LESS THAN NOBODY.
Giles Inglett Saltren was so completely thrown off his balance by
Welsh’s repudiations of the story of his parentage, that he did not
resent, he hardly heard the burst of indignation that escaped his uncle;
or, if he heard it, his mind was too preoccupied to follow his words,
and measure their force, and take umbrage at their grossness. He was
overpowered with dismay. What had he done? He could not even realise the
extent of the evil he had wrought, nor measure the depth of his own
baseness.
But Mr. Welsh was not a man to leave him without having spread out the
mass of his misdeeds before him, and held his head down over it, and
indicated its most salient features.
“You abominable little snob!” he exclaimed. “Have you forgotten what has
been done for you? If his lordship had not taken you from the hard form
on which you polished the seat of your corduroys, and set you in an easy
chair, you’d have nice callosities now. Probably you would not have been
alive at all had he not sent you to the South of France.” Mr. Welsh
became sarcastic. “No doubt you owe his lordship a grudge because he
didn’t let you go at once to kingdom come instead of detaining you here
in this Vale of Tears. Mind you, Giles—there is no escape from this
fact, that you owe your life to him. To him also you owe your education.
To him you owe it that, supposing you had lived, you are not now a
horny-handed ploughboy, that you know how to use a pocket-handkerchief,
and don’t put your knife in your mouth.”
Mr. Welsh thrust his hands into his pockets, and stood with legs apart
looking scornfully at his nephew.
“Pray, Mr. Giles Inglett, how would you like to go back to potato pasty
and cold boiled junk of bacon? To an early dinner, and swipes instead of
claret? To getting your clothes at a slop-shop, instead of being fitted
by a tailor? To being without books and magazines and reviews? Are you
aware that you have earned not one of the luxuries or even comforts of
civilised life? That they have come to you undeserved as does free
Grace? Upon my word, you make my blood splutter! Shall I tell you what
would have been the end of you had not Lord Lamerton come to the rescue?
After you were ill you would have been cared for, or not cared for,
after the fashion of common folk’s children, and your mother’s haphazard
way of doing everything, allowed to get your feet wet, and stand in
draughts, neglected one day, coddled the next, till your weak lungs gave
way, and rapid consumption set in. Shall I tell you what would have been
the course of Act II? Then you would have been mewed up in that dismal
back bedroom at Chillacot, with the ultramarine wash on the walls, and
the snipped, emerald-green, silver-paper fly trap suspended in the
middle of the room, and the blistered mirror, and the window looking out
at a dripping rock, ugh! There you would have lain and coughed; and when
an attempt was made to light the fire, the smoke would have refused to
try the road up the chimney, and preferred that to your lungs; and when
the window was opened to let the smoke out it would have let in the
smell of the pigstye. When you wanted a book to enliven you, you would
have been given Baxter’s ‘Saints’ Rest’ or a Methodist Missionary
Magazine, and death itself would have been welcome as an escape from
such literature. You would have needed wine, and not had it; cod-liver
oil, and not had it; grapes, and not had them; calves’ foot jelly, and
had to do without. You would have been given thin gruel, and fried
india-rubber, that playfully considered itself rump steak, much as you
consider yourself a nobleman, and leaden dough, greasy bacon, and
lukewarm bad tea. Your bed would have been lumpy, and made occasionally,
and your sheets changed now and then, and your pillow-case assuming the
adhesiveness to your cheek of postage stamps; and there would have been
a draught like a mill-race pouring in through that gap—I know it—under
the door. When you wanted to sleep by day, your mother would be scouring
pans in the back kitchen underneath, and when so inclined at night, your
father, on the other side of the partition, would be snoring like John
Willett. As you grew weaker, and more unable to endure worry, in would
have come the captain, to exhort and expound, and stir and whip up your
weary soul into a caper of screaming terror. You would have longed for
death as an escape from the smells and the smoke, and the crude blue,
and the draught, and the knots in your mattress, and the Missionary
Magazines, and the pigs in the yard, and the benzoline lamp.”
Mr. Welsh stooped and picked up his newspaper, which lay crumpled on the
floor. He smoothed it, and folded it on the table. Then he looked hard
at his nephew. Giles remained motionless, with eyes on the carpet; his
brow was troubled and his lips trembling. He was very pale.
“That is how you would have ended as a boy of seventeen,” pursued Mr.
Welsh, remorselessly, mercilessly. “Your life you owe to Lord Lamerton,
your mind has been expanded and enriched by him. Had he not sent you to
college what would have been the range of your ideas? What would you
have known of Shakespeare, Thackeray, Pope, Goethe and Dante? What
appreciation of art? You would have been as incapable of judging between
a good painting and a daub, of discriminating between Tannhauser and
Sankey and Moody, as any chawbacon. What I have learned, I have learned
with labour; I had no masters, no hand to help me over the stile. I wish
I had had your advantages, but no Lord Lamerton took me up. I had not
that luck. I have had to fight my own way. I daresay you think it
inconsistent in me to take the part of his lordship against my own
nephew, but that is because your conscience is disordered. I fight him
tooth and nail, because he is an aristocrat, and I a democrat. It is my
business to attack the Tories and the landed interest and the House of
Lords. I am a politician, and in politics all is fair; but we are now in
another region altogether, in that of common honesty, and domestic
relations; I look on my lord, not as a nobleman, but as a father, and a
kind-hearted man who has done much for you; and I am able to take the
gauge of your conduct accordingly. You have behaved infamously towards
your benefactor, you have hurt him where he is most sensitive—hitting,
you contemptible little coward, below the belt. You have stained the
pure name of his only daughter, tarnished the honour of an
irreproachable house. Who will believe that the girl ran away with you,
because she supposed that you were her brother? Everyone knows that you
are nothing of the kind. Should it leak out that you are not Captain
Saltren’s son, how will it mend matters if it be shown that you are the
bastard brat of old blear-eyed, one-handed, limping Samuel Ceely?”
Giles winced, he raised both his hands, half beseechingly, half as if to
protect himself from the words which struck him as blows. It was a
convulsive, not a purposed movement. Also he looked up for a moment, and
attempted to speak, but said nothing, the words died away in his throat.
Then his head fell again.
“You say you have saved some money,” Welsh went on; “whose money? That
which Lord Lamerton gave you. How many hundreds of pounds do you suppose
you have cost him? In sending you to Bordighera, in doctors’ bills, in
school and college accounts? You swaggered at Oxford as a gentleman, and
Lord Lamerton paid for it. He furnished your rooms in college, paid your
battels. You invited your friends to breakfasts and wines, and he paid
for them. Who but he put the clothes on your back, hung the pictures on
your walls, fitted neat boots on your feet, and supplied you with that
silk pocket-handkerchief you are now using to wipe the shame drops off
your brow with? And—in return for all this, you stab him to the heart
and blast the fair name of his child! Good heavens! I feel as
uncomfortable in your presence as would Mr. Gladstone in a lodge of
Primrose Dames on St. Benjamin’s day. But there!—enough about your
despicable self. It is high time something were done about Miss Inglett.
I’ll go with you. What a nuisance it is that Tryphœna is just now
without a cook. I’ll bring the girl here, nevertheless, if she has
nowhere else to go to; or I will run down with her myself to Orleigh, or
I’ll take her to any relation she may have in town. You come with me,
you mean little cad, as far as your inn, or lodgings, or where the deuce
you are, and leave me there. Don’t show your pasty face again. We have
seen already too much of you.”
He rang the bell, and the maid-of-all-work appeared.
“Susan, turn, or take off your apron, and run and fetch me a hansom.”
“Please, sir, an’ if I don’t come on an ’ansom?”
“Then a cab. Come, sharp!”
He said no more. He was agitated, because very angry. He went out for
his hat and gloves, and an umbrella, opened the latter and refolded it;
then he discovered that he was in a shabby morning coat, so he changed
it upstairs, and put on his boots in the hall, and then returned for his
newspaper.
By this time Susan had arrived, seated in a four-wheeler. She had not
encountered a hansom.
“Go on,” said Welsh to his nephew, “I’ll follow.” He took his newspaper
from the table, and brought it with him to the cab.
The direction was given to the driver, and the vehicle started. Welsh
would not speak another word to Giles. He threw himself back with a
grunt in the cab and began to read his paper.
Jingles looked dreamily forth from the window on his side. The cab was
being driven along Gold Hawk Road; there was not much traffic in it that
morning; a coal-cart, a Shepherd’s Bush omnibus were passed. The cabman
drew up, and swore at an old lady who in crossing the road had dropped a
parcel of tracts, which scattered in all directions, and who returned
almost under the feet of the horse to recover some of the papers. Mr.
James Welsh uttered an exclamation. Saltren did not notice it, he was in
a stunned condition, unable to take observation of anything, unable to
do more than reiterate in his mind, “I have made a mistake—a fatal
mistake!” He was unable even to consider in what way it could be
rectified, if capable of rectification. He was not in a condition to
weigh his uncle’s proposals what to do with Arminell. He did not even
feel his uncle’s rude remarks, they passed over him without producing an
impression, so deadened were his faculties by the consternation in which
he was. His brain was like a sewing-machine in full operation, with a
needle in it, stab—stab—stabbing, and always carrying the same thread,
“I have made a mistake—a fatal mistake!” and making therewith a lock
stitch incapable of unravelment, that went round and round both heart
and brain, and bound them together.
“Good God!” exclaimed Welsh, and let drop his paper on his lap. Then he
turned, “Giles!” he shouted in his nephew’s ear. “Confound the fellow,
are you asleep? I did think I had heard the worst, but there is worse
behind! Lord—this is awful! Giles—you fool—look at the paper.”
The young man took the sheet mechanically. The fly jolted, and he could
not read. He laid the paper down. “My eyes are dazzled,” he said, “I
cannot make out the print. Besides, I am indifferent to news.”
“You must not be indifferent. The news concerns you particularly.”
“I don’t care about politics,” said Giles irritably, “I am worried,
crushed. I have made a mistake—an awful, a fatal mistake.”
“This is not about politics at all,” shouted his uncle. “Lord! How shall
I break the tidings to Miss Inglett? I wish I had brought my wife. Women
do these things better than men. But, as we have no cook, Tryphœna is
engaged this morning in the kitchen, up to her ears, above her ears,
judging from the condition of the top of her head, in work—I must do it.
I hope that Miss Inglett has not seen a newspaper this morning.”
“Well—then—what is it?” asked young Saltren impatiently.
“What is it? Just this,” answered Welsh grimly and with vehemence, “Lord
Lamerton is dead.”
“Dead!” Giles Saltren was frozen with horror.
“Yes—dead. Found dead near Chillacot, fallen down the cliff whilst on
his way to see your father. Of course there are suspicions of foul play.
Nothing as yet certain.”
“Found dead!” The young man gasped for breath. The muscles of his chest
contracted and a pain as though a bayonet had stabbed him shot through
his heart. He was suffocating, he gasped for breath. The windows of the
cab began to spin round him, the back of the cab with the cushions swung
round to the front, and the front lights went behind, and the side
windows rose and hung over his head, then revolved and were beneath his
feet. Mr. Welsh let down the glass near the young man, as he saw the
condition into which he was falling, and that he was incapable of doing
this for himself.
“Yes,” said his uncle, “dead—that is what has come on us now, and there
is mischief behind. That mad, fanatical fool, the captain—I should not
wonder if he were involved in it, with his visions, and trumpets, and
vials, and book of the Gilded Clique. He ought to have been locked up
long ago. He took everything in solemn earnest; he believed in
Marianne’s rodomontade; he swallowed her lies whole. As far as I can
guess this is what happened. Lord Lamerton discovered that Miss Inglett
was gone, gone with you, and without a word to any one went to Chillacot
over the down to make inquiries of the captain about the fugitives. How
he came to fall over the cliff on his way, God knows! But of this I am
very certain, that it was you, Giles, who sent him on the road that led
to death. He would not have gone to Chillacot had he not had need to go
there to inquire after you. So now, Giles, what do you think of
yourself—eh?”
Young Saltren covered his face with his hands, and sank fainting into
the bottom of the cab.