“I will make you, Geoffrey,” he protested, warming to kindle the necessary enthusiasm in his intended pupil. “Your fortune at the Bar, that will be child’s play; I will guarantee for you, if I live, something higher, a prize more glorious than mere money. Don’t think of that; leave money-grubbing to tradesmen; more than enough for everything a man can want will come of course, for you cannot march successfully through our profession without the accompaniment of the golden cymbals! But if I take you in hand as I propose, there is no saying where you will stop. Because I am at the end of my tether, which has pulled me up with an ugly jerk, because I can do no more for myself, is no reason why, so long as my brains are left me, I should not do something for another man. No, don’t begin to thank me; I am not even pretending that there is any virtue in my offer. If,” he laughed, “I had still the use of my legs I wouldn’t do it, that’s obvious. I should be too keen on my own career to trouble much about helping another man on. I should, if I had completely recovered, have probably given you a piece of jewellery in acknowledgment of your kindness, and always been your friend and glad to see you. I am selfish; all successful men are, although some contrive to disguise it from a stupid public by advertising the contrary; it has made me; I don’t say I could not have got on without practising selfishness, but it would have taken me much longer, and time, you know, is of the essence of our contract with Fate in these days of hustle, rush and scramble. And it is just that very instinct of self that now draws me to you; for selfishness by no means implies ingratitude. Within limits, they who make self their god are keenly grateful to those who serve in his temple. It is just as well to be honest in a matter of this kind, and for neither of us to enter upon a contract such as I am proposing with false impressions. For it must be a contract, my dear Geoffrey; binding by the very seal of our individual interests, and to be honourably kept in its spirit as well as on its material side. It will be necessary for us to believe in one another, to trust one another. Those are general stipulations: the only specific conditions I shall make are, absolute, inviolable secrecy, which you would hardly break, and, what you may find less easy to comply with, implicit obedience to my instructions. I am not surprised to see you look serious at that, but don’t misunderstand me. I am not going to put a knife in your hand and send you forth to murder one of my pet aversions. I have no intention of asking you to do anything, to use any weapon which an ordinary man of the world need in honour, our code of to-day, shrink from. But if I want a man hit hard you must hit him hard; you will be my soldier, and when I send you out to fight I don’t expect you to patch up a truce and arbitrate. I have always been a fighting man, and as my representative, my proxy, you would have to carry my banner, which bears the motto, ‘No compromise.’ The rewards would be great. If, as I hardly suppose, my affairs should turn out so that it became necessary for me to levy toll of your earnings, I would take care you were no loser by that. I will get you into the House, and what is more, I will make you master of the art of making your mark there when you are in. That is the real crux. That is where nine out of ten, even clever, men fail. There need be no limit to your ambition. Every day’s programme shall be sketched for you, every wrong turning marked with a red cross, every pitfall fenced, the right road clearly marked. You shall see your fellow travellers drop off, but you shall, if you follow my clue, go on triumphantly, each milestone marking a new success. The world is before you to conquer. The world consists mainly of fools, but even fools get in your way, it is all they can do, and there are clever spirits to oppose your progress. The conquest is easy enough, but unhappily men usually find that out too late, when they are too old for the fray. I doubt whether you could do it alone, Geoffrey, at least while the victory is worth having, but with me behind you, you may be irresistible. Is it a compact?”
The compact was made readily enough, the chances of the strange proposal being too dazzling to be rejected. If the purely ethical side of the arrangement lodged a feeble protest in Herriard’s mind, the material advantage with which it was weighted drove the monitor out of hearing. Success deferred is to the impatience of youth more galling, perhaps, than the settled disappointment of failure to a maturer mind. From Herriard success, the immediate success which a fairly clever and ambitious man expects to be his, had been withheld to a degree that had begun to gall him. Other men of his standing, no cleverer but more pushing, or more lucky, than he, were forging ahead. We are never so conscious of our slow progress as when we see ourselves left behind by others who started with us. Here, ready to Herriard’s hand, was a means of catching up and passing his rivals, indeed of astonishing his world. It seemed rather like making a compact with the devil, he would tell himself with a laugh; yet where, he argued, was the wrong? He was going to rob no one; it was merely a partnership that he was entering into, and the success of a partnership is gauged by its strongest rather than its weakest member. Why should a bed-ridden man of genius be debarred from the active exercise of his mental powers? Where was the dishonour in being his spokesman, any more than his amanuensis?
So the argument went all one way; the strange partnership began, and was not long in justifying its existence. Men who frequented the fruitful and thorny paths of the law began to speak of Geoffrey Herriard as one of the cleverest of rising counsel; some, speculating in “futures” out of the capital of their reputation for foresight, pointed at him as the coming man. He went far to justify them by the lucky capture of a seat at a bye-election, the victory being in some measure due to a series of particularly smart and telling speeches, which tore into shreds the platform of his opponent, a flabby soap-maker with a long purse and a short vocabulary. Herriard’s maiden speech was a success. “Best I’ve heard since poor Paul Gastineau,” Sir Henry Hartfield commented.
“Rather reminds me of him,” his companion remarked. “Something of the same fiery periods and tendency to antithesis. It just shows how easily a man’s place can be filled, even the cleverest.”
The resemblance in style was indeed remarkable both at the Bar, on the platform, and in the House, for in the early day of his pupildom Herriard had to keep tight and assiduous hold on his master’s hand. The work was hard, but the tutor was clever in imparting his knack, and, with a reputation increasing to a flattering degree, the incentive to industry on the pupil’s part was great.
Every night Herriard paid a visit to the secluded house in Mayfair, sometimes to stay far into the early hours of the morning, rehearsing a speech, analyzing the probable trends of a cross-examination, making notes from Gastineau’s quick observation of weak points or strong ones, spotting flaws, devising traps, in fact looking to every rivet in his own armour, speculating on every possible loose joint in his adversaries’ for the morrow’s tilt.
So the singular conjunction of rare master and apt pupil had continued in almost unbroken success for more than three years. Herriard had gained such a degree of confidence in playing his part as now almost to wear his instructor’s talent at second-hand. He promised to become a rich man, and Gastineau, with ample means of his own for his circumscribed luxury, was pleased that it should be so. In return for wealth and reputation he expected Herriard to mark down, to follow up and worry certain old-time rivals of his own. His pupil sometimes marvelled at the malignant viciousness of his “riding orders.” It was as though Gastineau had given him a rhetorical bottle of vitriol to fling over the smug face of some self-satisfied prig of an Under Secretary. Still he felt in honour bound to fling the corrosive denunciations with the most stinging effect, very much to the distortion of the Superior Being’s cultivated blandness. Then Gastineau was wont to declare himself well satisfied; and perfect friendship, founded on mutual service, existed between the two men.
But strange events, little dreamt of by either, were on their way to meet them; events which were to turn into disastrous twistings the paths that had run so easily side by side.
CHAPTER III
A SOCIETY SENSATION
“HAVE you heard the latest sensation, Lady Rotherfield?”