O’Hagan calledupon me. His entrances possess electric properties. One’s schemes melt; O’Hagan becomes the scheme of all things terrestrial. The future shrinks, bounded by O’Hagan. The universe is “a universe after Captain the Hon. Bernard O’Hagan.” An unexpected call by the Tsar of all the Russias could not be more exciting, and one would be less impressed if the Mikado dropped in for a pipe and a Scotch-and-soda.
“I have selected you, Raymond”—he toyed with his monocle—“to act for me in a little affair on the French coast. You will be associated with Lieutenant the Chevalier Camille d’Oysans.”
That was bad hearing.
The Chevalier, according to O’Hagan, is “the last of thegrand seigneurs.” I think O’Hagan may be right; and trust he is. This fire-eating Frenchman in my opinion constitutes a menace to society. He would any day rather cut a man’s throat than shake hands with him.
(His recent decoration for having personally dispatched a larger number of Boches than any other man in the armies of France, will be a memory fresh in my reader’s mind.)
“And I do not expect you to withdraw, Raymond,”—coldly.
Since, on more than one recent occasion, I had been so unfortunate as to incur O’Hagan’s displeasure, I perceived that a path was cut for my feet—a path of peril, from which, nevertheless, I might not stray. I understand that Charles II., when it pleased him, could be a king indeed. The fact that O’Hagan inherits a similar capacity from someone or another is not necessarily destructive of what posthumous reputation remains to the lady of his race who ornamented the Stuart court.
He passed to me a press cutting. The paragraph related how an anonymous gentleman had had a public misunderstanding with Mr. Ronald Brandon, the famous author, whose forthcoming work, etc., etc. The misunderstanding had been due to the presence of La Belle Yvette Lotus, the beautiful dancer, etc., etc.
“D’Oysans has already arranged the preliminaries,” explained O’Hagan. “So all that you have to do, my boy, is to meet me at Victoria to-night at ten-thirty.”
“This is incredible!”
“Not at all.”
“We shall all stand to be arrested!”
“Never fear. These little affairs are better managed in France!”
“For heaven’s sake, what weapons?”
“Swords!”
“In what way are you interested in this girl?”
“In no way. Not in the slightest.”
O’Hagan stood up and gracefully executed the Grand Salute with his cane.
“I badly need a little practice,” he said. “That is all, Raymond!”
“This man, Ronald Brandon, has some reputation as a swordsman.”
“So I hear,” replied O’Hagan languidly. “He has grossly insulted me; so that I am quite looking forward to meeting him. Although he merely comes of a race of attorneys, he appears to have a fine reach.”
He yawned slightly. There came a ringing of my door bell, which I proceeded to investigate.
“Might I inquire who the blazes your distinguished visitor is?”
Thus O’Hagan, critically examining a very large size in formidable ruffians who had forced his way past me into the study.
“Which of you is O’Hagan?” demanded the caller, truculently.
He was a man fully six feet two in his boots; wore a peculiarly racy tweed suit, cut morning-coat fashion; a pink soft collar, and a green tie adorned with a big diamond. He was bullet-headed, close shaven, and rejoiced in a prominent jaw of marine blue. He threw a soft hat into a corner and addressed a ferocious glare to each of us in turn.
“You have a broken nose,” said the Captain, with icy distaste.
“That’s done it! You’re ’im!” proclaimed the visitor. “An’ you’ll ’ave a broken neck in ’alf a mo!”
He stripped off his coat and hurled it amongst the litter of my writing-table. He removed the diamond and placed it in his waistcoat pocket. He tore his collar from his ox-like neck and cast it on the carpet. He began to unbutton his vest.
“This is not a public bath,” said O’Hagan, observing these manœuvres through his monocle. “You can have a wash for twopence at the lower end of Langham Place.”
The other proceeded stolidly with his immodest toilet, divesting himself of his waistcoat and rolling up his sleeves over his hirsute, brawny arms. No reply he made; he was a man too full for words.
O’Hagan rose from the Chesterfield which is his favourite lounge and stretched himself languidly. He poked the fire and left the poker between the bars.
“Raymond,” he drawled, “shall I go and find a constable to throw this low dog down stairs?”
The man leapt to the door with extraordinary agility, locked it, and slipped the key into a back pocket of his trousers. He faced us, a formidable figure, stripped to the pink shirt, which revealed the enormous development of his pectoral muscles. O’Hagan moves amid singular proceedings.
“Now, my bonny gentleman! My name’s ‘Trooper’ Belcher—an’ I’m ’er husband!”
“I trust you refer to Mrs. Belcher?”—O’Hagan.
Belcher: “My wife’s La Belle Lotus!”
The Captain studied Mr. Belcher with a new curiosity.
“I gather that you are a music-hall pugilist. Am I also to conclude that you are a bully acting on behalf of Mr. Brandon, whom I have to meet at seven in the morning outside Calais?”
“Imet Mr. bloomin’ Brandon at seven this evenin’ outside Oxford Circus!” shouted Belcher. “You’llmeet ’im in Middlesex ’Ospital!”
My wits had deserted me. From the moment that the man had thrust his way into my rooms up to that when he had thus proclaimed himself the assailant of Brandon, I had stood helplessly watching his outrageous proceedings.
(“A gentleman, to-day,” O’Hagan has informed me, “is utterly at the mercy of the first lusty ruffian who cares to attack him. The only offensive and defensive art which survives to any extent—brutal pugilism—is extensively practised among the lower classes. Where is the gentleman’s sword? Taken from him! The Higher Jiu-jitsu, my dear Raymond, or Art of Gentle Thought, should be included in the curriculum of every preparatory establishment.”)
Belcher executed a charge which, I think, would have swept a healthy bullock from its feet. O’Hagan, with a lightning rapidity of action apparently peculiar to pupils of Shashu Myuku of Nagasaki, secured and presented the poker.
The man touched it with one huge fist and recoiled, screaming hoarsely.
“By God! that’s ’ot!” he panted.
“It is,” replied O’Hagan, again thrusting the point amid the coals; “red hot!” With his left hand he waved his monocle in my direction. “One cannot soil one’s hands with the persons of low fellows, Raymond!”
Belcher snatched up a heavy chair as though it had had no greater weight than a matchbox. A lightning, rapier lunge with the poker—an unpleasantsizzlingsound—and the chair crashed harmlessly to the floor. The now painfully singed “trooper” fell back on to the Chesterfield, groaning.
Again my bell rang.
“Hand the key to Mr. Raymond, my man,” ordered O’Hagan; “and replace your filthy rags upon your indecently nude person.”
Belcher threw the key across the carpet. My mind had assimilated a profound truth of the Higher Jiu-Jitsu: brute courage falters in the presence of hot pokers. I went to the door, and upon the landing stood a dazzling vision in leopard skins.
“My ’usband!” (The vision had a French accent.) “Is he here? Yes? Quick!”
She slipped past me, as an animal growl sounded from within. My rooms no longer were my own, but were become a rendezvous for insane meetings—for nightmare encounters. I re-entered the bear-garden which I had been wont to call my study.
The leopard lady was kneeling beside the wounded Mr. Belcher and explaining in voluble syncopated English that his suspicions were groundless, that it was a “boom,” no more; that he mustnotkill Captain O’Hagan.
“My impression, Raymond,” said the latter, focussing me across the room, “is that our friend Belcher has recently left jail.”
“What if I ’ave!” roared that maltreated ruffian, starting to his feet.
“This,” replied O’Hagan with suppressed ferocity, “that if you are present in another minute I shall send you back again!Madame!”—he bowed to La Belle—“kindly remove your property from my friend’s apartment—I would suggest that you deposit it in cold storage—and permit me to say that I had credited you with nicer taste!”
He placed a cigarette between his lips, igniting it with the now white-hot poker.
—————
“Itis singularly illustrative of the obscure psychology of the lower orders,” said Bernard O’Hagan, “this marrying habit of Continental music-hall artistes. The female of the species may drive, take supper, and accept diamonds from men of pedigree; but she always marries a prize-fighter or a bookmaker. It is a process of natural selection, Raymond. When out of the proceeds of a successful professional career she invests in a husband, she ‘backs her fancy.’ I have known Spanish dancers who were adored by reigning monarchs to have unsavoury husbands concealed in all sorts of filthy alleys; and one lady circus rider to whom I was presented in Budapest proved to be lawfully wedded to a retired Paris sewerman. Zoologically, the habit has interest.”
Our inquiries at the hospital discovered Mr. Brandon to be on the danger list.
“The most promising meeting since I encountered Baron Verneux,” murmured O’Hagan, “indefinitely postponed! The Chevalier Camille d’Oysans will be keenly disappointed. He had made all the necessary arrangements for flying the country!”
We learned that the police were in quest of Mr. Brandon’s assailant. A call at Mr. Alex. Dewson’s hotel provided a surprise.
“I shall not chastise him,” explained my friend. “The depths of his ignorance are pathetic. But I feel it to be my duty to tell him that he is a disgrace to the great nation which includes in its roll of honour the name of Edmond O’Hagan.”
Mr. Dewson could receive no visitors. Captain O’Hagan swept the servant aside and waved to me to follow. It needs something more than a verbal rebuff to exclude O’Hagan—something in the nature of a double-barred iron door or a squad with fixed bayonets.
My friend honoured Mr. Dewson’s apartment. And Mr. Dewson, a heavily bandaged figure hunched up in an armchair by the fire, observed our intrusion with his one visible eye.
“Raymond,” said O’Hagan, as he focussed this crippled apparition, “the ‘Trooper’ has forestalled us again!”
“You bet he has, Captain!” whispered a weak voice.
O’Hagan turned to me.
“In the thoroughness of Mr. Belcher’s method,” he said, “I find something almost admirable, Raymond! The ‘Trooper’ is a loss to the service.”
That he was a loss which speeding Time should rectify, we, being but human, could not foresee. But is it not history how Sergeant Belcher, at a spot not a hundred miles from Ypres, acquired the most coveted distinction in the gift of His Britannic Majesty for rescuing a badly wounded officer under heavy fire? And is it not written in deathless annals that the name of that gallant officer was Captain the Hon. Bernard O’Hagan, V.C., D.S.O.?
EXPLOIT THE FOURTH.HE BURIES AN OLD LOVE.
EXPLOIT THE FOURTH.
HE BURIES AN OLD LOVE.
EXPLOIT THE FOURTH.HE BURIES AN OLD LOVE.
Thatclass distinctions are invidious, that one man is as good as another, are theorems which find no place in O’Hagan’s philosophy. His whole life is a protest against such propositions. He complains that there is no badge peculiar to the gentleman; that the latest morning-coat from Savile Row is colourably imitated, and within a week, by Rye Lane, Peckham. Hence, I take it, his broad, black ribbon with the dependent monocle, his purple-lined cloak.
These things are not imitated, and for a simple reason. O’Hagan’s cloak makes no appeal to Peckham, and leaves even Hampstead cold.
O’Hagan holds that to tolerate scurrility from the lower classes is to encourage rebellion, and maintains that the French Revolution was brought about, not by the vices of the nobility, but by its weakness.
“Spare the axe and spoil the people,” he says.
Upon the necessity for a sort of patrician purple, distinctive of the gentleman, he is insistent, and the episode illustrative of this which he is fond of citing is that of the lonely lady of the Strand.
Captain O’Hagan, then, one evening, was swinging westward along that thoroughfare, hatless, as usual, in evening dress, with his purple-lined cloak flying. Idle curiosity induced him to stroll down that narrow, sloping way which terminates in dungeonesque darkness and arches, but which leads one to the stage-door of the Novelty Theatre. At the end of the passage upon which the stage-door opens there may sometimes be found sundry loafers. The inexperienced might assume these to be connected with the Novelty establishment, but would err in so doing. They are connected with a much older establishment; the ancient order of Mouchers.
As O’Hagan came abreast of this place, the sole representative of the ancient order on duty that evening, with a headshake, an upward and a downward glance, and an evil smile, dismissed the inquiry of a young lady who, timidly, had addressed him, and hastened to meet a party of three American comedians as they descended from their car.
The lady, who was quite young, and simply dressed in a dark walking habit, flushed with mortification, and then became very pale as she turned away.
O’Hagan’s blood boiled within his veins. It is such a simple, everyday incident as this which renders him really terrible. He hastened after the lady, who was walking slowly in the direction of Charing Cross, and touched her gently upon the arm.
“Madame—your pardon!”
She turned, startled.
“That fellow at the stage-door was rude to you. I beg, as a favour, that you will grant me permission to reprimand him.”
The lady, unmistakably, was displeased. She was dark, and, as O’Hagan observed with aesthetic appreciation, of a delicately aristocratic beauty.
“You are mistaken. Pray do not trouble.”
(“How,” O’Hagan will ask, “could she be expected to know that a stranger addressing her in the Strand was one in whose discretion she might safely confide? To permit any boor to endue a dress suit is to kill chivalry.”)
“Madame, I beg that you will not misjudge me. I am not mistaken, neither in my surmise nor as to my plain duty. I do not know your name, nor seek to learn it. Mine is Captain O’Hagan. And had you been a flower-seller I should as staunchly have disputed my right to protect you from insult as I do knowing you to be of my own rank.”
She was bewildered. My friend is essentially bewildering. He is not a person whom any man or any woman can hope to snub—to overlook. He comes into one’s life, a tangible proposition, which cannot be ignored; which, unavoidably, must bedealt with.
“I do not know you, sir. I really cannot stand here conversing with a perfect stranger.” Then, with a little, half-doubting glance up to the fine eyes: “Are you one of the O’Hagans of Dunnamore?”
O’Hagan bowed as no other man, though you search the courts of Europe, can bow.
“Then, Captain O’Hagan, since you are a gentleman, please forget about the door-porter. Believe me, I have troubles enough without seeking new ones.”
There was pathos in the words, in her low, quivering voice.
“I cannot doubt it. And, since you know my family, you may know that its name stands stainless for seven generations. You should not be here, at this hour, alone. In the absence of a father, of a brother, accept my escort. It is in no way encumbent upon you to accept my friendship, though it would be devoted and disinterested.”
She was biting her lip now, in pathetic perplexity; but there was a new confidence in the glance which she gave him. It was the glance of a woman who sorely lacked a friend, and into whose heart the conviction was stealing that heaven had sent her one.
“You are more than kind, Captain O’Hagan.” Now she met his eyes frankly. Her decision was made. “I am—Lady Brian Dillon.”
(“You see, Raymond,” he has since explained to me, “there was more than mere chance in my unaccountable decision to explore that passage. Fate, my boy—fate!”)
He took the gloved hand which she offered with a pretty embarrassment, and bent over it in his unique, courtier fashion.
“I have never met your husband, Lady Dillon. But his late father, Sir John, was one of my dearest friends. I regard you, now, as that dear friend’s daughter, and since Fate has brought us both here to-night, I regard your interests as a sacred charge. You are in trouble. How can I serve you?”
—————
I doubtif London could furnish another man—a father confessor excepted—who, in so brief a time, could have learnt from the young Lady Dillon so much of her history as did O’Hagan. Side by side, they paced up and down a comparatively quiet street dipping riverward, and the girl (for she was no more) confided in this man, whom, twenty minutes earlier, she had not known.
Does not that argue eloquently for my friend? Does it not make amends for much that seems harsh in his nature? For although, alas! women often are deceived in men, a woman’s instincts can never err in such case as this; a true woman, as this one, never pours out the trouble with which her heart is bursting, to a knave—to a blackguard. I defy you to confute me. Be it remembered that, by a trick of Fate—or shall we say Providence?—these two had friends in common. Nor be it forgot that, for fifty miles north, south, east and west of Dunnamore, “the honour of an O’Hagan” is a form of oath. But, nevertheless, I maintain that there is something grandly and expansively human—something splendid and true—in the nature of a man whom at such brief acquaintance a good womanknowsto be worthy of her confidence. Don’t you agree with me?
“Of course I remember your wedding!” said O’Hagan. “Bless my soul! you were a Miss Sheila Cavanagh! As a child you must have been at Dunnamore many a time! Why! we are quite old friends! You are not married three months, yet?”
“Ten weeks,” replied Lady Dillon, pathetically.
“And simply because your husband, Sir Brian, saw you walking in St. James’s Park with a gentleman——”
“He has not spoken to me—for four days!”—brokenly.
“And now he is waiting on the stage of the Novelty for a Miss Betty Chatterton, late of the Folly Theatre, whom formerly he admired——”
“—He used to go about with her a lot, I know!”
“And this gentleman with whom you were walking?”
Lady Dillon looked away.
“Ah,” said O’Hagan sadly, “you have been indiscreet. He was an old admirer?” (nod). “Persistent, unscrupulous?” (nod)—“and you were sending this fellow about his business?”
She looked up to him as, of old, looked Menippus Lycius to Apollonius of Tyana; as to one omniscient—yet, crowning wonder, as to a favourite brother. Such is the timbre of my friend’s exquisite sympathy. Is it not a divine gift?
“How can you possibly know that?”
“My dear Lady Dillon—you have told me! Does your husband know this person?”
“He knowsofhim. But he has never even asked me his name. I thought he understood that I did not care and never had cared for the man. Oh! why did I see him? Why did I see him? But I feared that, unless I definitely dismissed him, he would compromise me!”
“My poor child!” He patted her arm, soothingly. There are phases of his patronage which are healing. One absorbs his condescension gratefully, as a penitent receiving absolution from a holy cardinal. “You see, your marriage was a family arrangement, and your husband is uncertain of your affections. This regrettable incident has convinced him—wrongly—that from your point of view it is merely amariage de convenance. His flirtation is a harmless one. He is, I dare swear, eating his heart out! But the pride of the Dillons has him by the throat. My dear little lady—leave him to me!”
She looked up to him wonderingly again; but, with something of the touching confidence of a child, permitted him to conduct her Strandward.
“Captain O’Hagan! I could never, never explain to him! That is why I dare not speak! He wouldneverforgive me for seeing him again—would never understand——”
“Leave it entirely in my hands!Iwill do the explaining! Simply accept my explanation, and decline in any way to enlarge upon it. You shall not be compromised, because I know you do not deserve it. Neither shall that hare-brained husband of yours compromise another girl out of merepique.”
She said nothing to that. In the Strand, opposite the Novelty:
“That is your car yonder?” asked O’Hagan.
“Oh! don’t let Priestman see me!” cried Lady Dillon. “I was afraid he would see me when I spoke to that wretch at the door!”
“You are perfectly certain that your husband is in the theatre?”
“Yes! yes! I don’t know why I asked that man! But, indeed, I don’t know what possessed me at all! Oh! Captain O’Hagan, I am so miserable!”
“Boy!” said O’Hagan to a passing urchin—“tell the chauffeur of the Rolls Royce yonder, to pull around here!”
Off ran the boy.
“But——” began Lady Dillon.
O’Hagan patted her arm. The chauffeur, having received the boy’s message, could be seen looking in their direction. Presently he walked across to where they stood. Recognising Lady Dillon, he stared; then touched his cap.
“I ordered you to bring the car over,” said O’Hagan, icily.
“Sir Brian”——began the man.
“Did you understand my words?”
The chauffeur ran back, and in a few moments the big car was drawn up to the kerb. O’Hagan placed Lady Dillon comfortably in a cushioned corner.
“Good-night, dear Lady Dillon,” he said. “I will bring Brian home to you very shortly!”
Her wondering, tearful eyes never left his face. To the now deferential though badly embarrassed man:
“Home!” said O’Hagan.
Off moved the smoothly-running car. Whilst she could see him where he stood, Lady Dillon never took her eyes from the tall, cloaked figure of this old friend of old friends and one so newly found, of this astonishing Samaritan who had promised to restore to her the gladness of life. With picturesque head bowed he waited until the Rolls Royce was lost from view, one gloved hand resting upon the heavy ebony cane, the other, ungloved, dangling from two long fingers the monocle dependent on its black silk ribbon.
It is a never-ending source of regret to me that we have no Velasquez to-day. Captain the Hon. Bernard O’Hagan would inspire such an one to a great masterpiece.
My friend returned to the narrow alley-way, descended it, and stood before the unofficial deputy for the baggage-man, whose treatment of Lady Dillon had occasioned his just resentment. In his dealings with such as this, O’Hagan can be terrible. To him he addressed no word.
Dropping his monocle, he seized the fellow by the ear (with his gloved hand) and dragged the agonised face closely to his own haughty countenance. The feat was seemingly performed effortless—such is the outstanding wonder of that Judo, or Higher Jiu-jitsu, whereof Shashu Myuku of Nagasaki is the Grand Master. There are not six Europeans, O’Hagan will tell you, who have been initiated into the occultry of the Japanese super-force.
“You recently insulted a lady who inquired if Sir Brian Dillon had entered the stage-door. Down on your knees, you sot—and beg for pardon!”
Obedient to a power which, seemingly entering at the ear, proceeded thence through every tortured nerve of his person, rendering him helpless, inert, down dropped the big, hulking figure. It chanced that none was there to see. Yet the exhibition was an odd one.
“Repeat, after me, ‘I humbly beg, sir——’ ”
“Police!” gasped the man, and strove to get at O’Hagan with his hands.
Abruptly he dropped them; his big face grew livid. The Captain, holding the ear in that vice-grip, had merely turned it slightly backward. The man groaned; beads of perspiration started on his brow.
“Repeat, after me, ‘I humbly beg, sir, for the lady’s pardon.’ ”
Faintly:
“I humbly . . . beg, sir . . . for . . . my Gawd! . . . the lidy’s pardon!”
“And abjectly entreat you to forgive me!”
“And . . . abjec . . . abjec’y entreat . . . you to forgive . . . me!”
“Get up!”
The victim struggled erect. He met the quelling gaze.
“Any repetition of the offence means that my man will wait upon you—and bring a horse-whip!”
The fellow scrambled aside, and raised a quivering hand to his forehead. Captain O’Hagan, swinging his monocle, strode to the stage-door.
—————
Tothe stage door-keeper said O’Hagan:
“Has Miss Chatterton appeared yet?”
“She has, sir.”
“Is she in her dressing-room?”
“I believe so, sir.”
“Has she a private dressing-room?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is she dressed, yet?”
“She must be, sir. She finished over half-an-hour ago, and a gentleman went up some time since.”
“What number is her room?”
“It’s Number Six, sir, but——”
Captain O’Hagan placed half-a-crown upon the window-ledge and stepped along the passage.
“Excuse me, sir!” The man came running from his box.
O’Hagan turned, glass raised.
“You wished to speak to me?”
“Thank you very much, sir, but I must take your card through first, or——”
“My name is Captain O’Hagan. I have business with Miss Chatterton.” He proceeded, unruffled.
“You’ll get me into trouble, sir——”
O’Hagan, over his shoulder:
“I esteem your regard for duty, my man. Rely upon me.”
He was gone. The door-keeper scratched his head.
Ascending a flight of stone steps, the Captain came to a landing, a door opening upon it. The door was ajar and bore no number, but voices might be heard proceeding from the room beyond. O’Hagan rapped, and opened the door.
Several gentlemen, in several stages of undress, all looked up from their several toilettes.
“I fear I intrude,” said O’Hagan, holding his monocle before his right eye and examining the occupants of the apartment with a kind of genial curiosity. “I wish to find room number six.”
“Next floor, second door,” volunteered a young man in underwear.
“I am indebted.”
O’Hagan withdrew and proceeded upstairs. Room six showed a closed door. O’Hagan knocked.
“Who’s there?” inquired a masculine voice.
O’Hagan entered.
A golden-headed lady, who was arranging a rare exotic in hats upon her elaborate coiffure, fixed wondering eyes upon the intruder. A maid glanced up from where she knelt beside a large basket; and a dark-haired, perfectly groomed young man, of military bearing, rose hurriedly from his seat upon a second and even larger basket.
Captain O’Hagan bowed.
“Miss Chatterton, your pardon. Sir Brian Dillon, I presume? Might I ask you, my good girl”—to the staring maid—“to withdraw.”
He held the door open.
“Here, I say!” burst out Miss Chatterton. “Who are you? What’s it all about——”
“I am Captain O’Hagan. I have a family matter to discuss with Sir Brian; and I wish you, Miss Chatterton, to be present.”
He waved his monocle towards the maid, and then in the direction of the open door. The girl stood up, looked at her mistress, but saw her to be as helpless as herself; looked at the forceful new arrival, and slowly went out. O’Hagan closed the door. Two pairs of wondering eyes followed his every movement. My friend has a singular quality of personality. I believe he could so enter the House of Lords as to visit consternation upon every peer present, and to set the bishops reviewing their pasts with grave misgivings. Bernard O’Hagan is a mannerist of genius.
Sir Brian Dillon cleared his throat.
“If I might venture on a remark,” he said, with an angry gleam in his grey eyes, “what do you want, and who the devilareyou?”
O’Hagan wound the black ribbon about his right forefinger.
“I am the gentleman,” he replied, with frigid distinctness, “whom you saw walking with Lady Dillon in St. James’s Park some days ago, and I am here todemandan explanation!”
Have you sometimes, at a proper and sombre social function, dreamed of what would happen if some bold spirit rose up and sang one of Mr. George Robey’s sprightliest songs? Have you even contemplated, in what I may term horrified delight, the effect of a loudly uttered swear-word upon a gathering of elders? This remark of O’Hagan’s produced that sort of effect.
Betty Chatterton slowly sank down into an armchair, never removing her gaze from the last speaker. Sir Brian’s eyes opened wider and yet wider. He bit his lower lip—and took a step forward. He halted.
“You,” he began—and his tone was different from that of his normal speech—“youare here, to demand an explanation ofme! You admit that you are——”
“I beg,” O’Hagan interrupted him, “that you will not refer to my statement as an admission. I am proud of my name, and proud of my friendship with your wife. You have wronged her, and you wrong Miss Chatterton. Particularly, you have wrongedme. It is for this—for your gross insult to myself—that I am here to call you to account!”
Dillon nearly choked; and his fingers twitched convulsively. He believed, and with a large and generous trust had sought no word from his wife in aye or nay, that it had been another than himself who first had won her love. Later, he believed that his trust had been misplaced, had been betrayed; that the unknown who had played some part, great or small, in her life before he, Brian, came into it, was indeed lord of the kingdom that he madly had thought his own.
Now the usurper stood before him, his attitude neither apologetic nor explanatory—not that of the offender but of the offended! “—To call me to account!” echoed Dillon, in a voice sunken almost to a whisper.
That form of words was the crowning affront of all. It summoned into being the primeval savage which dwells somewhere within every man of Celtic stock. It was this primitive being, whose tribal pride had stifled relenting—denied the woman fair speech and trial—and not the cultured modern man, with whom O’Hagan was come to deal.
“Betty”—Dillon’s speech was thick as that of a drunkard—“would you mind postponing the supper?” He swallowed, dryly. “I will see you—to the car. Forgive me, but to-night——”
“Iwill see Miss Chatterton to a cab,” interrupted O’Hagan’s icy voice. “I have sent Lady Dillon home in the car.Youwill await me here——”
Dillon clenched his fists: his nostrils dilated. In that instant my friend came more nearly to an unseemly embroilment than ever in his surprising career.
“Brian!”
Betty Chatterton sprang to Dillon, clutching his arm.
“Miss Chatterton,” continued O’Hagan, “I beg you to accept my escort. It will be better if we go at once.”
She looked from man to man, and grew pale to the lips. Sir Brian glassily stared directly at O’Hagan and ignored the hand that clung to his rigid arm. The girl released her clasp and turned imploring blue eyes upon the Captain.
“Oh, Captain O’Hagan,” she said, “there is some dreadful mistake! If you think—ah! how can I say what I mean?Willyou believe me”—she frankly met his gaze—“if I tell you that Sir Brian and I are just chums?” Her eyes were flooded with tears. “He is awfully—dreadfully unhappy about . . .” She laid her hand hesitatingly upon O’Hagan’s arm. “I know you have done him no wrong. Won’t you believeme, too? Can’t we be friends?”
(“I had anticipated something altogether more vulgar, Raymond,” O’Hagan recently informed me. “I will confess that I was surprised and delighted. Miss Chatterton had the instincts of a lady and the generosity of a gentleman! A really lovable nature, my boy. That infernal ass deserved nothing so fine as her friendship!”)
The Captain raised her hand to his lips, bending over it with stately courtesy. Again their eyes met—and these two understood one another.
“Betty,” began Dillon, advancing.
She turned to him.
“Stay where you are, Brian,” she said, with a sudden note of command. “You must see that I don’t want to be mixed up in your quarrels. And—Captain O’Hagan is right. We cannot expect the world to understand us. You shouldn’t have come here to-night. No, I’m not angry with you, silly boy—but it wasn’t fair to me. I can see that, now. You had nearly made a big mistake, Brian. Good-bye.”
She held out her hand, firmly. Dillon turned away.
“All right,” she said, and shrugged her shoulders. “You’ll know I was a real pal one day.”
She leant lightly upon O’Hagan’s arm; and the two left the room. She smiled bravely as they passed the stage door-keeper and bade him cheerily good-night.
(“Gad, Raymond!” says O’Hagan, “that girl was a brick; for she was every bit as much in love with Dillon as Dillon was in love with his wife!”)
—————
O’Hagan, withsome research, recently established the fact, in the case of Betty Chatterton, that “there was good blood on the mother’s side.” I fancy he slept better after that. As a child of the people (I use my friend’s phraseology) Miss Chatterton was a disturbing element in the Captain’s philosophy.
He turned to the dressing-room. Let us accompany him.
On the landing stood the maid.
“Please, sir,” said she, timidly, “may I go in and finish packing the basket?”
“Presently, my good girl,” replied the Captain, “presently.”
Sir Brian Dillon was seated where O’Hagan first had found him. He was smoking a cigarette. His face was somewhat pale.
He rose, as the Captain entered, and very deliberately threw the cigarette into the tiny hearth. To any but a student of indications, he must have appeared quite composed. O’Hagan knew it to be otherwise. Yet he was unprepared for Dillon’s action. Dillon, silently, leapt at him across the room!
I say he was unprepared. In a certain sense he was. But, on the other hand, a pupil of Myuku is never unprepared. O’Hagan dropped his cane, instinctively (the Higher Jiu-jitsu is essentially instinctive). He grasped the fist which whizzed within half an inch of his right ear, performing one of those lightning movements unachievable by any other man of my acquaintance. He thrust it up. He twisted it to the right—down—and doubled the arm behind Dillon’s back. Daintily, he clasped the other wrist and held the left arm inert, outstretched at an angle of forty-five from his opponent’s side.
This, you may know, is a simple trick, which can be performed, with luck, by several members, individually, of the Metropolitan and City Police forces.
Dillon made one attempt to break away—and then stood still, looking back across his shoulder at O’Hagan.
“By God, I’ll kill you!”
There was something shocking in the murderous intent which beaconed from his eyes.
“Later, you shall be afforded every opportunity. But, first, you must hear me. Shall I release you?”
No humiliation can equal that which it is in the power of the expert Jiu-Jitsuist to inflict. An enraged man, though he be outclassed, overweighted, may fight to the last and keep his pride. But this supreme inertia, this being petrified, posed as for a ballroom scene in a “living-picture,” with frenzied anger boiling in the veins and no muscle responding to the mind’s urgent commands, is something that must be experienced fully to be appreciated.
Dillon panted.
“If I release you,” added O’Hagan icily, “it will be upon parole; upon the understanding that you conserve your resentment for a more fitting time.”
“Release me!”
“Upon that understanding?”
“Curse you! . . .yes!”
O’Hagan dropped his hands, stepped back to the little mantelpiece and leaned upon it, raising his monocle before his right eye.
“Sir Brian Dillon,” he said deliberately, “you may have heard my name; for I knew your father well.”
The other’s fingers twitched. He glared directly at O’Hagan, and thrust his hands deeply in his pockets.
“Your father would have known the gross nature of your insult to me. Strong man as you are, he would have forced you to apologise, or have knocked you down. Do your memories bear me out?”
Dillon swallowed, emotionally.
“You add insult to the most awful injury one man can inflict upon another——”
“Stop!” O’Hagan’s big eyes blazed. He took a step forward. “Stop! By God, sir, if you presume to cast such an innuendo in my face I will break your neck, though I hang for it!”
There was a species of subdued ferocity in his manner that had forced conviction upon anyone. No man born of woman could have doubted him.
“You slander me. It is no excuse that you do so, thinking I am he who died on the Yukon border last March.”
A puzzled expression mingled and conflicted with the others which flitted across Dillon’s face.
“Since Sheila Cavanagh and I met at Dunnamore Castle—a childish meeting which your wife had forgotten—we never had set eyes upon each other until that day in St. James’s Park. Despite the passage of years, I knew her again. How dare you—I repeat, sir, how dare you presume to deny me the privilege of your wife’s friendship!”
Dillon’s expression changed again—to one of bewilderment.
“Then,” he gasped, “you are not——”
O’Hagan raised his head.
“Let him rest in peace,” he said sternly. “He was an honourable man, unfortunate in love. You wrong him villainously. If she had cared for him he would be alive to-day. It was something very like suicide—and therefore I charge you, Brian Dillon, never to breathe a word of his unhappy end, never to speak his name to your wife.”
“I don’t know his name. How do you——”
“I buried him in the snow!” said Captain O’Hagan with impressive finality.
Dillon dropped limply on to the big property-basket.
“Then Sheila never cared for him! And he is dead! And it was you, an old friend, and a friend of my father’s, whom——”
“You have been a villain to her!—a villain to Miss Chatterton—doubly a villain to me!——”
Sir Brian sprang up, his face boyish, bright with a glad contrition.
“Captain O’Hagan!” he cried, “will you take my hand? A hundred thousand times I apologise!Canyou forgive me! Do you think Sheila can?”
* * * * *
“At such times,” my mendacious friend has informed me, “to lie becomes a virtue. Dillon distrusted his wife’s old admirer—whose name he had quixotically, though fortunately, avoided learning. Therefore, preparatory to peace, the anonymous gentleman had to be whitewashed. His whitewashing accomplished, next, in order to insure Dillon’s silence respecting his history, he had to be buried for ever.
“I buried him in the eternal snows, Raymond. What more appropriate tomb for the rejected lover?”