O'Rane's nose came down on his upper lip in a withering sneer.
"I suppose it means one or two trusty and competent nurses, and the child will be kept in another part of the house. And, later on, London air won't suit it, and it will be sent with a governess to the sea, educated abroad.... My God! I was educated abroad!" He coughed apologetically and relieved his feelings by pacing up and down in front of the fire. "Where had we got to?" he asked absently. "Oh, yes! Well, a boy like that—I assume for some reason it's going to be a boy—might owe the whole of his career, his life, his happiness and power of doing good entirely to a chance meeting with some man who chose to pay three hundred a year on his account for so many years. But it's the personal touch, the personal relationship that must be established!" He swung round in his walk and faced me. "All my life I've wanted to be Prince Florizel!" he cried. "I wanted to be able to lend a hand to distressed young Americans who found unexpected dead bodies in their Saratoga trunks, I wanted to find comfortable and remunerative positions at my court for the conscience-stricken survivors of the Suicide Club. But with the untrammelled disposal of your estate——"
"Wouldn't it pall, if you didn't have to make the money before you gave it away?" I asked.
"I don't think my interest in human beings would ever pall," he answered. "There's such a devil of a lot of them, and they're all different. When I got into the House, I stood as a Tory, and George was rather offended, because he said I was the most revolutionary nihilist he'd ever met. I could never call myself a democrat, though, because democrats deal in mobs, and I only see a mob as composed of individuals, all different, all absorbingly interesting—with bodies to be kicked and souls to be damned, if your preference lies that way. I can't deal with people as types. I can't classify them; each one is much too real, too personal. And, if you're like that, you end up as a nihilist, because all government is based on generalisations, mostly inaccurate and wholly inadequate. As we're finding out." He put his watch to his ear and listened. "I must be making my way to the station," he said. "I'm not taking an active party line at present, but I seem to find a growing sense that the old governing classes haven't measured up, haven't made good in their own job. We've had three specimens since the war started.... I always feel that in universal nihilism I should come to my own. Now I must fly! Forgive me for talking so much!"
3
George returned to London the following day in a better temper than, I fear, would have been mine, if I had been invited to the country and abandoned by my host within an hour of my arrival. Melton week-end parties have long been famous, for Dr. Burgess has had through his hands perhaps a fifth of the younger statesmen and barristers, authors, clergymen and soldiers of the day. Any old Meltonian can claim a bed, and it will be found for him in his old house, at the Raven or in lodgings; he dines on Saturday night in Common Room as a matter of course and lunches with Burgess next day as a matter of right. Strangers from less fortunate foundations are jealously excluded, but I attended one dinner as a Governor and found a Law Officer on my right, a silk from the Commercial Court on my left and a twice-wounded Brigadier opposite me. The food was tolerable, the wine good; the conversation indiscreetly well-informed. George told me that, when he was in the House, he could only find out what was going on by spending a week-end at his old school.
"I had one bad moment on Sunday afternoon," he confessed, when I asked for news of O'Rane. "We'd all been lunching with the old man, and he asked me to stay behind. It was rather reminiscent of certain regrettable meetings in my extreme youth.... I knew what he was going to talk about and I knew it would be no good for me to beat about the bush. The door had hardly closed before he put it to me what was the matter with Raney. I had to tell him everything, you can't hide things from Burgess. For that reason I wasn't sorry that Raney had bolted here; he'd never forgive me, if he guessed I'd given him away."
"But it won't make any difference, will it?" I asked.
"Oh, Burgess has got too much of God's commonsense. But Raney can't stand being pitied. Burgess will only allude to it, if he convinces himself that it will do some good. I'm afraid I don't see how it can; poor old Raney's just got to set his teeth once more and go through it single-handed...."
A week later Bertrand, George and I were gossiping over a last cigar, when Lady Loring entered with a grave face. The doctor had that moment left after his evening visit to Sonia.