As soon as he was gone, a sigh of relief ran half-unawares through the
little square party. They felt some unearthly presence had been removed
from their midst. General Claviger turned to Monteith. “That's a curious
sort of chap,” he said slowly, in his military way. “Who is he, and
where does he come from?”
“Ah, where does he come from?--that's just the question,” Monteith
answered, lighting a cigar, and puffing away dubiously. “Nobody knows.
He's a mystery. He poses in the role. You'd better ask Philip; it was he
who brought him here.”
“I met him accidentally in the street,” Philip answered, with
an apologetic shrug, by no means well pleased at being thus held
responsible for all the stranger's moral and social vagaries. “It's the
merest chance acquaintance. I know nothing of his antecedents. I--er--I
lent him a bag, and he's fastened himself upon me ever since like a
leech, and come constantly to my sister's. But I haven't the remotest
idea who he is or where he hails from. He keeps his business wrapped up
from all of us in the profoundest mystery.”
“He's a gentleman, anyhow,” the General put in with military
decisiveness. “How manly of him to acknowledge at once about the cobbler
being probably a near relation! Most men, you know, Christy, would have
tried to hide it; HE didn't for a second. He admitted his ancestors had
all been cobblers till quite a recent period.”
Philip was astonished at this verdict of the General's, for he himself,
on the contrary, had noted with silent scorn that very remark as a piece
of supreme and hopeless stupidity on Bertram's part. No fellow can help
having a cobbler for a grandfather, of course: but he need not be such a
fool as to volunteer any mention of the fact spontaneously.
“Yes, I thought it bold of him,” Monteith answered, “almost bolder than
was necessary; for he didn't seem to think we should be at all surprised
at it.”
The General mused to himself. “He's a fine soldierly fellow,” he said,
gazing after the tall retreating figure. “I should like to make a
dragoon of him. He's the very man for a saddle. He'd dash across country
in the face of heavy guns any day with the best of them.”
“He rides well,” Philip answered, “and has a wonderful seat. I saw him
on that bay mare of Wilder's in town the other afternoon, and I must say
he rode much more like a gentleman than a cobbler.”
“Oh, he's a gentleman,” the General repeated, with unshaken conviction:
“a thoroughbred gentleman.” And he scanned Philip up and down with his
keen grey eye as if internally reflecting that Philip's own right to
criticise and classify that particular species of humanity was a trifle
doubtful. “I should much like to make a captain of hussars of him.
He'd be splendid as a leader of irregular horse; the very man for a
scrimmage!” For the General's one idea when he saw a fine specimen of
our common race was the Zulu's or the Red Indian's--what an
admirable person he would be to employ in killing and maiming his
fellow-creatures!
“He'd be better engaged so,” the Dean murmured reflectively, “than in
diffusing these horrid revolutionary and atheistical doctrines.” For the
Church was as usual in accord with the sword; theoretically all peace,
practically all bloodshed and rapine and aggression: and anything
that was not his own opinion envisaged itself always to the Dean's
crystallised mind as revolutionary and atheistic.
“He's very like the duke, though,” General Claviger went on, after
a moment's pause, during which everybody watched Bertram and Frida
disappearing down the walk round a clump of syringas. “Very like the
duke. And you saw he admitted some sort of relationship, though he
didn't like to dwell upon it. You may be sure he's a by-blow of the
family somehow. One of the Bertrams, perhaps the old duke who was out
in the Crimea, may have formed an attachment for one of these Ingledew
girls--the cobbler's sisters: I dare say they were no better in their
conduct than they ought to be--and this may be the consequence.”
“I'm afraid the old duke was a man of loose life and doubtful
conversation,” the Dean put in, with a tone of professional
disapprobation for the inevitable transgressions of the great and the
high-placed. “He didn't seem to set the example he ought to have done to
his poorer brethren.”
“Oh, he was a thorough old rip, the duke, if it comes to that,” General
Claviger responded, twirling his white moustache. “And so's the present
man--a rip of the first water. They're a regular bad lot, the Bertrams,
root and stock. They never set an example of anything to anybody--bar
horse-breeding,--as far as I'm aware; and even at that their trainers
have always fairly cheated 'em.”
“The present duke's a most exemplary churchman,” the Dean interposed,
with Christian charity for a nobleman of position. “He gave us a couple
of thousand last year for the cathedral restoration fund.”
“And that would account,” Philip put in, returning abruptly to the
previous question, which had been exercising him meanwhile, “for the
peculiarly distinguished air of birth and breeding this man has about
him.” For Philip respected a duke from the bottom of his heart, and
cherished the common Britannic delusion that a man who has been elevated
to that highest degree in our barbaric rank-system must acquire at the
same time a nobler type of physique and countenance, exactly as a Jew
changes his Semitic features for the European shape on conversion and
baptism.
“Oh, dear, no,” the General answered in his most decided voice. “The
Bertrams were never much to look at in any way: and as for the old duke,
he was as insignificant a little monster of red-haired ugliness as ever
you'd see in a day's march anywhere. If he hadn't been a duke, with
a rent-roll of forty odd thousand a year, he'd never have got that
beautiful Lady Camilla to consent to marry him. But, bless you,
women 'll do anything for the strawberry leaves. It isn't from the
Bertrams this man gets his good looks. It isn't from the Bertrams. Old
Ingledew's daughters are pretty enough girls. If their aunts were like
'em, it's there your young friend got his air of distinction.”
“We never know who's who nowadays,” the Dean murmured softly. Being
himself the son of a small Scotch tradesman, brought up in the Free
Kirk, and elevated into his present exalted position by the early
intervention of a Balliol scholarship and a studentship of Christ
Church, he felt at liberty to moralise in such non-committing terms on
the gradual decay of aristocratic exclusiveness.
“I don't see it much matters what a man's family was,” the General said
stoutly, “so long as he's a fine, well-made, soldierly fellow, like this
Ingledew body, capable of fighting for his Queen and country. He's an
Australian, I suppose. What tall chaps they do send home, to be sure!
Those Australians are going to lick us all round the field presently.”
“That's the curious part of it,” Philip answered. “Nobody knows what he
is. He doesn't even seem to be a British subject. He calls himself an
Alien. And he speaks most disrespectfully at times--well, not exactly
perhaps of the Queen in person, but at any rate of the monarchy.”
“Utterly destitute of any feeling of respect for any power of any sort,
human or divine,” the Dean remarked, with clerical severity.
“For my part,” Monteith interposed, knocking his ash off savagely, “I
think the man's a swindler; and the more I see of him, the less I like
him. He's never explained to us how he came here at all, or what the
dickens he came for. He refuses to say where he lives or what's his
nationality. He poses as a sort of unexplained Caspar Hauser. In my
opinion, these mystery men are always impostors. He had no letters of
introduction to anybody at Brackenhurst; and he thrust himself upon
Philip in a most peculiar way; ever since which he's insisted upon
coming to my house almost daily. I don't like him myself: it's Mrs.
Monteith who insists upon having him here.”
“He fascinates me,” the General said frankly. “I don't at all wonder the
women like him. As long as he was by, though I don't agree with one word
he says, I couldn't help looking at him and listening to him intently.”
“So he does me,” Philip answered, since the General gave him the cue.
“And I notice it's the same with people in the train. They always listen
to him, though sometimes he preaches the most extravagant doctrines--oh,
much worse than anything he's said here this afternoon. He's really
quite eccentric.”
“What sort of doctrines?” the Dean inquired, with languid zeal. “Not, I
hope, irreligious?”
“Oh, dear, no,” Philip answered; “not that so much. He troubles himself
very little, I think, about religion. Social doctrines, don't you know;
such very queer views--about women, and so forth.”
“Indeed?” the Dean said quickly, drawing himself up very stiff: for you
touch the ark of God for the modern cleric when you touch the question
of the relations of the sexes. “And what does he say? It's highly
undesirable men should go about the country inciting to rebellion on
such fundamental points of moral order in public railway carriages.”
For it is a peculiarity of minds constituted like the Dean's (say,
ninety-nine per cent. of the population) to hold that the more important
a subject is to our general happiness, the less ought we all to think
about it and discuss it.
“Why, he has very queer ideas,” Philip went on, slightly hesitating; for
he shared the common vulgar inability to phrase exposition of a certain
class of subjects in any but the crudest and ugliest phraseology. “He
seems to think, don't you know, the recognised forms of vice--well, what
all young men do--you know what I mean--Of course it's not right, but
still they do them--” The Dean nodded a cautious acquiescence. “He
thinks they're horribly wrong and distressing; but he makes nothing at
all of the virtue of decent girls and the peace of families.”
“If I found a man preaching that sort of doctrine to my wife or my
daughters,” Monteith said savagely, “I know what _I_'d do--I'd put a
bullet through him.”
“And quite right, too,” the General murmured approvingly.
Professional considerations made the Dean refrain from endorsing this
open expression of murderous sentiment in its fullest form; a clergyman
ought always to keep up some decent semblance of respect for the Gospel
and the Ten Commandments--or, at least, the greater part of them. So
he placed the tips of his fingers and thumbs together in the usual
deliberative clerical way, gazed blankly through the gap, and answered
with mild and perfunctory disapprobation: “A bullet would perhaps be
an unnecessarily severe form of punishment to mete out; but I confess
I could excuse the man who was so far carried away by his righteous
indignation as to duck the fellow in the nearest horse-pond.”
“Well, I don't know about that,” Philip replied, with an outburst of
unwonted courage and originality; for he was beginning to like, and he
had always from the first respected, Bertram. “There's something about
the man that makes me feel--even when I differ from him most--that he
believes it all, and is thoroughly in earnest. I dare say I'm wrong, but
I always have a notion he's a better man than me, in spite of all his
nonsense,--higher and clearer and differently constituted,--and that if
only I could climb to just where he has got, perhaps I should see things
in the same light that he does.”
It was a wonderful speech for Philip--a speech above himself; but, all
the same, by a fetch of inspiration he actually made it. Intercourse
with Bertram had profoundly impressed his feeble nature. But the Dean
shook his head.
“A very undesirable young man for you to see too much of, I'm sure,
Mr. Christy,” he said, with marked disapprobation. For, in the Dean's
opinion, it was a most dangerous thing for a man to think, especially
when he's young; thinking is, of course, so likely to unsettle him!
The General, on the other hand, nodded his stern grey head once or twice
reflectively.
“He's a remarkable young fellow,” he said, after a pause; “a most
remarkable young fellow. As I said before, he somehow fascinates me.
I'd immensely like to put that young fellow into a smart hussar
uniform, mount him on a good charger of the Punjaub breed, and send him
helter-skelter, pull-devil, pull-baker, among my old friends the Duranis
on the North-West frontier.”