Israel Rank

by Roy Horniman

“I’ll come over on Sunday,” I said.

“Do.” He understood my anxiety to impress Sibella with the idea that I did not care. I wondered whether things would have been different had Sibella known of my altered prospects. I was convinced that I held at least an equal place with Lionel Holland in such affection as Sibella was capable of. It was Thursday; by Sunday I might possibly have conquered the first sting of chagrin sufficiently to conceal my feelings. The excitement of my new venture in life was entirely lost in the night of despair I passed. Equally with the Gascoyne earldom, Sibella was my ambition. She was the kind of girl to whom the position of Countess Gascoyne would have come quite naturally. In common with her brothers and sisters she had that which would have enabled her to carry off any dignity, frivolous and superficial as her real nature was. I had dreamed of the joy of placing her in a position so very much above anything she could have expected.

Still, the battle was not over. I believed in my power to conquer her in competition with Lionel Holland, if I were given equal worldly advantages, and it seemed as if such advantages were coming my way.

The fact that I was unable to idealise Sibella never cooled my love. I burned for her, and frankly confessed it. For the rest, she had spirits and special magnetism enough to make her a delightful companion. A great many of her faults matched my own weaknesses. I sympathised with her desire for beautiful clothes at any cost, as well as with her yearning for the right of entry to that society which the middle classes exalt by envying and imitating.

I made up my mind to fight, and went for the first time to Mr. Gascoyne’s office somewhat comforted by the mere determination to give battle to my rival.

I discovered very speedily that the work suited me admirably. The rest of the clerks evidently gathered that my being taken into the firm had been made a special feature of, for they treated me almost with deference.

I had by this time fixed on the next member of the Gascoyne family whom I intended to remove. It was Henry Gascoyne, the orphan son of Patrick Gascoyne. He had a sister, but all intervening females yielded precedence to my mother, as heiress to her father. It was therefore not necessary to consider her. Her brother was about twenty-two years of age, and by a little inquiry I learned that he was at Oxford, where he had already gained a reputation as one of those who might do wonderful things if he chose to apply himself, but who preferred to be content with the reputation of his potentialities and the cultivation of as much muscle as was consistent with nights spent in hard drinking. I inspected his father’s will at Somerset House, and learned that he and his sister had been left some fifteen thousand pounds apiece, which capital, however, they could not touch till Henry Gascoyne was twenty-five. His sister was entirely devoted to him, and spent her own income in keeping up a small house in the New Forest which he had inherited from his father. He would have been content to let the whole place go to rack and ruin, but devotion to her father’s memory, and a desire to have a place which her brother might look upon as home, induced her to support the establishment entirely out of her own resources. So much I had learned from two or three visits paid at irregular intervals to the neighbourhood.

Chapter VIII

The Sunday after Grahame had brought me the news of Sibella’s engagement I visited the Hallwards. I managed to get through a conventional speech of congratulation, stung to self-possession by a certain radiance and exhilaration in Sibella’s bearing. Grahame had told them of my good fortune, and there was a distinct change of manner towards me on the part of the other members of the family. They had never wholly believed that I was related to the Gascoynes, or had thought that if it were true I was making the most of a very remote connection. To them I had been the object for as much patronage as they dared display towards one not prone to endure condescension. I could see that Sibella looked at me with a new interest. She was growing into a truly beautiful woman, and all trace of the slightly suburban minx was becoming rapidly obliterated by a crescendo of style and distinction. It was quite evident that she would have the manners and self-possession of a thoroughly well-bred beauty, and she had acquired a facility for putting on her clothes with an altogether overpowering effect of distinction. It seemed to me a little curious that a character which I knew to be somewhat small should have achieved a certain impression of breadth and ease in her personality. Probably it was the result of the unquestionable fact of her extreme beauty. At any rate, she was rapidly learning the secret of predominance, and she showed, captivating and delicious, in distinct relief to her surroundings.

Mr. Gascoyne’s twenty pounds had enabled me, through the purchase of decent boots, gloves, etc., to bring my wardrobe into play again. I had dressed as rakishly as possible, determined that Sibella should have no satisfaction in the dejection of an unsuccessful lover. I knew her character and the pleasure she would have derived from it. I simulated the best of spirits, and Grahame loyally helped me to sustain the illusion. I was inwardly consumed with jealousy whenever my hungry eyes fell upon her, but I roused myself for a tour de force in acting and succeeded. Lionel Holland came in later. I saw him through the large drawing-room windows coming up the path, supremely confident and jaunty. He was evidently surprised to see me. We had not met since the evening of my humiliation. I greeted him cordially, however, and he was obliged to be civil, but I had the satisfaction of feeling that he was by no means at his ease. He was so perfectly assured that, being poor, I was an interloper in a well-to-do house, that he would have liked, I am sure, to ask me what the devil I meant by intruding. I on my part was galled by the attitude of superior intimacy he assumed in a house where I had been intimate when he was a stranger to it. I was perfectly determined that he should not dislodge me, and that nothing he said or did should interfere with my visits to the Hallward establishment. He was staying to supper as a matter of course, and I detected a shade of annoyance on his face when Mrs. Hallward, in consequence of an aside from Grahame, extended an invitation to me to do likewise. I accepted, although I was compelled to submit to the disappearance of the lovers to the schoolroom for fully an hour previous to the meal. I sang and played to the others as I had been in the habit of doing, and worked hard to make myself agreeable. I was so far successful that Mrs. Hallward asked me why I came so seldom, and discussed the Gascoyne family in a corner of the drawing-room with me after supper. She was herself the great-grand-daughter of a Nova Scotian baronet and never forgot it, although she had saving perception enough not to allude to it directly. As a rule she brought it in with some such remark as—“There is I believe a baronetcy knocking about in our own family somewhere—where exactly I don’t know—but it is there,” a remark subtly framed, so as to convey the impression that, being no snob, she forbore to mention how very near the said baronetcy was, in fact, that it was knocking about so very near that it was quite possible a collision might occur at any moment.