TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
LOVE IN CHIEF
A Novel
BY
ROSE K. WEEKES
“One should master one’s passions (love, in chief),
And be loyal to one’s friends.”
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS
PUBLISHERS · MCMIV
Copyright, 1904, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published September, 1904.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. WRITE ME AS ONE WHO LOVES HIS FELLOW-MEN 1
II. HE THAT SHOWED MERCY ON HIM 11
III. THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND IS MAN 21
IV. I ALWAYS DID WHAT I DEVISED 35
V. SHE GOES ON SUNDAY TO THE CHURCH 48
VI. HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY 64
VII. COURAGE QUAND MÊME 78
VIII. I WILL NOT LET THEE GO 100
IX. WE TOOK SWEET COUNSEL TOGETHER 113
X. WAS THAT THE LANDMARK? 125
XI. IN ARDEN 141
XII. AND WILT THOU LEAVE ME THUS? 156
XIII. THE FIRST DROPS OF THE THUNDER-SHOWER 177
XIV. SMALL BEER 189
XV. COLLOQUIES WITH AN OUTSIDER 205
XVI. A NIGHT-PIECE 218
XVII. THE ONE SHALL BE TAKEN 243
XVIII. THE OTHER LEFT 254
XIX. ROMANCE BRINGS UP THE NINE-FIFTEEN 268
XX. SO THEY TWO WENT ON 283
LOVE IN CHIEF
LOVE IN CHIEF
I
WRITE ME AS ONE WHO LOVES HIS FELLOW-MEN
The waiting-room of Dr. Maude’s surgery at Monkswell was sparely
furnished with guests, mainly because the December weather was of that
mild and unseasonable type commonly called unhealthy. The darkness
outside was pierced by a fine, invisible rain, borne on a south wind,
and the waiting-room, though heat as well as light was spread only by
a single gas-burner, was not cold. One patient was with the doctor;
the details of his complaint could have been overheard by the others
if they had cared to listen, but they did not; sufficient unto them
were their own diseases. Five centres of self-complacent misery were
sitting on a cane-seated bench; the sixth person was leaning against
the wall with his hands in his pockets. The only other representative
of the male sex was eight years old, and had come to have a tooth out;
too stolid to feel nervous, he sat sucking peppermints. His mother,
in a decent black mantilla and a square-fronted bonnet trimmed with
red chrysanthemums, was talking to a girl with a baby about wrongs
invisible to the unjaundiced eye. The young mother’s dark eyes and
delicate features had the remains of real beauty, though two years of
matrimony had made her middle-aged; her pretty young sister, sitting
beside her, showed what she must have been. The baby was not handsome;
its pinkish-purple face was framed in a yellow woollen hood, and the
colour which should have tinged its cheeks had settled upon its ugly
little button of a nose and on its chin. It wheezed; the mother coughed
loosely; the girl stared before her; the young man also coughed, but
inobtrusively. He did not give to phthisis its due dignity.
The surgery presently discharged its patient and received the small
martyr to toothache. The young man took the seat left vacant; and the
gaslight, falling on his face, showed thin, brown features, eyebrows
strongly arched and strongly marked, and bright, vagrant eyes which
took an interest in everything. He edged a little closer to the young
mother and looked inquiring. Finding that did not answer, he plunged
into conversation with a speech which was admirable in sentiment but
not discreet in wording.
“Jolly baby, that.”
“Yes, he was a fine boy,” said the girl, her tired eyes quickening as
she looked down at her child, “but he’s after his teeth now, and it’s
pulled him daouwn awful. We didn’t have a wink of sleep with him last
night.”
“You must be pretty tired, then,” quoth the stranger. “Wonder if the
little chap would come to me?”
“He don’t like strangers,” said the mother, doubtfully. She was unused
to hear her boy called either a jolly baby or a little chap; and she
distrusted the abilities of a young man, plainly unmarried, moreover,
who used such terms.
“I’ll hold him like a patent rocking-chair,” the stranger asserted.
“Come on, sonny. You won’t howl at me, will you? Great land, what a
weight you are! I never turned ayah before—yes, put my eye out, will
you? What’s wrong besides the teeth?”
“He’s got a touch of bromtitus; I caught it washing-day, and he took it
from me. Oh, it’s crool work washing in the winter; our houses hasn’t
any coppers, and we has to do it all out at the back.”
“Do you mean you wash the clothes in the open air?”
“Every mite of ’em. My husband he’s been to the landlord times and
again, but he won’t do nothing for us; and they’re the cheapest houses
round, so we just have to put up with it.”
“What a beastly shame! Who’s your landlord?”
“Old Fane, up at Fanes. Ah, he is a hard man. Last time as Mr. Searle
went to see him, ‘You can take or leave it,’ he says; ‘I can get plenty
more as won’t complain. I will not be pestered with discontented
gutter-birds,’ he says. So my husband he come away; there wasn’t
nothing to be done.”
“Fane, I think you said,” said the brown-eyed stranger, upon whose face
the tale had painted a gleeful anticipation, as he took down the name
in a pocket-book. “I’m thinking I’d like a little friendly conversation
with Mr. Fane. Whereabouts is your place?”
“Burnt House, they call it; right out in the fields it is. If he’d put
in one copper for the six houses, you wouldn’t think he’d ever miss
the money. But he don’t care about us poor folks. I wish we was in
Farquhar’s houses, that I do.”
Conversation was here broken by Dr. Maude, who summoned Mrs. Searle
and her sister and the baby. Her short interview left her in tears. The
doctor had ordered milk, which seemed to her as far beyond her means
as caviare or turtle-soup. It would be got, but meanwhile Mrs. Searle
would starve, Mr. Searle would swear, and the debt at the shop would
grow. The stranger gave her a shilling, and fled into the surgery to
escape her thanks.
The place smelt strong of drugs; shelves laden with bottles climbed
up one wall, and the others were decorated with framed photographs
and cases of medical books. Everything was strictly professional and
methodically neat; and the doctor, slight and dark in appearance, cool
and composed in manner, was the essence of his room embodied.
“What’s your trouble?” he asked of the stranger, who stood before him
interested and insouciant, his hands still in his pockets.
“Hæmorrhage from the lungs. Oh, I’ve had the charming complaint before,
and I know the ways of it; I’ve been despaired of three times already.
But I’d like you just to tinker up my old constitution, if that’s
possible.”
“When did the hæmorrhage occur?”
“I had a smart attack Sunday, and it’s been off and on ever since.”
“Then you ought to be in bed.”
“Quite so, Æsculapius, but I haven’t one.”
“There is the workhouse infirmary at Alresworth.”
“To which I’m on the way; but I didn’t think I could git.”
Then there was silence, while Maude applied his stethoscope. After
testing the lungs he tried the heart, and after the heart other organs,
and soon discovered that his patient was a collection of inceptive
diseases. His questions elicited a tale of ill-health lightly borne in
which he did not believe, for stoicism is rare in surgery patients.
“I don’t know your face—where do you come from?” Maude asked him.
“I was at Alresworth with a travelling company as a kind of a sort of
a shadowy understudy of a sub-super, but I knocked up Sunday and was
left behind. Nobody missed me. I can’t act any more than a dead egg,”
said the patient, candidly—“ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine; is
that enough? But that don’t matter in the profession. Hullo, were you
in the cricket-team at Queens? Nice game, cricket. I always shone in it
myself.”
He disengaged himself, and walked across to study the photographed
groups on the wall.
“Come back, please; I have not done with you,” said the doctor. “What’s
your name?”
“Oh, _I_ don’t know—John Smith, I guess. Last time I played cricket
was near the English cemetery at Iquique. Jolly ground it was, too.
There’s never a drop of rain from year’s end to year’s end, so the turf
isn’t too good; but we had thousand-foot precipices on three sides
of the ground, and what could you ask more? We played till Saunders
made a boundary hit, and then we hadn’t a rope long enough to fetch
up the ball. Next time Saunders went up there was after Yellow Jack
had done with him. My hat! it was hot enough for kingdom come. The
very abomination of desolation; red hills, and never a blade of grass,
except the thread of green where the water comes down from the snows.”
“Well, John Smith,” said the doctor, “I can’t do much for you; your
constitution’s rotten. You had better stop talking, take this medicine,
and go to the infirmary, if it’s true that you have no home. A motor
’bus passes here at seven, and goes to Alresworth.”
The patient made a grimace. “More land of counterpane for me, I
suppose. Passes here at seven, does it? I shall certainly be ’bus-sick;
but, after all, tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. Take my tip,
Æsculapius, and don’t you drop your cricket. Good-night.”
It was only half-past six. Maude felt an impulse to recall the
picturesque stoic and bid him wait in the surgery until the omnibus
passed; but honesty is a rare quality, and the stranger, by pleasing
him, inspired him with mistrust. An observant man, he noticed that John
Smith spoke French like a Frenchman: a Parisian could have detected the
difference, for his accent was that of Guernsey: but Maude had learned
modern languages at a public school. In brief, the rain was inaudible
in the surgery; the stranger was a questionable character; and Maude
did not ask him in.
John Smith went out whistling; his frame was lean and gaunt and
loose-jointed, but he walked with a fine swing. The surgery was the
last house of the village. Some hundred yards further on the railway
embankment spanned the road, and a lane turning up just beyond it led
to the station. John Smith, sauntering along in the increasing rain,
found shelter beneath the arch and stayed there. The wind blew up from
the south straight through the tunnel, and the scene circumscribed by
the arc of masonry was wild and beautiful. Across the black sky raced
a froth of fleecy clouds, through which a half-moon shone, girt by a
pallid zone of blue and bronze. The wild streamers were so unearthly
pale, the heaven so solemnly dark, that only by the moon’s presence
could sky be told from cloud. Gray hills, crowned with dark soft masses
of woodland, folded down to a valley deep in mist, where a cluster of
golden lights burned like a constellation magnified by rain; while up
to his very feet the streaming road was turned to a sheet of glory by a
common street-lamp.
John Smith immediately brought out a penny pencil and a penny
exercise-book and began to write. Valiantly disregarding the
inequalities of the brick-work, he rested the paper against the wall.
He had thought of some elegant words and phrases for describing the
evening sky, and wanted to fix them fast on paper before they escaped
from his volatile memory. Actor he had been by chance, artist he
was by nature; an artist in words, he professed himself gravely; a
lover of apt phrase and finely balanced sentence; one of that happy
confraternity whose goal in a strange room is always the bookcase. He
had as many interests as ideas, but this reigned paramount.
The wind blew, and the rain came with it. It may have been the cold,
or it may have been the weight of Mrs. Searle’s baby, or it may have
been the inevitable sequence of his disease, which suddenly arrested
the writer’s hand, and made him, choking, press a handkerchief to his
lips to quell the flow. He knew how to meet the attack, and, lacking
any other couch, lay down in the road; he could not well be wetter, and
a mud-bath, at least, is warm. His handkerchief was drenched, but the
stream did not stop. Presently the moon dimmed before his eyes, and his
own troubled breathing seemed a far-off sound. It crossed his blurred
mind that he was about to solve the great riddle, and go out with
the wind; and he reflected with satisfaction that Dr. Maude, who had
unmercifully turned him out into the rain, would be visited by pangs
of conscience. He felt neither fear nor elation, but a certain regret
in leaving a world which he had persistently enjoyed in spite of all;
after which consciousness went out like a spark, and John Smith lay
still in the road.
II
HE THAT SHOWED MERCY ON HIM
Ten minutes later a train passed southwards across the arch. It had
discharged passengers at the station, and among them one who soon came
driving down the lane in a high dog-cart fitted with pneumatic tyres,
acetylene lamps, and a correct groom sitting up behind. As it turned
the corner the horse, a handsome chestnut signally well groomed, shied
violently at John Smith’s prostrate figure, and was promptly checked by
the driver, who had him well in hand. He looked back over his shoulder.
“What’s that, Simpson?”
“Drunken man, sir,” said the correct groom, stolidly.
“Pleasant weather to lie in the road. Still, will you?” He gripped the
reins as though to curb the restive horse gave him pleasure. “Just go
and see if he’s all right, Simpson. He’ll get run over lying under the
arch there.”
Simpson got down. He resented his master’s charitable fads when they
affected his comfort, but he dared not complain. It was true that Mr.
Farquhar carried generosity to his servants to its extreme limit, but
those who transgressed his laws had to go. He bent over John Smith and
announced with undeviating stolidity: “Been fighting, sir.”
“Fighting, has he? Come and hold the horse for a minute.”
Servant and master changed places, and Farquhar in his turn scrutinised
the features of John Smith. He moved the stained handkerchief, sniffed
at his lips, laid a finger on the spot where the pulse should have
beaten, and then stood up.
“Shift the seat as far forward as it’ll go. Yes; now put the cushions
in the bottom of the cart. The rug over them. Is the back let down?
That’s right.” He picked up John Smith and shouldered him as if he
were a gun. The luckless artist in words weighed less than eight
stone, but the strength required to lift him so easily was very great,
and was shown more remarkably still when Farquhar raised him up at
arm’s-length to put him into the dog-cart. Simpson lent his assistance,
protesting only by silence against the introduction of a drunken and
excessively muddy prodigal between the folds of the new carriage-rug.
His discretion was rewarded by his master, who explained, as he took
his seat again and picked up the reins: “It’s a case of illness, poor
chap. The man’s not drunk.”
“Very good, sir,” said Simpson, touching his cap; but he did not
believe it. Even the irreproachable Mr. Farquhar was no hero to his
groom.
About a mile beyond the arch Simpson had to get down to open a gate,
and the dog-cart drew up at the front door of The Lilacs, which was
the pleasing name of Farquhar’s bachelor residence. It was a large
modern villa built of red brick and white stucco, boasting Elizabethan
mullioned windows on the first floor, modern bays below, a castellated
turret, and a Byzantine porch with a cupola, which tasteful decorations
the officious ivy had done its best to veil. Inside, the house was
furnished well and, before all things, comfortably; it was heated by
an arrangement of hot-air pipes in the Russian fashion, and cooled in
summer by genuine punkahs. John Smith was carried in and laid before
the library fire; Simpson was sent to fetch the doctor, and the master
of the house himself attended on the muddy stranger. Farquhar was a
wonderfully good Good Samaritan.
He began by stripping off John Smith’s wet clothes, noting that the
shirt, which had seen its best and almost its worst days, was neatly
marked in a woman’s writing with the name of Lucian de Saumarez. His
other garments, which were in better condition, bore only the red
cotton hieroglyphics of the laundress. Few people could have excelled
Lucian de Saumarez in the art of dressing badly; his hat alone would
have roused envy in a scarecrow. Farquhar did not dare to give him
brandy, but he began to practise a remedy potent as alcohol and safer.
Kneeling beside the parchment-covered articulated skeleton on the
sofa, he ran his fingers over him with subtle, measured movements,
unpleasantly suggestive of the coiling and uncoiling of a snake. He had
learned the art of massage among strange people in a strange land; it
seemed literally to recall the spirit to the body it had quitted.
Lucian de Saumarez became conscious of existence in a tingling thrill
of warmth which crept all over his frame. The return to life was
exquisitely delicious; a deep peace rapt him far out of reach of pain,
and his mental faculties came back one by one while yet his bodily
sense was drowned in dreams. But, suddenly, he was aware of a change,
the truth being that Farquhar had paused in his task. Vague discomfort
followed; then he opened his eyes and saw, as a vignette beyond a
tunnel of darkness, the face of a man reading a letter. That letter,
written by a woman’s hand on thick blue paper with a gilded monogram,
was familiar to Lucian; it was the same which he for nine years had
carried close to his heart. Without wonder he saw the dream-stranger
turn the page and read to the end, he watched him fold it up and put
it back in its place; and then the trance reabsorbed him, and again he
revelled in delicious dreams under the magic touch of Noel Farquhar.
Some minutes later he came to himself completely, and discovered what
was being done to his unconscious frame. Lucian looked on massage
as first cousin to hypnotism, and hated both, with all the lively
independence of a character which could not bear to place itself, even
voluntarily, even for a moment, at the mercy of another man’s will.
Prepared with a strong protest, he opened his eyes and was struck
dumb. In the open English face of Noel Farquhar he recognized the
dream-vision who had read his letter.
“Ah, you’ve come to yourself,” said Farquhar, pleasantly. “You’re with
friends; don’t speak. The doctor will be here directly.”
Lucian put up his eyebrows, sent his eyes straying round the room, and
brought them back to his host’s face with an air of inquiry. Farquhar
smiled.
“How you came here? My horse shied at you and I picked you up. My
name’s Farquhar—Noel Farquhar.”
“M. P.?” said Lucian, who was by fits an ardent politician.
“Quite right. Can I communicate with your friends?”
“Don’t own any.”
“I hope you won’t say that long. Now you really must not talk any more;
I sha’n’t answer you if you do.”
As he evidently meant to keep his word, Lucian subsided, and gave
himself up to observing. The room was conventionally furnished, but he
saw on the floor the skin of a black panther, and behind the door the
nine-foot spiral ivory horn of a narwhal, trophies which even Whiteley
cannot provide. Himself a wanderer, he rejoiced to see such tokens of
his host’s pursuits; a sportsman is kin to a sportsman all the world
over. From studying the furniture he turned to study Noel Farquhar.
Most people knew the name of the member for Mid-Kent, and his face
was tolerably familiar through the slanderous presentations which the
papers call portraits. He had been in Parliament for several years,
and was supposed to be a coming man. When he got on his legs, members
deferred their engagements; his speeches were generally lively, always
pithy, and never long, a trinity of virtues rare as the Christian
graces, and, like them, culminating in the last. He had the advantage
of a good voice and delivery. As a politician he was incorruptible; he
would criticise his own party, when it seemed in danger of deviating
from that ideal of rectitude which animates the bosom of every
British statesman. A Bayard without fear or reproach, a high-souled
patriot with a caustic tongue, he had a niche all to himself among
parliamentary celebrities.
He stood in his socks only five feet nine, but the width of his
shoulders was exceptional, and his frame was lean and hard and supple
as a panther’s. Every muscle had been trained and trained again to
the pitch of excellency, and every movement had the sure grace of
controlled strength. The comeliness of perfect health and physical
fitness was his; he diffused a kind of tonic energy which acted on
susceptible people almost like an electric current. For the rest, he
was the typical Englishman: fair-haired, grey-eyed, sunburnt, pleasant,
in spite of the grim curve of cheek and jaw, which matched the almost
ominous strength of his physique. Lucian, like other people, would have
accepted him for what he seemed, if he had not seen him deliberately
reading through his love-letter. As it was, he looked into the fair,
open face and knew him for a humbug; though he could not imagine why
he should have read it, nor how it could advantage him to befriend a
miserable, sordid, reprobate, and degraded outcast such as Lucian de
Saumarez.
Dr. Maude came hard on the heels of the returning Simpson; he did
not resort to Bob Sawyer’s tactics to increase the reputation of his
practice. Farquhar met him in the hall and brought him in, and the
patient overheard an edifying fragment of conversation.
“Well, I couldn’t very well leave him out in the road, poor chap, so I
had to bring him along.”
“And he will probably recoup himself from your plate-chest.”
“What a cynic you are! I never thought of such a thing,” said Farquhar,
laughing.
“Your innocence must stand in your way sometimes, I should think.”
“I never knew it do so. I believe, myself, that trust begets
trustworthiness.”
“Ah, you’re a philanthropist,” said Maude, walking into the room. The
patient lay quiet, apparently unconscious. “I expected that it was this
fellow you’d got hold of,” Maude said, without surprise. “He came to me
an hour ago. I told him to go to Alresworth infirmary; I suppose he
had an attack while waiting for the ’bus.”
“Well, I think you might have let him wait in the surgery.”
“He’s probably a thief. I don’t profess to be a philanthropist, myself.”
“Philanthropist, indeed!” said Farquhar. “It’s not philanthropy I’m
feeling for you, doctor.”
“I dare say,” Maude responded, proceeding with his analysis of Lucian’s
bones.
“You persist in crediting me with virtues I don’t possess.”
“Modesty’s your great fault; every one knows that.”
“Well, yours isn’t over-amiability, anyhow,” returned Farquhar, again
laughing.
Satirical compliments are more difficult to meet than most forms of
attack, but Farquhar’s unconsciousness was a perfect piece of acting.
Lucian wondered whether Maude knew the motive of his philanthropy.
As a fact, Maude knew nothing and suspected merely because Farquhar
was a virtuous person; he would have believed that the Apostle Peter
got himself martyred for a consideration, and canonised by a piece of
celestial jobbery. Being put to rebuke, he confined his conversation to
the subject of Lucian’s illness, and in a short time the prodigal was
installed in the best room and fed with the fatted calf under the form
of tinned essence of beef.
III
THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND IS MAN
For several days Lucian was kept dumb by the tactics of his host,
who walked punctually out of the room as soon as the invalid opened
his lips. In half an hour he would return to the chafing guest; and
then, if Lucian remained silent, he heard the paper read aloud, but
if he dared to speak he was once more left to himself. As Lucian was
eminently gregarious and hated his own society, the discipline achieved
its object. He was treated like a royal guest, and repaid his host by
vivisecting his character. The ground of his suspicions seemed trivial,
but was substantial. Feeling the letter in its old place, Lucian
sometimes wondered if he had dreamed that scene. But, no, he knew it
was real; for the reason that he had seen on Farquhar’s face as he read
an expression which he could never have imagined. What he suspected was
not very clear; but Lucian had an inquisitive disposition, and his
interests at this time were limited in number. Hence his exaggerated
curiosity.
The church at Monkswell was heated by pipes which on mild days brought
the temperature up to seventy degrees Fahrenheit, and in cold weather
left the air in such a condition that to uncover his bald head was
a severe trial of the parson’s faith. The weather had changed, and
Farquhar, coming in after service on Sunday afternoon, went straight to
the fire to warm his hands. He was an exemplary church-goer.
“Cold?” inquired Lucian, who was now allowed to talk a little.
“Bitterly. The snow-wind’s blowing; we shall be white to-morrow, if I
don’t err.”
“Gale at seventy miles an hour, temperature twenty degrees below zero;
yes, I’ve tried that out in Athabasca, and it didn’t suit me,” said
Lucian, whose rebellious body appreciated luxury though his hardy
spirit despised it.
“My faith, no! but I’m not sure that twenty degrees below isn’t better
than a hundred and twenty above.”
“That’s a nice preparation for the bad time coming,” said the
incorrigible Lucian. “Talking of which, what was that devilry you used
when you carried in my fainting form?”
“Devilry, indeed! It was massage.”
“Not the ordinary, common or garden English massage, sonny; I’ve tried
that.”
“Massage is massage all the world over, I should have said. However, I
learned mine in Africa.”
“And who was your moonshee?”
“An old Arab sheikh who wore immaculate robes, and carried a dagger
with a handle of silver filigree and a very sharp point, with which he
prodded his slaves when they failed in their duties. Are you satisfied
now?”
“No, not in the least; but I didn’t expect to be. Who’s old Fane?”
“My dear fellow,” said Farquhar, mildly, “your mind reminds me of a
flea. Mr. Fane is a farmer hereabouts, a kind of local squire.”
“Is he well off?”
“Tolerably, I believe. Why do you ask?”
“Old curmudgeon!” said Lucian. “Stingy old miserly murderer!”
“One at a time, I beg,” said Farquhar.
“Well, he may be an angel incognito, but his war-paint’s unco guid,
that’s all.”
“How has he roused your righteous wrath?”
Lucian related Mrs. Searle’s story, waxing eloquent over her wrongs,
and illustrating his points with rapid foreign gestures, as his
manner was. Farquhar compressed his lips, which already joined in a
sufficiently firm line. “I know those houses,” he said; “they are
unfit for habitation. I tried to get them condemned a year ago. Want a
copper, do they? They’ll never get it from Fane.”
“I wish he’d tried what starvation’s like, that’s all.”
“Have you?”
“Have I? I was a thousandaire till I was four-and-twenty,” said Lucian,
clasping his lean, brown hands behind his head—“but since then, devil
a penny have I had to spend! My head is bloody but unbowed beneath the
bludgeonings of Fate—W. E. Henley. I’m proud to say I could take the
shine out of Orestes.”
Farquhar sat down by the fire and pulled the tea-table towards him.
He was very useful at an afternoon party: could always remember the
precise formula for every person’s several cup. “How did you lose your
money?” he inquired, flavoring his own tea with lemon, in the Russian
style.
“Sixteen thousand in one night playing écarté, sonny. No, don’t preach;
I never gamble now I’ve got no money. Besides, on that memorable
occasion my circumstances were exceptional.”
“Exceptionally bad, I should think. What did you do?”
“What did I do? Commenced author, and I flatter myself I should have
made a decided hit, only I was overtaken by what another distinguished
author calls Bluidy Jack. The medico swore it was the writing brought
it on. I also swore, in many tongues, and had a second go; I held on
gallantly for three months, and then went to a hospital, and a nurse
fell in love with me. ‘Those lips so sweet, so honey-sweet—’ We swore
fidelity. I shared with her my fortune—we broke a sixpence. She had
three hundred a year and a large soul. Inconstant creature! On getting
my ticket-of-leave from the hospital I introduced her to my chief pal;
and would you believe it? the base villain borrowed my first fiver to
elope with her with.”
“Good Heavens, de Saumarez!” said Farquhar, laughing against his will,
“you don’t mean to tell me that all this is true?”
“True? _True?_ Every blessed word of it. I then tried to ’list, but
couldn’t pass the medical. So I got another pal and started as a
tomato-johnny in Guernsey. We’re Guernsey people, you know,” he added,
his voice taking a different intonation. “I’ve a certain affection
for it, too; there I’ll hope to lay these carious old bones of mine
when I’ve done with them. Mighty poor crops they’ll make, too. Well,
I thought Guernsey, being my own, my native land, might be a sort of
all-inclusive mascot for me. But, Lord bless you, sonny, it rained
thunderbolts! Give you my word, no sooner were our glass-houses up than
there arrived a record shower of aerolites; sticky, shiny, black things
they were, for all the world like liquorice. Two-thirds of the panes
went. As I didn’t want to wreck the bosom friend’s boat, we dissolved
partnership, and Jonah went off on his own.”
Farquhar could himself corroborate this story; he remembered the
meteoric shower, which had attracted some attention.
“The stars in their courses came out of them to fight against me, you
see. Well, I went back to town and held horses. I fared sumptuously
every day at coffee-stalls, or at Lockhart’s when I was in funds. I
draw a veil over this period. I was submerged. Then, in hospital, I
met a very decent fellow who got me a berth in Miss Inez Montroni’s
travelling company, where I lived gaily on a pound a week till that
memorable Sawbath which I broke by knocking up. I was discovered by a
kind angel: adsum. Are you insured against fire?”
“Oh, I’m not afraid of ill-luck!” said Farquhar.
“Aren’t you, now? I detect a kind of arrogance, a sort of healthy
scepticism in your tone, my friend. I wonder what you are afraid of?
Not much, I guess.”
“Was your ill-health hereditary?” asked Farquhar, who as a temperance
advocate studied the question of transmission.
“Don’t know. My parents died ere I was born, and never saw their son,
you see. I inherited my bad luck, anyway.
‘Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!’”
“It hasn’t depressed your spirits.”
“Oh, I don’t believe in letting trouble beat you.”
“You talk as though trouble were a living personality.”
“So it is; a force inimical, to be conquered, held down, and trampled
into the earth.”
“I don’t see how you’re going to conquer trouble. It has its way, and
that’s all.”
“It’s not all. Trouble will make a man despair, or drink, or gamble,
or go mad, or maybe even shoot himself. Well, I’d defy it to make me
deflect a hair’s-breadth from myself, come all the shafts of fate. As
long as I’ve lips I’ll grin.”
“That’s how you take things?” said Farquhar. “Well, it’s not my way.”
His face lighted up with a heady defiance, his lips shut in a straight
line, his eyes sparkled with quite unregenerate fire.
“What is your way, then?”
Farquhar’s expression went instantly out, and he lowered his eyelids.
“Well, you know, things are different for you and me,” he said,
diffidently. “I’m lucky in having a religious faith to fall back on.”
“Oh, I _do_ like you!” said Lucian, after a few seconds, smitten with
an admiration which was not wholly admirable. He solemnly stretched out
his hand. “Sonny, you’re a great man,” he declared. “I wish I had your
cheek. Shake!”
Farquhar smiled politely, deprecated the compliment, and evaded the
point at issue; and shortly afterwards conveyed himself out of the room
on the plea that the invalid had done enough talking. It was fortunate
for him that the language of the eye cannot be put in as evidence,
for Lucian knew that he had detected, in Farquhar’s too candid orbs,
a tacit acknowledgment of all the deceit wherewith he was desirous of
charging him.
Next morning in country and city men awoke to a white, silent world
under a dome of blue, immaculate sky. There was no wind; and the
breath of horse and rider hung still in the air after Noel Farquhar
as he rode up to Burnt House. A huge sweep of bare, white country lay
outspread, sparkling in the sun; the hedges were so thickly thatched
with snow that they did not break the even whiteness of the prospect.
The miserable little group of black, wooden cottages, Farquhar’s goal,
was discernible a great way off; they were so lonely that when Farquhar
rode back an hour later only his own tracks, black where the crushed
snow had melted, confronted him upon the road.
The day passed, and several beside, and a week later the soiled rags
of the snow still lingered under hedges and by tussocks in the fields
when Farquhar took another morning ride, this time in the direction
of Fanes. The house lay low; its E-shaped façade, built of bright-red
brick and ornamented with facings of freestone, and with diagonal bands
of dark brown crossing one another, looked across shaven lawns and wide
gravel paths to a stream formally laid out with cascades and little
islands, in summer bright with roses. Some noble trees sprang from
the lawn; in particular, a most beautiful silver birch, whose slight,
tapering branches sustained a colony of ragged black blots, which were
the nests of the rooks of Fanes. The birds took toll from all the
orchards around, and were almost as well hated as their owners.
Mr. Fane had a thin, tall figure, with stooping shoulders and
forward-thrusting head. A pair of keen, cold eyes looked suspiciously
forth from under penthouse brows; self-sufficiency had compressed
his lips, selfish study had hollowed his cheeks, and his thin, even
voice, precise in enunciation even to pedantry, was the true index of a
steadfastly unamiable character. The Fanes enjoyed great unpopularity;
father, son, and daughter, they were all shunned like lepers. Old
Fane had married abroad; no one heard his wife’s maiden name, and
when he came back as a widower nobody cared to ask. The two children
grew up as they would. The son, Bernard, was notoriously a poacher;
the daughter was a beauty, a wild rider, untutored and untamed, and
shared, so it was said, her brother’s heinous crimes in the preserves.
It was this business which shut off the young Fanes from the society of
their peers. Once in past years they had made their appearance at the
first meet of the season, but they never went again; and thenceforward
avoided society more scrupulously than society avoided them.
All this happened before Noel Farquhar came to The Lilacs. He had more
than once tried to make friends with young Fane, and had been snubbed
for his pains; and thus to this hour matters stood. Nobody knew much
about them, but they possessed a fearsome reputation, which caused
nervous ladies to skip nimbly over fences when they saw Bernard Fane
approaching on his big black horse.
Eumenes Fane received in his library, a long, low room walled with
books. One case held tier on tier of novels in their native French,
both old and new; another was devoted to theology, and put a row of
Blair’s most unchristian sermons across the middle shelf as a gilded
breastplate against the assaults of modern heresies. Mr. Fane was
a ferocious Calvinist; he felt it his duty to go in for hell, and
wished to exact consent in the same beliefs from his children, his
servants, and in ever-widening circles from the ends of the earth. Over
the mantel hung an interesting old design in black and white, which
represented the Last Day: a small queue of saints in stained-glass
attitudes ascending the celestial mountains under the convoy of
woolly angels, a large corps of sinners being haled out of their
tombs by demons armed with three-pronged spears, which they used as
toasting-forks. His Satanic Majesty was gleefully directing their
operations, amid tongues of realistic flame. On the card-board mount of
the picture the following verse was inscribed in youthful round-hand:
_Perdition is needful; beyond any doubt
Hell fire is a thing that we can’t do without.
Saltpetre and pitchforks with brimstone and coals
Are arguments new to rescue men’s souls.
We must keep it up, if we like it or not,
And make it eternal, and make it red-hot._
_Mirabelle Fane._
The signature seemed to indicate that Mr. Fane was not always
implicitly obeyed by his children.
He remained sitting when Farquhar was announced, and looked as
forbidding as possible. Farquhar bowed, and looked as pleasant as
possible. The interview promised to be unconventional.
“You are Noel Farquhar?”
“That’s my name, sir,” said Farquhar, always particularly respectful to
an elderly man.
“You write to me that you have made some alterations in my cottages at
Burnt House,” continued old Fane, referring to a letter in his hand.
“I have, sir; and I hope you will forgive my officiousness in acting
without your leave.”
“I understand that you have put in a copper.”
“It hasn’t damaged the property; I’ll answer for that; and it was
pretty badly wanted. If you’d looked at the place yourself—”
“Where is the copper set?”
“As a lean-to on the last house.”
“What are the dimensions?”
Farquhar supplied him with precise particulars. “I happened to hear
the story from one of your tenants, and I ordered the thing at once,
without a thought of the landlord’s right in the matter. When I did
remember, it was too late; the work was begun. I can assure you, sir,
that it actually adds to the value of the property.”
“So I supposed. What should you say at a guess is the rental worth of
the improvement?”
“Oh, something very small; not more than sixpence a week, sir.”
Mr. Fane made an entry in his book. “Thank you; I am much obliged to
you. Good-morning.”
“You’ll overlook my indiscretion?”
“Overlook it? Indiscretion? I am a poor man, and you have put into my
pocket three shillings a week, Mr. Farquhar; I am greatly indebted to
you.”
“I have put into your pocket three shillings a week?”
“The additional rent of the six houses, you understand.”
“You mean to raise the rent?”
“Certainly. Indiscriminate charity is against my principles.”
“But, sir, they’ll never be able to pay it.”
“I shall, I hope, find other tenants who will.”
“And the charity is mine, Mr. Fane.”
“And the houses are mine, Mr. Farquhar. Would you be so good as to let
yourself out? The men are out on the farm. You cannot well miss your
way.”
Farquhar took up his hat and retired. He really could not attempt to
argue the matter, and was aware that he had been neatly outwitted. So
great a philanthropist should have been saddened by thoughts of the
Searles, victims of his blunder; but Noel Farquhar, as he walked down
the hall, was smiling, in candid appreciation of the nice precision of
his defeat.
IV
MY ACTIONS ALWAYS HARMONISED
WITH MY OWN SWEET VOLITION;
I ALWAYS DID WHAT I DEVISED
AND RARELY ASKED PERMISSION.
Ere he was able to let himself out, however, he was recalled.
“Mr. Noel Farquhar!”
Farquhar turned, and saw on the stairs a girl with a small head and a
crown of chestnut hair. She came leisurely down with her hand on the
balustrade, planting each foot lightly but with decision; her gait was
very characteristic. The light was from behind and left her features
dark. When she had reached the hall, “I want to speak to you,” said
she, calmly; “please to come in here.”
Farquhar held his peace and followed her into another low room,
littered with more books and with Miss Fane’s somewhat masculine
appurtenances—a pair of dogskin gloves, a hard felt hat, and a
riding-whip among them. Armorial bearings were carved upon the lintel
and traced again in silver upon the uprights of the andirons, across
which logs were lying, in primitive style. The girl went first to the
fire and stooped to warm her hands before she confronted him.
“Have you been talking to my father?”
“Am I speaking to Miss Fane?”
“Of course; why do you ask such a question as that?”
“Because I really was not sure; I thought you were younger.”
“Most people know us by sight, though we are too wicked to be
received,” returned Miss Fane, indifferently. “I don’t know whether you
mistook me for a servant. However, that doesn’t matter; have you been
speaking to my father?”
“I came by appointment on a business matter, Miss Fane.”
“About those cottages at Burnt House. You should have written to my
brother Bernard; he manages the farm, and he is reasonable to deal
with. Does my father mean to raise the rents?”
“He said such was his intention, but I hope he will think better of it.”
“Oh no, he won’t. Are you going to acquiesce, and let your protégés be
evicted?”
“I can hardly make Mr. Fane lower the rents, can I?”
“You could make up the difference yourself.”
As this was precisely what Farquhar had determined to do, he was, of
course, struck by her intelligence. But he did his alms in modest
secrecy. “I dare say they will find the extra sixpence,” he said.
“They can’t. Searle drinks, and the others are as bad, or worse.
They’re helpless.”
Farquhar did not answer her. She had just moved into the sunlight, and
he was startled by her beauty. No flower-loveliness was hers, delicate
and evanescent; she glowed like a jewel with colour, the brighter for
the sunlight which illumined the rich damask of her cheeks, the rich
whiteness of her brow, the rich hazel of her eyes, the rich chestnut
of her hair. Dolly Fane possessed in its full splendour the misnamed
devil’s beauty, the beauty of colour, vitality, youth. Her lips were
virginally severe, her figure slight, girlishly formed, not yet mature;
she was not so old, nor yet so self-possessed, as she wished to appear.
“Well, if you are giving in there is no more to be said,” she added,
with a slight contemptuous movement which was plainly a prelude to
showing him out.
Farquhar hastily cast to the winds his modest reserve. “I am not giving
in; I do mean to make up the difference,” he said.
“You do?” said Dolly, fastening her eyes upon him.
“You’re very charitable, Miss Fane,” said Farquhar, smiling.
“Not in the least. I am sorry for Mrs. Searle; but I did not ask you
for that reason. I wanted to see what you are like. You’ve spoken to my
brother Bernard once or twice, haven’t you?”
“I have; but he did not seem interested in my conversation.”
“Oh, that’s Bernard’s way; he always thinks people mean to patronise
him. You know London well, don’t you?”
“I’ve lived a good deal in town, certainly.”
“Should I pass muster in society?”
“Pass muster?” Farquhar repeated. It was not easy to abash him, but
this young beauty, with her odd questions, contrived to do it.
“Yes. I know I am behaving in an unusual way now, but have I the accent
and the appearance of a lady?”
“Most certainly you have.”
“Do you think so? Should I get on in town? Do you think I am
sufficiently presentable to be an actress?”
“An _actress_? Yes, I should say you were.”
“You’ve not seen me act, of course; I can do it. And I’ve a passable
voice, and I’m fairly good-looking. Books say that theatre-goers will
put up with poor acting for the sake of a pretty face; is that true?”
“It depends on the prettiness of the face. It would be true in your
case.”
“I don’t in the least want compliments. I want the plain truth.”
“And I’m giving it.”
“Oh,” said Dolly, evidently disconcerted. He had checked her for the
minute, and she remained silent, though fresh questions were at her
very lips.
“Are you fond of acting?” Farquhar asked, to loosen her tongue. “Are
you burning to play Juliet?”
“Juliet? Oh no! I’d like to be Cleopatra or Lady Macbeth, though. Some
one powerful and perhaps wicked; but not like La Dame aux Camélias, or
Iris, or Agnes Ebbsmith. If _I_ threw the Bible in the fire, I should
keep it there.”
“And make it eternal, and make it red-hot,” suggested Farquhar.
“Did you read those lines? Aren’t they good? Years ago I wrote them
there, and father never could make me rub them out, though he tried
with his riding-whip. But that wouldn’t interest you. On your honour,
do you think I should have a chance on the stage?”
“On my honour, I do. But why do you want to go? I should have thought
you’d too much sense to be stage-struck.”
“I’m not stage-struck, but I want to leave this place, and that seems
the simplest way. We are badly off. I never see any one except my
brother. I do not know how to behave. I have never had the chance of
speaking to a gentleman before: which was why I called you in and asked
you these questions. I expect no girl you know would have done it,
would she?”
“You’re right—she wouldn’t; the more fool she, if she wanted the answer
as badly as you did.”
“Exactly,” said Dolly; “for, after all, it doesn’t matter what you
think of me.”
Farquhar slightly altered his whole bearing. He leaned against the
chimney-piece and looked her in the face. “My opinion does matter,
you know,” he said. “I’ve some influence, which I could use either to
promote or to frustrate your interests. I know plenty managers, and so
forth, and I’m popular.”
“It does not matter,” Dolly corrected swiftly; “for I would under no
circumstances consent to be beholden to you for anything beyond the
piece of truth you’ve already given me.”
“You’re independent.”
“I hope so.”
“I’d much like to teach you to obey.”
“Mathematicians have always wanted to square the circle.”
“You’ve a will of your own; you’re worth talking to.”
“Is this how a gentleman speaks to a lady?”
“No, it’s how a man speaks to a woman.”
Dolly glanced out of the window. “That’s my brother Bernard with his
dogs. He stands six foot three, and he’s the best wrestler in Kent.”
“Meaning you’d set him to turn me out? He’d never do it.”
“Do you think you’re as strong as Bernard?”
“Stronger,” answered Farquhar, stretching out his arm. Pride of
strength was in that gesture, and more than pride—arrogance.
Dolly had a primitive admiration for strength, and his self-confidence
tingled through her veins. She liked him the better that he was
dangerous to handle; she was more at her ease that they were outside
convention.
“At least, you’re not stronger than Bernard plus half a dozen men whom
I could call in a minute,” she remarked, evenly. “Wouldn’t it be wiser
to make no fuss, but go?”
Farquhar started, passed his hand across his eyes, and looked at her
earnestly, as though her words had wakened him. “Miss Fane, I believe
I’ve been saying the most outrageous things!” he exclaimed. “Haven’t I?
I don’t know what possessed me. What have I said?”
“A little harmless nonsense, that’s all,” Dolly assured him.
“I must ask you to forgive me. To tell the truth, I’d a touch of
sunstroke out in Africa, and since then I’m not my own master at times.
I’m literally out of my wits. I don’t know what I’ve said, but nothing
was farther from my mind than any rudeness to you—to any lady. You will
believe that?”
“Perhaps. Good-bye.”
“You won’t punish me by declining to speak to me?”
“We aren’t likely to meet. Your friends don’t know me.”
“We shall meet, if you allow it. Will you?”
“Will I, now?” said Dolly. She went and threw open the door.
“Good-morning.”
Farquhar pleaded, but his words were wasted. Not a word more would Miss
Fane say, and at last he took up his hat and walked out.
When she had watched him out of sight, Dolly went bareheaded across the
lawn to a tool-shed under the trees, round which circled a numerous
company of dogs, ranging from a smart terrier up to a huge grave
brute, half bloodhound, half Great Dane, of the breed which Virginian
planters used in the good old days for tracking down their runaway
slaves. Within, Dolly found the tall young fellow whom she had pointed
out to Farquhar. He was darker than his sister, and not so handsome,
but the two were plainly slips of the same tree. Bernard’s manners
needed attention. When his sister appeared he did not lay down his saw,
which produced an ear-piercing rasping and ratching such as denied
conversation. Dolly put her hand on his and arrested his work by force.
“Well, what did that chap Farquhar want?” asked Bernard, without
resentment.
Dolly related Farquhar’s doings at Burnt House, and the sequel.
Bernard’s comment was: “I guess he must be an ass,” and he took up his
saw to resume work, but was once more summarily stopped by his sister.
These incidents were stages in the conversation; as people of quick
wits often do when they live together, these two were in the habit of
expressing themselves by signs.
“He’s going to pay the difference himself, and not let father know,”
Dolly explained.
“Then I guess he’s only a soft. But how did you hear?”
“I called him into the parlour and asked. I asked him whether I should
succeed on the stage.”