THE REFLECTIONS OF LYNTON HORA
There was undoubted reason why the name of Marven should move Lynton
Hora to emotion. It swept him back over the thirty years which bridged
him from his youth. He would not have answered to the name of Hora in
those days; the days when he and Richard Marven--"Gay" Marven--had
been subalterns together in the same cavalry regiment. But the name
he had borne then was buried and forgotten long since, and the young
man who had borne it was dead to the knowledge of the world, though
his virtues and his sins, his memories and hatreds--most certainly his
hatreds--lived actively in the recluse connoisseur and antiquarian,
Lynton Hora.
He had had good reason for burying his earlier self--an all-sufficing
excuse for blotting out his existence from his regimental companions,
from the friends of his youth, from the parents who had wept over his
downfall perhaps even more than they had mourned the presumed death
which had followed his punishment.
The name of Marven had brought vividly before his mind a picture of
the bitterest moment of his life. Never could the memory of that
moment lose the poignancy of its sting. The hollow square in the
barrack yard, the epaulets he had once worn on his shoulder lying on
the ground, the look of scorn on the faces of his brother officers
and reflected on the faces of the men who had been till
then beneath him, for the convicted thief, he saw these things clearly
at the mention of Captain Marven's name.
He had always held that Marven was responsible for his dishonour,
Marven who had everything which he, Hora, had desired and which fate
had denied him. On the day he had first met him envy had entered into
his heart. The contented smile on Marven's face, the expression which
declared that everything is the best possible in the best possible
world, had irritated him. Hora had not shown his irritation! Early in
his youth he had learned to control the expression of his feelings. But
companionship had deepened the irritation day by day. Gay Marven was
the most popular man in the mess, Hora the least. Marven was wealthy,
a credit to a smart cavalry regiment; Hora's allowance barely sufficed
to meet the bare necessary expenditure, and so he was debarred from
indulging in the extravagances which his comrade affected.
Some of them sneered at him and Hora attributed the sneers to Marven's
influence, though wrongfully, and his irritation became anger.
Later, a greater cause of jealousy arose through the interposition of
the essential feminine element in all drama. Hora had fallen hopelessly
in love, and he had reason to think that the affection he had bestowed
would be returned. Then Marven appeared on the scene, and Hora's hopes
had vanished. Marven had only to be natural to dazzle the eyes of all
beholders with the rays of his sunshiny disposition. Hora's temperament
was of an intellectual coldness more likely to provoke esteem than
love. The attack of aerotitis which affected both of them
accentuated in each his natural characteristics. Marven became more
brilliant than ever, Hora more passionately reserved. Then Hora, his
natural judgment in suspension, had imagined that it would be possible
to out-dazzle Marven. Reckless of consequences, he joined in all the
pursuits from which he had hitherto stood aloof. His useful charger
had been replaced by two magnificent mounts. His tailor had been made
temporarily happy by a swiftly swelling account. He had begun to
entertain lavishly--a year's income, apart from his pay, would not have
met one single week's expenditure. He had known that the pace could not
last, but fate had been kind to him at the outset. He had speculated
on the turf and had won. From the card table, too, he rarely rose a
loser and the play that went on in the card room of the mess, when the
Colonel was not there, would have genuinely shocked the commanding
officer, had he been aware of the amount of the stakes at issue. Hora's
comrades thought he had come in for a legacy, and he was no longer
deemed a discredit to their ranks.
Though delayed, the day when the inevitable reckoning was to be met
could not be averted forever. When fortune frowned, instead of smiling
upon his turf speculations, he was forced to visit the Jews. There
he could obtain but trifling accommodation, for he had never had any
expectations, and was heir to nothing but an unstained name. Even
the five hundred pounds he had ultimately raised was only advanced
at ruinous interest on a three months' bill. He had plunged more
wildly than ever. He had lost. He had become short of cash to meet
his daily out-of-pocket expenses. Even then, he might have
been saved from utter extinction had not he imagined that he had
succeeded in putting his rival in the shade. He had staked everything
upon one last hazard. There had been under his control certain
regimental funds. He had made use of them, knowing full well that so
soon as his anticipated engagement was announced he would have no
difficulty in obtaining a further loan, since the object of rivalry
between Marven and himself was wealthy, as well as beautiful. With
that loan he had counted on being able to replace the money he had
embezzled. But Marven was before him, and the day Marven's engagement
to Beatrice Challys was announced an unexpected investigation of Hora's
accounts by the Colonel of the regiment disclosed the defalcation. Hora
was placed under arrest, and the torrent rushed over him.
When he had reached his own apartment, Lynton Hora spared himself not
a single pang of bitterness of the memories of what had followed.
The weary days under arrest, the long-drawn-out inquiries, the court
martial, the day of the promulgation of the sentence, when he was
drummed out of the regiment, and had walked out of the barrack yard
into the hands of the civil police, who were awaiting him to bring him
to further trial.
He had been spared nothing. There was no influence which could
have been exerted to save him from any one of the ignominies
which he had incurred. He had supplied an excellent example
for exhibiting the impartiality of the law. No private in the
ranks should be able to say that he received harsher treatment
than the officer of a crack cavalry regiment.
He had faced his punishment bravely, indeed, he had welcomed the
solitude of the cell when he had eventually exchanged his cavalry dress
for another of H. M.'s uniforms. There he had not to meet the scorn of
men's eyes.
One by one he recalled the incidents. They had never ceased to pain
him, even though he tried to laugh at his weakness in imagining that
the wound to his pride still rankled. But he would not have been
without that smarting sore. He took the same fierce satisfaction in the
pain with which the martyrs of Smithfield solaced themselves as they
thrust their arms into the fire. He told himself always that the mental
suffering, the intolerable scorn he had faced, had shown him the world
as it is, and not as it pretends to be. He postulated a deceitful,
hypocritical world with a smile on its face for the man of wealth, and
a frown and a brick for the poor devil who had the will to enjoy and
not the means to gratify his longings.
Before his disgrace he had hated only one man--afterwards he hated all
men, and at least one woman--she who preferred Gay Marven, fortune's
favourite, to himself, fortune's scapegoat. But in addition to enabling
him to appreciate the smiles and frowns of the world at their proper
worth he told himself that his experience had made a man of him. It
certainly left him a purposeful, resourceful, scrupleless being, with a
definite object in existence.
That object was revenge. Revenge on the world which had scorned him,
revenge on the world which had labelled him criminal, revenge above all
upon Marven.
He had made all his plans long before his sentence had
expired. He saw that he must die to the world if the future was to
have any promise at all, for a past, such as his, would have been an
incubus no man might carry for long. So, when his term of imprisonment
was over, he disappeared in the broad light of day. At least the
ex-convict disappeared from English eyes when he sculled out to sea
in a fair-weather craft from a south coast watering-place. A day or
two later the overturned boat was picked up with the ex-convict's coat
still entangled in the seat, and with his ticket-of-leave still in the
pocket. There was nothing to connect the Lynton Hora who a few weeks
later landed from an English tramp steamer at an Italian port with the
missing man.
Hora had not found existence present many difficulties. He had buried
his scruples with his identity, and a man of brains, with courage and
no scruples, need never look very far for the means of subsistence.
For a while he preyed on British tourists. They were of his own race,
and, therefore, his chiefest enemies, and, besides, he knew that, since
he would need a place where he might build a reputation and a new
identity if his purposes were to be fulfilled, it would be unwise to
prey upon the inhabitants of the selected spot. Italy appealed to him.
He became to all intents and purposes Italian. An English soap-maker's
wife, "seeing" the Eternal City, supplied him, unwittingly, with funds
to purchase a vineyard in Tuscany. He stocked his farm and furnished
a house with the contents of a duchess' jewel casket. The capital
necessary for pursuing his agricultural operations was provided
indirectly by the Casino authorities at Monte Carlo. Hora had ventured
no stake at the tables. He had merely relieved a successful
gambler of his winnings. Thus provided with a home, he had paid a visit
to England. When he returned, six months later, he brought his reputed
son with him, a child of three; and away in England, his old comrade,
now Captain Marven, together with Mrs. Marven, had mourned beside an
empty cot in their nursery.
Hora had succeeded in the initial step towards the accomplishment of
his revenge. But this had been only the first step. His appetite was
not to be sated with one simple meal of vengeance. His rival, like
himself, should never be allowed to forget his loss. So punctually
every year, on the anniversary of the stolen boy's birthday, Marven
had received a brief type-written note stating that the child was
alive and well--nothing more. Hora would gladly have signed the note
with his forgotten name, but that thereby he might have incurred
danger to himself and the overthrow of his whole scheme of revenge.
When the appointed time came, when the child was full grown, when by
his own acts the child should be damned beyond all redemption--then
the woman who had refused his offer of marriage should have her son
restored to her, the rival who had won that woman's love from him
should have the paternity of the criminal thrust upon him, and the
whole world should be made aware of Guy's real parentage. That was
the complete scheme of revenge Hora contemplated; to consummate
which he had instilled into the baby ears the subtle poison of his
perverted morality, had skilfully taken advantage of the boy's
adventurous nature to interest him in the romantic possibilities
of a criminal career, had laboured and watched the unfolding of a
mind with the patience of a Japanese gardener producing a
dwarfed and twisted miniature of a fair tree of the forest.
He had been discreet in his work. He had no intention of making of his
pupil a rod for his own scourging. His conception of the great criminal
he desired to make of Guy had nothing in common with the average
conception of a person given to indulgence in all the commonplace
vices of humanity. Self-control he had early realised was of more
importance to the man who was waging single-handed warfare with the
world, than to the units of the community with whom he was at issue.
His own predilections, too, were instinctively refined. The grosser
forms of self-indulgence had never appealed to him. He was an epicure
of life, and had no desire to spoil his palate with a surfeit of coarse
pleasures. Clean living himself, he demanded cleanliness of life in
those about him. To what happened outside of his own household he was
cynically indifferent.
Guy had proved a credit to his training. He was healthy in body, full
of the enthusiasm of living, and possessed of a fine rapture for the
profession to which he had served his apprenticeship. Almost the time
was ripe for the consummation of Hora's revenge, when chance had
brought Guy into contact with his real parents. This was a contingency
Hora had not foreseen, and it needed careful consideration. He did
not fear that the relationship would be disclosed. Guy himself had no
suspicion of the facts. He knew no parent but Hora, though he believed
that he remembered the mother whom Hora had invented for his benefit,
whose portrait hung on the wall of his bedroom, and of whom Hora
had spoken to him on many occasions. Yes, Guy Marven's real
identity was sufficiently sunken in that of Guy Hora to ensure him
against discovery, even though physical likeness should lead to comment.
Yet, Hora's first emotion, on learning that his foster-son had met
his father and mother, was one he thought he had banished forever.
A sensation of fear had passed over him, a dread lest the natural
inclination of son to mother should manifest itself, lest the blood
which pulsed eagerly in the son's arteries should cry out to the blood
which ran more sluggishly in his father's veins, and, his own mock
relationship disestablished, there be destroyed the living instrument
for his revenge he had spent so many years in fashioning. Nor had
his only fear been for the loss of his whole scheme of revenge. He
realised, for the first time, that his interest in Guy was more than
that of the artist in his artistry. Guy had always looked to him, had
repaid him for his attention with all the warmth of an affectionate
nature. He was the one being in whom, save Myra, Hora had taken a
personal interest. Suppose someone else were to take his, Hora's, place
in the young man's thoughts? The dread was in his mind, though he would
not acknowledge it--though he denied its existence. That would be a
piece of sentimentalism utterly foreign to his whole nature. He told
himself that he had no affection for the child of his adoption, save
that of the master craftsman in his tool. Of course he would regret the
necessity, when it arose, of giving the tool to destruction, but he
would admit to himself no warmer interest in Guy's fate than that.
Self-persuaded on the point, he considered whether the meeting, of
which he had been apprised, might not be utilised for the furtherance
of his plans. Nor was it long before he became persuaded that Fate was
playing into his hands. Supposing that the acquaintance developed into
intimacy. A thousand vague possibilities floated, shadow-like, before
Hora's eyes. He determined that the acquaintance should be continued,
but still fearful, he determined also that Guy should be plunged more
deeply into the vortex of crime than hitherto, so that, struggle and
strive as he might, he should find it impossible to escape. Fortunately
for his purpose, Guy had expressed himself as hungering for further
adventure. Well, Hora was fertile of plans, and he saw very good
reasons why Guy's desires should be humoured. His household saw nothing
more of the Commandatore that day. He remained alone with his thoughts.