Scandal: A Novel

by Cosmo Hamilton

Franklin locked his door.

He knew very well that within ten minutes Ida Larpent would be upon him and that inevitably, being told by Beatrix of the latest move, Malcolm would be down to see what he could do. He had no wish to see anyone at that moment, not even his best friend.

He quietly loaded and lit a pipe, sat down in his favorite arm-chair, shoved his hands into his pockets and his long legs out and settled down to think. He hadn't done such a thing since the night of his father's death when for the second time in his young life grief had seized him by the throat and there did not seem to be one speck of light on his black horizon.

He went back to the night in New York, which was still within easy reach, when he and Malcolm had caught sight of Beatrix and Sutherland York. He was then his own master, heart-whole, a complete individualist, in the almost uncanny position of being free from responsibility, at the beck and call of no living creature. He was then one of the very few men in civilization who was able to go through life unattached either to a business or a cause. He was able to buy almost everything that caught his fancy. The one thing that all the money in the world cannot purchase he was lucky enough to possess. He had health. He was sound in wind and limb.

He followed himself into his antler-hung studio and stood again looking round its crowded walls, suddenly and for the first time impatient of his games, realizing that his toys were empty and meaningless. Malcolm's surprising outburst about Beatrix rang again in his ears. He remembered that it had drawn from him a sort of prayer. "My God," he had said, "I wonder when I shall begin to live!"

Then he went over the ground from New York to the Vanderdyke House in the new car which had provided him with a momentary thrill. He had gone reluctantly because his interest in meeting Ida Larpent again was not keen. Their friendship had been very pleasant and agreeable but it had served its purpose. And then he saw himself, the super-individualist, as sceptical of Fate as all young men are, come down into the hall to be met by Beatrix with her urgent plea for help.

Without hesitation or motive, without thought or fear of consequences he had given his help and in an instant had lost his detachment, his splendid isolation, and rendered himself liable to responsibility, signed on to life's roll-call as the slave of a cause.

The amazing irony of it all only came to him in its utter nakedness as he sat there, locked into his own room, summing up the subsequent rush of events. In one careless moment he had flung his freedom away for the girl in whom he had never been able to squeeze up any sort of interest, the girl who had been the unconscious cause of his discontent and self-disgust, the girl to whom he had intended to give the spurs, who had set the torch of love to his breast and who was now to be allowed to go free and unpunished merely because she disarmed him with a smile.

He got up and walked about.

It might be that what people call Fate,—he was vaguely inclined to believe that their word for it was not the honest one,—had suddenly, in the multiplicity of its daily work, become interested in his particular case and in that curious and almost ineradicable way, given him a very good reason for beginning to live,—or was it one of the haphazard incidents that come into the lives of human beings from out of the clouds, not in the nature of tests or trials, but as mere accidents out of which to shuffle in the best possible manner?