MRS. HANBURY.
John Hanbury had reached the end of the street before he knew where he
was. He had no memory of how he got out of the house. No doubt he had
behaved like a madman, and he had been temporarily insane. He must
have snatched his hat in the hall, but he was without his overcoat.
His heart was beating violently, and his head was burning hot. He must
have run down the street. There was no one in view. He had only a
whirling and flashing memory of the last few minutes with Dora. His
temper had completely mastered him, and he must have spoken and
behaved like a maniac. He must have behaved like a maniac in her
presence--to her!
Now and then, in the heat of public speaking, he had been carried
beyond himself, beyond the power of memory afterwards, but never in
his life had impetuosity betrayed him in private life until now. What
sort of a lunatic must he have been to sin for the first time before
the only woman he ever cared for? The woman he had asked to be his
wife?
The excitement of the day had been too much for him, and he had broken
down in the end. He had taken only one glass of wine at dinner, and
only coffee after. Something must have gone wrong with his brain.
Could it be this fainting which had overtaken him to-day, and twice
before, indicated some flaw or weakness in the brain? It would have
been better he had died in that accursed slum than come back to
consciousness and done this. Then he had fainted like a woman, and
behaved like a coward. Now he had acted like a cad! He had abused,
reviled the woman he professed to love, and who he knew loved him! He
dared say he had not struck her! It was, perhaps, a pity he had not
struck her, for if he had he should be either now in the hands of the
police, or shot by her father! It was a good job the girl had a father
to shoot him. If he was called out he should fire in the air, and if
Ashton demanded another shot and missed him, he should reserve his
fire and blow his own brains out. When a man did a thing like this,
there was only one reflection that could ease his intolerable agony of
reproach--he could blow out his brains and rid the world of a cowardly
cad.
From the moment he found himself at the end of Curzon Street until he
reached his mother's house in Chester Square, he walked rapidly,
mechanically, and without design. When he saw the door before him he
was staggered for a moment.
"How did I come here?" he asked himself, as he opened it with a
latch-key. He could not answer the question. He saw in a dim way that
it would be interesting to imagine how a man in possession of his
faculties walked a whole mile without knowing why he walked or
remembering anything by the way. But at present--Pooh! pooh!
"Mrs. Hanbury wishes to see you, sir, in her own room, if you please,"
said a servant, who had heard him come in and appeared while he was
hanging up his hat.
"Very well. Tell her I shall be with her in a few minutes."
His mother's room adjoined her sleeping chamber, and was opposite his
own bed-room on the second floor.
He turned into the long dining-room to his right. There was here a dim
light burning, the windows were wide open, the place cool and still.
He shut the door behind him and began pacing quickly up and down. It
was necessary in some way to collect his mind before meeting his
mother.
He shut his fists hard against his chest and breathed hard as he
walked. By his breathing he judged he must have run part of the way
from Curzon Street.
The perspiration was trickling down his forehead. He held his head up
high; he felt as though there was a tight hand round his throat. He
thrust his fingers inside his collar and tried to ease his neck.
"This is absurd," he said aloud at last. But what it was that he felt
to be absurd he did not know.
"The heat is suffocating one!" he said in a short time, and tore again
at his shirt, loosing his necktie and rumpling his collar.
"I am choking for air!" he cried, and tried to fling the windows
higher up, but they were both as high as they could go.
"My throat is cracking!" he cried huskily, and looking round with
blazing eyes through the dim room saw a caraffa on the side-board. He
poured out a glass of water and swallowed the water at a draught. "Oh,
that is much better," he said with a smile, and resumed his walk up
and down the long room at a lessened rate. "Let me think," he said;
"let me think if I can."
He clasped his hands behind his back and leaned his head on one side,
his attitude when designing the plan of a speech or musing upon the
parts of it.
The water he had swallowed and the slackened pace and the posture of
reflection, tended to cool him and bring his mind into condition for
harmonious working.
"Let me treat the matter," he whispered, "as though I were only a
friend, and had come here to state my case and implore advice. How
does the matter stand exactly? Let us look at the facts, the simple
facts first."
His pace became slower and slower. His face ceased to work, and lost
the flushed and wild appearance. Gradually his head rose erect and
stood back upon his neck. His eyes lit up with the flashes of reason.
They no longer blazed with the flame of chaotic despair. He unclasped
his hands and began to gesticulate. He ceased to be the self-convicted
culprit, and became the argumentative contender before the court. He
had ceased to do his worst against the accused and was exercising all
his faculties to compel an acquittal.
Presently his manner changed. He had adduced all his reasons and knit
them together in his argument. Now he was beginning to appeal to the
feelings of the man on the bench and the men in the box. His head was
no longer erect, his gestures no longer combative. He was asking them
to remember the circumstances of the case. He was painting a picture
of himself. He appealed to their finer natures, and begged them not to
contemn this young man, who by the nature of the great art, the noble
art of oratory, to which he had devoted much study and in which he had
had some successful practice, lived always in a state of exalted
sentiment and sensations. This young man was more likely than others
of his years to be overborne and carried away by emotions which would
not disturb the equanimity of another man. His nature was excitable,
and he had the ready, in this case the fatally ready, command of words
belonging to men who had trained themselves for public speaking.
Here the scene became so real to his mind that unknown to himself he
broke out into speech:
"Gentlemen, I know he, may not be excused wholly. I will not ask you
to say he is not to blame. I will not dare to say I think he behaved
as a considerate and thoughtful man. But, gentlemen, though you
cannot approve his conduct, you will not, oh, I pray you, do not take
away from him the reputation he holds dearer than life, the reputation
of being a sincere man and a gentleman. Amerce him in any penalty
you please short of denying him the reputation of being earnest and
high-minded and----" He paused. Tears for the spectacle of himself
were in his eyes. His voice was shaken by the intensity of his pity
for himself.
"John," said a soft voice behind him.
He turned quickly round. A tall, slender woman, with calm, clear face
and snow-white hair, was standing in the room.
"Mother! I did not hear you come in."
"I hope I did not break in disastrously. It is late. I wanted to see
you for a few minutes before I went to bed. I did not like to speak
until you stopped."
He had gone to her and put his arm round her waist and kissed her
smooth white hair above her smooth, pure forehead. "Mother," he said,
in a low, soft, musical and infinitely tender voice, "I am sorry I
kept you waiting for me. I was going to you in a moment, dear."
There was none of the art of the orator in these words, or in the
exquisitely tender flexions of the voice. But the heart of the man was
in the tones of his voice for his mother.
She looked at him in the dim light and saw his disordered collar and
tie, but put that down to excitement caused by his rehearsal.
He led her gently to a chair and took one in front of her by the side
of the dining-table. He took her thin, white hand in both his own and
looked into her calm, beautiful face, radiant with that tranquil light
of maternal love justified and fulfilled.
"You have something to tell me, mother? Something pleasant, I hope,
about yourself." He had never spoken in a voice of such unreckoning
love to Dora in all their meetings and partings. It was the broad,
rich, even sound of a river that is always flowing in one direction
and always full, not the tinkle of a capricious fountain or the
tempestuous rush of a torrent at the mercy of exhaustion or drought.
"I have, my son. It does not concern me, or if it does, but
indirectly. Indeed, I do not know. It has to do with you, dear." They,
like sweethearts, called one another "dear," because they were
inexpressibly dear to one another.
"With me, mother? And how?" John Hanbury was not a handsome man, but
when he smiled at his slender, grey-haired mother, and patted her
delicate white thin hands with his own large and brown, there was more
than physical beauty in his looks, there was a subjugating, an
intoxicating radiance, and all-completed prostration of his soul
before the mother he worshipped.
"I do not know exactly, John. Your father gave me in trust for you, as
you know, a paper, which I was not to give to you except at some great
crisis of your life. If no harm of any particular moment threatened
you until you were thirty, you were never to see this paper."
"I know," he said. "I was only seventeen then--not launched in the
world--and he thought I might, when I came of age, and got my two
thousand a-year, plunge into dissipation, and take to racing or
backing horses, or cards, or something of that kind. Well, mother, I
hope you are not uneasy about me on those scores? This paper is no
doubt one of extremely good advice from an excellent father to a young
son. I am sure I will read the paper with all the respect I owe to any
words he may have left for my guidance. You do not think, mother, I am
now likely to give way to any of those temptations?"
She shook her small head gravely.
"I do not fear you will give way to the ordinary temptations of youth,
John. I know you too well to dread anything of the kind. I don't think
the paper your father left me for you refers to the ordinary danger in
a young man's path."
"Then you must believe it has to do with unusual dangers, and you must
believe I am now threatened by some unusual dangers?" said he with a
start. He had been threatened by a very uncommon danger that day, the
danger of being made a laughing stock for the whole town, but such a
misfortune could never have been contemplated by his father. Compared
with the importance of a message from his dead father, how poor and
insignificant seemed his fears of the early part Of this day.
"I do not know. I am not sure. Something out of the common must be in
your case, my dear child." What a luxury of pride and delight to think
the tall, powerful, stalwart, clever man, was her child, had been a
little helpless baby lying in her lap, pressed close to her heart!
"When your father died you were in his opinion too young, I dare say,
to be taken into his confidence. He often told me he would leave a
paper for you, and that I was not to give it you until you were
between twenty one and thirty (if I lived), and that I was only to
give it to you in case you showed any very strong leaning towards
politics or a public life."
The son smiled, and threw himself back in his chair. He felt greatly
relieved. He knew his father had always shown a morbid horror of
politics, and had always tried to impress upon him the emptiness of
public honours and distinctions. Why, his father never said. The son
distinctly remembered how tremulously excited the old and ailing man
had been at every rumour of ambitious scheming abroad, particularly
how he garrulously condemned the ceaseless scheming for the throne of
France then perplexing the political world. He had often pointed out
to his young son the folly of the Legitimists and the Orleanists and
the Napoleons, until once John had said, "Why, sir, you are as
emphatic to me in this matter as if I myself were a pretender!" Upon
which his father had said, "Hush! Hush! my boy. You must not jest
about such matters. Idle, the idlest, pretensions of the kind have
often caused oceans of bloodshed." Upon which John had smiled in
secret to note how his father's cherished horror had carried him so
far as to caution him, John Hanbury, member of a simple English
household, against aspiring to the kingly or imperial throne of the
Tuileries!
"You do not think, mother," he said gaily, "that I am going to buy a
tame eagle, and hire a fishing boat and take France?"
She smiled sadly, remembering her husband's dread of lofty aspirants.
"No," she said, "I think, if your father were alive now, he would see
as little need of cautioning you against becoming a pretender to the
throne of France as of keeping out of dissipation. But he told me if
ever you showed signs of plunging into politics I was to give you the
paper. I left it in my room, thinking we might both sit there, not
fancying we should have our chat here. I shall give it to you as you
go to your room."
"And you have no clue to what the paper contains?" he asked
pleasantly.
"No," she answered with hesitancy and a thoughtful lowering of her
eyes. "You remember, at that time--I mean as a boy and lad--you were a
fierce Radical."
"Oh, more than that! I was a Republican, a Socialist, a Nihilist, I
think. A regular out-and-out Fire-eater, Iconoclast, Destructionist, I
think," the young man laughed, throwing himself back in his chair and
enjoying the memory of his youthful thoroughness.
"And your father took no part whatever in politics, seemed to dread
the mention of them. He was at heart, I think, an aristocrat."
"And married the daughter of Sir Ralph Preston, whose family goes back
centuries before the Plantagenets, and to whom a baronetcy is like a
mere Brummagem medal on the breast of a Pharoah."
Mrs. Hanbury shook her head deprecatingly and smiled. "I am afraid you
are as ardent in your estimate of my family pretensions to lineage as
you were long ago in your hatred of kings and princes."
"But I have always been true to you, mother!" he said in that
wonderful, irresistible, meltingly affectionate voice; he took her
hand and kissed it reverentially.
"Yes, my son. Always." As his head was bent over her hand she laid her
hand on his thick dark curly hair.
"My mother," he murmured, when he felt her touch.
Her eyes filled and shone with tears. She made an effort, commanded
herself, and as her son sat back on his chair, went on: "You know when
your father went into business there was no necessity of a money kind
for his doing so. The Hanburys have had plenty of money always, never
lands, as far as I know, but money always. They were not a very old
family as far as I have heard. This was a point on which your father
was reticent. At all events he went into business in the City, as you
are aware, and there made a second fortune."
"Well, mother, I am not at all ashamed of our connection with business
or the City," said the young man pleasantly.
"Nor am I, John, as you know. When I married your father, none of my
people said, at all events to me, that I disgraced my family or
degraded my blood. Your father was in business in Fenchurch Street
then. My family had known your father all his life. Our marriage was
one purely of inclination, and was most happy. Your father was a
simple, intelligent, kind-hearted gentleman, John, and as good a
husband and father as ever breathed."
"Indeed, mother, I am quite sure of that. I still feel raw and cold
without him," said the young man gravely.
"And I shall never get over his loss. I never forget it for one hour
of any day. But I am growing talkative in my age like all old people,"
she said, drawing herself up and laughing faintly. "I am sure I have
no reason for saying it, but I fancy the paper your father left with
me for you, is in some way connected with the business, or the reason
which made him go into business. He gave it to me a few days before he
died, and when he knew he was dying. He gave it to me after saying a
great deal to me about business, after arranging his other business
affairs. He said he did not like you to take so much interest in
politics, but that he supposed he must not try to foretell your
future. That there was such a thing as going too far in any cause, and
that if ever you showed any disposition to put your extreme views in
practice, I was to give you this paper. 'In fact, Amy,' said he, 'if
our dear boy goes into public life at the popular side, give him this
paper; it may be the means of moderating his ardour; but do not give
it to him until he is over twenty-one. He will have, I think, no need
of it if he keeps quiet until he is thirty. If his mind takes the
other bend and he shows any sympathy with any reactionary party in
Europe, any party that wants to unsettle things as they now are,
destroy this on your peril. If you think he is devoted only to English
Radicalism, give him the paper; if he mixes himself up with any
Republican party on the Continent, give him the paper. But if he shows
sympathy with any pretender on the Continent, _burn the paper, Amy, as
you love your boy, and bury the ashes of it too_.' Those were his very
words. What they mean or refer to I do not know." Her face had grown
paler.
"And you never read the paper?"
"No. Nor have I the least clue to its contents. I only know that your
father was a sensible man, and attached great importance to it. If you
come I will give it to you now."
They both rose and left the dining-room together. As they went
up-stairs she said:
"I am aware for some time you have not been quite certain as to the
side you would throw in your lot with. I don't think your father ever
contemplated such a situation, and it seems to me that if this paper
is to be of any use to you it must be of most use when you are
wavering."
"But I am no longer wavering. I have decided to throw in my lot with
the advanced party."
"When did you make up your mind?"
"To-day."
"Oh, you dined at Curzon Street. And have you arranged about your
marriage with dear Dora? No new daughter was ever so welcome as she
will be to me. Has the time been fixed?"
He started. "No, not exactly, mother." He had forgotten for the past
quarter of an hour all about the quarrel or scene with Dora. He
flushed crimson, and then grew dusky white. He seized the balustrade
for a moment to steady himself. His mother was walking in front, and
could not see the signs of his agitation.
He recovered himself instantly.
She judged by his tone that her question had not been well timed. With
the intention of getting away as far as possible from the thought of
Dora, or marriage, she said, turning round upon him with a smile as
she opened her boudoir door, "By the way, who was that admirable
paragon whose panegyric you were pronouncing in the dining-room when I
came in?"
He laughed uneasily and did not meet her eyes. "An acquaintance of
mine, a poor devil who has got himself into serious trouble."
"A friend of yours, John, in serious trouble."
"Not a friend, mother, an acquaintance of mine."
"Do I know him, John?"
"No, mother. Not in the least. I should be very sorry you did. I hope
you may never know him."
For the second time in a minute Mrs. Hanbury felt that she had asked
an ill-timed question.
She handed him the paper of which she had spoken. He said good-night
to her, and as the clock on the lower lobby was striking midnight he
entered his own room.