The Arbiter: A Novel

by Lady Florence Eveleen Eleanore Olliffe Bell

"But, Robert," Anna said, "I don't feel it is sent to us for that."

"Sent!" said Pateley. "Well, that is one way of putting it."

But he did not enlarge upon the point. He accepted his sisters just as they were, with their limitations, their principles, and everything. He was not particularly susceptible to beauty and distinction, in the sense of these qualities being necessary to his belongings, and perhaps it was as well. Anna and Jane, though they looked undeniably like gentlewomen, had nothing else about them that was particularly agreeable to look upon. Nor were they either of them very strikingly ugly, or, indeed, strikingly anything. Jane was the better looking of the two. It was, perhaps, a rather heartless freak of destiny that life should have ordained her to live with somebody who was like a parody of herself, older, rounder, thicker, plainer. Living apart they might each have passed muster; living together they somehow made their ugliness, like their income, go further. But in the composite photograph it was Anna who predominated. It was a pity, for she was the stumpier of the two.

Long and earnest were the discussions the little sisters had that night after their splendid brother had departed, until by the time they went to bed they were prepared, or so it seemed to them, to launch their existence on a dizzy career of extravagance. They were going, as they expressed it, to put their establishment on another footing, which meant that instead of being attended by an inexperienced young person of eighteen they were to have an arrogant one of twenty-five. Their own elderly servant had declined to face the temptations of London, and had remained behind, living close to their old home. And, greatest event of all, they had at length—it was now summer, but that didn't matter, furs were cheaper—yielded to the thought which they had been alternately caressing and dismissing for months, and they were each going to buy a Fur Cloak. The days in which this all important purchase was being considered were to the Miss Pateleys days of pure enjoyment. Days of walks along Oxford Street, no longer so bewildered by the noise of London traffic, the discovery of some shop in an out of the way place whose wares were about half the price of the more fashionable quarters. The days were full of glorious possibilities.

It was two days after that evening visit of Pateley's to his sisters, which had so gilded and transformed their existence, that sinister rumours began to float over London, bringing deadly anxiety in their wake. Telegrams kept pouring in, and were posted all over the town, becoming more and more serious as the day went on: "Disturbances in South Africa. Hostile encounter between English and Germans. Cape to Cairo Railway stopped. Collapse of the 'Equator, Ltd.,'" until by nightfall the whole of England knew the pitifully unimportant incidents from which such tragic consequences were springing—that a group of travelling missionaries, halting unawares on German territory and chanting their evening hymns, had been disturbed by a rough fellow who came jeering into their midst, that one of the devout group had finally ejected him, with such force that he had rolled over with his head on a stone and died then and there; and that the Germans were insisting upon having vengeance. As for the "Equator, Ltd.," nobody knew exactly in what the collapse consisted. The wildest reports were circulated respecting it; one saying that it was in the hands of the Germans, another that they had destroyed the plant that was ready to work it, another again, and it was the one that gained the most credence, that there was no gold in the mine at all, and that the whole thing was a swindle. The offices of the "Equator" were closed for the night. They would probably be besieged the next morning by an angry crowd eager to sell out, but the shares would now be hardly worth the paper they were written upon. Pateley, in a frenzy of anxiety, in whichever direction he looked—for his sisters, for himself, for his party, for the Cape to Cairo Railway—spent the night at his office to see which way events were going to turn. In his unreasoning anger, as the day of misfortune dawned next morning, against destiny, against the far-away unknown missionaries, against all the adverse forces that were standing in the way of his wishes, there was one concrete figure in the foreground upon whom he could justifiably pour out his wrath: Sir William Gore, the Chairman of the "Equator," who, in the public opinion, was responsible for the undertaking. He would go to see Sir William that very day as soon as it was possible. In the meantime he would go round to his sisters to try to prepare them for the unfavourable turn that their circumstances after all might possibly take. As, sorely troubled at what he had to say, he came up into their little sitting-room, he found it bright with flowers; the fragrance of sweet peas filled the air. Anna, who had longed for flowers all her life and had welcomed with tremulous gratitude the rare opportunities that had come in her way of receiving any, had suddenly realised that it might not be sinful to buy them. The joy that she had in the handful bought from a street vendor was cheap, after all, at the price that might have seemed exorbitant if it had been spent on the flowers alone.

"Robert," said Jane, almost before he was inside the room, "guess what we are going to do?"

"Something very naughty, I'm afraid," Anna said, excited and shy at the same time. She was generally less able than Jane to overcome the awe that they both felt of a relation so great and so beneficent, so altogether perfect, as their brother Robert, but at this moment she was intoxicated by the possession of wealth, by the sense of luxury, of well-being, by that fragrance of the spirit her imagination added to the fragrance of the flowers that stood near her. "We're each going to buy a fur cloak like that, look!" And she held out to him proudly the picture in the inside cover of the Realm of Fashion, representing a tall, slender, undulating lady, about as unlike herself as could well have been imagined, wrapped in a beautiful clinging garment of which the lining, turned back, displayed an exquisite fur. Pateley, as we have said, was not as a rule given to an excess of sensibility. He did not ridicule sentiment in others, but neither did he share it; that point of view was simply not visible to him. Suddenly, however, on this evening he had a moment of what felt to himself a most inconvenient access of emotion. There was a plain and obvious pathos in this particular situation that it needed no very fine sensibilities to grasp, in the sight of his sister, her small, thickset little figure encased in her ugly little gown, looking up appealingly to him over her spectacles with the joy of a child in the toy she was going to buy. It was probably the first, the very first time in her life, that she had had that particular experience. Added to the joy of getting the thing she coveted was the sense of having looked a conscientious scruple in the face, and seen it fly before her like an evil spirit before a spell. She had routed the enemy, pushed aside the obstacle in front of her, and, excited, and flushed with victory, was looking round on a bigger world and a fairer view. Pateley, to his own surprise, found himself absolutely incapable of putting into words what he had come to say, not a thing that often happened to him. In wonder at his not answering at once, Anna, misinterpreting his very slight pause, caught herself up quickly and said anxiously—

"That is what you suggested, isn't it, Robert? You are quite sure you approve of it?"

"Yes, yes, I approve," he said heartily, recovering himself. "Of course. Go ahead."