The Socialist

by Guy Thorne

And he was thoroughly unhappy and disturbed.

His friends, the young aristocrats of Paul's, had long noticed the change in him. It had become an occasion of common talk among them, and no one was able to explain it. The general theory—believed by some and scouted by others—was that the duke was still suffering from the shocks of the terrible railway accident outside Paddington Station and his torture and imprisonment at the hands of the vile gang in the West End slum.

It was thought that his mind had not recovered tone, that his hours of melancholy and brooding were the result of that. Men tried to cheer him up, to take him out of himself, but with poor success. His manner and his habits seemed utterly changed. The members of the gang who had kidnapped and imprisoned the duke had been tried at the sessions of the Central Criminal Court and were sentenced to various lengthy terms of imprisonment. The duke had gone up from Oxford to be present at the trial. When he returned he refused to speak of it, but his friends learnt from the daily papers that the ringleader of the criminals had been sent into penal servitude for no less than twenty years, and that, by special permission of the judge, the duke had spent several hours with the prisoner directly sentence had been pronounced.

Such a proceeding was so utterly unlike the duke, and his reticence about it was so complete, that every one was lost in wonder and conjecture.

And there was more than this: during term the duke hardly entertained at all. His horses were exercised by grooms, and he took no part in social life. And worse than all, from the point of view of his Oxford friends, he began to frequent sets of whose existence he had hardly been aware before. This shocked the "bloods" of the 'Varsity more than anything else. It was incredible and alarming. Had the duke been a lesser man he himself would have been dropped. Few outsiders are aware of, or can possibly realise, the extent to which exclusiveness and a sort of glorified snobbery prevails in certain circles at Oxford. Social dimensions are marked with a rigidity utterly unknown elsewhere. Even the greater Society of the outside world is not so exclusive.

It was known that the duke was in the habit of taking long walks alone with a poor scholar of his own college. The man was of no birth at all, a "rank outsider," called Burnside. The duke was constantly being seen with this man and with others of his friends—fellows who wore black clothes and thick boots and never played any games. It was nothing less than a scandal!

Now and then men who went to the duke's rooms would find strange visitors from London there, people who might have come from another world, so remote were they in appearance, speech, and mode of thought. And the worst of it all was that the duke kept his own counsel, and nobody dared to comment upon the change in his hearing. There was a reserve and dignity about him, a sense of power and restrained force which chilled the curiosity of even intimate friends. They all felt that something ought to be done; nobody knew how to set about it. Then, unexpectedly, an opportunity presented itself. Lord Hayle was thrown from his horse and was taken to the private hospital with a broken leg. As soon as it was allowed all the men of his set—the exclusive set to which he and the duke belonged—paid him frequent visits. Lord Hayle himself had noted with growing dissatisfaction and perplexity the marked change in his future brother-in-law. He saw that John was moody and preoccupied, seemed to have some secret trouble, and was changing all his habits. This distressed and grieved him, but he had said nothing of it to his sister or any one else, hoping that it was but a passing phase. Moreover, he had only seen the commencement of the change. Away from everything in the hospital he had not been able to witness the full development.

His friends enlightened him; they told him everything in detail, and urged him to remonstrate.

"It will come better from you than from any one else, Hayle," they said. "You are Paddington's closest friend, and he's going to marry your sister. It really is your duty to try and bring him back to his old self and to find out what really is the matter with him."