"As the foolish moth returning
To its Moloch, and its burning,
Wheeling nigh, and ever nigher,
Falls at last into the fire,
Flame in flame;
So the soul that doth begin
Making orbits round a sin,
Ends the same."
It was a sultry night in June rather more than a year after Mr.
Tempest's death. An action had been brought by Colonel Tempest directly
after his brother's death, when the will was proved in which Mr. Tempest
bequeathed everything in his power to bequeath to his "son John." The
action failed; no one except Colonel Tempest had ever been sanguine
that it would succeed. Colonel Tempest was unable to support an
assertion of which few did not recognize the probable truth. No proof of
John's suspected illegitimacy was forthcoming. His mother had died when
he was born; it was eleven years ago. The fact that Mr. Tempest had
mentioned him by name as his son in his will was overwhelming evidence
to the contrary. The long-delayed blow fell at last. A verdict was given
in favour of the little schoolboy.
"I'm sorry for you, I am, indeed," said Mr. Swayne, composedly watching
Colonel Tempest flinging himself about his little room, into which the
latter had just rushed, nearly beside himself at the decision of a
bribed and perjured court.
Mr. Swayne was a stout, florid-looking man between forty and fifty, with
a heavy face like a grimace that some one else had made, who laboured
under the delusion, unshared by any of his fellow-creatures, that he was
a gentleman. In what class he had been born no one knew. What he was now
any one could see for himself. He was generally considered by the men
with whom he associated a good fellow for an ally in a disreputable
pinch, and a blackguard when the pinch was over. Every one regarded
Dandy Swayne with contempt, but for all that "The Snowdrop," as he was
playfully called, might be seen in the chambers and at the dinners of
men far above him in the social scale, who probably for very good
reasons tolerated his presence, and for even better reviled him behind
his back. He had a certain shrewdness and knowledge of the seamy side of
human nature which stood him in good stead. He was a noted billiard
player--a little too noted, perhaps. His short, thick ringed hands did
not mind much what they fastened on. He was not troubled by
conscientious scruples. The charm of Dandy Swayne's character was that
he stuck at nothing. He would go down any sewer provided there was money
in it, and money there always was somewhere in everything he took in
hand. Dandy Swayne's career had had strange ups and downs. No one knew
how he lived. The private fortune on which he was wont to enlarge of
course existed only in his own imagination. Sometimes he disappeared
entirely for longer or shorter periods--generally after money
transactions of a nature that required privacy and foreign travel. But
the same Providence which tempers the wind to the shorn lamb watches
over the shearer also, and he always reappeared again, sooner or later,
with his creased white waistcoat and yesterday's gardenia, and the old
swagger that endeared him to his fellow-creatures.
He was up in the world just now, living "in style" in smart chambers
strewn with photographs of actresses, and littered with cheap expensive
furniture, and plush hangings redolent of smoke and stale scent, among
which Colonel Tempest was knocking about in his disordered evening
dress.
"I'm sorry for you, Colonel," repeated Mr. Swayne, slowly; "but I wish
to ---- you'd sit down and not rush up and down like that. It's not a bit
of good taking on in that way, though it's ---- ---- luck all the same."
Mr. Swayne's conversation was devoid of that severe simplicity which
society demands; indeed, it was so encrusted and enriched with
ornamental gems of expression of a surprising and dubious character,
that to present his conversation to the reader without the personal
peculiarities of his choice of language is to do him an injustice
which, however unavoidable, is much to be regretted. Mr. Swayne's
conversation without his oaths might be compared to a bird without its
feathers; the body is there, but all individuality and beauty of contour
is gone.
Mr. Swayne filled his glass, and pushed the bottle across to his friend,
whose flushed face and shaking hand showed that he had had enough
already. Colonel Tempest sat down impatiently and filled his glass, too.
"It's the will that did it, I suppose," suggested Mr. Swayne; "that
tipped it over."
"Yes," said Colonel Tempest, striking his clenched hand on the table.
"_My son John_ he called him in his will; there was no getting over
that. He knew it when he put those words in. He knew I should contest
the succession, and he hated me so that he perjured himself to keep me
out of my own, and stuck to it even on his death-bed. John is no more
his son than you are. A little dark Fane, that is what he is. They say
he takes after his mother's family; he well may do, ---- him!"
Mr. Swayne sympathetically echoed the sentiment in a varied but not less
forcible form of speech.
"And my son," continued Colonel Tempest, his fair weak face whitening
with passion--"you know my boy; look at him--a Tempest to the backbone,
down to his finger-nails. You can't look at him among the pictures in
the gallery and not see he is bone of their bone and flesh of their
flesh. He is as like the Vandyke of Amyas Tempest the cavalier as he can
be. It drives me mad to think of him, cut out by a bastard!"
Mr. Swayne appeared to be in a meditative turn of mind. He watched the
smoke of his cigar curl upwards from the unshaved crater of his lip into
the air.
"You're in the tail, I suppose?" he remarked at last.
"Of course I am. If my brother John died without children, everything
was to come to me and my heirs. My brother had only a life interest in
the place."
"Then I don't see how he was to blame, doing as he did, if it was
entailed all along on his son." Mr. Swayne spoke with a certain cautious
interest.
"He never _had_ a son. If he had disowned his wife's child, everything
would have come to me."
"Lor!" said Mr. Swayne, "I did not understand it was so near as that.
Then this little chap, this John, he's all that stands between you and
the property, is he? Failing him, it still comes to you?"
Mr. Swayne's small tightly-wedged eyes, with the expression of
dissipated boot-buttons, were beginning to show a gleam of professional
interest.
"Yes, it would; but John won't fail," said Colonel Tempest, savagely.
"He will keep us out. We shall be as poor as rats as long as we live,
and shall see him chucking our money right and left!" and Colonel
Tempest, who was by this time hardly responsible for what he said,
ground his teeth and cursed his enemy in a paroxysm of rage and drink.
Mr. Swayne observed him attentively.
"Don't take on so, Colonel," he remarked soothingly. "Dear me, what's a
little boy?--What's a little boy here or there," he continued,
meditatively, "one more or one less? There's a sight of little kids in
the world; some wanted, some not. I've known cases, Colonel"--here he
fixed his eyes on the ceiling--"cases with parents, maybe, singing up in
heaven and takin' no notice, when little chaps that weren't wanted, that
nobody took to, seemed to--meet with an accident, get snuffed out by
mistake."
"John won't meet with an accident," said Colonel Tempest passionately.
"I wish to ---- he would!"
"I look at it this way," said Mr. Swayne, philosophically. "There's
things gentlemen can do, and there's things they can't. A gentleman is a
party that can't do his dirty work for himself, though as often as not
he has a deal on his hands that must be shoved through somehow. The
thing is to find parties who'll take what I call a personal interest, if
it's made worth their while. Now about this little boy, that no one
wants, and is a comfort to nobody. It's quite curious the things little
boys will do; out in boats alone, outriggers now, as dangerous as can
be, or leaning out of railway carriages in tunnels. Lor! you never know
what they won't be up to, little rascals. They're made of mischief.
Forty thousand a year, is it, he is keeping you out of, and yours by
right? Well, I don't say anything about that; but all I say is, I have
friends I can find that are open to a bet. What's the harm of betting a
thousand pounds to one sovereign that you never come into the property?
It ain't likely, as you say. What's the harm of a bet, provided you
don't mind risking your money? Let's say, just for the sake of--of
argument, that there _was_ ten bets--ten bets at a thousand to one that
you never come in. Ten thousand pounds to pay, if you come in after all.
What's ten thousand pounds to a man with forty thousand a year?" Mr.
Swayne snapped his fingers. "And no trouble to nobody. Nothing to do but
to pay up quietly when the time comes. It don't concern you who takes up
the bets, and you don't know either. You know nothing at all about it.
You lay your money, and, look here, Colonel, you mark my words, some way
or somehow, some time or other, _that boy will disappear_."
The two men looked steadily at each other. Colonel Tempest's eyes were
bloodshot, but Mr. Swayne had all his wits about him; he never became
intoxicated, even at the expense of others, if there was money in
keeping sober.
"Curse him!" said Colonel Tempest in a hoarse whisper. "He should not
get in my light."
The child was to blame, naturally.
Mr. Swayne did not answer, but went to a side table, on which were pens,
ink, and paper. Some things, if done at all, are best done quickly.