“Gartree.”
“That old fool? He will probably misdirect, and give you a second chance. Good-night, my dear boy. So glad you scored to-night.”
They shook hands affectionately, and in another minute Herriard, in spite of a long, exciting day, was walking, with the brisk step of that elation which knows no fatigue, towards his rooms in Mount Street.
CHAPTER II
THE HISTORY OF A COMPACT
THREE years earlier there had been an appalling railway accident between Cordova and Seville. Two tightly packed trains had come into collision, with results that had prevented even the Spanish officials from hushing up the contretemps, and had sent an electric wave of shudders over the whole news-reading world. Among the second division of its victims, the dangerously, even mortally, wounded, there appeared one name at least which added, in England, at any rate, to the sensational interest which for nearly a week the affair induced. It was that of the most prominent coming man of the day, Paul Gastineau, K.C., M.P., a man who had indeed arrived and who was bound, in French phrase, to go far. Lay politicians were fond of quoting one another that a man of such marvellous brain-power and capability for hard work had the easy and certain reversion to the Woolsack: members of his own branch of the profession, if they did not agree with the forecast, let it pass unchallenged; while there were many grains of intentional truth in the chaff indulged in by the other branch when they would declare that the solicitor, who, having a fighting case on hand, failed to retain Paul Gastineau, laid himself open to an action for negligence.
For Gastineau was above all things a fighter, and one who fought with his brains as well as with his tongue; a distinction which they who know courts of law will readily appreciate. An awkward adversary, ever in deadly earnest, who always fenced with the button off; his enemies and defeated opponents, and they were many, said not too scrupulously; but he fought to win, and usually did win, leaving mere niceties and quibbles to the schoolmen; and to have the knack of winning means much, if not everything. It meant much for Paul Gastineau. He became the most talked about man at the Bar, and his enemies being too human to let his praises pass in silence, simply added their voices to the babble that made him known. Our forefathers were stupid enough to regard the envy, hatred and malice that attend on success as something of a drawback; a toll, they called it, paid for being eminent: we know better, and nowadays the wisely successful man regards his detractors as a valuable asset in the working capital on which he pursues the business of eminence.
Parties in the political world do not look far or seek beneath the surface for their allies. Perhaps they are too busy, or too lazy; not to suggest that they are too stupid. Anyhow they have a well-defined leaning towards ready-made reputations: the practice may be expensive and exacting, but it saves trouble. Once Gastineau had become an established success his Party found that they could not do without him, and to that success and to that discovery did a very worthy and somnolent brewer, whose legislative faculties appeared to be somewhat clouded by the fumes of his own ale, owe his more comfortable place of repose in that honourable, if shunted, wagon-lit called the House of Lords. Eminent forensic lawyers are often failures in Parliament, and Gastineau was clever enough at the Bar to make wiseacres pretty sure of his falling short in the House. But the short-sighted soothsayers who judge the individual from the aggregate had made no allowance for a certain quality which, beyond his grit, his talent, and his power of concentration, was to be an important factor in the success which he forthwith became. They forgot that he was not altogether an Englishman: there was Southern blood in his veins, a warmer tinge to his mind; he had the vivacity and intellectual chic of the Italian added to the determination of an Englishman. So he rose almost at a bound to a high position among the legal members of the House, and with that his position seemed assured.
Naturally when it was seen that this distinguished man was among the victims of the Spanish railway smash, something like a thrill ran through the country which was the stage of his career. Society speculated as to the extent of his injuries and his chance of recovery; his own profession believed, many of them hoped, that, even if he did recover, his flight would thenceforward be a drooping one, while our old friend, the man in the street, always ready with an obvious moral platitude, made much of the impending sword which Fate hangs over the heads of even the most brilliantly successful of poor humanity.
Meanwhile in a poor monastery near an obscure Spanish town Gastineau lay battling with characteristic determination to keep at bay Death who stood over him. When he had been extricated from the wreckage of the train he was placed aside on the ground to await means of removal to the improvised hospital; and he had lain there in what, to a man of his character and ambition, far exceeded the bitterness of death. His spine was injured, he felt no pain, was, indeed, scarcely conscious of the strange numbness and deprivation of all muscular power. But, after the first stunning shock, his mind had become, even for him, abnormally clear and alert, the change from lethargic dizziness had come like the clearing off of vapours from the sun. “Thank Heaven,” he muttered to himself, “this is the end, the lightning before death; if only it will come quickly, for all is over with me.”
So in a state of savage, resentful impatience he lay there, looking up at the stars, all unconcerned in their cold glitter, types of the all-enduring, which mocked that poor transient clay which had aspired to be a planet in a system so mundane as to admit of railway accidents; and as he looked with despairing eyes he cursed them as the unjust rulers of his fate. Then, for his mind was in too great a state of exaltation to dwell long on any one thought, before him rose and passed as in an extraordinarily vivid panorama the salient incidents of his career, to be succeeded by the principal stages he had been wont justifiably to picture in his future. Never to be. The past was all he could claim now; the present was mere impotence, and the future had vanished at the touch of a sleepy signalman’s hand on the wrong lever. He ground his teeth as he thought of it; he had a good deal of cynical philosophy in him, but it failed here, the stake had been too great, the certainty of winning too absolute for him to regard this startling reverse with equanimity. Then he came to review his triumphs, his mistakes, his sins: the last had been mostly pleasant, none the less so, perhaps, that his ambition had required their concealment; he felt he would rather have lived for sin, flagrant, even, and open, than died like this. If he had known how near the end was he would not have been so careful; the world’s opinion, bah! What was it worth now? Something came to his mind that since the jar of the accident he had strangely forgotten; something that had sent him there, sent him, as it turned out, to his death. Was there justice in that? Curiously his legally trained mind began to busy itself in weighing the equity of the penalty. It was at least strangely swift, fitting and thorough, but was it just? Summum jus, summa injuria. He smiled resentfully at the aptness of the adage, then became conscious that some one was speaking to him, was sympathetically asking as to his hurt. A young man knelt by his side and, with a cushion, tried to make his position more comfortable, talking cheerily to him the while. He was one of the uninjured passengers doing his best for his less fortunate fellow travellers. For the moment Gastineau hated his succourer in a wave of malicious envy; why had not this nobody, this worthy, common-place young Englishman, dull, probably, and mentally circumscribed, with the hallmark of Eton plainly showing, why had not this man been shattered, and he, the brilliant worker, with a name and a place in the world, have gone scatheless? So bitter was the selfish thought that for a while he could hardly bring himself to acknowledge the young stranger’s kindness; all he wanted was to be let alone, to die quickly. But the other was not to be easily rebuffed; perhaps he made allowance for a sufferer’s state of mind and temper; anyhow he soon won, by tactful assiduity, the wounded man’s gratitude, to such a degree, indeed, that when they came to bear Gastineau to the monastery he begged the young fellow not to leave him. There self came in again, since other sufferers might need the young Samaritan’s care; but the case seemed desperate, and he could not bear to refuse a manifestly dying man’s request.