Sainty rather expected a letter with some attempt at exculpation from
his cousin; but Claude was evidently aware that in many awkward
positions there is no course so expedient as silence. Had circumstances
made a meeting with Sainty seem imminent, he might have thought
otherwise; but, as things were, having nothing to say, he said nothing,
and trusted to time to take the edge off the situation. Sainty composed
several very withering answers to the possible letter, but as it never
came he had no occasion to send them.
He had not contrived to get a word with Arthur after the memorable
supper. ‘Hope you won’t mind, old man, promised to see Miss de Vere
home; only civil,’ the boy had murmured, as he slipped into the little
hired _coupé_ that was waiting. Mademoiselle Balbullier had hinted that
a like attention would not be unwelcome from himself, but finding her
hints disregarded, had driven off in a hansom with Miss Bingham,
laughing very shrilly at some joke that seemed to tickle them hugely.
Sainty returned to Cambridge more than ever persuaded that if anything
was to be done for Arthur it must be done quickly. He had for some time
had a scheme in his head, which had been germinating slowly, but for it
to come to blossom, let alone fruit, he needed above all things the
co-operation of Gerald Newby. He therefore made haste to seek his friend
and lay his plans before him. He found Newby for a wonder alone.
‘So you’re back,’ Gerald said, pushing the papers together on his desk
and pulling the blotting-paper over them, a little trick of his which
always exasperated Sainty, who would rather have died than look at
anything not meant for him.
‘Are you busy?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got something special to talk to you
about.’
‘I’m not too busy to be at the service of any one who wants me,’ said
Newby. ‘Mere college work never seems to me as important as real human
needs.’
‘Ah! I’m so glad to hear you say that; it gives me a better hope in what
I have to say to you.’ Sainty had thought so much over the scheme he had
to propose--it was so important to him--that now it was trembling on the
threshold of utterance he feared lest he should not put it before Newby
to the best advantage.
There was so long a pause that the young don came round from his
writing-table to a position from which he faced and dominated his
interlocutor. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m all attention.’
‘First of all about my brother,’ Sainty began, with some hesitation.
‘You must know that I’ve found things even worse than I expected; it’s
not merely idleness and waste of time, as I feared; there’s a woman in
the case.’
Newby frowned. He had an almost feminine prudery. The fact was he knew
very little of such things, and what he did not know always seemed to
him dark and dangerous, a subject to be as much as possible avoided in
conversation. ‘I am very little qualified to advise----’ he began.
‘Oh! that’s not what I wanted your help about,’ Sainty assured him; ‘at
least, not directly; but you know I’ve often told you how I wished I
could get rid of my most unsuitable part in life.’
Newby made an almost imperceptible gesture of impatience, as who should
say, ‘We are back to that old game, are we?’
‘It was not mere talk,’ Sainty went on. ‘I have thought and thought
about it, till I really have evolved something; I have once or twice
wanted to speak to you about it, but have been afraid. Why I mentioned
Arthur just now, was that a great factor in my desire for a change of
life was that I thought I saw my way to helping him, perhaps to _saving_
him; and what I’ve seen in this visit to London convinces me that I’ve
no time to lose.’
‘You interest me,’ said Newby patronisingly. He went across and fastened
his outer door. ‘If what you have to say to me is so important,’ he
said, ‘we may as well secure ourselves against interruption.’
‘Ever since I was a child,’ Sainty began again, ‘it has been borne in on
me that my brother was as pre-eminently fitted for my place in the world
as I was _un_fitted for it. I used to think I was sure to die young, and
that so matters would adjust themselves naturally without my
intervention. Well--I’m nearly twenty-two, and I seem to get stronger
every year. I don’t say I’m a tower of strength, but I fancy I’m less
likely to die than many more robust men. For one thing, I do no
dangerous things. You can understand that the idea is not a pleasant one
to me that my one business in life is to keep my brother out of his
birthright.’
‘It isn’t his birthright; it’s yours.’
‘That’s as you happen to look at it; it’s not my view. I can’t feel as
if I had any right to what is only a hindrance and clog to me, and would
be such a help to him.’
‘But you can’t change places with him, however much you may wish to.’
‘Legally and physically, no; virtually, yes. For ever so long I’ve been
hatching a pet scheme, but I can’t carry it out without your help. I’ve
not the health, the will, nor the intellect necessary; but you would be
the ideal person to do it, and you would help and cheer me when I
failed.’
‘May I know what this wonderful idea of yours is?’
‘I can’t make him Lord Belchamber--I wish I could; but I can practically
give him the position, if I hand over the place and income to him. He
would be able to marry some nice girl; he is one of those who ought to
marry young. With a healthy, out-of-door life and plenty of innocent
congenial occupation, and the influence of a good woman at his side, all
that is kindly in him would have room to develop. He is not naturally
vicious, only weak and incurably headstrong and obstinate.’
‘And what do you propose to do with _yourself_?’
‘Ah! that is it; that’s where _you_ come in. The whole thing hangs on
you.’ Sainty looked appealingly in his friend’s face. ‘I’m half afraid
to put it to the touch,’ he said; ‘I have it so much at heart.’
‘I can’t give you my views on your Utopia unless you tell me what it
is.’
Sainty detected and grieved at the faint sneer in the use of the word
‘Utopia.’
‘You don’t encourage me,’ he said.
‘How can I, till I know what you propose?’
‘I thought we might go, you and I, into one of those East End parishes
and start a place something on the lines of Toynbee Hall, a sort of
university for the poor, a centre of culture and light and civilisation
in the middle of all that dreariness and barbarity; I to find the money,
and you practically everything else, with me for your lieutenant to work
under your orders.’
Sainty brought it all out with a rush, when once he had come to the
point, and then paused breathless to hear how his idea would be
received. Newby sat silent for a moment or two; at least he took the
matter seriously.
‘Have you thought at all what it will cost?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ cried Sainty eagerly, ‘I’ve gone into all that rather carefully.
Say that it costs £20,000 to build the place--it could be done for that,
very simple and plain; a big hall to begin with, and perhaps a cloister,
and a few sets of rooms like college rooms. After the initial expense I
don’t think it _could_ cost more than £2000 or £3000 a year. Of course
we should live in the simplest way--there would be no luxury; and
gradually I should hope the place would begin to help pay for itself; it
wouldn’t be a charity, you know.’
‘And the land?’ asked Newby; ‘is that included in your £20,000? You
would want a good big plot, for the heart of London, to put up such
buildings as you propose.’
‘Oh, that could be managed. I might pay for half and raise the other
half by mortgage on the property, or even the whole. There need be no
difficulty about the money part of it; _I_’d see to that. The question
is, will you help? All the rules, all the details of the working of the
thing would have to come from you. You would be absolute master. I
thought,’ he added a little piteously, ‘that it would appeal to you as
an opportunity of carrying out some of your ideals. It would, of course,
be entirely undenominational; people of all creeds should be invited to
explain their views. It might be the beginning, the nucleus of your idea
of universal belief and brotherhood.’
The pleading eyes fixed on his face seemed to make Newby vaguely ill at
ease. While Sainty was talking he had shifted his position, got up and
walked to the window, and sat down again at his desk, on which he
drummed a little with his fingers. Now he rose and came back to his
friend. There was a touch of embarrassment and something like
compunction, as he said--
‘My dear fellow, it’s impossible, simply impossible.’
Sainty, glancing round the charming room with its air of dignified calm
and severe luxury, saw suddenly how sham was its austerity, how real its
comfort.
‘I am asking a great deal of you,’ he said; ‘too much, I’m afraid.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said Newby eagerly. ‘Don’t think I would hesitate at
any little personal sacrifice; that is indeed a low view of me. But,
believe me, I see the impracticability of the whole thing.’
For a few seconds there was an uneasy silence. The summer breeze from
the open windows faintly stirred the pictures on the wall. Voices
softened by distance and pleasant outdoor sounds came wafted to them
where they sat. It occurred to Sainty that it was not necessary for a
young man to ‘have great possessions’ ‘to go away sorrowful’ when
confronted by the opportunity of the supreme sacrifice for others. No
one knew better than he that Newby’s way of life would have been far
harder for him to give up than his own; and this knowledge lent a great
tenderness and humility to his voice as he asked, ‘Why impracticable if
we are both willing?’
‘Take yourself to begin with,’ Newby answered; ‘think of your people,
your mother, your uncle, the duke and duchess--what would they say to
such a scheme?’
‘Oh, they’d be horrified at first; but I don’t think they would offer
any very strenuous opposition to such a simple plan of disposing of me
in favour of Arthur.’
‘Then, think how _I_ should appear in the matter. What would they say of
me?--that I had acquired a great influence over you, and then used it to
make you devote yourself and your money to the support of myself and the
furtherance of my crack-brained schemes. It’s ten to one against their
even allowing me any sincerity; far more likely they would think my one
object was to advertise myself while living at your expense.’
‘And do you care so greatly what people say of you?’
‘Yes, I do. My dear boy, you are one of the great ones of the earth and
can afford to be thought eccentric if you please; but I am a poor
scholar--my good name is everything to me.’
‘You said once that we could never hope to do anything unless we were
prepared to be misunderstood; that no man could really be good for
anything of whom the commonplace respectable people spoke well.’
‘Good heavens!’ cried Newby, with not unnatural exasperation, ‘I wish
you wouldn’t cast snatches of things I may have said in some quite
different connection in my teeth.’ He made another excursion to the
window and stood looking out for a second or two. Presently he turned
and said in a much more chastened manner, ‘Then there’s what I’m doing
here. You yourself can bear witness that I am not without influence on
a number of young men, an influence you have told me was good. Have I a
right to give up my work here, my power of influencing unnumbered young
lives towards higher and purer ideals, for a quite problematical chance
of doing good to costermongers, and incidentally enabling your brother
to stand in your shoes?’
For a few moments neither spoke.
‘Then you refuse?’ said Sainty almost under his breath. ‘Is it quite,
quite irrevocable?’
‘My dear boy, some day you will see the matter in its true light and
will thank me for having saved you from following the will-o’-the-wisp
of your own too precipitate philanthropy. The idea is purely fanciful;
believe me, it would never work. In the first place, the mortifications,
the disappointments, the roughness of the life, would kill you in a
year.’
‘And if meanwhile my money and my feeble efforts had served to start a
really useful work, to launch you on a career of helpfulness, what would
that matter? Would it not even be the simplest solution of all? Arthur
would then step into the place in which it is so much my object to
establish him.’
‘Quâ method of suicide the machinery is cumbrous and expensive,’ said
Newby, with dreary facetiousness; ‘and you can’t seriously expect me to
aid and abet you in committing the happy dispatch.’
They talked much longer, Sainty still pleading for his idea, though
without much hope of success, Newby, gaining assurance from the sound of
his own voice, pouring more and more cold water on the project and
abounding in excellent reason. Sainty could not but see the sense of
much that Gerald said; yet he came away from the interview not only
depressed and disappointed at the ruthless killing of his cherished
scheme, but with an uncomfortable sense of having caught a glimpse of
his idol’s clay feet, always one of the saddest experiences of life. He
felt too a certain closing in on him as of fate; his attempts to mould
events or to avert catastrophes had met with singularly little success.
Was all struggle useless, then? was it true that we were only puppets
in the iron grip of destiny? To a person of his temperament it was only
too easy to believe it, yet youth’s everlasting assertion of free-will
dies hard in our twenty-second year, and it was not without many
searchings of heart that Belchamber settled down to the conviction that
there was nothing to be done. To say that his brother was never out of
his thoughts would be an exaggeration. Happily for us, there is no such
thing as complete absorption in one idea. When we have lost all that
made life worth having, if we were honest we should own that at certain
moments the most trivial of daily preoccupations drove our grief
completely out of our minds. There is no evidence to show that the
inhabitants of Herculaneum were other than cheerfully busy; and we all
pursue a hundred frivolous objects, though lying every one of us
inexorably under sentence of death.
In the year that followed Sainty thought much and anxiously of Arthur,
but he also thought of many other things. For one thing, the management
of his estate was beginning to interest him. Having originally turned
his attention that way purely to please his mother, he had gradually
come to some appreciation of what he could do for his fellow-creatures
over an area for which he was more or less responsible. Whatever his
views might be as to the position of the land-owning class, while he
held such a position it undoubtedly entailed many duties and
responsibilities. Whether his land were eventually to pass to the State
or be cut up into peasant properties, as long as it remained his it was
clearly better that the people on it should live in well-drained,
weathertight houses, than in insanitary hovels; that they should be as
far as possible provided with regular employment, educated, amused, kept
from the public-house. While Cambridge and his work for the tripos held
him, he had thought less of all these things, secure in the conviction
that his mother and uncle were giving them careful attention. To tell
the truth, he had a little feared to absorb himself in them while he
still cherished a hope that his work in life might lie in far other
fields, that all this might be Arthur’s business, not his. In his
immediate neighbourhood there was no very terrible distress to stir his
imagination; by the poor on the place Lady Charmington had scrupulously
done something more than her duty, and hard as were the lives of the
agricultural labourers, at least their lot had fallen to them in
pleasant places--their work was done in the pure air of heaven. It was
for the huddled degraded masses of the great cities, and especially of
London, that his soul felt the overwhelming sickening pity which had
threatened to drive him out into the wilderness. Now that he personally
seemed to be barred from effort in that direction, that his
long-cherished hopes of seating his brother in his place had proved
quite impracticable, and all the fabric raised by his dreams on that
foundation had fallen in ruins about his ears at the blast of Newby’s
inexorable common-sense, the plain duties that lay immediately around
him presented themselves as something to be clutched with an almost
despairing intensity. Here, at least, was work ready to his hand, and he
promised himself it should be done thoroughly. He absorbed himself in
his mother’s big ledgers, her detailed and carefully kept accounts of
all the workings of the great property, with the same student’s passion
for mastering his subject that he had brought to his Cambridge studies.
Had Lady Charmington been a less conscientious woman, the thought that
her power was passing from her might not have been without a sting; but
she had talked so much of ‘giving an account of her stewardship,’ and so
often lamented Sainty’s want of interest in his own possessions, that,
whatever slight pangs she may have had to stifle, she had not the face
to express anything but pleasure at his changed attitude. So far, too,
he was still her pupil, eagerly learning all she had to tell, and
accepting her word as final. It is possible that she took a genuine
pleasure in introducing him to his duties, and she may well have been
forgiven some moments of pride in displaying to him both the quantity
and quality of her work during his minority. Sainty, on his side, began
to understand all that his mother had done for him, and his wonder was
only equalled by his gratitude.
Lady Charmington’s confidence in Arthur’s application to his studies
began to be shaken about this time by his ignominious failure to pass
his examination; and here it was she who turned to Sainty for
help--Sainty who, impossible as it seemed, had been right where she was
wrong.
‘I can’t make it out at all,’ she would say; ‘he seemed to be working so
hard. You recollect he wouldn’t even come home last Easter; and then in
the summer he went off on that reading party.’
Arthur, in fact, after a fortnight at Belchamber--a fortnight during
which he had been moody, restless, unlike himself, and had carefully
shunned all possibilities of private or personal talk with either his
mother or brother--had left hurriedly on a mysterious ‘reading party.’
Sainty wrote often to the London lodgings, but seldom got any answers,
and doubted whether many of his letters ever reached the person to whom
they were written. It became increasingly difficult to pacify Lady
Charmington, who passed by a rapid transition from her serene optimism
to the depths of the gloomiest apprehension. Sometimes for days she
would hardly talk of anything else, expressing wonder, surprise,
disappointment, all of which Sainty had more or less to pretend to
share, with a sense of deceit when he reflected how little surprised he
really was, and how much he could have enlightened the poor lady.
At Sainty’s earnest request Arthur came again to Belchamber in November
for the shooting, his last visit, as it proved, for many a long day.
Sainty argued, remonstrated, implored. ‘What was he doing? What did he
intend to do? Didn’t he _want_ to go into the army? He must know he
could never get in if he didn’t work or pass his exams.’ It was all to
no purpose. The boy took refuge in a surly silence. He had two such
terrible scenes with his mother that for the first time in his life he
spent Christmas away from home. ‘I’m going to the Hunters,’ he wrote.
‘If I come to Belchamber there will only be a repetition of the ghastly
rows I had with mother in November, and what’s the good? I hate rows;
jawing never did me any good yet.’
Lady Charmington appealed to her brother. Lord Firth saw Arthur when he
came up for the meeting of parliament. Sainty could never learn
accurately what passed between them, but his uncle, that most amiable
gentleman, said he would not willingly speak to the boy again.
The spring wore away miserably in sickening suspense. Arthur was still
nominally working at ‘Monkton’s,’ but several letters had come from the
principal of the establishment, complaining of the slackness of his
attendance, which had not tended to soothe his mother’s feelings.
It was getting on for a year after the supper at the Hotel Fritz, when
Sainty, seeing a number of letters, most of which had a bill-like look
about them, on the hall table for Arthur, took them to his room to
re-direct. He was just about to do so, when he noticed that they had all
originally been sent to Monkton’s, and had been forwarded from there.
The postmarks of some of them were several weeks old, from which it was
evident not only that Arthur had not been at the crammer’s at all for
some time past, but that the people there believed him to be at home.
The pen dropped from Sainty’s hand, and he sat staring at the envelopes,
shuffling them idly from behind one another, as though they were a hand
at cards. Finally, shutting them sharply together, he thrust them into
his pocket, and went in search of his mother.
Since his defection at Christmas and the failure of Lord Firth to bring
the culprit to reason, Lady Charmington had talked much less of her
second son; for the most part she maintained a grim and offended
silence. Sainty wondered sometimes what this changed attitude might
mean. He was certain that she did not think less of Arthur, or worry
less about him. Was it possible that she had begun to distrust his
co-operation for any reason, and was trying to find out something for
herself without his help? Her manner, when he spoke to her on this
particular day, was stranger than ever, and she looked at him with a
sudden hard scrutiny which chilled him, when he asked if she did not
think it might be well for him to go to London and look Arthur up.
‘He never writes, and we don’t know what he may be doing,’ he said. ‘I
can’t let things drift in this way any longer.’
He said nothing of the letters in his pocket. Lady Charmington looked as
if she were on the point of saying something, and then decided not to.
‘Very well,’ she answered quietly; ‘how long shall you be gone?’
‘I don’t know; it will depend on what I find. Mother,’ he added, ‘don’t
you agree? don’t you think it will be well for me to go?’
Again his mother looked at him as if she would have read his soul; it
was the old glance that had made him stammer and look down as a child,
the look that said more clearly than words that she thought him a liar.
He had never been able to meet it. Instinctively he looked away.
‘Go, by all means,’ he heard her say, and he knew that her eyes were
still upon his face, the eyes of a judge, almost an accuser. ‘Go and see
what you can do. You may have means of getting at the truth not open to
me.’