A royal stag, whose many-branched and palmate antlers showed that he had seen at least ten springs, looked down upon the mantel-piece of Noel Farquhar’s library; a huge elk fronted him across the room. This style of decoration, which took its origin in the simple skull palisades of primitive Britain and latter-day Africa, which was handed down by the traditions of Tower Hill, and which is rampant in the modern hall, had in Noel Farquhar a devotee. The walls of his smoking-room bristled with the heads of digested enemies. Thither the two men repaired after dinner on Christmas night, taking with them a decanter of mid-century port, cigars of indubitable excellence, and a dish of nuts for Lucian, who took a childlike interest in extracting and peeling walnuts without breaking the kernel. Farquhar was inclined to be silent, in which mood Lucian, the student of the abnormal, found him specially interesting.
“Queer chap you are Farquhar,” he suddenly remarked. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about the fascinating Fanes?”
“Didn’t I? I thought I had.” Farquhar did not think any such thing, and Lucian knew it. “The day I went there Miss Dolly Fane stopped me in the hall, and would know whether I thought she’d make an actress. An odd girl.”
“Well, and what did you say to her?”
“Said she would. I couldn’t do otherwise, could I?”
“My immaculate friend, I’m afraid the charms of Miss Fane have persuaded you into a statement which is very remarkably near to a L, I, E, lie. At the least, you were disingenuous, decidedly.”
“Who says I am immaculate? Not I. You thrust virtues upon me and then cry out when I don’t come up to your notions of an archangel.”
“And your church-going and your alms-giving and your brand-new coppers and general holiness? Eh, sonny?”
“I’ve a creed, as four-fifths of the men down here are supposed to have; but whereas they deny in their acts what they repeat with their tongues, I prefer to perform what I profess. There’s a fine lack of logic about the way menregard their faith; each time they repeat their Credo they’re self-condemned fools. Well, I don’t relish making a fool of myself. Either I’ll be an infidel, and thus set myself free, or else I’ll act up to what I say. For that you praise me. Now, the only virtue to which I do lay claim is patience, of which I think I possess an extraordinary store.”
Lucian peeled a walnut with painstaking earnestness, and ate it with salt and pepper. The shell he flicked across at Farquhar, who had fallen into a brown study and was looking very grim. He looked up with a quick, involuntary smile.
“Did you shoot all these horned beasties yourself?” Lucian inquired, introducing the elk and the stag with a wave of the hand.
“Yes. I shot the elk in Russia; the horns weigh a good eighty pounds. Shy brutes they are, and fierce when at bay; this one lamed me with a kick after I thought I had done for him.”
“My biggest bag was twenty sjamboks running,” said Lucian, pensively. “I and some others were up country on a big shoot, and, of course, I got fever and had to lie up. Well, they used to come in with their blesbok and their springbok, and all the rest of it, so I didn’t see why I shouldn’t do a little on my own. So I lined up all our niggers with a sjambok apiece,and made my bag from my couch of pain. I worked those sjamboks afterwards for all they were worth. Yes, sir-ree.”
“Sometimes I really think you’re daft, De Saumarez!”
“Pray don’t mention it. Let’s see, where were you? Oh, in Russia. No, I’ve never been there—I don’t know Russia at all.”
“I do.”
“What, intimately?”
Farquhar turned his head, met Lucian’s eyes, and smiled. “Oh no; quite slightly,” he said, lying with candour and glee.
“Oh, indeed,” said Lucian. “Now that’s queer; I thought I’d met you there. By the way, do you believe in eternal constancy?”
“In what?”
“In eternal constancy; did you never hear of it before?”
“Well, yes, pulex irritans, I’ve seen a man go mourning all his life long; so I do believe in it.”
“No, no, sonny; I’m not discussing its existence, but its merits. Do you hold that a man should be eternally faithful to the memory of a dead woman?”
“Not if he doesn’t want to.”
“My point is that he oughtn’t to want to. See here; your body changes every seven years, and I’ll be hanged if your mind doesn’t change,too. Now, your married couple change together and so keep abreast. But if the woman dies, she comes to a stop. In seven years the survivor will have grown right away from her. The constant husband prides himself on his loyalty, and is ashamed to admit even in camera that a resurrected wife wouldn’t fit into his present life; but in nine cases out of ten the wound’s healed and cicatrised, and only a sentimental scruple bars him from saying so. And there, as I take it, he’s wrong.”
“What would you have him do?”
“Take another woman and make her and himself happy.”
“What becomes of the dead wife’s point of view?”
“According to my creed, you know, she’s got no point of view at all.”
“You can’t expect me to follow you there.”
“No; and so I’ll cite your own creed. After the resurrection there shall be no marrying or giving in marriage. She’s no call to be jealous.”
“You’ve no romance about you.”
“No sentimentalism, you mean. Half the feelings consecrated by public opinion are trash. It’s astounding how we do adore the dumps. Happiness is our first duty. It seems to me that one needs more courage to forget than toremember. That’s where I’ve been weak myself.”
Lucian put his hand inside his coat and took out the letter which Farquhar had read; he had been leading up to this point. He spread it open on his knee, showing the thick, chafed, blue paper, the gilded monogram and daisy crest, the thin Italian writing. “I’ve carried that about for nine years,” he said, glancing up, and then held the paper to the fire and watched it catch light. The advancing line of brown, the blue-edged flame, crept across the letter, leaving shrivelled ash in its track. Lucian held it till the heat scorched his fingers, and then let it fall in the fire. “A passionate letter, was it not?” he said, turning from the black, rustling tinder to meet Farquhar’s eyes.
“My dear De Saumarez!”
“Don’t humbug; you read it when you thought I was unconscious.”
“Ah,” said Farquhar, “now I understand why you understood.”
He altered his pose slightly, relaxing as though freed from some slight, omnipresent constraint; the nature which confronted Lucian was different in gross and in detail from the mask of excellence which he had hitherto kept on. Vices were there, and virtues unsuspected: coarse, barbaric, potent qualities, dominatedby a will-power mightier than they. Race-characteristics, hitherto overlaid, suddenly started out; and Lucian, recurring quickly to the last fresh lie which Farquhar had told him, exclaimed, “Why, man, you’re a Russian yourself!”
“Half-breed. My mother was Russian. My father was Scotch, but a naturalized Russian subject. The worse for him; he died in the mines. Confound him: a pretty ancestry he’s given me, and a pretty job I’ve had to keep the story out of the papers. I’ve done it, though.”
“But what’s it for?” asked Lucian, whose mind was flying to the story of Jekyll and Hyde.
“Respectability; that’s the god of England. Do you think I could confess myself the son of a couple of dirty Russian nihilists and keep my position? Not much. It’s the only crevice in my armour. Scores of men have tried to get on by shamming virtuous, but I’ve gone one better than they; Iamvirtuous. You can’t pick a hole in my character, because there’s none to pick. I speak the truth, I do my duty, I’m honest and honourable down to the end of the whole fool’s catalogue, I even go out of my way to be chivalrously charitable, as when I picked you up, or made a fool of myself over that confounded copper. That’s all the political muck-worms find when they comeburrowing about me. Yes, honesty’s the best policy; it pays.”
“H’m! well, my most honourable friend, you’d find yourself in Queer Street if I related how you’d read my letter.”
“Not in the least. I was glancing at it to find your address.”
“You took a mighty long time over your glance.”
“The paper was so much rubbed that I could hardly see where it began or ended.”
“There was the monogram for a sign-post.”
“Plenty women begin on the back sheet.”
“You’re abominable; faith, you are,” said Lucian. “You’re a regular prayer-mill of lies!”
“I’d never have touched it if I hadn’t prepared my excuse beforehand. Ruin my career for the sake of reading an old love-letter? Not I!”
Even as Farquhar wished it, the contemptuous and insulting reference displeased Lucian; the letter was still sacred in his eyes. But he would not, and he did not, allow the feeling to be seen. Farquhar’s measure of reserve was matched by his present openness; but Lucian, whose affairs were everybody’s business, kept his mind as a fenced garden and a fountain sealed. Action and reaction are always equaland opposite; the law is true in the moral as well as the physical world.
“Kindly speak of my letter with more respect, will you?” was all Lucian said.
“Oh, the letter was charming; I wish it had been addressed to me!”
“You shut up, and don’t try to be a profane and foolish babbler. I want to know what it’s all for—what’s your aim and object, sonny?”
“I’m going to get into the Cabinet.”
“You are, are you?” said Lucian. “And why not be premier?”
“And why not king? Because I happen to know my own limitations. I’ll make a damned good understrapper, but the other’s beyond me.”
“You’ll change your mind when you’ve got your wish.”
“And there you’re wrong. I’ll be content then. I’m content now, for that matter. It’s as good as a play to see how the virtuous people look up to me.”
Lucian leaned back in the attitude proper to meditation, and studied his vis-à-vis over his joined finger-tips. Strength of body, strength of mind, a will keen as a knife-blade to cut through obstacles, an arrogant pride in himself and his sins, all these had writ themselves large on Farquhar’s face; but the acute mindof the critic was questing after more amiable qualities.
“And so you took me in as an instance of chivalrous charity, eh? And what do you keep me here for, now I’m sain and safe?”
“You’re not well enough to be dismissed cured.”
“I beg your pardon. I could go and hold horses to-morrow.”
“I shall have to find some work for you before I let you go. I like to do the thing thoroughly.”
“I see. I’m being kept as an object-lesson in generosity; is that so?”
“You’ve hit it,” said Farquhar. “Hope you like the position. Have a cigar?”
“No, thanks. I don’t mind being a sandwich-man, but I draw the line at an object-lesson.” Lucian got up, and began buttoning his coat round him. “If that’s your reason for keeping me, I’m off.”
“De Saumarez, don’t be a fool.”
“I will not be an object-lesson,” said Lucian, making for the door. “My conscience rebels against the deception. I will expire on your threshold.”
Farquhar jumped up and put his back against the door. “Go and sit down, you fool!”
“I’ve not the slightest intention of sittingdown. I will be a body—a demd, damp, moist, unpleasant body.”
“Do you mean this?”
“I do. I’m too proud to take money from a man who’s not a friend.”
Farquhar was very angry. He knew what Lucian wanted, but he would not say it. “Go, and be hanged to you, then!” he retorted, and flung round towards the fire.
“All right, I’mgoing,” said Lucian, as he went into the hall.
He took his cap and his stick. Overcoat he had none, and he could not now borrow Farquhar’s. His own clothes were inadequate even for mid-day wearing, and for night were absurd. All this Farquhar knew. He heard Lucian unbolt and unlock the front door, and presently the wind swept in, invaded the hall, and made Farquhar shiver, sitting by the fire. Lucian coughed.
Up sprang Farquhar; he ran into the hall, flung the door closed, caught Lucian round the shoulders, and in the impatient pride of his strength literally carried him back to the library close to the fire. “You fool!” he said. “You dashed fool!”
“Well?” said Lucian, looking up, laughing, from the sofa upon which he had been cast. “Own up! Why do you keep me here?”
“Because you have a damnable way of getting yourself liked. Because you’re sick.”
“Sh! don’t swear like that, sonny; you really do shock me. And so you like me?”
“I’ve always a respect for people who find me out,” retorted Farquhar. “The others—Lord, what fools—what fools colossal! But you’ve grit; you know your own mind; you do what you want, and not what your dashed twopenny-halfpenny passions want. Besides, you’re ill,” he wound up again, with a change of tone which sent Lucian’s eyebrows up to his shaggy hair.
“You’re a nice person for a small Sunday-school!” was his comment. “Well, well! So you profess yourself superior to dashed twopenny-halfpenny passions—such as affection, for example?”
“I was bound to stop you going. You’d have died at my door and made a scandal.”
“You know very well that never entered your head. Take care what you say; I can still go, you know.”
Farquhar laughed, half angry; he chafed under Lucian’s control; would fain have denied it, but could not. “Confound you, I wish I’d never seen you!” he said.
“You’ll wish that more before you’ve done. I’m safe to bring bad luck. Gimme your handand I’ll tell your fortune. I can read the palm like any gypsy; got a drop of Romany blood in me, I guess.”
“You’ll not read mine,” said Farquhar, grimly, putting it out.
“Won’t I? Hullo! You’ve got a nice little handful!”
The hand was scarred from wrist to finger-tips.
“Never noticed it before, did you? I’m pretty good at hiding it by now.”
“How on earth was it done?”
“In hell—that’s Africa. I told you I learned massage from an old Arab sheikh; well, I practised on him. I was alone and down with fever, and they don’t have river police on the Lualaba. He made me his slave. Used to thrash me when he chose to say I’d not done my work; make me kneel at his feet and strike me on the face.”
“Good Lord! How did you like that, sonny?”
“I smiled at him till he got sick of it. Then he put me on silence: one word, death. He thought he’d catch me out, but I’d no notion of that; I held my tongue. So one day the old devil sent me to fetch his knife. It was dusk, and I picked it up carelessly; the handle was white-hot. He’d tried that trick with slavesbefore. Liked to see them howl and drop it, and then finish them off with the very identical knife—confound him!”
“Amen. And what did you do?”
“I? Brought him his knife by the blade; do you think I was going to let him cheat me out of my career?”
Lucian stared at him. “You—you!” he said. “And I verily believe the man’s telling the truth. What happened next?”
“Something to do with termites that I won’t repeat; it might make you ill.”
“Only a channel steamer does that, sonny. You got away, though?”
“Eventually; half blind and deadly sick. By the way, you’ve not told me why you made up your mind to burn that letter at this precise time?”
“To draw you, of course. And now you’ll be pleased to go and see that my room’s ready; I can hear Bernard Fane hammering at the door, so you can play billiards with him while I go to bye-low.”