Chapter XIII
“My niece is staying with us, Israel,” said Mr. Gascoyne one afternoon as he was leaving the office. “Will you dine with us on Friday evening?”
I said I should be delighted. Mr. Gascoyne and his wife had stayed at the Grange till the summer was almost over, and I knew that Miss Gascoyne was going to shut the house up for the winter, and that there was a possibility of her selling it in the spring.
She looked very stately and beautiful in her deep mourning, and was evidently glad to see me. We were together for fully a quarter of an hour before Mr. and Mrs. Gascoyne came down, and she talked quite freely and unconstrainedly of her brother.
The more I saw of her, the more I was struck by her absolute lack of pose in any small acceptation of the word. It positively gave me a sense of personal dignity to be with her.
“I am thinking of selling the Grange,” she said. “So long as there was my brother it seemed to me a certain sort of duty that the offshoots of a great family should keep up an appearance and have a fair country residence.” Then she smiled. “I am afraid, however, that my views are changing. I don’t look upon the Gascoynes as quite such great people as I used to do, though I still think that if one bears a great name one owes it a duty.”
“I am half a Jew,” I said, boldly, “and as an Oriental I have a great respect for caste and authority.”
“Do you think that is why the Jews succeed so well?”
“Yes; their chief aim is to remain at peace with the powers that be, and as Orientals they are satisfied that authority in this country abuses its privileges very little. They have no craving for more liberty.”
“They are a curious race.”
“I am not a Jew by religion, you know. I was baptised a Christian.”
She smiled.
“I don’t wish to be rude, but is that as far as your Christianity has reached?”
“My mother was a very religious woman. That is, she tested everything by her conscience, and always held that that was an unfailing standard.”
It was really quite wonderful on what a high platform I could conduct a conversation.
Mr. and Mrs. Gascoyne came in, and we went to dinner. The affection that had arisen between these two women was quite extraordinary, and it was surprising to see Miss Gascoyne yielding to her aunt something of the deference of a daughter, although I am certain she would have rejected the insinuation that she could ever put anyone in the place of the mother she had idolised.
The conversation turned on the Gascoyne family.
“Do you know,” said Mr. Gascoyne, “I was quite astonished to find how near our friend Israel is to the succession.”
It was an awkward remark, and Mr. Gascoyne evidently felt it to be so as soon as he had made it. The subject was allowed to drop at the moment, but Mr. Gascoyne revived it when we were alone.
“I can’t think how I came to make such a foolish remark, Israel. It cannot have failed to remind them both of what you have gained by their loss.”
This was exactly what I feared.
“I cannot be said to have gained much. Lord Gascoyne has a son and heir.”
“Let us consider. If Lord Gascoyne and his son were to die, you succeed as heir to your mother; that is, of course, when the two Henry Gascoynes, Ughtred, and myself, are out of the way—and none of us count for much. You see, the succession does not reach the female heir till it has been carried down to the last male heir. Rather hard on the women of the female lines, but so it is.”
“I am afraid, sir, it will be my lot to drudge along in the City all my life.”
“You are not the sort of person who ends as a drudge, Israel. Besides, go on as you are doing, and who knows what may happen.”
I guessed by the intonation of his voice that he was considering whether he should tell me more of his intentions.
When we returned to the drawing-room I played and sang to them till late, and left the house high in the good graces of both women. From that moment my position in the house at South Kensington became a much more intimate one. Even two women as independent by nature as Mrs. Gascoyne and her niece found it pleasant and convenient to have a young man about who was ready to take so much trouble off their hands. This was, of course, not so apparent till the first months of mourning were over, but when Miss Gascoyne, who was devoted to music and art, began to go to concerts and picture-galleries I was very useful.
I learned that Lord and Lady Gascoyne had called on Mrs. Gascoyne and her niece, and that the three were going to dine with them.
I sincerely hoped that my name would not be mentioned, as I had no wish for the head of the family to know of my existence till I had decided on my plan of action.
I had been inquiring cautiously about Ughtred Gascoyne, and had made a point of coming across him several times in the districts he haunted. He was a very good-looking man, with apparently no such mentality as provoked restlessness. He enjoyed his life thoroughly, for all I could see. He had been in the Guards. He had also sat in the House of Commons for a limited period, and had utterly declined to repeat the experiment. In fact, the two ventures, together with a short period of Court life, had in his own eyes been activity enough, and he had settled down to a life of ease. Having a good income of his own, and being welcome at Hammerton as often as he chose to go there, existence was altogether a pleasant affair. Still, fifty-five is young for a man nowadays, and he might very well marry and have a whole family of children. Selfish and apparently confirmed bachelors do very often in middle age perform a complete right-about-face, and end up as the benignant fathers of a whole troop of boys and girls. Ughtred Gascoyne had now arrived at that age when a man may by some such shock as hearing himself described as “that old bore” be driven into matrimony.
At present there did not seem to be much chance of it. There was a woman in his life, however. She was an actress, Catherine Goodsall, a woman of birth, who moved in very good society, and who, being neither a great tragedienne nor a great comedienne, managed to earn a salary larger than could be achieved by cleverer and more legitimate artistes on account of the extraordinary chic and distinction she could import into the delineation of smart society women. She was so much the real thing, so entirely free from the metallic artificiality of the usual impersonator of such characters, that managers sought her continually.
She had a husband somewhere, poor soul, a man who had been in the Navy, a blackguard who had been untrue to the dearest traditions of the British tar by laying his hand on a female otherwise than in the way of kindness; in fact, he had beaten her, and Ughtred Gascoyne had thrashed him, and, strange to relate, the wife had been grateful.
The husband had then disappeared. She had been unable to obtain a divorce, but society, recognising the plucky way in which she had managed to earn her own living, accepted her intimate friendship with Ughtred Gascoyne for the innocent affair it pretended to be.
Her position, perhaps, had also something to do with the fact that she had a keen tongue and a ready wit. Her tongue would have been a weapon to be dreaded had it not been that she had the superlatively rare quality of using it with discretion. Her somewhat unique social position earned her the envy of her fellow artistes, the majority of whom retain such footing as they have in society on sufferance, their insecurity by no means being caused by their profession; for, were it not for their calling, the majority of the theatrical sisterhood, even of the higher ranks, would still be moving in their own proper slatternly or suburban circles.
Perhaps it would be possible to reach the Honourable Ughtred through her. She was not above the weakness common to most women of fashion of possessing a craving for new male friends. I chose an opportunity when Ughtred Gascoyne was out of town to obtain an introduction to her. This was not a difficult matter. I kept my eyes on the advertisements of charitable performances and bazaars to which she was very generous in contributing her services. A bazaar would be the thing, being the sort of entertainment at which it was fairly easy to force an introduction.
I had not long to wait. She was announced to hold a stall at a fashionable bazaar. The particular object of it I forget, but I remember that it was at a town-hall a mile or two from Piccadilly Circus. She had charge of a photographic stall, and I had my photograph taken in such a variety of positions that long before the operation was over, and aided by the mention of one or two mutual friends, we had become sufficiently acquainted for me to remain and help her. Nothing, as I had calculated, could have been more likely to bring about a rapid intimacy, and before I left I had been asked to go and see her.
She had a small house on the north side of the Park, and I made up my mind to call on Sunday afternoon, but before that day I received a note asking me to come to lunch.
“A great many people drop in on Sunday afternoon in the winter,” she said when I arrived. “I should probably see nothing of you, and new friends always interest me. People think that a bad trait, don’t they, whereas it is nothing of the kind.”
“It certainly is not. It shows a progressive mind—that is, if there is no premature protestation.”
“Exactly. New friends should have just as many fresh points of interest as, say, a picture-gallery. I love to watch new temperaments; they blaze and change like sunsets.”
“You are quite right; but I hope this does not infer that you tire of your friends easily.”
“Not of the residuum. The majority pass, of course. One would miss an immense amount of good comradeship if everything which cannot be lasting is to be avoided.”
“You are not fickle?”
“Not in the least. We all have our inner sanctuary, and consequently we have our esoteric and exoteric friendships, and the lookers-on make mistakes as to which is which.”
“That is very true. There is nothing in which people are so much deceived about each other as in their emotions. Human nature is so much more many-sided than the world is willing to admit.”
“You believe that the good are not as good as they would have us believe, nor the bad as bad?”
“Exactly.”
She was a woman worth talking to, and I roused myself.
“It can be demonstrated. Goodness is largely a question of having aptitude for the latest conventions.”
“Demonstrate,” she challenged, and then added: “Personally, I feel it, but have not the proof to hand.”
I took up the challenge easily.
“For instance, in ancient Sparta, thieving was a virtue and cowardice a crime. Nowadays, a coward may get along very well, but a thief would probably come to grief very soon. So it is with many other things.”
“You think that a criminal may make a charming member of society, a good husband and father?”
I winced. The conversation was extracting opinions from me which were just as well concealed, but I answered frankly:
“I am sure of it.”
“So am I.”
I continued whimsically:
“Don’t you think society would be much happier if, instead of these horrible punishments and immurings, people who had been convicted of a crime should be compelled to wear some outward sign that they were not to be trusted in that particular direction? It should be treated as a disease, not as a disgrace.”
“A little difficult to enforce, eh?”
“Not at all. We should all be up in arms if Brown came to lunch without the governmental mark that he was not to be trusted with forks and spoons, and without the least acrimony we should call in a policeman who would correct the matter.”
“It might be carried still further, and people might be obliged to wear the evidence of their particular moral failing.”
“Everybody would lie, and which do you think would be the most popular hypocrisy?”
“In England, drink; because in the eyes of the average citizen of this country it would carry with it the least shame.”
“Well said; but to my mind there is no vice which is not preferable, and yet people will shake a drunkard by the hand when they would shrink from a criminal of the emotions.”
We both agreed that this was ridiculous. I had not been in the house an hour before I realised that she was a very charming woman, and that she was sincerely in love with Ughtred Gascoyne.
She harped a good deal on friendship, as if to exaggerate her sense of its value, and send the hearer away with the notion that a pure friendship between man and woman was her ideal.
I have, however, always had a keen instinct for the subtleties of female deception, and I was fully alive to the trend of her dissertations on friendship. They were the weapons she kept constantly in use for the defence of her character. She need not have been so careful, for the attacks and insinuations on her reputation were far fewer than she imagined. She was one of the chartered exceptions to the general demands of propriety. These exceptions exist to a certain degree, even in the most straight-laced society. She made some witty remark about the suburbs, that never-failing topic for the jests of those who consider themselves the elect of the social citadel of Mayfair.
“I am a suburban,” I answered. “I was brought up in Clapham.”
“You hardly suggest the suburbs,” she answered, unabashed.
“Oh, believe me, there are people of distinction in the suburbs.”
“Of course; only, one must have one’s little joke about them. Personally, I always tell my friends that they must not be too sure that they are free from the parochial because they dwell within hail of Piccadilly Circus.”
“Still, I think that, after all, the Londoner has a quickness and intelligence denied to the provincial, don’t you?”
“Yes, to the provincial, but not necessarily to the inhabitants of greater London. The guttersnipe of Manchester is a very stupid creature after your Cockney urchin.”
We went upstairs and talked until her regular coterie dropped in.
Sir Anthony Cross, whom I had met at Lady Pebworth’s, was one of the first to arrive. He did not like me, but, to my surprise, drew me into a corner.
“Do you remember, Rank, that evening the Pebworths and ourselves went to the Gaiety?”
“Perfectly.”
“You bowed to an awfully pretty woman in the stalls. She was with a good-looking bounder.”
I knew perfectly well whom he meant, of course; but, as he paused for me to refresh my memory, I looked puzzled.
“You must remember—an extraordinarily pretty woman.”
I still looked blank.
“Surely you must remember. A fair woman with fluffy hair and enormous blue eyes, but not a bit dolly, like most fair women. Rather a large mouth.”
“Oh yes; I think I remember.”
“Well, I fancy she’s married to that man.”
“If it’s the girl I think you mean, she is married to him. Her name is Sibella Holland.” It was not very well-bred to call Lionel Holland a bounder without first finding out if he was a friend of mine.
“What a ripping name! They’ve got a flat below mine. I should very much like to know them.”
“Do you want me to introduce you?”
Considering that Sir Anthony had gone out of his way on more than one occasion to be rude to me, I could not help thinking that there was a certain insolence in his obvious readiness to make use of me. If he intended doing so, however, I should certainly return the compliment.
“I am obliged to hurry away now, but that’s my address. I am usually at home between six and seven.”
I gave him a card and said good-bye.
I had promised to spend the evening with the Gascoynes. I was making immense strides with their niece, and I fancy that both Mr. and Mrs. Gascoyne were a little surprised at our having so much in common.