Your youth gives me the impression that you have gone into this affair
from a spirit of adventure. I can assure you that you have nothing to
gain commercially by interfering with my late kingdom. I hope, before
we part, that I can persuade you to abandon your idea of financing this
movement to restore me to the throne.
“I don't understand--er--your majesty.”
“I will explain. Please treat what I shall say as strictly confidential.
You must know, Mr. Bleke, that these attempts to re-establish me as a
reigning monarch in Paranoya are, frankly, the curse of an otherwise
very pleasant existence. You look surprized? My dear sir, do you know
Paranoya? Have you ever been there? Have you the remotest idea what sort
of life a King of Paranoya leads? I have tried it, and I can assure
you that a coal-heaver is happy by comparison. In the first place, the
climate of the country is abominable. I always had a cold in the head.
Secondly, there is a small but energetic section of the populace whose
sole recreation it seems to be to use their monarch as a target for
bombs. They are not very good bombs, it is true, but one in, say, ten
explodes, and even an occasional bomb is unpleasant if you are the
target.
“Finally, I am much too fond of your delightful country to wish to leave
it. I was educated in England--I am a Magdalene College man--and I have
the greatest horror of ever being compelled to leave it. My present life
suits me exactly. That is all I wished to say, Mr. Bleke. For both our
sakes, for the sake of my comfort and your purse, abandon this scheme of
yours.”
* * * * *
Roland walked home thoughtfully. Maraquita had left the royal residence
long before he had finished the whisky-and-soda which the genial monarch
had pressed upon him. As he walked, the futility of his situation came
home to him more and more. Whatever he did, he was bound to displease
somebody; and these Paranoyans were so confoundedly impulsive when they
were vexed.
For two days he avoided Maraquita. On the third, with something of the
instinct which draws the murderer to the spot where he has buried the
body, he called at her house.
She was not present, but otherwise there was a full gathering. There
were the marquises; there were the counts; there was Bombito.
He looked unhappily round the crowd.
Somebody gave him a glass of champagne. He raised it.
“To the revolution,” he said mechanically.
There was a silence--it seemed to Roland an awkward silence. As if he
had said something improper, the marquises and counts began to drift
from the room, till only Bombito was left. Roland regarded him with some
apprehension. He was looking larger and more unusual than ever.
But to-night, apparently, Bombito was in genial mood. He came forward
and slapped Roland on the shoulder. And then the remarkable fact came to
light that Bombito spoke English, or a sort of English.
“My old chap,” he said. “I would have a speech with you.”
He slapped Roland again on the shoulder.
“The others they say, 'Break it with Senor Bleke gently.' Maraquita say
'Break it with Senor Bleke gently.' So I break it with you gently.”
He dealt Roland a third stupendous punch. Whatever was to be broken
gently, it was plain to Roland that it was not himself. And suddenly
there came to him a sort of intuition that told him that Bombito was
nervous.
“After all you have done for us, Senor Bleke, we shall seem to you
ungrateful bounders, but what is it? Yes? No? I shouldn't wonder,
perhaps. The whole fact is that there has been political crisis in
Paranoya. Upset. Apple-cart. Yes? You follow? No? The Ministry have
been--what do you say?--put through it. Expelled. Broken up. No more
ministry. New ministry wanted. To conciliate royalist party, that is
the cry. So deputation of leading persons, mighty good chaps, prominent
merchants and that sort of bounder, call upon us. They offer me to be
President. See? No? Yes? That's right. I am ambitious blighter, Senor
Bleke. What about it, no? I accept. I am new President of Paranoya. So
no need for your kind assistance. Royalist revolution up the spout. No
more royalist revolution.”
The wave of relief which swept over Roland ebbed sufficiently after an
interval to enable him to think of some one but himself. He was not fond
of Maraquita, but he had a tender heart, and this, he felt, would kill
the poor girl.
“But Maraquita----?”
“That's all right, splendid old chap. No need to worry about Maraquita,
stout old boy. Where the husband goes, so does the wife go. As you say,
whither thou goes will I follow. No?”
“But I don't understand. Maraquita is not your wife?”
“Why, certainly, good old heart. What else?”
“Have you been married to her all the time?”
“Why, certainly, good, dear boy.”
The room swam before Roland's eyes. There was no room in his mind
for meditations on the perfidy of woman. He groped forward and found
Bombito's hand.
“By Jove,” he said thickly, as he wrung it again and again, “I knew you
were a good sort the first time I saw you. Have a drink or something.
Have a cigar or something. Have something, anyway, and sit down and tell
me all about it.”
THE EPISODE OF THE HIRED PAST
Final Story of the Series [First published in _Pictorial Review_,
October 1916]
“What do you mean--you can't marry him after all? After all what? Why
can't you marry him? You are perfectly childish.”
Lord Evenwood's gentle voice, which had in its time lulled the House
of Peers to slumber more often than any voice ever heard in the
Gilded Chamber, had in it a note of unwonted, but quite justifiable,
irritation. If there was one thing more than another that Lord Evenwood
disliked, it was any interference with arrangements already made.
“The man,” he continued, “is not unsightly. The man is not conspicuously
vulgar. The man does not eat peas with his knife. The man pronounces his
aitches with meticulous care and accuracy. The man, moreover, is worth
rather more than a quarter of a million pounds. I repeat, you are
childish!”
“Yes, I know he's a very decent little chap, Father,” said Lady Eva.
“It's not that at all.”
“I should be gratified, then, to hear what, in your opinion, it is.”
“Well, do you think I could be happy with him?”
Lady Kimbuck gave tongue. She was Lord Evenwood's sister. She spent a
very happy widowhood interfering in the affairs of the various branches
of her family.
“We're not asking you to be happy. You have such odd ideas of happiness.
Your idea of happiness is to be married to your cousin Gerry, whose only
visible means of support, so far as I can gather, is the four hundred
a year which he draws as a member for a constituency which has every
intention of throwing him out at the next election.”
Lady Eva blushed. Lady Kimbuck's faculty for nosing out the secrets of
her family had made her justly disliked from the Hebrides to Southern
Cornwall.
“Young O'Rion is not to be thought of,” said Lord Evenwood firmly. “Not
for an instant. Apart from anything else, his politics are all
wrong. Moreover, you are engaged to this Mr. Bleke. It is a sacred
responsibility not lightly to be evaded. You can not pledge your
word one day to enter upon the most solemn contract known to--ah--the
civilized world, and break it the next. It is not fair to the man. It is
not fair to me. You know that all I live for is to see you comfortably
settled. If I could myself do anything for you, the matter would be
different. But these abominable land-taxes and Blowick--especially
Blowick--no, no, it's out of the question. You will be very sorry if you
do anything foolish. I can assure you that Roland Blekes are not to be
found--ah--on every bush. Men are extremely shy of marrying nowadays.”
“Especially,” said Lady Kimbuck, “into a family like ours. What with
Blowick's scandal, and that shocking business of your grandfather
and the circus-woman, to say nothing of your poor father's trouble in
'85----”
“Thank you, Sophia,” interrupted Lord Evenwood, hurriedly. “It is
unnecessary to go into all that now. Suffice it that there are adequate
reasons, apart from all moral obligations, why Eva should not break her
word to Mr. Bleke.”
Lady Kimbuck's encyclopedic grip of the family annals was a source of
the utmost discomfort to her relatives. It was known that more than one
firm of publishers had made her tempting offers for her reminiscences,
and the family looked on like nervous spectators at a battle while
Cupidity fought its ceaseless fight with Laziness; for the Evenwood
family had at various times and in various ways stimulated the
circulation of the evening papers. Most of them were living down
something, and it was Lady Kimbuck's habit, when thwarted in her
lightest whim, to retire to her boudoir and announce that she was not
to be disturbed as she was at last making a start on her book. Abject
surrender followed on the instant.
At this point in the discussion she folded up her crochet-work, and
rose.
“It is absolutely necessary for you, my dear, to make a good match, or
you will all be ruined. I, of course, can always support my declining
years with literary work, but----”
Lady Eva groaned. Against this last argument there was no appeal.
Lady Kimbuck patted her affectionately on the shoulder.
“There, run along now,” she said. “I daresay you've got a headache or
something that made you say a lot of foolish things you didn't mean.
Go down to the drawing-room. I expect Mr. Bleke is waiting there to say
goodnight to you. I am sure he must be getting quite impatient.”
Down in the drawing-room, Roland Bleke was hoping against hope that Lady
Eva's prolonged absence might be due to the fact that she had gone to
bed with a headache, and that he might escape the nightly interview
which he so dreaded.
Reviewing his career, as he sat there, Roland came to the conclusion
that women had the knack of affecting him with a form of temporary
insanity. They temporarily changed his whole nature. They made him feel
for a brief while that he was a dashing young man capable of the
highest flights of love. It was only later that the reaction came and he
realized that he was nothing of the sort.
At heart he was afraid of women, and in the entire list of the women of
whom he had been afraid, he could not find one who had terrified him so
much as Lady Eva Blyton.
Other women--notably Maraquita, now happily helping to direct the
destinies of Paranoya--had frightened him by their individuality. Lady
Eva frightened him both by her individuality and the atmosphere of
aristocratic exclusiveness which she conveyed. He had no idea whatever
of what was the proper procedure for a man engaged to the daughter of
an earl. Daughters of earls had been to him till now mere names in the
society columns of the morning paper. The very rules of the game were
beyond him. He felt like a confirmed Association footballer suddenly
called upon to play in an International Rugby match.
All along, from the very moment when--to his unbounded astonishment--she
had accepted him, he had known that he was making a mistake; but he
never realized it with such painful clearness as he did this evening.
He was filled with a sort of blind terror. He cursed the fate which had
taken him to the Charity-Bazaar at which he had first come under the
notice of Lady Kimbuck. The fatuous snobbishness which had made him leap
at her invitation to spend a few days at Evenwood Towers he regretted;
but for that he blamed himself less. Further acquaintance with Lady
Kimbuck had convinced him that if she had wanted him, she would have got
him somehow, whether he had accepted or refused.
What he really blamed himself for was his mad proposal. There had been
no need for it. True, Lady Eva had created a riot of burning emotions in
his breast from the moment they met; but he should have had the sense to
realize that she was not the right mate for him, even tho he might have
a quarter of a million tucked away in gilt-edged securities. Their lives
could not possibly mix. He was a commonplace young man with a fondness
for the pleasures of the people. He liked cheap papers, picture-palaces,
and Association football. Merely to think of Association football in
connection with her was enough to make the folly of his conduct
clear. He ought to have been content to worship her from afar as some
inaccessible goddess.
A light step outside the door made his heart stop beating.
“I've just looked in to say good night, Mr.--er--Roland,” she said,
holding out her hand. “Do excuse me. I've got such a headache.”
“Oh, yes, rather; I'm awfully sorry.”
If there was one person in the world Roland despised and hated at that
moment, it was himself.
“Are you going out with the guns to-morrow?” asked Lady Eva languidly.
“Oh, yes, rather! I mean, no. I'm afraid I don't shoot.”
The back of his neck began to glow. He had no illusions about himself.
He was the biggest ass in Christendom.
“Perhaps you'd like to play a round of golf, then?”
“Oh, yes, rather! I mean, no.” There it was again, that awful phrase. He
was certain he had not intended to utter it. She must be thinking him a
perfect lunatic. “I don't play golf.”
They stood looking at each other for a moment. It seemed to Roland that
her gaze was partly contemptuous, partly pitying. He longed to tell her
that, tho she had happened to pick on his weak points in the realm of
sport, there were things he could do. An insane desire came upon him
to babble about his school football team. Should he ask her to feel his
quite respectable biceps? No.
“Never mind,” she said, kindly. “I daresay we shall think of something
to amuse you.”
She held out her hand again. He took it in his for the briefest possible
instant, painfully conscious the while that his own hand was clammy from
the emotion through which he had been passing.
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
Thank Heaven, she was gone. That let him out for another twelve hours at
least.
A quarter of an hour later found Roland still sitting, where she had
left him, his head in his hands. The groan of an overwrought soul
escaped him.
“I can't do it!”
He sprang to his feet.
“I won't do it.”
A smooth voice from behind him spoke.
“I think you are quite right, sir--if I may make the remark.”
Roland had hardly ever been so startled in his life. In the first place,
he was not aware of having uttered his thoughts aloud; in the second, he
had imagined that he was alone in the room. And so, a moment before, he
had been.
But the owner of the voice possessed, among other qualities, the
cat-like faculty of entering a room perfectly noiselessly--a fact which
had won for him, in the course of a long career in the service of the
best families, the flattering position of star witness in a number of
England's raciest divorce-cases.
Mr. Teal, the butler--for it was no less a celebrity who had broken in
on Roland's reverie--was a long, thin man of a somewhat priestly cast of
countenance. He lacked that air of reproving hauteur which many butlers
possess, and it was for this reason that Roland had felt drawn to him
during the black days of his stay at Evenwood Towers. Teal had been
uncommonly nice to him on the whole. He had seemed to Roland, stricken
by interviews with his host and Lady Kimbuck, the only human thing in
the place.
He liked Teal. On the other hand, Teal was certainly taking a liberty.
He could, if he so pleased, tell Teal to go to the deuce. Technically,
he had the right to freeze Teal with a look.
He did neither of these things. He was feeling very lonely and very
forlorn in a strange and depressing world, and Teal's voice and manner
were soothing.
“Hearing you speak, and seeing nobody else in the room,” went on the
butler, “I thought for a moment that you were addressing me.”
This was not true, and Roland knew it was not true. Instinct told him
that Teal knew that he knew it was not true; but he did not press the
point.
“What do you mean--you think I am quite right?” he said. “You don't know
what I was thinking about.”
Teal smiled indulgently.
“On the contrary, sir. A child could have guessed it. You have just
come to the decision--in my opinion a thoroughly sensible one--that your
engagement to her ladyship can not be allowed to go on. You are quite
right, sir. It won't do.”
Personal magnetism covers a multitude of sins. Roland was perfectly well
aware that he ought not to be standing here chatting over his and Lady
Eva's intimate affairs with a butler; but such was Teal's magnetism that
he was quite unable to do the right thing and tell him to mind his own
business. “Teal, you forget yourself!” would have covered the situation.
Roland, however, was physically incapable of saying “Teal, you forget
yourself!” The bird knows all the time that he ought not to stand
talking to the snake, but he is incapable of ending the conversation.
Roland was conscious of a momentary wish that he was the sort of man who
could tell butlers that they forgot themselves. But then that sort
of man would never be in this sort of trouble. The “Teal, you forget
yourself” type of man would be a first-class shot, a plus golfer, and
would certainly consider himself extremely lucky to be engaged to Lady
Eva.
“The question is,” went on Mr. Teal, “how are we to break it off?”
Roland felt that, as he had sinned against all the decencies in allowing
the butler to discuss his affairs with him, he might just as well go
the whole hog and allow the discussion to run its course. And it was an
undeniable relief to talk about the infernal thing to some one.
He nodded gloomily, and committed himself. Teal resumed his remarks with
the gusto of a fellow-conspirator.
“It's not an easy thing to do gracefully, sir, believe me, it isn't.
And it's got to be done gracefully, or not at all. You can't go to her
ladyship and say 'It's all off, and so am I,' and catch the next train
for London. The rupture must be of her ladyship's making. If some
fact, some disgraceful information concerning you were to come to her
ladyship's ears, that would be a simple way out of the difficulty.”
He eyed Roland meditatively.
“If, for instance, you had ever been in jail, sir?”
“Well, I haven't.”
“No offense intended, sir, I'm sure. I merely remembered that you had
made a great deal of money very quickly. My experience of gentlemen who
have made a great deal of money very quickly is that they have generally
done their bit of time. But, of course, if you----. Let me think. Do you
drink, sir?”
“No.”
Mr. Teal sighed. Roland could not help feeling that he was disappointing
the old man a good deal.
“You do not, I suppose, chance to have a past?” asked Mr. Teal, not very
hopefully. “I use the word in its technical sense. A deserted wife? Some
poor creature you have treated shamefully?”
At the risk of sinking still further in the butler's esteem, Roland was
compelled to answer in the negative.
“I was afraid not,” said Mr. Teal, shaking his head. “Thinking it all
over yesterday, I said to myself, 'I'm afraid he wouldn't have one.' You
don't look like the sort of gentleman who had done much with his time.”
“Thinking it over?”
“Not on your account, sir,” explained Mr. Teal. “On the family's. I
disapproved of this match from the first. A man who has served a family
as long as I have had the honor of serving his lordship's, comes to
entertain a high regard for the family prestige. And, with no offense to
yourself, sir, this would not have done.”
“Well, it looks as if it would have to do,” said Roland, gloomily. “I
can't see any way out of it.”
“I can, sir. My niece at Aldershot.”
Mr. Teal wagged his head at him with a kind of priestly archness.
“You can not have forgotten my niece at Aldershot?”
Roland stared at him dumbly. It was like a line out of a melodrama. He
feared, first for his own, then for the butler's sanity. The latter was
smiling gently, as one who sees light in a difficult situation.
“I've never been at Aldershot in my life.”
“For our purposes you have, sir. But I'm afraid I am puzzling you. Let
me explain. I've got a niece over at Aldershot who isn't much
good. She's not very particular. I am sure she would do it for a
consideration.”
“Do what?”
“Be your 'Past,' sir. I don't mind telling you that as a 'Past' she's
had some experience; looks the part, too. She's a barmaid, and you would
guess it the first time you saw her. Dyed yellow hair, sir,” he went on
with enthusiasm, “done all frizzy. Just the sort of young person that a
young gentleman like yourself would have had a 'past' with. You couldn't
find a better if you tried for a twelvemonth.”
“But, I say----!”
“I suppose a hundred wouldn't hurt you?”
“Well, no, I suppose not, but----”
“Then put the whole thing in my hands, sir. I'll ask leave off to-morrow
and pop over and see her. I'll arrange for her to come here the day
after to see you. Leave it all to me. To-night you must write the
letters.”
“Letters?”
“Naturally, there would be letters, sir. It is an inseparable feature of
these cases.”
“Do you mean that I have got to write to her? But I shouldn't know what
to say. I've never seen her.”
“That will be quite all right, sir, if you place yourself in my hands. I
will come to your room after everybody's gone to bed, and help you write
those letters. You have some note-paper with your own address on it?
Then it will all be perfectly simple.”
When, some hours later, he read over the ten or twelve exceedingly
passionate epistles which, with the butler's assistance, he had
succeeded in writing to Miss Maud Chilvers, Roland came to the
conclusion that there must have been a time when Mr. Teal was a good
deal less respectable than he appeared to be at present. Byronic was
the only adjective applicable to his collaborator's style of amatory
composition. In every letter there were passages against which Roland
had felt compelled to make a modest protest.
“'A thousand kisses on your lovely rosebud of a mouth.' Don't you think
that is a little too warmly colored? And 'I am languishing for the
pressure of your ivory arms about my neck and the sweep of your silken
hair against my cheek!' What I mean is--well, what about it, you know?”
“The phrases,” said Mr. Teal, not without a touch of displeasure, “to
which you take exception, are taken bodily from correspondence (which I
happened to have the advantage of perusing) addressed by the late Lord
Evenwood to Animalcula, Queen of the High Wire at Astley's Circus. His
lordship, I may add, was considered an authority in these matters.”
Roland criticized no more. He handed over the letters, which, at Mr.
Teal's direction, he had headed with various dates covering roughly a
period of about two months antecedent to his arrival at the Towers.
“That,” Mr. Teal explained, “will make your conduct definitely
unpardonable. With this woman's kisses hot upon your lips,”--Mr. Teal
was still slightly aglow with the fire of inspiration--“you have the
effrontery to come here and offer yourself to her ladyship.”
With Roland's timid suggestion that it was perhaps a mistake to overdo
the atmosphere, the butler found himself unable to agree.
“You can't make yourself out too bad. If you don't pitch it hot and
strong, her ladyship might quite likely forgive you. Then where would
you be?”
Miss Maud Chilvers, of Aldershot, burst into Roland's life like one
of the shells of her native heath two days later at about five in the
afternoon.
It was an entrance of which any stage-manager might have been proud
of having arranged. The lighting, the grouping, the lead-up--all were
perfect. The family had just finished tea in the long drawing-room.
Lady Kimbuck was crocheting, Lord Evenwood dozing, Lady Eva reading, and
Roland thinking. A peaceful scene.
A soft, rippling murmur, scarcely to be reckoned a snore, had just
proceeded from Lord Evenwood's parted lips, when the door opened, and
Teal announced, “Miss Chilvers.”
Roland stiffened in his chair. Now that the ghastly moment had come, he
felt too petrified with fear even to act the little part in which he had
been diligently rehearsed by the obliging Mr. Teal. He simply sat and
did nothing.
It was speedily made clear to him that Miss Chilvers would do all the
actual doing that was necessary. The butler had drawn no false picture
of her personal appearance. Dyed yellow hair done all frizzy was but one
fact of her many-sided impossibilities. In the serene surroundings of
the long drawing-room, she looked more unspeakably “not much good” than
Roland had ever imagined her. With such a leading lady, his drama
could not fail of success. He should have been pleased; he was merely
appalled. The thing might have a happy ending, but while it lasted it
was going to be terrible.