Mr. Usher the elder had settled down in Ayresford a few months after the death of Sylvester's mother. At first he had taken a small cottage, then a semi-detached villa. Finally, he had transferred his household gods to a comfortable little house standing in its own grounds not far from Woodlands. He was not beloved in Ayresford on account of his habit of telling dull stories of uninteresting incidents in his past career; but as he went to church regularly and did no particular harm to anybody, he was accepted as a member of the humdrum society of the somnolent little town. No one knew much of his antecedents. He had been something in Australia and now lived on his means. That he had chummed with Mr. Lanyon,—a fact which he proclaimed so unceasingly that people grew nervous with teasing anticipation whenever Australia was mentioned in his presence,—was a sufficient guarantee of his respectability. Then Roderick came on flying visits and with his brilliant ways acquired popularity. Later, when he produced plays, painted pictures for the Academy, and wrote novels, Ayresford was quite proud of him. The father gained a vicarious reputation. They wanted to make him people's church-warden. But here Matthew Lanyon intervened.
“I'm not a church-goer myself,” said he, “but I'm hanged if I'll let you make a mockery of the whole thing.”
Whereupon Usher replied that it was a pity for lifelong friends to quarrel over such a trifle, and wrote a letter to decline the church-wardenship. But he put a little black mark and some hieroglyphics, with the date, in a little black book, half filled with similar inscriptions, which he kept locked up in his safe. This was some years before Sylvester had left for London, and the black marks had gone on increasing. Ebenezer Usher was a methodical man.
He was very proud of his house, which was tastefully furnished and contained a choice collection of old china, of which he was a connoisseur. Ayresford naturally put him down as a man of substance, and though he entertained as little as decency allowed, he avoided the reputation of a miser. His elegant leisure was passed in collecting the china above mentioned, postage-stamps, and book plates, and in speculating through outside brokers.
One morning in June he sat at his table, by the open window, through which came all the scents of the lawn, immersed in his morning's work of sorting book plates. He had them before him in cardboard boxes neatly labelled on the back. They were divided into their several countries, subdivided into noble families and commoners, further divided into “Armorial,” “Artistic-Armorial,” and “Fanciful,” and they were all arranged according to date. A manuscript catalogue by his side gave the reference to case and position. A pile of loose plates, unmounted, lay immediately in front of him, through which he was going one by one. If the plate happened to be new, he put it aside for mounting. If it was a duplicate, he fished out his original from its case and subjected the two to anxious scrutiny through a magnifying-glass, to decide which was the better impression. Of the subject he had profound knowledge, and he had a sincere appreciation of beauty of workmanship. At such times as this he was the most harmless of old gentlemen, dignifying the evening of his days with a learned pastime.
He was leaning back in his chair, lovingly scrutinising the almost fragile tenderness of an exquisite Bewick, when a servant brought in two letters that had come by the second post. He bade her put them on the table, and there they lay for some time while he continued the inspection of his Bewick. At last he laid it down with a sigh and opened the first letter. It ran:—
Dear Sir,—We regret to inform you that the Great Elephantstock has fallen to 3 1/8. Kindly wire advice as to cover.We have every confidence in the stock and its ultimaterecovery.Yours faithfully,Peter Vavasour & Co.
Mr. Usher groaned and threw the letter away from him. He felt a most ill-used man. The ingratitude of the world after a laborious lifetime spent in its service pained him exceedingly. The sight of Roderick's handwriting on the other envelope by no means brought him comfort. Roderick's letters were rare, but unpleasantly to the point. He unfolded it with distrustful resignation. But when his glance had taken in its contents, his expression changed. He took off his gold spectacles, breathed on them, and wiped them with his handkerchief, and putting them on again, beamed at his son's letter:—
Revered Parent,—I'm going to marry Ella Defries. Can't getshekels without Lanyon's consent to union. A silly willgives him the hold. Am writing now for his blessing. Betterlet me overhaul the draft of your letter of paternal welcometo her, as I know your effusive little habits.Yours,Roderick.
“Ah, the flippant ways of youth,” said he, with an indulgent smile.
The bucket-shop shark's application for cover came to him now through the rosy cloud of his content. What did a few hundreds matter when his only son was putting himself into a position to relieve from want his aged father's declining years? He almost caressed Mr. Vavasour's letter as he folded it up carefully and placed it with Roderick's in the breast-pocket of his old frock-coat. He felt kindly disposed towards all mankind, and prepared with a benevolent air to go forth and visit his friend, Matthew Lanyon. He cleared his table of the book plates, scrupulously putting each in its proper case, and then rang the bell.
“My hat, Olivia. And my stick. No. The sun is warm. It is very hot. I shall take the green umbrella.”
The elderly servant brought him these articles. He put on the Panama straw hat with his accustomed deliberation, while Olivia held the umbrella. Then he took the latter in his hand, and went out with his slow old man's tread.
On his way through the wide straggling main street of Ayresford, he paused, according to long custom, to look into the window of a little poverty-stricken bric-à-brac shop, garnished with a few rusty old pistols, bits of china, and worm-eaten books. To-day was displayed a couple of leaves torn from an old postage-stamp album. The eye of the collector at once fixed itself on a Canada, green and unused. He hurried into the shop.
“Good-morning, Mrs. Driscoll; it is a very hot day.”
A dejected old woman rose from a stool by the counter.
“The Lord sends it, Mr. Usher. We must abide by His mercies.”
“We must indeed,” replied Usher, wagging his head.
“I thought I would come in and help you, Mrs. Driscoll, by making a little purchase.”
“You 're very kind, sir,” said the old woman, mournfully.
“What might you be asking for these two sheets of postage stamps?”
“Ten shillings, I was told, sir.”
Usher lifted up his hands pityingly and smiled.
“My dear Mrs. Driscoll, they are not worth half a crown. But I will be generous. It is one's duty to be generous to the poor and needy. I will give you five shillings.”
“Very well, sir,” said the old woman. The bargain was concluded, and Mr. Usher went out a very happy man. For a green, unused 7 1/2d. Canada postage stamp, as all philatelists know, will fetch some eight or nine pounds, if judiciously put on the market, and Mr. Usher had a beautiful specimen already in his collection. Fortune was really smiling on him this morning.
He reached Matthew Lanyon's office in a seraphic temper, which a quarter of an hour's wait did not ruffle. When Mr. Lanyon's client had departed, he was shown into the office, where Matthew was seated at his desk.
“I thought you would come,” said Matthew, without further greeting. “Sit down.”
“You are not looking at all well, my dear friend,” said Usher. “You should really take care of yourself. I always say it is wrong for a man to let his business affairs get the upper hand with him.”
It was true. Matthew had been ailing considerably of late, and his doctor had urged him to do a number of impossible things,—to go for a sea voyage, to reduce his practice, to take a partner. He was killing himself. He must stop, or human science wouldn't answer for the consequences.
“Human science can wait till she's asked,” the old man had replied with a certain humour. The past year had aged him considerably. His hair was greyer, his figure slightly bent, his face and hands thinner, his brow more care worn. Characteristically he had told Sylvester of none of his ailments, and during the weekends Sylvester had spent at Woodlands, he had made special efforts to appear bright and strong. When Sylvester, anxiously informed by his aunt, questioned him, he had laughed in his cheery way, but with a touch of petulance, and asked how he, a man of science, could attribute any importance to Agatha's silly whimsies.
He was not the man to be fond of pity, even from those dearest to him;a fortiori, he found Usher's sympathy particularly obnoxious.
“I'm exceedingly well,” he said somewhat irritably. “Better than I have been for months.”
“Perhaps the pleasant news has cheered you,” said Usher. “There is nothing like the happiness of others to make the heart young again. I am always rejoiced at the happiness of others. It is my nature.”
He said it with such an air of dull simplicity, uttering each vocable with weighty deliberation, that a smile flickered around Matthew's lips. “I really think you believe it.”
“I never disguise my sentiments. Falsehood is abhorrent to me.”
“Rubbish!” said Matthew, curtly. “I'm busy. I can only give you ten minutes. What have you come for?”
“To share your happiness in the engagement of our dear children,—my son, your ward.”
“I am not pleased at all. Even you ought to know that.”
“Not pleased?”
“No. A marriage like that is an impossibility.”
Usher opened his eyes in reproachful astonishment.
“Why?”
“How can I let my ward marry a man like Roderick?”
“My son is a fine fellow,” said Usher.
“He 's an infernal scamp,” said Matthew, “and you know.”
“He has been a little wild, I allow,” said Usher, indulgently. “But all young men sow their wild oats. Even you, Matthew, have committed indiscretions—”
“And I've paid for them a million times over,” said Matthew. “My God! I have paid the uttermost farthing.”
He passed his hand with a quick movement across his face, as if to wipe out a sudden contortion of features.
“We needn't discuss the matter,” he said in business tones. “I shall not give my consent.”
“I don't understand why it is necessary,” said Usher.
Matthew put him briefly into possession of the facts that Sylvester had disclosed to Roderick.
“They will marry without your consent,” said Usher. Matthew laughed.
“It takes two to make a marriage, Usher.” Usher looked at him dully and sighed. “I did not expect this ungenerosity from you, Matthew. Remember I am a father. I have always been a most affectionate father. My affection has always stood in my way. I plead for my poor son.”
“Your poor son! Why, I've supported him in comfort all his life. He earns a decent living himself, and twice I have saved him from gaol. By George, sir, he would have got there—and richly deserved it. If you think I'm going to give my consent to Ella marrying that confounded attitudinising swindler, you take me for a greater rascal than yourself.” Matthew got up and walked about the room.
He was not a man who easily lost his temper, but the idea of this marriage infuriated him. Usher lifted a deprecating hand.
“Perhaps it can be arranged,” said he.
“No, it can't. So you can go.”
“We will withdraw our claim for five thousand pounds.”
“Where do you suppose I'm to find five thousand pounds?”
“You can do what you like with Miss Defries's money, Matthew.”
Matthew stopped in his walk, and his face grew livid. He pointed to the door.
“Go out,” he said in a trembling voice, “or I'll have you turned out.”
Usher rose to his feet and shuffled towards the door.
“Then poor Sylvester shall know what were the parents in whom he trusted.”
“Let him know and be damned to you!” said Matthew.
He flung open the door into the outer office, and stood rigid and white with anger, as Usher passed out. Then, when he was alone, he put his hand to his heart, and staggering to an old couch threw himself down half fainting among the papers with which it was piled.
A clerk, coming in a few moments later to announce a client, found him white and gasping. But he insisted to the frightened youth on his being well again, drank a glass of water, and with a sheer effort of will, dragged himself to his feet and concentrated his faculties.
“Show Sir Trevor in,” said he.
But the sudden attack rendered him weak and anxious for the rest of the day. He had never fainted like that before. It must have been the heat and the fury he had flown into with Usher. When he went home to lunch Miss Lanyon was alarmed at his appearance.
“Perhaps I'm a little bilious. It is the heat. It's nothing,” he said obstinately.
Miss Lanyon looked at him sadly out of her faded blue eyes. If Dorothy, herself, or any of the household showed signs of poorliness, he would worry himself to death about it, get the doctors in, ransack the town for delicacies, and send special messengers from the office during the day to make inquiries. But where he himself was concerned, he was impatient of interference. Miss Lanyon shook her head. Men were insoluble enigmas.
In the afternoon he went round the garden with his little granddaughter, submitting to be decorated with whatever flowers her childish fancy selected. He wore carnations round the ribbon of his hat, a Maréchal Niel rose in the lapel of his coat, and pansies stuck down his waistcoat, and he stalked on, gravely holding the child's hand and chatting with her on terms of comradeship. As they passed by the strawberry beds in the kitchen garden, Dorothy pointed to some ragamuffin children pressing their faces against the iron gate.
“Dirty little boys,” she announced fastidiously.
“What would you sooner give them,—soap or strawberries?” asked the old man.
Dorothy reflected a moment.
“Soap is nasty,” she said.
“Well, we'll give them some strawberries. Open the gate and call them.”
She ran to the gate and gave the invitation. The children came in shyly, their mouths watering.
“Show them how to pick,” said Matthew.
She bent down and picked and gave a berry to each of the children. The old man walked away. Presently Dorothy came running after him. Why had he gone off?
“They'll eat more if I'm not there,” said he. “But why don't you stay?”
“One of them ate a slug,” replied Dorothy, in disgusted dignity.
The old man threw himself down on a garden seat and laughed. Dorothy clambered on to his knees.
“Tell me about the kangaroos,” she commanded. So for the next hour he entertained her with stories of kangaroos and monkeys and crocodiles and the strange beasts of far lands. Then Miss Lanyon came upon them, in search of Dorothy.
“There are some horrid little boys stealing the strawberries,” she said.
“What! are they there still? They began an hour ago. I gave them leave.”
“And they have been picking some of the green peaches that were coming on so nicely.”
“They'll enjoy them green better than we shall enjoy them ripe,” said Matthew. “So let them be.”
“I sha'n't. They'll be ill,” said Miss Lanyon, with spirit.
The old man went off to distribute halfpence among the children as a sort of compensation for loss of stomach aches, and his sister carried off Dorothy.
“Dorothy,” she said on the way, “your grandfather is a saint.”
“You said he was the worry of your life to-day,” said Dorothy.
“Because he's too good, dear. We're none of us good enough for him,” said Miss Lanyon.
Matthew returned to the seat and slowly divested himself of his flowers, giving himself up for the moment to the peaceful charm of the afternoon hour. The place was dear to him. It was more or less the creation of his life. It was a small house in a little garden when he had brought his wife to Ayresford. And he had added on to both, bit by bit, building a wing, buying a few adjacent acres, until it had come to be a large property perfectly laid out.
The house stood mellow and homelike in the soft sunshine, with ivy and clematis clustering on walls and around windows. The lawn, smooth and well trimmed, stretched into the dimness of a little wilderness marked by shrubs. The sycamores on the other side of the house waved their tops above the roof. He remembered when they were planted. She planted them. What a number of years ago! And there in the old part of the house was her window. The clematis had always been there. He remembered how it used to brush her cheek as she leaned out to call to him. It was just such an afternoon as this that her delicate face, like a pink shell, flushed with excitement, had appeared and she had summoned him nearer.
“Mat, Baby has cut a tooth.”
My God! He could hear her voice now; almost wondered whether she had not withdrawn within, and whether the five and thirty years had not been a vague dream, and he himself was not young and vigorous and defiant of fate. But the quick memories of the day rushed back upon him and obscured the dearer vision.
The marriage was impossible. His heart yearned towards the girl whom he loved with an old man's tender affection. How could he allow her to marry a man whom he knew, from heredity, from actual facts that had come miserably within his own knowledge, to be an unprincipled adventurer? The misery of it was that his lips were sealed. He could not tell her of Roderick's real character. To do that would be to break virtually the promise he had kept for over thirty years.
“Whatever I do for my own son, I shall do for yours.”
He could no more blacken Roderick's reputation than he could Sylvester's. Perhaps the marriage would redeem him. Yet to stake the life's happiness of a human soul that was dear to him upon the chance of another's redemption was too great a responsibility. Why had she engaged herself to this man? It was not through love. He drew from his pocket the letter he had received from her that morning and read it through. It was constrained, artificial. The tone jarred upon their intimacy. Perhaps Ella had changed, grown worldly and cynical, lost her love for him. Or was it only the letter of a girl at war with her own heart? He had seen many such battles in his time.
“At any rate, I withhold my consent,” he said decisively.
Yet Usher's threat agitated him more than he dared confess. He had never defied him before on that point. For a moment he was racked with a spasm of fear lest Sylvester should know the secret of his relations with Usher. The fear had grown with the years into the roots of his life, had become an unreasoning terror. To save his son the knowledge, he had been killing himself by inches with work and worry.
Suddenly he rose, shook himself as if impatient of the clinging doubts, and walked briskly across the lawn. Usher daren't do it, for his own sake.
Usher turned the corner of the house and met him by the door. Matthew frowned and regarded him angrily.
“I told you to go and be damned to you,” he said.
“You made use of improper language, Matthew. You lost your temper. I never lose my temper. I am a most peaceful man. And I forgive. It is a Christian virtue. I thought you might change your mind on reflection.”
“I haven't changed my mind,” said Matthew.
Usher took an envelope from his pocket, withdrew a letter, and handed it to Matthew.
“Would you like me to send that to Sylvester?”
Matthew glanced through it; his fingers trembled in spite of his will. But he tore the paper across and across and put the fragments into his jacket-pocket.
“You would not be such a fool as to kill the goose with the golden eggs,” he said.
“I thought you would do that,” said Usher, drawing another paper from his pocket; “but I have prepared a duplicate. I have always been a man of foresight. It is my firm intention to post this to Sylvester unless you give me your written consent to the marriage. I do not want money, Matthew. I have earned enough to keep me in comfort for the rest of my old age, and your promise to help my poor boy was based on no conditions. All the country says you are an upright man, Matthew. When I mentioned the five thousand pounds to-day, I was forgetting your scrupulous honour. I apologise. I always apologise when I am wrong. I am a just man.”
All through this harangue Matthew's stern gaze had never left the puffy, white-bearded, common face. And he saw, not for the first time, beneath the old man's dull and red-rimmed eyes, a hard gleam of hate. But for the first time he realised that even to such a man there might be something dearer even than money, and the chill fear fastened round his heart. He made an impatient movement across the threshold of the open door.
“Come into the library,” he said. “It is an insult to God's sweet air to discuss such things here.”
Usher followed him indoors. Some time later Miss Lanyon came down, having changed her dress for dinner, and leaned against the jamb of the creeper-covered porch and drank in the softness of the summer evening with the country-bred gentlewoman's vague mingling of happiness and regret. She had heard of the engagement. It had made her sad. Why had it not been Sylvester instead of Roderick? She sighed over the grave of her old maid's vicarious romance. A footstep behind her caused her to turn. It was Mr. Usher, buttoning his old frock-coat. His face showed grave benevolence.
“A father lives in his children,” he said, after receiving her reluctant congratulations. “I live in my son.”
The dinner-bell rang.
“I must go,” he continued. “I came to see my old friend on business. He is so good. His time is always at the disposal of his friends.”
“I told Dorothy this evening that he was a saint,” she said.
Usher squeezed her hand impressively.
“He is indeed, Miss Lanyon. He is indeed.”
But Matthew sat in his library chair staring in front of him in agony of spirit. He had yielded. The trace of the writing was there on the fresh blotting-paper before him. The strong man writhed under the humiliation of defeat. The proud, sensitive gentleman was tortured in his Nessus shirt of dishonour. And it comforted him not that it was for his son's sake. He felt as if he had ransomed him at the price of Ella's deliverance to the Minotaur.
Loss of faith in all through the faithlessness of one is a common and a tragic phenomenon. It is vain for the robust-minded to prove the illogic of the conclusion, which is one arrived at more from the emotional than the logical faculties of the brain. The phenomenon occurs only in men of a certain temperament. They are endowed with powers of intense individual passion, but lack that universality of sympathy which makes for breadth of judgment. To narrow the proposition to a particular case, they take one woman, not after long and patient deliberation,—that is the supreme pity of it,—but haphazard, on the impulse of a great emotion, and glorify her as the queen of all women. She becomes inevitably the test of a sex. The poor human touchstone fails, and a whole sex is condemned. To the commoner sort this loss of faith matters little, for the nobility of a great faith was never in them; they cultivate an easy-going cynicism, and that is all. But the men whose lives are broken, who feel within them the horrible weight of a dead ideal, are of nobler mould, and therein lies the piteousness of the tragedy.
Sylvester walked slowly homewards from his partner's house in St. John's Wood, where he had been dining. For Dr. Frodsham, who had ample means and a large family, had taken the opportunity of moving from the house in Weymouth Street into the purer air of the N. W. district, on Sylvester's entrance into partnership, and only retained a consulting-room, where he attended at certain hours. The sense of his loss hung heavy upon Sylvester. He had left a home that glowed with a happiness for ever beyond his reach. He had seen love, trust, sympathy, reflected from face to face of husband and wife. The house was glad with the laughter of youth. The somewhat intellectual atmosphere was softened by an indescribable tenderness of human relation. Faith in themselves as men and women, in humanity in general, gave a largeness to their social intercourse. And he had sat there recognising, wondering; envying, until the door had closed behind him and he was left to his loneliness on the silent pavement.
A boy and girl of the lower class passed slowly by, she with her head on his shoulder, he with his arm round her waist. They were saying nothing, probably were maintaining a half-hour's silence, but they were undeniably happy, and, for the moment, Sylvester envied them. Vulgar as may have been their affection, they, like the Frodshams, possessed that which he had lost for ever,—faith. And faith meant love and love meant life. He had seldom felt so keenly the abomination of his desolation, and the craving for a woman's touch grew to a pang like hunger. And yet his whole nature rejected the idea of fulfilment. He shuddered as he walked, and strove to turn his thoughts into another channel. But the elemental dominates a man's will. Unconsciously he returned to the subject. Ella had been much in his mind since Roderick's announcement. Her yielding to such a lover had strengthened his conviction of the contemptibility of a woman's nature. Cynically he congratulated himself on his escape. He set down nothing in extenuation. He only saw, on the one side, a woman of apparent refinement whom he had once thought worthy of being his wife, on the other side a blatant, sensual, mercenary cad. The refined woman had thrown herself into the cad's arms. What was the need of looking further? Any woman would have done the same. The so-called virtuous were merely the untempted. The kindly matron at whose table he had been dining had only maintained her position by a series of lucky accidents. And what living soul could tell whether she had been true to Frodsham? But he envied Frodsham his unclouded faith and the happiness that love brought to his hearth.
Thus Sylvester walked homewards, his thoughts revolving in a vicious circle. At Baker Street Station he passed through a crowd that was gathering around two fringed and feathered coster-girls shrieking and biting and cursing in a policeman's grip. They were too much for one man, for your coster-girl in drink is a she-devil, and possessed of extraordinary activities. One escaped, and as her companion was struggling with the constable, she rushed at his face with a gigantic hat-pin held dagger-wise.
In an instant Sylvester had dropped his light coat and had seized the fury by the arms from behind. And there he held her pinioned. She kicked, she butted, she poured out torrents of filth, she struggled, she tried to lie down, to the great excitement of the crowd, who, out of respect for the hat-pin, kept at a reasonable distance off, and expected to see a battle royal in which the slight man in evening dress would get the worst of it. But they were not prepared for such an exhibition of sheer strength on the part of the slight man. He stood like a figure of bronze, holding the foul and frenzied Amazon almost at arm's length, lifting her like a child when she tried to fall, forcing her down when she tried to leap into the air. The tussle, as far as Sylvester was concerned, did not last long; for two policemen, forcing their way through the throng, speedily relieved him of his charge and the lady of the hat-pin. Whereupon Sylvester, cheered by the crowd, coolly took his overcoat from a man who was holding it, and walked away down Baker Street.
The incident, although not tending to raise the Eternal Feminine in his esteem, broke the train of his morbid imaginings. He glowed with the sense of victory and chuckled quietly to himself. The successful application of one's own brute force brings exultation to the primitive savage in a man.
“I'm not in such bad training, after all,” he said to himself pleasantly.
So he sprang up the steps of the house in Weymouth Street in a much healthier frame of mind than that in which he had descended them some hours before. The sudden stirring of the blood had done him good.
“Mr. Lanyon is here, sir,” said a servant, meeting him in the hall. “He said he would wait until you came home.”
Sylvester disregarded the letters lying on the hall table, and ran upstairs to the drawing-room, where somewhat breathlessly he expressed his delight and wonder at seeing his father. But he was struck almost immediately with dismay at the look of illness on the old man's face.
“You have no business to be here,” he exclaimed. “You ought to be in bed. For God's sake, father, what is wrong with you?” He looked at him keenly. “It is the heart, isn't it?”
“Yes, that and other things,” Matthew admitted; “I have been a bit seedy lately. But I'll look after myself; don't fret. And I didn't come here to talk about my inside. I had to come up to town on business, so I thought I'd look in instead of writing. I haven't been waiting long. You see, your man has made me quite comfortable.”
He pointed to a tray by his side with whisky, soda, and glasses, and a box of cigars. Sylvester poured himself out a drink and bit off the end of a cigar.
“What's gone wrong?” he asked, striking a match.
“This confounded marriage of Ella's.”
“I wouldn't worry about it, father, if I were you. They are just worth one another. She has proved she's on his level by accepting him.”
“Not at all, not at all,” said the old man. “That shows you know nothing of women. It is one of the most astounding facts about an astounding sex, that women of absolute refinement will throw themselves away upon the most obvious cad, be utterly blind to his coarseness, if once he gets a hold upon them. It's a kind of helpless infatuation. It doesn't at all argue the degeneration of the woman.”
“Well, you can withhold your consent, and in the mean time try to open her eyes.”
“I have already given my consent, and there are reasons why I can't open her eyes,” said Matthew, rather slowly, looking at his finger tips.
Sylvester swung a straight-backed chair from its place and sat down near his father.
“Then you are not going to interfere at all? Don't you think that the best thing you can do? Let them work out their own salvation or damnation, as the case may be.”
“I love Ella as my own daughter, Syl, and I would save her if I could.”
“Then I don't understand,” said Sylvester. “Forgive my being impertinent, Syl, but this is a serious matter. Weren't you fond of Ella yourself, some time ago?”
The eyes of father and son met, and the eyes of each were very keen.
“I would rather not answer the question,” said Sylvester.
“You needn't,” replied Matthew, taking a sip of his whisky and soda.
There was a short silence. Sylvester smoked on, his glance fixed on his father's face, his mind more concerned with the traces of illness and suffering that he read there than with the subject under discussion.
“Syl,” said the old man, at last, looking at his son, “we are neither of us sentimental people.”
“I suppose we're not,” assented Sylvester, with a short laugh.
“Good. So what I want to say to you is serious. You have been a good son to me. I've tried to do my duty by you. But I've never asked you to do a thing for my sake during the whole course of your life. Do you think I should be justified in starting now?”
“It stands to reason,” said Sylvester.
Matthew rose from his chair and put his hand on his son's shoulder. With all the tenderness of his heart, he was a man singularly little given to outward demonstrations of affection.
“Then do everything in your power,” said he, “to stop this marriage. For my sake.” He turned and walked away. “I can do nothing,” he added.
“Very well,” replied Sylvester, quietly; “I'll stop it.”
“Don't undertake too much. I only asked you to try.”
“I've said I'll stop it, and I will. Even if it comes to—”
“What?”
“To marrying her myself,” said Sylvester, grimly.
Matthew sat down again, and then passed one of the long silences, so common between these two, who seemed to understand each other better when no words were spoken. Each man kept his own life's secrets hidden in his heart, would have gone through torture rather than reveal them to the other, or indeed to any human being, and yet each was dearer to the other than any being on earth. Speech, then, on intimate matters was dragged reluctantly and painfully from their souls, which preferred to hold a silent and mysterious communion. Even what he had said to Sylvester this evening seemed to Matthew an indecency, an exposure of an integral part of himself that the proud man kept hidden under a usually inscrutable veil of reserve. It was characteristic of both that the subject received no further allusion.
“I must think about turning in,” said Matthew at last.
“I'll go and see if they've made things comfortable for you,” said Sylvester.
“But, bless you, man, I'm not billeting myself on you and turning your house upside down. I'm putting up at the Charing Cross Hotel.”
“You'd better stay here for two or three days and let me doctor you a bit,” said Sylvester.
But the old man pooh-pooh'd the idea. He did not want doctoring. He had had some worrying intricate business lately. These confounded landed proprietors,—they got their affairs into the most disastrous muddles, and when once they had put them into a lawyer's hands thought themselves relieved of all responsibilities and gaily went off to borrow more money. God may have made man in his own image, but he certainly forgot to supply the majority of the images with brains. However, he had set things straight by now and could take it easy for a bit. When he wanted Sylvester to doctor him, he would say so.
Against his will and better judgment, Sylvester had to let him go. He announced his intention of walking to Charing Cross, but Sylvester anticipated him by whistling up a hansom at the street door. Matthew protested. He had always walked home.
“Do something for my sake,—for a change,” said Sylvester, with a touch of humour.
The old man laughed, entered the cab, and drove off.
Sylvester went upstairs to finish his cigar. The world seemed a more ironical place than it had appeared some hours before. He felt certain aches in his fingers and sundry tinglings in his shins. He stooped and rubbed the latter with a meditative smile. There was another young woman between whom and her desires he was about to come. He speculated on the prospect of rubbing his shins after that encounter.
“I wonder how it is to be done,” he said, lying back in his chair.
His promise was given. He would have unquestioningly married his fair antagonist of Baker Street had his father so commanded. But all the same it was not without uneasiness that he contemplated his mission. And as for the girl he had undertaken to save, he assured himself that he took no interest whatever in her destiny.
To celebrate the engagement, Lady Milmo held a great reception to which came crowds of distinguished and undistinguished persons, but it was characteristic of her gatherings that the former far outnumbered the latter. The air hummed with congratulations and with laudations of Art. Sylvester, moving sardonically through the press, felt like a visitor dazed by the whirl of a great unfamiliar factory. He confessed the feeling to an acquaintance who fluttered between the two worlds of art and science.
“The manufactory of artificial ideals,” laughed the latter, having also to maintain a reputation for epigram.
The wit stayed to speak with a friend, and Sylvester tried to edge his way towards the further end of the room where Ella stood talking with a couple of men. From where he was he could see that she looked more than usually beautiful. Her face was flushed, her eyes held the light of enthusiasm, her young figure in a simple white silk dress stood out proud and defiant against the darkness of an open window. It recalled vividly to his mind her attitude when long, long ago she had passionately expressed her faith in the glory of the world. His lips twitched in a half-smile. All around him he heard snatches of conversation in which the engagement was alluded to. A man cast doubts on Roderick's solvency. A girl declared she would just as soon marry a steam-organ. A lean, anxious woman with a mechanical grin ecstaticised over the union. The Art Colony was discussed on all sides.
Presently Roderick, resplendent in a great white bow that fell half over his shirt-front and almost hid a topaz solitaire, caught sight of him and hailed him with a southern wave of his hand.
“My dear comrade,” he cried as soon as he was within hand-shaking range of Sylvester, “it does my heart good to see you here to share our joy. Have you spoken to her yet? There she is—
'Oh, she is fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!'
Isn't she? A throbbing moment,amigo.”
“I'm glad to see you so much in love,” said Sylvester. “It's refreshing.”
“Cynic!” said Roderick. “That's why your hair is turning grey. Look at mine,—fresh as a rose in June. And I'm older than you.”
“How's the Utopia?”
“Colossal. Come, I'll introduce you to Sir Decimus Bland. Lady Derring has fixed me with her glassy eye, and I must obey her call. Sir Decimus, let me present my oldest and most valued friend, Dr. Sylvester Lanyon, the terror of bacilli.”
Sir Decimus was a portly red-faced man who, from a habit of holding his hands in front of him, looked as if he were supporting a model of one of his Art galleries after the self-conscious manner of a “donor,” supporting his church in the company of various saints in an old Italian painting. He puffed as he spoke and glared amiably through a single eye-glass.
“Delighted to make your acquaintance, Dr. Lanyon,” said he. “Your name is a household word in the domain of science. In our domain we also have bacilli to fight against,—commercialism, insincerity, all the cankers that destroy the soul of art.”
“So you are going to choose an environment unsuitable for their development, I hear,” said Sylvester.
“Yes, the Walden Art Colony. I am, as you may know, guaranteeing the Director's salary. Our fortunate friend is just the man for the post.”
“When do you think it will take practical shape?” asked Sylvester.
“We hope to start next spring—and under very happy auspices. I look upon this as a fitting culmination to the poor services I have been able to render to Art in this country. Are you interested in the movement, Dr. Lanyon?”
“Not financially. I hardly know enough about it. One thing I don't quite understand. I thought an artist gave out the experience he had gathered in his contact with real life. How is he going to get that contact if he buries himself in what amounts to a desert island?”
“He goes direct to nature,” replied Sir Decimus, platitudinously.
“Does he?” argued Sylvester. “Rocks and trees are all very well for pretty pictures. But what about love and sorrow and other human emotions. He seems to get away entirely from the important side of nature.”
“Yes, yes, so I grant. But it's hardly that,” puffed Sir Decimus, mopping his forehead. “Ah, here is Urquhart; he will tell you all about it. Don't you know Urquhart?”
He performed the introduction, stated the case at great length with a confusion that irritated the scientist's trained mind, and then, with visible relief, moved away. Bevis Urquhart, a slight young man, with a tiny silky black moustache and a languid manner, began a patient explanation. Sylvester had heard of him as a lad of great wealth who had convulsed a whole county by refusing to ride to hounds and uttering blasphemy against partridge shooting. It was whispered that he had invented a new religion and had an oratory in his bedroom fitted with expensive idols made of chrysoprasus.
“It is the mistake of the crowd,” said he, “to regard Art as an interpretation of experience. Art has nothing to do with Life. Life claims all for itself and so kills Art, drains it of its blood. In other words, Life claims Art, Art does not claim Life. If not, Art would be unexpressed. The poem would remain a pure crystal in the soul of the poet, the picture a fair-hued mist in the fantasy of the painter. Art is the revelation of the Undetermined, and this can only reach its fulness in the quietude of the soul.”
“Thank you,” said Sylvester; “you have given me a lucid solution of my difficulty.”
The young man smiled deprecatingly.
“Pardon me. I try to be an artist in words, and lucidity is so brutal and commonplace. Do you read Mallarmé?”
“No,” said Sylvester. “When I want wholesome unintelligibility I read Rabelais.”
Urquhart looked pained. There was a slight pause.
“Fond of bicycling?” asked Sylvester, cheerily.
Again came the pitying smile over the face of the young semi-millionaire.
“I know so little of the things one does with one's body,” he said.
“Better learn,” said Sylvester. “Capital exercise. Shakes up your liver, you know.”
Here he was carried off by Lady Milmo, who was dying to introduce him to somebody.
“Do you understand all the things they talk about here?” he asked.
Lady Milmo regarded him with a twinkling eye.
“God bless your soul, no,” she said.
“I suppose they're all exceedingly clever?”
Lady Milmo stood upon the points of her toes and looked around, as if to take in all her guests in one comprehensive glance. Then she half whispered into his ear,—“They've all got to talk like that to one another for the sake of their reputations. But I go round and talk to each in turn of their cooks or their stomachs, according to sex,—and they love it!”
“Well, I'd sooner talk to you, Lady Milmo,—though not of my stomach,—than to any of these people,” said Sylvester, with a laugh. “Can't you steal five minutes?”
Lady Milmo spied a couple of vacant chairs in a near corner, and sitting down on one motioned Sylvester to the other. Then she smiled. She was a kind-hearted woman, and in spite of her false air of youth possessed much charm of manner.
“I suppose you want to talk about the engagement!” she said.
“No, not particularly. What do you think of this Colony, where Ella proposes to exile herself?”
“Utter rubbish,” said Lady Milmo.
Sylvester expressed surprise. “I was under the impression that you were one of its fervent propagandists.”
“Oh, one must do something,” she replied inconsequently. “One bubble is just as good as another to blow during the season. Whether it's providing eau de cologne for released criminals, or founding a Garden of Eden for unsuccessful poets, it all comes to the same thing in the end. You look puzzled. Well, what is one person's amusement is another's bewilderment.”
“But all these promoters—Ella and Roderick—they believe in it?”
“Oh, yes, they believe in it. People will believe in anything,—Mr. Urquhart's new religion, for instance. But the Art Colony is rubbish. Don't put a penny in it. I haven't. It may be a romantic toy for Ella to play with for the first two years of her married life, but then she will come back and settle down to a reasonable existence. You won't give me away, will you?”
Sylvester promised, and a few moments later found himself standing alone, wrapped in gloomy wonder at the inanity of life. A voice roused him from his meditation.
“Good-evening, Sylvester.”
He started and found Ella by his side. She looked at him boldly, with a little triumphant gleam of defiance. He shook hands, explained that his object in accepting the invitation was to offer her his congratulations. Social convention required the formula. Ella's ear, however, detected an ironical note, and the blood came swiftly to her cheeks.
“For a man who scorns hypocrisy—” she began; then checked herself. His regard of grave inquiry made her swiftly conscious of a false position, and her cheeks flamed hotter.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “You don't really congratulate me.”
“Why do you say so?”
“I feel that you are inimical to me, and you have never liked Roderick.”
“One can wish one's enemies well,” he remarked with a half-smile.
“Why should we be your enemies? You should hear how differently Roderick speaks of you.”
“My dear Ella,” replied Sylvester, “I have not uttered a single word against Roderick. It would be in very bad taste for me to do so. I have known him for many years, and we still meet. But he is not an intimate friend of mine.”
“You dislike him,” said Ella. “I feel that you do.”
The feline that is in the nature of all women—just as its stronger, tigerish development is in the nature of all men—tingled to her finger ends. She felt the velvet sheaths stiffen back. The sight of him angered her. She itched to provoke him to battle, to fall on him tooth and claw if he took up her challenge. An unreasoning instinct clamoured also for violent defence of Roderick. It was a psychological moment full of many feminine complexities which she half understood; and that made her the more angry.
Sylvester, looking only on the surface, smiled somewhat contemptuously at her desire to scratch. Certainly he had undertaken a campaign against her; but he felt that so undignified a skirmish was not the wisest preliminary to hostilities. He had come here, besides, to reconnoitre.
“Why should I dislike Roderick?” he asked.
“Because you never try to understand anybody. Because Roderick has not locked himself up in your iron cage of convention; because he hasn't set himself up on a pillar of impeccability as you have done. You sit within your own prim parlour of moderation and think the man who goes to generous extremes is a lost soul. You need not have congratulated me. I should not have resented it. I should have understood and have given you credit for honesty.”
But Sylvester was not to be drawn into strife. He replied equably that he would withdraw his congratulations, if they offended her. Meanwhile they might talk of something pleasanter. She suggested Shakespeare and the musical glasses, with a fine air of disdain.
“Or the Walden Art Colony?” said Sylvester.
“What have you to say against the Colony?” she flashed.
“Nothing at all. Do you believe in it?”
“With all my heart. It is a great movement. It is an idea to live for. It is the first thing I have had to believe in since—since I threw off the girl and became a woman.”
“And I sincerely hope it won't be the last,” he replied with grave irony. And as a young man drew nigh to take his leave of Ella, he bowed and turned away with a saturnine sense of a victory after which there would be no rubbing of shins. But Ella, although she smiled sweetly on the young man, felt that she had been foolish in wantonly exposing herself to Sylvester's cold mockery, and the brightness of her evening suffered a miserable eclipse. It was only when Sir Decimus Bland came up and talked Colony with ponderous patronage, and elevated her to the dignity of high-priestess of the undefined cult of the Higher Art, that she regained her self-respect and looked more serenely on the universe.