Nor does a young man whose inherited instincts are all in fierce war with his new convictions listen unmoved to gracious counsel such as this from the Titular Head of all nobility, for whose ancestors his own had bled on many a historic field.
He had stood quite alone. Mary Marriott, his wife that was to be, had given him no help. Tender, loving, ready to marry him at any cost, she nevertheless stood aloof from influencing his decision in the hour of trial.
He tried hard to get help and support from her, to make her love confirm his resolution, but he tried in vain. With the clear sanity of a noble mind, the girl refused to throw so much as a feather-weight into the scale of the balance, though in this she also suffered (secretly) as much as he.
Then he went to the others, sick and sore from the buffetings he was receiving at all hands—from his own order and from the great public press they influenced, from the great solid middle-class of the country which, more than anything else perhaps, preserves the level of wise-dealing and order in England. The others were as dumb as the girl he loved. It was true that a section of the Socialist party, the noisy, blatant—and possibly insincere—big drum party, hailed him as prophet, seer, martyr, and Galahad in one. But there was a furious vulgarity about this sort of thing which was more unnerving, and made him more wretched than anything else at all. Such people spoke a different language from his own, a different language from that of Fabian Rose and his friends. They said the same thing perhaps—he was inclined to doubt even that sometimes—but the dialect offended fastidious ears, the attitude offended one accustomed to a certain comeliness and reticence even in the new life and surroundings into which he had been thrown. Both the Pope and General Booth, for example, serve One Master, and live for Our Lord. But it is conceivable that if the Bishop of Rome could be present at a mass meeting of the Salvation Army in the Albert Hall, he would leave it a very puzzled and disgusted prelate indeed.
Rose and his friends avoided influencing the duke, of set purpose. They were high-minded men and women, but they were also psychologists, and trained deeply in the one science which can dominate the human mind and human opinion.
They wanted the Duke of Paddington badly. They wanted the enormous impetus to the movement that his accession would bring; they wanted the great revenues which would provide sinews of war for a vast campaign. But they knew that nothing would be more disastrous than an illustrious convert who would fall away. The duke had been left alone.
For a month after the few words he had addressed to the people at the theatre supper, the struggle had continued. His name was in every one's mouth. It would not be too much to say that all Europe set itself to wonder what would be the outcome. The journals of England and the Continent teemed with denunciation, praise, sneers. Tolstoi sent a long message—the thing fermented furiously, and, instructed by the journalists, even the man in the street recognised that here was something more than even the renunciation of one man of great possessions for an idea—that it would create—one way or the other—a disintegrating or binding force, that a precedent would establish itself, that vast issues were involved.
After a week of it, the duke disappeared. Only a few of his friends knew where he was, and they were pledged not to say. He was fighting it out alone in a little mountain village of the Riviera—Roquebume, which hangs like a bird's nest on the Alps between Monte Carlo and Mentone, and where the patient friendly olive growers of the mountain steppes never knew who the quiet young Englishman was who sat in the little auberge under the walls of the Saracen stronghold and watched the goats and the children rolling in the warm dusk, or stared steadfastly out over the Mediterranean far below, to where the distant cliffs of Corsica gleamed like pearls in the sun.
He came back to England, his decision made, his first resolve strengthened into absolute, assured purpose. The ruffians who had kidnapped him on the night of the railway accident had been unable to torture him into buying his freedom. For what to him would have been nothing—a penny to a beggar—he might have gone free. And yet he had nearly died rather than give in. Save for the chance or Providence which brought his rescuers to him in the very last moment, he would have died—there is no doubt about it.
Now again, he was firm as granite. His mind was made up, nothing could alter it nor move it. His hand had been placed upon the plough. It was going to remain there, and he left the palms and orange groves of the South a man doubly vowed. He had married at once. Mary Marriott became a duchess. Several problems arose. Should he drop his title—that was one of them. He refused to do so, and in his refusal was strongly backed up by the real leaders of the movement. "You were born Duke of Paddington," said Rose, "and there is no earthly reason why you should become Mr. John something or other. It would only be a pretence, and if you do, I shall change my own name to James Fabian Turnip! and as I have always told you Socialism never says that all men are equal—true Socialism that is. It only says that all men have equal rights! At the same time some of our noisy friends will go for you—though you won't mind that!" They did "go for" him. Despite the fact that he had given up everything—his friends and relatives, his order, his tastes, there was not wanting a certain section of the baser socialistic press which spoke of "The young man with great possessions" who would give up much but not all; like all professional sectarians, rushing to the Gospels in an extremity to pick and choose a few comfortable texts from the history of One whom they alternately held up as the First Great Socialist, and then denied His definite claims to be the Veritable Son of God.