks only to answer. And as for bridge—remember that this is a night of mourning. Bridge is far too frivolous a pursuit."
"Bridge a frivolous pursuit?" Sybil exclaimed. "Heavens, what sacrilege. What ought we to do, Lord Arranmore?"
"Sit in sackcloth and ashes, and hear Brooks lecture on the poor," he answered, lightly. "Brooks is a mixture of the sentimentalist and the hideous pessimist, you know, and it is the privilege of his years to be sometimes in earnest. I know nothing more depressing than to listen to a man who is in earnest."
"You are getting positively light-headed," Sybil laughed. "I can see no pleasure in life save that which comes from an earnest pursuit of things, good or evil."
"My dear child," Lord Arranmore answered, "when you are a little older you will know that to take life seriously is a sheer impossibility. You may think that you are doing it, but you are not."
"There must be exceptions," Sybil declared.
"There are none," Lord Arranmore answered, lightly, "outside the madhouse. For the realization of life comes only hand in hand with insanity. The people who have come nearest to it carry the mark with them all their life. For the fever of knowledge will scorch even those who peer over the sides of the cauldron."
Lady Caroom helped herself to some more tea.
"Really, Arranmore," she drawled, "for sheer and unadulterated pessimism you are unsurpassed. You must be a very morbid person."
He shrugged his shoulders.
"One is always called morbid," he remarked, "who dares to look towards the truth."
"There are people," Lady Caroom answered, "who look always towards the clouds, even when the sun is shining."
"I am in the minority," Lord Arranmore said, smiling. "I feel myself becoming isolated. Let us abandon the subject."
"No, let us convert you instead," Sybil declared. "We want to look at the sun, and we want to take you with us. You are really a very stupid person, you know. Why do you want to stay all alone amongst the shadows?" Arranmore smiled faintly.
"The sun shines," he said, "only for those who have eyes to see it."
"Blindness is not incurable," she answered.
"Save when the light in the eyes is dead," he answered. "Come, shall we play a game at fourhanded billiards?"
It resolved itself into a match between Lady Caroom and Lord Arranmore, who were both players far above the average. Sybil and Brooks talked, but for once her attention wandered. She seemed listening to the click of the billiard-balls, and watching the man and the woman between whom all conversation seemed dead. Brooks noticed her absorption, and abandoned his own attempts to interest her.
"Your mother and Lord Arranmore," he remarked, "are very old friends."
"They have known one another all their lives," she murmured. "Lord
Arranmore has changed a good deal though since his younger days."
Brooks made no reply. The girl suddenly bent her head towards him.
"Are you a judge of character?" she asked.
He shook his head.
"Scarcely. I have not had enough experience. It is a fascinating study."
"Very. Now I want to ask you something. What do you think of Lord
Arranmore?"
Her tone betokened unusual seriousness. His light answer died away on his lips.
"It is very hard for me to answer that question," he said. "Lord
Arranmore has been most unnecessarily kind to me."
"His character?"
"I do not pretend to be able to understand it. I think that he is often wilfully misleading. He does not wish to be understood. He delights in paradoxy and moral gymnastics."
"He may blind your judgment. How do you personally feel towards him?"
"That," he answered, "might be misleading. He has shown me so much kindness. Yet I think—I am sure—that I liked him from the first moment I saw him."
She nodded.
"I like him too. I cannot help it. Yet one can be with him, can live in the same house for weeks, even months, and remain an utter stranger to him. He has self-repression which is marvellous—never at fault—never a joint loose. One wonders so much what lies beyond. One would like to know."
"Is it wise?" he asked. "After all, is it our concern?
"Not ours. But if you were a woman would you be content to take him on trust?"
"It would depend upon my own feelings," he answered, hesitatingly.
"Whether you cared for him?"
"Yes!"
She beat the floor with her foot.
"You are wrong," she said, "I am sure that you are wrong. To care for one is to wish ever to believe the best of them. It is better to keep apart for ever than to run any risks. Supposing that unknown past was of evil, and one discovered it. To care for him would only make the suffering keener."
"It may be so," he admitted. "May I ask you something?"
"Well?"
"You speak—of yourself?"
Her eyes met his, and he looked hastily downwards.
"Absurd," she murmured, and inclined her head towards the billiard-table. "They have been—attached to one another always. Come over here to the window, and I will tell you something."
They walked towards the great circular window which overlooked the drive. As they stood there together a four-wheeled cab drove slowly by, and a girl leaned forward and looked at them. Brooks started as he recognized her.
"Why, that must be some one for me," he exclaimed, in a puzzled tone.
"Whatever can have happened to old Bullsom?"
She looked at him politely bewildered.
"It is the niece of a man whom I know very well in Medchester," he exclaimed. "Something must have happened to her uncle. It is most extraordinary."
MARY SCOTT PAYS AN UNEXPECTED CALL
Brooks met the butler entering the room with a card upon his salver. He stretched out his hand for it mechanically, but the man only regarded him in mild surprise. "For his lordship, sir. Excuse me."
The man passed on. Brooks remained bewildered. Lord Arranmore took the card from the tray and examined it leisurely.
"Miss Mary Scott," he repeated aloud. "Are you sure that the young lady asked to see me?"
"Quite sure, your lordship," the servant answered.
"Scott. The name sounds familiar, somehow!" Lord Arranmore said.
"Haven't I heard you mention it, Brooks?
"Miss Scott is the niece of Mr. Bullsom, one of my best clients, a large builder in Medchester," Brooks answered. "Why?"
He stopped suddenly short. Arranmore glanced towards him in polite unconcern.
"You saw her with me at Mellon's, in Medchester. You asked me her name."
Lord Arranmore bent the card in his forefinger, and dropped his eyeglass.
"So that is the young lady," he remarked. "I remember her distinctly. But I do not understand what she can want within me. Is she by any chance, Brooks, one of those young persons who go about with a collecting-card—who want money for missions and that sort of thing? If so, I am afraid she has wasted her cab fare."
"She is not in the least that sort of person," Brooks answered, emphatically. "I have no idea what she wants to see you about, but I am convinced that her visit has a legitimate object."
Lord Arranmore stuck the card in his waistcoat pocket and shrugged his shoulders.
"You are my man of affairs, Brooks. I commission you to see her. Find out her business if you can, and don't let me be bothered unless it is necessary."
Brooks hesitated.
"I am not sure that I care to interfere—that my presence might not be likely to cause her embarrassment," he said. "I have seen her lately, and she made no mention of this visit."
Lord Arranmore glanced at him as though surprised. "I should like you to see her," he said, suavely. "It seems to me preferable to asking her to state her business to a servant. If you have any objection to doing so she must be sent back."
Brooks turned unwillingly away. As he had expected, Mary sprang to her feet upon his entrance into the room, and the colour streamed into her cheeks.
"You here!" she exclaimed.
He shook hands with her, and tried to behave as though he thought her presence the most natural thing in the world. "Yes. You see I am Lord Arranmore's man of affairs now, and he keeps me pretty hard at work. He seems to have a constitutional objection to doing anything for himself. He has even sent me to—to—"
"I understand," she interrupted. "To ascertain my business. Well, I can't tell it even to you. It is Lord Arranmore whom I want to see. No one else will do."
Brooks leaned against the table and looked at her with a puzzled smile.
"You see, it's a little awkward, isn't it?" he declared. "Lord Arranmore is very eccentric, and especially so upon this point. He will not see strangers. Write him a line or two and let me take it to him."
She considered for a moment.
"Very well. Give me a piece of paper and an envelope."
She wrote a single line only. Brooks took it back into the great inner hall, where Lord Arranmore had started another game of billiards with Lady Caroom.
"Miss Scott assured me that her business with you is private," he announced. "She has written this note."
Lord Arranmore laid his cue deliberately aside and broke the seal. It was evident that the contents of the note consisted of a few words only, yet after once perusing them he moved a little closer to the light and re-read them slowly. Then with a little sigh he folded the note in the smallest possible compass and thrust it into his waistcoat pocket.
"Your young friend, my dear Brooks," he said, taking up his cue, "does me the honour to mistake me for some one else. Will you inform her that I have no knowledge of the person to whom she alludes, and suggest—as delicately as you choose—that as she is mistaken an interview is unnecessary. It is, I believe, my turn, Catherine." "You decline, then, to see her?" Brooks said.
Lord Arranmore turned upon him with a rare irritation.
"Have I not made myself clear, Brooks?" he said. "If I were to keep open house to all the young women who choose to claim acquaintance with me I should scarcely have a moment to call my own, or a house fit to ask my friends to visit. Be so good as to make my answer sufficiently explicit."
"It is unnecessary, Lord Arranmore. I have come to ask you for it yourself."
They all turned round. Mary Scott was coming slowly towards them across the thick rugs, into which her feet sunk noiselessly. Her face was very pale, and her large eyes were full of nervous apprehension. But about her mouth were certain rigid lines which spoke of determination.
Sybil leaned forward from her chair, and Lady Caroom watched her approach with lifted eyebrows and a stare of well-bred and languid insolence. Lord Arranmore laid down his cue and rose at once to meet her.
"You are Lord Arranmore," she said, looking at him fixedly. "Will you please answer the question—in my note?"
He bowed a little coldly, but he made no remark as to her intrusion. "I have already," he said, "given my answer to Mr. Brooks. The name which you mention is altogether unknown to me, nor have I ever visited the place you speak of. You have apparently been misled by a chance likeness."
"It is a very wonderful one," she said, slowly, keeping her eyes fixed upon him.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"I regret," he said, "that you should have had your journey for nothing.
I can, I presume, be of no further use to you."
"I do not regret my journey here," she answered. "I could not rest until I had seen you closely, face to face, and asked you that question. You deny then that you were ever called Philip Ferringshaw?"
"Most assuredly," he answered, curtly.
"That is very strange," she said.
"Strange?
"Yes. It is very strange because I am perfectly certain that you were."
He took up his cue and commenced chalking it in a leisurely manner.
"My dear young lady," he said, "you are; I understand, a friend of Mr. Brooks, and are therefore entitled to some amount of consideration from me. But I must respectfully remind you that your presence here is, to put it mildly, unsought, and that I do not find it pleasant to be called a liar under my own roof and before my friends."
"Pleasant!" she eyed him scornfully; "nor did my father find it pleasant to be ruined and murdered by you, a debauched gambler, a common swindler."
Lord Arranmore, unruffled, permitted himself to smile.
"Dear me," he said, "this is getting positively melodramatic. Brooks, for her own sake, let me beg of you to induce the young woman to leave us. In her calmer moments she will, I am sure, repent of these unwarranted statements to a perfect stranger."
Brooks was numbed—for the moment speechless. Sybil had risen to her feet as though with the intention of leaving the room. But Lord Arranmore interposed. If he were acting it was marvellously done.
"I beg," he said, "that you will none of you desert me. These accusations of—Miss Scott, I believe are unnerving. A murderer, a swindler and a rogue are hard names, young lady. May I ask if your string of invectives is exhausted, or is there any further abuse which you feel inclined to heap upon me?"
The girl never flinched.
"I have called you nothing," she said, "which you do not deserve. Do you still deny that you were in Canada—in Montreal—sixteen years ago?"
"Most assuredly I do deny it," he answered.
Brooks started, and turned suddenly towards Lord Arranmore as though doubtful whether he had heard rightly. This was a year before his father's death. The girl was unmoved.
"I see that I should come here with proofs," she exclaimed. "Well, they are easy enough to collect. You shall have them. But before I go, Lord Arranmore, let me ask you if you know who I am."
"I understand," Lord Arranmore answered, "that you are the daughter or niece of a highly respectable tradesman in Medchester, who is a client of our young friend here, Mr. Brooks. Let me tell you, young lady, that but for that fact I should not—tolerate your presence here."
"I am Mr. Bullsom's niece," the girl answered, "but I am the daughter of Martin Scott Cartnell!"
It seemed to Brooks that a smothered exclamation of some sort broke from Lord Arranmore's tightly compressed lips, but his face was so completely in the shadow that its expression was lost. But he himself now revealed it, for touching a knob in the wall a shower of electric lamps suddenly glowed around the room. He leaned forward and looked intently into the face of the girl who had become his accuser. She met his gaze coldly, without flinching, the pallor of her cheeks relieved by a single spot of burning colour, her eyes bright with purpose.
"It is incredible," he said, softly, "but it is true. You are the untidy little thing with a pigtail who used always to be playing games with the boys when you ought to have been at school. Come, I am glad to see you. Why do you come to me like a Cassandra of the Family Herald? Your father was my companion for a while, but we were never intimate. I certainly neither robbed nor murdered him."
"You did both," she answered, fiercely. "You were his evil genius from the first. It was through you he took to drink, through you he became a gambler. You encouraged him to play for stakes larger than he could afford. You won money from him which you knew was not his to lose. He came to you for help. You laughed at him. That night he shot himself."
"It was," Lord Arranmore remarked, "a very foolish thing to do."
"Who or what you were before you came to Montreal I do not know," she continued, "but there you brought misery and ruin upon every one connected with you. I was a child in those days, but I remember how you were hated. You broke the heart of Durran Lapage, an honest man whom you called your friend, and you left his wife to starve in a common lodging house. There was never a man or woman who showed you kindness that did not live to regret it. You may be the Marquis of Arranmore now, but you have left a life behind the memory of which should be a constant torture to you."
"Have you finished, young lady?" he asked, coldly.
"Yes, I have finished," she answered. "I pray Heaven that the next time we meet may be in the police-court. The police of Montreal are still looking for Philip Ferringshaw, and they will find in me a very ready witness."
"Upon my word, this is a most unpleasant young person," Lord Arranmore said. "Brooks, do see her off the premises before she changes her mind and comes for me again. You have, I hope, been entertained, ladies," he added, turning to Sybil and Lady Caroom.
He eyed them carelessly enough to all appearance, yet with an inward searchingness which seemed to find what it feared. He turned to Brooks, but he and Mary Scott had left the room together.
"The girl-was terribly in earnest," Lady Caroom said, with averted eyes. "Were you not—a little cruel to her, Arranmore? Not that I believe these horrid things, of course. But she did. She was honest."
Lord Arranmore shrugged his shoulders. He was looking out of the window, out into the grey windy darkness, listening to the raindrops splashing against the window-pane, wondering how long Brooks would be, and if in his face too he should see the shadow, and it seemed to him that Brooks lingered a very long time.
"Shall we finish our game of billiards, Catherine?" he asked, turning towards her.
"Well—I think not," she answered. "I am a little tired, and it is almost time the dressing bell rang. I think Sybil and I will go up-stairs."
They passed away—he made no effort to detain them. He lit a cigarette, and paced the room impatiently. At last he rang the bell.
"Where is Mr. Brooks?" he asked.
"Mr. Brooks has only just returned, my lord," the man answered. "He went some distance with the young lady. He has gone direct to his room."
Lord Arranmore nodded. He threw himself into his easy-chair, and his head sank upon his hand. He looked steadfastly into the heart of the red coals.
THE MARQUIS MEPHISTOPHELES
"I am so sorry," she said, softly, "our last evening is spoilt."
He shook his head with an effort at gaiety.
"Let us conspire," he said. "You and I at least will make a struggle."
"I am afraid," she said, "that it would be hopeless. Mother is an absolute wreck, and I saw Lord Arranmore go into the library just now with that terrible white look under his eyes. I saw it once before. Ugh!"
"After all," he said, "it only means that we shall be honest.
Cheerfulness to-night could only be forced."
She laughed softly into his eyes.
"How correct!" she murmured. "You are improving fast."
He turned and looked at her, slim and graceful in her white muslin gown, her fair hair brushed back from her forehead with a slight wave, but drooping low over her ears, a delicate setting for her piquant face. The dark brown eyes, narrowing a little towards the lids, met his with frank kindliness, her mouth quivered a little as though with the desire to break away into a laugh. The slight duskiness of her cheeks—she had lived for three years in Italy and never worn a veil—pleased him better than the insipidity of pink and white, and the absence of jewelry—she wore neither bracelet nor rings gave her an added touch of distinction, which restless youth finds something so much harder to wear than sedate middle age. The admiration grew in his eyes. She was charming.
The lips broke away at last.
"After all," she murmured, "I think that I shall enjoy myself this evening. You are looking all sorts of nice things at me."
"My eyes," he answered, "are more daring than my lips."
"And you call yourself a lawyer?"
"Is that a challenge? Well, I was thinking that you looked charming."
"Is that all? I have a looking-glass, you know."
"And I shall miss you—very much."
She suddenly avoided his eyes, but it was for a second only. Yet Brooks was himself conscious of the significance of that second. He set his teeth hard.
"The days here," he said, slowly, "have been very pleasant. It has all been—such a different life for me. A few months ago I knew no one except a few of the Medchester people, and was working hard to make a modest living. Sometimes I feel here as though I were a modern Aladdin. There is a sense of unreality about Lord Arranmore's extraordinary kindness to me. To-night, more than ever, I cannot help feeling that it is something like a dream which may pass away at any moment."
She looked at him thoughtfully.
"Lord Arranmore is not an impulsive person," she said. "He must have had some reason for being so decent to you."
"Yes, as regards the management of his affairs perhaps," Brooks answered. "But why he should ask me here, and treat me as though I were his social equal and all that sort of thing—well, you know that is a puzzle, isn't it?"
"Well, I don't know," she answered. "Lord Arranmore is not exactly the man to be a slave to, or even to respect, the conventional, and your being—what you are, naturally makes you a pleasant companion to him—and his guests. No, I don't think that it is strange."
"You are very flattering," he said, smiling.
"Not in the least," she assured him. "Now-a-days birth seems to be rather a handicap than otherwise to the making of the right sort of people. I am sure there are more impossibilities in the peerage than in the nouveaux riches. I know heaps of people who because their names are in Debrett seem to think that manners are unnecessary, and that they have a sort of God-sent title to gentility."
Brooks laughed.
"Why," he said, "you are more than half a Radical."
"It is your influence," she said, demurely.
"It will soon pass away," he sighed. "To-morrow you will be back again amongst your friends."
She sighed.
"Why do one's friends bore one so much more than other people's?" she exclaimed.
"When one thinks of it," he remarked, "you must have been very bored here. Why, for the last fortnight there have been no other visitors in the house."
"There have been compensations," she said.
"Tell me about them!" he begged.
She laughed up at him.
"If I were to say the occasional visits of Mr. Kingston Brooks, would you be conceited?"
"It would be like putting my vanity in a hothouse," he answered, "but I would try and bear it."
"Well, I will say it, then!"
He turned and looked at her with a sudden seriousness. Some consciousness of the change in his mood seemed to be at once communicated to her. Her eyes no longer met his. She moved a little on one side and took up an ornament from an ormolu table.
"I wish that you meant it," he murmured.
"I do!" she whispered, almost under her breath.
Brooks suddenly forgot many things, but Nemesis intervened. There was the sound of much rustling of silken skirts, and—Lady Caroom's poodle, followed by herself, came round the angle of the drawing-room.
"My dear Sybil," she exclaimed, "do come and tie Balfour's ribbon for me. Marie has no idea of making a bow spread itself out, and pink is so becoming to him. Thanks, dear. Where is our host? I thought that I was late."
Lord Arranmore entered as she spoke. His evening dress, as usual, was of the most severely simple type. To-night its sombreness was impressive. With such a background his pallor seemed almost waxen-like. He offered his arm to Lady Caroom.
"I was not sure," he said, with a lightness which seemed natural enough, "whether to-night I might not have to dine alone whilst you poor people sat and played havoc with the shreds of my reputation. Groves, the cabinet Johannesburg and the '84 Heidsieck—though I am afraid," he added, looking down at his companion, "that not all the wine in my cellar could make this feast of farewells a cheerful one."
"Farewell celebrations of all sorts are such a mistake," Lady Caroom murmured. "We have been so happy here too."
"You brought the happiness with you," Lord Arranmore said, "and you take it away with you. Enton will be a very dull place when you are gone.
"Your own stay here is nearly up, is it not?" Lady Caroom asked. "Very nearly. I expect to go to Paris next week—at latest the week after, in time at any rate for Bernhardt's new play. So I suppose we shall soon all be scattered over the face of the earth."
"Except me," Brooks interposed, ruefully. "I shall be the one who will do the vegetating."
Lady Caroom laughed softly.
"Foolish person! You will be within two hours of London. You none of you have the slightest idea as to the sort of place we are going to. We are a day's journey from anywhere. The morning papers are twenty-four hours late. The men drink port wine, and the women sit round the fire in the drawing-room after dinner and wait—and wait—and wait. Oh, that awful waiting. I know it so well. And it isn't much better when the men do come. They play whist instead of bridge, and a woman in the billiard-room is a lost soul. Our hostess always hides my cue directly I arrive, and pretends that it has been lost. By the bye, what a dear little room this is, Arranmore. We haven't dined here before, have we?"
Lord Arranmore shook his head. He held up his wineglass thoughtfully as though criticizing the clearness of the amber fluid.
"No!" he said. "I ordered dinner to be served in here because over our dessert I propose to offer you a novel form of entertainment."
"How wonderful," Sybil said. "Will it be very engrossing? Will it help us to forget?"
He looked at her with a smile.
"That depends," he said, "how anxious you are to forget."
She looked hastily away. For a moment Brooks met her eyes, and his heart gave an unusual leap. Lady Caroom watched them both thoughtfully, and then turned to their host.
"You have excited our curiosity, Arranmore. You surely don't propose to keep us on tenterhooks all through dinner?"
"It will give a fillip to your appetite."
"My appetite needs no fillip. It is disgraceful to try and make me eat more than I do already. I am getting hideously stout. I found my maid in tears to-night because I positively could not get into my most becoming bodice."
"If you possess a more becoming one than this," Lord Arranmore said, with a bow, "it is well for our peace of mind that you cannot wear it."
"That is a very pretty subterfuge, but a subterfuge it remains," Lady Caroom answered. "Now be candid. I love candour. What are you going to do to amuse us?"
He shook his head.
"Do not spoil my effect. The slightest hint would make everything seem tame. Brooks, I insist upon it that you try my Johannesburg. It was given to my grandfather by the Grand Duke of Shleistein. Groves!"
Brooks submitted willingly enough, for the wine was wonderful. Sybil leaned over so that their heads almost touched.
"Look at our host," she whispered. "What does he remind you of?"
Brooks glanced across the table, brilliant with its burden of old silver, of cut-glass and hothouse flowers. Lord Arranmore's face, notwithstanding his ready flow of conversation, seemed unusually still and white—the skin drawn across the bones, even the lips pallid. The sombreness of his costume, the glitter in his eyes, the icy coldness of his lack of coloring, though time after time he set down his wineglass empty, were curiously impressive. Brooks looked back into her face, his eyes full of question.
"Mephistopheles," she whispered. "He is absolutely weird to-night. If he sat and looked at me and we were alone I should shriek."
Lord Arranmore lifted a glass of champagne to the level of his head and looked thoughtfully around the table.
"Come," he said, "a toast-to ourselves. Singly? Collectively. Lady Caroom, I drink to the delightful memories with which you have peopled Enton. Sybil, may you charm society as your mother has done. Brooks, your very good health. May your entertainment this evening be a welcome one.
"We will drink to all those things," Lady Caroom declared, "with enthusiasm. But I am afraid your good wishes for Sybil are beyond any hope of realization. She is far too honest to flourish in society. She will probably marry a Bishop or a Cabinet Minister, and become engrossed in theology or politics. You know how limiting that sort of thing is. I am in deadly fear that she may become humdrum. A woman who really studies or knows anything about anything can never be a really brilliant woman."
"You—"
"Oh, I pass for being intelligent because I parade my ignorance so, just as Sophie Mills is considered a paragon of morality because she is always talking about running off with one of the boys in her husband's regiment. It is a gigantic bluff, you know, but it comes off. Most bluffs do come off if one is only daring enough."
"You must tell them that up at Redcliffe," Lord Arranmore remarked.
Sybil laughed heartily.
"Redcliffe is the one place where mother is dumb," she declared. "Up there they look upon her as a stupid but well-meaning person. She is absolutely afraid to open her mouth."
"They are so absurdly literal," Lady Caroom sighed, helping herself to an infinitesimal portion of a wonderful savoury. "Don't talk about the place. I know I shall have an attack of nerves there."
"Mother always gets nerves if she mayn't talk," Sybil murmured.
"You're an undutiful daughter," Lady Caroom declared. "If I do talk I never say anything, so nobody need listen unless they like. About this entertainment, Arranmore. Are you going to make the wineglass disappear and the apples fly about the room a la Maskelyne and Cook? I hope our share in it consists in sitting down."
Arranmore turned to the butler behind his chair.
"Have coffee and liqueur served here, Groves, and bring some cigarettes.
Then you can send the servants away and leave us alone."
The man bowed.
"Very good, your lordship."
Lord Arranmore looked around at his guests.
"The entertainment," he said, "will incur no greater hardship upon you than a little patience. I am going to tell you a story."
THE CONFIDENCE OF LORD ARRANMORE
The servants had left the room, and the doors were fast closed. Lord Arranmore sat a little forward in his high-backed chair, one hand grasping the arm, the other stretched flat upon the table before him. By his side, neglected, was a cedar-wood box of his favourite cigarettes.
"I am going," he said, thoughtfully, "to tell you a story, of whom the hero is—myself. A poor sort of entertainment perhaps, but then there is a little tragedy and a little comedy in what I have to tell. And you three are the three people in the world to whom certain things were better told."
They bent forward, fascinated by the cold directness of his speech, by the suggestion of strange things to come. The mask of their late gaiety had fallen away. Lady Caroom, grave and sad-eyed, was listening with an anxiety wholly unconcealed. Under the shaded lamplight their faces, dominated by that cold masterly figure at the head of the table, were almost Rembrandtesque.
"You have heard a string of incoherent but sufficiently damaging
accusations made against me to-day by a young lady whose very existence,
I may say, was a surprise to me. It suited me then to deny them.
Nevertheless they were in the main true."
The announcement was no shock. Every one of the three curiously enough had believed the girl.
"I must go a little further back than the time of which she spoke. At twenty-six years old I was an idle young man of good family, but scant expectations, supposed to be studying at the Bar, but in reality idling my time about town. In those days, Lady Caroom, you had some knowledge of me."
"Up to the time of your disappearance—yes. I remember, Arranmore," she continued, her manner losing for a moment some of its restraint, and her eyes and tone suddenly softening, "dancing with you that evening. We arranged to meet at Ranelagh the next day, and, when the next day came, you had vanished, gone as completely as though the earth had swallowed you up. For weeks every one was asking what has become of him. And then—I suppose you were forgotten."
"This," Lord Arranmore continued, "is the hardest part of my narrative, the hardest because the most difficult to make you understand. You will forgive my offering you the bare facts only. I will remind you that I was young, impressionable, and had views. So to continue!"
The manner of his speech was in its way chillingly impressive. He was still sitting in exactly the same position, one hand upon the arm of his high-backed chair, the other upon the table before him. He made use of no gestures, his face remained as white and emotionless as a carved image, his tone, though clear and low, was absolutely monotonous. But there was about him a subtle sense of repression apparent to all of them.
"On my way home that night my hansom knocked down an old man. He was not seriously hurt, and I drove him home. On the way he stared at me curiously. Every now and then he laughed—unpleasantly.
"'I have never seen any one out of your world before,' he said. 'I dare say you have never spoken to any one out of mine except to toss us alms. Come and see where I live.'
"He insisted, and I went. I found myself in a lodging-house, now pulled down and replaced by one of Lord Rowton's tenement houses. I saw a hundred human beings more or less huddled together promiscuously, and the face of every one of them was like the face of a rat. The old man dragged me from room to room, laughing all the time. He showed me children herded together without distinction of sex or clothing, here and there he pointed to a face where some apprehension of the light was fighting a losing battle with the ghouls of disease, of vice, of foul air, of filth. I was faint and giddy when we had looked over that one house, but the old man was not satisfied. He dragged me on to the roof and pointed eastwards. There, as far as the eyes could reach, was a blackened wilderness of smoke-begrimed dwellings. He looked at me and grinned. I can see him now. He had only one tooth, a blackened yellow stump, and every time he opened his mouth to laugh he was nearly choked with coughing. He leaned out over the palisading and reached with both his arms eastward. 'There,' he cried, frantically, 'you have seen one. There are thousands and tens of thousands of houses like this, a million crawling vermin who were born into the world in your likeness, as you were born, my fine gentleman. Day by day they wake in their holes, fill their lungs with foul air, their stomachs with rotten food, break their backs and their hearts over some hideous task. Every day they drop a little lower down. Drink alone keeps them alive, stirs their blood now and then so that they can feel their pulses beat, brings them a blessed stupor. And see over there the sun, God's sun, rises every morning, over them and you. Young man! You see those flaming spots of light? They are gin-palaces. You may thank your God for them, for they alone keep this horde of rotten humanity from sweeping westwards, breaking up your fine houses, emptying your wine into the street, tearing the silk and laces from your beautiful soft-limbed women. Bah! But you have read. It would be the French Revolution over again. Oh, but you are wise, you in the West, your statesmen and your philanthropists, that you build these gin-palaces, and smile, and rub your hands and build more and spend the money gaily. You build the one dam which can keep back your retribution. You keep them stupefied, you cheapen the vile liquor and hold it to their noses. So they drink, and you live. But a day of light may come.'"
Lord Arranmore ceased speaking, stretched out his hand and helped himself to wine with unfaltering fingers.
"I have tried," he continued, "to repeat the exact words which the old man used to me, and I do not find it so difficult as you might imagine, because at that time they made a great impression upon me. But I cannot, of course, hope to reproduce to you his terrible earnestness, the burning passion with which every word seemed to spring from his lips. Their effect upon me at that time you will be able to judge when I tell you this—that I never returned to my rooms, that for ten years I never set foot west of Temple Bar. I first joined a small society in Whitechapel, then I worked for myself, and finally I became a police-court missionary at Southwark Police-Court. The history of those years is the history of a slowly-growing madness. I commenced by trying to improve whole districts-I ended with the individual."
Brooks' wineglass fell with a little crash upon the tablecloth. The wine, a long silky stream, flowed away from him unstaunched, unregarded. His eyes were fixed upon Lord Arranmore. He leaned forward.
"A police-court missionary!" he cried, hoarsely.
Lord Arranmore regarded him for a moment in silence.
"Yes. As you doubtless surmise, I am your father. Afterwards you may ask me questions."
Brooks sat as one stupefied, and then a sudden warm touch upon his hand sent the blood coursing once more through his veins. Sybil's fingers lay for a moment upon his. She smiled kindly at him. Lord Arranmore's voice once more broke the short silence.
"The individual was my greatest disappointment," he continued. "Young and old, all were the same. I took them to live with me, I sent them abroad, I found them situations in this country, I talked with them, read with them, showed them the simplest means within their reach by means of which they might take into their lives a certain measure of beautiful things. Failure would only make me more dogged, more eager. I would spend months sometimes with one man or boy, and at last I would assure myself of success. I would find them a situation, see them perhaps once a week, then less often, and the end was always the same. They fell back. I had put the poison to sleep, but it was always there. It was their everlasting heritage, a gift from father to son, bred in the bone, a part of their blood.
"In those days I married a lady devoted to charitable works. Our purpose was to work together, but we found it impracticable. There was, I fear, little sympathy between us. The only bond was our work—and that was soon to be broken. For there came a time, after ten breathless years, when I paused to consider."
He raised his glass to his lips and drained it. The wine was powerful, but it brought no tinge of colour to his cheeks, nor any lustre to his eyes. He continued in the same firm, expressionless tone.
"There came a night when I found myself thinking, and I knew then that a new terror was stealing into my life. I made my way up to the roof of the house where that old man had first taken me, and I leaned once more over the palisading and looked eastwards. I fancied that I could still hear the echoes of his frenzied words, and for the first time I heard the note of mockery ringing clearly through them. There they stretched—the same blackened wilderness of roofs sheltering the same horde of drinking, filthy, cursing, parasitical creatures; there flared the gin-palaces, more of them, more brilliantly lit, more gorgeously decorated. Ten years of my life, and what had I done? What could any one do? The truth seemed suddenly written across the sky in letters of fire. I, a poor human creature, had been fighting with a few other fanatics against the inviolable, the unconquerable laws of nature. The hideous mistake of all individual effort was suddenly revealed to me. 'We were like a handful of children striving to dam a mighty torrent with a few handfuls of clay. Better a thousand times that these people rotted—and died in their holes, that disease should stalk through their streets, and all the evil passions born of their misery and filth should be allowed to blaze forth that the whole world might see, so the laws of the world might intervene, the great natural laws by which alone these things could be changed. I looked down at myself, then wasted to the bone, a stranger to the taste of wine or tobacco, to all the joys of life, a miserable heart-broken wretch, and I cursed that old man and the thought of him till my lips were dry and my throat ached. I walked back to my miserable dwelling with a red fire before my eyes, muttering, cursing that power which stood behind the universe, and which we call God, that there should be vomited forth into the world day by day, hour by hour, this black stream of human wretchedness, an everlasting mockery to those who would seek for the joy of life.
"They took me to the hospital, and they called my illness brain-fever. But long before they thought me convalescent I was conscious, lying awake and plotting my escape. With cunning I managed it. Of my wife and child I never once thought. Every trace of human affection seemed withered up in my heart. I took the money subscribed for me with a hypocrite's smile, and I slunk away from England. I went to Montreal in Canada, and I deliberately entered upon a life of low pleasures. Pardon me!"
He bent forward and with a steady hand readjusted the shade of a lamp which was in danger of burning. Lady Caroom leaned back in her chair with an indrawn sobbing breath. The action at such a moment seemed grotesque. His own coolness, whilst with steady fingers he probed away amongst the wounded places of his life, was in itself gruesome.
"My money," he continued, "was no large sum, but I eked it out with gambling. The luck was always on my side. It's quite true that I ruined the father of the young lady who paid me a visit to-day. After a somewhat chequered career he was settling down in a merchant's office in Montreal when I met him. His luck at cards was as bad as mine was good. I won all he had, and more. I believe that he committed suicide. A man there was kind to me, asked me to his house—I persuaded his wife to run away with me. These are amongst the slightest of my delinquencies. I steeped myself in sin. I revelled in it. I seemed to myself in some way to be showing my defiance for the hidden powers of life which I had cursed. I played a match with evil by day and by night until I was glutted. And then I stole away from the city, leaving behind a hideous reputation and not a single friend. Then a new mood came to me. I wanted to get to a place where I should see no human beings at all, and escape in that way from the memories which were still like a clot upon my brain. So I set my face westwards. I travelled till at last civilization lay behind. Still I pushed onward. I had stores in plenty, an Indian servant who chanced to be faithful, and whom I saw but twice a day. At last I reached Lake Ono. Here between us we built a hut. I sent my Indian away then, and when he fawned at my feet to stay I kicked him. This was my third phase of living, and it was true that some measure of sanity came back to me. Oh, the blessed relief of seeing the face of neither man nor woman. It was the unpeopled world of Nature—uncorrupted, fresh, magnificent, alive by day and by night with everlasting music of Nature. The solitudes of those great forests were like a wonderful balm. So the fevers were purged out of me, and I became once more an ordinary human being. I was content, I think, to die there, for I had plenty to eat and drink, and the animals and birds who came to me morning and evening kept me from even the thought of loneliness. The rest is obvious. I lost two cousins in South Africa, an uncle in the hunting-field. A man in Montreal had recognized me. I was discovered. But before I returned I killed Brooks, the police-court missionary. This girl has forced me to bring him to life again."
It was a strange silence which followed. Brooks sat back in his chair, pale, bewildered, striving to focus this story properly, to attain a proper comprehension of these new strange things. And behind all there smouldered the slow burning anger of the child who has looked into the face of a deserted mother. Lady Caroom was white to the lips, and in her eyes the horror of that story so pitilessly told seemed still to linger.
Lord Arranmore spoke again. Still he sat back in his high-backed chair, and still he spoke in measured, monotonous tones. But this time, if only their ears had been quick enough to notice it, there lay behind an emotion, held in check indeed, but every now and then quivering for expression. He had turned to Lady Caroom.
"Chance," he said, "has brought together here at the moment when the telling of these things has become a necessity, the two people who have in a sense some right to hear them, for from each I have much to ask. Sybil is your daughter, and from her there need be no secrets. So, Catherine, I ask you again, now that you know everything, are you brave enough to be my wife?"
She raised her eyes, and he saw the horror there. But he made no sign.
She rose and held out her hand for Sybil.
"Arranmore," she said, "I am afraid."
He looked down upon his plate.
"So let it be, then," he said. "It would need a brave woman indeed to join her lot with mine after the things which I have told you. At heart, Catherine, I am almost a dead man. Believe me, you are wise."
He rose, and the two women passed from the room. Then he resumed his former seat, and attitude, and Brooks, though he tried to speak, felt his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth, a dry and nerveless thing.
For in these doings there was tragedy.
"There remains to me you, Philip Kingston, my son," Lord Arranmore said, in the same measured tone. "You also have before you the story of my life, you are able from it to form some sort of idea as to what my future is likely to be. I do not wish to deceive you. My early enthusiasms are extinct. I look upon the ten or twenty years or so which may be left to me of life as merely a space of time to be filled with as many amusements and new sensations as may be procurable without undue effort. I have no wish to convert, or perhaps pervert you, to my way of thinking. You live still in Utopia, and to me Utopia does not exist. So make your choice deliberately. Do you care to come to me?"
Then Brooks found words of a sort.
"Lord Arranmore," he said, "forgive me if what I must say sounds undutiful. I know that you have suffered. I can realize something of what you have been through. But your desertion of my mother and me was a brutality. What you call your creed of life sounds to me hideous. You and I are far apart, and so far as I am concerned, God grant that we may remain so."
For the first time Lord Arranmore smiled. He poured out with steady hand yet another glass of wine, and he nodded towards the door.
"I am obliged to you," he said, "for your candour. I have met with enough hypocrisy in life to be able to appreciate it. Be so good as to humour my whim—and to leave me alone."
Brooks rose from his seat, hesitated for a single moment, and left the room. Lord Arranmore leaned back in his high-backed chair and looked round at the empty places. The cigarette burned out between his fingers, his wine remained untasted. The evening's entertainment was over.