Scremerston was very unlike his father: he was a small, rather fair man, with a slight moustache, a close-clipped beard, and little grey eyes with pink lids. His health was not good: he had been invalided home from the Imperial Yeomanry, after a slight wound and a dangerous attack of enteric fever, and he had secured a pair for the rest of the Session. He was not very clever, but he certainly laughed sufficientlyat what Miss Willoughby said, who also managed to entertain the Earl with great dexterity andaplomb. Meanwhile Logan and the Jesuit amused the excellent Lady Mary as best they might, which was not saying much. Lady Mary, though extremely amiable, was far from brilliant, and never having met a Jesuit before, she regarded Father Riccoboni with a certain hereditary horror, as an animal of a rare species, and, of habits perhaps startling and certainly perfidious. However, the lady was philanthropic in a rural way, and Father Riccoboni enlightened her as to the reasons why his enterprising countrymen leave their smiling land, and open small ice-shops in little English towns, or, less ambitious, invest their slender capital in a monkey and a barrel-organ.
‘I don’t so very much mind barrel-organs myself,’ said Logan; ‘I don’t know anything prettier than to see the little girls dancing to the music in a London side street.’
‘But do not the musicians all belong to that dreadful Camorra?’ asked the lady.
‘Not if they come from the North, madam,’ said the Jesuit. ‘And do not all your Irish reapers belong to that dreadful Land League, or whatever it is called?’
‘They are all Pap---’ said Lady Mary, who then stopped, blushed, and said, with some presence of mind, ‘paupers, I fear, but they are quite safe and well-behaved on this side of the Irish Channel.’
‘And so are our poor people,’ said the Jesuit. ‘If they occasionally use the knife a little—naturam expellas furca, Mr. Logan, but the knife is a differentthing—it is only in a homely war among themselves that they handle it in the East-end of London.’
‘Cœlum non animum,’ said Logan, determined not to be outdone in classical felicities; and, indeed, he thought his own quotation the more appropriate.
At this moment a great silvery-grey Persian cat, which had sat hitherto in a stereotyped Egyptian attitude on the arm of the Earl’s chair, leaped down and sprang affectionately on the shoulder of the Jesuit. He shuddered strongly and obviously repressed an exclamation with difficulty, as he gently removed the cat.
‘Fie, Meriamoun!’ said the Earl, as the puss resumed her Egyptian pose beside him. ‘Shall I send the animal out of the room? I know some people cannot endure a cat,’ and he mentioned the gallant Field Marshal who is commonly supposed to share this infirmity.
‘By no means, my lord,’ said the Jesuit, who looked strangely pale. ‘Cats have an extraordinary instinct for caressing people who happen to be born with exactly the opposite instinct. I am like the man in Aristotle who was afraid of the cat.’
‘I wish we knew more about that man,’ said Miss Willoughby, who was stroking Meriamoun. ‘Areyouafraid of cats, Lord Scremerston?—but you, I suppose, are afraid of nothing.’
‘I am terribly afraid of all manner of flying things that buzz and bite,’ said Scremerston.
‘Except bullets,’ said Miss Willoughby—Beauty rewarding Valour with a smile and a glance so dazzling that the good little Yeoman blushed with pleasure.
‘It is a shame!’ thought Logan. ‘I don’t like it now I see it.’
‘As to horror of cats,’ said the Earl, ‘I suppose evolution can explain it. I wonder how they would work it out inScience Jottings. There is a great deal of electricity in a cat.’
‘Evolution can explain everything,’ said the Jesuit demurely, ‘but who can explain evolution?’
‘As to electricity in the cat,’ said Logan, ‘I daresay there is as much in the dog, only everybody has tried stroking a cat in the dark to see the sparks fly, and who ever tried stroking a dog in the dark, for experimental purposes?—did you, Lady Mary?’
Lady Mary never had tried, but the idea was new to her, and she would make the experiment in winter.
‘Deer skins, stroked, do sparkle,’ said Logan, ‘I read that in a book. I daresay horses do, only nobody tries. I don’t think electricity is the explanation of why some people can’t bear cats.’
‘Electricity is the modern explanation of everything—love, faith, everything,’ remarked the Jesuit; ‘but, as I said, who shall explain electricity?’
Lady Mary, recognising the orthodoxy of these sentiments, felt more friendly towards Father Riccoboni. He might be a Jesuit, but he wasbien pensant.
‘What I am afraid of is not a cat, but a mouse,’ said Miss Willoughby, and the two other ladies admitted that their own terrors were of the same kind.
‘What I am afraid of,’ said the Prince, ‘is a banging door, by day or night. I am not, otherwise, of a nervous constitution, but if I hear a door bang, Imustgo and hunt for it, and stop the noise, either by shutting the door, or leaving it wide open. I am a sound sleeper, but, if a door bangs, it wakens me at once. I try not to notice it. I hope it will leave off. Then it does leave off—that is the artfulness of it—and, just as you are falling asleep,knockit goes! A double knock, sometimes. Then I simplymustget up, and hunt for that door, upstairs or downstairs—’
‘Or in my—’ interrupted Miss Willoughby, and stopped, thinking better of it, and not finishing the quotation, which passed unheard.
‘That research has taken me into some odd places,’ the Prince ended; and Logan reminded the Society of the Bravest of the Brave. Whathewas afraid of was a pair of tight boots.
These innocent conversations ended, and, after dinner, the company walked about or sat beneath the stars in the fragrant evening air, the Earl seated by Miss Willoughby, Scremerston smoking with Logan; while the white dress of Lady Alice flitted ghost-like on the lawn, and the tip of the Prince’s cigar burned red in the neighbourhood. In the drawing-room Lady Mary was tentatively conversing with the Jesuit, that mild but probably dangerous animal. She had the curiosity which pious maiden ladies feel about the member of a community which they only know through novels. Certainly this Jesuit was very unlike Aramis.
‘And whoishe like?’ Logan happened to be asking Scremerston at that moment. ‘I know the face—I know the voice; hang it!—where have I seen the man?’
‘Now you mention it,’ said Scremerston, ‘Iseem to remember him too. But I can’t place him. What do you think of a game of billiards, father?’ he asked, rising and addressing Lord Embleton. ‘Rosamond—Miss Willoughby, I mean—’
‘Oh, we are cousins, Lord Embleton says, and you may call me Rosamond. I have never had any cousins before,’ interrupted the young lady.
‘Rosamond,’ said Scremerston, with a gulp, ‘is getting on wonderfully well for a beginner.’
‘Then let us proceed with her education: it is growing chilly, too,’ said the Earl; and they all went to billiards, the Jesuit marking with much attention and precision. Later he took a cue, and was easily the master of every man there, though better acquainted, he said, with the foreign game. The late Pope used to play, he said, nearly as well as Mr. Herbert Spencer. Even for a beginner, Miss Willoughby was not a brilliant player; but she did not cut the cloth, and her arms were remarkably beautiful—an excellent but an extremely rare thing in woman. She was rewarded, finally, by a choice between bedroom candles lit and offered by her younger and her elder cousins, and, after a momentary hesitation, accepted that of the Earl.
‘How is this going to end?’ thought Logan, when he was alone. ‘Miss Bangs is out of the running, that is certain: millions of dollars cannot bring her near Miss Willoughby with Scremerston. The old gentleman ought to like that—it relieves him from the bacon and lard, and the dollars, and the associations with a Straddle; and then Miss Willoughby’sfamily is all right, but the girl is reckless. A demon has entered into her: she used to be so quiet. I’d rather marry Miss Bangs without the dollars. Then it is all very well for Scremerston to yield to Venus Verticordia, and transfer his heart to this new enchantress. But, if I am not mistaken, the Earl himself is much more kind than kin. The heart has no age, and he is a very well-preserved peer. You might take him for little more than forty, though he quite looked his years when I saw him first. Well,Iam safe enough, in spite of Merton’s warning: this new Helen has no eyes for me, and the Prince has no eyes for her, I think. But who is the Jesuit?’
Logan fought with his memory till he fell asleep, but he recovered no gleam of recollection about the holy man.
It did not seem to Logan, next day, that he was in for a very lively holiday. His host carried off Miss Willoughby to the muniment-room after breakfast; that was an advantage he had over Scremerston, who was decidedly restless and ill at ease. He took Logan to see the keeper, and they talked about fish and examined local flies, and Logan arranged to go and try the trout with the bustard some night; and then they pottered about, and ate cherries in the garden, and finally the Earl found them half asleep in the smoking-room. He routed the Jesuit out of the library, where he was absorbed in a folio containing the works of the sainted Father Parsons, and then the Earl showed Logan and Father Riccoboni over the house. From a window of the gallery Scremerstoncould be descried playing croquet with Miss Willoughby, an apparition radiant in white.
The house was chiefly remarkable for queer passages, which, beginning from the roof of the old tower, above the Father’s chamber, radiated about, emerging in unexpected places. The priests’ holes had offered to the persecuted clergy of old times the choice between being grilled erect behind a chimney, or of lying flat in a chamber about the size of a coffin near the roof, where the martyr Jesuits lived on suction, like the snipe, absorbing soup from a long straw passed through a wall into a neighbouring garret.
‘Those were cruel times,’ said Father Riccoboni, who presently, at luncheon, showed that he could thoroughly appreciate the tender mercies of the present or Christian era. Logan watched him, and once when, something that interested him being said, the Father swept the table with his glance without raising his head, a memory for a fraction of a moment seemed to float towards the surface of Logan’s consciousness. Even as when an angler, having hooked a salmon, a monster of the stream, long the fish bores down impetuous, seeking the sunken rocks, disdainful of the steel, and the dark wave conceals him; then anon is beheld a gleam of silver, and again is lost to view, and the heart of the man rejoices—even so fugitive a glimpse had Logan of what he sought in the depths of memory. But it fled, and still he was puzzled.
Logan loafed out after luncheon to a seat on the lawn in the shade of a tree. They were all to bedriven over to an Abbey not very far away, for, indeed, in July, there is little for a man to do in the country. Logan sat and mused. Looking up he saw Miss Willoughby approaching, twirling an open parasol on her shoulder. Her face was radiant; of old it had often looked as if it might be stormy, as if there were thunder behind those dark eyebrows. Logan rose, but the lady sat down on the garden seat, and he followed her example.
‘This is better than Bloomsbury, Mr. Logan, and cocoapour tout potage: singed cocoa usually.’
‘Thepotagehere is certainly all that heart can wish,’ said Logan.
‘The chrysalis,’ said Miss Willoughby, ‘in its wildest moments never dreamed of being a butterfly, as the man said in the sermon; and I feel like a butterfly that remembers being a chrysalis. Look at me now!’
‘I could look for ever,’ said Logan, ‘like the sportsman in Keats’sGrecian Urn: “For ever let me look, and thou be fair!”’
‘I am so sorry for people in town,’ said Miss Willoughby. ‘Don’t you wish dear old Milo was here?’
Milo was the affectionate nickname—a tribute to her charms—borne by Miss Markham at St. Ursula’s.
‘How can I wish that anyone was here but you?’ asked Logan. ‘But, indeed, as to her being here, I should like to know in what capacity she was a guest.’
The Clytemnestra glance came into Miss Willoughby’s grey eyes for a moment, but she was not to be put out of humour.
‘To be here as a kinswoman, and an historian, with a maid—fancy me with a maid!—and everything handsome about me, is sufficiently excellent for me, Mr. Logan; and if it were otherwise, do you disapprove of the proceedings of your own Society? But there is Lord Scremerston calling to us, and a four-in-hand waiting at the door. And I am to sit on the box-seat. Oh, this is better than the dingy old Record Office all day.’
With these words Miss Willoughby tripped over the sod as lightly as the Fairy Queen, and Logan slowly followed. No; he didnotapprove of the proceedings of his Society as exemplified by Miss Willoughby, and he was nearly guilty of falling asleep during the drive to Winderby Abbey. Scremerston was not much more genial, for his father was driving and conversing very gaily with his fair kinswoman.
‘Talk about a distant cousin!’ thought Logan, who in fact felt ill-treated. However deep in love a man may be, he does not like to see a fair lady conspicuously much more interested in other members of his sex than in himself.
The Abbey was a beautiful ruin, and Father Riccoboni did not conceal from Lady Mary the melancholy emotions with which it inspired him.
‘When shall our prayers be heard?’ he murmured. ‘When shall England return to her Mother’s bosom?’
Lady Mary said nothing, but privately trusted that the winds would disperse the orisons of which the Father spoke. Perhaps nuns had been bricked up in these innocent-looking mossy walls, thought Lady Mary, whose ideas on this matter were derived froma scene in the poem ofMarmion. And deep in Lady Mary’s heart was a half-formed wish that, if there was to be any bricking up, Miss Willoughby might be the interesting victim. Unlike her brother the Earl, she was all for the Bangs alliance.
Scremerston took the reins on the homeward way, the Earl being rather fatigued; and, after dinner,twowhite robes flitted ghost-like on the lawn, and the light which burned red beside one of them was the cigar-tip of Scremerston. The Earl had fallen asleep in the drawing-room, and Logan took a lonely stroll, much regretting that he had come to a house where he felt decidedly ‘out of it.’ He wandered down to the river, and stood watching. He was beside the dark-brown water in the latest twilight, beside a long pool with a boat moored on the near bank. He sat down in the boat pensively, and then—what was that? It was the sound of a heavy trout rising. ‘Plop,plop!’ They were feeding all round him.
‘By Jove! I’ll try the bustard to-morrow night, and then I’ll go back to town next day,’ thought Logan. ‘I am doing no good here, and I don’t like it. I shall tell Merton that I have moral objections to the whole affair. Miserable, mercenary fraud!’ Thus, feeling very moral and discontented, Logan walked back to the house, carefully avoiding the ghostly robes that still glimmered on the lawn, and did not re-enter the house till bedtime.
The following day began as the last had done; Lord Embleton and Miss Willoughby retiring to the muniment-room, the lovers vanishing among the walks. Scremerston later took Logan to consultFenwick, who visibly brightened at the idea of night-fishing.
‘You must take one of those long landing-nets, Logan,’ said Scremerston. ‘They are about as tall as yourself, and as stout as lance-shafts. They are for steadying you when you wade, and feeling the depth of the water in front of you.’
Scremerston seemed very pensive. The day was hot; they wandered to the smoking-room. Scremerston took up a novel, which he did not read; Logan began a letter to Merton—a gloomy epistle.
‘I say, Logan,’ suddenly said Scremerston, ‘if your letter is not very important, I wish you would listen to me for a moment.’
Logan turned round. ‘Fire away,’ he said; ‘my letter can wait.’
Scremerston was in an attitude of deep dejection. Logan lit a cigarette and waited.
‘Logan, I am the most miserable beggar alive.’
‘What is the matter? You seem rather in-and-out in your moods,’ said Logan.
‘Why, you know, I am in a regular tight place. I don’t know how to put it. You see, I can’t help thinking that—that—I have rather committed myself—it seems a beastly conceited thing to say—that there’s a girl who likes me, I’m afraid.’
‘I don’t want to be inquisitive, but is she in this country?’ asked Logan.
‘No; she’s at Homburg.’
‘Has it gone very far? Have yousaidanything?’ asked Logan.
‘No; my father did not like it. I hoped to bring him round.’
‘Have youwrittenanything? Do you correspond?’
‘No, but I’m afraid I havelookeda lot.’
As the Viscount Scremerston’s eyes were by no means fitted to express with magnetic force the language of the affections, Logan had to command his smile.
‘But why have you changed your mind, if you liked her?’ he asked.
‘Oh,youknow very well! Can anybody see her and not love her?’ said Scremerston, with a vagueness in his pronouns, but referring to Miss Willoughby.
Logan was inclined to reply that he could furnish, at first hand, an exception to the rule, but this appeared tactless.
‘No one, I daresay, whose affections were not already engaged, could see her without loving her; but I thought yours had been engaged to a lady now at Homburg?’
‘So did I,’ said the wretched Scremerston, ‘but I was mistaken. Oh, Logan, you don’t know the difference!Thisis genuine biz,’ remarked the afflicted nobleman with much simplicity. He went on: ‘Then there’s my father—you know him. He was against the other affair, but, if he thinks I have committed myself and then want to back out, why, with his ideas, he’d rather see me dead. But I can’t go on with the other thing now: I simply cannot. I’ve a good mind to go out after rabbits, and pot myself crawling through a hedge.’
‘Oh, nonsense!’ said Logan; ‘that is stale and superfluous. For all that I can see, there is no harm done. The young lady, depend upon it, won’t breakher heart. As a matter of fact, they don’t—wedo. You have only to sit tight. You are no more committed than I am. You would only make both of you wretched if you went and committed yourself now, when you don’t want to do it. In your position I would certainly sit tight: don’t commit yourself—either here or there, so to speak; or, if you can’t sit tight, make a bolt for it. Go to Norway. I am very strongly of opinion that the second plan is the best. But, anyhow, keep up your pecker. You are all right—I give you my word that I think you are all right.’
‘Thanks, old cock,’ said Scremerston. ‘Sorry to have bored you, but Ihadto speak to somebody.’
* * * * * *
‘Best thing you could do,’ said Logan. ‘You’ll feel ever so much better. That kind of worry comes of keeping things to oneself, till molehills look mountains. If you like I’ll go with you to Norway myself.’
‘Thanks, awfully,’ said Scremerston, but he did not seem very keen. Poor little Scremerston!
Logan ‘breasted the brae’ from the riverside to the house. His wading-boots were heavy, for he had twice got in over the tops thereof; heavy was his basket that Fenwick carried behind him, but light was Logan’s heart, for the bustard had slain its dozens of good trout. He and the keeper emerged from the wood on the level of the lawn. All the great mass of the house lay dark before them. Logan was to let himself in by the locked French window; for it was very late—about two in the morning.He had the key of the window-door in his pocket. A light moved through the long gallery: he saw it pass each window and vanish. There was dead silence: not a leaf stirred. Then there rang out a pistol-shot, or was it two pistol-shots? Logan ran for the window, his rod, which he had taken down after fishing, in his hand.
‘Hurry to the back door, Fenwick!’ he said; and Fenwick, throwing down the creel, but grasping the long landing-net, flew to the back way. Logan opened the drawing-room window, took out his matchbox, with trembling ringers lit a candle, and, with the candle in one hand, the rod in the other, sped through the hall, and along a back passage leading to the gunroom. He had caught a glimpse of the Earl running down the main staircase, and had guessed that the trouble was on the ground floor. As he reached the end of the long dark passage, Fenwick leaped in by the back entrance, of which the door was open. What Logan saw was a writhing group—the Prince of Scalastro struggling in the arms of three men: a long white heap lay crumpled in a corner. Fenwick, at this moment, threw the landing-net over the head of one of the Prince’s assailants, and with a twist, held the man half choked and powerless. Fenwick went on twisting, and, with the leverage of the long shaft of the net, dragged the wretch off the Prince, and threw him down. Another of the men turned on Logan with a loud guttural oath, and was raising a pistol. Logan knew the voice at last—knew the Jesuit now. ‘Rien ne va plus!’ he cried, and lunged, with all the force and speed of an expert fencer, atthe fellow’s face with the point of the rod. The metal joints clicked and crashed through the man’s mouth, his pistol dropped, and he staggered, cursing through his blood, against the wall. Logan picked up the revolver as the Prince, whose hands were now free, floored the third of his assailants with an upper cut. Logan thrust the revolver into the Prince’s hand. ‘Keep them quiet with that,’ he said, and ran to where the Earl, who had entered unseen in the struggle, was kneeling above the long, white, crumpled heap.
It was Scremerston, dead, in his night dress: poor plucky little Scremerston.
* * * * * *
Afterwards, before the trial, the Prince told Logan how matters had befallen. ‘I was wakened,’ he said—‘you were very late, you know, and we had all gone to bed—I was wakened by a banging door. If you remember, I told you all, on the night of your arrival at Rookchester, how I hated that sound. I tried not to think of it, and was falling asleep when it banged again—a double knock. I was nearly asleep, when it clashed again. There was no wind, my window was open and I looked out: I only heard the river murmuring and the whistle of a passing train. The stillness made the abominable recurrent noise more extraordinary. I dressed in a moment in my smoking-clothes, lit a candle, and went out of my room, listening. I walked along the gallery—’
‘It was your candle that I saw as I crossed the lawn,’ said Logan.
‘When a door opened,’ the Prince went on—‘thedoor of one of the rooms on the landing—and a figure, all in white,—it was Scremerston,—emerged and disappeared down the stairs. I followed at the top of my speed. I heard a shot, or rather two pistols that rang out together like one. I ran through the hall into the long back passage at right-angles to it, down the passage to the glimmer of light through the partly glazed door at the end of it. Then my candle was blown out and three men set on me. They had nearly pinioned me when you and Fenwick took them on both flanks. You know the rest. They had the boat unmoored, a light cart ready on the other side, and a steam-yacht lying off Warkworth. The object, of course, was to kidnap me, and coerce or torture me into renewing the lease of the tables at Scalastro. Poor Scremerston, who was a few seconds ahead of me, not carrying a candle, had fired in the dark, and missed. The answering fire, which was simultaneous, killed him. The shots saved me, for they brought you and Fenwick to the rescue. Two of the fellows whom we damaged were—’
‘The Genoese pipers, of course,’ said Logan.
‘And you guessed, from the cry you gave, who my confessor (hebanged the door, of course to draw me) turned out to be?’
‘Yes, the head croupier at Scalastro years ago; but he wore a beard and blue spectacles in the old time, when he raked in a good deal of my patrimony,’ said Logan. ‘But how was he planted onyou?’
‘My old friend, Father Costa, had died, and it is too long a tale of forgery and fraud to tell you how this wretch was forced on me. Hehadbeen a Jesuit,but was unfrocked and expelled from Society for all sorts of namable and unnamable offences. His community believed that he was dead. So he fell to the profession in which you saw him, and, when the gambling company saw that I was disinclined to let that hell burn any longer on my rock, ingenious treachery did the rest.’
‘By Jove!’ said Logan.
* * * * *
The Prince of Scalastro, impoverished by his own generous impulse, now holds high rank in the Japanese service. His beautiful wife is much admired in Yokohama.
The Earl was nursed through the long and dangerous illness which followed the shock of that dreadful July night, by the unwearying assiduity of his kinswoman, Miss Willoughby. On his recovery, the bride (for the Earl won her heart and hand) who stood by him at the altar looked fainter and more ghostly than the bridegroom. But her dark hour of levity was passed and over. There is no more affectionate pair than the Earl and Countess of Embleton. Lady Mary, who lives with them, is once more an aunt, and spoils, it is to be feared, the young Viscount Scremerston, a fine but mischievous little boy. On the fate of the ex-Jesuit we do not dwell: enough to say that his punishment was decreed by the laws of our country, not of that which he had disgraced.
The manuscripts of the Earl have been edited by him and the Countess for the Roxburghe Club.
‘I cannot bring myself to refuse my assent. It would break the dear child’s heart. She has never cared for anyone else, and, oh, she is quite wrapped up in him. I have heard of your wonderful cures, Mr. Merton, I mean successes, in cases which everyone has given up, and though it seems a very strange step to me, I thought that I ought to shrink from no remedy’—
‘However unconventional,’ said Merton, smiling. He felt rather as if he were being treated like a quack doctor, to whom people (if foolish enough) appeal only as the last desperate resource.
The lady who filled, and amply filled, the client’s chair, Mrs. Malory, of Upwold in Yorkshire, was a widow, obviously, a widow indeed. ‘In weed’ was an unworthycalembourwhich flashed through Merton’s mind, since Mrs. Malory’s undying regret for her lord (a most estimable man for a coal owner) was explicitly declared, or rather was blazoned abroad, in her costume. Mrs. Mallory, in fact, was what is derisively styled ‘Early Victorian’—‘Middle’ would have been, historically, more accurate. Her religion was mildly Evangelical; she had been brought up on theMemoirs of the Fairchild Family, by Mrs. Sherwood, tempered by Miss Yonge and the Waverley Novels. On these principles she had trained her family. The result was that her sons had not yet brought the family library, and the family Romneys and Hoppners, to Christie’s. Not one of them was a director of any company, and the name of Malory had not yet been distinguished by decorating the annals of the Courts of Bankruptcy or of Divorce. In short, a family more deplorably not ‘up to date,’ and more ‘out of the swim’ could scarcely be found in England.
Such, and of such connections, was the lady, fair, faded, with mildly aquiline features, and an aspect at once distinguished and dowdy, who appealed to Merton. She sought him in what she, at least, regarded as the interests of her eldest daughter, an heiress under the will of a maternal uncle. Merton had met the young lady, who looked like a portrait of her mother in youth. He knew that Miss Malory, now ‘wrapped up in’ her betrothed lover, would, in a few years, be equally absorbed in ‘her boys.’ She was pretty, blonde, dull, good, and cast by Providence for the part of one of the best of mothers, and the despair of what man soever happened to sit next her at a dinner party. Such women are the safeguards of society—though sneered at by the frivolous as ‘British Matrons.’
‘I have laid the case before the—where I always take my troubles,’ said Mrs. Malory, ‘and I have not felt restrained from coming to consult you. When I permitted my daughter’s engagement (of course after carefully examining the young man’s worldly position)I was not aware of what I know now. Matilda met him at a visit to some neighbours—he really is very attractive, and very attentive—and it was not till we came to London for the season that I heard the stories about him. Some of them have been pointed out to me, in print, in the dreadful French newspapers, others came to me in anonymous letters. As far as a mother may, I tried to warn Matilda, but there are subjects on which one can hardly speak to a girl. The Vidame, in fact,’ said Mrs. Malory, blushing, ‘is celebrated—I should say infamous—both in France and Italy, Poland too, as what they callun homme aux bonnes fortunes. He has caused the break-up of several families. Mr. Merton, he is a rake,’ whispered the lady, in some confusion.
‘He is still young; he may reform,’ said Merton, ‘and no doubt a pure affection will be the saving of him.’
‘So Matilda believes, but, though a Protestant—his ancestors having left France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nancy—Nantes I mean—I am certain that he isnotunder conviction.’
‘Why does he call himself Vidame, “the Vidame de la Lain”?’ asked Merton.
‘It is an affectation,’ said Mrs. Malory. ‘None of his family used the title in England, but he has been much on the Continent, and has lands in France; and, I suppose, has romantic ideas. He is as much French as English, more I am afraid. The wickedness of that country! And I fear it has affected ours. Even now—I am not a scandal-monger, and I hope for the best—but even last winter he was talked about,’ Mrs.Malory dropped her voice, ‘with a lady whose husband is in America, Mrs. Brown-Smith.’
‘A lady for whom I have the very highest esteem,’ said Merton, for, indeed, Mrs. Brown-Smith was one of his references or Lady Patronesses; he knew her well, and had a respect for her character,au fond, as well as an admiration for her charms.
‘You console me indeed,’ said Mrs. Malory. ‘I had heard—’
‘People talk a great deal of ill-natured nonsense,’ said Merton warmly. ‘Do you know Mrs. Brown-Smith?’
‘We have met, but we are not in the same set; we have exchanged visits, but that is all.’
‘Ah!’ said Merton thoughtfully. He remembered that when his enterprise was founded Mrs. Brown-Smith had kindly offered her practical services, and that he had declined them for the moment. ‘Mrs. Malory,’ he went on, after thinking awhile, ‘may I take your case into my consideration—the marriage is not till October, you say, we are in June—and I may ask for a later interview? Of course you shall be made fully aware of every detail, and nothing shall be done without your approval. In fact all will depend on your own co-operation. I don’t deny that there may be distasteful things, but if you are quite sure about this gentleman’s—’
‘Character?’ said Mrs. Malory. ‘I amsosure that it has cost me many a wakeful hour. You will earn my warmest gratitude if you can do anything.’
‘Almost everything will depend on your own energy, and tolerance of our measures.’
‘But we must not do evil that good may come,’ said Mrs. Malory nervously.
‘No evil is contemplated,’ said Merton. But Mrs. Malory, while consenting, so far, did not seem quite certain that her estimate of ‘evil’ and Merton’s would be identical.
She had suffered poignantly, as may be supposed, before she set the training of a lifetime aside, and consulted a professional expert. But the urbanity and patience of Merton, with the high and unblemished reputation of his Association, consoled her. ‘We must yield where we innocently may,’ she assured herself, ‘to the changes of the times. Lest one good order’ (and ah, how good the Early Victorian order had been!) ‘should corrupt the world.’ Mrs. Malory knew that line of poetry. Then she remembered that Mrs. Brown-Smith was on the list of Merton’s references, and that reassured her, more or less.
As for Merton, he evolved a plan in his mind, and consulted Bradshaw’s invaluable Railway Guide.
On the following night Merton was fortunate or adroit enough to find himself seated beside Mrs. Brown-Smith in a conservatory at a party given by the Montenegrin Ambassador. Other occupants of the fairy-like bower of blossoms, musical with all the singing of the innumerable fountains, could not but know (however preoccupied) that Mrs. Brown-Smith was being amused. Her laughter ‘rang merry and loud,’ as the poet says, though not a word of her whispered conversation was audible. Conservatories (in novels) are dangerous places for confidences, butthe pale and angry face of Miss Malory didnotsuddenly emerge from behind a grove of gardenias, and startle the conspirators. Indeed, Miss Malory was not present; she and her sister had no great share in the elegant frivolities of the metropolis.
‘It all fits in beautifully,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith. ‘Just let me look at the page of Bradshaw again.’ Merton handed to her a page of closely printed matter. ‘9.17 P.M., 9.50 P.M.’ read Mrs. Brown-Smith aloud; ‘it gives plenty of time in case of delays. Oh, this is too delicious! You are sure that these trains won’t be altered. It might be awkward.’
‘I consulted Anson,’ said Merton. Anson was famous for his mastery of time-tables, and his prescience as to railway arrangements.
‘Of course it depends on the widow,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith, ‘I shall see that Johnnie is up to time. He hopes to undersell the opposition soap’ (Mr. Brown-Smith was absent in America, in the interests of that soap of his which is familiar to all), ‘and he is in the best of humours. Then their grouse! We have disease on our moors in Perthshire; I was in despair. But the widow needs delicate handling.’
‘You won’t forget—I know how busy you are—her cards for your party?’
‘They shall be posted before I sleep the sleep of conscious innocence.’
‘And real benevolence,’ said Merton.
‘And revenge,’ added Mrs. Brown-Smith. ‘I have heard of his bragging, the monster. He has talked aboutme. And I remember how he treated Violet Lebas.’
At this moment the Vidame de la Lain, a tall, fair young man, vastly too elegant, appeared, and claimed Mrs. Brown-Smith for a dance. With a look at Merton, and a sound which, from less perfect lips, might have been described as a suppressed giggle, Mrs. Brown-Smith rose, then turning, ‘Post the page to me, Mr. Merton,’ she said. Merton bowed, and, folding up the page of the time-table, he consigned it to his cigarette case.
* * * * * *
Mrs. Malory received, with a blending of emotions, the invitation to the party of Mrs. Brown-Smith. The social popularity and the wealth of the hostess made such invitations acceptable. But the wealth arose from trade, in soap, not in coal, and coal (like the colza bean) is ‘a product of the soil,’ the result of creative forces which, in the geological past, have worked together for the good of landed families. Soap, on the other hand, is the result of human artifice, and is certainly advertised with more of emphasis and of ingenuity than of delicacy. But, by her own line of descent, Mrs. Brown-Smith came from a Scottish house of ancient standing, historically renowned for its assassins, traitors, and time-servers. This partly washed out the stain of soap. Again, Mrs. Malory had heard the name of Mrs. Brown-Smith taken in vain, and that in a matter nearly affecting her Matilda’s happiness. On the other side, Merton had given the lady a valuable testimonial to character. Moreover, the Vidame would be at her party, and Mrs. Malory told herself that she could study the ground. Above all, the girlswere so anxious to go: they seldom had such a chance. Therefore, while the Early Victorian moralist hesitated, the mother accepted.
They were all glad that they went. Susan, the younger Miss Malory, enjoyed herself extremely. Matilda danced with the Vidame as often as her mother approved. The conduct of Mrs. Brown-Smith was correctness itself. She endeared herself to the girls: invited them to her place in Perthshire, and warmly congratulated Mrs. Malory on the event approaching in her family. The eye of maternal suspicion could detect nothing amiss. Thanks mainly to Mrs. Brown-Smith, the girls found the season an earthly Paradise: and Mrs. Malory saw much more of the world than she had ever done before. But she remained vigilant, and on the alert. Before the end of July she had even conceived the idea of inviting Mrs. Brown-Smith, fatigued by her toils, to inhale the bracing air of Upwold in the moors. But she first consulted Merton, who expressed his warm approval.
‘It is dangerous, though she has been so kind,’ sighed Mrs. Malory. ‘I have observed nothing to justify the talk which I have heard, but I am in doubt.’
‘Dangerous! it is safety,’ said Merton.
‘How?’
Merton braced himself for the most delicate and perilous part of his enterprise.
‘The Vidame de la Lain will be staying with you?’
‘Naturally,’ said Mrs. Malory. ‘And if thereisany truth in what was whispered—’
‘He will be subject to temptation,’ said Merton.
‘Mrs. Brown-Smith is so pretty and so amusing, and dear Matilda; she takes after my dear husband’s family, though the best of girls, Matilda has not that flashing manner.’
‘But surely no such thing as temptation should exist for a man so fortunate as de la Lain! And if it did, would his conduct not confirm what you have heard, and open the eyes of Miss Malory?’
‘It seems so odd to be discussing such things with—so young a man as you—not even a relation,’ sighed Mrs. Malory.
‘I can withdraw at once,’ said Merton.
‘Oh no, please don’t speak of that! I am not really at all happy yet about my daughter’s future.’
‘Well, suppose the worst by way of argument; suppose that you saw, that Miss Malory saw—’
‘Matilda has always refused to see or to listen, and has spoken of the reforming effects of a pure affection. She would be hard, indeed, to convince that anything was wrong, but, once certain—I know Matilda’s character—she would never forgive the insult, never.’
‘And you would rather that she suffered some present distress?’
‘Than that she was tied for life to a man who could cause it? Certainly I would.’
‘Then, Mrs. Malory, as itisawkward to discuss these intimate matters with me, might I suggest that you should have an interview with Mrs. Brown-Smith herself? I assure you that you can trust her, and I happen to know that her view of the man aboutwhom we are talking is exactly your own. More I could say as to her reasons and motives, but we entirely decline to touch on the past or to offer any opinion about the characters of our patients—the persons about whose engagements we are consulted. He might have murdered his grandmother or robbed a church, but my lips would be sealed.’
‘Do you not think that Mrs. Brown-Smith would be very much surprised if I consulted her?’
‘I know that she takes a sincere interest in Miss Malory, and that her advice would be excellent—though perhaps rather startling,’ said Merton.
‘I dislike it very much. The world has altered terribly since I was Matilda’s age,’ said Mrs. Malory; ‘but I should never forgive myself if I neglected any precaution, and I shall take your advice. I shall consult Mrs. Brown-Smith.’
Merton thus retreated from what even he regarded as a difficult and delicate affair. He fell back on his reserves; and Mrs. Brown-Smith later gave an account of what passed between herself and the representative of an earlier age:
‘She first, when she had invited me to her dreary place, explained that we ought not, she feared, to lead others into temptation. “If you think that man, de la Lain’s temptation is to drag my father’s name, and my husband’s, in the dust,” I answered, “let me tell you thatIhave a temptation also.”
‘“Dear Mrs. Brown-Smith,” she answered, “this is indeed honourable candour. Not for the world would I be the occasion—”
‘I interrupted her, “Mytemptation is to makehim the laughing stock of his acquaintance, and, if he has the impudence to give me the opportunity, Iwill!” And then I told her, without names, of course, that story about this Vidame Potter and Violet Lebas.’
‘I didnot,’ said Merton. ‘But why Vidame Potter?’
‘His father was a Mr. Potter; his grandfather married a Miss Lalain—I know all about it—and this creature has wormed out, or invented, some story of a Vidameship, or whatever it is, hereditary in the female line, and has taken the title. And this is the man who has had the impertinence to talk aboutme, a Ker of Graden.’
‘But did not the story you speak of make her see that she must break off her daughter’s engagement?’
‘No. She was very much distressed, but said that her daughter Matilda would never believe it.’
‘And so you are to go to Upwold?’
‘Yes, it is a mournful place; I never did anything so good-natured. And, with the widow’s knowledge, I am to do as I please till the girl’s eyes are opened. I think it will need that stratagem we spoke of to open them.’
‘You are sure that you will be in no danger from evil tongues?’
‘They say, What say they? Let them say,’ answered Mrs. Brown-Smith, quoting the motto of the Keiths.
The end of July found Mrs. Brown-Smith at Upwold, where it is to be hoped that the bracingqualities of the atmosphere made up for the want of congenial society. Susan Malory had been discreetly sent away on a visit. None of the men of the family had arrived. There was a party of local neighbours, who did not feel the want of anything to do, but lived in dread of flushing the Vidame and Matilda out of a window seat whenever they entered a room.
As for the Vidame, being destitute of all other entertainment, he made love in a devoted manner.
But at dinner, after Mrs. Brown-Smith’s arrival, though he sat next Matilda, Mrs. Malory saw that his eyes were mainly bent on the lady opposite. The ping-pong of conversation, even, was played between him and Mrs. Brown-Smith across the table: the county neighbours were quite lost in their endeavours to follow the flight of the ball. Though the drawing-room window, after dinner, was open on the fragrant lawn, though Matilda sat close by it, in her wonted place, the Vidame was hanging over the chair of the visitor, and later, played billiards with her, a game at which Matilda did not excel. At family prayers next morning (the service was conducted by Mrs. Malory) the Vidame appeared with a white rosebud in his buttonhole, Mrs. Brown-Smith wearing its twin sister. He took her to the stream in the park where she fished, Matilda following in a drooping manner. The Vidame was much occupied in extracting the flies from the hair of Mrs. Brown-Smith, in which they were frequently entangled. After luncheon he drove with the two ladies and Mrs. Malory to the country town, the usual resource of ladies in the country, and though he sat next Matilda, Mrs. Brown-Smith wasbeaming opposite, and the pair did most of the talking. While Mrs. Malory and her daughter shopped, it was the Vidame who took Mrs. Brown-Smith to inspect the ruins of the Abbey. The county neighbours had left in the morning, a new set arrived, and while Matilda had to entertain them, it was Mrs Brown-Smith whom the Vidame entertained.
This kind of thing went on; when Matilda was visiting her cottagers it was the Vidame and Mrs. Brown-Smith whom visitors flushed in window seats. They wondered that Mrs. Malory had asked so dangerous a woman to the house: they marvelled that she seemed quite radiant and devoted to her lively visitor. There was a school feast: it was the Vidame who arranged hurdle-races for children of both sexes (so improper!), and who started the competitors.
Meanwhile Mrs. Malory, so unusually genial in public, held frequent conventicles with Matilda in private. But Matilda declined to be jealous; they were only old friends, she said, these flagitious two; Dear Anne (that was the Vidame’s Christian name) was all that she could wish.
‘You know the place issodull, mother,’ the brave girl said. ‘Even grandmamma, who was a saint, says so in herDomestic Outpourings’ (religious memoirs privately printed in 1838). ‘We cannot amuse Mrs. Brown-Smith, and it is so kind and chivalrous of Anne.’
‘To neglect you?’
‘No, to do duty for Tom and Dick,’ who were her brothers, and who would not greatly have entertained the fair visitor had they been present.
Matilda was the kind of woman whom we all adore as represented in the characters of Fielding’s Amelia and Sophia. Such she was, so gracious and yielding, in her overt demeanour, but, alas, poor Matilda’s pillow was often wet with her tears. She was loyal; she would not believe evil: she crushed her natural jealousy ‘as a vice of blood, upon the threshold of the mind.’
Mrs. Brown-Smith was nearly as unhappy as the girl. The more she hated the Vidame—and she detested him more deeply every day—the more her heart bled for Matilda. Mrs. Brown-Smith also had her secret conferences with Mrs. Malory.
‘Nothing will shake her belief in that man,’ said Mrs. Malory.
‘Your daughter is the best girl I ever met,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith. ‘The best tempered, the least suspicious, the most loyal. And I am doing my worst to make her hate me. Oh, I can’t go on!’ Here Mrs. Brown-Smith very greatly surprised her hostess by bursting into tears.
‘You must not desert us now,’ said the elder lady. ‘The better you think of poor Matilda—and sheisa good girl—the more you ought to help her.’
It was the 8th of August, no other visitors were at the house, a shooting party was expected to arrive on the 11th. Mrs. Brown-Smith dried her tears. ‘It must be done,’ she said, ‘though it makes me sick to think of it.’
Next day she met the Vidame in the park, and afterwards held a long conversation with Mrs. Malory.As for the Vidame, he was in feverish high spirits, he devoted himself to Matilda, in fact Mrs. Brown-Smith had insisted on such dissimulation, as absolutely necessary at this juncture of affairs. So Matilda bloomed again, like a rose that had been ‘washed, just washed, in a shower.’ The Vidame went about humming the airs of the country which he had honoured by adopting it as the cradle of his ancestry.
On the morning of the following day, while the Vidame strayed with Matilda in the park, Mrs. Brown-Smith was closeted with Mrs. Malory in her boudoir.
‘Everything is arranged,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith. ‘I, guilty and reckless that I am, have only to sacrifice my character, and all my things. But I am to retain Methven, my maid. That concession I have won from his chivalry.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Mrs. Malory.
‘At seven he will get a telegram summoning him to Paris on urgent business. He will leave in your station brougham in time to catch the 9.50 up train at Wilkington. Or, rather, so impatient is he, he will leave half an hour too early, for fear of accidental delays. I and my maid will accompany him. I have thought honesty the best policy, and told the truth, like Bismarck, “and the same,”’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith hysterically, ‘“with intent to deceive.” I have pointed out to him that my best plan is to pretend to you that I am going to meet my husband, who really arrives at Wilkington from Liverpool by the 9.17, though the Vidame thinks that is an invention of mine. So, yousee, I leave without any secrecy, or fuss, or luggage, and, when my husband comes here, he will find me flown, and will have to console himself with my luggage and jewels. He—this Frenchified beast, I mean—has written a note for your daughter, which he will give to her maid, and, of course, the maid will hand it toyou. So he will have burned his boats. And then you can show it to Matilda, and so,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith, ‘the miracle of opening her eyes will be worked. Johnnie, my husband, and I will be hungry when we return about half-past ten. And I think you had better telegraph that there is whooping cough, or bubonic plague, or something in the house, and put off your shooting party.’
‘But that would be an untruth,’ said Mrs. Malory.
‘And what have I been acting for the last ten days?’ asked Mrs. Brown-Smith, rather tartly. ‘You must settle your excuse with your conscience.’
‘The cook’s mother really is ill,’ said Mrs. Malory, ‘and she wants dreadfully to go and see her. That would do.’
‘All things work together for good. The cook must have a telegram also,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith.
The day, which had been extremely hot, clouded over. By five it was raining: by six there was a deluge. At seven, Matilda and the Vidame were evicted from their dusky window seat by the butler with a damp telegraph envelope. The Vidame opened it, and handed it to Matilda. His presence at Paris was instantly demanded. The Vidame was desolated, but his absence could not be for more than five days. Bradshaw was hunted for, and found: the9.50 train was opportune. The Vidame’s man packed his clothes. Mrs. Brown-Smith was apprised of these occurrences in the drawing-room before dinner.
‘I am very sorry for dear Matilda,’ she cried. ‘But it is an ill wind that blows nobody good. I will drive over with the Vidame and astonish my Johnnie by greeting him at the station. I must run and change my dress.’
She ran, she returned in morning costume, she heard from Mrs. Malory of the summons by telegram calling the cook to her moribund mother. ‘I must send her over to the station in a dog-cart,’ said Mrs. Malory.
‘Oh no,’ cried Mrs. Brown-Smith, with impetuous kindness, ‘not on a night like this; it is a cataclysm. There will be plenty of room for the cook as well as for Methven and me, and the Vidame, in the brougham. Orhecan sit on the box.’
The Vidame really behaved very well. The introduction of the cook, to quote an old novelist, ‘had formed no part of his profligate scheme of pleasure.’ To elope from a hospitable roof, with a married lady, accompanied by her maid, might be an act not without precedent. But that a cook should come to formune partie carrée, on such an occasion, that a lover should be squeezed with three women in a brougham, was a trying novelty.
The Vidame smiled, ‘An artist so excellent,’ he said, ‘deserves a far greater sacrifice.’
So it was arranged. After a tender and solitary five minutes with Matilda, the Vidame stepped, last, into the brougham. The coachman whipped up the horses, Matilda waved her kerchief from the porch,the guilty lovers drove away. Presently Mrs. Malory received, from her daughter’s maid, the letter destined by the Vidame for Matilda. Mrs. Malory locked it up in her despatch box.
The runaways, after a warm and uncomfortable drive of three-quarters of an hour, during which the cook wept bitterly and was very unwell, reached the station. Contrary to the Vidame’s wish, Mrs. Brown-Smith, in an ulster and a veil, insisted on perambulating the platform, buying the whole of Mr. Hall Caine’s works as far as they exist in sixpenny editions. Bells rang, porters stationed themselves in a line, like fielders, a train arrived, the 9.17 from Liverpool, twenty minutes late. A short stout gentleman emerged from a smoking carriage, Mrs. Brown-Smith, starting from the Vidame’s side, raised her veil, and threw her arms round the neck of the traveller.
‘You didn’t expectmeto meet you on such a night, did you, Johnnie?’ she cried with a break in her voice.
‘Awfully glad to see you, Tiny,’ said the short gentleman. ‘On such a night!’
After thus unconsciously quoting theMerchant of Venice, Mr. Brown-Smith turned to his valet. ‘Don’t forget the fishing-rods,’ he said.
‘I took the opportunity of driving over with a gentleman from Upwold,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith. ‘Let me introduce him. Methven,’ to her maid, ‘where is the Vidame de la Lain?’
‘I heard him say that he must help Mrs. Andrews, the cook, to find a seat, Ma’am,’ said the maid.
‘He reallyiskind,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith, ‘but I fear we can’t wait to say good-bye to him.’
Three-quarters of an hour later, Mr. Brown-Smith and his wife were at supper at Upwold.
Next day, as the cook’s departure had postponed the shooting party, they took leave of their hostess, and returned to their moors in Perthshire.
Weeks passed, with no message from the Vidame. He did not answer a letter which Mrs. Malory allowed Matilda to write. The mother never showed to the girl the note which he had left with her maid. The absence and the silence of the lover were enough. Matilda never knew that among the four packed in the brougham on that night of rain, one had been eloping with a married lady—who returned to supper.
The papers were ‘requested to state that the marriage announced between the Vidame de la Lain and Miss Malory will not take place.’ Why it did not take place was known only to Mrs. Malory, Mrs. Brown-Smith, and Merton.
Matilda thought that her lover had been kidnapped and arrested, by the Secret Police of France, for his part in a scheme to restore the Royal House, the White Flag, the Lilies, the children of St. Louis. At Mrs. Brown-Smith’s place in Perthshire, in the following autumn, Matilda met Sir Aylmer Jardine. Then she knew that what she had taken for love (in the previous year) had been,
‘Not love, but love’s first flush in youth.’
‘Not love, but love’s first flush in youth.’
They always do make that discovery, bless them! Lady Jardine is now wrapped up in her baby boy. The mother of the cook recovered her health.
‘Mr. Frederick Warren’—so Merton read the card presented to him on a salver of Limoges enamel by the office-boy.
‘Show the gentleman in.’
Mr. Warren entered. He was a tall and portly person, with a red face, red whiskers, and a tightly buttoned frock-coat, which more expressed than hid his goodly and prominent proportions. He bowed, and Merton invited him to be seated. It struck Merton as a singular circumstance that his visitor wore on each arm the crimson badge of the newly vaccinated.
Mr. Warren sat down, and, taking a red silk handkerchief out of the crown of his hat, he wiped his countenance. The day was torrid, and Mr. Merton hospitably offered an effervescent draught.
‘Without the whisky, if you please, sir,’ said Mr. Warren, in a provincial accent. He pointed to a blue ribbon in the buttonhole of his coat, indicating that he was conscientiously opposed to the use of alcoholic refreshment in all its forms.
‘Two glasses of Apollinaris water,’ said Merton to the office-boy; and the innocent fluid was brought,while Merton silently admired his client’s arrangement in blue and crimson. When the thirst of that gentleman had been assuaged, he entered upon business thus:
‘Sir, I am a man of principle!’
Merton congratulated him; the age was lax, he said, and principle was needed. He wondered internally what he was going to be asked to subscribe to, or whether his vote only was required.
‘Sir, have you been vaccinated?’ asked the client earnestly.
‘Really,’ said Merton, ‘I do not quite understand your interest in a matter so purely personal.’
‘Personal, sir? Not at all. It is the first of public duties—the debt that every man, woman, and child owes to his or her country. Have you been vaccinated, sir?’
‘Why, if you insist on knowing,’ said Merton, ‘I have, though I do not see—’
‘Recently?’ asked the visitor.
‘Yes, last month; but I cannot conjecture why—’
‘Enough, sir,’ said Mr. Warren. ‘I am a man of principle. Had you not done your duty in this matter by your country, I should have been compelled to seek some other practitioner in your line.’
‘I was not aware that my firm had any competitors in our line of business,’ said Merton. ‘But perhaps you have come here under some misapprehension. There is a firm of family solicitors on the floor above, and next them are the offices of a company interested in a patent explosive. If your affairs, or your politicalideas, demand a legal opinion, or an outlet in an explosive which is widely recommended by the Continental Press—’
‘For what do you take me, sir?’ asked Mr. Warren.
‘For a Temperance Anarchist,’ Merton would have liked to reply, ‘judging by your colours’; but he repressed this retort, and mildly answered, ‘Perhaps it would be as much to the purpose to ask, for what do you takeme?’
‘For the representative of Messrs. Gray & Graham, the specialists in matrimonial affairs,’ answered the client; and Merton said that he would be happy if Mr. Warren would enter into the details of his business.
‘I am the ex-Mayor of Bulcester,’ said Mr. Warren, ‘and, as I told you, a man of principle. My attachment to the Temperance cause’—and he fingered his blue ribbon—‘procured for me the honour of a defeat at the last general election, but endeared me to the consciences of the Nonconformist element in the constituency. Yet, sir, I am at this moment the most unpopular man in Bulcester; but I shall fight it out—I shall fight it to my latest breath.’
‘Is Bulcester, then, such an intemperate constituency? I had understood that the Nonconformist interest was strong there,’ said Merton.
‘So it is, sir, so it is; but the interest is now bound to the chariot wheels of the truckling Toryism of our time—to the sycophants who basely made vaccination permissive, and paltered with the Conscientious Objector. These badges, sir’—the client pointed to his own crimson decorations—‘proclaim that I have been vaccinated onbotharms, as a testimonyto the immortal though, in Bulcester, maligned discovery of the great Jenner. Sir, I am hooted in the public streets of my native town, where Anti-vaccinationism is a frenzy. Mr. Rider Haggard, the author ofDr. Therne, has been burned in effigy for his thrilling and manly protest to which I owe my own conversion.’
‘Then the conversion is relatively recent?’ asked Merton.
‘It dates since my reading of that powerful argument, sir; that appeal to reason which overcame my prejudice, for I was a prominent A. V.’
‘Ave?’ asked Merton.
‘A. V., sir—Anti-Vaccinationist. A. C. D. A. too, and always,’ he added proudly; but Merton did not think it prudent to ask for further explanations.
‘An A. V. I was, an A. V. I am no longer; and I defy popular clamour, accompanied by brickbats, to shake my principles.’
‘Justum et tinacem propositi virum,’ murmured Merton, adding, ‘All that is very interesting, but, my dear sir, while I admire the tenacity of your principles, will you permit me to ask, what has vaccination to do with the special business of our firm?’
‘Why, sir, I have a family, and my eldest son—’
‘Does he decline to be vaccinated?’ asked Merton, in a sympathetic voice.
‘No, sir, or he would never darken my doorway,’ exclaimed this more than Roman father. ‘But he is engaged, and I can never give my consent; and if he marries that girl, the firm ceases to be “Warren & Son, wax-cloth manufacturers.” That’s all, sir—that’s all.’
Mr. Warren again applied his red handkerchief to his glowing features.
‘And what, may I ask, are the grounds of your objection to this engagement? Social inequality?’ asked Merton.
‘No, the young lady is the daughter of one of our leading ministers, Mr. Truman—author ofThe Bishops to the Block—but principles are concerned.’
‘You cannot mean that the young lady is excessively addicted to the—wine cup?’ asked Merton gravely. ‘In melancholy cases of that kind Mr. Hall Caine, in a romance, has recommended hypnotic treatment, but we do not venture to interfere.’
‘You misunderstand me, sir,’ replied Mr. Warren, frowning. ‘The young woman, on principle, as they call it, has never been vaccinated. Like most of our prominent citizens, her father (otherwise an excellent man) objects to what he calls “The Worship of the Calf” on grounds of conscience.’
‘Conscience! It is a hard thing to constrain the conscience,’ murmured Merton, quoting a remark of Queen Mary to John Knox.
‘What is conscience without knowledge, sir?’ asked the client, using—without knowing it—the very argument of Mr. Knox to the Queen.
‘You have no other objections to the alliance?’ asked Merton.
‘None whatever, sir. She is a good and good-looking girl. On most important points we are thoroughly agreed. She won a prize essay on Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Of course Shakespeare could not have written them—a thoroughly uneducatedman, who never could have passed the fourth standard. But look at the plays! There are things in them that, with all our modern advantages, are beyond me. I admit they are beyond me. “To be, and to do, and to suffer,”’ declaimed Mr. Warren, apparently under the impression that this is part of Hamlet’s soliloquy—‘Shakespeare could never have writtenthat. Where didhelearn grammar?’
‘Where, indeed?’ replied Merton. ‘But as the lady is in all other respects so suitable a match, cannot this one difficulty be got over?’
‘Impossible, sir; my son could not slice the sleeve in her dress and inflict this priceless boon on her with affectionate violence. Even the hero ofDr. Thernefailed there—’
‘And rather irritated his pretty Jane,’ added Merton, who remembered this heroic adventure. ‘It is a very hard case,’ he went on, ‘but I fear that our methods are powerless. The only chance would be to divert young Mr. Warren’s affections into some other more enlightened channel. That expedient has often been found efficacious. Is he very deeply enamoured? Would not the society of another pretty and intelligent girl perhaps work wonders?’
‘Perhaps it might, sir, but I don’t know where to find any one that would attract my James. Except for political meetings, and a literary lecture or two, with a magic-lantern and a piano, we have not much social relaxation at Bulcester. We object to promiscuous dancing, on grounds of conscience. Also, of course, to the stage.’
‘Ah, so youdoallow for the claims of conscience, do you?’
‘For what do you take me, sir? Only, of course the conscience must be enlightened,’ said Mr. Warren, as other earnest people usually do.
‘Certainly, certainly,’ said Merton; ‘nothing so dangerous as the unenlightened conscience. Why, in this very matter of marriage the conscience of the Mormons leads them to singular aberrations, while that of the Arunta tribe—but I should only pain you if I pursued the subject. You said that your Society indulged in literary lectures: is your programme for the season filled up?’
‘I am President of the Bulcester Literary Society,’ said Mr. Warren, ‘and I ought to know. We have a vacancy for Friday week; but why do you inquire? In fact I want a lecturer on “The Use and Abuse of Novels,” now you ask. Our people, somehow, always want their literary lectures to be about novels. I try to make the lecturers take a lofty moral tone, and usually entertain them at my house, where I probe their ideas, and warn them that we must have nothing loose. Once, sir, we had a lecturer on “The Oldest Novel in the World.” He gave us a terrible shock, sir! I never saw so many red cheeks in a Bulcester audience. And the man seemed quite unaware of the effect he was producing.’
‘Short-sighted, perhaps?’ said Merton.
‘Ever since we have been very careful. But, sir, we seem to have got away from the subject.’
‘It is only seeming,’ said Merton. ‘I have an idea which may be of service to you.’
‘Thank you, most kindly,’ said Mr. Warren. ‘But as how?’
‘Does your Society ever employ lady lecturers?’