The Miss Pateleys, sisters of Robert Pateley, lived together. The death
of their parents, as we have said, had taken place when their brother
was already launched on his successful career as a journalist. They had
at first gone on living in the little country town in which their father
had been a solicitor. It had not occurred to them to do anything else.
They were surrounded there by people who knew them, who considered them,
towards whom their social position needed no explaining and by whom it
was taken for granted. When they went shopping, the tradespeople would
reply in a friendly way, "Yes, Miss Pateley,--No, Miss Jane. This is the
stocking you generally prefer"; or, "These were the pens you had last
time," with an intimate understanding of the needs of their customers,
forming a most pleasing contrast to the detached attitude of the staff
of big shops. The sisters had a very small income between them, eked out
by skilful management, and also, it must be said, by constant help from
their brother, who represented to them the moving principle of the
universe embodied in a visible form. He it was who knew things the
female mind cannot grasp, how to read the gas meter, what to do when the
cistern was blocked, or when the landlord said it was not his business
to mend the roof. These things which appeared so preoccupying to Anna
and Jane seemed to sit very lightly on their brother Robert, and when
they saw him shoulder each detail and deal with it with instant and
consummate ease they admired him as much as they did when they saw him
carrying upstairs his own big portmanteau which the united female
strength of the house was powerless to deal with. After a time Robert,
devoted brother though he was, found that it complicated existence to
have to settle these matters by correspondence, still more to have
suddenly to take a journey of several hours from London in order to deal
with them on the spot. He proposed to his sisters that they should come
and live in London. With many misgivings, and yet not without some
secret excitement, they assented, and for a few months before our story
begins they had been established in the same house as their brother, on
the floor above the lodgings he inhabited in Vernon Street, Bloomsbury.
Vernon Street, Bloomsbury, was perhaps a fortunate place for them to
begin their London life in, if London life, except as a geographical
term, it can be called, for two poor little ladies living more
absolutely outside what is commonly described by that name it would be
hard to find. Indeed, if it had not been for the courage and
adventurous spirit of Jane, the younger of the two, their hearts might
well have failed them during those first months in which the autumn days
shortened over the district of Bloomsbury. Since they knew no one, they
had nobody to visit, and nobody came to see them. They were still not a
little bewildered by London. There were, it was true, a great many
sights of an inanimate kind; but how to get at them? They did not
consider themselves justified in taking cabs, and omnibuses were at
first, to two people who had lived all their lives in a tramless town, a
disconcerting and complicated means of locomotion. However, as the time
went on they shook down, they found their little niche in existence;
they made acquaintance with the clergyman's wife and some of the
district visitors, and when the first summer of their London life came
round, the summer following Rachel's marriage, everything seemed to them
more possible. London was bright, sunshiny, and welcoming, instead of
being austere and repellent. Pateley had succeeded in obtaining a key of
the square close to which they lived, and they sat there and revelled in
the summer weather. The mere fact of having him so near them, of knowing
that at any moment in the day he might come in with the loud voice and
heartiness of manner which always cheered and uplifted them, albeit some
of his acquaintances ventured to find it too audible, gave them a fresh
sense of being in touch with all the great things happening in the
world. Then came a moment in which, indeed, the larger issues of life
seemed to present themselves to be dealt with. Pateley, under whose
auspices the _Arbiter_ had prospered exceedingly, and who had an
interest in it from the point of view of a commercial enterprise as well
as of a political organ, found himself one day the possessor of a larger
sum of ready money than he had expected. He made up his mind that some
of it should be given to his sisters, and that the rest should join
their own savings invested in the "Equator," which seemed to present
every prospect of succeeding when once the moment should come to work
it. Pateley was altogether in a high state of jubilation in those days.
The Cape to Cairo railway was actually on the verge of being completed.
In a week more the gigantic scheme would be an accomplished fact. The
excitement in London respecting it was immense. A small piece of German
territory still remained to be crossed, but if no unforeseen incident
arose to jeopardise the situation at the last moment all would yet be
well. The rejoicings of Englishmen commonly take a sturdy and obvious
form, and two days after the great junction was expected to take place,
the _Arbiter_ was to give a dinner at the Colossus Hotel in the Strand
to the representatives of the Cape to Cairo Railway in London, after
which the Hotel would be illuminated on all sides, and fireworks over
the river were to proclaim to the whole town that Africa had been
spanned. Pateley was to take the chair at the dinner. He had some shares
in the railway himself, although the rush upon it had been too great
for him to secure any large amount of them. He had golden hopes,
however, in the future of the "Equator," when once the railway was at
its doors. Anderson had gone back again to Africa, this time with an
eager staff of companions, and was only waiting for his time to come.
"Now then," Pateley said jovially, one evening, as he went into the
lodgings in Vernon Street and found his sisters sitting over their
somewhat inadequate evening meal, "Times are looking up, I must tell
you. I shouldn't wonder if you were better off before long. When the
railway's finished, and if the "Equator" mine is all we believe it to
be, you ought to get something handsome out of it--and I have got
something for you to go on with which will keep you going in the
meantime. So now I hope you will think yourselves justified in sitting
down to a decent dinner every evening, instead of that kind of thing,"
and he pointed, with his loud, jovial laugh, to the cocoa and eggs on
the rather dingily appointed table.
Jane's eyes sparkled and her cheeks flushed with an incredulous joy.
Anna's breath came quickly. What a fairy prince of a brother this was!
"But, Robert, we had better not make much difference in our way of
living at first, had we?" Anna said, timidly, calling to mind the
instances in fiction of imprudent persons who had launched out wildly on
an accession of fortune and then been overtaken by ruin.
"Well, I don't suppose you are either of you likely to want to cut a big
dash," he said with another loud laugh. "At least, I don't see you doing
it."
"It is a great responsibility," Anna said timidly. "I hope we shall use
it the right way."
"Right way!" said Pateley. "Of course you will. Go to the play with it,
get yourself a fur cloak, have a fire in your bedroom----"
"Oh!" said Jane.
"But, Robert," Anna said, "I don't feel it is sent to us for that."
"Sent!" said Pateley. "Well, that is one way of putting it."
But he did not enlarge upon the point. He accepted his sisters just as
they were, with their limitations, their principles, and everything. He
was not particularly susceptible to beauty and distinction, in the sense
of these qualities being necessary to his belongings, and perhaps it was
as well. Anna and Jane, though they looked undeniably like gentlewomen,
had nothing else about them that was particularly agreeable to look
upon. Nor were they either of them very strikingly ugly, or, indeed,
strikingly anything. Jane was the better looking of the two. It was,
perhaps, a rather heartless freak of destiny that life should have
ordained her to live with somebody who was like a parody of herself,
older, rounder, thicker, plainer. Living apart they might each have
passed muster; living together they somehow made their ugliness, like
their income, go further. But in the composite photograph it was Anna
who predominated. It was a pity, for she was the stumpier of the two.
Long and earnest were the discussions the little sisters had that night
after their splendid brother had departed, until by the time they went
to bed they were prepared, or so it seemed to them, to launch their
existence on a dizzy career of extravagance. They were going, as they
expressed it, to put their establishment on another footing, which meant
that instead of being attended by an inexperienced young person of
eighteen they were to have an arrogant one of twenty-five. Their own
elderly servant had declined to face the temptations of London, and had
remained behind, living close to their old home. And, greatest event of
all, they had at length--it was now summer, but that didn't matter, furs
were cheaper--yielded to the thought which they had been alternately
caressing and dismissing for months, and they were each going to buy a
Fur Cloak. The days in which this all important purchase was being
considered were to the Miss Pateleys days of pure enjoyment. Days of
walks along Oxford Street, no longer so bewildered by the noise of
London traffic, the discovery of some shop in an out of the way place
whose wares were about half the price of the more fashionable quarters.
The days were full of glorious possibilities.
It was two days after that evening visit of Pateley's to his sisters,
which had so gilded and transformed their existence, that sinister
rumours began to float over London, bringing deadly anxiety in their
wake. Telegrams kept pouring in, and were posted all over the town,
becoming more and more serious as the day went on: "Disturbances in
South Africa. Hostile encounter between English and Germans. Cape to
Cairo Railway stopped. Collapse of the 'Equator, Ltd.,'" until by
nightfall the whole of England knew the pitifully unimportant incidents
from which such tragic consequences were springing--that a group of
travelling missionaries, halting unawares on German territory and
chanting their evening hymns, had been disturbed by a rough fellow who
came jeering into their midst, that one of the devout group had finally
ejected him, with such force that he had rolled over with his head on a
stone and died then and there; and that the Germans were insisting upon
having vengeance. As for the "Equator, Ltd.," nobody knew exactly in
what the collapse consisted. The wildest reports were circulated
respecting it; one saying that it was in the hands of the Germans,
another that they had destroyed the plant that was ready to work it,
another again, and it was the one that gained the most credence, that
there was no gold in the mine at all, and that the whole thing was a
swindle. The offices of the "Equator" were closed for the night. They
would probably be besieged the next morning by an angry crowd eager to
sell out, but the shares would now be hardly worth the paper they were
written upon. Pateley, in a frenzy of anxiety, in whichever direction
he looked--for his sisters, for himself, for his party, for the Cape to
Cairo Railway--spent the night at his office to see which way events
were going to turn. In his unreasoning anger, as the day of misfortune
dawned next morning, against destiny, against the far-away unknown
missionaries, against all the adverse forces that were standing in the
way of his wishes, there was one concrete figure in the foreground upon
whom he could justifiably pour out his wrath: Sir William Gore, the
Chairman of the "Equator," who, in the public opinion, was responsible
for the undertaking. He would go to see Sir William that very day as
soon as it was possible. In the meantime he would go round to his
sisters to try to prepare them for the unfavourable turn that their
circumstances after all might possibly take. As, sorely troubled at what
he had to say, he came up into their little sitting-room, he found it
bright with flowers; the fragrance of sweet peas filled the air. Anna,
who had longed for flowers all her life and had welcomed with tremulous
gratitude the rare opportunities that had come in her way of receiving
any, had suddenly realised that it might not be sinful to buy them. The
joy that she had in the handful bought from a street vendor was cheap,
after all, at the price that might have seemed exorbitant if it had been
spent on the flowers alone.
"Robert," said Jane, almost before he was inside the room, "guess what
we are going to do?"
"Something very naughty, I'm afraid," Anna said, excited and shy at the
same time. She was generally less able than Jane to overcome the awe
that they both felt of a relation so great and so beneficent, so
altogether perfect, as their brother Robert, but at this moment she was
intoxicated by the possession of wealth, by the sense of luxury, of
well-being, by that fragrance of the spirit her imagination added to the
fragrance of the flowers that stood near her. "We're each going to buy a
fur cloak like that, look!" And she held out to him proudly the picture
in the inside cover of the _Realm of Fashion_, representing a tall,
slender, undulating lady, about as unlike herself as could well have
been imagined, wrapped in a beautiful clinging garment of which the
lining, turned back, displayed an exquisite fur. Pateley, as we have
said, was not as a rule given to an excess of sensibility. He did not
ridicule sentiment in others, but neither did he share it; that point of
view was simply not visible to him. Suddenly, however, on this evening
he had a moment of what felt to himself a most inconvenient access of
emotion. There was a plain and obvious pathos in this particular
situation that it needed no very fine sensibilities to grasp, in the
sight of his sister, her small, thickset little figure encased in her
ugly little gown, looking up appealingly to him over her spectacles with
the joy of a child in the toy she was going to buy. It was probably the
first, the very first time in her life, that she had had that particular
experience. Added to the joy of getting the thing she coveted was the
sense of having looked a conscientious scruple in the face, and seen it
fly before her like an evil spirit before a spell. She had routed the
enemy, pushed aside the obstacle in front of her, and, excited, and
flushed with victory, was looking round on a bigger world and a fairer
view. Pateley, to his own surprise, found himself absolutely incapable
of putting into words what he had come to say, not a thing that often
happened to him. In wonder at his not answering at once, Anna,
misinterpreting his very slight pause, caught herself up quickly and
said anxiously--
"That is what you suggested, isn't it, Robert? You are quite sure you
approve of it?"
"Yes, yes, I approve," he said heartily, recovering himself. "Of course.
Go ahead."
"You must not think," she went on, reassured, "that we mean to spend all
our money in things like this, but of course a fur cloak is useful; it
is a possession, isn't it? and it is, after all, one's duty to keep
one's health."
"Of course it is," Pateley said. "No need of any further argument."
"I am so glad," she said, "so glad you approve!" and she smiled again
with delight.
Again Pateley felt an unreasoning fury rising in his mind that people
who were so easily satisfied should not be allowed to have their heart's
desire. Perhaps after all, it was not true about the "Equator"; perhaps
things might be better than they seemed. At any rate, he would not say
anything to his sisters until he had seen Gore. And with some hurried
explanation of the number of engagements that obliged him to leave them,
he strode out.