LORD ALISTAIR’S REBELLION

LORD ALISTAIR’S
REBELLION

BY
ALLEN UPWARD

In the Pot it is called Scum

In the Sea it is called Foam:

In the Sky it is called Light.

MITCHELL KENNERLEY
NEW YORK MCMX

Copyright 1910 by
Mitchell Kennerley

CONTENTS

LORD ALISTAIR’S REBELLION

CHAPTER I
WESTMINSTER BRIDGE

Night clad the imperial city in a black robe stitched with fire.

The misty river rolled in from the sea through its illuminated bridges with the subdued swish of some great snake writhing its way through hoops of gold.

Out in the fog-haunted region between the bridges the movement of the red and green-eyed steam-tugs, clutching invisible barges and dragging them away into the darkness, seemed like a shadow-show in which grotesque demons were hunting the souls of men.

The two banks of the river offered a contrast full of significance.

Along the left bank white lamps that slit the dusk with the hard, bright glare of diamonds were strung like beads at measured spaces apart. A broad, smooth-paven road rattled with the wheels of traffic, and the long bend of the river revealed a sweep of stately buildings representing the power and splendour of a great civilization.

Education, law, science, government, police, had their homes side by side along that mighty façade, which thus became an entablature on which the characters of civilization were legibly impressed. Beside the ancient universities of the law stood the headquarters of the vast machinery for the teaching of the populace—that is to say, for the taming of successive generations of barbarians. The power of wealth was expressed in luxurious hotels and club-houses, in the mansion of the noble and the estate-office of the millionaire. The revenues of empire flowed in and out through the gates of one majestic pile; from another the guardians of the social order waged war against the restless ranks of crime. Last in place towered the huge palace of the imperial Legislature, supreme over all.

Across the river the low mass of the southern shore lay in obscurity. All that could be distinguished over there was a dark roof-line broken by a few tall, smokeless chimneys, rising above the water like the walls and towers of a beleaguered city encompassed by its moat. The solitary illumination on that side of the river was afforded by a high square building which broke the gloom from instant to instant with huge letters of yellow fire, spelling out uncouth, barbaric syllables in what might have been the jargon of some subterranean race of men. Seen across the river mist the tower flared out like those burning mosques beheld from afar by the voyager in the Underworld as he drew near to the city of Dis.

All night the square, ugly minaret continued to flash its monstrous hieroglyphs upon the darkness, as though the dwellers on the southern shore were signalling a message from their camp. And from time to time, when the rattle of the wheels on the hither side stayed for a moment, there was borne across the water the low, sullen hum as of a vast multitude swarming in the narrow streets and stunted houses of the hidden region beyond.

Thus the two banks of the river faced each other with something of a mutual threat.

On one side of the gulf, that low, sombre roof-line with its fitful torch-fires; on the other side, the broad illuminated rampart of civilization, crowned by its imperial keep.

A light more brilliant than the rest streamed from the summit of the ponderous clock-tower that guards the foot of Westminster Bridge.

This was the answering signal of the northern shore to that sullen camp across the river. It burned there to proclaim that the sovereign power of empire was at work beneath, judging over five hundred millions of men, and two and a half continents. All the forces of the mightiest society the world has yet beheld were focused here in the High Court of Parliament, the Board of the Anglo-Roman Raj.

Here the decrees were shaped in obedience to which invincible fleets crossed the ocean; armies were transported from one hemisphere to the conquest of another; kings were dethroned in Africa and other kings were crowned in Asia; warlike republics were extinguished under the Southern Pole, and tottering dynasties propped up in the shadow of the Himalayas; whole races of men, speaking strange tongues, and reckoning time by other constellations, had their laws and manners and religions changed for them; immemorial savagery was thrust into the forcing-house of civilization, and immemorial civilizations were rooted up; from this centre the hardy freemen of the Baltic North spread the ancient Mediterranean culture and Semitic folklore wherever the Raj extended round the globe.

Here throbbed the great piston-rod which drove the myriad wheels of government and slowly stamped deeper age after age the same Roman-Semitic imprint upon the subjugated populace at home.

Night after night, as the dwellers on the southern shore gazed across at the majestic citadel of the Raj, they saw that beacon burning, the symbol of the unresting watchfulness of their rulers against the assaults of foes within and without. That steady flame shone out defiance alike to the foreign invader and the traitor within the gates; to the rebels who scoured the African veldt, and the more dangerous rebels who skulked through the streets and alleys of the imperial capital. On all alike, on the encroaching Tsar as on the plotting Maharajah, on far-off savages and on felons crouching at the gates, the Genius of the Raj was seen to keep its never-closing eye.

More than a mile away, round the curving bank of the river, where the warehouses of Mammon clustered thickly round the temple of Jehovah, there rose another Symbol, invisible in the night, soaring high above the intervening territory of squalor.

This Symbol was intended to represent a Roman gibbet, the gibbet on which a Redeemer had been put to death two thousand years ago, in a remote corner of that ancient Mediterranean realm of which this modern civilization was heir.

In the night these two Symbols confronted each other, the Flame and the Cross, as though they were the warring ensigns of Ahura-Mazda, the Spirit of Light, and Anru-Mainya, the Spirit of Darkness.

On the midmost arch of Westminster Bridge a young man stood alone, leaning over the parapet, and sounding with his eyes the black depth of the water below.

His whole air and appearance were out of harmony with the spot where he found himself, and suggested that he must have strayed there from some gayer quarter of the town. An opera hat was thrust back on his head, and a silk-lined overcoat, thrown open in front, allowed his waistcoat, of white satin, to become soiled by contact with the grime of the bridge. He held a cane of rich and fanciful design in one hand; the other hand, resting loosely on the ironwork of the balustrade, showed more than one curious and valuable ring.

He leaned on the bridge dully, his head drooping as though he were tired. Although his face was that of a man not yet thirty years of age, it bore marks which showed that he had lived too eagerly, without heed to life’s immitigable laws. Already the forehead was crossed with faint lines, though there was no thinning of the black hair that curled above. The beauty of the face was marred by the flush of intemperance, and the sensuous underlip contradicted the refinement of the sensitive nostrils. The dark, restless eyes and delicate chin completed the impression of passion and weakness which was left by the whole face.

On the pavement of St. James’s such a figure would have seemed at home. Seen where it was, like a tropical bird blown ashore on some bleaker landscape, it provoked the curiosity of the passers-by.

Some of them took offence at the unusual sight. A group of roughs returning from some haunt of vice on the north side to their dens across the river eyed the well-dressed loiterer with envious contempt, and tried to hustle him as they went by. Their leader, a hulking Irishman, encouraged them in a coarse speech, which still breathed faintly of the sea-scented glens of Connemara.

Something in the voice or in the words startled the lounger. He turned his head quickly, and gave the ruffian a questioning look, under which he slunk to one side, and passed on with his friends. In the dark streets where their homes lay they might not have been abashed so easily. But their courage for violence ebbed on the well-lighted bridge. Few crimes are committed at high noon.

A policeman sauntering on to the bridge shortly afterwards caught sight of the stranger, and seemed to become interested in his doings. Instead of pursuing his way when he had reached the farther end of the bridge, the officer halted, and stood about on the pavement by St. Thomas’s Hospital, keeping his eyes fixed on the figure that overhung the balustrade so persistently.

Two shop-boys coming along in their turn had their sense of humour tickled by the young man’s forlorn attitude. One of them gave vent to a ribald jest.

“Look,” he said aloud to his comrade, “there’s Jesus Christ.”

So closely wrapped in his own thoughts was the lounger that it was many seconds after they had been uttered before the words succeeded in penetrating to his consciousness. The last sound of the youths’ trampling feet had died away at the end of the bridge before he woke up sufficiently to ask himself with a resentful air: “What made him say that?”

He found himself unable to dismiss the jeer from his mind, in which it went on echoing with such tormenting insistence that at last he stood up and shook himself, unconsciously making a physical effort to change the pattern in the brain’s kaleidoscope.

But the suggestion which so irritated him was not to be got rid of in that fashion. It chimed in too well with the whole tenor of his meditation since he had found his way on to the bridge. The half-formed questions which had been baffling his attempts to give them definite shape now all at once began to come together and settle down into one question, precipitated, as it were, by that profane mockery.

“Why,” he reflected, with a growing sense of anger at the comparison—“why did he call me that?”

It was not because he attributed any serious intention to the jester that he argued thus with himself. He was in that mood when everything around us appears mysterious and fraught with some revelation to which we only need a key. The words of the shop-boy became for him a hint from the night itself, like the cryptic utterances of the characters in a play of Maeterlinck’s.

“What likeness is there between Christ and me?” he went on, putting the problem before himself more distinctly.

What likeness, indeed, between this spoilt child of civilization, to whom the world seemed to have given of its best, for whom Christianity could be no more than a legend, and that buffeted Redeemer hanging on his gibbet in the Syrian sun of two thousand years ago?

And yet an insult cannot rankle unless it is barbed with truth. From the inner cells of memory, where they had been stored up in past days by a religious mother, certain words and phrases were already coming forth, as though moved by some subtle affinity, to answer that uncomfortable question.

Despised and rejected of men—they ran something like that. And again: Stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. There were other words which should have followed, surely, but he tried in vain to draw them forth.

Despised and rejected of men. The flush darkened on the young man’s cheek as he flung back his head with a rebellious and angry glance at the river’s northern bank, where the shining walls and towers of the city of Ormuzd seemed to overhang the gulf—the glance which an exile gives at the city which has driven him forth.

He had fled to the spot, stunned by one of those buffets which life is ever waiting to deal to those who have not learnt their lesson aright. And his ears still smarted with the scream of the newsboys who were proclaiming in every street that Lord Alistair Stuart had failed.

In London men like Alistair Stuart fail every day, and go under, leaving scarcely a ripple on the smooth surface of a society which hastens to forget all disagreeable things. But Lord Alistair’s catastrophe had been able to eclipse for one night the comedy of politics and the tragedy of war. For he happened to be one of the few in whom the world is interested, and when the world is interested in a man it will not suffer him to go down to sheol in peace. Its hisses are the reaction of its cheers, and those who court its notice put their lives to the hazard, like Esther when she went to touch the sceptre of Ahasuerus.

The world knew Alistair Stuart in two characters—as the brother and heir-presumptive of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay, and as the lover of Molly Finucane.

To the outer world, for which newspapers are written and formal histories compiled, he was the brother of one of its most important citizens. The Duke of Trent was distinguished not only by his rank, but by his service to the State. By an ironical coincidence the same Gazette which revealed the fact that Lord Alistair Stuart had filed his petition also contained the notification that his brother had kissed hands as Secretary of State. It was impossible that the moralists of the pulpit and the press should overlook the striking example of the idle and industrious apprentice, and the younger brother’s disgrace was deepened by the elder’s triumph.

In that inner world whose newspapers are the boudoirs and the smoking-rooms, and which goes for its history to memoirs and chronicles of the back-stairs, the name of Alistair Stuart had gained celebrity in connection with a personage of whom the pulpit might not know, and the press might not tell.

Molly Finucane had achieved one of those reputations which have given certain women a place in history. In the ancient world she might have had princes to fight for her, and poets to sing her praise. In the modern world she was a figure of evil, regarded with a feeling like that which inspired the legends of the succubi. An element of mystery attached to her extraordinary career. It was said that she could neither dance nor sing, that she was astonishingly ignorant, and that her speech and ways smelt of the gutter. Even beauty was denied her. The men whom she had ruined themselves could not explain the secret of her power over them; she overcame her victims like a malarial fever. Some men could meet her day after day without succumbing; others lost themselves from the first; others again began by despising her as an ugly little street-girl, and ended by giving her their wives’ jewels.

How many had perished in the maelstrom of desire which she created none could say. But there was a ghastly story of the young Earl of St. Luc, who had put an end to his life at the age of twenty because his trustees refused him the means to set up an establishment for Molly Finucane. An ineffaceable impression had been made by the two contrasted pictures of the desolate mother weeping over her boy’s dead body, as it was dragged all stained and dripping from the moat surrounding the ancient keep of the St. Lucs, and of the wide-mouthed, stupid Irish girl, planted in a reek of tobacco smoke on a table crowded by tipsy youths, repeating to them in her cracked, shameless voice the latest and most brutally coarse refrain of the street.

It was a year, perhaps two years, since the tongue of scandal had first singled out the name of Alistair Stuart from among the rest of those who singed their wings in this fatal flame. Gradually it became known that Molly Finucane had given him a devotion which no other man had ever been able to buy with gold or blood or tears. For his sake she had refused at the last moment to take possession of the miniature palace furnished for her by the great Brazilian broker, Mendes; who had simply shrugged his shoulders and ordered the house to be kept vacant and ready for her. Stuart and she had gone to live together in a faded corner of Chelsea, in a house surrounded by elms with black trunks and yellow leaves.

The house in Chelsea loomed large in the mind of the new generation. It was regarded as a citadel of sin, as the headquarters of a cult which gloried in its moral degeneracy. Alistair Stuart assumed the character of a high-priest among the pagans, as they chose to call themselves—poets whose verses echoed still more faintly the faint autumnal sighs of Verlaine; wits whose epigrams were brilliant with the phosphorescence of corruption; men in whom genius was a vice, and vice an affectation. Hatred of the middle classes was the watchword of this sect, which was recruited from penniless younger sons, from university failures, from a whole class for whom the Protestant Church has no refuge, but who in Catholic countries end often in the monastery. They waged war on the Victorian Age, on its religion, on its art, on its commercialism, but, above all, on its Puritanism.

In the eyes of this brotherhood of the unfit bankruptcy was rather meritorious than disgraceful, and the fifty thousand pounds which Stuart had spent without possessing represented so much spoil taken from the Philistines. Stuart’s own first proceeding after he had signed the warrant for his civil degradation had been to send forth invitations for a supper to celebrate the event.

His bankruptcy had been in one sense voluntary. Although he had cut himself off from intercourse with his family when he took the house in Chelsea, he knew that Trent would have helped him to make terms with his creditors. But he knew also that Trent would have required him to give up Molly Finucane. He had filed his petition with a light heart, in the belief that the disgrace would fall more heavily on his brother than on himself.

For the éclat resulting from his act he had been prepared, but not for the effect of the éclat on his own mind.

He had been on his way to a club in Piccadilly overlooking the Green Park, which served as a meeting-ground for those members of the cult who kept on terms with respectability. Almost on the club steps he was arrested by the sight of his name in large letters on a news-bill, bringing the sharp reminder that he had forfeited his right of entry.

It was a shock to him to find that his exploit had suddenly lost its charm. He bought a paper as he walked on, and read of his brother’s promotion to the Cabinet. The unforeseen coincidence intensified his discomfiture. This brother of his, whom he had always looked on as a dullard and a prig, whom he had so often sneered at among his own friends, was standing there crowned in front of the footlights, while he, Alistair, was being hissed off the stage. In a flash he saw the ruin he had made of his life, and was dismayed.

And as he wandered miserably through the streets the question that had risen and struggled for expression in his mind was—Why? Why had his brother so far surpassed him in the race? Why were the honours and rewards of life bestowed on some and not on others? Why had he, Alistair, steered his bark upon the rocks?

Standing there between that visible theatre of his brother’s triumph, on the north side of the river, and the unknown hooligan realm upon the south, with which there stole upon him a daunting sense of affinity, he pondered the question; and while he pondered it, the feeling grew upon him that it would not be answered by itself, that it was a part of a more tremendous issue, that the meaning of life was involved in it, and the eternal mystery of the world.

Alistair looked back for some clue to the tangled skein of his career; and by-and-by the vista of the past took on distinctness, like one of those marvellous canvases of Rembrandt from whose dingy surface there gradually peeps out a whole magical landscape charged with light.

CHAPTER II
BIOGRAPHICAL

The lustre of the rain was over the grey lochs and green Hebrides.

The broad sound that stretched between the Island of Oig and the mainland was crinkled in furrows, on whose torn edges the foam-spit flickered like driving snowflakes. Whenever the indigo folds of the rolling rain parted for a minute the white beaches of Kesteven gleamed out like a picked bone. Away to the southward, where the fishing-boats were slowly reaching round the Mull of Oig, their taut sails glistened like new-washed tiles in the sunshine; then, as they twisted about and came up into the wind, the light emptied out of their sails like water being spilt, and each boat in turn became a murky phantom gliding forward along leaden grooves.

When the rain-wreaths closed round again, the mainland was blotted out with its hills and pine-forests, and the fishing-boats were no longer anything but blurred hints of things behind a screen. The mist wrapped the Island of Oig round with a great stillness, as though it had been removed a thousand miles off into the midst of the sea.

When at last the heavy cloud phalanxes broke and drifted overhead, and the lochs and isles lay in clear day, something new had crossed into the magic ring of the horizon.

Down in the south-east, in the far-off corner of the landscape, where the pale rose-purple of the hills melted into the dark slate-purple of the waves, a low black smudge had come like a flake of soot on a glorious stained-glass window. Seen at first as a mere speck on the picture, it swiftly spread and grew till it became a great dingy smear trailing across the heavens. And there was something about this new presence in the landscape which made it seem strange and hostile to the rest. It was as though a harsh, unexpected note had been struck in the middle of a symphony. All the other things there—the clouds and the sunlight, the hills and the sea—seemed to have grown used to one another during the ages, and to keep up a stately accord together; but this smoke giant forced himself in amongst them, like an upstart that had not learnt their ways—an ugly gnome of the underworld breaking into the haunts of the fairies and the nixies.

Beneath the inky banner a small black steamer lifted its hull above the wave-line and came on obstinately, beating defiance with its paddles to the mother elements. The fishing-boats that for thousands of years had put in and out from the little haven of Oig had never done aught but coax the elemental forces in order to turn them to service. For them the winds and the tides had been instruments on which they searched, as it were, for the right chords. But this masterful intruder snapped the strings in careless discord; compared with the others, it seemed to be a burglar breaking the locks of Nature with a crowbar instead of opening them with a key.

Fussing and fretting as it came, the steamboat struck right through the fleet of fishing-boats, and hurried on. It churned its way noisily into the harbour, driving small rowing-boats to right and left like frightened birds, and took up its berth against the pier with the air of an invading column taking up its quarters in a surrendered town. At the same time everything seemed to wake up to meet it: the old men who leant all day against the harbour wall started out of their dreams to handle the ropes flung to them from the steamer’s deck; the harbour master and the factor of the company hastened along the quay, and all the folk of the little town issued from their houses and swarmed down to the water’s edge. The whole Island of Oig roused itself from its six days’ peace, and began to bustle for its life.

Having taken fast hold of the pier with its rope tentacles, the masterful black monster rapped out a wooden gangway, down which there walked quickly a passenger who looked as much estranged from the surroundings as the floating machine which had transported him from the mainland.

The strangeness was not so much in his black clothes as in his gait and bearing. He walked jerkily, with short, quick steps, casting glances to right and left through his spectacles, as though he were moving through a crowd, on the lookout for hindrances. His feet struck the ground in the helpless, violent fashion of one who wore boots and used his feet merely as the ferrules of his legs on the pavement, instead of as claws to grasp the ground with. The muscles of his neck had suffered a similar atrophy; a long course of high collars and top-heavy hats had drilled his head into a fixed pose, and it moved on the socket of the neck stiffly and jerkily within certain narrow limits. That his eyes had also become cramped by gazing at books instead of fields and clouds was shown plainly enough, for this man of the town wore glasses. He had only to open his mouth to speak, and you saw that his very teeth were no longer Nature’s handiwork.

The townsman’s speech was as outlandish in the Island of Oig as were his dress and gait. He stopped half-way down the pier, before a group of boys, who had left their play to come and see the steamer, and put a question in English.

“Can one of you boys direct me to the house of Mr. Duncan Gilderoy?”

Now, nearly everyone on the Island of Oig bore the name of Gilderoy; and this was all the more noteworthy because Gilderoy was not their real name, but one which the whole clan to which the islanders belonged had taken to hide their own, in order to escape the enmity of other and more powerful clans on the mainland, which had sworn to wipe them out. This wholesale exchange had taken place more than three hundred years before, and only a few of the very old islanders, living in the most out-of-the-way corners of the isle, any longer remembered what their real name was; and they were not believed by the rest, because the story sounded so strange beside the sober narratives of events told in the books written by people in Edinburgh, and called the “History of Scotland.” Therefore, though the Pax Britannica was now established in Oig, the inhabitants still clung to their cloak-name, so that all of them but those whose families had come into the island since the sixteenth century called themselves Gilderoy. And of these Gilderoys every third man had been baptized Duncan, because Duncan was the lucky name of the island, and it was well known that if you were baptized by that name you could not be drowned, unless the nixies made a mistake;—though even that was not known to the present generation, who had been brought up on the Edinburgh books, and who therefore thought they had their children baptized Duncan because it was the custom.

So when the outlander put his question the boys stood dumb at first, staring at him and wondering at his stupidity. The invader on his part wondered at theirs.

“Don’t you speak English?” he demanded crossly, as though ignorance of that tongue were wrong in itself, a sign of natural depravity which even the benighted heathen must know in their hearts they ought to be ashamed of.

The boys seemed to feel the force of the rebuke. They turned their eyes to one who stood in the forefront of the little group, as if calling on him to defend them. The leader answered instantly:

“What Duncan Gilderoy is that?”

He spoke the outlander’s tongue as easily as the outlander himself, though each of them sounded his words in a way that seemed a little strange in the other’s ears. The man from the mainland crowded his words in that habit of hurried speech which towns beget. The boy intoned his words with a slight shrillness caught from the winds and waves that battle round the Hebrides. The boy had already learnt from the stranger’s speech that he was an Englishman; the Englishman thought he learnt from the boy’s that he was not a Scotchman. To the Englishman a Scotchman was a person who spoke the dialect of old Northumbria. He had expected to find the islanders of Oig speaking either Gaelic or the speech of Burns.

“Are you English?” he exclaimed.

The boy flushed darkly.

“No,” he said, and held his tongue.

This time the invader looked at him closer. He was a handsome boy of eleven or twelve years of age, tall, and rather slender, and although he wore old, worn clothes, he did not look in the least humble or ashamed of them, a thing which struck the Londoner’s mind as reckless and a little bad. Below his kilt of dark green tartan, variegated with stripes of black and white, the boy’s legs and feet were bare, like those of his companions. Above the kilt he had on a shabby jacket of black velvet with tarnished silver buttons, and a round bonnet set on the back of his black curls made a frame for his face.

The man repeated his first question in another form.

“Do you know Mr. Duncan Gilderoy?”

“Do you mean Duncan Gilderoy of the Old House? Or is it the minister?” asked the boy.

“No, it’s not the minister. He is a farmer, and they told me his house was just outside the town.”

He said “town,” because he had heard it called that on the steamer. But his London eye called it “village.” Two rows of squat houses struggling up from the harbour’s edge to a small kirk just under the ridge of the hill—that was all he could see.

“Then that is Duncan Gilderoy of the Old House,” put in another of the boys.

The man turned to him.

“Has he a young gentleman living with him, named Stuart?” he asked.

All eyes were turned to the boy who had been the first to speak. This boy gave a distrustful, searching glance at the stranger.

“If that is the Duncan Gilderoy you want, I can take you to him,” he said, rather unwillingly.

“Come on, then.”

The other boys fell back, staring hard, as their comrade walked off beside the man in the English clothes. The man carried a small travelling-bag in one hand, and before they had gone many yards he offered it to his guide.

“Would you like to earn a sixpence?” he said pleasantly.

The boy flushed again and frowned angrily. Then he stopped dead, and, turning round, shouted back to the group they had just left:

“Here, Jock, carry his bag, and he’ll give you sixpence.”

Jock proved to be the boy who had guessed which Duncan Gilderoy the stranger wanted. He darted from the rest, and ran up to seize the bag, and then, having taken possession of it, fell in on the other side of its owner.

The Londoner felt he had made a mistake of some kind. The boy who had refused an offer of sixpence commanded his respect. Gazing at him again, it began to dawn upon him that this bare-footed young Highlander carried himself with dignity, and that he held up his head in a way that is not taught in Board-schools. The next moment the boy, aware that he was being studied, lowered his head with a defensive instinct, and glanced at the man out of the corner of his dark eyes. The glance was at once sly and naïve, like that of some bright, wicked bird.

“And what is your name, my boy?” the Englishman asked, with a touch of middle-class patronage. He could not quite get the bare feet out of his mind.

“I am Alistair Stuart.”

The stranger uttered a sound of surprise.

“The Stuart who lives with Mr. Duncan Gilderoy?”

“Yes.” The answer came unwillingly again.

“Then you are the boy I have come here for.”

“I knew that,” said Stuart. And a slightly cunning look came into his eyes.

The man was baffled. He could not quite make up his mind whether the boy had been playing a practical joke on him from the first, or had been merely too dull to explain himself. Londoner-like, he leant a little towards the second supposition, for he was managing clerk to a firm of solicitors in Theobald’s Road, and firmly believed that human nature contained no depths which he had not sounded to their very bottom. He believed that all men were animated by one supreme motive, the making of money, that they were distracted and impeded in their progress towards the goal by the counter-attractions of woman and wine, and that he was the wisest who best withstood these allurements, and kept his gaze steadily fixed on that yellow bull’s-eye of endeavour. He regarded the law as the rules of the game, and knew to a hair exactly how far it was possible to go without breaking them. There was only one irrational element in the man’s life: he was a Wesleyan, and holding it for certain that the doctrine of that sect amounted to an immediate communication to himself from his Maker, of whom he was a good deal afraid, he paid in reluctantly but largely to the Church funds, which he regarded as a species of blackmail levied by God on business men.

The three walked up through the narrow street together. The street was paved with cobble-stones, and ascended in layers or great steps, with one or more houses to a step. The houses themselves would have been called hovels in London, and looking at them, the law-clerk considered that he was walking through a slum. He wondered almost mournfully how human creatures could submit to pass their lives in such miserable conditions. The sight of the bare-footed lads and lasses with their red cheeks and shapely legs woke actual pity in his breast; for he was naturally kind, and his kindness could only find expression in the benevolent wish to take control of all these lives which he understood so little, and shape them into the image of his own.

Stuart had been looking forward to the coming of this man ever since he could remember. He had always known that Duncan Gilderoy was only his foster-father, and that his life would not be lived out on Oig. They had told him that his father and mother lived in France, and that his father was too ill to have his children with him. He could not recollect these legendary parents, who were only known to him by portraits which he religiously cherished, and by letters which came to him regularly from his mother. His father, from whom he received only occasional messages, was the object of a devotion that filled his whole heart; his yearning for that unknown father’s love was one of those passions of childhood which are never told, and which are never forgotten. There was more of awe than love in his thoughts about his mother; she was an Englishwoman, and the tenderness that her letters expressed was overlaid with pious monitions and references to Bible texts. He learned that he had an elder brother, James, who was being educated at a school in England under the casual supervision of the head of the family, who had never noticed Alistair. At some time or other—he was doubtful when—the perception had come that the character of his upbringing was at least partly due to lack of money. The islands and moorlands, the castles and broad acres that made up the great inheritance of Trent and Colonsay were all tributary to certain men of law in London and in Edinburgh, whom the clansmen of Oig hated as a conquered nation hates the invader encamped upon its soil.

Alistair knew also—for these things were the history and politics of Oig—that his father stood next in succession to the dukedom, and that his brother’s favour with the reigning Duke was in right of his exalted destiny as heir.

Thus the boy, reared in the society of herdsmen and fishers, who were to him as kinsmen of a lower rank, had had always before his eyes the vision of the great world in which he was one day to play a part. Civilization shone for him afar off, as it shines for the native of some colonial wilderness, in all the hues of hope and wonder. How often had he climbed to the top of the cliff that overlooked the Sound of Oig, and laid himself down on the wind-mown grass, looking and longing for the first peep of that sooty feather which he had taken for the signal of emancipation. No instinct had ever warned him that the little noisy packet was a slaveship, the galley of the great Anglo-Roman Raj, coming to make him captive, and carry him off to be tamed and trained into a citizen of the Raj, to speak its tongue and wear its dress, and learn its manners, and its laws, till the innermost pulse of his being should be timed to the Anglo-Roman time, and the ancient Pictish blood in his veins should forget its source, and run as if through Anglo-Roman ducts.

Looking back across his life to this point of departure, it seemed to Alistair that he had found the clue of his tangled skein, and that he might in time achieve a complete answer to the riddle of his fate. For a moment the longing of his heart returned to that green islet in its grey sea, and he bitterly regretted that he had not been left to live out his life there among the clansmen whom he loved, and by whom he was beloved, who esteemed him as a prince among them, and would have still esteemed and shielded him had he become the outlaw of the Raj. He was an exile—surely it was this, he told himself—he was an outlander adrift amongst a race to which he did not belong; which he never could understand, and by which he never could be understood.

The first great misunderstanding with his captors had come when he was a boy. There was a Velasquez-looking portrait on the walls of Colonsay House of a lad of fifteen, long-legged and slim, with eyes like the night—a night haunted by the slumber of wild beasts that the first footfall will disturb. The dress of this boy was touched with the girlish delicacy that betrays a mother’s darling: the collar was of lace, the jacket was of velvet, the straw hat, thrust back from his forehead, was costlier than lace or velvet. At night he slept in silk, in a tapestried chamber. His days were passed within the stately walls, or in roaming through the glorious demesne, of one of the historic homes of England, watched over with all the care that love and wealth could afford.

He had lived with his mother ever since his father’s death. It was not until she had clasped him in her arms that she had told him of his loss, and she had never suspected the bitterness of the boy’s grief. The father whom he had never known remained a sacred memory still, all the more sacred because his mother never talked to him about the dead. By this time the old Duke was dead as well, and James had succeeded him, so that the days of hardship were over, and the inheritance was being nursed back into something like its former splendour.

A fond yearning to regain some of the lost years of their childhood had caused their mother to keep both her boys beside her, giving them a tutor instead of a school. But she had another motive which she tried to believe was paramount—the desire to bring them early into her own religious fold.

During four years Alistair had had his mind steeped day after day in the emotional atmosphere of primitive Christianity. This was his mother’s native air, and she could not have been brought to believe that it might be drawn with difficulty and pain by any human creature. If the knowledge had been forced upon her that such a training was unwholesome for either of her sons, her universe would have become a maze without a plan; her God would have been shattered like Dagon.

To both the boys this training came as part of the yoke which age imposes on youth. Boyhood is always surrendering its secret convictions at the bidding of authority; the process called education is one long defeat of the barbarians by the legions. Their mother heard them repeat the phrases which she had taught them, and believed in her work.

A cold temper and unimaginative mind enabled the elder boy to take this religion in the formal spirit in which it has been taken by a great part of mankind for two thousand years. As a theory of the universe it received his unquestioning assent; as a life-motive it left him practically untouched. He became the unconscious hypocrite whom the Gospel was written to make us loathe, and who has governed the Church ever since the Gospel was written.

On Alistair his mother’s teaching had another effect. A poet’s sensitiveness on the score of words made him shrink at times from the familiar language of his mother’s creed. But his temperament responded readily to the exciting influence of religious emotion, and the cunning which usually accompanies hysteria taught him to use this faculty for his own protection. When he had been naughty during the day—and Alistair was already marked out as the naughty one of the two brothers—it was his mother’s habit to come into his room after he had gone to bed, and try to soften him. She knelt beside the bed, and talked and prayed with him till the boy melted in a confession of wrongdoing, and the two made it up with kisses and tears.

These scenes had endeared Alistair to his mother, whose tenderness for her younger son aroused the elder’s secret jealousy. They had been ruinous to the boy himself, whom they made an emotional debauchee. He spent his sincerity in spasms of repentance which left him worse than before. There were yet other consequences: the nervous organization is a sensitive instrument, which ignorant fingers do not touch for nothing.

For a year past Alistair had inspired his mother with hopes that he was ripening for the change of mind which she called conversion. He had become more serious; his gaiety was sometimes dashed with melancholy; he wrote verses which she treasured up as evidences of the direction his intelligence was taking. The verses were echoes of the poets whom she had placed in his hands, and her favourite poets were Miss Havergal and Dr. Bonar. He had taken to wandering much by himself in the park; sometimes on returning from these rambles he posed her with strange questions about the nature of the Deity and the contradictions that abound in every positive system of the universe.

The mother drew happy auguries. Like Hannah, she dedicated her son to the Lord, and wrote to the Archbishop who was his godfather, to interest him in the boy.

All this time one half of life had been carefully hidden from Alistair. Of the great mystery of life he knew less than an animal knows. For him, as for all his generation, the divine lore which was once communicated in solemn temples and amid consecrated groves, which is still given the character of a revelation among the worshipping millions beneath the Himalayas, lay under the blight of the great ascetic frenzy which spread round the Mediterranean zone two thousand years ago. The temple had long been a stew, the revelation a vulgar jest bandied about on furtive lips; the groves were cut down, the torches were blown out, the musical instruments were broken, and the rite of initiation had passed from the holy places into the sewers. The road of darkness was esteemed the road of safety; and Alistair walked upon it in ignorance alike of the law of Heaven and of the taboo of man.

The Garden of Eden is like that flying island of Arabian geography which descends unawares in front of the adventurer, and tempts him to tread its enamelled turf, surrendering his senses to the hymeneal music of its birds, and the perfume of its myriad flowers. The earth was changed for Alistair by a keeper’s daughter, a girl of his own age, with a face fair as an apple-blossom, in whose heart the seed of ambition had been early sown by a vain mother’s hand. All through one summer-tide they met by stealth among the woods of Trent; while she, intoxicated by the young lord’s notice, listened with uncomprehending ears to that passionate romance which youth pours out at the first touch of love: and for him the sunshine sprinkled all the air with orange-blossoms through the green network overhead, the silver birch-stems rose like rejoicing fountains in the glimmering shade, the hum of insects lapped his enamoured ear like the vague music of a shell, the very ground distilled a rapturous scent, and all his pulses sang within him as his life swept into the great throb of the universal world.

The retribution which followed on discovery tortured him still in the remembrance. What such a discovery must have cost a mother like his, he could not gauge. He only knew that every sacred feeling in his own breast had been outraged, the innermost sanctuary had been profaned, the delicate blossoms had been uprooted and trampled in the mire. He had a recollection of hideous scenes, of questions that were intolerable insults, of a visit from the Archbishop, who came too late to mediate, and, finally, of a term of penal servitude passed in an institution abroad, from which Alistair returned a Roman Catholic.

In his mother’s eyes this was a moral bankruptcy. Fresh influences were brought to bear on the perverted one; the rest of his youth was passed in drifting from one guardianship to another, under a perpetual cloud, and manhood found him without faith and without a career.

That his mother had loved him throughout Alistair knew well, though even he did not know how much she loved him. Perhaps the love between them had been strengthened by the tragedy of the past. It seemed to Alistair now to have been the old story of the hen that has hatched out a duckling from the shell. He thought of his mother with a painful mingling of wrath and tenderness, believing her to have been cruel to him, and knowing that she had been cruel to herself for his sake. The mother whom his instinct taught him to demand was one of those mothers of the passionate races, who live only to be the slaves of their sons, to hear their confessions, to soothe their remorse, to abet them in their worst crimes. His grievance against his own mother was that she had not taken him for what he was. The changeling had been tormented in the hope of giving it a human soul.

When he came of age he took the problem out of her hands. “You do not understand me,” he told her one day; “I must live my own life.”

His brother, Trent, had granted him an allowance of a thousand a year, which his tradesmen raised to five thousand. The contents of every shop in London were at the command of the brother of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay, on condition that the brother of the Duke paid double for them. The shopkeepers began by cheating him, as though they foresaw that he would end by cheating them.

Stuart hardly knew that he was extravagant. Most of the ways in which he spent money were ways in which he heard other men praised for spending it. He collected miniatures; he bought old cabinets, which were repaired for him by skilful workmen; he published tiny volumes with his own poems, in which a strain of southern passion mingled with the dreamy melancholy of the northern seas. His pleasures were those of a poet, not a man about town. He lent money to those about him, to the poets whose names were unknown to the readers of magazines, to the painters whose pictures were abhorred by the Royal Academy, to the musicians who could not make bright tunes. Such men have no right to live; but Stuart fed them at his table, and rejoiced in the incense of their praise.

It was the difference between Lord Alistair Stuart and the men who surrounded him which had first fascinated Molly Finucane. He had been for her a mystery which she was bent on exploring. When after a time she found that this intellectual side of her lover’s character was out of her reach, she became jealous, and sought to choke it. It was of such as she that a certain acquaintance of Stuart’s in those days wrote that all men kill the thing they love.

In her own way, and with what truth was left to her, Molly Finucane did love Alistair Stuart. That was the part of it which others could not be expected to allow for. The life in the house in Chelsea had been as regular as that of any married pair. The only visitors received were Stuart’s friends. Molly had discarded all her old associates as completely as though she had been really married—always with the exception of Mendes, whom Alistair sometimes asked to dinner. She had practised what in her eyes was economy, playing the novel part of housekeeper, enjoying the strange experience of giving orders to tradesmen, and calculating the prices of household stuff. Unfortunately, she could not shake off at once the habits of reckless expense which she had been taught. Her nature had come to crave for excitement as an opium-eater’s craves for the drug, and the only amusements she knew were costly ones. The play, for Molly, meant a brougham, a little dinner at a smart restaurant, a private box, and a supper at some Bohemian night-club—in short, the spending of five or ten pounds. She went to the theatres and music-halls very often. On the nights when she did not go she felt disastrously bored, and wished herself dead. Then she had to have flowers every day, and a new bracelet or some such trifle every week, or she felt herself neglected. She had acquired the fatal idea that the love of men was only to be gauged by the money they spent on her. An unbroken stream of these offerings was necessary to convince her that Stuart had not tired of her.

In reality, it was the attempt to live within his means which destroyed Lord Alistair’s credit. As soon as his tradesmen heard of the house in Chelsea they began to send in their bills, and as soon as the money-lenders heard that he was paying his debts they refused to help him. It was the Duke of Trent whom they had trusted to, and now they recollected that the Duke’s estates had come to him heavily mortgaged. They told Lord Alistair to apply to his brother, and his brother told him to leave Molly Finucane. Like the rest of the world, he believed that it was the house in Chelsea which had brought his brother down.

Alistair had retorted by filing his petition. It was to be open war at last, he told himself. If the head of his house would not heed him, neither would he heed the honour of the house.

And now, as he stood on the bridge and gazed at the spectacle of the night, it was borne in upon him more fully and more clearly that he was not without companions; that his case was not a solitary case, but that other houses besides the house of Trent and Colonsay had their younger sons and their failures; that other lands besides Oig had given their children to be devoured by the minotaur called Civilization; that his was only one of those broken lives which underlie the pageantry of empire, like the rubble underneath rich palace walls.

He turned once more to regard the spectacle of the night, and his eye swept over the two edifices that confronted each other immediately above the bridge, the palace, and the hospital; the chosen of the race gathered in the one, its victims in the other, as if civilization were an army whose headquarters and whose ambulance stood side by side. His eye rested long where the road leading down into the dark purlieus of poverty and crime flared and roared like the mouth of sheol; then it returned to the northern side, where the roof of a great mansion was just visible above the trees.

What he saw there was the form of a grey-haired woman seated alone, thinking of her prodigal son, perhaps praying for him, perhaps expecting him. He threw one last backward glance towards the city of Ahriman, and then, with a shudder, he set his face towards the gates of Ormuzd, and walked swiftly off the bridge.

All the time he had been standing there a prayer had been going up to Heaven: “Give me back my son, O Lord! Give me back my son!”

CHAPTER III
THE PRODIGAL SON

Alistair walked past the lights of Palace Yard, and turned into the broad avenue of Parliament Street, bordered by the vast offices of the British Empire. When he had gone half-way to Charing Cross, he turned aside again, and presently found himself in front of a high and sombre house, one of a row whose windows overlooked the river and the bridge. It stood back in a bleak garden enclosed in tall iron railings, where nothing grew but grass and trees and ivy, all of the same shade of soot-encrusted green. This was Colonsay house, a relic of the days when the Thames had been a glorious highway between the cities of London and Westminster, a highway lined with the dwellings of great nobles, and bright with painted barges and fluttering banners.

Now a slight air of decay hung over the old house, and it seemed conscious that it had outlived its generation. The tide no longer washed the foot of its lawn, and rich brocades and jewelled sword-hilts no longer sparkled under its trees. It stood there with its few neighbours, isolated among the encroaching buildings of a newer age, and waiting its own turn to be devoured.

Stuart hesitated for a moment as he stood outside the door. There had been a time when he would have walked through that door as of right. But it was long since he had lived under his brother’s roof, and more than a year since he had passed this doorway last. During the time that he had been living in Chelsea he had shunned all intercourse with his family. His mother had written to him more than once, but her letters had remained unanswered. The letters were entreaties to him to abandon the woman who was dragging him down, and he had not abandoned her.

He raised his hand to the bell, and jerked it roughly. Then he stood waiting, half ashamed to encounter the gaze of his brother’s servants, and resenting their curiosity in advance.

“Is the Duke in?” he asked of the man who opened the door. He had no wish to meet his brother that night.

In the first moment the footman did not recognize his questioner. The next his face lit up with an expression of respectful sympathy.

“No, my lord; his Grace is at the House of Lords. But will your lordship come in?”

As he threw the door wider the butler, an old family retainer, stepped forward. His face wore the same expression as the footman’s, a little less subdued, and he ventured on a word of welcome.

“I hope I see your lordship well? Her Grace is upstairs, and I believe would be very glad to see your lordship.”

“Very well, Stokes,” said Stuart shortly, giving the footman his hat and stick. “I’ll go up.”

The servants fell back with faces of demure congratulation as he passed between them to the foot of the staircase. It was evident that they viewed this home-coming of the prodigal as the pleasant and appropriate ending to a deeply interesting history. Perhaps Lord Alistair’s transgressions had aroused in their breasts a secret fellow-feeling such as they could never have for their upright, decorous master. The conduct which had disgraced Lord Alistair in the eyes of his equals had made him a hero in theirs. Disgrace, after all, is a relative term; what is ignominy in the schoolroom is often glory in the playground.

Alistair reached the first floor, and took his way to the well-remembered little drawing-room, where his mother always sat when she was alone. Tapping softly on the panel, he opened the door and went in.

It was an old-fashioned room with narrow Georgian windows, and the walls were decorated with painted panels, set in elaborate gilt scrollwork, with small tail-pieces underneath, in the style of an Italian altar-piece. A picture of sportsmen in a coppice was completed by a dead pheasant below, and a sea-piece was similarly finished off with a group of shells. In contrast with this eighteenth-century elegance the furniture was of that ungraceful, stereotyped pattern which has not yet been out of date long enough to be esteemed for its curiosity. It was the work of an age which valued the useful above the beautiful, and preferred the accurate production of machinery to the irregular handiwork of the craftsman. It was the age of the political economists, when Free Trade was the gospel of humanity, and the world’s ideal took shape in a huge bazaar. It was an age in which England ruled the world, and the shopkeeper ruled England, and men deemed that the millennium could not be far away.

The religion of this age was Evangelical Christianity. The work of Wellesley and Whitefield still leavened the national life from the cottage to the throne. The Catholic conspiracy had not become formidable; the rising tide of knowledge had not yet sapped the foundations of the old beliefs. A miscellany of Hebrew literature, half savage, half sublime, bound up with the cryptic legends of the Roman catacombs, and rendered into English by the intellect of the sixteenth century, was accepted as the personal composition of the Creator, inspired, infallible, and irrevocable, from the first letter in the word Genesis to the last in the word Amen. Salvation by faith was the watchword of the Churches; the unbeliever was assured that his best actions were but additional sins until he had gone through that spiritual experience which brought him within the pale of the redeemed.

Yet this strait, remorseless creed educated women who were gracious and beautiful in their lives, and of such women Caroline, Duchess of Trent, was one. She accepted her creed, as the scientist accepts the law of cause and effect, without understanding it, but her logic was able to reconcile it with hope and charity, and with a tireless devotion to the good of all about her.

They who are willing to sacrifice themselves will never want those who are willing to accept the sacrifice. In her girlhood Caroline had been a maid of honour in the Court of Queen Victoria, and she had ever since been one of that small circle whom the widowed monarch counted as her personal friends. The needs of selfish parents had forced her into an early marriage with a sickly old man whom she nursed faithfully and kindly, but whom she could not love. He died before she was thirty, leaving her with enough wealth to attract Lord Alexander Stuart, the penniless younger son of a great but impoverished house.

To this man, as handsome as he was worthless, she gave her heart and her fortune, in accordance with the common law which mates the best with the worst, and he had become the father of her children before she made the discovery that he was an irreclaimable drunkard and gambler. For their own sakes she consented to part with her children, and she passed the next ten years of her life in accompanying the man to whom she believed herself bound, from Continental hotel to hotel, keeping up a hopeless struggle against the vices which were dragging him down to the grave.

Her loyalty, and perhaps some relic of her love, survived him, and no word of hers had ever betrayed his memory to his sons. In the face of the younger she found a resemblance to his father which had insensibly gained on her affection, and although she had tried to disguise it from them, and from herself, both the boys soon knew that Alistair was their mother’s favourite. When the courtesy rank of Duchess was conferred on her by royal patent, she did not value the distinction for herself, but her mother’s heart felt a secret pride that her handsome, naughty Alistair should be given the style of Lord.

The catastrophe which opened her eyes to the meaning of heredity rendered her frantic with grief and shame. That likeness between Alistair and his father which had fascinated her for so long now became a source of terror. The handsome boyish face, with its ruddy cheeks and bright eyes and clustering curls, which had gladdened her sight, was now a dreadful chart in which she read prophecies of evil to come.

Under the stress of panic she took that step which she had since bitterly regretted, which had cost Alistair his religion, and had cost her his confidence. Ever since that miserable time mother and son had remained apart, gazing at each other wistfully across a chasm which neither could bridge.

The life which he had been leading since his manhood seemed to her a dangerous, if not an evil one. She saw him moving in a world which was wholly strange to her, a world in which her own ideals of conduct were ignored or despised. She heard that he had written poems which she was advised not to see. Trent told her they were unfit for any decent woman to read, and the Archbishop added that they were blasphemous. When she ventured on a remonstrance with Alistair he replied by telling her that art was above morality, and that a poet must be a law unto himself.

Like all the mothers of her generation, she would fain have shut her eyes to one side of her son’s life. But even she could not help but hear of such a portent as Molly Finucane. The Archbishop felt it his duty to warn her. Trent openly complained that his brother was disgracing the family, and threatened to forbid him the house. He might have carried out the threat if Alistair had not ceased his visits of his own accord.

By this time sorrow had helped her sixty years to make the Duchess an old woman. Her figure was still upright, but her hair was silvered. Her face, at once sweet and venerable, was marked by a settled sadness. Her elder son had been as great a comfort to her as his brother had been a trial, and she had learned to value him more and more. Yet not all her pride in Trent’s career could soothe her inward grief and yearning over the marred life of the son who had gone astray.

Alistair came in softly, and found his mother in tears. At the sound of his footstep on the threshold her face flushed, and she rose up, breathing fast, and went quickly to meet him, with a great joy shining in her eyes.

“My boy!” she cried hysterically. “My boy Alistair!”

They stood there silently for a space, with their arms round one another’s necks, and both felt comforted, for these two loved each other very tenderly, and they had not met for a long time.

Such moments do not last. The first gush of affection spent, they were left face to face, two natures belonging to different worlds.

While Alistair led his mother to a seat he asked anxiously:

“When is Trent likely to be back? I don’t want to see him.”

The Duchess looked troubled.

“He won’t be in till late, I expect. He is introducing a Bill in the House to-night, and he told me not to sit up for him. I think there is another debate on first, about the Church.”

Alistair heard her listlessly. The doings of the House of Lords sounded in his ears just then like the fretting of phantoms on a stage. He had struck his foot for the first time against reality. What does anyone know of life who has never risen in the morning wondering under what roof he shall lay his head at night?

“But you ought to see him,” the mother went on to say. “He is your brother—neither of you should ever forget that. You want his help, dear, and I am sure he will help you if you will only let him.”

“He should have helped me before,” Alistair returned in a resentful tone. “I know Trent; he would not lift a finger to save me from being hanged unless he were afraid of what people would say.”

“Don’t be bitter,” the mother pleaded. “Your brother means well by you, I am sure.”

“Nonsense, mother; he would be only too glad to get rid of me altogether. I have always been a thorn in his side. He looks upon me as the black sheep of the family, and always will. Trent would like to pack me off to the Klondike for the next ten years, I expect.”

As this was one of the suggestions which had actually fallen from the Duke’s lips that day, when the news of his brother’s insolvency had been brought to the house, the Duchess found it difficult to answer.

“Klondike would be better for you than the life you have been leading here,” she said as gently as she could. “Don’t you think it would be better for you to leave London and go abroad for a time out of the reach of temptation?”

The young man frowned. He knew very well what was meant by the word “temptation.”

“I can’t go without money,” he said shortly.

“I could let you have a little, dear, and James, I know, will let you have as much as you want, as long as he knows that it won’t be spent”—she hesitated an instant—“in bad ways.”

Alistair scowled.

“What business is it of his how I spend my money?”

His mother raised her hand with a certain quiet dignity.

“It is my business, at all events, to know what kind of life my boy is living, and to sorrow when I know that he is living in open sin and shame.”

To this speech Alistair made no answer. He could have made none that would not have added to his mother’s pain.

“How much do you want?” the Duchess asked presently in a weary tone. It was not the first conversation between them that had ended at the same point.

The young man started up.

“Look here, mother, I didn’t come here to ask for money; I’m past that now. It doesn’t matter to me whether I stay in London or go abroad. Trent can decide for himself about that. Anyway, I must go under for a time, I suppose, and I don’t much care if I ever come up again. I was out on Westminster Bridge just now, wondering whether it wouldn’t be the easiest way to drop over, and put an end to it all; and then I thought of you, and felt sorry for your sake more than my own; and so I made up my mind to come and see you—and here I am.”

The poor lady shook a good deal as she listened to this speech; and, remembering her prayer just before Alistair came in, she breathed a silent thanksgiving, and the tears came back into her eyes.

“Oh, my poor boy, can’t you see that all this is the result of the life you have chosen!” She would have liked to make a more direct reference to her religious belief, but feared to do so. She had learnt by this time that her son and she had no common ground in that direction. “Why—why don’t you leave that wicked woman, and start a new life? She is ruining you, body and soul.”

Alistair frowned impatiently.

“I can’t let you say that, mother. It’s not her fault, Heaven knows! The poor little thing has tried to do her best for me. She is a great deal better than some of your good women, who would draw their skirts aside if they passed her in the street.”

He spoke roughly, but not disrespectfully.

The Duchess sighed heavily.

“My unhappy boy, you know nothing about good women. You never meet them; you might be a different man if you did. If I could only bring you under the influence of some really good, devoted girl, such as I know”—a name rose to the Duchess’s lips, but she deemed it wiser not to pronounce it at that moment—“who would love you well enough to overlook the past, she might redeem you even now.”

Alistair sighed, too, at the picture called up by his mother’s words. He thought of poor little neurotic Molly, with her spasms of utter wretchedness, her hysterical fits, her occasional drunken outbreaks in which all the gutter in her blood came to the surface; he thought of her perpetual, feverish craving for excitement, of her secret hatred of his intellectual pursuits, of their ill-managed, disorderly household, with insolent servants going and coming every month. And then he contrasted the portrait with that of some sweet and gracious maiden—such a girl as his mother must have been in her youth—who would bring peace into his life, whose presence would be soothing as the sound of church bells heard at evening across the autumn fields, who would guide and rule their home through happy years of wedded friendship. Alistair sighed.

His mother heard and drew courage from the sigh. Already her mind was busy in working out a scheme for her boy’s salvation. Her eagerness led her to make a false step at the outset.

“If you will go away even for a short time I shall feel happier,” she pleaded. “Won’t you try to separate yourself from this woman? If you like to go abroad I could come with you, perhaps. You have often said that you should like to visit Rome?”

Alistair shook his head stubbornly.

“I cannot go away without Molly.”

The Duchess of Trent flushed. It seemed to her that this answer was an insult, even though she had in a manner forced it from him.

“I wonder that you dare say that to me,” she said, with a touch of anger.

“I beg your pardon, mother. But it’s no good our discussing such things. I can’t expect you to understand how I feel about her. She has given up everything—you may say she has reformed—for my sake, and if I were to send her adrift now I should feel myself a blackguard. Why, God help me, I believe the poor little thing’s been selling her jewels to pay the housekeeping bills for the last few months. If she’d been my wife she couldn’t have done more than that.”

His mother started, and a look of dreadful apprehension came into her eyes.

“Don’t talk like that, Alistair! I’m getting old, and it frightens me. Promise me, promise me, my own dear son, that you will never marry her?”

In her agitation the poor lady rose and went to him, laying a pleading hand on his shoulder as she looked into his face.

“No, I don’t suppose I shall ever do that,” he said.

But he spoke in a tone of dejection, like a man not certain of himself, and the mother’s fear was not relieved.

CHAPTER IV
A FAMILY COUNCIL

The Duke of Trent and Colonsay, after shaking hands with the Prime Minister, and receiving the congratulations of several colleagues on his first appearance as a Minister in charge of an important measure, was walking out of the House, when he felt himself tapped familiarly on the shoulder from behind.

He turned round in some annoyance, for he was careful of his dignity, but the look of rebuke was exchanged for one of respectful pleasure as he perceived that the hand which had touched him was the Duke of Gloucester’s.

“Are you going back to Colonsay House?” the Prince inquired.

“I was going,” the Minister returned, conveying by the change of tense that his movements were for the Prince to dispose of.

“That’s right; then I’ll walk round with you, if I shan’t put you out,” Prince Herbert said, linking his arm in friendly fashion in the Duke’s.

The two companions were old acquaintances; they might almost be called friends. They had been boys together, in so far as a Prince is allowed to be a boy. Their houses were in the same part of the country, and the cordial relations between the Duchess Caroline and her royal mistress had been renewed by their descendants.

At that time, indeed, Prince Herbert had been more intimate with Alistair Stuart than with James. The younger boy’s merry, versatile disposition had made him a favourite, while his brother was rather a dull companion. But the course of their later lives had tended to keep up the intercourse between the Prince and the Duke, while Alistair had gradually drifted away into paths in which it was impossible for his royal friend to keep him company.

The new Home Secretary expected to receive some compliment as they passed out under the vast vault of the Victoria Tower and turned eastward. His speech that night had been a marked success. The Bill he had just introduced was one to provide the punishment of flogging for the gangs of street-boys who infested the southern side of the river. He had denounced the enemies of order with conviction, and the House had cordially endorsed his righteous anger. No one had been weak enough to think, or bold enough to suggest, that there was any better way to deal with the hooligan than to flog him. There had been a time when England could export her savages to savage lands, but, by some wonderful political alchemy, no sooner did she cast her convict colonies on the shores of America and Australia than they rose up mighty states, and with the zeal of renegades refused to harbour the next criminal generation. Even the army, so long the last refuge of the blackguard, was become respectable. Science was already lifting a confident voice to preach extermination for the unfit, and society, puzzled between the old creed and the new, found itself too weak to crucify, but not too weak to scourge.

It was with a sense of disappointment that the young Minister found that their walk was to be a silent one. The Prince said nothing till they were in Colonsay House.

“I suppose the Duchess is not up so late as this?” the Prince asked, as they entered the hall.

“My mother generally goes on about this time, but I will ask. Stokes, go and see if her Grace is in her room, and if so tell her his Royal Highness has asked for her.”

The Duke led the way into a Japanese smoking lounge which opened off the stairs. A large bow-window revealed the panorama of the night-enchanted river, the reflections of the bridge lamps veining the tide with molten gold.

Prince Herbert walked to the window and gazed out speechless for several minutes, during which his host strewed a lacquered table with cigars of a rare brand, named after the Prince himself.

“The grandest view in Europe, I always think,” the Prince observed, as he turned reluctantly from the window. “And yet there is something dreadful in it. It is so utterly removed from Nature. It makes one think of the underground life which we are told the race will one day have to take to.”

“We have taken to it already, it seems to me,” Trent answered. “We travel underground, our light and water come to us underground, our food is cooked underground, and I am told there are underground stables in some parts of London.”

Prince Herbert closed his lips as he walked across to choose a cigar. It was not the first time that he had found James Stuart a heavy person to talk to. He could not help comparing this commonplace mind, with its prim grasp of daily life and its impotence to rise to any higher plane, with the brilliant and sensitive imagination of Alistair, like a soaring bubble, one moment glowing with the reflected radiance of a thousand stars, the next moment smashed against the coarse paling of the roadway.

Yet it was this man who enjoyed honour and favour, while the other was become an outcast. It was to this man that he himself was about to sue for some toleration of the other.

He had just struck a light when the door opened to admit Alistair’s mother. With the quick instinct of sympathy she had divined the object of the royal visit, and she pressed a warm kiss on the Prince’s forehead as he came forward to greet her.

“My dear aunt,” he exclaimed, using the title which he had given her in his boyish days, “I hope you haven’t come downstairs on my account. I ought to have gone up to you.”

“I would much rather sit here, and see you smoke,” she said, with an affectionate smile. “That is, if an old woman is not in the way of two young men.”

Prince Herbert hastened to draw forward a chair, but the Duchess refused to sit down till the visitor had lit his cigar. As soon as some servants who had brought in a tray of spirits had left the room, the Prince opened his appeal.

“I am very sorry about Alistair,” he said.

A frown passed quickly over the Duke’s face at this allusion to the family trouble, but his mother looked up gratefully.

“I was sure you would be,” she responded. “Poor foolish boy! If only I could find a way to save him!”

“Couldn’t this have been prevented?” inquired Prince Herbert, glancing at the elder brother.

James shook his head decisively.

“It was impossible. My mother will tell you I did everything I could. Twice I have got him to give me an account of his debts, and settled them, as I thought. But I don’t believe now that he ever let me know one half of what he really owed. It is like pouring water into a sieve to try and help Alistair.”

“Do you know what the amount is now?”

“Fifty or sixty thousand, I understand. I don’t suppose he knows within ten thousand or so himself. It is two years’ revenue of the property. Everything is entailed; I can only mortgage my life interest, and that means paying a heavy premium for life insurance. Ever since he came of age I have given him a thousand a year, and of course he could have his rooms here if he chose to lead a decent life. My mother knows that that is the very utmost I can do for him if I mean to keep up the estates as they ought to be kept up. I have to think of a jointure for my wife, if I should ever marry, and some provision for my own children.”

The Duke delivered his defence in an injured tone, as though he felt that the sympathy of his audience was against him. Prince Herbert, in his quiet way, returned to the attack.

“I have really no right to ask you, but I should have thought your properties brought you in a great deal more.”

“They are still heavily encumbered,” was the answer. “There are mortgages on nearly everything except the Scotch land, and that brings in nothing. I might let the moors, I suppose, but in my opinion that would be another disgrace. I am very strongly opposed to giving these Americans and stockbrokers the pick of all the historic places in Great Britain. I blame Cantire for letting Mull.”

This time the Duke spoke with undisguised warmth. It was a relief to him to silence the misgivings from which his own mind was not entirely free on the subject of Alistair.

“After all, I owe a duty to my people, as well as to Alistair,” he continued. “I am the head of the clan as well as the landlord. I regard myself as a constitutional monarch on my own estate, and I have no right to sacrifice my tenants in order to enrich Molly Finucane.”

Prince Herbert felt himself rebuked. He doubted no more than others that the house in Chelsea had been Alistair’s undoing.

“Is there no hope of rescuing him?” He looked hesitatingly at the Duchess.

“I have just seen Alistair,” she confessed, not without some fear of her elder son’s resentment. “He came here to see me to-night.”

“To ask for money, I suppose,” said the Duke.

The Duchess was wounded by the taunt.

“He did not ask for any, and I did not give him any,” she said with dignity. “I told him I was sure that you would help him if he would only leave that woman.”

“And what did he say?”

“I don’t think he meant what he said; I can’t think so. But he talked about her in such a way that for a moment I thought he wanted to marry her.”

A fierce exclamation broke from the Minister, a milder one from Prince Herbert.

“If he does that, he shall never have another farthing from me; I will never acknowledge him again!”

“His infatuation for her is terrible,” the mother went on. “He even defended her to me. He told me that she had made sacrifices for him—that she was paying for the house.”

The two men exchanged glances. This was a deeper depth than either of them had suspected. Perhaps the Duchess would have suppressed this part of her information if she had understood how it would strike a man.

“Is there no chance that the woman herself may give him up now?”

The Duchess shook her head doubtfully.

“I should think not, from what he says. I hardly know what it is best to do. I think perhaps he might be induced to give an undertaking not to marry her, in return for some assistance.”

The Home Secretary made a face of disgust.

“So I am to be blackmailed, am I? I have to bribe my brother not to make a street-girl the next Duchess of Colonsay.”

Prince Herbert looked distressed.

“Are you sure that is the right way to go to work with Alistair?” he asked gently. “I have always believed that there was good in him, you know. Perhaps if you tried to appeal to his generosity you might do more than you suppose.”

Alistair’s mother gave the speaker a grateful look.

“Thank you, Bertie. It is very good of you to plead for my poor boy. I think, James dear, you may have been a little harsh with him sometimes.”

“If you were to go to him now,” the Prince pursued, “not to scold him at all, but just to say, ‘Well, old fellow, you’re in a mess; let’s see if I can get you out,’ I think you would find him very different to deal with.”

The elder brother still frowned.

“You don’t know Alistair as well as I do. He would most likely insult me. The last time I wrote to him, nearly a year ago, enclosing his allowance, and pointing out to him how the life he was leading was bound to end, he wrote back to me—my mother saw the note: ‘Dear Jim, your cheques are better than your sermons. Affectionately, Alistair.’”

Prince Herbert by a severe effort checked the smile which rose to his lips.

“After all, he is your brother,” he reminded the aggrieved senior.

“I’m sure I don’t know why he should be,” the Duke muttered, but he let his voice drop at the sight of his mother’s sorrowful face.

“I would see him myself,” the Prince added, “only I have to leave for Birmingham to-morrow to lay the foundation stone of a cathedral, and I am under engagements which will keep me in the district for several days.”

The Duchess rose and walked across the room to where her son was seated, tapping a fretful foot upon the floor. She laid her hand on his arm, and looked him beseechingly in the face.

“My son, my eldest son!” she murmured softly. “You need not be jealous of the poor prodigal. Say that you will go?”

And James said that he would go.

That night Alistair’s mother did not sleep.

The bankrupt himself slept heavily after emptying a bottle of champagne, at whose expense he no longer hesitated. The new Minister tossed to and fro till the excitement of debate had evaporated, and then sank into a calm, health-giving slumber. Prince Herbert slept too; if he had passed a troubled night the wires would have flashed the news next day from Auckland to Vancouver.

But the Duchess of Trent could not sleep. She spent a night of fear and sorrow, her mind haunted by the terrible word that spelt the wreck of her darling—the word wife.

Rather than see her son married to Molly Finucane she could have prayed that he might be taken from the world. To her apprehension such a marriage meant ruin final and irretrievable, ruin social, moral and religious, ruin in this life and the next.

As the first streak of dawn slanted through the window the poor lady crept from her bed, and throwing a dressing-gown round her shoulders, sat down at a small writing-table to write a letter.

She began by addressing the envelope, with fingers that shook partly from cold and partly from anguish: Miss Finucane, Elm Side, Chelsea.

She had made up her mind to take the desperate step of writing to Molly Finucane to implore her not to marry Alistair.

She had first entertained the idea of going to Molly to make the appeal in person, but she had found herself unable to face the reception which she feared was possible. Molly Finucane’s reputation daunted her. The courage of this gentle, pious, pure-minded woman was not great enough to brave the scoffs of a girl whom common fame reported as more foul-mouthed than a bargeman.

The letter took a long time to write. The words came slowly, and more than once the writer felt inclined to drop the pen in despair. But at last it was finished.

The letter ran like this:

“Dear Madam:

“Will you pardon the liberty I take in addressing you? I write on behalf of my son Alistair. I hardly know how to express myself without seeming unkind, but you will understand what a shock it has been to his mother to see him in the Bankruptcy Court. He was here last night, and from what he has said to me I feel sure that you do not wish him ill. His only chance of salvation is an entire change of life, and that can only be brought about by your influence. The tremendous hold you have over him is my only excuse for appealing to you like this. I have no doubt you see as clearly as I do how his present life is likely to end—in misery and distress. Nothing I could do would be too much to show my gratitude if you would consent to let his friends extricate him from his present way of life, and give him a fresh start. He is still a young man, and unmarried, and therefore we hope it is not too late to save him. If you are really his friend you will yourself be anxious to do nothing that would drag him deeper down into the abyss. In his present state of mind I fear for him; he is hardly master of his actions, and might be led in a thoughtless moment to take some step which he could never recall. It is even possible that he might contemplate marrying you, which—forgive my saying so—would entail certain misery on you both. He would lose all his friends, and as soon as the awakening came he would regard you as his bitterest enemy, and the cause of his ruin. I hope you will not resent my speaking thus plainly; I need not say I do so solely out of the natural anxiety of a mother for her boy, and not out of any desire to say anything harsh or unkind toward you personally. Most earnestly I implore you, I appeal to you in the name of your own mother, to let me save my boy! With many apologies for thus addressing you, believe me,

“Yours very sincerely,
“Caroline Trent and Colonsay.”

The letter finished, the Duchess betook herself to her praying-closet, where she remained till her maid appeared.

CHAPTER V
BEERS COOPERAGE

The Duchess of Trent would never call the little chamber which she used for her devotions an oratory, thinking that term savoured of Romanism. The furniture of the praying-closet was as downright and old-fashioned as its name. There was a little table against the wall, supporting a plain cross of silver, a Bible, a Book of Common Prayer, a small book of devotions called Bogatzky’s “Golden Treasury,” containing portions of Scripture, with hymns and prayers for each day. An armchair and a kneeling-cushion were the only other articles in the closet, except on the walls, which were hung with a few illuminated texts of Scripture, and a fine engraving of one of Holman Hunt’s pictures. It was such a room as might have been used by the pious Countess of Huntingdon, or one of those saintly dames who kept alive the lamp of Evangelical Christianity through the days of the Regency.

Here the Duchess was accustomed to spend many hours in pious meditation. Her nature was inclined to the tenets of the Quakers, but, like the royal mistress whom she had formerly served, she deemed that questions of ecclesiastical forms and government were unimportant, provided they did not come between the soul and its Maker. Her horror of Romanism had its root in the natural strength of her character; she revolted from the devotional practices of that communion as a healthy man might revolt from the use of crutches. Her education had taught her to consider that the claims of the Roman Church were a deliberate imposture, but she was too charitable to think evil of the individual members of its priesthood. The great wave of medieval reaction which was now sweeping over the English Church, and in a lesser degree over the Nonconformist bodies, had passed her by. The ecclesiastical subtleties which had exercised the mind of Newman and his followers were meaningless to her. She lived, as she humbly believed, in direct communion with God, whose Holy Spirit afforded her what light was necessary to salvation, and the Sacraments she regarded as mere outward tokens of a spiritual allegiance.

Believing thus, her piety overflowed, not in the observance of fasts, nor in attendance at public services, but in works of benevolence. In the country parish where she had formerly lived she had discharged all the duties of a curate, except those connected with public worship. The cottagers believed in her more than in the Rector; on several occasions she had been asked to baptize some new-born infant whose little life seemed to be guttering out. Those of such children who survived were regarded as singularly blest, and their parents showed great reluctance to let the ceremony be repeated in the church with the proper forms. She had been in still greater request as a peacemaker; no quarrel ever outlived her interference in that office. Yet she never scolded the people, and seldom rebuked them. Her method was to take the causes of mutual offence upon herself, and ask forgiveness from each in turn. It became imprudent for her to speak severely to any of the villagers, even when rebuke was called for. She found out once that a drunkard whom she had sternly reproved for ill-treatment of his children was set upon in consequence by the entire village and beaten dangerously. Her removal to London was felt like death. The whole country-side was downcast. She arranged to keep up the payment of all her alms by the hands of the Rector, but this was not felt as a consolation. Half the population of the parish followed her on the day she went away from them, the mothers crying and holding up their babes to take a last look at her, the children silent and hanging their heads. The fathers at work in the fields cast down their tools as the carriage went by, and came and stood in the road, with bared heads, till it had disappeared.

Afterwards the Rector, himself a well-meaning but dull man, meeting one of the men on his way home, said that he was glad to see so much love shown by the people for her Grace.

The man stared at him.

“Us love she, sir? Why, that’s nought. ’Twere her as loved we, sir, better than us love each other.”

When the Duchess settled in her son’s London house, she sought at once for the spot where such service as hers was most needed. She did not apply to the minister of the parish in which Colonsay House was situated, lest, tempted by her great rank, he might exaggerate the claims of his own district, and perhaps push out some humbler worker. For though every Calvinist is something of a republican, and the Duchess of Trent made it a point of conscience not to set value on the title she bore, a wise prudence taught her never to forget the importance attached to it by others, and the unwholesome influence it was likely to have over a certain class of minds. She knew how to distinguish with perfect clearness between the courtship paid to her rank and the love which she inspired on her own account; in this respect again resembling the monarch who was her friend.

After a careful investigation, carried out quietly by herself, the Duchess chose for her sphere of charitable labour a district lying in the south of the Thames, between Lambeth and Westminster Bridges. Here, under the shadow of the Archbishop’s Palace, she found heathendom as utter as, and vice more rank than that the Church was sending out missionaries to cope with in China and Hindustan.

The Vicar of the parish in which this region was included, whose name was Dr. Coles, was a pious, learned, and zealous divine, but he was believed to construe his ordination vows according to a code of honour more Roman than English. The services at St. Jermyn’s bore little resemblance to those of a Protestant place of worship, and it was suspected that they were but the outward and visible signs of a still deeper cleavage between the Doctor’s private beliefs and those affirmed in the articles of religion which he had subscribed. The Vicarage was the resort of a great number of young men from the theological colleges, among whom the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s appeared to enjoy an authority not explained by his rank in the Church.

Being a man advanced in years, and not being able to afford more than one curate, Dr. Coles was glad to avail himself of the services of helpers from outside the parish. Most of these were women of wealth and position, who came from their homes in the fashionable quarter to minister to the dwellers in the back streets of Lambeth. The reader of the society paragraphs in the daily press sometimes little suspected that the women whose names he saw in the list of guests at a grand dinner-party or dance the night before had spent their morning going about the slums of St. Jermyn’s.

The Duchess of Trent and Colonsay went to work without fuss, calling herself at the homes of the poor, and winning an easy entrance by her own kindly and modest demeanour. The sullen drudges of these dark precincts soon learned to look for her coming, not as that of a patroness, but as that of a dear friend, who was interested in the small details of their daily lives, and ever ready to sympathize if a drunken husband overnight had left a black bruise on the poor thin arm, or a ne’er-do-well son had been sent to the cells for fighting in the streets. They never knew how closely their own stories often tallied with the experience of the lady who listened to them so wistfully, and who found in soothing their sorrows the means of living down her own.

It was to this district that the Duchess took her way on the morning after she had seen her son.

The carriage set her down at the corner of a small street, called, as if in mockery of a more splendid region, Little Bond Street. Walking down this street, where she was well known, and nodding pleasantly to those of its inmates who were at their doors, the Duchess presently came to a small court or yard, which bore on the wall of the archway opening out of the street the legend “Beers Cooperage.”

Beers Cooperage no longer retained any trace of the manufacture of casks and barrels which some departed cooper had doubtless carried on there in bygone days. It consisted of a row of half a dozen very small cottages, with still smaller enclosures in front, which looked as though they might once have been meant for gardens. A last reminder of the time when Beers Cooperage had considered itself to be in a rural neighbourhood lingered on the window-sills of some of these cottages, which were ornamented with miniature wooden railings and five-barred gates, a touch of rustic fancy of which the modern Londoner has become incapable. Yet though the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage could not have originated these quaint decorations, and had probably never seen the country sights they were meant to recall, they took a pathetic pride in possessing them, and as soon as one of the railings or gates showed signs of decay it was carefully repaired.

Who knows what influence such trifles have over all of us? It is certain that the dwellers in Beers Cooperage were generally quieter and more decent in their lives than most of their neighbours. One or two of them kept singing-birds, instead of terriers to kill rats with. The inmate of one house, a poor cripple, had even set himself resolutely to make his front garden a reality instead of a name, by planting a row of wallflowers, bought full-grown from a coster-monger, in what he evidently considered a bed. These plants, which perished periodically, and were regularly renewed, were regarded with reverence by the neighbours, and attracted pilgrims to view them from two or three streets away. But on the rare occasions when they burst into bloom of their own accord, no profane hand was allowed to come too near them. After being reverently smelled at a distance by the dwellers in the Cooperage, the blossoms were culled with anxious pride by their proprietor, and made into a nosegay for the Duchess, who carried them home with her, and set them on the table of her oratory. They were the only flowers ever seen on that simple altar.

There was one house in Beers Cooperage, however, which differed strikingly from the rest. This was the hovel at the upper end, where the yard terminated in a high blank wall. There were no five-barred gates on the window-sills here; nothing but fragments, which hung rotting over the edge. Half the panes in the window were broken, and stuffed with dirty scraps of paper. The paling before the house was also fast disappearing, and the space in front was littered with broken tins and refuse not sufficiently noisome to attract the notice of the sanitary inspector. In the corner stood a kennel tenanted by a mongrel bulldog, the terror of the small children in the Cooperage. The door of this cottage generally stood half open, and through it came all day and night long sounds of angry scolding, or of oaths and drunken yells. The inside of the place matched with its outside. The floors and stairs looked as if they were never washed; the germs of a dozen fevers might have lurked in the dirt which was thickly piled everywhere. The miserable crockery and kitchen stuff was in as deplorable a condition as the windows. The bedding chiefly consisted of heaps of unwashed rags.

This was the one house in Beers Cooperage into which the Duchess had never yet ventured to go. It was tenanted by an Irishman, who had threatened to wring the neck of any —— Protestant who came meddling inside his doors.

For the last fortnight the Cooperage had enjoyed a blessed spell of relief from the presence of this man, whose formidable strength, added to his choleric temper, rendered him the terror of his neighbours. He had been taken in the act of kicking an old man whom he had first knocked down. The magistrate before whom he was brought, who had just previously imposed a sentence of six months on a boy for the theft of a pair of boots, desirous, perhaps, to show that he could be merciful on occasion, sent the hooligan to prison for fourteen days, thereby releasing the rest of the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage for that exact length of time.

On this morning, as soon as the Duchess came out from under the archway which formed the entrance to the Cooperage, she saw that something was amiss.

Several of the cottages showed broken windows, and in one or two places even the cherished gates and rails had been damaged or destroyed. A broken birdcage lay on the ground in the far corner of the yard beside the dog’s kennel. All the doors of the houses were closed, except the Irishman’s, through which shrill screams were issuing. Lastly, the poor lame gardener was standing in his little plot disconsolately regarding the wreck of his cherished flowers, which looked as though they had been trampled over by a regiment.

“Mike Finigan done it,” he explained, in answer to the Duchess’s sympathetic exclamation. “’E got outer prison yisterday, and ’e come in drunk lorst night with ’is crew, and played old ’Arry all over the place.”

As if the presence of the Duchess had instantly become known, by what is called mental telepathy, to every resident in the Cooperage, all the other doors were thrown open, and the women crowded about her, recounting the tale of the Irishman’s misdeeds, and denouncing their author. The owner of the broken birdcage pointed to it, not without a certain melancholy pride in her pre-eminence of wrong.

“’E broke it ’isself, and ’is mates killed my bird; and there I’m going to let it lie till I ’aves the law of ’im, the roughing.”

Whether the woman believed that the continuance of the broken cage on its present spot would be a strong confirmation of her story, like the bricks in Jack Cade’s chimney, or whether she had some obscure feeling like that which causes a Brahmin creditor to starve himself to death, in a spirit of revenge, on his debtor’s doorstep, and considered the wrecked cage as a talisman which would work harm to the wrongdoer, she failed to explain. But the threat of legal proceedings was not taken seriously by her neighbours, the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage regarding an appeal to the constituted authorities with much the same feeling as schoolboys do a complaint to a master. The poor have an instinct which teaches them that the State is their enemy; they are a subject population within the borders of the Raj.

While the group round the Duchess were still shrilly vociferating, evidently with the object of making their reflections reach the ears of the Irishman in his retreat, they were interrupted by the appearance of two figures in the mouth of the archway.

One of these new-comers was a man, the other a girl of nineteen or twenty. At the sight of the first the Duchess of Trent frowned slightly, but her face brightened again as she caught sight of his companion, whom she had come out this morning in the secret hope of meeting.

There is a type of womanhood known all over the world as English, and in that bright and gracious type Hero Vanbrugh was completely moulded. It is not a type of classical perfection, like that associated with the Roman virgin; it does not cast that intoxicating spell over the passions of men which Southern poets mean by love. The Southern language has no word for this type; it is only the dear old Northern names of maid and sweetheart and wife which express its tender charm.

Hero Vanbrugh, as she stood framed in the archway, was a picture to gladden the eyes. It was not only that her features were delicately chiselled, and her body a harmony of slenderness and strength; there were men who declared that at some moments she seemed to them to be actually plain; but the freshness of the rain was in her face, and the laughter of the wind in her hair, and the blue breath of the sea in her eyes, and there were other men to whom at many moments she seemed the fairest sight that they had ever looked upon.

The dress which she wore was of that unpretending serviceable pattern which would have been deemed almost masculine a few years before. In the eyes of a man the simple coat with its white collar, and the plain skirt, might have appeared homely, but the eye of another woman would have been quick to note the marks of an artist’s hand in the cut of each garment, and would have credited the wearer with perfect taste, coupled with the means to gratify it.

The man who stood beside her in the archway was as unlike her as it was possible to be.

If Hero Vanbrugh might have been taken as a type of all that was best in English humanity, the same could scarcely have been said of her companion. Big and bull-necked, with coarse, flushed features, small, deep-set eyes, and a round fleshy chin, he might have passed, in a different dress, for a comrade of Mike Finigan himself. His costume would have marked him out in any other country as a Roman priest. He wore the shovel hat, with a long brim projecting before and behind, which is associated with the stage priest of comic opera, and his whole figure, from the neck to the ankles, was enveloped in a long black robe of design similar to that worn by Noah and his family in the toy arks. The priests of Rome in this country being in the habit of adopting a dress corresponding with the character of that worn by the people among whom they live, this outlandish disguise served to indicate that the wearer was in Anglican Orders. He was, in fact, the Rev. Aloysius Grimes, curate of St. Jermyn’s parish.

The Rev. Aloysius was one of that class which has flowed into the ranks of the clergy of late years in increasing numbers, to fill the gap created by the falling off in the supply of graduates from the Universities, a falling off due as much to the decline in the value of the Church’s preferments, perhaps, as to the decline of belief in her doctrines. The son of a small tradesman in the suburbs, he had passed from a higher-grade Board School into a theological college. He had entered the college an ordinary sharp London lad of the lower orders, and left it the social equal of dukes.

Such a youth, strongly conscious of the importance of the step he had gained, was not likely to listen with reluctant ears to any doctrine which exaggerated the dignity of his profession. The Rev. Aloysius came out into the world firmly impressed that he was a priest, commissioned by the Maker of the Universe to teach and to rule mankind, endowed with power to bestow the absolution and remission of sins, and supernaturally enabled to work the awful miracle of Transubstantiation.

Between the Duchess of Trent and Mr. Grimes there was an instinctive antagonism, which each strove to veil beneath the outward forms of courtesy, the Duchess because she respected the curate’s cloth, the curate because he respected her Grace’s rank. To the Duchess the doctrines held and taught by the Rev. Aloysius were simply and literally blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits. She supposed that they had been abandoned as such at the Reformation, and she understood them so to be condemned by the Articles of the English Church. Yet she perceived that they were now freely tolerated within its pale by those to whom the government of the Church was committed, and she shrank with real pain from setting up her own judgment against that of the Episcopal Bench.

What added to her distress was the fact that she was unable to credit the head of that Bench with any belief in what she had always regarded as the cardinal doctrine of Christianity. That doctrine in her mind was the Atonement. The great truth which Catholicism images in the crucifix seemed to her the central one of Christianity, and those who doubted it became in her view mere Deists, with a reverence for Jesus of Nazareth. Such a Deist she believed Dr. Dresden, the then Primate, to be, and, believing it, she regarded even the Rev. Aloysius as more worthy of his place in the Church than the Archbishop.

Mr. Grimes glided in front, fawning over the hand of the Duchess, before Hero could come up.

“I am so delighted to meet you here, Duchess. It is so good of you to do so much for our poor people. They are always singing your praises.”

The Duchess made the briefest response to these compliments as she turned to greet Hero.

“My dear, how well you are looking! One would think that St. Jermyn’s was a health-resort, to see you. Now I wonder whether you will take compassion on a poor old woman, and let me carry you home to lunch with me presently?”

Hero blushed as she listened to these old-fashioned compliments.

“You are exceedingly kind, Duchess. I shall be delighted. I came here in the brougham to-day, so that I shall be able to send a message to my father to let him know where I am. But what is all this about?” She turned to the excited women who were now repeating the tale of Mike Finigan’s outrages in the ears of Mr. Grimes.

The Rev. Aloysius was listening with a troubled brow. In his secret heart he had a great respect for Finigan, partly because he knew that the Irishman had no respect at all for him, and regarded him as an impostor, dressed in plumes borrowed from his own clergy, partly because of the superior example which the Finigans showed to his own flock in the matter of reverence for the priesthood. The hooligan and his family in their wildest moments treated their own priest as being invested with dreadful sanctity and tremendous powers. They firmly believed that Father Molyneux could strike any one of them dead without moving an eyelash; if one of them had been betrayed into lifting a hand against the Father’s person, they would have expected to see it wither to a stump. Yet Father Molyneux was a very insignificant-looking little man, with a jolly smile, and a brogue like the scent of an onion, who went about dressed in a shabby overcoat and a disreputable hat of the ordinary chimney-pot shape. He said “Sorr” to Mr. Grimes when that gentleman condescended to greet him in the street, and never showed by a word or look that he did not regard him as a superior by whose notice he was honoured. It was true that the little priest had a reputation for humour among his own friends; a sound as of laughter was sometimes heard issuing from the presbytery as the Rev. Aloysius passed by; a book entitled “The Secret History of the Romish Conspiracy” had been found by the priest’s housekeeper in the cupboard where his reverence kept his whisky and his slippers; but those things were mercifully hidden from the curate of St. Jermyn’s.

Mr. Grimes turned towards Hero, as she came forward, shaking his head.

“I’m afraid it’s a sad business, Miss Vanbrugh. Finigan has broken out again. I can’t understand how it is that a man so well conducted in some respects, with such genuine faith in his religion, schismatic though it may appear to us, should be guilty of outrages like this.”

Hero flushed up. She did not share the elder woman’s deep-rooted prejudice against the Catholicizing movement, which attracted her strongly on its æsthetic side, but her English common sense remained to her.

“The man is a drunken brute, who ought to have been sent to penal servitude for fourteen years, instead of being let off with a paltry fourteen days!” she exclaimed. “What are prisons for, I should like to know, except to protect peaceful folk from ruffians like that?”

The Rev. Aloysius shook his head doubtfully. He was inclined to read the text, “Thy faith hath made thee whole,” in a very broad sense, and to consider that Mike Finigan’s admirable loyalty to his creed ought to atone for any trifling disregard of his neighbours’ peace and comfort.

But the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage, whose rude minds failed to appreciate the beauty of Mr. Finigan’s theological attitude, in the face of their broken flower-pots and slaughtered pets, were quick to perceive that Hero was the champion of whom they stood in need. They deserted the curate to besiege her with their complaints; the owner of the birdcage renewed her direful malediction, and another woman, who could boast no injury on her own account, drew the sympathetic young lady to the scene of the trampled wallflowers.

The sight aroused Miss Vanbrugh’s wrath in real earnest.

“I have a great mind to send for the police myself,” she declared. “I only wish I had seen him do it, so that I could give evidence.”

The women shrank back at these words. Their anger against Finigan, already partly relieved by the mere exertion of denouncing him, was cooled at once by Miss Vanbrugh’s threat.

“That ’ud only mike it wuss, miss,” the lame man responded dolefully. “’E’d come out again at the end of a week like a mad Calico, an’ not leave a roof over our ’eads.”

Before Hero had time to resolve this extraordinary expression into an allusion to the late Khalifa of the Soudan there was a stir among the little group behind, caused by the sudden appearance of Mike Finigan himself at the door of his abode.

Now that the women perceived that their clamour had achieved its purpose of rousing the evildoer, they suddenly became silent. Finigan lounged forward, with a masterful air, his hands in his pockets, and surveyed his neighbours disdainfully.

It said, in the history-books out of which the small Britons of Beers Cooperage were taught in the Board School, that Ireland had been conquered by England in the year of grace 1172. The history-books said nothing about the conquest of Beers Cooperage by Mike Finigan.

Seen close at hand, the Irishman did not look a remarkably vicious or ill-disposed creature. His face was of the dark, heavy, animal type to be met with in some of the western counties of England itself. He represented that mixed remnant of old, forgotten races which is found washed up in out-of-the-way corners of the land, the relics of prehistoric wanderings and subjugations, the rubble of European man.

Because his ancestors during a thousand years or so had spoken a Gaelic dialect, learned language-mongers called Mike Finigan a Celt. His name might have told them that he was a mongrel Finn, between whom and the fair-haired, blue-eyed Gauls who took Rome there was no more kinship than between the Chinaman and the Greek. The traditions of his own land, had the language-mongers cared to study them, would have disclosed to them the existence of half a dozen strange older races, some of whom in all likelihood were still speaking Neolithic dialects of their own when the armies of Cæsar landed in Britain.

This primitive savage had been brought from his native bogs, and set down among a peaceable town-dwelling population, chiefly of Dutch descent, by the economic machinery of the Raj. The Raj had taught him to speak its language, and bestowed upon him a voice in the choice of its administrators.

Now the Raj was trying to digest Mike Finigan.

In his own country, dwelling on some bare hillside beaten by the rains of the Atlantic, the Irishman might have seemed a picturesque figure. Living the life that was natural to him, digging his native peat, and finding an outlet for his brutal instincts in the folk-fights that formed the immemorial pastime of the country-side, he would have been a harmless subject.

In the streets of London he was a dangerous criminal. The civilized life brought out all that was worst in this wild nature. It galled him with its manifold restraints. It stunned him with its monotony of work. It teased him with its decorum. It stifled him with its lack of air and space. Finally, it drove him to the public-house.

If dirt be matter in the wrong place, so is crime conduct in an unfit historical or geographical environment. If the hooligan had lived a few thousand years earlier he would have been a hero. He would have refreshed himself with his native mead before going into battle, and his strength becoming as the strength of ten, he would have been deemed of supernatural birth. His exploits would have become the theme of bards, divine honours would have been rendered to his memory, and, his figure shining through the mist of saga like a demigod’s, learned students would have been engaged to-day in identifying him with the solar orb.

As it was, Mike Finigan’s history was already written to its end. After a long or short series of savage atrocities, after wounding and maiming a certain number of peaceable citizens, and being punished by sentences ranging from a small fine to six months’ hard labour, according to the magistrate before whom he happened to be brought, one of Mike Finigan’s kicks some day, probably by pure accident, would cause a death; when society, seizing the excuse for which it had been waiting all along, would hang Mike Finigan. A pity that you could not have passed the sentence before the murder, and commuted it to transportation, back to the little shieling in the potato-patch from which you dragged his father, Your Majesty the public!

The effect of alcohol is different on different constitutions, a truism which fanatics forget. On Finigan its effect was to make him a raging wild beast. His unfortunate neighbours would have been the first to bear witness that when the drink was not in him the Irishman was harmless enough. His speech was always coarse, and he was a stranger to soap and water, but those were venial faults in the light of his drunken frolics. At such moments the appearance of the Khalifa himself in their archway would have struck less consternation into the dwellers in the Cooperage than Mike Finigan’s.

After one of these outbursts the Irishman was usually sullen and silent for a day or two, during which period his neighbours found it wisest to leave him alone. He was in that condition, surly, but not dangerous, as he strode forth to silence his assailants.

At the sight of the Duchess he paused, uncertain. Though he had uttered a coarse threat against any Protestant who should invade his own home, he had acquired a tacit respect for the quiet lady who visited his neighbours, and perhaps there were times when he would not have been sorry if the Duchess had disregarded his words, and included his wife and family in her friendly ministrations. A secret shame at having disgraced himself in her eyes caused him to assume a defiant and insolent air as he demanded of the women:

“And what have yez got to say agin me, now I’m here?”

The women shrank back terrorized.

The Duchess thought it useless for her to speak. But Mr. Grimes, anxious to show her Grace how well he could administer a priestly reproof, rashly undertook to answer the bully.

“I wonder you are not ashamed to ask the question, Finigan. You have been behaving in a shocking, scandalous manner. Do you consider what disgrace you bring, not merely on yourself as a man, but on the Church to which you belong?”

The Irishman turned red.

“Here, Mister, yez lave me Church alone, an’ I’ll lave yours,” he muttered.

The Rev. Aloysius smiled at the success with which he had touched the man’s weak spot.

“I am not blaming your Church,” he said impressively. “The teaching you have received is good enough for you to know when you have done wrong. I am pointing out to you that your neighbours here, who do not know and understand the Church of Rome as I know and understand it, are not likely to have their opinion of it raised by such conduct as yours last night.”

The curate was warming to his work, and would have gone on to inflict further stabs on the sensitive place, when suddenly the Irishman clenched his fists, and stepped towards him.

“Say another word about me Church, good or bad, and, be the Howly Moses, I’ll knock yer teeth down yer Protestant throat!”

The Rev. Aloysius fairly recoiled, stunned, to do him justice, as much by the insult conveyed in the description of himself as a Protestant as by the threat of personal violence. It was too bitter; the serpent of schism had raised its baleful crest, and stung him in the very midst of his flock.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, no one suspected the true cause of his agitation. Before he could frame a suitable retort an unexpected ally came to his rescue.

Hero Vanbrugh had listened impatiently to the curate’s attempted admonition of the hooligan. Her indignation at the brutalities whose effects she had just seen was still hot within her, and the Irishman’s hectoring demeanour made it boil over.

She walked up quickly, and confronted him with blazing eyes.

“You coward! How dare you stand there and bluster! How dare you come out and show yourself, in the face of all the mean, silly, brutal, wicked things you did last night! Where is the bird you and your friends killed? There is its cage! Look at it, and stay here and brazen it out if you dare! Look at that poor man’s flowers all trodden down and broken! I wonder you can bring yourself to pass them! To rob a poor lame man! a cripple! I suppose you will beat him next, or murder him if you are not afraid of the police. I tell you, you are a coward, nothing but a big hulking coward, who goes about bullying women and children—and cripples! Go! Don’t stay out here! Go and hide yourself, lest a man should come along and see you!”

Then a great thing happened. For Mike Finigan, the tyrant of Beers Cooperage and the terror of the police, raised his finger to his forelock, and with a muttered—“Beg pardon, miss,” turned round, and shrank back into his house like a thoroughly ashamed man.

The Duchess turned to Hero with a look of grateful admiration.

“You did that splendidly, my dear. Thank you.”

The women, relieved of the presence of their enemy, would have burst out in a triumphant chorus, but Hero restrained them with a gesture, and the next minute they were surprised to see her turn white and totter against the side of the Duchess, who hastened to draw her away.

CHAPTER VI
THE WHOLE DUTY OF WOMAN

As the two ladies passed under the archway from Beers Cooperage into the street they were followed by Mr. Grimes, anxious to efface the rather humiliating figure he had cut in his encounter with Mike Finigan.

“I wonder if we may have the honour of seeing you at our bazaar this week, Duchess?” he said smirkingly.

“What bazaar is that? I don’t think I have heard of it,” the Duchess responded, with indifference.

“The Legitimist bazaar—to obtain funds on behalf of the cause,” the curate explained.

The Duchess of Trent knitted her brows.

“I am afraid I don’t understand. What cause is that, if you please?”

The Rev. Aloysius faltered somewhat in his speech as he answered:

“It is the cause of the legitimate monarchs who have been excluded from their thrones by—ah—popular insurrections, and—ah—constitutions and republics, and so on. The Duke of Orleans is one of our principal objects,” he went on rather hurriedly, observing a significant frown come over her Grace’s brow at the word constitution—“rightfully Louis XIX of France; and then there is Don Carlos of Spain, and the Duke of Cumberland, and others. Many of us consider that the Bishop of Rome has been wrongfully deprived of his sovereign rights by the House of Savoy.”

“Any more?” asked the Duchess, with some scorn. “I shall be glad to know whether you consider the Queen as a usurper, because I have served in her household as a girl, and I have no desire to conspire against her in my old age.”

The curate of St. Jermyn’s cast down his eyes.

“Oh, I dare say there are a few members of the Guild who hold, in an academical spirit, of course, that the elder branch of the Stuarts are entitled to our allegiance, but that is really more a pose than anything else. No one intends the slightest disrespect towards Queen Victoria. But the French Republic is very different; its intolerance towards the religious orders must make every Christian wish to see its downfall.”

“I am afraid that I do not sympathize with your views sufficiently to care to come to your bazaar,” the Duchess said dryly. “It appears to me that Legitimism, according to your account of it, is another name for Roman Catholicism, and I am a Protestant.” The Rev. Aloysius looked pained. “Besides,” her Grace went on severely, “even if this nonsense about the Stuarts is only a pose, as you say, it seems to me in very bad taste. I only trust it is not actually treasonable.”

Mr. Grimes bit his lip. Then he put on a touch of bravado as he replied:

“I am sorry you should think so harshly of us, Duchess. I should not have ventured to broach the subject, only Lord Alistair Stuart is among our patrons, and we hope to see him on Saturday. Miss Vanbrugh also held out a hope that she might drop in for an hour.”

“I was only coming out of curiosity, remember; I told you that, Mr. Grimes,” put in Hero promptly. “As it is, I think I shall follow the Duchess’s lead, and boycott you. I have no objection to Louis XIX, but I think I must draw the line at Mary III.”

It was under this name that the Bavarian Princess whom the Legitimist Guild honoured with their homage, figured in their recently published calendar of true and lawful Sovereigns. It must not be supposed that in so styling her the Legitimists were inconsistent enough to acknowledge the title of the wife of William of Orange to a place in the list of British monarchs. The Mary II recognized by them was the ill-starred rival of Queen Elizabeth. Further back than the martyr of Fotheringay their genealogical inquiries did not too curiously extend, lest, perhaps, they should find themselves confronted with that direct descendant of the Plantagenets who plied the trade of a chimney-sweeper in the last generation, and who, as a base Protestant mechanic, would have been ill-deserving of the sympathy accorded to such illustrious figures as Don Carlos and Leo XIII.

But a change had come over the face of the Duchess while Hero was speaking. Now she said to her:

“After all, I expect it is a mistake to treat Mr. Grimes’s friends seriously. Suppose we agree to look in on the conspirators together? I should like you to meet my boy Alistair.”

And without waiting for the expression of the curate’s exuberant delight at this decision, the elder woman gave the signal to enter the carriage that was to convey them to Colonsay House.

On the way thither the Duchess made no further reference to what was in her mind. But while they were waiting for lunch to be served, she took her guest into the little drawing-room where Alistair had found her the night before.

“I want to talk to you about my boy,” she said, making Hero sit down beside her on the couch. “I dare say you know he is in sad trouble just now.”

This was by no means Hero’s first visit to Colonsay House. The friendship between her and the Duchess was of some standing. Encountering each other among the squalid byways of St. Jermyn’s parish, a mutual liking had quickly sprung up between them, which rested on no more occult base than the simple goodness of heart which was common to the two. The older woman admired Hero Vanbrugh for her courage and plain good sense, and Hero on her part revered the Duchess for her antique piety and single-mindedness. Thus it came about that the two were constant companions, visiting in the same district and helping in each other’s work.

It was a source of secret regret to the Duchess that Hero did not share her own old-fashioned prejudice against the Catholic practices and teachings of Mr. Grimes and his Vicar. Hero had an æsthetic appreciation of the ritual of St. Jermyn’s, with its banners and processions, its incense and its worship of the consecrated elements, and this led her to listen with outward tolerance to the utterances of Dr. Coles and his disciple on the subject of the Catholic doctrines which lay behind these outward symbols. But the native strength of her mind forbade her to make that surrender of her own judgment to priestly authority which is the real test of the Catholic temper.

Perhaps this obstinacy was due more largely than she suspected to the personal antipathy inspired in her by the Rev. Aloysius. A young woman’s religion is generally coloured by her personal relations with the man who is her religious teacher; and Hero secretly despised Mr. Grimes as a man, though she tried to respect him as a clergyman. A suggestion from the curate that Miss Vanbrugh would derive spiritual benefit from a visit to his confessional had been so discouragingly received that he never ventured to renew it.

The curate did not help himself in Hero’s eyes by his rather too evident admiration of her as a woman. If he had not been vowed to celibacy it might have been supposed that he was courting her; and even as it was, there were jealous eyes, belonging to older and plainer women in the St. Jermyn’s flock, which watched him with distrust, and jealous minds which dwelt upon the fact that Anglican vows of celibacy are a poor security. Perhaps it is not doing much injustice to Mr. Grimes to suppose that there were moments when he himself recollected with some satisfaction that in his Church such vows resemble the treaties of civilized Powers, and are liable to be repudiated the moment they become inconvenient.

Be that as it may, it is certain that Hero Vanbrugh was heart-whole as far as her clerical admirer was concerned. Lord Alistair Stuart she had never met, her intimacy at Colonsay House dating since the separation due to Molly Finucane.

She was familiar with Lord Alistair’s story, in so far as it had become a social scandal, but this was the first time his mother had pronounced Alistair’s name in her presence, and her interest was strongly roused.

She gave the Duchess a nod of sympathy and understanding.

“I saw what had happened in the papers. I was very sorry. It must have been a great blow to you and to the Duke.”

“It is a crushing blow,” the mother answered. “Not only in itself, but because of what lies behind it. My boy would never have come to this if he had not fallen under the influence of that dreadful woman.”

In saying this the poor mother spoke quite sincerely. In spite of Alistair’s disclaimer, in spite of her own experience with him in the past, she could not bring herself to forego the mother’s consolation of laying her darling’s sins upon another’s shoulders. In the eyes of a true mother the whole world is full of wicked men and women busied in laying snares for the destruction of her child; she never deems it possible that her child may be himself the tempter of others.

Hero did not doubt that the Duchess spoke perfect truth. What woman likes to think that another woman’s influence is otherwise than hurtful to a man in whom she is interested?

“I am sure of it,” Miss Vanbrugh said with conviction. “But perhaps what has happened”—they both shrank from the word “bankruptcy”—“may be the best thing in the end, if it compels him to leave her.”

The Duchess shook her head despondently.

“I hardly know what will happen yet. I hinted that his brother might come to his help if he would give up his present life, and he refused. Do you know what I am actually afraid of? I believe that woman is scheming to make him marry her!”

Hero Vanbrugh was as much shocked by this suggestion as the Duchess could have desired. Her training had not been severely Puritanical, but an instinct older than copybooks and Sunday schools taught her to look on Molly Finucane as her natural enemy. Such women as Molly were traitors to their sex; they were the blacklegs of the feminine trades-union. The wage which the others had worked from time immemorial to establish—honour, a home, the half of all a man’s possessions, and the chief place in his life—all this the free-lance had foregone, to snatch the miserable gains of adventure.

The announcement that lunch was on the table did not interrupt the conversation. But it added another interlocutor in the person of the Duke of Trent.

The new Minister had passed a busy morning at the Home Office. His first care had been to send for his solicitor, to consult him about Lord Alistair’s affairs. The lawyer told him that, though the nominal amount of his brother’s indebtedness was not less than fifty thousand pounds, the creditors would probably be willing to accept one-half to cancel the proceedings. Twenty-five thousand was a large sum to a man circumstanced as the Duke was; nevertheless, he had made up his mind that it should be forthcoming, and he had instructed the solicitor to open the negotiations on his behalf.

The most important item of official business had been a call from the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who reported a fresh piece of hooligan violence from the neighbourhood of Bermondsey. A policeman was again the victim, and the Force were beginning to show a dangerous temper, and to demand permission to carry revolvers for their own protection.

The Home Secretary privately sympathized with this demand, but he foresaw that such a departure would be the signal for a storm of protest in the workmen’s papers and in the House of Commons. The particular quarter of London where the latest outrage had occurred was represented in the House by a sturdy demagogue who was not likely to sit with his mouth closed while his constituents were threatened with what he had already described in advance as martial law. The very gangs which were now defying the police were believed to have done effective work during the last election, and on one memorable occasion their popular representative had led them to an armed encounter with the forces of law and order in the heart of the capital.

These considerations had to be weighed by the Home Secretary. A Cabinet Minister in these days holds the position of a buffer between the permanent heads of his department, who really govern the Raj, and the assembly elected by the populace to supervise them. The first duty of the Minister, no doubt, was to support his staff, but it was also imperative to take no step that might endanger the popularity of his party in the constituencies. In this dilemma the Duke of Trent had reserved his decision till he should have had an opportunity of consulting Major Berwick, the trusted chief of the electoral machine.

A smile of pleasure betrayed his gratification at the entrance of Miss Vanbrugh, who greeted him with the ease of old friendship. He told his mother briefly of the steps he had already taken on Alistair’s behalf.

The Duchess gave him a grateful look.

“Thank you, dear; I knew you would do what you could. I was just talking to Hero about the poor boy. The one thing we have to try for now is to make this trouble a means of rescuing him from his present life.”

“I ought to make that condition, of course,” the elder brother observed doubtingly; “but from what you told me last night he would only refuse it if I were to.”

“It is very difficult,” the Duchess admitted. “I am afraid you are right. Perhaps if you say nothing about conditions, and simply let him know that you are helping him generously, he will feel ashamed not to make a return.”

The Duke of Trent had his own opinion as to his brother’s sense of shame, but he did not care to express it before Miss Vanbrugh.

“What I want most,” the Duchess proceeded, “is to induce him to come here again. I dread the consequence of his always being with that woman. If I could get hold of him sometimes, and bring him into contact with women of a different kind, I feel sure that the contrast between them and the woman he is living with would soon disgust him with her.”

Even if the Duchess had not stolen a glance at Hero Vanbrugh as she spoke, her drift could hardly have been misunderstood by the girl. The Duke failed to see the personal application of his mother’s remark.

“If you could find some decent woman who would overlook the past, and get him to marry her, she might be able to keep him straight,” he said bluntly. “On the other hand, she might not.”

“I feel sure that he might be saved by the right woman,” the Duchess said earnestly. “I am convinced that the poor boy is secretly sick of the life he has been leading, and only his pride keeps him from giving it up. A noble, pure-minded girl, who really cared for him, would be able to do anything she liked with Alistair.”

This time the allusion was too plain to be mistaken. The Home Secretary intercepted the blush on Hero’s face, and his eyes were opened. A look of dissatisfaction replaced his indifferent air, as he replied with some bitterness:

“I am not so sure of it. Many a good woman has sacrificed her life before now in the effort to reclaim a man who was unworthy of her, and the sacrifice has been in vain.”

In saying this he was thinking of the history of his own father and mother, of which he had learned more than his mother suspected. He had sometimes felt surprised, as well as mortified, that he should have had such a parent as Lord Alexander. Never having seen his father since early childhood, and being free from any tendency to romantic idealism, the Duke was able to judge the dead man quite impartially, and to think of him as if he had been some remote ancestor, whose virtues and vices were merely matter of curiosity for his descendants.

“I wonder my mother’s own experience has not taught her the folly of thinking that a worthless man can be redeemed by a good wife,” he reflected impatiently. “Alistair takes after his father; no doubt that is why she has always loved him better than me. Her whole soul is absorbed in trying to save him from the consequences of his own follies, and I am merely a pawn in the game. Now she wants to enlist Hero Vanbrugh in the same task, as if a girl like that were fit for nothing better than to be the keeper of a drunken prodigal.”

The Duchess observed the frown on her eldest son’s brow with wondering dismay. It did not occur to her that he could be moved by any other feeling than fraternal jealousy. Old-fashioned in her ideas on this subject, as on most others, she had never contemplated it as possible that the Duke of Trent and Colonsay could marry out of his own class. And the class in which, with perfectly unconscious pride, she placed her young friend was that middle one which appeared to have been created to supply doctors and lawyers and men of business for the service of the aristocracy. In her eyes the girl’s father, Sir Bernard Vanbrugh, was simply a successful medical man. The scientific achievements which had made him a European personage, greater than any Secretary of State, were outside her ken.

If she had come to entertain the project of marrying Hero Vanbrugh to her prodigal son as a last means of averting the terrible catastrophe of Molly Finucane, she did so honestly, considering that she offered a privilege to Hero, corresponding with the greatness of the interest at stake. It was in the perfect simplicity of this conviction that she had so candidly revealed her design. In the same spirit she had been ready to take Alistair’s brother into her confidence without any apprehension that she might be applying the spur of rivalry to a slumbering admiration.

She was familiar with the Duke’s expressed views on matrimony, which she respected, although they struck a little cold on her own more emotional nature. She knew that he had made up his mind from an early age to two things—that he was one of the best matches in Great Britain, and that marriage was the most important card he had to play in the game of life. It had long been understood between them that Trent was in no hurry; that what he required in a wife was a great fortune, accompanied by those social graces which count for so much in politics; and that when he found a possessor of both these gifts who pleased him she would become his Duchess. The mother lived in the mild expectation of hearing some day that her young sultan had thrown the handkerchief to a fitting aspirant, whom it would be her part to welcome with what tenderness was permitted, and in whose favour she would cheerfully resign her place in Colonsay House.

Thus it lay altogether outside her calculations that her eldest son could take any interest in Hero Vanbrugh warmer than a passing friendship. The prudent young statesman was the last person in the world whom anyone acquainted with him would have believed capable of a romantic passion. And the last person in the world to believe it would have been the young Minister himself.

A man who has lived to the age of thirty without ever losing his head in the company of a woman naturally regards himself as love-proof, and perhaps insensibly relaxes his self-defence. But Hero Vanbrugh enjoyed one great advantage over almost every unmarried girl whom Trent had ever met, inasmuch as she had not come before him as a candidate for the orange-blossoms.

If he had met her in one of those crowded ballrooms where her sisters are paraded nightly in the London season for the allurement of intending purchasers, Trent would have carefully guarded himself from giving her a second thought. He had met her for the first time at his own table, lunching in outdoor costume with his mother, who introduced her as a helper in her charitable work. The Duke, presuming that Miss Vanbrugh came from some humble clerical circle, unbent from his ordinary reserve in the desire to put her at her ease. He was rewarded for this kindly effort by the discovery that she was beautiful and charming.

It was not until afterwards that he learned from his mother, who rallied him playfully on his fascination, that he had been entertaining the daughter of the great Vanbrugh. It was chance, therefore—one of those chances that every now and then take over the control of our lives and change them for us—that had caused Trent to meet Hero Vanbrugh on this easy footing instead of in the cankered atmosphere of fashion. But the ice, once broken, could not be re-formed, and the relations between Hero and her host at Colonsay House had developed into intimacy.

Up to this time the Duke’s mental attitude had been that of a man who views a tempting object in a shop-window, and stands hesitating, purse in hand, wishful to buy, but unable to make up his mind to give the price. Now he suddenly became aware that another possible purchaser was coming up, and that if he wanted to make sure of the bargain, he must lose no more time.

An embarrassing silence was broken by Hero, who undertook to divert the thoughts of the Home Secretary by asking:

“What do they think in the Home Office of the Legitimist Guild?”

CHAPTER VII
THE DECADENTS

It was some time after dinner when the Duke of Trent, faithful to his promise to their mother, drove up to the gate of Alistair’s house in Chelsea.

On the way James considered what line it would be best for him to take. He reckoned on finding the prodigal in a despondent mood, perhaps half estranged from the temptress already, under the stress of poverty and disgrace. If so, it should prove an easy task to appeal to him by the picture of the welcome awaiting him in Colonsay House. Alistair could not but be touched by his brother’s generosity—and James meant to be generous. He meant to say—to say a little condescendingly, perhaps, but kindly: “I take your debts on myself. Your name is cleared. Your mother and I only ask you not to forget that you have a home to come to when you like.”

By the time he had reached the house the Duke had half persuaded himself that he should be able to bring the repentant one away with him that very night.

The house was surrounded on all sides by a high brick wall, pierced at the entrance by a tall narrow gateway, the gate of Georgian ironwork. Ordering his coachman to wait, the Minister strode up a covered pathway that led to the door of the house, and knocked.

As he did so he was aware that the lower part of the house was brilliantly lit up. He caught a murmur of voices coming through the windows of a room which overlooked the front garden, and even heard what sounded like applause.

Before he could frame any explanation to himself of these sights and sounds the door was opened by a smart lad in a rather untidy page’s livery, who stared at the visitor with the vulgar impertinence of a servant who does not respect his employers.

At the same instant a loud burst of laughter came from the interior of the building.

“Is Lord Alistair at home?” the Duke demanded sharply, incensed by this reception.

“He’s engaged,” said the boy glibly, giving the Duke a cautious look. “What name, please?”

“The Duke of Trent. I am his lordship’s brother,” returned the Home Secretary, frowning.

“Oh, that’s all right, my lord—I mean Your Grace,” the page responded, with an air of relief. “Come in, please.”

And, scarcely giving the visitor time to remove his hat, he threw open the door of the room from whence the sounds had proceeded, and announced him.

The new-comer took two steps through the doorway, and stopped astounded.

He had arrived on the scene of a festivity. Around a dining-table, crowded with a confusion of dessert-dishes, champagne-bottles, coffee-cups, cigar-boxes, and spirit-stands, with the ashes of innumerable cigars and cigarettes soaking in the spilt wine and coffee on the tablecloth, were seated some seven or eight men, most of them young, all wearing evening dress, and seeming to be in the highest spirits. At the head of the table, facing the Duke as he came in, the woman he had come to snatch his brother away from lolled back in her chair, puffing a cigarette, her hands monstrously encumbered with coloured stones, and her powdered bosom resplendent with five or six chains of jewellery. At the foot of the table, beside the door by which James had just entered, the brother he had come to pardon and to redeem turned languidly in his seat, and, rising with studied nonchalance, removed a cigar from his lips to say:

“That you, Trent? So good of you to join us.” And, turning to the company again, he added the careless introduction: “My brother.”

His second glance round the room had warned the angry Duke that, however he might be disposed to treat Molly Finucane, her guests were not men whom he had any right to object to meet. Too well-bred to make a scene under the circumstances, he choked down his indignation, and, after a haughty bow, which neither included nor excluded the lady of the house, he accepted the chair which someone offered him. It was with a sense of satisfaction not unmingled with surprise that the Secretary of State discovered on sitting down that his neighbour was a personal acquaintance, the great Mendes, head of the South American Bank, and a financier with whom Cabinet Ministers were obliged to reckon.

Lord Alistair vouchsafed a light word of explanation.

“Been having a little feed to celebrate my smash,” he said, waving his hand over the dirty table. “These are my friends. You see before you the members of the Dishonourable Brotherhood of Decadents, an association for the spread of corruption among the upper classes. Dishonourable Brother St. John, I call upon you for a speech.”

“What on earth is all this?” the Duke demanded in a whisper of his neighbour.

The millionaire shrugged his shoulders, as though he were slightly ashamed of his company.

“I suppose they intend it for humour,” he answered in the same key. “It’s one of your brother’s ideas. He’s always starting something of the kind. It used to be a Chinese Guild, and they all dressed as mandarins and wore pigtails. Last year it was an anti-Semite show, and Stuart had the cheek to ask me to join it.” The Jew’s smile as he said this was a trifle threatening. “They parody everything. That Frenchman opposite, Des Louvres”—he nodded towards a man with a thin, wicked-looking face and small dark beard and moustache—“he is at the bottom of it, I believe. They may know something about him in your Office.”

The Home Secretary was staggered. Possessed of too little imagination to see anything in the proceedings but a rather scandalous jest of the kind that undergraduates indulge in at places like Cambridge and Oxford, he felt that the mere fact of the jest being carried out by grown men made it doubly unbecoming. And he felt personally aggrieved that these men should be making merry over an event which had cast a shadow on the house of which he was the head. He recalled his mother’s grief, Prince Herbert’s gracious interest, the money sacrifice which he himself was preparing to make; and his heart swelled with inward wrath and shame.

He could not help wondering privately what Mendes was doing in such company. The keen, remorseless man of business who had executed a masterpiece of legal robbery, and thereby made himself one of the new world powers which were taking the place of Kings and Cabinets, seemed strangely out of place among that crew of mockers. The Brazilian sat for the most part silent, his lips set in an ironical smile. But from time to time his glance wandered in the direction of Molly Finucane, who moved restively in, her chair whenever she caught Mendes’s black eyes fixed on hers.

The rest of the revellers were all excited in different degrees by the wine they had been drinking, and their remarks and interruptions formed a sort of ground-bass to the speech which Alistair had called for. Mr. Gerald St. John, whom the “Court Guide,” more tender of his dignity than he seemed to be himself, described as “Honourable,” was a man of about the same age as Stuart, though his bald forehead gave him the appearance of being older. He had some little reputation as an amateur in music and painting; he had composed songs which were occasionally sung, and painted pictures which the New Gallery did not disdain.

Addressing his friends as “Dishonourable Brethren,” he hailed them as the missionaries of a new gospel. Theirs was the task to purge society of Puritanism and propriety. They were to set the example of becoming artists in Beautiful Sin. It was impossible for Trent to tell how far he was serious. His speech mingled echoes of the cant of a certain class of literary and artistic critics with what appeared to be broad farce.

But two passages in the address made an impression on the Minister, by their curious connection with his recent interests. The first was a surprising compliment to the Church of Rome; the second was a panegyric in a much broader vein of the hooligans.

Of the Roman Church the speaker said that it was the only form of Christianity which deserved their toleration and respect. He regarded it as the true Church of the Decadence, and as such he called upon the Brotherhood to support it. He was not himself a Catholic; he was a polytheist. But he considered that, next to polytheism, the Church of Rome afforded the best rallying-point for all that was beautiful and corrupt in the art and life of the age.

This extraordinary eulogy was received with vociferous applause, especially by the French Count, whose air was that of a man enjoying a personal triumph. Molly Finucane, who had not been to Mass or Confession for many years, but who had not quite shaken off her early impressions, tried to disguise her nervousness by hammering the table with her wineglass till it broke—an accident which she was half disposed to interpret as the work of an offended Power.

The Duke of Trent, who entertained a vague respect for the Roman Church as a venerable institution whose influence was generally exerted on the side of the Conservative party, hardly knew what to think of this equivocal homage to its merits. The Honourable Gerald St. John passed on to the question of hooliganism, not without a shy glance in the direction of the Home Secretary, which showed how much the jest was enhanced by the presence of hooliganism’s official adversary.

The hooligans, he declared, were crusaders fighting for the same cause as that Dishonourable Brotherhood. They were martyrs of the new individualism. Their so-called outrages constituted a protest—the only form of protest which dull and hidebound statesmen could understand—against the iron yoke of Socialist civilization, under which they were all groaning. He regarded the hooligans as saviours. It was significant that so far the man whom they had selected for attack was that embodiment of everything vulgar and virtuous, the suburban ratepayer. When they had exterminated the ratepayer, he hoped they would go on to the millionaire. He had always regretted that their fellow-workers, the Anarchists, should show so much antipathy to Kings. It was an unreasonable prejudice. Kings were picturesque survivals in the midst of the hideous monotony of modern life. Kings were rarely respectable, and were not seldom steeped in crime; and this applied particularly to those romantic claimants—he, the speaker, preferred the dear old name “Pretender”—whom their Dishonourable Brother on the left was seeking to restore.

This allusion was accepted by Des Louvres with eager manifestations of approval. Once more the Secretary of State felt an obscure uneasiness as he compared these mocking utterances with the recent experience of his own department, and he began to ask himself if he was indeed listening to the first whispers of a coming storm.

Hero Vanbrugh’s question about the Legitimist Guild had not fallen on deaf ears. He had had the curiosity to ask his permanent staff if they knew anything of the Legitimists, and he found they knew very little. There is nothing Government Departments dislike so much as information, except the trouble of acting on it. No one in the Home Office could say exactly who the Legitimists were, or how they had come into existence as a guild. Their very number was unknown, but it was believed to be insignificant. They were wholly without influence or following, and would never have been heard of but for the fact that the newspapers regarded their proceedings as a good joke. Every sensible person put them down as a clique of vain and foolish young men who made themselves supremely ridiculous by trying to revive a cause which had been dead for a hundred and fifty years.

Such was the official view. Sixty or seventy years before a similar view had been taken of the action of a little clique of Oxford men who were setting themselves to undo the work of the Protestant Reformation. That little clique had undertaken to break up a settlement which had taken root for two hundred and fifty years, and had survived twelve reigns and six rebellions. In the course of a single reign they had come within sight of their goal. They had driven the word “Protestant” out of polite conversation, and made it a synonym for everything base, ignorant and malicious. They had made it dangerous for a Protestant to object publicly to Catholic practices which were still forbidden by the letter of the law. They had sent an informal embassy to the Vatican to negotiate the re-entry of England into the Roman obedience; and they had delivered the first open attack on the legislative bars which still hindered that consummation.

Fresh from the assurances of the Home Office, it was a shock to the Minister to find himself for the second time that day confronted with this ridiculous but offensive movement. It was true that Mr. St. John’s remarks bordered on satire, but the serious-minded are apt to resent satire at the expense of what they fear, as much as at the expense of what they revere; the only notes they wish to hear are the snap of cavil and the rumble of denunciation.

If the Duke of Trent had consulted his own inclination he would have risen and protested against this trifling with treason. But, like most men who are deprived of the sense of humour, James Stuart was keenly sensitive to ridicule, and he dared not expose himself to the merciless wit of this crew of profligates. He bitterly repented the false step he had taken in sitting down amongst them, but he sought in vain for any means of extrication.

Meanwhile the orator concluded with a felicitous reference to the occasion of the feast.

One Dishonourable Brother—in fact, the founder of their Order, he said—had shown that it was possible to emulate, if not to surpass, the exploits of the humble hooligan. By his magnificent defiance of the day before he had struck dismay into the mercenary ranks of their hereditary foes—he need not say he meant the trading class, whose shameful supremacy had made England unfit to live in. Their gallant host had plundered the hostile camp of a sum which represented one of the greatest triumphs ever achieved over the Philistine. He called upon him, in their name, not to pay this canaille a farthing in the pound. And he called upon them to drink confusion to the respectable classes, coupled with the name of their Arch Decadent!

Everyone rose to his feet to drink the toast, with the exception of the bankrupt himself, and his brother, who tried to conceal his disgust under an air of amused tolerance.

Alistair Stuart was conscious of his brother’s real feeling, and resented it all the more because he was half ashamed of his own part in the buffoonery. His tone became louder and more insolent as he gulped down glass after glass of spirits, and called upon one or other of his guests to keep up the entertainment.

Nobody dared call upon the Secretary of State. They all knew enough to feel that he was a stranger in the camp, if not a spy, and only the emphasized indifference of Stuart to his brother’s presence gave them courage to go on. The presence of this representative of all that they professed to loathe and despise, looking on with chill disapproval, dashed their spirits unexpectedly, and even to their own ears their customary jests took on a hollow sound.

Presently it came to the turn of a youth seated opposite to the Duke. He was of a pale and sickly countenance, the whiteness of his face being accentuated by the black locks which he allowed to grow down to his neck. His tie was a black sash with flowing ends like that worn by French Art students in the quarter of Batignolles. He did not appear to be much more than twenty, and answered to the name of Egerton Vane.

“Who is he?” Trent asked his neighbour.

“The lunatic with the scarf round his neck? That’s a minor poet. I don’t suppose you have ever come across his works. He publishes two volumes every year, at his own expense, of course, with about twenty poems in each. No one ever reads them, except the provincial reviewers. He has got an album filled with cuttings from papers like the Pembrokeshire News and the Berwick-on-Tweed Gazette. ‘A volume of verse from the graceful pen of Mr. Egerton Vane’—that’s the kind of incense he feeds on. Once he got a puff in a paper called the Librarian, and carried it about with him for months. He said to me with tears in his eyes: ‘This is recognition!’”

Everyone in the room seemed to have some literary or artistic vocation, except Mendes himself. The motive which brought the South American there remained unguessed by Trent, but it was clear that he extracted some amusement from his strange associates.

“That other young fool over there is his brother, Wickham Vane,” the millionaire continued, indicating a boy of eighteen or thereabouts, at the other end of the table.

“Does he write poetry, too?”

“No, he doesn’t do anything so material as write. He thinks beautifully about old tapestry.”

Wickham Vane might have been pursuing his peculiar vocation at that moment from his absorbed expression. But he roused himself from his abstraction to pay the homage of attention to his elder brother.

Egerton Vane held a large sheet of paper in his hand, but before reading from it he prepared his hearers’ minds by a short allocution.

“The poem I am about to read you strikes an entirely new note in literature, the note of the unreal. It is a ‘Sonnet to a Drawer in a Japanese Cabinet.’ I have come to the conclusion that all the poets who have preceded me have been mistaken in thinking that Nature was poetical. The artificial only is poetical, because only Art can be artistic. Nature is incapable of symbolism, and the symbol alone is truly beautiful. All the glorious sins which reveal themselves crudely and grossly in mere human beings are latent in exquisite suggestion in the divinely precious works of Art. Even the handicrafts of the East are steeped in the splendid sensuality of its peoples. In this poem I have attempted to do justice to the subtle and elusive vice which clings like the aroma of putrefying rose-leaves to the workmanship of a Japanese cabinet in my possession.”

The poet proceeded to read:

SONNET

TO A DRAWER IN A JAPANESE CABINET

What shadow of dead secrets, lemon-eyed,

Lurks in thy black recesses, frightful drawer,

Crowned with the Pagan scent of delicate gore

Fresh from the veins of some green suicide?

Behold thy lacquered sins are glorified

In frantic fowls that round thy handle soar,

Mad with obscure desires, like those that tore

Unclean blue Mænads by the Phrygian tide!

And horrors like vermilion rats awake

And crawl about thee, crooning in my ears

Dim, vampire songs of shrivelled souls that ache

With the strange lust for torture-baths of pain;

Sick with the thirst of poison drunk in vain,

And bleeding with the clammy blood of tears.

The new note thus successfully struck in literature was applauded with a vehemence that concealed some jealousy on the part of the other poets present. Only Molly Finucane, who was beginning to feel herself left out in the cold, asked the author impertinently what his work meant.

“Nothing!” was the rapt reply. “All Art is quite meaningless.”

The Duke of Trent turned to Mendes.

“And is that absurd and disgusting rubbish the sort of thing which passes for poetry to-day?”

“Not to-day, perhaps, but it will pass for it to-morrow. If Egerton Vane goes on long enough, I have no doubt he will found a school. But I have noticed that most young fellows who begin like that end by going into a monastery.”

The Duke began to see a new usefulness in the institutions which he had been brought up to regard with aversion.

The Brazilian, who knew the weak spot in most of his fellow-men, maliciously threw an apple of discord among the company by asking Egerton Vane across the table what he thought of the poems of Rowley Drummer.

The quarrel which instantly arose and raged over the merits of this distinguished writer showed that envy of a rival’s renown may be a stronger passion than hatred of the middle classes.

The chief apologist for the poet was a man who had recently achieved a scandalous success with a novel in which he dealt faithfully with the vices of all his most intimate friends. The terror inspired by this performance had made him for the moment the most courted man in London society, and persons like the brothers Vane followed him about everywhere in the hope of finding themselves pilloried to fame in Basil Dyke’s next libel.

Dyke, who found his antipathy to the bourgeoisie sensibly diminished by every cheque which reached him from his publisher, and who was already meditating desertion from the decadent ranks in favour of marriage with an heiress, put forward a claim on behalf of his client which it did not seem easy to refute.

“He has made vice popular in the person of the British soldier,” he urged. “He has stamped with brazen hoofs upon the Gordons and the Havelocks and the prayer-meeting heroes of the Victorian Age, and has called upon the drudging taxpayer to bow down and worship a swearing, drinking blackguard. His patriotism is nauseous in itself, I grant, but then he has made it patriotic to break the Ten Commandments. He has identified Imperialism with immorality.”

“And therefore, I suppose, you would say with Art?” retorted Egerton Vane, with ill-concealed annoyance. “All Art is immoral, but it does not follow that all immorality is artistic.”

“Vulgarity is never artistic,” added the thinker about old tapestry, coming to his brother’s support. “Rowley Drummer has no sense of the unreal. He sees life in all its blinding vulgarity, and therefore the better he paints it, the worse is the result.”

Dyke saw that he had gone too far. It is always bad manners to praise one poet in the hearing of another. He tried to qualify his praise.

“I do not defend him as an artist,” he explained, “but as a demagogue. I say that the coarse passion called patriotism, in his hands, has been turned to a good purpose. After he has taught the public to acclaim the hooligans of the barrack-room, they cannot very well flog the hooligans of the street.”

To the Minister, fresh from his legislative essay, this remark sounded like a challenge. Once more a doubt invaded his mind as to whether all that he was listening to was sheer ribaldry, or whether there were not underlying it some serious purpose, or at least some serious tendency, of which Cabinet Ministers one day might have to take heed.

Molly Finucane had been feeling bored for some time, and, what was worse, feeling that her exclusion from the conversation reflected on her position as the lady of the house. She seized this opportunity to assert her prerogative.

“Who talks of flogging the hooligans?” she asked, with a good deal of scorn. “They’ll have to catch ’em first.”

She stopped short, warned by the uneasy looks of the rest that she had committed herself in some way. Molly did not read the papers, and so was ignorant of the recent proceedings of the House of Lords. But she was aware that Lord Alistair’s brother was identified in some way with the Government, and therefore with the cause of law and order, and she guessed that her expressions might contain some element of offence.

There had been a time when Molly would have enjoyed nothing so much as shocking a Cabinet Minister by telling him across her own table that her brother was a corner-boy. But for the past year a great change had come over her disposition, as great as that which transforms the roystering medical student into the serious family practitioner. It had not needed the letter from Lord Alistair’s mother to put before her the idea of becoming Lord Alistair’s wife, nor to teach her the way in which his friends would take such an alliance. To become Lady Alistair without at the same time obtaining the social honours which other Lady Alistairs enjoyed would do little to satisfy that yearning for other women’s respect which is the torment appointed for such as Molly Finucane. And there was enough good in Molly to make her anxious for Alistair’s sake not to be a permanent blight on his career. It was for his sake as much as for her own that she had been striving painfully for the last twelve months to acquire the habitudes of a lady.

The unexpected arrival of the Duke of Trent had caused her a thrill of pleasurable excitement. To make a good impression on the head of the family, she felt, would bring her half-way to the goal. Now, at the thought that she had been so near to disgracing herself, she could have bitten her tongue.

Molly’s preoccupations were not shared by Alistair, who took it for granted that his brother had come to reproach him, and resented what seemed to him an impertinent intrusion. By this time he had drunk too much to care what he said or did, and the desire was strong upon him to wreak his bitter feelings on the head of his favoured elder.

Staggering to his feet, and casting a disdainful look at the silent and annoyed Duke, he burst out:

“I am a hooligan. I’ve been trying to disguise it ever since I was a boy, but I’m not going to try any more. I hate your law and order; I hate your respectability; I hate your civilization. Our forefathers were thieves and murderers, and I envy them. They lived a jolly life among the heather and the hills, and they were gentlemen. They didn’t cringe to cobblers and butchers for votes, and go to church on Sundays to please their grocer. They swore and drank and diced as much as they liked, and never asked what the Dissenters thought of them. I am sick of the strait-waistcoat; I am sick of swallow-tail coats and prayer-books. Why should I torture myself in the effort to lead your unnatural life? I protest against it all. Life is one long persecution of men like me, by men like you. Why can’t you leave me alone, as I leave you alone? I don’t force you to drink and gamble, and lead what you are pleased to call an immoral life. Why do you try to force me to lead a moral one?”

He paused for a moment, and then, as if the overflow of his wrath had sobered him, went on in a more serious vein:

“What is your ideal? Show me the man you honour, and I will show you the value of your morality. The hero of to-day is the successful cheat, the tradesman who has made a million by selling rotten food to the poor or to your own soldiers in South Africa; the bandit of the Stock Exchange; the monopolist who has broken the hearts and ruined the lives of a hundred struggling rivals, and who three hundred years ago would have been hanged as an engrosser. That is the man to whom you kneel, for whom all the doors of all the churches are thrown open, in whose name I am ordered to reform my ways.”

The speaker seemed to feel the need of pointing his denunciation with a personal application.

“I am your victim. I am the man whose life is ground out beneath the Juggernaut wheels of what you call your social system. Why? Because I cannot become hard and selfish and stupid like your model. It is monotony that you want; it is originality that you hate. Go to the tombs of your martyrs—most of them are buried in Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s—Goldsmith the bankrupt, Nelson the adulterer, Pitt the drunkard, Shakespeare the debauchee. Those are the men whom you are trying to exterminate, and you have nearly succeeded. I—I had something here, perhaps”—he smote his forehead with his hand—“and I might have done something if I had ever had the chance. But you have killed me. All the bright instincts, all the golden wings that fluttered in the dawn, all the magic whispers, all the reveries and dreams—they are dead and still and silent now. Your work is done.”

A slight shiver went round the room and touched even the Cabinet Minister, who had been more than once on the point of rising and taking his departure.

Suddenly Alistair Stuart broke into a loud laugh.

“Thank you, my Dishonourable friends—thank you for your support to-night. You see before you a bankrupt, but a merry one. You will hear of me again before long. I think of taking a house on the south side of the river, and turning hooligan. I invite you to become members of my band. I hope to give some trouble to the authorities. We are fortunate in having one of them here to-night. I invite you to drink his health, gentlemen—my brother, the Home Secretary, author of a Bill to punish the hooligans by flogging. In your name I defy him, and drink damnation to his Bill!”

The thickness of his speech and the increasing wildness of his behaviour relieved Lord Alistair’s hearers from the necessity of treating this as anything but the utterance of an intoxicated man. But it was clearly necessary to put an end to the scene.

Mendes and the Duke of Trent rose together, but the financier was the first to speak.

“Gentlemen, it is time we were going. Stuart, sit down! You don’t know what you are doing!”

He thrust Lord Alistair down into a chair and held him there, while the others made their hasty farewells and streamed out into the hall.

“I am obliged to you, Mendes,” said the Duke. “Do you think,” he added in a whisper, “you could get that girl out of the way?”

“It’s her house, I believe, but I’ll try to send her to bed,” was the answer.

The Brazilian went up to Molly, who sat looking rather frightened at her end of the table. He said a few words in a low voice which appeared to produce the right effect. Molly Finucane glanced timidly at the Duke, and then came towards him with an evident desire to propitiate.

“I’ll leave him with you, if you like,” she said, “but you won’t find it much good talking to him to-night, I expect. You’d better come again in the morning, if it’s any business.”

Trent confined himself to bowing silently, and Mendes accompanied Miss Finucane out of the room, leaving the brothers together.

Alistair had remained still, with his head resting in his hands, as though exhausted by his passion. Hearing the door close, he looked up sullenly.

“Well, what do you want with me?” he asked.

Faithful to his resolve to be gracious, in spite of the provocations he had received, the Duke made a mild answer.

“I want you to come home, Alistair.”

“This is home.”

“My house is your home,” said James, not unkindly; and, with a tact of which he was not always capable, he added: “Our mother’s house is the home of both of us.”

Alistair reddened.

“How is she?” he muttered.

“She is very anxious and unhappy about you. I have promised her to save you, if you will let me.”

This time the elder brother’s words were not so well chosen. It always grated on Alistair to be reminded that he was dependent on James.

“I can’t leave my friends,” he said stubbornly.

Trent thought of the company he had just seen depart, and his indignation got the better of him.

“Friends!” he repeated. “Friends who have landed you in the Bankruptcy Court!”

“Well, you didn’t keep me out of it!”

Trent made a strong effort to keep his temper.

“I have seen my solicitor to-day with the object of preventing the adjudication. Alistair, I will do it, if you will only pull yourself together, and make it possible for your mother and me to help you. I will pay your debts once more, though I can ill afford it, and start you again with a clean sheet, if you will only take advantage of it. Come! I have got the brougham waiting outside. Why shouldn’t you get up now, and let me take you straight away with me?”

He tried to speak cheerfully and confidently. But there was no encouragement in the bleared eyes that looked up at him.

“What! and leave Molly after she’s stuck to me all this time? D’you think I’m a cad, Trent?”

“You called yourself a hooligan just now.”

Trent regretted the retort the moment it had passed his lips. But it was too late. Alistair started up angrily.

“And, damn it! I’ll be a hooligan before I will sell the little woman for a few miserable thousands, like that! Go to the devil, you and your clean sheet! I’m sorry for the old mater, if she feels it, but I can’t stand your patronage, and I won’t have your moralizing; so you can just leave me alone.”

“I will leave you alone!” exclaimed his brother. “God forgive me, I sometimes wonder what I have done to deserve being cursed with such a brother as you!”

He turned and strode out of the room, leaving Alistair to sway and sink down with his head upon the table among the ashes and wine-stains of the extinguished revel.

CHAPTER VIII
A LEGITIMIST DEMONSTRATION

The carriage which brought the Duchess of Trent and Miss Vanbrugh to the Legitimist bazaar set them down at the door of a mean-looking, brick-built schoolroom, over the door of which was a niche containing the statue of a woman holding a babe in her arms.

This woman was intended for a Jewish peasant, wife of the carpenter Joseph of Nazareth. This babe was her Divine Son, the second person of the Christian Triad.

The woman wore an emblem of glory in the form of a crown on her head. The babe’s head was undecorated. The group was copied without alteration from the ancient pagan idols of the Great Mother and her Child, worshipped for countless ages in the Mediterranean zone.

Beneath the niche four letters were cut. They were the four initials, A.M.D.G., of the Latin words, Ad majorem Dei gloriam—“To the greater glory of God.”

It was the motto of the famous Society of Jesus, set up over a building in which the children of Protestant Churchmen were being educated. Only the Jesuit motto was not set out in full; it was merely hinted at by those cryptic letters. This was a touch that Ignatius Loyola would have admired.

Neither of the two ladies observed the unobtrusive initials, nor, if they had done so, would they have understood their significance. But they could scarcely avoid seeing the idol in its niche; and just as they were stepping out of the carriage a bright little lad, attractively robed in a white gown with a red vest above, evidently a singing-boy from the church hard by, passed through the doorway, bowing reverently to the sacred image as he went up the steps.

The Duchess of Trent was amazed. Her works of charity had never brought her into this part of the parish, and she had always kept herself from contact with the religious activities of St. Jermyn’s.

“If that is not Popery, I should like to know what is?” she exclaimed bluntly to her young friend. “Did you see that boy bowing to the Virgin Mary? I have no doubt they are taught to pray to her as well.”

This surmise was perfectly just. Such slight control as the episcopate, or at least the lay judges of the Privy Council, exercised over the services in St. Jermyn’s Church, appeared to cease altogether on the threshold of the school. Within that building Dr. Coles was supreme, and taught what religion he pleased. If it had suited him to set up an image of Siva for the adoration of his scholars, or to inculcate the most degrading beliefs of primitive savagery, no one would have interfered with his discretion. Thus, while the Vicar maintained some of the forms of Anglican worship in the parish church, in the schoolroom he had long laid them aside. The catechism taught to the boys was one prepared by a clerical secret society, and was carefully contrived to fill the learner’s mind with hatred for the Protestant heresy, and to turn it in the direction of Catholic Unity.

A special liturgy, compiled by the same hands, was also provided for the use of the scholars. In it the Mother of God figured as the principal, though not the sole, object of worship, the Apostle Peter taking the second place. Among the prayers, precedence was given to one for the Patriarch of the West—“Thy servant Leo, that he may be inspired rightly to define and zealously to defend the faith once delivered to Thy saints.” After this came petitions on behalf of a personage discreetly referred to as “the lawful Sovereign of these realms,” the souls of the dead “now awaiting Thy judgment,” and the reunion, “under one visible Head on earth,” of all branches of the Holy Catholic Church. Dr. Coles himself was responsible for a supplementary prayer in which “our blessed patron, Saint Jermyn,” was complimented on his influence with the Mother of God, due to the continence of his life on earth, and implored to use that influence on behalf of the area for which he was, as it were, the spiritual County Councillor.

It was a document breathing the spirit of the Dark Ages, when God figured in men’s minds as a sort of Byzantine Emperor, surrounded by a court of heavenly chamberlains and eunuchs, each dispensing favours to his own train of followers, and none incapable of being bribed.

Miss Vanbrugh, regarding the symbolical sculpture with the indifference born of ignorance, smiled at her friend’s indignation.

“Let us go in,” she said; “I don’t think it’s so bad inside.”

The whitewashed walls of the room in which they found themselves offered a curious medley of science and religion, evidencing a painful struggle in the mind of Dr. Coles between proselytizing zeal and a desire to earn the grants of an heretical Government. A large crucifix over the teacher’s desk was flanked by a geological map of Great Britain, and a glass case containing silk in various stages from the cocoon to the finished skein. The Ten Commandments on one wall were faced by the two hemispheres on the other; and an illuminated calendar of Holy Days was half concealed by a chart depicting screws, wedges, levers, and other mechanical appliances. The cloven, or at least the clerical, hoof peeped out in a series of cartoons illustrative of English history, the scenes chosen being all in one category—the landing of Augustine, the martyrdom of Edmund, Thomas à Becket defying Henry II., and Langton, with a formidable crozier, extorting Magna Charta from King John apparently by the threat of physical violence, while the barons respectfully looked on.

On this particular occasion the eye was quickly distracted from these mural decorations by the exhibition beneath. The room, which was large enough to contain one or two hundred people, was lined round three sides by stalls loaded with that extraordinary description of articles which are manufactured specially for sale at bazaars, and in which the greatest possible uselessness is combined with the greatest possible fragility. Children’s frocks, which no child could wear for an hour without damaging them, embroidered tobacco-pouches sufficient to dismay the most stout-hearted smoker, weird contrivances of paper and cheap ribbon described as toilet-tidies, ridiculous pin-cushions, and impossible patchwork quilts formed the staple of the display. In one corner a lottery was being conducted by the Rev. Aloysius Grimes, happy in that immunity from the law which newspaper editors cannot obtain; and pretty little choristers, in their sacred vestments, were passing to and fro among the ladies doing a roaring trade in the sale of tickets. But the great attraction of the afternoon was the theatre, which had been organized in an adjoining classroom, and in which it was announced that a Miracle Play would be produced at four o’clock, under the direction of Egerton Vane, Esq.

As soon as Mr. Grimes caught sight of the Duchess of Trent and her companion, he handed over the care of the lottery to a young lady assistant, and hastened forward to greet them. He was just shaking hands, when a stir in the doorway announced the arrival of Dr. Coles.

In appearance the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s contrasted very favourably with his curate. It was easy to see that he was a man of education and refinement, and his white hairs gave him a certain dignity. His face was that of a sensualist, but the benevolent smile, which had become almost stereotyped on his lips, produced an impression of cordiality and goodness of heart. The Doctor’s career had not been quite untroubled by the voice of scandal. But any bygone slips on the part of a saintly man had been forgotten or forgiven. The reverent murmur which welcomed his appearance among his flock was a striking testimony to the influence he had secured over those among whom he worked.

The Rev. Aloysius, breaking away from the two ladies in the middle of a sentence, without apology, was the first to cast himself on both knees before his employer, and respectfully kiss a large ring on the Vicar’s extended forefinger.

“What in the name of goodness does that mean?” the astonished Duchess asked of Hero.

She spoke loudly enough to be heard by several persons in the throng, who turned and cast rebuking glances at her. Directly afterwards she saw a number of well-dressed women advance one after the other and salute the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s with the same ceremonial as that observed by Mr. Grimes.

“Are they all mad, or what is it?” the Duchess whispered. “I have never seen such a thing before in my life, except when I was abroad, in Roman Catholic society. But even they don’t kneel to their priests, only to a Bishop.”

Hero blushed guiltily. She was better informed than the Duchess, but she was not sure that her knowledge might not damage her in her friend’s eyes.

“Perhaps these people regard Dr. Coles as a Bishop,” she suggested timidly. “Have you never heard it whispered that he had been secretly consecrated by—an Armenian Bishop, I think?”

The Duchess stared at her in honest bewilderment.

“How could that be? I don’t understand. Why should an English clergyman go to Armenia to be consecrated?”

Hero saw that she must make her revelation complete.

“I understand the object was to renew the Apostolical Succession in the Church of England.”

“It has never been broken,” said the Duchess, with decision. She had been told so as a girl, and had never given the subject a second thought. To her devout mind, too candid to be taken in logical snares, the presence or absence of one or two or three Bishops at the consecration of another could not seem a matter of real concern. To attribute to such details the awful consequences they possess for Catholic minds would have seemed to her to attribute the technical instincts of a small attorney to the Maker of the sun and stars.

“The Pope of Rome refuses to recognize Anglican Orders, you know,” Hero explained gently. “The application was made to him the other day by Lord Bargreave on behalf of a third of the clergy, and he told them that the English Church had no Bishops, no priests, and no Sacraments.”

The Duchess flushed to the roots of her hair.

“When I was a girl,” she said sternly, “the Church of England would have refused to recognize the Pope of Rome. I was brought up to believe that the Roman communion was a half-pagan, half-political body, which had corrupted the Gospel with idolatry and superstition, and forfeited its right to be called a Christian Church.”

It was Hero’s turn to be astonished as she listened to the language of an extinct generation. Brought up in the age which had witnessed the triumph of the Ritualist propaganda, it was news to her that the national Church had ever occupied any attitude but one of envious imitation or suppliant apology towards that of Rome. And yet Hero Vanbrugh was a girl who had read a good deal, travelled much, and used her own powers of observation and reasoning. She had seen the ignorant priesthoods of Spain and Italy, and their brutish flocks, the most degraded element in the European population. The sight of the Rev. Aloysius Grimes cringing to Mike Finigan had roused her indignation. And yet the spectacle of a great society of Grimeses cringing to Mike Finigan’s master, in the name of Elizabeth’s and Cromwell’s countrymen, had scarcely moved her to a passing sigh.

“Times have changed,” she murmured to the Duchess.

And times had. Even the Duchess realized dimly that it had become unsafe to utter aloud her sentiments of loyalty to the English Church or to the English Throne in a Church of England schoolroom, while it had ceased to be unsafe for Dr. Coles to parade openly his treason to both. His episcopal character was no secret in the theological colleges from which a steady stream of young men like the Rev. Aloysius turned their steps to the obscure Lambeth Vicarage in search of those supernatural powers which they deemed the neighbouring Archbishop had no power to bestow. In this way the whole Church was being gradually leavened, so that the time was at hand when some portion of the mysterious virtue brought from Armenia would have found its way into all the channels of ordination, and obstinate Evangelicals would be receiving Armenian Orders unknown to themselves, and would be working the great Transubstantiation miracle in which they personally did not believe.

For the sake of achieving this object Dr. Coles had put on one side the prospect of promotion in the English Church. With abilities sufficient to have raised him perhaps to the House of Lords, he had deliberately accepted the part of priest of an obscure parish, content if his underground revolution was allowed to proceed without interference. His motives were mixed, perhaps, but great revolutions are the result of mixed motives, and never of wholly small and base ones. The Vicar of St. Jermyn’s was blinded to the degrading character of his methods by the loftiness of his aims. He took the guilt of fraud and perjury on his conscience, and he did so contentedly, looking forward to the time when the Church he served would re-enter the Catholic unity, and the Body of Christ be made whole.

As soon as he had finished receiving the homage of his peculiar adherents, the old priest went up to the Duchess of Trent, for whom he had a warm regard. In spite of the theological gulf that sundered them, she commanded his sympathy far more than the vain and hysterical women who grovelled in his confessional, and her simple and unselfish piety displayed in those good works which all religions enjoin had won his gratitude and respect. Had he been able to make a convert of the Duchess he would have felt it as great a triumph as when the State-appointed Bishop of Linchester, laying aside his jewelled crozier and mitre, came and knelt in the humble study of St. Jermyn’s Vicarage to receive them again at the hands of the “Bishop of Lambeth.”

On her side the Duchess was not blind to the merits of Dr. Coles, his indefatigable zeal, unworldliness, and kindly temper. They met as friends meet, seated in different trains, and going in opposite directions, who exchange a brief word of greeting before they pass out of each other’s sight.

The Duchess had never referred to the religious aberrations of the Doctor, but she thought she might safely challenge him on the subject of loyalty to the Throne.

“I had no idea that you sympathized with the Legitimists,” she observed.

The Vicar smiled indulgently.

“This bazaar, I suppose you mean? It is more Father Grimes’s doing than mine. I hold entirely aloof from politics.”

“But you have lent your schoolroom.”

Dr. Coles frowned.

“My schoolroom, as you call it, is a public building,” he said, with a touch of anger. “I find I am expected to lend it for the purposes of political meetings, even to the party which almost openly aims at Disestablishment. I sometimes wonder I don’t receive an application to lend it for an infidel lecture.”

The Duchess was impressed. Dr. Coles had struck the one note which brought them into perfect accord, in his reference to infidelity.

In the view of the Duchess this was the one thing worse than Popery. Her religious scale was made up of five degrees. At the very bottom came Infidelity, in which term she was disposed to include the Unitarian denomination and those divines of her own Church whose Hebrew studies had led them to take different views as to the authorship of the Old Testament books from those at one time prevalent. The second head, Popery, covered practically the whole Christian Church during the ages between the death of Paul and the conversion of Martin Luther, and two-thirds of existing Christendom. The third division, under the word Idolatry, embraced the religions of the rest of mankind, including the stern monotheists of Islam. The Jews formed a class apart; the Duchess was too good a Conservative to blame that ancient race severely for their stubbornness in resisting even a Divine reform; she regarded them as a species of embryo Christians, whose development had been arrested in the caterpillar stage. Her fifth division, Protestantism, applied to the sects dating from the Lutheran revolt, and to stray heretics of the past, such as the Socialist Lollards and the freethinking Albigeois, who possessed the merit of having been persecuted by Rome. Among these, of course, she distinguished between the converted Christian and the much larger class of sinners for whom she wished to take for granted a death-bed repentance.

It was not an unimportant matter that the Duchess of Trent should have held these views. Money is always important, and the Duchess was one of a very large moneyed class who were always ready to open their purses on behalf of their favourite propaganda. The infidel and the sinner were supposed to be reached by the ordinary machinery of the Church, and the Papist and the Jew had been wellnigh abandoned as hopeless, though a few Englishmen of the lower class still prowled through countries like Spain and Portugal, distributing Protestant tracts and increasing the dislike felt for their nation. But the great field for missionary effort, of course, was that section of mankind labelled idolaters or heathen. In the spirit of the hymn which singles out the inoffensive Buddhists of Ceylon to brand them with the epithet vile, the good Duchess firmly believed that to thrust, not merely the theology, but the morals, social customs, marriage institutions, language, manners, and even clothing of her own age and country upon all the peoples of the earth was a Divine injunction to be neglected at her peril.

This generous zeal had long been encouraged by the statesmen of the Raj, who saw its possessions widened without the expense of arms. The British Empire resembles no other that has ever existed in having come into existence unconsciously. England has sent forth her outlaws on the shores of distant continents, and they have come back soldiers for her. Her merchants have gone forth seeking merchandise, and realms Alexander sighed for have fallen like ripe fruit into their hands. Her missionaries have Anglicized where they should have Christianized; the bigoted worshippers of Allah and Vishnu imitate the language of Macaulay, and every new church in Africa gives a new cotton-mill to Lancashire.

Dr. Coles had a more personal argument in store for the Duchess of Trent.

“Surely you cannot be very bigoted against the Legitimists,” he urged. “I thought that all the old Scotch families were Jacobites at heart. And Lord Alistair Stuart is a member of the Guild.”

“I have heard my mistress, the Queen, say: ‘I am the greatest Jacobite of them all,’” the Duchess responded. “But I don’t think she ever expected to hear of real Jacobites in the twentieth century. I don’t take your friends very seriously, Dr. Coles, and I dare say my son doesn’t either.”

Before the discussion could be carried further Alistair himself came into view. His mother watched him anxiously, half afraid of seeing him accord the same homage to Dr. Coles as the others. But whether because he was wanting in reverence for Armenia, or because he was ashamed to show greater respect to a man than to his own mother, Stuart contented himself with shaking hands with the priest, after he had previously greeted his parent.

He was surprised at first to see her at such a function. But the diplomacy of the Duchess was very transparent. She at once turned to Hero, and pronounced the formula which entitles two people in English society to know of each other’s existence.

It was the first time Alistair had seen Miss Vanbrugh, but not the first time he had heard her name. The eyes of society are very keen where a man like the Duke of Trent and Colonsay is concerned, and its whispering-gallery is very wide. Although the Duke himself had never given any significance to his intercourse with Hero, the correct significance had already been given to it by others, and the rumour had reached Lord Alistair. For him the girl who stood before him was the girl who was on the point of becoming his brother’s betrothed.

He raised his eyes to her face, and when he saw that picture of calm, sweet maidenhood, with all the bloom of youth and purity upon it, and those eyes radiant with high and happy thoughts, and when he recalled that other face he had just quitted, with the paint peeling off under the haggard eyes, and the cracked lips set in a querulous scowl because he had not dared to bring her into the company of reputable women, and when he compared his own lot, cast with that unhappy creature, with the life that lay before his brother, blest in so dear a wife, then his heart failed him, and he had to turn away his eyes to hide the unexpected smart.

On her part Hero was not much less moved. She saw standing before her the figure around which her imagination had already woven its romance, and he was handsomer than the hero of her romance. The gracefully-knit form, with its statuesque neck and curling dark hair, breathed the very spirit of the lays of Oisin. The swish of the heather was still in his elastic tread, the sunlight of the rain-washed Hebrides was in his glance. She seemed to see him in his kilt and plaid, the eagle’s feather nodding in his bonnet, and the claymore by his side, a young chieftain of the glens, starting at daybreak from his bed among the fern, and setting forth perhaps to woo a maiden like herself with the immemorial charms of song and dance. In the strait garb of the decorous capital he seemed to her like a shorn Samson, and she thought of violets fading in a city garret, and skylarks caged in a dark cellar beating their wings in want of light and air.

She, also, drew her comparison, and the cold and perfect courtier of Colonsay House suffered by it. For the first time she felt in its full strength that instinct of self-sacrifice which lies at the core of every noble nature. The task which Stuart’s mother had offered to her, and in which she had only taken a sentimental interest, now became a fascination. The longing to save this glorious soul, fallen among weeds and briars, to lift it up and wipe away its stains, and set it on its true path again, overcame her like the touch of love; the touch of love overcame her like the longing to save, and her hand trembled in Alistair Stuart’s.

The two Vanes sidled up, anxious to be recognized by their chief.

“So glad you have turned up, Stuart,” bleated the elder. “It’s quite a demonstration, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Wickham echoed, “it is a blow. I think we are striking a blow.”

He meant at the hated middle classes. It was the only kind of a blow he was ever likely to strike against that or any other enemy.

Stuart heard them with impatience. Somehow the presence of Hero made the two brothers look tawdry and ridiculous with their decadent cant, their untidy hair, and their silly, outlandish neckties. He answered with irony:

“No doubt the middle classes will be frightened when they hear of this bazaar. But you must see that it gets into the papers, otherwise the effect will be lost. Are there any reporters here?”

The brothers looked around a little nervously.

“I hope so,” said Egerton, whose vanity was slightly greater than his cowardice.

“It might vulgarize the thing,” suggested Wickham whose cowardice was slightly greater than his vanity.

Stuart understood their fears, and played on them by way of distraction from his secret emotion.

“I expect the place is crammed with detectives,” he observed. “I fancied I saw one or two suspicious-looking fellows with notebooks as I came in.”

Hero grasped the situation, and smiled.

“No; do you think so?” exclaimed the elder Vane in a tone of exultation, tempered by alarm. “But surely there is nothing they can take hold of—nothing illegal, I mean—in a bazaar?”

“They may shadow us after this, though,” muttered the junior, in whom alarm had got the better of exultation.

“They may treat the bazaar as evidence of a conspiracy,” Stuart suggested cheerfully. “But here comes St. Maur; you had better ask him.”

He turned, and led Hero away through the crowd, to escape from the person he had indicated, leaving the brothers in a state of cruel apprehension.

But Mr. St. Maur was not to be shaken off so easily. This gentleman, who had spelt his name “Maher” in his native city of “Dahblin” (as he was accustomed to pronounce it), was the son of a decent butter-merchant, who had put him to the Bar. Coming over to the Temple, in accordance with old custom to keep his terms, the ambitious youth was surprised and charmed to find that his membership of the Roman Church, which had stood somewhat in his light in the society of the Irish capital, was here a fashionable distinction. To drink the Roman Pontiff’s health before that of the British Sovereign appeared to be in some mysterious way a passport to Court favour, and a Roman missionary had just been given precedence over the heads of the English Church. The policy of the Primrose League had been adapted to the purposes of proselytism, and a club had been founded in the West End in which the middle-class aspirant could enjoy the privilege of lunching in the same room as a Roman Cabinet Minister and receiving the Times fresh from the hands of a Roman Duke. Unfortunately the Duke and the Cabinet Minister failed to play their parts with sufficient zeal, or else there were not enough of them to go around, and St. Bridget’s Club gradually sunk from depth to depth till not merely Protestants, but Jews, profaned its portals, and it became a refuge for all the suspicious characters whom other clubs refused.

Young Maher was not long in deciding to forsake the Irish Bar for the English, and a slight alteration in the spelling of his name enabled him to pose as an offshoot of one of the greatest families in Britain. The difficulty of an accent which clove obstinately to his tongue was met by a well-constructed legend of an Irish branch of the family in question, supposed to have settled in the Emerald Isle about the time of Strongbow. On the strength of this genealogy, which would have done credit to the Heralds’ College in its best remunerated moments, Mr. St. Maur was in the habit of referring to a nobleman of lofty rank as “the head of our house,” thereby causing intolerable anguish to his friends, the Vanes, who were only nephews of a baronet. Unfortunately they were prevented from questioning the genuineness of St. Maur’s pedigree, inasmuch as they had laid every stress upon it in introducing him to their acquaintance. But they had an uneasy sense that the Irishman was an impostor who had beaten them by mere bluff.

On his part the barrister having, as he conceived, surpassed the Vanes, was seeking for loftier heights to scale. As soon as he met Lord Alistair Stuart in the brothers’ flat he promptly marked him out for attack. Undaunted by Stuart’s evident dislike for him, the Irishman persistently forced himself on his notice. With this object he had thrown himself heart and soul into the Legitimist cause, as he would have thrown himself into the Independent Labour Party the day after if the leaders of that movement had been members of the peerage.

Having come to the bazaar chiefly in order to push his acquaintance with Lord Alistair, Mr. St. Maur was not the man to be balked of his prey.

“Grand success, this, isn’t it, Stuart?” he bawled out from afar, as he hustled his way through the throng.

Much as Stuart disliked his follower, he failed to give him credit for the naked singleness of his aims. Had he fully understood the Irishman’s character, he would have got rid of him before this by the easy expedient of introducing him to his brother. Once anchored to the coat-tails of a Duke, St. Maur would have left a mere younger brother severely alone. As it was, Lord Alistair saw no way of repelling the intruder except by a harshness which was not in his nature.

Mr. St. Maur shook hands effusively, and then, finding he was not going to be introduced to Lord Alistair’s companion, began enlarging on the prospects of the movement.

“I consider this affair will launch us as a serious party,” he declared. “The public will begin to reckon with us. It will soon be time to think of a Parliamentary candidature. What do you say, Stuart?”

Alistair shrugged his shoulders.

“I should think you would get about ten votes in any constituency in England.”

“Ah, but what about Scotland? There is a feeling up there that might be appealed to. If a man like yourself, now, a member of an old Highland family, were to stand in your own part of the country, don’t you think the clansmen would rally round you?”

“You forget that I should have my brother’s influence dead against me. He is a member of the Government.”

“He would have to disavow you officially, of course. But privately, you know? Don’t you think the Duke might be brought to show some sympathy for the movement?”

“He would simply laugh at it, I expect,” said Stuart.

“The Duke of Gloucester does not laugh at it,” returned the other.

Alistair’s face darkened at the name, and he cast down his eyes.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

St. Maur swelled with importance.

“I happen to have private information that he watches the proceedings of the Guild with the closest attention. He has everything that appears in the press about us sent him by a press-cutting agency.”

“I wish I had known that before,” said Alistair. And, turning to Hero, he explained: “I have let them have an autograph letter of the Prince’s to sell at one of the stalls.”

The absurdity of this did not strike Hero so much as its ingratitude.

“A letter from the Prince to you, do you mean?” she asked, with an accent of reproach.

“Yes; I used to know him very well when we were boys. I came across it the other day among some old papers. But I shouldn’t like him to hear that I had let it be sold.”

A purpose had swiftly formed in Hero’s mind.

“Whereabouts is the stall?” she inquired.

“Over here.”

Turning his back on Mr. St. Maur with unwonted rudeness, he conducted Hero to a stall presided over by a pretty, overdressed little woman, who had been persuaded by Mr. Grimes in the confessional that she would thus atone for certain errors to which pretty, overdressed little women are prone. Prince Herbert’s autograph had been entrusted to her for sale, and by good luck it had not been disposed of when the two came up.

“What is the price of this letter?” Miss Vanbrugh asked quickly.

“One guinea,” the stallkeeper simpered. “It is from His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester to Lord Alistair Stuart,” she added in ignorance of who stood before her.

“Let me buy it, and give it to you!” cried Alistair, guessing Hero’s design.

She took up the letter. It was a short schoolboy’s note, and contained a misspelt word.

“Dear Alistair:

“I cannot meet you to-morrow, as the Crown Prince of Austria is coming, but I will go out fishing on Saturday if you like. Come over here at ten o’clock—mind, be punctual.

“Yours affectionately,
“Herbert.

“P.S.—Sorry to break my promise, but they made me. Mind, bring your fishing-rod.”

Hero handed the letter to her companion.

“I would rather you let me buy it, and give it back to you,” she said.

She handed the money to the lady of the stall, who was looking considerably astonished.

Alistair understood the delicate rebuke. His glance took in the contents of the friendly, boyish note afresh, and he felt ashamed that he had parted with it.

“I am very grateful to you, Miss Vanbrugh, believe me,” he said earnestly, as he slipped the letter into his pocket. “I ought not to have let it go into strange hands. But I hope I needn’t count you as a stranger. You are often at Colonsay House, aren’t you?”

“I have never met you there,” said Hero pointedly.

And Alistair was silent.

The Miracle Play was a great success, though not, perhaps, in the way anticipated by Dr. Coles.

The Vicar had understood that the text of the Ober-Ammergau performance was to furnish the basis of a version only slightly modified by Mr. Egerton Vane. But Mr. Vane, being deeply imbued with the spirit of Maeterlinck, had allowed his adaptation to become tinctured to an unforeseen extent by the vein of symbolism peculiar to the work of the Belgian master. The orthodox Christian interpretation being repugnant to his feelings as a Pagan, he had, moreover, boldly replaced it by something more congenial to his own sympathies.

The result was somewhat as though a conscientious Buddhist should rewrite “Paradise Lost,” endeavouring to make it illustrate the doctrine of metempsychosis.

In the opening scene Mary was introduced as the Spirit of Form, receiving the Annunciation from the Angel Gabriel as the representative of Creative Genius. The dialogue, which was fortunately unintelligible to nine-tenths of the audience, turned on the sterility of the Jewish nation in the department of the plastic arts. Mary was informed that her Son would remove the prohibition contained in the Second Commandment, thereby opening the way for the Christian school of statuary and painting.

The whole of the sacred narrative was dealt with from the same standpoint. The Wise Men were presented as the exponents of the three arts of Poetry, Music, and Painting, whose respective merits were discussed at some length. The dispute of the child Christ in the Temple was made to turn on Keats’s famous identification of Truth with Beauty. Satan, in the scene of the Temptation, appeared as the genius of Utilitarianism and the middle classes, urging the Christ to abandon the principle of Art for Art’s sake. Towards the end of the drama Byron’s jest about Barabbas was almost literally incorporated, Barabbas being designed as a type of commercial success in literature—a Jewish Tennyson or Ruskin.

Every allusion to the Jews as a people was barbed with the bitterest malignity. The Semitic spirit was branded, with some historical confusion, as that of Philistinism par excellence; and Isaiah and other prophets were ingeniously represented as having fallen martyrs to their literary excellence rather than to their reforming energy.

The allegory was so vague and the dialogue so obscure that most of those present entirely failed to grasp the enormity of the author’s transgression. But it was otherwise with Dr. Coles. The Armenian proselyte was a learned and thorough-going medievalist, and he had taken it for granted that medieval traditions would be strictly adhered to. He had left the work of superintending the rehearsals to his curate, never deeming that Mr. Grimes was capable of betraying the trust. Nor was he, had he been sufficiently intelligent to perceive that he was being made a cat’s-paw by his pagan librettist. The actors in the piece, being the choir-boys, were even less capable of judging of the drift of the performance.

The deeply mortified Vicar restrained his wrath till the moment when the High-Priest Caiaphas came upon the scene in the thinly-disguised character of the proprietor of a morning paper with an enormous circulation, when it became impossible to mistake the dramatist’s intentions. Rising from his seat in the front row of the audience, Dr. Coles gave a peremptory order for the curtain to be let down, and the thoroughly mystified spectators seized the opportunity to escape.

CHAPTER IX
MOLLY FINUCANE AT HOME

As he turned away from St. Jermyn’s schoolroom, after putting his mother and Miss Vanbrugh into their carriage, Lord Alistair Stuart made a curious discovery. Thrusting his hands into his pocket in the act of nodding to a cabdriver, he found that he had no money.

The brother of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay had often known what it was to want a thousand pounds, but he had never been without sovereigns in his pocket, and it took him some moments to realize that this state of things was not accidental, but natural in his new circumstances.

Much to his own surprise, he felt the first cold touch of poverty distinctly exhilarating, like a bather’s first plunge into the sea. It was not hardship so far; it was merely adventure. He apologized to the disappointed cabman, and set off to walk to Chelsea, with that sense of superiority to fortune which Aristippus may have felt when he bade his tired slave throw away the bag of gold.

Voluntary suffering has always exercised a powerful charm over a certain order of mankind. The starvation, the confinement, and the self-torture of the Hindu fakir and the Catholic saint have not been practised solely with a business-like view to reward in a future life; they have satisfied a need—morbid, perhaps, but real, since it is found among races that have scarcely risen to the conception of another world. It is as if diseased human nature instinctively sought its own remedy, as the suffering animal seeks out the herb possessed of healing powers.

As Alistair Stuart took his way through the mean streets of Lambeth and Vauxhall, with their narrow dirty pavements, their scanty shops at the street-corners and their taverns in which the only touches of brightness and prosperity seemed concentrated, he felt the temptation growing strong upon him.

“After all, it would not be so bad to live this life,” he said to himself. “One might be very cosy in one of these small old houses, tucked up against some great dead wall, with unknown things taking place on the other side of it, or buried beneath some huge railway arch, with trains thundering overhead all night to unknown destinations. I seem to be an outlaw; why shouldn’t I live among outlaws? I could loaf about in flannel shirts and dressing-gowns all day long, and Molly would fetch me my beer from the public-house. I should smoke long clay pipes, and write an epic poem, like the ‘City of Dreadful Night.’”

But the recollection of Thomson and his poem turned the current of his thoughts into a darker channel.

“How many men of genius has London brained with her paving-stones!” he reflected bitterly. “The poet asks for nothing but liberty to sing, and the world will not give it to him. ‘Give me money’s worth for my bread and raiment and shelter’ is her harsh demand; and she drags the poet from his fountain in the wilderness to sweep the dust of the bazaar.”

His fellow-feeling for the poor drunken schoolmaster rested on sentiment. In Alistair the seed of genius, delicate from the first, had been choked, not by the pressure of physical needs, but by a profound moral discouragement. During the years in which genius begins to recognize itself, to try its wings, and point its first shy flight towards the empyrean, he had found himself living the life of a criminal on a ticket-of-leave. He had been kept in a state of spiritual starvation, deprived of the food for which his nature pined, and choked with the dry bread of Calvinism. The budding tendrils of his mind had shrivelled, vainly searching for the air of sympathy and the warm sun of praise. He had been made to feel afraid of his own intelligence, his dreams and guesses after truth and beauty were imputed to him as iniquity; and if he ever sought to give them expression, he wrote as Crusoe might have written on his desert isle—for the ears of savages.

His genius had emerged from this ordeal maimed for life. If he sang now, it was not as the birds sang, rejoicing in their Maker’s gift to them, but stealthily, as prisoners sing in dungeons, apprehensive of the passing warder’s tread. Even the desire for fame was now a broken spring. He had tasted too deeply of the bitter cup of disapproval to hope to cleanse his mouth with the honey of applause. He felt vaguely that he had been sent into the world to teach his fellow-men to rejoice with him in all its beauty and its wonder, and that they had struck him brutally across the lips, and bidden him become dull and timid and mean-hearted, like themselves.

A whole generation in England had endured an experience more or less like Alistair’s, and the literature of the age still breathes a suppressed bitterness against the cruelties of Evangelicalism. The persecution was all the more oppressive because it was not sanctioned by any public authority, nor embodied in any law. It was carried on privately, around every hearth, and in every hour of family life, poisoning the springs of truthfulness and self-respect, and breaking the hearts of the young. It was the memory of such wrongs that had made easy the triumph of the Catholic reaction; the Protestant tyranny had fallen, as other tyrannies fall, more by its own abuses than by the strength of its assailants. The fires of Smithfield were forgotten, and the little pagan group who surrounded Alistair Stuart patronized the Roman Church as their most powerful ally against the Nonconformist conscience.

But Alistair was beginning to look deeper. The play he had just witnessed, in spite of its absurdities, had embodied certain sentiments of his own. “There is no cure,” he reflected as he walked along. “There is no help for men like me; the crowd will always persecute us. They have set up the image of the Crucified One that they might crucify others in his name. The memory of Otway did not save Chatterton; the sufferings of Chatterton did not redeem Poe. Their flattery of the dead is only a deeper insult to the living. They kneel at the tomb of Shakespeare, and if Shakespeare rose again they would cast him into Reading Gaol.”

It was Alistair Stuart’s misfortune to be only a half-hearted sinner. The world likes its men to be thorough-going. Confronted with a mixed individuality it is disconcerted and annoyed, like a reviewer called upon to judge a poem by a prose-writer, or a serious volume from a humorist’s pen. Alistair’s natural instincts had been cowed by his boyish experience. Without sharing the convictions of the righteous, he lacked the courage to despise them utterly. He would have had them pardon him, though he could not repent.

His embittered mood lasted till he came in sight of the river below Battersea Park. The sunlight sparkling on the water, and the fresh breeze blowing over the trees of the park, refreshed him for the moment, and his thoughts turned to Hero Vanbrugh.

A sigh rose to his lips.

“If I had only met her a year ago!”

The rebuke which Hero had administered so delicately in the matter of the royal autograph had moved him to the heart. It had been an appeal to his self-respect, a proof that she credited him with honourable instincts like her own, and at this crisis in his life the compliment was like the touch of balm upon a sore. With such a hand as Hero’s to restrain him, that plunge into the social underworld which he was contemplating lost its fascination. How was it that in all the years they had known him neither his mother nor his brother had ever been able to strike the chord which this girl’s finger had touched unerringly at their first meeting?

In searching for the answer to this riddle, he recollected whither his steps were bound. The figure of Molly Finucane rose before him like a faded portrait over which a breath of discoloration had passed, leaving it tarnished and dingy, and he shivered slightly, and unconsciously relaxed the quickness of his pace.

His heart sank within him as he ascended the familiar path, and let himself in with his latchkey. Missing the expected figure of the page, he hung up his hat himself, and passed into the drawing-room.

“Where’s Tom?” he inquired, not without some foreboding of the reply he should receive.

Molly was lying on the sofa in a low-necked dress, pulling a cigarette, and trying to amuse herself with an illustrated ladies’ paper, which did not amuse her at all—it was much too severe in its decorum. She sat up yawning at Stuart’s entrance, and frowned as he put his question.

“I had to get rid of him for insolence,” she replied, with still smouldering wrath. “I told him my shoes hadn’t been cleaned this morning, and the young brat contradicted me to my face, and said he couldn’t do them any better. The lazy little wretch hadn’t touched them. I asked him if he knew who he was talking to, and he became insolent. So I just ordered him to pack up and leave the house.”

Stuart listened without much interest to this story, the counterpart of which he had often heard before. Somehow Molly’s servants were perpetually incurring dismissal for similar behaviour. It was rare for her to keep them more than a couple of months, and it was not uncommon for them to be sent away the day after they arrived; and always for the same cause—disrespect to the mistress of the house.

“I can’t think what’s the matter with the servants nowadays,” Molly complained. She was not the only mistress to whom it had never occurred that there could be, by any possibility, a servants’ side to the great question. “I had a Scotchwoman here to-day, applying for the cook’s place”—the cook had been under notice to leave for some time—“and she was most impertinent.”

Molly stopped rather unexpectedly, as though she had been going to give particulars of the impertinence, but had suddenly thought better of it. The Scotchwoman, in fact, had presumed so far as to inquire into the character of the relationship between the lady of the house and the Lord Alistair Stuart who was indicated as its master, and had withdrawn her candidature for the situation on learning that the tie was merely one of friendship. Being told rather fiercely by Miss Finucane that this was not her business, the offender had replied uncompromisingly: “Excuse me, miss, I don’t set up to blame you, but I have my character to think of, and if it was known that I had taken a place in a house that wasn’t respectable, I might not be able to suit myself elsewhere.”

It was no doubt the irritation caused by this plain speaking which had vented itself on the unlucky page. Alistair shrugged his shoulders as though in sympathy, but inwardly the question suggested itself whether Miss Vanbrugh ever had to encounter insolence on the part of servants. He did not think it likely.

He had to go upstairs to dress for dinner, this being a point about which Miss Finucane was very particular. If ever a man ventured to present himself at her dinner-table in morning dress she was apt to take it as a carefully studied reflection on her character. Her own time hung so heavily on her hands that she spent half her day over her wardrobe. She breakfasted in a fur-lined dressing-gown, put on a walking-dress during the morning, lunched in a third costume, wore an æsthetic tea-gown in the afternoon, made a grand toilet for dinner, and exchanged it for a loose night-robe in which she drank whisky and water before going to bed. In all these changes of costume jewels played a great part. Diamonds and sapphires meant to Molly much what a table well covered with briefs means to a barrister, or the strips of ribbon on his breast to a soldier; they were the tangible tokens of success.

When Stuart came downstairs there was no sign of dinner. He sat down and tried to talk to Molly about the bazaar, but she listened sulkily, offended because he had not ventured to take her with him.

“There were lots of women there, I suppose?” she asked, in a grumbling voice.

“Yes, a good many. Women belonging to the Church, most of them, I expect.”

“Was there anyone you knew?”

She fixed a shrewdly questioning glance on him, and noted the momentary hesitation that preceded his reply.

“No, no one.”

Molly gave a scornful smile.

“That’s a lie, Alistair. Was your mother there?”

“I prefer not to talk about my mother,” returned Alistair, who dreaded Molly’s coarse tongue.

“Do you think I didn’t know why you wouldn’t take me?” Molly retorted. “Who else was there?”

“No one I had ever met before.”

Molly pounced on the concealed admission.

“Your mother introduced you to someone. Who was it?”

Stuart rose to his feet, beginning to get angry.

“The only woman I spoke to the whole afternoon was a young lady who, I believe, is going to marry my brother.”

“What’s her name?”

“I decline to tell you.” He walked over to the bell and rang it impatiently. “What the deuce are they keeping dinner for?”

Molly sat silent, watching him with all the cunning of a narrow intelligence concentrated on one point. No one in the world was more ignorant than Molly Finucane was of the things that are written about in books, but the keenest counsel who ever sifted the evidence of a lying witness could not have matched the sureness with which she detected anything in Alistair’s mind that threatened her supremacy over him. Her instinct now warned her that some danger had arisen for her, and her fear, overpowering her jealousy for the moment, made her hold her tongue.

No notice was taken of Lord Alistair’s ring, but after another ten minutes or so an untidy parlour-maid put her head into the room and announced that dinner was ready.

The dinner was badly cooked, and not appetising, and the parlour-maid had neglected to warm the claret. Molly called for champagne.

“There’s none left, ma’am,” the maid retorted, speaking in that hostile tone which her servants generally assumed towards Miss Finucane.

“Yes, there is, unless you’ve drunk it in the kitchen.”

An altercation between mistress and maid followed, high words being used on both sides. Stuart went on with his dinner in silent disgust, trying not to listen. He had sat through similar scenes often enough before, but they had not made the same impression on him. It was as though his whole nature had been set throbbing like a bell with a certain note, with which his surroundings were all out of tune.

The dinner was not only badly cooked, but it quickly appeared that there was not enough of it. On seeing a few slices of ham set before her in the place of a joint, the mistress of the house lost her temper.

“Go and tell the cook to make an omelette,” she ordered angrily. “It’s disgraceful that we can’t have enough to eat.”

The parlour-maid departed. A minute or two afterwards the door was flung open violently, and the cook advanced into the middle of the dining-room.

“You can’t have an omelette. I’ve no eggs, and the fire’s gone out,” she remarked loudly and aggressively.

“What do you mean, cook?” said Molly, evidently rather alarmed.

The cook saw her mistress quailing, and raised her voice.

“I mean that I’ve cooked as much as I mean to, and I’m not going to do any more. I’m tired of it.”

“This is disgraceful!” exclaimed her mistress, appealing to Stuart. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, to come in and talk like that, simply because I asked for an omelette.”

“Well, you can’t have it, then,” the cook returned, with a ring of triumph.

“Very well; that’s enough. Go downstairs!” commanded Molly.

The cook tossed her head, and marched out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

“Do you owe the woman any wages?” Stuart asked, as soon as she was gone. He knew by experience that it was useless to interfere in these periodical scenes between Molly and her household.

“Not a farthing,” Molly protested. “And I’ve always treated her kindly, too. I can’t think what makes her presume like that.”

The cook went down fuming and snorting into the kitchen, and gave the explanation to her sympathizing sisters.

“I’ll teach her to send haughty messages out to me, and me a respectable woman whose father had a farm, and six men under him; and her out of the gutter, and no better than a street-walker, if you come to that, though she do ride in her carriage, and wear as many jewels as a Martinet.”

“You mean a Marchioness, don’t you, Eleanor?” inquired the housemaid, who had moved in higher spheres.

“I mean a lady, that’s what I mean,” said the cook, with grim emphasis. “Consequently I don’t mean Miss Finucane, as she calls herself, though her real name’s Finigan, and she’s low Irish down to her boot-soles.” She took a long breath, and concluded: “And so I’d have told her to her face if his lordship hadn’t been there; but he’s a gentleman, when all’s said and done, and I’m sorry for him.”

The cook spoke for her sex. Most women were sorry for Lord Alistair Stuart.

When Molly saw Alistair rise from the table immediately after the cook’s stormy exit, her face fell.

“You’re not going out again?” she protested.

“I’ve got to,” was the answer.

“Take me with you, then,” Molly demanded.

“Can’t. I’m going to see Des Louvres.”

“You’re always going there. What do you want to see him for?”

“It’s on business to do with the Legitimists.”

“Bother the Legitimists!” Molly was not a politician. Beyond the vague notion that all these pretenders of whom she heard so much enjoyed the secret patronage of the Pope, and must therefore be in some way inimical to that Protestantism which it had been her first lesson as a child to abjure and abhor, she was completely indifferent to their cause.

“I won’t have you go,” she continued. “You’ve been out all day, and left me alone with those wretched servants. I want you to take me to the theatre.”

“I’ve no money,” said Stuart impatiently.

“Can’t you borrow some?”

“Who from?”

A name rose to Molly’s lips, but she hesitated to pronounce it. She looked at Stuart, and as their eyes met each knew what the other was thinking of.

“No,” he declared hastily. “I’m sorry, Molly, but I must go. I promised. There’s to be somebody there that I must meet.”

“Who?”

“Well, it’s a sort of secret. You won’t talk about it?”

“Who have I got to talk to?”

The retort struck painfully on Alistair. That compassion for Molly which lay at the root of his refusal to leave her was stirred by the reminder of the poor little woman’s loneliness. She had no friends, she could have no friends in their present circumstances, and she had no interests in life apart from him. He felt that he was ill-treating her by this second absence in one day, and his voice softened as he explained:

“It’s Don Juan. Des Louvres told me he doesn’t want it to be known that he’s in England.”

The name was not familiar to Molly.

“Who is he?” she asked, more with the object of detaining Stuart than from any real curiosity on the subject.

Don Juan, in fact, only ranked as an heir-apparent in the Legitimist almanac, his father being still alive. He represented one of those families of decrepit and priest-ridden despots which were everywhere driven from the thrones of the Mediterranean by the great Liberal flood of the nineteenth century. Now the flood was beginning to abate, the wrongs of the past were fading from men’s minds, and the figures of these discrowned Princes stood forth once more, surrounded by the halo of romantic misfortune.

But all this did not concern Molly in the least. Don Juan’s only importance for her was as a new acquaintance for Stuart. She took a jealous interest in all Alistair’s friends, not as individuals, but as influences over him which might or might not tend to detach him from herself.

“Why are you going to meet him?” she asked, hardly waiting for the answer to her first question.

Alistair gave a half-ashamed smile.

“Well, he is going to give me a decoration, I believe—the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.”

Molly looked impressed. She was sensitive about Alistair’s social position, which she was conscious of having compromised, and this decoration, coming on the morrow of his bankruptcy, seemed a welcome rehabilitation.

“Then he really is a Prince?” she asked, with floating recollections of police-court cases in which adventurers had obtained money by pretending to titles not really theirs.

Stuart laughed good-naturedly.

“Yes, he’s a Prince right enough; at least, he’s as good as the Comte de Rouen.”

Molly had heard of the Comte de Rouen, whose party had just given proof of its vitality in a neighbouring country in one of the most extraordinary episodes recorded in history. A conflict, extending over years, and threatening at one time to assume the character of a civil war, had taken place between the heads of the army, on the one hand, and the civil Government on the other, over the body of an obscure Jewish officer. If the guilt or innocence of the victim of this famous persecution had not yet been placed beyond the reach of doubt, at least it was made clear that his enemies had steeped themselves in perjury, forgery, and every kind of subornation and conspiracy. It became equally evident that the motive of their action was rather religious than political; a chasm was revealed running through the nation, and sharply dividing the clerical persecutors from the anti-clerical defenders of the accused man. The army chiefs appeared as the tools of the priesthood, which was seen in full cry on the trail of a Semitic victim. The contagion spread to other countries, and prelates of the Roman Church in England proclaimed their sympathy with the crusade. A shock ran through Europe and America. It was as if the mask of saintly meekness under persecution worn so closely by the Roman Church for a century had been suddenly lifted for a moment, and modern men had obtained a glimpse of the Fury’s visage underneath, with its writhing snakes and its teeth gnashing for blood, the visage which they had almost come to think of as a fable of Protestant historians.

The name of the Comte de Rouen silenced Molly, and Alistair was allowed to depart without further objection.

As soon as he had left the house she went upstairs, took out his mother’s letter, and read it through again for the fourth or fifth time, with her lips tightly pinched and her forehead wrinkled in the effort to devise some reply calculated at once to teach the Duchess manners, and yet to neutralize her opposition.

This was what she wrote:

“Dear Madam:

“Don’t worry about Alistair. You are about as likely to see me marry him as you are to see”—she named a sacred personage—“riding down Piccadilly on a bicycle.

“Yours truly,
“Mary Finucane.”

CHAPTER X
A SCIENTIFIC OPINION

The Duke of Trent and Colonsay sat at his great office table in his room at the Home Office thinking.

The table was piled high with official papers. The permanent staff of a Government Department are quick to detect the weakness of each new chief put over their heads by the changing tide of parliamentary warfare. The weakness of the new Home Secretary was for details and statistics. A return of a hundred foolscap pages showing exactly how many pounds of beef and how many pounds of rice are consumed in the prisons of the country every year, or how many miles a policeman tramps over in the same period in the course of his beat, afforded a real satisfaction to his intellect. His staff catered for this taste as if they had been the conductors of a popular magazine. They kept their new chief busy and contented, and he let them alone.

But it was not about his important functions in the State that the Minister was thinking at this moment, but about a more personal concern.

His discovery of his mother’s project had left him for some time in a state of indecision, due partly to the fact that his desire was not so much to marry Hero Vanbrugh as to prevent his brother from marrying her. The appearance of a rival on the scene is generally sufficient to decide a hesitating wooer, but then the Duke had not been exactly a wooer, and this was another cause of embarrassment. Suddenly to begin paying the attentions of a lover to a girl whom he had been accustomed to treat familiarly as his mother’s friend seemed to a man of the Duke’s stiff habit of mind an awkward, and possibly a ridiculous, proceeding.

On the other hand, he saw that his mother was actively pushing her design, and he could not shut his eyes to the fact that Alistair was a rival to be feared.

It is difficult at all times for a man with a strong sense of his own dignity to make love, and for a man animated by the calm and temperate regard of the Duke of Trent to try to make love according to the accepted English convention struck even his imagination as dangerously foolish.

He condemned in his own mind the national custom which requires the man to do his own love-making.

“Now, in France,” he reflected, “there would be no trouble about the matter. I should tell my mother to send for Sir Bernard Vanbrugh, and they would settle it between them.”

Sir Bernard’s name suggested an alternative which recommended itself the more the longer he considered it. He would carry his proposal to Hero’s father, and leave it to him to break the ice with Hero herself.

His acquaintance with the great scientist and physician was of the slightest, but he could hardly distrust the reception such a son-in-law as himself was likely to receive, and he might count on the father’s influence with his daughter to overcome any possible hesitation on her part.

Desirous to give every possible distinction to his overture, the Home Secretary drew towards him a sheet of the official notepaper, and wrote a few lines requesting the physician to name an hour at which he would receive him on a private matter. The note folded and sealed, he handed it to his private secretary, with injunctions to send it by a messenger, and bring back the reply.

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s answer, which arrived within half an hour, was even more formal than the Duke’s request, simply stating that the physician would be at liberty that day at five o’clock.

The Duke ordered his carriage, and alighted at Sir Bernard’s door in Stratford Place punctually at the hour named. Rather to his surprise, but even more to his relief, he was taken, not into the drawing-room, but into the physician’s consulting-room, and offered the patient’s chair.

The man whose grey powerful eyes, under their square wall of forehead, were turned on him with something of the penetrative power of a searchlight, across a fragile-looking desk in some decorative wood, was a man with a remarkable history.

There are some men of whom their friends are accustomed to say that they should like them better if they were not so clever. Vanbrugh had started in life with this handicap. He was an intellectual monster, a brain-giant whose understanding was to the understandings of those about him what the magnesium light is to a tallow candle.

Those into whose company he was thrown suffered somewhat as they would have done in a strong light. Moreover, they were conscious that Vanbrugh silently looked through them and over them, and they resented the process in proportion to their conceit of themselves.

Thus it happened that the ablest man of his time was the most unpopular.

The unpopularity was the most marked among the members of his own profession. To Vanbrugh the usages and traditions of his class were so much rubbish. He saw in the etiquette of medicine nothing but the precautions of dunces to protect their incapacity from discovery. He was unable to make allowance for that infirmity of the human mind which clings to custom through sheer terror of the unknown. Where he ought to have imputed cowardice he imputed fraud.

He was a revolutionist by sheer force of insight. His mind covered at a single bound the slow progress of years, and he was too impatient to wait for the laggards to catch him up. The stupid are in a great majority at all times, and in all situations, but some men, not less great than Vanbrugh, have possessed the art of coaxing them, and leading them on. It was just this art that Vanbrugh lacked. Unconscious of his own brutality, he trampled on folly and dullness with feet of iron, and the dull and foolish turned and rent him.

Up to the age of forty Bernard Vanbrugh’s life had been one long record of disaster.

As a student he had been deeply unpopular, even with his professors, who saw that they had in him a critic rather than a pupil. While still walking the hospitals, the young man had ventured to argue with the great lights of the profession whom he was there to watch reverently and believe implicitly. He had had the audacity to suggest to a celebrated gynecologist the use of ice at a critical stage of a well-known operation; and though the specialist found himself obliged to act on the advice, and subsequently enhanced his reputation by adopting the treatment in his private practice, he never forgave the young man’s presumption.

The medical authorities treated Vanbrugh with strict justice, up to the point at which justice ceased to be obligatory; that is to say, they awarded him as examiners every prize for which he chose to enter, but they refused him a house-surgeoncy. When the astonished and mortified young man tried to learn the reason for this refusal, he was met by polite excuses and the recommendation that he should start in practice as a consultant.

One old professor told him the truth.

“Our honorary staff will not have you,” he said bluntly. “Not because they haven’t confidence in you, but because they think you haven’t confidence in them.”

With a bitter smile Vanbrugh acknowledged the justice of the excuse.

He made up his mind that he must accept a house-surgeoncy in the provinces. But when he came to apply for the usual testimonials from those who had superintended his education, he received documents so frigidly worded as to show clearly that they were given as a matter of obligation merely, and not with any good will. The local doctors in whose hands the appointments lay discerned the actual disapproval beneath the formal recommendation. Vanbrugh, the most distinguished student of his year, or for many years, was not even invited to present himself for a personal interview when he applied for a post of two hundred a year in a small country town.

He abandoned this useless attempt without much regret. He knew well enough that London contained his destiny, and that he had been guilty of treason to his own powers in seeking to escape it.

His enemies had advised him to become a consultant—that is to say, to take rooms in an expensive street in the West End, and wait for other doctors to send him patients as to a superior. Vanbrugh took this advice, and for fifteen years no patient ever crossed his threshold.

A consultant depends absolutely on the support of his own profession, and in his own profession Vanbrugh was hated as few men are hated. There were men who, if they had heard of a patient intending to consult him, would have walked across London to prevent it.

Vanbrugh was a poor man. The whole of the funds remaining from his scholarships, together with the remittances doled out grudgingly by his family, were set aside to pay the rent of the rooms in Brook Street. His brass-plate, once affixed to the doorpost there, became his flag, which he would not strike while life remained. In the meantime he had to live.

After endless trials in all directions, Bernard Vanbrugh succeeded in getting employment on the staff of one of those bureaus which undertake to supply information on any subject. Vanbrugh’s was the medical department, and he was paid at the rate of half a crown an hour. The work had mostly to be done at the British Museum, and his weekly earnings averaged about two pounds.

This, then, was the situation. The most brilliant follower of medicine in Europe, perhaps the keenest intellect of his time, was compelled to spend the best years of his life among broken-down journalists, and stranded governesses, and all the sad jetsam of the educated class, doing drudge’s work for the wages of a drudge. The celebrated Huxley had a narrow escape from the same fate. How many other Huxleys and Vanbrughs are to-day dreeing the same weird, while the millions of philanthropy roll about the gutters, and the billions of endowments pass into the pockets of the dunce?

Vanbrugh divided his scanty earnings into two equal portions. Fifty pounds a year paid for his food and clothes and the rare holidays conceded to health, with the other fifty he bought books and scientific instruments.

The subject he had chosen to investigate was the cells of the brain.

At the age of forty he completed his work on the brain, and the fifteen years’ penal servitude to which he had been sentenced by human stupidity and spite approached its term.

He carried the manuscript to an important publisher, and solicited a personal interview.

Strange to say, the publisher granted it. Vanbrugh’s name was well known to him. Some hints of his researches had leaked out from time to time, and the hospitals were already trembling. The meteoric career of the student had not been forgotten. Every now and then his brethren spoke of Vanbrugh as of a man from whom the world was certain to hear sooner or later. While he was toiling in the dust he was already reluctantly recognized as the coming man.

Vanbrugh placed his book in the publisher’s hands with something of his old arrogance, which half a lifetime of hardship had not been able to crush.

“This is a book which will, directly it appears, supersede every other book on the brain. But if your reader sees my name on the title-page, he will tell you it is rubbish. I ask you to submit it to him without allowing him to know whom it is by, and then he may tell you the truth.”

The publisher smiled. He glanced from his caller’s proud, harsh countenance to his shabby clothes and patched boots, and thought he could understand. “The man is a crank,” he said to himself. “His troubles have unhinged him.”

Nevertheless, he gave the required promise. He even went beyond his word. Lest his English reader should suspect the authorship of the book and be prejudiced in consequence, he took the trouble to forward the manuscript to Vienna, to a renowned specialist in that capital, saying that his usual advisers differed as to the merit of the work, and requesting an impartial opinion. This was the first stroke of fortune in Vanbrugh’s favour.

In less than a month the publisher was astonished by receiving back the manuscript with a letter in which the Viennese authority repeated Vanbrugh’s very words.

“I cannot understand what you tell me about your advisers,” the Austrian wrote. “This is one of the greatest works I have ever had the good fortune to read. It will supersede every existing work on the brain. The author has done you a high honour in offering this book to your house.”

The great publisher winced. It so happened that he had in the press a voluminous book on this very subject by a baronet and physician-in-ordinary to the Court, a book on whose preparation he had already spent a considerable sum. It was clear that one of these two books must kill the other. In either case he must be at a loss. On the other hand, if he were to refuse Vanbrugh’s work, it might be taken by the great rival house which divided the trade with his.

In this uncertainty he decided to submit the manuscript to his reader in the ordinary way. Scarcely had he sent it off when he received a second call from Vanbrugh.

The Austrian specialist, not dreaming that his opinion could be disregarded, and filled with enthusiasm for Vanbrugh’s achievement, had addressed a letter to him, congratulating him in the warmest terms. The letter did not elate Vanbrugh in the least, but it brought him round to the publisher to find out what was being done with his book.

He came, taking it for granted that its acceptance was now out of doubt. The publisher, compelled to give a definite answer, made up his mind on the spot, and proposed terms which Vanbrugh accepted.

Two days later his reader returned the manuscript with a brief note, dismissing it as the work of a charlatan. Vanbrugh had beaten this man in one of the hospital examinations.

When the book came out, the medical reviewers were staggered. They dared not attack, and they would not praise it; it was therefore allowed to fall dead from the press. The distinguished baronet, whose book had been thrown over by the publisher, was furious. He threatened to have Vanbrugh’s name taken off the register as a quack.

The publisher was wringing his hands, when suddenly an offer arrived from Leipzig for the German rights of the book, an offer larger in amount than what he had paid Vanbrugh for the copyright. Similar offers came tumbling in from Paris, from Rome, and from St. Petersburg. Rival editions appeared in New York and Chicago, the publishers of which, more honest than their legislators, sent considerable sums to the author. The scientific press on both sides of the Atlantic rang with the name of Bernard Vanbrugh, and the popular journals followed suit.

As Vanbrugh had foretold, his book superseded every existing treatise on the brain.

The first part of the work was a careful and exhaustive monograph on the brain-cells, their morphology and physiology. Vanbrugh had applied every available tool of scientific investigation in his experiments—chemical agents, electric discharges, the microscope, and the photograph. The reaction under the different rays of the spectrum had been tested separately and in combination, and results of the highest interest obtained. But the epoch-making character of the book was given to it by the second part.

Here Vanbrugh had boldly essayed the feat of building a bridge between physiology and what is called psychology. He had explored what are known as mental phenomena in the light of his physical analysis. Into this dim and distrusted region of knowledge Vanbrugh had projected the searchlight of his merciless intellect, and had made it scientific ground.

Even the lay reader could follow him here, and understand most of his conclusions. Vanbrugh disdained the hieroglyphic vocabulary of the new priesthood of science, and forced the words of daily life into the service. In this part of the book occurred his famous comparison of the brain to a biograph, with the process of thought carried on by a series of films, succeeding each other with inconceivable rapidity, but yet with a gap of pure annihilation after each.

“Science is measured knowledge,” was the keynote of his triumphant peroration.

“Science is measured knowledge, and the only measures we can apply are physical ones, and we can only apply them to physical phenomena. Slowly but surely, as we succeed in identifying these processes called mental with the processes of the brain-cells, we shall be enabled to reduce them to a plan, to evolve order out of confusion, and to regulate human passion and intelligence as we regulate the secretions of the stomach and the circulation of the blood, the alternation of the harvests, and the courses of the tides.”

Such thorough-going materialism shocked and terrified not a few readers, but the day was gone by for any objection to be raised on that score in scientific circles. Before the book had been out a year it was the recognized authority on the subject with which it dealt in every civilized country, and the London colleges were obliged to give it a place upon their shelves.

Honours and distinctions flowed in upon the author from abroad. Vienna was the first to offer him the honorary membership of her first learned society, and other capitals hastened to do the same. A great foreign ruler, who considered it a part of his own greatness to befriend greatness in others, sent his most coveted Order to the poor English doctor, of whom his Ambassador in London had never so much as heard till he was directed to call upon him with the decoration. Not content with that, the Emperor wrote privately to the English Court, remonstrating with it warmly on its neglect of so illustrious a subject.

The English Court took the hint, and Sir Bernard Vanbrugh figured in the next list of birthday honours. Then at last the sullen opposition of the profession gave way. His brethren realized that they were compromising their own reputation in the eyes of the world, and on the next vacancy Vanbrugh was offered, and he accepted, the Presidency of his College.

He was now sixty years of age; his appointment-book was filled up for weeks in advance, and his only child was an heiress.

The Duke of Trent, with all the prestige of his rank and office, yielded to the same involuntary fear that Vanbrugh always inspired, and sat down like a schoolboy in the master’s presence.

“I don’t think we have met very often,” he began, “but I dare say you know that Miss Vanbrugh is a great friend of my mother’s.”

At the mention of his daughter the scientist moved slightly, and his expression became less severe.

“I have had many opportunities of seeing her at Colonsay House,” the Minister pursued, his tone unconsciously betraying his intimate sense of a favour about to be conferred, “and, so far as I am able to judge, she is disposed to like me. I will come to the point at once, and say that the object of my visit is to ask you to give her to me. I don’t suppose it is necessary for me to say anything to you on the subject of my own feelings. I show them sufficiently by my proposal. I am not a sentimental schoolboy, but you may believe me when I say that, should your daughter honour me by becoming my wife, I shall do the utmost in my power to make her happy.”

Sir Bernard listened without any further sign of emotion to this speech, the formality of which did the wooer less harm in his eyes than it might have done in Hero’s.

“What does Hero say?” was his sole observation in reply.

“I have not spoken to her yet. In fact, I have never given her any reason to expect this proposal. We have been friends, and nothing more, so far. I confess I have felt some difficulty about approaching her. I have had no experience in love-making, and it occurred to me that you might be willing to sound Miss Vanbrugh on my behalf.”

The physician made no objection to this suggestion. He remained thinking for some little time, and then answered deliberately:

“You have done me an honour, of which I am entirely sensible, in asking for my daughter’s hand. As your wife her position would be a very proud one, and perhaps most fathers in my place would accept your offer without a moment’s hesitation. But Hero is my only child, and I am a man who has always held strong views on the question of marriage. I trust you will not think me wanting in appreciation of your high claims to consideration if I put exactly the same questions to you which I have always intended to put to any man who came to me in the character of a future son-in-law.”

The Secretary of State was a little surprised by this reception of his offer, but on the whole he was pleased by it. He told himself that few candidates for matrimony would be better able to withstand a father’s scrutiny than he.

“I shall be very pleased to answer any questions you wish to put to me. You are most fully entitled to know everything I can tell, and I have nothing to conceal.”

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh nodded. Opening a drawer in his desk, he took out a large printed form and spread it out in front of him.

“I had better begin, perhaps,” the suitor suggested, “by giving you the names of my solicitor and banker. They will give you every information with regard to my financial circumstances.”

The physician shook his head slightly.

“I do not doubt that your means are ample, and my daughter will not be a portionless girl. I am the medical adviser to a number of insurance companies, and this paper contains the questions it is my duty to put to a person who desires to insure his life. In my view, I ought not to have to say, marriage is an infinitely more important step than the granting of a policy. Are you willing for me to examine you with the same care as if you were asking my employers to insure you for a few thousand pounds?”

The Duke opened his eyes. Not even Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s reputation for originality—eccentricity it is called in Government departments—had prepared him for such a proposition. But any momentary irritation was quickly swallowed up in the comforting reflection: What sort of reception would this man give to Alistair!

“I am at your disposal, Sir Bernard!”

The physician began his methodical examination exactly as if he were dealing with an ordinary patient. He weighed the Cabinet Minister, he measured him, he took his pulse and temperature, and sounded his heart and lungs. As test after test was applied the examiner did not conceal his interest and satisfaction, and at the close of the ordeal his manner became almost enthusiastic.

“I can congratulate you,” he reported, “on being an almost perfect life—I may say, a remarkable life. Do you know that you are as nearly as possible a normal man?”

The twelfth subject of the Queen looked ever so slightly disconcerted by the compliment.

“You don’t understand, I see,” said Vanbrugh. “I must explain to you that scientific anthropologists have arrived at certain standards of bodily proportion, of the energy of the vital functions, and so on, which they have fixed as constituting the norm of humanity—that is to say, the perfect balance which ought to be found in every member of the species. The normal man is therefore a scientific abstraction: he is the imaginary type with which actual individuals are to be compared, and to which they should as far as possible conform. Now I find that you fulfil to an extraordinary degree every requirement which anthropological science has laid down for the species. You are, therefore, a normal man—the first I have ever been fortunate enough to come across.”

The Duke of Trent tried to persuade himself that this was a flattering report, though in his ear the word “normal” sounded disagreeably like commonplace.

“At all events, you are satisfied?” he asked.

“I am more than satisfied so far. Now as to your family history——”

For the first time a misgiving stole into the Duke’s mind, as he remembered Lord Alexander Stuart’s career. Surely this scientific inquisitor was not going to visit the sins of the father on the son, as his words foreboded?

“Is your father living?”

“No; I have the title,” the Duke reminded him.

“True. At what age did he die?”

“As far as I can recollect, at about thirty-eight or forty. I could easily ascertain.”

“That may not be necessary. What did he die of?”

The Duke’s cheeks burned. But he saw the folly of temporizing with a man like Vanbrugh. The story of Lord Alexander was perfectly well known in London.

“Of delirium tremens, I am afraid.”

Sir Bernard’s eyebrows lifted, and he shot a painful glance at the unfortunate son.

“Your mother,” he hastened to say, “I know is alive. What is her state of health?”

The Duke was glad to be able to reply altogether satisfactorily. He was beginning to breathe again when the scientist put the fatal question:

“Have you any brothers or sisters?”

“One brother.” As the admission escaped him all his old bitterness against his junior returned with ten-fold force.

“Living?”

“Yes, he is living.”

“Surely I have heard something about him lately?” Sir Bernard said reflectively. “What is he called?”

“Lord Alistair Stuart.”

The words might have been red-hot coals on the Duke’s lips and not have given him a greater wrench to utter.

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh laid down his paper and leant back in his chair.

“I cannot congratulate you on your family history,” he said gravely.

“Surely, sir, you will not hold me responsible because I had an unworthy father, and have a brother who takes after him? I am not like them. Ask anyone who has ever known me, and they will tell you that my life has been absolutely free from reproach. I neither drink nor gamble; I have never indulged in any kind of vice——”

The physician interrupted him with a quiet gesture.

“I am not a priest, Duke, but a scientist. I am not here to deal in moral blame or praise, but to decide whether you are a man whom I can welcome as the father of my grandchildren. Your family history is against you.”

“Every family has its black sheep,” the unfortunate suitor urged.

“Every existing family is the result of ill-assorted marriages, brought about by any consideration rather than the desire to have healthy offspring. You must forgive my saying that Lord Alistair Stuart is a very black sheep indeed.”

“Alistair is not hopeless,” said the Duke, astonished to find himself defending his brother. “He is young yet, and he may settle down and marry some respectable woman.”

“Heaven forbid!” Sir Bernard Vanbrugh noted his listener’s bewilderment at this unexpected rejoinder. “The greatest service a man like your brother can render to society is to lead the life he is leading. Nature understands these things better than we do. She takes a man like that and unites him with a woman like Molly Finucane in order that the vicious strain may die out. To take your brother away and marry him to a healthy woman, in order that they might have diseased children, would be the worst of crimes.”

James Stuart shuddered as he listened to the voice of the new morality preaching its relentless gospel.

“But you didn’t find any strain of disease in me?” he pleaded.

“These things often pass over a generation. The law of heredity is still mysterious. It is the most important of all the problems awaiting scientific solution. You ask me to take a risk—a tremendous risk. I can only promise to consider it carefully.”

Of his own accord Sir Bernard added:

“As far as you are personally concerned, I could not hope to meet a man to whom I should give my daughter with greater confidence. Your temperament is exactly what she needs to correct her own tendency to emotionalism. You see, I am frank with you, Duke, as frank as you have been with me. I have watched over my daughter with all the powers of observation I possess from her earliest years, and I cannot shut my eyes to her weakness.”

“Miss Vanbrugh is as near perfection as any girl I have seen!” exclaimed the wooer, with unwonted enthusiasm. “If she has a weakness it is in being too ready to sacrifice herself for others.”

“That is the weakness I mean,” the scientist resumed calmly. “Her attraction towards Catholicism has given me some anxiety, and would give me more if I thought it went below the surface.”

“But you are not a Protestant?”

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh smiled at the old-fashioned word.

“There are no more Protestants,” he pronounced. “There is Science and there is Superstition. Religion, as I understand it, is a form of hysteria, skilfully exploited in the interests of the clerical class. To me as a physician this Catholic revival is the symptom of a widespread cerebral disease which attacks individuals of morbid temperament. I have watched the class of persons who exhibit the symptom, and I have seldom failed to trace the disease. On the whole I am inclined to diagnose it as an obscure form of sexual perversion. A woman does not want to go to confession unless she has something to confess.”

The Home Secretary shivered, as he listened to this brutal analysis, with the same sense of discomfort as a thinly-clad man exposed to a cold blast of air. He was not the first man who had experienced the same sensation in listening to Bernard Vanbrugh.

A week later he received the scientist’s decision.

“It gives me great pain,” Sir Bernard wrote, “not to be able to accept your proposal for my daughter’s hand, but your family history is too bad. Personally, you are everything that a father could desire, but my grandchildren must not have in their veins the same blood as Lord Alistair Stuart.”

CHAPTER XI
THE PRETENDER

That mood of deep dissatisfaction with his life which had been growing upon Alistair Stuart of late was strongly with him as he left the Underground Railway-station at Westminster, and walked across the bridge on his way to see Des Louvres.

The night was misty, but not dark, the lamps were lit, and the Palace showed up grey and spectral beside the water, while farther on there stretched a dim line of river-shore unillumined by any spark of light, as though night and slumber had overcome and blotted out that quarter of the city, while the other parts were still awake with feverish life.

As Alistair reached the southern foot of the bridge all the lights and sounds of Lambeth burst upon him with an effect of squalid but stirring energy.

He plunged into the bustling thoroughfare, with its noisy street-stalls, its jostling tramcars, and its hurrying passengers, as a bather plunges into the sea, and took his way along the road which branches southwards in the direction of Kennington. The sense of bankruptcy and failure no longer affected him disagreeably as it still did in the region he had just quitted. Here his poverty seemed to bring him into touch with the life about him, and he looked at everything with pleased, expectant eyes, like a traveller wandering through the picturesque slums of some romantic town of Spain or Italy in which he thinks of settling for a time.

He drew a deep breath of anticipation, like a man about to be released from prison, as he reflected that the poverty which he had been afraid of might become a glorious incognito, under which his nature would have freer play than it had ever had in the world which had held him hitherto. The thought of this new, strange freedom caused his blood to tingle. Strange, formless instincts and yearnings began to stir within him. He glanced curiously to right and left as he walked along, down dark, narrow turnings with narrower courts and alleys leading out of them, and the impulse grew upon him to throw off the ways and hampering conventions of his class, and mingle in the mysterious, half-naked life of this underground world of which he seemed to catch glimpses all around him.

“There are adventures to be met with here!” he whispered to himself. “There are men who commit crimes!”

All the old lawless blood of a hundred generations of highland manslayers and freebooters surged up into his brain, and he fidgeted in his civilized bonds as a boy on a hot summer’s day fidgets in his clothes before the splash and sparkle of the sea.

For a moment he stopped in front of a house which was to let, but a glance at his watch caused him to move on at a quickened pace. He was amused with the idea that the watch, which he had bought in Paris, would pay for a year’s rent of the house.

By this time the character of the thoroughfare had begun to change. He was passing by terraces of lodging-houses standing back behind long narrow strips that had once been gardens. In some of them the sickly grass still struggled for existence, in others it had frankly given up the ghost and been replaced by gravel. Decayed notice-boards behind the railings announced the various ways in which the tenants of these houses struggled for a livelihood; one aspired to be a coal-merchant, one deemed himself a dentist, others would have liked to give lessons in shorthand or book-keeping; none of them, it was to be feared, got much beyond the stage of expectation.

Presently Stuart came to a street in which the houses seemed to be of a better class; it was a street which still preserved some features from the time when this neighbourhood had ranked as a residential suburb for the prosperous middle class, on a level with Dulwich or Finchley of to-day. The name painted on the side-wall was Chestnut-Tree Walk, and the first house in the street was detached, and surrounded by a high wall, over which a few straggling shoots of dirty ivy hung their heads, while at the side of the house rose up one or two trees which, if the thick black crust upon their limbs and stunted foliage could have been washed off, might have proved even to be chestnuts.

This house was the end of Alistair’s walk. It was the residence of the Comte des Louvres.

The situation was happily chosen for privacy. The neighbourhood was not quite poor enough for a well-dressed man to be conspicuous, and not quite respectable enough to possess an organized social vehmgericht, while it was altogether off the track of the ordinary foreign outlaw. Such of his neighbours as had noticed his existence at all supposed the tenant of Chestnut-Tree House, known simply as “Monsieur,” to be a teacher of the French language, who had seen better days. The last supposition was not very wide of the mark, but the better days were those of the Count’s ancestors, real and fictitious. His great-grandfather, a wealthy furniture-maker, had conferred the title on himself in the confusion of the great Revolution, after the last of the true Des Louvres had perished by the guillotine. Similar occupations of vacant honours were too common at the time for this one to attract much attention, and the furniture-maker’s son, by a great display of zeal for the Bourbons and for Holy Church, had succeeded in firmly establishing his position in the aristocratic sphere. It was the grandson who had dissipated the family fortune, leaving the present Count only the inheritance of a good name.

The merits of his ancestors, or his own Legitimist zeal, had secured for Des Louvres the patronage of the Pretender who passed as the Comte de Rouen, but whom the Count invariably referred to in private as His Most Christian Majesty Louis XIX. In the service of this personage Des Louvres filled a position half-way between that of a press-agent and a chargé d’affaires, supplying the English newspapers with paragraphs in the Count’s interest, and generally watching the course of events on his behalf.

Des Louvres had made no mystery of these functions, but a certain obscurity hung over whatever other transactions he was engaged in. Some persons believed him to be in the employment of a Government celebrated for its elaborate secret police organized in every capital of the world; others suspected the Count of rendering services even less creditable to a certain foreign potentate, and hinted that the house in Chestnut-Tree Walk, if it could speak, would be able to tell some very strange stories indeed.

Among these activities of Des Louvres which he took less pains to hide was his connection with the English Legitimists. It was he who kept them in touch with the more important organizations abroad—in France, in Spain, in Italy, and in Portugal. He cheered their flagging spirits, oppressed by the sense of their insignificance at home, by making them feel that the Guild was taken seriously on the Continent, and that they themselves were persons of note in Paris and Madrid. It brought consolation and refreshment to Egerton and Wickham Vane to know that their toy conspiracy bulked largely in the columns of such trusted organs of the Papacy as the Osservatore Romano or the Paris Univers.

Des Louvres was one of those who know human nature only by its weaknesses. Such men seldom come to grief, though they never come to greatness. He had been the first to perceive that Lord Alistair Stuart’s bankruptcy would change his point of view in certain respects, and to lay his plans accordingly.

As soon as Stuart touched the bell-knob of Chestnut-Tree House—the door abstained from the indiscretion of a knocker—he was admitted by the Count’s confidential servant, a fellow whom it did not require the science of M. Bertillon to identify as a hardened criminal. Leclerc, as this respectable felon was called, received Lord Alistair with an exaggeration of his customary deference, and ushered him towards what Des Louvres called his cabinet.

On the way he observed respectfully:

“You will find Monsieur le Comte alone. His Royal Highness has not yet arrived.”

He spoke in a sort of church whisper, as though the coming princeling already cast a shadow of awe before.

Des Louvres came out to receive his visitor, whom he greeted with enthusiasm.

“I am delighted you have managed to get here. Don Juan is most anxious to make your acquaintance.”

Stuart had come to keep the appointment with a certain feeling of interest in the romance of Don Juan’s exalted claims, tempered with an insular distrust of foreign royalties and foreign decorations. His prejudice softened insensibly under the Count’s blandishments.

“Has his father much of a party left?” he asked.

“Undoubtedly a very strong one. The priesthood has never taken kindly to the constitutional dynasty, and you know that in those countries the Church is still a power.”

“I suppose there is no prospect of his taking the field?” Stuart said wistfully, as he thought of what a glorious escape it would be from the ruins of his present life to take part in a romantic expedition to a sunburnt land, to recover a lost crown.

The watchful Frenchman caught the note of yearning in Alistair’s voice, and his answer was tuned in sympathy.

“On the contrary, there is every prospect just now. Not the father himself, of course—he is too old—but Don Juan as his representative. His father intends to abdicate in his favour, I believe.”

“And you think he has a real chance?” asked Alistair. His eyes lit up as he pictured himself lying out on the wild sierras, making the camp-fire under the cork-trees at night, and in the daytime taking part in that great game whose stakes are death and renown. Already he was marching, crowned with myrtle, through Gothic cities bedight in flags and flowers, his ears deafened with the clang of joy bells and the roar of exultant throngs, and his veins throbbing with the intoxication of victory.

“If I did not think so I should not have asked you to meet him,” answered Des Louvres, following up the impression he had made. “The Prince has come to England in order to organize an expedition. All he requires are the necessary funds to arm his followers with modern weapons. As soon as he succeeds in landing the first shipload of magazine rifles and ammunition the country will be in flames—I ought to say that I mention this for your ear alone. You are the only person in England beside myself whom the Prince is willing to take into his confidence.”

Alistair received this compliment with satisfaction not unmixed with surprise. Hitherto he had not been very serious in his support of the Legitimist cause, for Alistair was one of those who are wiser in judgment than in action, and it did not escape him that a party which rallied to it such adherents as the two Vanes contained no very formidable menace for existing institutions. To find himself thus singled out as the one English partisan whom Don Juan considered worthy of his confidence was therefore as unexpected as it was gratifying.

“If Don Juan would care to have me, I should like to volunteer for the expedition,” he said eagerly.

“I know that you could not please him more than by such an offer,” Des Louvres responded. “He will certainly invite you to serve as one of his aides-de-camp. This will make it especially appropriate for him to give you the Holy Sepulchre.”

Alistair could not resist a slight grimace. He was unable to overcome the fear that by his acceptance of this doubtful honour he might be making himself ridiculous. He had recently been forced to contrast himself rather sharply with his elder brother; the contrast would be sharp indeed between the Garter which Trent expected soon to receive and this mock badge bestowed by a foreign adventurer.

Des Louvres was aware of Stuart’s feeling, which he had manœuvred skilfully to overcome.

“Of course, the Prince recognizes that in the present state of his affairs it is you who confer a favour on him by consenting to take this decoration,” he said. “You must not suppose that he does not understand the difference between you and a man like Egerton Vane.”

Alistair smiled.

“I shouldn’t think you would have much difficulty in persuading either of the Vanes to accept the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.”

Des Louvres shrugged his shoulders.

“I have promised them the second or third class, as a matter of fact. They are gentlemen, and it will make a good impression abroad if the Prince appears to have a strong connection in England.”

He had scarcely finished his explanation when the faithful Leclerc opened the door to admit the two brothers.

As Stuart had judged, Des Louvres had encountered no misgiving on their part. At the first mention of the Pretender and his decoration their flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes had betrayed the eagerness within. In fact, their feelings had been so unmistakable that Don Juan’s agent thought he might safely slip in an intimation that there were fees in connection with the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, as in the case of better known and more highly coveted distinctions. The fees payable by a Chevalier, he informed Egerton, amounted to sixty pounds in English money, while Wickham might compound for the lower dignity of a Companion with forty pounds. This disagreeable preliminary had caused much anguish to the brothers, who were both misers at heart; but after a severe struggle vanity triumphed over avarice, and they handed their cheques to the Count as Chancellor of the Order, on his assurance that the sums named represented little more than the actual cost of the jewels they would receive from His Royal Highness.

The sight of Lord Alistair Stuart in the Count’s study came as a considerable shock to the Vanes, who had looked forward to patronizing Stuart on the strength of their new honour. “In foreign Courts they attach more importance to a decoration than to a mere courtesy title,” Egerton had already laid it down to his admiring brother. “I am not sure that, as a Chevalier of the Holy Sepulchre, I am not entitled to take precedence of Alistair Stuart.” The study of ancient tapestry not throwing any light on this important problem, Wickham received the observation with that soothing docility which his brother had been accustomed to exact from their nursery days.

But a bitterer stroke awaited the Chevalier Vane, as Egerton had now instructed his servants to call him. For scarcely had the new-comers exchanged greetings with the rival they found before them when a confident ring at the front-door was followed by the entrance of the one man whom they had most wished to crush with their newly-acquired rank—in short, Mr. St. Maur.

Neither of the Vanes could conceal his chagrin at this turn of affairs, and Des Louvres perceived that all his tact would be required to smooth them down. As soon as the intruder had planted himself, with his customary simple strategy, beside Lord Alistair as the person of highest rank present, their host put his lips to the ear of the Chevalier.

“It is a thousand pities that we have no better Irishman among us than this fellow,” he whispered. “His Royal Highness insisted on my presenting some representative of Ireland to him; and what could I do?”

“I think you should have declined,” the Chevalier Vane returned acidly. “I consider that the dignity of the Order will be lowered if the Prince bestows it on a man like that.”

“His family is very ancient and illustrious,” Des Louvres suggested.

The Chevalier Vane put on a pitying smile.

“I am afraid his family doesn’t much appreciate the connection. I have never heard of St. Maur’s being asked to——” He named the ducal seat to which St. Maur was in the habit of referring as if it had been his childhood’s home.

“I am a foreigner; I do not understand these things,” said the Frenchman. “But I have met this man in your flat, and I have heard you introduce him to others as a relative of the Duke’s.”

The charge was a true one, and Egerton winced. The Count pursued pitilessly:

“Besides, it is a very common thing in this country, is it not, for the elder branch to ignore the existence of the younger ones?”

This was hitting Vane on a raw place. The abiding sorrow of the brothers’ lives was that their titled relative, a vulgar Philistine immersed in field-sports and such coarse pleasures, had never taken the slightest notice of a cousinship which should have been his pride.

Further discussion was prevented by the sound of wheels outside. Des Louvres instantly excused himself to his guests, and went out to the front-door to receive his royal guest with fitting honour.

The personage who now alighted from a hansom-cab, and walked up the steps to where the Count stood waiting with bowed head, was a tall, swarthy young man of a rather heavy type of face, and sombre eyes. The face and figure were not lacking in distinction, though they could scarcely be called handsome. Their chief defect, however, was an air of listlessness and lifelessness, as though the unfortunate bearer of a great name had been crushed beneath its weight from his birth.

Life had, in fact, had nothing to offer Don Juan that he could accept as compensation for what his forefathers had possessed and lost. The misery of opposition, the misery of exile, and the misery of ruin had accumulated their shadows over his cradle. The secret of earthly happiness is to have found the work we are best fitted for, and to be doing it with all our might. The only work for which this young man had been formed by birth or circumstance was to saunter in black velvet beneath the shade of cedar-trees, in a park wide as a province, with a falcon on his wrist, and silk-clad favourites on each side of him, while behind a curtain a queen and a confessor played chess for his kingdom. It was thus that his ancestors had discharged their office for two centuries; it was thus that he himself would have discharged it had the kingdom been still to lose.

It is unhappiness to gaze too long at the unattainable. The memory of the past had been to Don Juan what a glimpse of London is sometimes to a savage, unfitting him to take up his daily task, and rendering his life a dull ache of longings for the remote and unachieved. In understudying the great part he was never likely to play he had missed the chance of success in some humbler rôle.

The poor Royal Highness mounted the steps of Chestnut-Tree House and greeted Des Louvres in a tone of intimacy.

“I am not too soon, am I? Those gentlemen have come?” he asked, using the French language.