“My dear Anthony,” answered Lord Ferriby, turning over his papers witha preoccupied air, as if the question under discussion only called fora small share of his attention—“my dear Anthony, the money wassubscribed for the amelioration of the lot of the malgamite workers. Wehave not only ameliorated their lot, but we have elevated them morallyand physically. We have far exceeded our promises, and the subscribers,who, after all, take a small interest in the matter, have every reasonto be satisfied that their money has been applied to the purpose forwhich they intended it. They were kind enough to intrust us with thefinancial arrangements. The concern is a private one, and it is thebusiness of no one—not even of theTimes—to inquire into the methodwhich we think well to adopt for the administration of the MalgamiteFund. If the subscribers had no confidence in us, they surely would nothave given the management unreservedly into our hands.” Lord Ferribyspread out the limbs in question with an easy laugh. Has not a greaterthan any of us said that a man “may smile, and smile, and be avillain”? A silence followed, which was almost, but not quite, brokenby the major, who took his glass from his eye, examined it verycarefully, as if wondering how it had been made, and, replacing it witha deep sigh, sat staring at the opposite wall.
“Then you are not disposed to withdraw your name from the concern?” asked Cornish.
“Most certainly not, my dear Anthony. What have the malgamiters done that I should, so to speak, abandon them at the first difficulty which has presented itself?”
“And what about the profits?” inquired Cornish, bluntly.
“Mr. Roden is our paid secretary. He understands the financial situation, which is rather a complicated one. We may, I think, leave such details to him. And if I may suggest it (I may perhaps rightly lay claim to a somewhat larger experience in charitable finances than either of you), I should recommend a strict reticence on this matter. We are not called upon to answer idle questions, I think. And if—well—if the labourer is found worthy of his hire ... buy yourself a new hat, my dear Anthony. Buy yourself a new hat.”
Cornish rose, and looked at his watch. “I wonder if Joan will give us a cup of tea,” he said. “We might, at all events, go up and try.”
“Certainly—certainly. And I will follow when I have finished my work. And do not give the matter another thought—either of you—eh!”
“He's been got at,” said Major White to his companion as they walked upstairs together, as if Lord Ferriby were a jockey or some common person of that sort.
“Il est rare que la tête des rois soit faite à la mesure deleur couronne.”
“What I want is something to eat,” Miss Marguerite Wade confided in an undertone to Tony Cornish, a few minutes later in Lady Ferriby's drawing-room. She said this with a little glance of amusement, as Cornish stood before her with two plates of biscuits, which certainly did not promise much sustenance.
“Then,” answered Cornish, “you have come to the wrong house.”
Marguerite kept him waiting while she arranged biscuits in her saucer. He set the plates aside, and returned to her in answer to her tacit order, conveyed by laying one hand on a vacant chair by her side. Marguerite was in the midst of that brief period of a woman's life wherein she dares to state quite clearly what she wants.
“Why don't you marry Joan?” she asked, eating a biscuit with a fine young optimism, which almost implied that things sometimes taste as nice as they look.
“Why don't you marry Major White?” retorted Tony; and Marguerite turned and looked at him gravely.
“For a man,” she said, “that wasn't so dusty. So few men have any eyes in their head, you know.” And she thoughtfully finished the biscuits. “I think I'll go back to the bread-and-butter,” she said. “It's the last time Lady Ferriby will ask me to stay to tea, so I may as well be hanged for—three pence as three farthings. And I think I will be more careful with you in the future. For a man, you are rather sharp.” And she looked at him doubtfully.
“When you attain my age,” replied Tony, “you will have arrived at the conclusion that the whole world is sharper than one took it to be. It does not do to think that the world is blind. It is better not to care whether it sees or not.”
“Women cannot afford to do that,” returned Marguerite, with the accumulated wisdom of nearly a score of years. “Oh, hang!” she added, a moment later, under her breath, as she perceived Joan and Major White coming towards them.
“I have a letter for you,” said Joan, “enclosed in one I received this morning from Mrs. Vansittart at The Hague. She is not coming to the Harberdashers' Assistants' Ball, and this is, I suppose, in answer to the card you sent her. She explains that she did not know your address.” And Joan looked at him with a doubting glance for a moment.
Cornish took the letter, but did not ask permission to open it. He held it in his hand, and asked Joan a question. “Did you see Saturday's Times?”
“Yes, of course I did,” she answered earnestly; “and of course, if it is true you will all wash your hands of the whole affair, I suppose. I was talking to Mr. Wade about it. He, however, placed both sides of the question before me in about ten words, and left me to take my choice—which I am incompetent to do.”
“Papa doesn't understand women,” put in Marguerite.
“Understands money, though,” retorted Major White, looking at her in somewhat severe astonishment, as if he had hitherto been unaware that she could speak.
Marguerite took the rebuff with demurely closed lips, a probable indication that the only retort she could think of was hardly fit for enunciation.
Then Cornish drifted out of the conversation, and presently moved away to the window, where he took the opportunity of opening Mrs. Vansittart's letter. Mr. Wade, near at hand, was explaining good-naturedly to Lady Ferriby that, with the best will in the world, five per cent, and perfect safety are not to be obtained nowadays.
“MON AMI” (wrote Mrs. Vansittart in French), “I take a daily promenade after coffee in the Oude Weg. I sit on the bench where you sat, and more often than not I see the sight that you saw. I am not a sentimental woman, but, after all, one has a heart, and this is a pitiful affair. Also, I have obtained from a reliable source the information that the new system of manufacture is more deadly than the old, which I have long suspected, and which, I believe, has passed through your mind as well. You and I went into this thing withoutle bon motif; but Providence is dealing out fresh hands, and you, at all events, hold cards that call for careful and bold playing. My friend, throw your Haberdashers over the wall and act without delay.”
She enclosed a formal refusal of the invitation to the Haberdashers' Assistants' Ball.
Major White was not a talkative man, and towards Joan in particular his attitude was one of silent wonder. In preference to talking to her, he preferred to stand a little way off and look at her. And if, at these moments, the keen observer could detect any glimmer of expression on his face, that glimmer seemed to express abject abasement before a creation that could produce anything so puzzling, so interesting, so absolutely beautiful—as Joan.
Cornish, seeing White engaged in his favourite pastime, took him by the arm and led him to the window.
“Read that,” he said, “and then burn it.”
“Of course,” Joan was saying to Marguerite, as he joined them, “there are, as your father says, two sides to the question. If papa and Tony and Major White withdraw their names and abandon the poor malgamiters now, there will be no help for the miserable wretches. They will all drift back to the cheaper and more poisonous way of making malgamite. And such a thing would be a blot upon our civilization—wouldn't it, Tony?”
Marguerite nodded an airy acquiescence. She was watching Major White—that great strategist—tear up Mrs. Vansittart's letter and throw it into the fire, with a deliberate non-concealment which was perhaps superior to any subterfuge. The major joined the group.
“That is the view that I take of it,” answered Tony.
“And what do you say?” asked Joan, turning upon the major.
“I? Oh, nothing!” replied that soldier, with perfect truthfulness.
“Then what are you going to do?” asked Joan, who was practical, and, like many practical people, rather given to hasty action.
“We are going to stick to the malgamiters,” replied Tony, quietly.
“Through thick and thin?” inquired Marguerite, buttoning her glove.
“Yes—through thick and thin.”
Both girls looked at Major White, who stolidly returned their gaze, and appeared as usual to have no remark to offer. He was saved, indeed, from all effort in that direction by the advent of Lord Ferriby, who entered the room with more than his usual importance. He carried an open letter in his hand, and seemed by his manner to demand the instant attention of the whole party. There are some men and a few women who live for the multitude, and are not content with the attention of one or two persons only. And surely these have their reward, for the attention of the multitude, however pleasant it may be while it lasts, is singularly short-lived, and there is nothing more pitiful to watch than the effort to catch it when it has wandered.
“Eh—er,” began his lordship, and everybody paused to listen. “I have here a letter from our clerk at the Malgamite office in Great George Street. It appears that there are a number of persons there—paper-makers, I understand—who insist upon seeing us, and refuse to leave the premises until they have done so.”
Lord Ferriby's manner indicated quite clearly his pity for these persons who had proved themselves capable of such a shocking breach of good manners.
“One hardly knows what to do,” he said, not meaning, of course, that his words should be takenau pied de la lettre. His hearers, he obviously felt assured, knew him better than to imagine that he was really at a loss. “It is difficult to deal with—er—persons of this description. What do you propose that we should do?” he inquired, turning, as if by instinct, to Cornish.
“Go and see them,” was the reply.
“But, my dear Anthony, such a crisis should be dealt with by Mr. Roden, whom one may regard as our—er—financial adviser.”
“But as Roden is not here, we must do without his assistance. Perhaps Mr. Wade would consent to act as our financial adviser on this occasion,” suggested Cornish.
“I'll go with you,” replied the banker, “and hear what they have to say, if you like. But of course I can take no part in anything in the nature of a controversy, and my name must not be mentioned.”
“Incognito,” suggested Lord Ferriby, with a forced laugh.
“Yes—incognito,” returned the banker, gravely.
The major attracted general attention to himself by murmuring something inaudible, which he was urged to repeat.
“Doocid decent of Mr. Wade,” he said, a second time.
And that seemed to settle the matter, for they all moved towards the door.
“Leave the carriage for me,” cried Marguerite over the banisters, as her father descended the stairs. “Seems to me,” she added to Joan in an undertone, “that the Malgamite scheme is up a gum-tree.”
At the little office of the Malgamite Fund the directors of that charity found four gentlemen seated upon the chairs usually grouped round the table where the ball committee or the bazaar sub-committees held their sittings. One, who appeared to be what Lord Ferriby afterwards described, more in sorrow than in anger, as the ringleader, was a red-haired, brown-bearded Scotchman, with square shoulders and his head set thereon in a manner indicative of advanced radical opinions. The second in authority was a mild-mannered man with a pale face and a drooping sparse moustache. He had a gentle eye, and lips for ever parting in a mildly argumentative manner. The other two paper-makers appeared to be foreigners. “Ah'm thinking——” began the mild man in a long drawl; but he was promptly overpowered by his fellow-countryman, who nodded curtly to Mr. Wade, and said—“Lord Ferriby?”
“No,” answered the banker, calmly.
“That is my name,” said the chairman of the Malgamite Fund, with his finger in his watch-chain.
The russet gentleman looked at him with a fierce blue eye.
“Then, sir,” he said, “we'll come to business. For it's on business that we've come. My friend Mr. MacHewlett, is, like myself, in charge of one of the biggest mills in the country; here's Mossier Delmont of the great mill at Clermont-Ferrand, and Mr. Meyer from Germany. My own name's a plain one—like myself—but an honest one; it's John Thompson.”
Lord Ferriby bowed, and Major White looked at John Thompson with a placid interest, as if he felt glad of this opportunity of meeting one of the Thompson family.
“And we've come to ask you to be so good as to explain your position as regards malgamite. What are ye, anyway?”
“My dear sir,” began Lord Ferriby, with one hand upraised in mild expostulation, “let us be a little more conciliatory in our manner. We are, I am sure (I speak for myself and my fellow-directors, whom you see before you), most desirous of avoiding any unpleasantness, and we are ready to give you all the information in our power, when”—he paused, and waved a graceful hand—“when you have proved your right to demand such information.”
“Our right is that of representatives of a great trade. We four men, that have been deputed to see you on the matter, have at our backs no less than eight thousand employees—honest, hard-workin' men, whose bread you are taking out of their mouths. We are not afraid of the ordinary vicissitudes of commerce. If ye had quietly worked this monopoly in fair competition, we should have known how to meet ye. But ye come before the world as philanthropists, and ye work a great monopoly under the guise of doin' a good work. It was a dirty thing to do.”
Lord Ferriby shrugged his shoulders. “My dear sir,” he said, “you fail to grasp the situation. We have given our time and attention to the grievances of these poor men, whose lot it has been our earnest endeavour to ameliorate. You are speaking, my dear sir, to men who represent, not eight thousand employes, but who represent something greater than they, namely, charity.”
“Ah'm thinking!” began Mr. MacHewlett, plaintively, and the very richness of his accents secured a breathless attention. “Damn charity,” he concluded, abruptly.
And Major White looked upon him in solid approval, as upon a plain-spoken man after his own heart.
“And we,” said Mr. Thompson, “represent commerce, which was in the world before charity, and will be there after it, if charity is going to be handled by such as you.”
There was, it appeared, no possibility of pacifying these irate paper-makers, whose plainness of speech was positively painful to ears so polite as those of Lord Ferriby. A Scotchman, hard hit in his tenderest spot, namely, the pocket, is not a person to mince words, and Lord Ferriby was for the moment silenced by the stormy attack of Mr. Thompson, and the sly, plaintive hits of his companion. But the chairman of the Malgamite Fund would not give way, and only repeated his assurances of a desire to conciliate, which desire took the form only of words, and must, therefore, have been doubly annoying to angry men. To him who wants war there is nothing more insulting than feeble offers of peace. Major White expressed his readiness to fight Messrs. Thompson and MacHewlett at one and the same time on the landing, but this suggestion was not well received.
Upon two of the listeners no word was lost, and Mr. Wade and Cornish knew that the paper-makers had right upon their side.
Quite suddenly Mr. Thompson's manner changed, and he glanced towards the door to see that it was closed.
“Then it's a matter of paying,” he said to his companions. Turning towards Lord Ferriby, he spoke in a voice that sounded more contemptuous than angry. “We're plain business men,” he said. “What's your price—you and these other gentlemen?”
“I have no price,” answered Cornish, meeting the angry blue eyes and speaking for the first time.
“And mine is too high—for plain business men,” added Major White, with a slow smile.
“Seeing that you're a lord,” said Thompson, addressing the chairman again, “I suppose it's a matter of thousands. Name your figure, and be done with it.”
Lord Ferriby took the insult in quite a different spirit to that displayed by his two co-directors. He was pale with anger, and spluttered rather incoherently. Then he took up his hat and stick and walked with much dignity to the door.
He was followed down the stairs by the paper-makers, Mr. Thompson making use of language that was decidedly bespattered with “winged words,” while Mr. MacHewlett detailed his own thoughts in a plaintive monotone. Lord Ferriby got rather hastily into a hansom and drove away.
“There is nothing for it,” said Mr. Wade to Cornish in the gay little office above the Ladies' Tea Association—“there is nothing for it but to run Roden's Corner yourself.”
“The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one's self.”
Percy Roden was possessed of that love of horses which, like sentiment, crops up in strange places. He had never been able to indulge this taste beyond the doubtful capacities of the livery-stable. He found, however, that at the Hague he could hire a good saddle-horse, which discovery was made with suspicious haste after learning the fact that Mrs. Vansittart occasionally indulged in the exercise that his soul loved.
Mrs. Vansittart said that she rode because one has to take exercise, and riding is the laziest method of fulfilling one's obligations in this respect.
“I don't like horsy women,” she said; “and I cannot understand how my sex has been foolish enough to believe that any woman looks her best, or, indeed, anything but her worst, in the saddle.”
There is a period in the lives of most men when they are desirous of extending their knowledge of the surrounding country on horseback, on a bicycle, on foot, or even on their hands and knees, if such journeys might be accomplished in the company of a certain person. Percy Roden was at this period, and he soon discovered that there are tulip farms in the neighbourhood of The Hague. A tulip farm may serve its purpose as well as ever did a ruin or a waterfall in more picturesque countries than Holland; for, indeed, during the last weeks in April and the early half of May, these fields of waving yellow, pink, and red are worth traveling many miles to see. As for Mrs. Vansittart, it may be said of her, as of the rest of her sex under similar circumstances, that it suited her purpose to say that she would like nothing better than to visit the tulip farms.
Roden's suggestion included breakfast at the Villa des Dunes, whither Mrs. Vansittart drove in her habit, while her saddle-horse was to follow later. Dorothy welcomed her readily enough, with, however, a reserve at the back of her grey eyes. A woman is, it appears, ready to forgive much if love may be held out as an excuse, but Dorothy did not believe that Mrs. Vansittart had any love for Percy; indeed, she shrewdly suspected that all that part of this woman's life belonged to the past, and would remain there until the end of her existence. There are few things more astonishing to the close observer of human nature than the accuracy and rapidity with which one woman will sum up another.
“You are not in your habit,” said Mrs. Vansittart, seating herself at the breakfast-table. “You are not to be of the party?”
“No,” answered Dorothy. “I have never had the opportunity or the inclination to ride.”
“Ah, I know,” laughed the elder woman. “Horses are old-fashioned, and only dowagers drive in a barouche to-day. I suppose you ride a bicycle, or would do so in any country but Holland, where the roads make that craze a madness. I must be content with my old-fashioned horse. If, in moving with the times, one's movements are apt to be awkward, it is better to be left behind, is it not, Mr. Roden?”
Roden's glance expressed what he did not care to say in the presence of a third person. When a woman, whose every movement is graceful, speaks of awkwardness, she assuredly knows her ground.
Mrs. Vansittart, moreover, showed clearly enough that she was on the safe side of forty by quite a number of years when it came to settling herself in the saddle and sitting her fresh young horse.
“Which way?” she inquired when they reached the canal.
“Not that way, at all events,” answered Roden, for his companion had turned her horse's head toward the malgamite works.
He spoke with a laugh that was not pleasant to the ears, and a shadow passed through Mrs. Vansittart's dark eyes. She glanced across the yellow sand hills, where the works were effectually concealed by the rise and fall of the wind-swept land, from whence came no sign of human life, and only at times, when the north wind blew, a faint and not unpleasant odour like the smell of sealing-wax. For all that the world knew of the malgamite workers, they might have been a colony of lepers. “You speak,” said Mrs. Vansittart, “as if you were a failure instead of a brilliant success. I think”—she paused for a moment, as if the thought were a real one and not a mere conversational convenience, as are the thoughts of most people—“that the cream of social life consists of the cheery failures.”
“I have no faith in my own luck,” answered Percy Roden, gloomily, whose world was a narrow one, consisting as it did of himself and his bank-book. Moreover, most men draw aside readily enough the curtain that should hide the world in which they live, whereas women take their stand before their curtain and talk, and talk—of other things.
Mrs. Vansittart had never for a moment been mistaken in her estimate of her companion, of—as he considered himself—her lover. She had absolutely nothing in common with him. She was a physically lazy, but a mentally active woman, whose thoughts ran to abstract matters so persistently that they brought her to the verge of abstraction itself.
Percy Roden, on the other hand, would, with better health, have been an athlete. In his youth he had overtaxed his strength on the football field. When he took up a newspaper now he read the money column first and the sporting items next.
Mrs. Vansittart glanced at neither of these, and as often as not contented herself with the advertisements of new books, passing idly over the news of the world with a heedless eye. She, at all events, avoided the mistake, common to men and women of a journalistic generation, of allowing themselves to be vastly perturbed over events in far countries, which can in no way affect their lives.
Roden, on the other hand, took a certain broad interest in the progress of the world, but only watched the daily procession of events with the discriminating eye of a business man. He kept his eye, in a word, on the main chance, as on a small golden thread woven in the grey tissue of the world's history.
It was easy enough to make him talk of himself and of the Malgamite scheme.
“And you must admit that you are a success, you know,” said Mrs. Vansittart. “I see your quiet grey carts, full of little square boxes, passing up Park Straat to the railway station in a procession every day.”
“Yes,” admitted Roden. “We are doing a large business.”
He was willing to allow Mrs. Vansittart to suppose that he was a rich man, for he was shrewd enough to know that the affections, like all else in this world, are purchasable.
“And there is no reason,” suggested Mrs. Vansittart, “why you should not go on doing a large business, as you say your method of producing malgamite is an absolute secret.”
“Absolute.”
“And the process is preserved in your memory only?” asked the lady, with a little glance towards him which would have awakened the vanity of wiser men than Percy Roden.
“Not in my memory,” he answered. “It is very long and technical, and I have other things to think of. It is in Von Holzen's head, which is a better one than mine.”
“And suppose Herr von Holzen should fall down and die, or be murdered, or something dramatic of that sort—what would happen?”
“Ah,” answered Roden, “we have a written copy of it, written in Hebrew, in our small safe at the works, and only Von Holzen and I have the keys of the safe.”
Mrs. Vansittart laughed. “It sounds like a romance,” she said. She pulled up, and sat motionless in the saddle for a few moments. “Look at that line of sea,” she said, “on the horizon. What a wonderful blue.”
“It is always dark like that with an east wind,” replied Roden, practically. “We like to see it dark.”
Mrs. Vansittart turned and looked at him interrogatively, her mind only half-weaned from the thoughts which he never understood.
“Because we know that the smell of malgamite will be blown out to sea,” he explained; and she gave a little nod of comprehension.
“You think of everything,” she said, without enthusiasm.
“No; I only think of you,” he answered, with a little laugh, which indeed was his method of making love.
For fear of Mrs. Vansittart laughing at him, he laughed at love—a very common form of cowardice. She smiled and said nothing, thus tacitly allowing him, as she had allowed him before, to assume that she was not displeased. She knew that in love he was the incarnation of caution, and would only venture so far as she encouraged him to come. She had him, in a word, thoroughly in hand.
They rode on, talking of other things; and Roden, having sped his shaft, seemed relieved in mind, and had plenty to say—about himself. A man's interests are himself, and malgamite naturally formed a large part of Roden's conversation. Mrs. Vansittart encouraged him with a singular persistency to talk of this interesting product.
“It is wonderful,” she said—“quite wonderful.”
“Well, hardly that,” he answered slowly, as if there were something more to be said, which he did not say.
“And I do not give so much credit to Herr von Holzen as you suppose,” added Mrs. Vansittart, carelessly. “Some day you will have to fulfil your promise of taking me over the works.”
Roden did not answer. He was perhaps wondering when he had made the promise to which his companion referred.
“Shall we go home that way?” asked Mrs. Vansittart, whose experience of the world had taught her that deliberate and steady daring in social matters usually, succeeds. “We might have a splendid gallop along the sands at low tide, and then ride up quietly through the dunes. I take a certain interest in—well—in your affairs, and you have never even allowed me to look at the outside of the malgamite works.”
“Should like to know the extent of your interest,” muttered Roden, with his awkward laugh.
“I dare say you would,” replied Mrs. Vansittart, coolly. “But that is not the question. Here we are at the cross-roads. Shall we go home by the sands and the dunes?”
“If you like,” answered Roden, not too graciously.
According to his lights, he was honestly in love with Mrs. Vansittart, but Percy Roden's lights were not brilliant, and his love was not a very high form of that little-known passion. It lacked, for instance, unselfishness, and love that lacks unselfishness is, at its best, a sorry business. He was afraid of ridicule. His vanity would not allow him to risk a rebuff. His was that faintness of heart which is all too common, and owes its ignoble existence to a sullen vanity. He wanted to be sure that Mrs. Vansittart loved him before he betrayed more than a half-contemptuous admiration for her. Who knows that he was not dimly aware of his own inferiority, and thus feared to venture?
The tide was low, as Mrs. Vansittart had foreseen, and they galloped along the hard, flat sands towards Scheveningen, where a few clumsy fishing-boats lay stranded. Far out at sea, others plied their trade, tacking to and fro over the banks, where the fish congregate. The sky was clear, and the deep-coloured sea flashed here and there beneath the sun. Objects near and far stood out in the clear air with a startling distinctness. It was a fresh May morning, when it is good to be alive, and better to be young.
Mrs. Vansittart rode a few yards ahead of her companion, with a set face and deep calculating eyes. When they came within sight of the tall chimney of the pumping-station, it was she who led the way across the dunes. “Now,” she suddenly inquired, pulling up, and turning in her saddle, “where are your works? It seems that one can never discover them.”
Roden passed her and took the lead. “I will take you there, since you are so anxious to go—if you will tell me why you wish to see the works,” he said.
“I should like to know,” she answered, with averted eyes and a slow deliberation, “where and how you spend so much of your time.”
“I believe you are jealous of the malgamite works,” he said, with his curt laugh.
“Perhaps I am,” she admitted, without meeting his glance; and Roden rode ahead, with a gleam of satisfaction in his heavy eyes.
So Mrs. Vansittart found herself within the gates of the malgamite works, riding quietly on the silent sand, at the heels of Roden's horse.
The workmen's dinner-bell had rung as they approached, and now the factories were deserted, while within the cottages the midday meal occupied the full attention of the voluntary exiles. For the directors had found it necessary, in the interests of all concerned, to bind the workers by solemn contract never to leave the precincts of the works without permission.
Roden did not speak, but led the way across an open space now filled with carts, which were to be loaded during the day in readiness for an early despatch on the following morning. Mrs. Vansittart followed without asking questions. She was prepared to content herself with a very cursory visit.
They had not progressed thirty yards from the entrance gate, which Roden had opened with a key attached to his watch-chain, when the door of one of the cottages moved, and Von Holzen appeared. He was hatless, and came out into the sunshine rather hurriedly.
“Ah, madame,” he said, “you honour us beyond our merits.” And he stood, smiling gravely, in front of Mrs. Vansittart's horse.
She surreptitiously touched the animal with her heel, but Von Holzen checked its movement by laying his hand on the bridle.
“Alas!” he said, “it happens to be our mixing day, and the factories are hermetically closed while the process goes forward. Any other day, madame, that your fancy brings you over the dunes, I should be delighted—but not to-day. I tell you frankly there is danger. You surely would not run into it.” He looked up at her with his searching gaze.
“Ah! you think it is easy to frighten me, Herr von Holzen,” she cried, with a little laugh.
“No; but I would not for the world that you should unwittingly run any risks in this place.”
As he spoke, he led the horse quietly to the gate, and Mrs. Vansittart, seeing her helplessness, submitted with a good grace.
Roden made no comment, and followed, not ill pleased, perhaps, at this simple solution of his difficulty.
Von Holzen did not refer to the incident until late in the evening, when Roden was leaving the works.
“This is too serious a time,” he said, “to let women, or vanity, interfere in our plans. You know that the deaths are on the increase. Anything in the nature of an inquiry at this time would mean ruin, and—perhaps worse. Be careful of that woman. I sometimes think that she is fooling you.—But I think,” he added to himself, when the gate was closed behind Roden, “that I can fool her.”
“A tous maux, il y a deux remèdes—le temps et le silence.”
“They call me Uncle Ben—comprenny?” one man explained very slowly to another for the sixth time across a small iron table set out upon the pavement.
They were seated in front of the humble Café de l'Europe, which lies concealed in an alley that runs between the Keize Straat and the lighthouse of Scheveningen. It was quite dark and a lonely reveler at the next table seemed to be asleep. The economical proprietor of the Café de l'Europe had conceived the idea of constructing a long-shaped lantern, not unlike the arm of a railway signal, which should at once bear the insignia of his house and afford light to his out-door custom. But the idea, like many of the higher flights of the human imagination, had only left the public in the dark.
“Yes,” continued the unchallenged speaker, in a voice which may be heard issuing from the door of any tavern in England on almost any evening of the week—the typical voice of the tavern-talker—“yes, they've always called me Uncle Ben. Seems as if they're sort o' fond of me. Me has seen many hundreds of 'em come and go. But nothing like this. Lord save us!”
His hand fell heavily on the iron table, and he looked round him in semi-intoxicated stupefaction. He was in a confidential humour, and when a man is in this humour, drunk or sober, he is in a parlous state. It was certainly rather unfortunate that Uncle Ben should have in this expansive moment no more sympathetic companion than an ancient, intoxicated Frenchman, who spoke no word of English.
“What I want to know, Frenchy,” continued the Englishman, in a thick, aggrieved voice, “is how long you've been at this trade, and how much you know about it—you and the other Frenchy. But there's none of us speaks the other's lingo. It is a regular Tower of Babble we are!” And Uncle Ben added to his mental confusion a further alcoholic fog. “That's why I showed yer the way out of the works over the iron fence by the empty casks, and brought yer by the beach to this 'ere house of entertainment, and stood yer a bottle of brandy between two of us—which is handsome, not bein' my own money, seeing as how the others deputed me to do it—me knowing a bit of French, comprenny?” Benjamin, like most of his countrymen, considering that if one speaks English in a loud, clear voice, and adds “comprenny” rather severely, as indicating the intention of standing no nonsense, the previous remarks will translate themselves miraculously in the hearer's mind. “You comprenny—eh? Yes. Oui.” “Oui,” replied the Frenchman, holding out his glass; and Uncle Ben's was that pride which goes with a gift of tongues.
He struck a match to light his pipe—one of the wooden, sulphur-headed matches supplied by thecafé—and the guest at the next table turned in his chair. The match flared up and showed two faces, which he studied keenly. Both faces were alike unwashed and deeply furrowed. White, straggling beards and whiskers accentuated the redness of the eyelids, the dull yellow of the skin. They were hopeless and debased faces, with that disquieting resemblance which is perceptible in the faces of men of dissimilar features and no kinship, who have for a number of years followed a common calling, or suffered a common pain.
These two men were both half blind; they had equally unsteady hands. The clothing of both alike, and even their breath, was scented by a not unpleasant odour of sealing-wax.
It was quite obvious that not only were they at present half intoxicated, but in their soberest moments they could hardly be of a high intelligence.
The reveller at the next table, who happened to be Tony Cornish, now drew his chair nearer.
“Englishman?” he inquired.
“That's me,” answered Uncle Ben, with commendable pride, “from the top of my head to me boots. Not that I've anything to say against foreigners.”
“Nor I; but it's pleasant to meet a countryman in a foreign land.” Cornish deliberately brought his chair forward. “Your bottle is empty,” he added; “I'll order another. Friend's a Frenchman, eh?”
“That he is—and doesn't understand his own language either,” answered Uncle Ben, in a voice indicating that that lack of comprehension rather intensified his friend's Frenchness than otherwise.
The proprietor of the Café de l'Europe now came out in answer to Cornish's rap on the iron table, and presently brought a small bottle of brandy.
“Yes,” said Cornish, pouring out the spirit, which his companions drank in its undiluted state from small tumblers—“yes, I'm glad to meet an Englishman. I suppose you are in the works—the Malgamite?”
“I am. And what do you know about malgamite, mister?”
“Well, not much, I am glad to say.”
“There is precious few that knows anything,” said the man, darkly, and his eye for a moment sobered into cunning.
“I have heard that it is a very dangerous trade, and if you want to get out of it I'm connected with an association in London to provide situations for elderly men who are no longer up to their work,” said Cornish, carelessly.
“Thank ye, mister; not for me. I'm making my five-pound note a week, I am, and each cove that dies off makes the survivors one richer, so to speak—survival of the fittest, they call it. So we don't talk much, and just pockets the pay.”
“Ah, that is the arrangement, is it?” said Cornish, indifferently. “Yes. We've got a clever financier, as they call it, I can tell yer. We're a good-goin' concern, we are. Some of us are goin' pretty quick, too.”
“Are there many deaths, then?”
“Ah! there you're asking a question,” returned the man, who came of a class which has no false shame in refusing a reply.
Cornish looked at the man beneath the dim light of the unsuccessful lamp—a piteous specimen of humanity, depraved, besotted, without outward sign of a redeeming virtue, although a certain courage must have been there—this and such as this stood between him and Dorothy Roden. Uncle Ben had known starvation at one time, for starvation writes certain lines which even turtle soup may never wipe out—lines which any may read and none may forget. Tony Cornish had seen them before—on the face of an old dandy coming down the steps of a St. James's Street club. The malgamiter had likewise known drink long and intimately, and it is no exaggeration to say that he had stood cheek by jowl with death nearly all his life.
Such a man was plainly not to be drawn away from five pounds a week.
Cornish turned to the Frenchman—a little, cunning, bullet-headed Lyonnais, who would not speak of his craft at all, though he expressed every desire to be agreeable to monsieur.
“When one isen fête,” he cried, “it is good to drink one's glass or two and think no more of work.”
“I knew one or two of your men once,” said Cornish, returning to the genial Uncle Ben. “William Martins, I remember, was a decent fellow, and had seen a bit of the world. I will come to the works and look him up some day.”
“You can look him up, mister, but you won't find him.”
“Ah, has he gone home?”
“He's gone to his long home, that's where he's gone.”
“And his brother, Tom Martins, both London men, like myself?” inquired Cornish, without asking that question which Uncle Ben considered such exceedingly bad form.
“Tom's dead, too.”
“And there were two Americans, I recollect—I came across from Harwich in the same boat with them—Hewlish they were called.”
“Hewlishes has stepped round the corner, too,” admitted Uncle Ben. “Oh yes; there's been changes in the works, there's no doubt. And there's only one sort o' change in the malgamite trade. Come on, Frenchy, time's up.”
The men stood up and bade Cornish good night, each after his own manner, and went away steadily enough. It was only their heads that were intoxicated, and perhaps the brandy of the Café de l'Europe had nothing to do with this.
Cornish followed them, and, in the Keize Straat, he called a cab, telling the man to drive to the house at the corner of Oranje Straat and Park Straat, occupied by Mrs. Vansittart. That lady, the servant said, in reply to his careful inquiry, was at home and alone, and, moreover, did not expect visitors. The man was not at all sure that madame would receive.
“I will try,” said Cornish, writing two words in German on the corner of his visiting-card. “You see,” he continued, noticing a well-trained glance, “that I am not dressed, so if other visitors arrive, I would rather not be discovered in madame's salon, you understand?”
Mrs. Vansittart shook hands with Cornish in silence, her quick eyes noted the change in him which the shrewd butler had noticed in the entrance-hall. The Cornish of a year earlier would have gone back to the hotel to dress.
“I was just going out to the Witte society concert,” said Mrs. Vansittart. “I thought the open air and the wood would be pleasant this evening. Shall we go or shall we remain?” She stood with her hand on the bell looking at him.
“Let us remain here,” he answered.
She rang the bell and countermanded the carriage. Then she sat slowly down, moving as under a sort of oppression, as if she foresaw what the next few minutes contained, and felt herself on the threshold of one of the surprises that Fate springs upon us at odd times, tearing aside the veils behind which human hearts have slept through many years. For indifference is not the death, but only the sleep of the heart.
“You have just arrived?”
“No; I have been here a week.”
“At The Hague?”
“No,” answered Cornish, with a grave smile; “at a little inn in Scheveningen, where no questions are asked.”
Mrs. Vansittart nodded her head slowly. “Then,mon ami,” she said, “the time has come for plain speaking?”
“I suppose so.”
“It is always the woman who wants to get to the plain speaking,” she said, with a smile, “and who speaks the plainest when one gets there. You men are afraid of so many words; you think them, but you dare not make use of them. And how are women to know that you are thinking them?” She spoke with a sort of tolerant bitterness, as if all these questions no longer interested her personally. She sat forward, with one hand on the arm of her chair. “Come,” she said, with a little laugh that shook and trembled on the brink of a whole sea of unshed tears, “I will speak the first word. When my husband died, my heart broke—and it was Otto von Holzen who killed him.” Her eyes flashed suddenly, and she threw herself back in the chair. Her hands were trembling.
Cornish made a quick gesture of the hand—a trick he had learnt somewhere on the Continent, more eloquent than a hundred words—which told of his sympathy and his comprehension of all that she had left unsaid. For truly she had told him her whole history in a dozen words.
“I have followed him and watched him ever since,” she went on at length, in a quiet voice; “but a woman is so helpless. I suppose if any of us were watched and followed as he has been our lives would appear a strange mixture of a little good and much bad, mixed with a mass of neutral idleness. But surely his life is worse than the rest—not that it matters. Whatever his life had been, if he had been a living saint, Tony, he would have had to pay—for what he has done to me.”
She looked steadily into the keen face that was watching hers. She was not in the least melodramatic, and what was stranger, perhaps, she was not ashamed. According to her lights, she was a good woman, who went to church regularly, and did a little conventional good with her superfluous wealth. She obeyed the unwritten laws of society, and busied herself little in her neighbours' affairs. She was kind to her servants, and did not hate her neighbours more than is necessary in a crowded world. She led a blameless, unoccupied, and apparently purposeless life. And now she quietly told Tony Cornish that her life was not purposeless, but had for its aim the desire of an eye for an eye and a life for a life.
“You remember my husband,” continued Mrs. Vansittart, after a pause. “He was always absorbed in his researches. He made a great discovery, and confided in Otto von Holzen, who thought that he could make a fortune out of it. But Von Holzen cheated and was caught. There was a great trial, and Von Holzen succeeded in incriminating my husband, who was innocent, instead of himself. The company, of course, failed, which meant ruin and dishonour. In a fit of despair my husband shot himself. And afterwards it transpired that by shooting himself at that time he saved my money. One cannot take proceedings against a dead man, it appears. So I was left a rich woman, after all, and my husband had frustrated Otto von Holzen. The world did not believe that my husband had done it on purpose; but I knew better. It is one of those beliefs that one keeps to one's self, and is indifferent whether the world believes or not. So there remain but two things for me to do—the one is to enjoy the money, and to let my husband see that I spend it as he would have wished me to spend it—upon myself; the other is to make Otto von Holzen pay—when the time comes. Who knows? the Malgamite is perhaps the time; you are perhaps the man.” She gave her disquieting little laugh again, and sat looking at him.
“I understand,” he said at length. “Before, I was puzzled. There seemed no reason why you should take any interest in the scheme.”
“My interest in the Malgamite scheme narrows down to an interest in one person,” answered Mrs. Vansittart, “which is what really happens to all human interests, my friend.”