Israel Rank

by Roy Horniman

Chapter VIII

The Sunday after Grahame had brought me the news of Sibella’s engagement I visited the Hallwards. I managed to get through a conventional speech of congratulation, stung to self-possession by a certain radiance and exhilaration in Sibella’s bearing. Grahame had told them of my good fortune, and there was a distinct change of manner towards me on the part of the other members of the family. They had never wholly believed that I was related to the Gascoynes, or had thought that if it were true I was making the most of a very remote connection. To them I had been the object for as much patronage as they dared display towards one not prone to endure condescension. I could see that Sibella looked at me with a new interest. She was growing into a truly beautiful woman, and all trace of the slightly suburban minx was becoming rapidly obliterated by a crescendo of style and distinction. It was quite evident that she would have the manners and self-possession of a thoroughly well-bred beauty, and she had acquired a facility for putting on her clothes with an altogether overpowering effect of distinction. It seemed to me a little curious that a character which I knew to be somewhat small should have achieved a certain impression of breadth and ease in her personality. Probably it was the result of the unquestionable fact of her extreme beauty. At any rate, she was rapidly learning the secret of predominance, and she showed, captivating and delicious, in distinct relief to her surroundings.

Mr. Gascoyne’s twenty pounds had enabled me, through the purchase of decent boots, gloves, etc., to bring my wardrobe into play again. I had dressed as rakishly as possible, determined that Sibella should have no satisfaction in the dejection of an unsuccessful lover. I knew her character and the pleasure she would have derived from it. I simulated the best of spirits, and Grahame loyally helped me to sustain the illusion. I was inwardly consumed with jealousy whenever my hungry eyes fell upon her, but I roused myself for a tour de force in acting and succeeded. Lionel Holland came in later. I saw him through the large drawing-room windows coming up the path, supremely confident and jaunty. He was evidently surprised to see me. We had not met since the evening of my humiliation. I greeted him cordially, however, and he was obliged to be civil, but I had the satisfaction of feeling that he was by no means at his ease. He was so perfectly assured that, being poor, I was an interloper in a well-to-do house, that he would have liked, I am sure, to ask me what the devil I meant by intruding. I on my part was galled by the attitude of superior intimacy he assumed in a house where I had been intimate when he was a stranger to it. I was perfectly determined that he should not dislodge me, and that nothing he said or did should interfere with my visits to the Hallward establishment. He was staying to supper as a matter of course, and I detected a shade of annoyance on his face when Mrs. Hallward, in consequence of an aside from Grahame, extended an invitation to me to do likewise. I accepted, although I was compelled to submit to the disappearance of the lovers to the schoolroom for fully an hour previous to the meal. I sang and played to the others as I had been in the habit of doing, and worked hard to make myself agreeable. I was so far successful that Mrs. Hallward asked me why I came so seldom, and discussed the Gascoyne family in a corner of the drawing-room with me after supper. She was herself the great-grand-daughter of a Nova Scotian baronet and never forgot it, although she had saving perception enough not to allude to it directly. As a rule she brought it in with some such remark as—“There is I believe a baronetcy knocking about in our own family somewhere—where exactly I don’t know—but it is there,” a remark subtly framed, so as to convey the impression that, being no snob, she forbore to mention how very near the said baronetcy was, in fact, that it was knocking about so very near that it was quite possible a collision might occur at any moment.

She was most decidedly a snob, but not of an objectionable kind. As a matter of fact, I have always considered well-bred snobs rather pleasant people, and have often wondered whether they would have been as well bred if they had not been snobs. People who love the pleasantly decorative in life have at least taste, and the preference for titles, fine surroundings and social paraphernalia may be a form of art.

“Do you and Lionel ever see each other in the City?” asked Sibella, who, I had already remarked, was not so much in love that she could refrain from teasing her lover.

“Never,” said Lionel shortly.

“For eighteen months I hardly went near the City,” I answered.

“Doing other things?” asked Lionel, in an unpleasant tone.

“Living on my capital,” I answered airily, giving him a keen, steady glance of daring. “It was the most beautiful time I have ever had, and I don’t regret it. It will never come again, and I might have spent it in a dingy City office.”

“Earning your living,” put in Lionel.

“There was no necessity,” I laughed.

Grahame gazed at Lionel in haughty inquiry as if desirous of knowing what he meant by being rude to his guest.

In fact, Lionel’s airs of intimacy and general at-homeness obviously irritated Grahame not less than the constant use of his Christian name.

I declined to be drawn into displaying the least sign of annoyance, although Holland seized every opportunity to deliver innuendo or satire, the latter weapon in his hands becoming more often than not mere clumsy facetiousness. I made a point of being gay, and without talking of my prospects in Mr. Gascoyne’s firm took very good care to leave the impression that it was their promising nature that accounted for my good-humour. I managed by judicious circumlocution and tact to bring the conversation round to reminiscences, throwing them far enough back to prevent his joining in, and slyly flattering Sibella on the subject of her childish achievements so that she revived memories with zest, and became engrossed with the recapitulation of events and bygone adventures in which I, and not Lionel Holland, appeared as her cavalier.

“I believe Lionel is getting jealous,” she remarked towards the end of supper, noticing her lover’s sulky taciturnity.

I had been secretly sure of that fact for the last twenty minutes, and had been enjoying a discomfiture which the rest of the company had not appreciated. He had also, as I perceived, grasped that whenever I chose I was quick and dexterous enough to leave him conversationally a laggard every time.

Not that I relied on these qualities to pass him in the race for Sibella’s appreciation. My instinct in female psychology was too sure. Certainly, if such superficial qualities could have dazzled any woman, they would have dazzled Sibella, whose mind was prone to skim airily and gracefully the surface of things. Even the most transparent of women, however—if there be such things as transparent women—elude analysis when the exact qualities which attract them in their lovers come under consideration.

Sibella was hardly the character one would have imagined overlooking the pinchbeck in Lionel Holland, and yet she had accepted it with a most surprising ease. Such a surrender seemed to negative all her leanings, at any rate in surface matters, to the well-bred and socially ascending scale. True, he would be rich, but Sibella had other admirers who would be richer. He had personality, and perhaps this wins with women more than anything. With all his faults he was not insignificant, and he was undeniably a very beautiful young man, notwithstanding his obvious veneer.

I had taken my courage in my hands and stayed and smoked with Grahame in the library, knowing full well that Lionel and Sibella were in each other’s arms in the schoolroom. It is strange how we manage to endure the things which in anticipation were to slay us with their mere agony.

Mr. and Mrs. Hallward were lax in their supervision of the engaged couple, as they had been about everything else in connection with their children. Sibella and her lover remained undisturbed when her father and mother retired for the night, and it was passably late for a young woman of respectable family to be letting her lover out when the front door closed behind him. She evidently heard our voices, for she came into the library.

“You two still here?”

She seated herself on the club-fender. She was wide awake, and I remembered that as a child she had never betrayed sleepiness at children’s parties—she always expressed her capacity to stay up to any hour. Her family complained that she never could be induced to rise in proper time in the morning.

“Isn’t it lovely, Israel, for you to have had such a piece of luck!”

“Oh, I shall always fall on my feet,” I answered, easily. “You see, I was born lucky, and that is better than being born rich.”

“How do you know you were born lucky?” she asked with interest.

I was not to be questioned out of my pose. “It’s like genius. An instinct teaches the genius to know himself, and something of the same thought instructs the lucky man.”

I spoke with such perfect good spirits and conviction that I could see she found herself believing me. She perched herself on the edge of the great desk which occupied the centre of the library and asked for a cigarette.

“Don’t smoke, Sibella,” said Grahame. He was the sort of man who would not have objected to the female belongings of anyone else smoking, but who objected to his own doing so, on the ground that it was his business to see that they suffered no material damage in the eyes of the world.

“What nonsense, Grahame! Of course I shall smoke—as much as I like—well no, not quite as much as I like because that would spoil my teeth, and I don’t intend to do anything that would injure my personal appearance.”

“That is a very patriotic resolve,” I laughed. “There is some beauty so striking that it becomes a national property.”

Sibella made a face.

“Thank you. I’m nothing of the kind.”

“For goodness’ sake don’t flatter Sibella,” said Grahame. “She is vain enough already.”

“So long as she is vain and not conceited it does not matter.”

“The difference?”

“Well, vanity is a determination to make the best of our superiorities whilst frankly admitting them; conceit is a morbid desire to enforce the fact on other people.”

“Subtle,” murmured Grahame, who never spoke above his middle tones, “but I am not convinced. Sibella thinks a great deal too much of herself.”

“It is better than thinking too little of one’s self,” said Sibella, blowing rings of smoke and pursing up her lips deliciously, till I could have cried out on her for heartlessness.

“Very much better,” I assented. “People who think too little of themselves generally end by a mock humility which is a form of conceit infinitely tedious. No, believe me, the vanity you decry has in it something of virtue.”

Grahame turned to Sibella.

“Haven’t you noticed, Sibella, how much older Israel has grown of late?”

“Not in looks,” cried Sibella. “To-night he looks like a boy.”

This idea pleased me. The author of the secret that lay in young Gascoyne’s grave looking almost a boy savoured of the incongruous, for which I had developed an appetite.

“I didn’t mean in appearance,” said Grahame. “Israel looks as if he had never had a trouble.”

The idea pleased me even more. Grahame’s criticism showed that I was playing my game with the right effect, and that the weeks of prostration following on the successful coup at Lowhaven had left no effect. Sibella, from her very nature, could not forbear giving me one or two glances with just enough of feeling in them to fill the atmosphere with a vague suggestion of sentimentality, but I behaved as if the very air she breathed was not to me love’s own narcotic. I fought fiercely against myself lest I should give the least sign that her power over me was supreme as ever.

“What lovely chocolates you used to bring me, Israel!”

I laughed buoyantly.

“Ah, but you remember the first Lionel brought you. They cost more.”

“As if I cared for that!”

Grahame laughed in his turn.

“As if, Sibella dear, you ever cared for anything else.”

Grahame had the most incomparable way of pointing out people’s faults to their faces without offence.

Sibella, however, looked angry.

“No one can say that I am mercenary.”

I was at some pains not to join Grahame in the roar of laughter provoked by this remark. Sibella knew of old how impossible it was for her to cope with Grahame, so she turned the batteries of her anger on me.

“I believe you quite agree with Grahame.”

“What about?”

“About my being mercenary.”

“I am sure I don’t.”

“Then why did you laugh?”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, I’m not mercenary, am I?”

“Of course not.” I smiled.

She detected the irony.

“Lionel never says such things to me.” For one instant I felt the lash and smarted. I was half inclined to retort “Lionel is the prince of good manners,” but that would have given her the satisfaction she was waiting for, and most likely she would have gone to bed.

Grahame at heart was very proud of Sibella, but he, like myself, was under no delusions about her. His special fondness was also partly a result of their having been so much together as children. Mr. and Mrs. Hallward’s other children were much older, and with the exception of Miss Hallward, an unmarried spinster verging on forty, were either married or out in the world. Miss Hallward, who must have been singularly handsome in her youth, and who as a matter of fact was so still, had devoted her whole life to her brothers and sisters, and was particularly fond of Sibella, who made use of her in every possible way. Miss Hallward had always been singularly kind to me, and I liked her.

I could well remember an incident which occurred on the occasion of one of my first visits to the house. Sibella had been asked to do something by Miss Hallward and had refused, and, working herself into a rage, had told her sister, who at that time could not have been more than thirty, that she was a disappointed old maid and that nobody had wanted to marry her because she was so unattractive. Miss Hallward had grown very white, and had turned on Sibella with a fierceness I never saw her display before or after. The occurrence was unimportant, except that it served to frame her, as it were, in the past of an unhappy love story, and she was always the more interesting to me because of it.

When I said good-bye to Sibella I felt sure that she was more interested in me than she had been since as a boy of sixteen I had declared my passion and had been granted the privilege of kissing her when opportunity offered, little love passages of which Grahame had remained in entire ignorance. I also saw that I had succeeded in giving her the impression I was aiming at—that I was wholly freed from her spell. To a girl of Sibella’s temperament this is at all times amazing, and so far from being glad at her rejected lover being in spirits she was at pains to detect the unhealed wound. Still, she was in her way really in love with Lionel Holland, and was not prepared to invest more than the smallest superfluity of coquetry and fascination in bringing me again into her net. I verily believe it would have given her some pleasure to see Holland and myself at each other’s throats. Then she would probably have been content to leave me to some other woman. Had she known how near I was at times to seizing her in my arms and kissing her, with or without her will, she would have been satisfied—more, I think she would have been frightened.

She had a peculiar and unexpected effect on me. I found myself wavering in my purpose, and returning once more to the question which I had thought decided as to whether the risk I ran was worth the prize. I even found myself troubled with scruples as to the taking of life, and for some weeks was in serious danger of abandoning my undertaking.

And yet I cannot say that Sibella had any direct influence for good upon me, and it would have been hard to define why she should have exercised a restraining influence upon me at all.

I continued my visits to the Hallwards and saw that her pique at my apparent indifference to her engagement grew.

She might have been content with the number of admirers to whom it had obviously been a matter of some moment, but Sibella wanted the one admirer to care who was apparently indifferent.

I evidently pleased Mr. Gascoyne at the office, for his cordiality towards me increased daily. I threw into my manner towards him just as much of the filial attitude as I could without suggesting the least desire to usurp the place of his dead son.

After a few weeks he asked me to come and dine and meet his wife.

“By the way, Rank, my wife does not know that you are a relative of mine, and for certain reasons I would sooner you did not mention it—at least yet.”

He was evidently nervous lest his wife might think he had been quick to fill their dead son’s place.

“I have my reasons, and I am asking you to oblige me,” he added cordially, noting the faint look of surprise I thought it policy to assume; it would never have done to let him think I could be treated unceremoniously.

I dined at the house in South Kensington, outside which I had so often watched. It seemed a quiet and sad household. Mrs. Gascoyne possessed the feminine capacity for filling the house with the presence of her dead, and turning a home into a tomb. Mr. Gascoyne was pleased that I managed to make her smile once or twice, and said as much as we sat over our wine.

“I am afraid there is very little to amuse you here, but I should be glad if you would dine with us now and then. I think my wife likes you. You have dignity, and she always likes people with dignity.”

I laughed.

“You have been very good to me, sir,” I said.

“I see in you excellent qualities, Israel.” It was the first time he had ever called me by my Christian name. I was obviously progressing in his esteem.

He was right. I had excellent qualities. I always had. I am affectionate, naturally truthful and kind-hearted. My secret deeds have been an abstraction, in no way in tune with the middle tones of my character.

Mr. Gascoyne was essentially a business man, and it was my business qualities which appealed to him most. I had a natural gift for order and method, and although he was not given to praise, I detected a look of pleased surprise when I displayed some unusual perception of what was wanted in a particular situation. Lionel Holland, who at least seemed to have imbibed a wholesome fear of irritating me when we were together, could not witness my progress in the scale of prosperity without making an attempt to injure me in the eyes of my employer.

It appeared that he knew a fellow-clerk of mine, a youth who considered that I had ousted him from the place which should in time have been his. I had not been in the office a couple of hours before I grasped this fact. He was a pleasant fellow enough in an ordinary way, but his disappointment had brought out—as far as his relations towards me were concerned—his worst points. He had a slight acquaintance with Lionel Holland. This acquaintance the latter improved upon, and I was not a little surprised to find Harry Cust one Sunday afternoon sitting in the Hallwards’ drawing-room. He was staying with Lionel from Saturday till Monday, and I think it gave his host infinite pleasure to introduce him where I had been known from childhood—though what particular satisfaction it was to him I could not quite see.

I soon realised that my life’s history was in the possession of my fellow-clerks. I was too much in favour with Mr. Gascoyne for them to venture to show the contempt they felt because my mother had let lodgings. I would have been glad if one of them had had the temerity to throw it in my teeth, for an insult to my dead mother would have found me a perfectly normal person with an absolutely primal sense of loyalty.