THE
MIS-RULE OF THREE
By
FLORENCE WARDEN
Author of
“The House on the Marsh,” “The Heart of a Girl,”
Etc., Etc.
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
Paternoster Square
1904
_All Rights Reserved_
CONTENTS
I. THEY DISCUSS THE GIRL
II. THEY FIND THE GIRL
III. SOMEBODY’S IDEAL
IV. AND SOMEBODY’S AVERSION
V. WAS IT AVERSION?
VI. A BOLT FROM THE BLUE
VII. SOMEBODY’S LUGGAGE
VIII. BAYRE’S IDEAL
IX. A MYSTERY
X. OR A CRIME?
XI. RIVALS
XII. THE MEETING
XIII. PRUDENCE _V._ PASSION
XIV. TAKE THE BULL BY THE HORNS
XV. THE HOSPITALITY OF MR BAYRE
XVI. A SECRET FOR SALE
XVII. THE BLACKMAILERS
XVIII. RETRIBUTION
XIX. GOOD-BYE
XX. AND AGAIN GOOD-BYE
XXI. PARENTS AND GUARDIANS
XXII. A RUNAWAY
XXIII. A PHOTOGRAPH
XXIV. RECONCILIATION
XXV. THE HIDDEN WOMAN
XXVI. THE RULE OF THREE BECOMES THE RULE OF ONE
The Mis-rule of Three
CHAPTER I.
THEY DISCUSS THE GIRL
The Diggings were in a street somewhere off Tottenham Court Road, in
a tall, old-fashioned, roomy house which had seen its best days, but
which still made a valiant attempt to hold its own in the respectable
class in a neighbourhood where respectability is not exactly rampant.
For dingy foreigners of the undesirable class abound exceedingly in
those parts, and undesirables of home growth are not unknown there.
Indeed, individuals of both these types did get in, now and then,
within the hospitable shelter of No. 46 itself, in spite of the
anxiety of Mrs Inkersole, the landlady, to preserve the high tone of
the house.
But whoever might occupy the ground floor and the first floor of No.
46, whoever might enjoy the solid mahogany and second-hand chenille
curtains of the former, or bask in the luxury of alleged Sheraton
upholstered in vivid plush and brocade in the latter, the historical
Diggings on the second floor remained for month after month in the
possession of the famous Three, who were known among the landlady’s
family and servants as “The gentlemen.”
Not only did “the gentlemen” occupy the two rooms which constituted
the second floor, but they overflowed upwards into two of the small
apartments of the rabbit warren which is always to be found on the
upper floors of the typical London lodging-house. One of these small
upper rooms belonged to Bartlett Bayre, a tall, thin, dark-skinned,
black-haired young man, who was a clerk at Somerset House in the first
place, and a struggling writer of loftiest ambition but as yet very
indifferent success in the second. His room was remarkable for great
outward neatness, though the internal condition of the wardrobe and
chest of drawers left much to be desired in the way of order.
The little room next to Bayre’s was occupied by Ted Southerley, a big,
broad, stolid, red-faced Northerner, who was “on” two or three papers
of no world-wide circulation and with no very certain prospects, and
on one which actually paid its way and afforded a modest pittance to
its most energetic if, perhaps, slightly commonplace contributor.
The third member of the confraternity was a painter, to whom neither
the Academy nor the New Gallery had as yet opened its doors. As the
happy possessor of a small allowance from home, which enabled him to
enjoy the luxury of being idle and the further luxury of pretending to
be very busy at the same time, Jan Repton occupied the place of honour
among the three friends: that is to say, he had the back room on the
second floor all to himself as combined studio and bedroom. This
apartment, therefore, offered a picturesque combination; an easel
being placed near the window for the benefit of the north light, while
a small bedstead stood in one corner, and a platform for a model
occupied the place of honour in the middle of the room. The bedstead
was used by day for books, newspapers and parcels of various kinds.
The dressing-table made a convenient hat and coat stand; while the
washstand was rendered picturesque with a display of palettes,
canvases, paint-brushes, and all the paraphernalia of the artist’s
profession.
On occasions of state, when friends or cousins from the country were
to be entertained, such choice bits of this outfit as seemed adapted
to the purposes of the picturesque were transferred to the
sitting-room in the front, together with the easel containing the
picture upon which Repton was engaged, the model platform and a few
bits of cheap brocade, remnants bought at drapers’ sales, to be thrown
at random across the well-worn and springless sofa and over the backs
of the lodging-house chairs. Also, on these occasions, the solid
square table, which would then have been particularly useful, was
thrust into the bedroom at the back, so that the visitors might have
their tea uncomfortably in corners, on their own laps, in what was
felt to be the orthodox studio fashion.
Bayre grumbled on these occasions, objecting to this “faking up” of an
unreal atmosphere of artistic luxury to which they were unaccustomed.
Ted Southerley growled more openly at the unnecessary discomfort the
plan entailed. But Jan Repton was inexorable. Art was superior to all
things else: and the artistic atmosphere, according to him, “gave a
tone,” which he was not going to sacrifice for any utilitarian whims
of “you two fellows.”
It may be mentioned that “Jan” was an assumed name and not Repton’s
real baptismal prænomen. He had, in fact, been christened plain
“John”; but finding the appellation unsatisfying, he replaced it by
the three simple letters which gave him at once a distinction in his
small circle, which the circle did not hesitate to inform him was the
only one he would ever possess.
It was after an entertainment which had not been altogether
satisfactory, Repton having tried to sing and Bayre to play the banjo,
both with more exuberant applause than real success, that they were
rearranging the furniture in its everyday position one November
evening when a certain discontent which had of late been growing in
Bayre’s breast reached a momentous crisis.
“I tell you what it is, Repton,” said he, as he managed, after fearful
struggles, to get the fourth and last leg of the table through the
door into the sitting-room, “all this beastly turn-out and turning
everything upside down whenever your friends and relations put in an
appearance here is perfectly sickening. Have friends by all means if
you like, though Southerley and I can do without denuding half the
country parishes in England of their inhabitants at regular intervals
to fill our room and eat our bread-and-butter.”
“Bother your bread-and-butter!” said Repton, cheerfully, as he tilted
the table over into its place in the middle of the room, and dragged
on the dark green tapestry tablecloth with which it was a point of
honour to cover the much-dented sham mahogany top. “You could have
your own relations here if you liked, or if you’ve got any. I’m not
going to let myself grow into a moping misanthrope for you, or for
Southerley either, and so I tell you.”
“Nobody wants you to grow into a moping misanthrope, or into anything
else you don’t like,” boomed out burly Ted Southerley from the cosy if
slightly battered armchair by the fire into which he had dropped with
his pipe when the ladies went away. “But I do think, Repton, for all
our sakes, you might exercise the principle of judicious selection
among your acquaintances, and especially you might introduce a little
more variety among the ladies. Your female cousins are thoroughly
charming, I admit, but they do run a little to the same type now,
don’t they?”
“You have to take your cousins as you can get them,” replied Repton,
cheerfully. “Some of us would be glad enough to have cousins at all;
and if they were such beauties that they were run after by half
London, why, you couldn’t expect them to come up to take tea with us
on a second floor now, could you?”
“I shouldn’t expect it,” snapped Bayre. “And more than that, if I have
to expect it now it’s not because I like it. To have to sit for two
hours listening to a sandy-haired girl who can talk about nothing but
the theatres and the opera, and who is trying all the time to impress
you with the idea that she belongs to a circle in society where she
certainly never set foot herself, and about which you yourself know
little and care less, is no end of a bore.”
“She moves in a circle a precious sight better than yours!” retorted
Repton, nettled. “And as for talking, she was only trying to find
something to say because you were too surly to open your own mouth.
And as for her being sandy--”
“I thought you didn’t like women to be intellectual, Bayre,” put in
Southerley, anxious to prevent a quarrel. “I can’t make out what it is
you want.”
Bayre, thus challenged, sat on the edge of the table, put his hand in
his pocket, swung his leg, and laid down the law upon the subject of
the Eternal Feminine thus:--
“I like a woman,” said he, “who exhales femininity at every pore. That
is to say, one who is above all things modest and even somewhat shy;
one who says little, does not trouble her head about the arts or
sciences, or about intellectual pursuits, when compared with the
interests of the home. There I imagine her supreme; calm, serene,
orderly, diffusing a spirit of comfort, an atmosphere of peace,
wherever she appears. She has no thought of “Society” in the modern
slang sense, because for her Society is concentrated in her home, in
the little circle of human beings who depend upon her, as they would
upon an all-wise, all-providing, all-healing fairy, for help and
sympathy and sunny kindness.”
“What you want is a housekeeper who will darn your socks, cook your
mutton chop, and give her whole mind, what she has of it, to making
you comfortable,” said Repton, scoffingly.
“Not altogether that, though socks are more comfortable when darned
than when in holes, as we occasionally wear them at present, and chops
are undoubtedly better cooked than raw,” replied Bayre, suavely.
“What do you think of his precious feminine ideal, Southerley?” asked
Repton, with a superb raising of his light eyebrows.
“I think it’s all jolly rot,” said Ted, promptly. “I don’t mean I
disapprove of a woman’s being domestic in her tastes--somebody must
look after the house, and see to the dinner and all that sort of
thing, I suppose; and certainly none of those things would get done
very well if they were left to me--but a woman who had her hands
always in dough or in dusters, whose mind was divided between her
saucepan and her cotton reels, would drive me mad.”
“Do _you_ want small talk and Society slip-slop, then, as
accomplishments?” sneered Bayre.
“No,” said Southerley. “What I admire in a woman is spirit and fire,
life and animation. My ideal is a girl who can ride like the wind,
whose feet dance as she walks, whose eyes are all aglow with life and
vitality, and there--I shouldn’t mind if she were a bit of a genius
into the bargain!”
“A genius!” roared Repton, derisively. “What should a female genius
want with you, Southerley?”
“Well, he’s welcome to her!” put in Bayre with contempt. “It’s the
first time I ever heard a sane man say he admired that sort of thing
in a woman! And I should think it would be the last! Intellect in a
woman--intellect out of the common, I mean: of course I don’t mean
that I admire a born fool--is an evil fungus, hideous and useless if
not actually noxious in itself, and fatal, too, to the object upon
which it has made its home.”
“Very poetical, but very absurd,” remarked Southerley. “The female
genius you sneer at so loftily would be much more likely even to
manage the house well than the sheep-woman you think so much of. And
if she didn’t, at any rate she wouldn’t bore you to death as the other
would.”
“Why don’t you get hold of some of your sheep and bring ’em here and
let’s see if we can worship ’em too?” suggested Repton, derisively.
“They’re common enough; surely you must have a few sisters and cousins
and aunts who answer to the description!”
“No,” said Bayre, stolidly. “It happens that I haven’t. I have only
one relation in the world that I know anything about, and that’s not
much.”
“And who’s he--or she?”
“_He_ is an elder brother of my late father’s, a very rich man who
lives a kind of hermit’s life on one of the smaller of the Channel
Islands. A bachelor and reputed to be a miser.”
“A bachelor! And very rich! Why don’t you go and look him up?” said
Southerley, the matter-of-fact.
“Don’t know that he wants me. If he does, he’s kept the fact very much
to himself,” said Bayre.
“If I had a rich bachelor uncle,” said Repton, lightly, “I should go
and get him to leave me all his money, and then find a handy cliff--”
“It would be better, first of all,” said Southerley, gravely, “to find
out just what ‘very rich’ means. It would be a pity to go and burden
one’s soul with a crime under a decent figure. Old gentlemen who live
shut up often get the reputation of great wealth on something under
two hundred a year!”
“That’s a point worth considering,” admitted Bayre.
“Look here, you fellows,” said Repton, who had grown suddenly
thoughtful, “wouldn’t it be a lark if we were all of us to go to the
place--wherever it is--Jersey and Guernsey isn’t it? Or is it the
Scillies?--and hunt up this recluse? If he didn’t take a fancy to
Bayre--and I see heaps of reasons why he shouldn’t--why, he might to
you or me, you know, Southerley? And anyhow it would be a bit of a
spree, and I could find something to paint. Perhaps get known as the
Jersey man, or the Guernsey man, or the Sark man, and make it
impossible for anybody to think about any of those places for ever
after without thinking of Jan Repton.”
“And I,” said Southerley, “might get some decent ‘copy’ out of them, I
fancy. Shirts for sailors at Jersey and Guernsey; cows at Alderney;
rocks, I suppose, at Sark. All interesting things that people are
dying to know all about. This is to be thought of, Bayre.”
“What on earth you want to go to any place for in order to write about
it I don’t know,” observed Bayre, grimly. “For no matter what you see
or what you hear, you always manage to report it under such a veneer
of commonplace that nobody would ever think you got your information
out of anything more up-to-date than the ninth edition of the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_!”
“My dear fellow, when you write for commonplace people you must write
in a commonplace way. Now you, who write for the people that read your
works--people so uncommon that they don’t exist--can ransack the
dictionary for obsolete adjectives and introduce compound words that
nobody has ever heard of with impunity.”
“I may not find it easy to get to my public,” said Bayre, in whose
dark face a flush was rising, “but when I do it won’t consist of the
sweepings of the counter and the stable, or of the representatives of
the culture created by Snick-snacks.”
“Look here,” broke in Repton, who perceived that the atmosphere was
growing rather sultry, “without any chaff, don’t you think a week’s
outing might be got out of this idea? It’s the right time of year, in
the first place, to see the islands in their everyday aspect, with no
taint of the tourist about them.”
“And the right time of year for an awfully rough sea passage!”
observed Southerley, who was not a “good sailor.”
Bayre played with his moustache and reflected.
“When you come to think of it,” said he at last, “it’s not such a bad
notion of yours, Repton, that we should go and pay the old gentleman a
surprise visit. I’ve never been to the Channel Islands, and a blow
across the sea would get rid of some of the cobwebs of this infernal
city.”
“Don’t abuse old London, I beg,” said Southerley. “It’s the only place
worth living in for a man with any brains in his head.”
Repton and Bayre both turned on him looks of scorn. The fact that he
had been, in a small and modest way, successful in those callings of
Art and Literature in which they themselves had so far failed--for
Southerley had had his sketches reproduced in the not over-particular
columns of a Sunday paper--rankled in the breasts of both.
“It happens,” said Bayre, “that I could get a holiday now if I liked,
and I might not be able to do so later. If you fellows agree to go
I’ll make arrangements as soon as you like. I’ve been getting restless
lately. Working with no result is not good enough: dull routine work
for one’s bread-and-butter and nothing more’s not good enough: this
beastly old city’s not good enough: _life’s_ not good enough!”
With which drastic comment on things in general and his own affairs in
particular, Bayre began to swing up and down the room at a great rate,
with his hands in his pockets and his dark eyes gleaming rather
savagely from out of his pale face, to which dark hair worn long gave
a certain individuality at which Southerley, with his close-cropped,
conventional head, and Repton, with what his friends called his sandy
stubble, scoffed long and loudly.
Though neither of the other young men chafed as much under the
conditions of existence as Bayre did, the suggestion of a change, of a
possibly romantic adventure with a sort of object, seized both of
them.
And the end of it was that, without wasting much time in discussion,
they all made arrangements for a journey together to the Channel
Islands, to hunt out in company this mysterious rich bachelor uncle of
Bayre’s in whose existence, perhaps, two of the party scarcely
believed at all.