When Ned Blackborough left Cwmfairnog he left behind him also the very
desire for dreams. He remained simply a rich man with no wants save
for what wealth can bring. All the rest--the capacity for imagination
inclusive--was mere moonshine. For the first time in his life the
pompous luxury of New Park did not offend him, he drank a bottle of
ludicrously high-priced champagne for supper, he smoked a good many
ludicrously highly-drugged cigarettes, not as he generally did almost
unconsciously, but of set purpose, taking a solid joy in the fuddled
state to which they reduced him.
He woke, of course, with a headache next morning, and having had
breakfast he looked at his bank-book, a thing he had not done for
months. It was not exactly exhilarating to a man who had just made up
his mind to enjoy what he could as a millionaire!
But, even as he looked at the balance, something in him rose up and
mocked at him. How long would this phase last? How long could this
pompous acquiescence in wealth as a means of pleasure last? How could
eyes that had once seen, ears that had once heard, remain blind and
deaf to the only realities, the only pleasures of life?
He put the question aside in an attempt to find anything but party in
the politics of the morning paper, and coming to the conclusion that
they were synonymous terms, he ordered the motor and went round to
Egworth to St. Helena's Hospital. Woods, the little secretary, always
had a tonic effect on him, and he really wanted to see how things had
been going on in his absence. He found the secretary's office full up
with business, and little Wood's face keener than ever.
"It is going on all right, sir, and I have kept strictly to the lines
you laid down; but it involves a good deal of--of tact and
correspondence"--he pulled a file towards him and fingered it. "This,
for instance, contains nothing but applications to me personally for
fairly fair contracts of sorts, based on secret commission. These I
answer myself, as the firms sending the suggestions are really quite
respectable. The minor tradesmen, and all applications made through
the servants I leave to the clerks."
"You leave to the clerks," echoed Ned thoughtfully, "and some, no
doubt, never come into the office at all."
Woods shrugged his high shoulders, "One can expect nothing else. It is
impossible to gauge the extent to which dislike to what they call
'splitting' obtains amongst domestic servants. They will never tell on
another. A great many of them, of course, refuse these monstrous
suggestions for taking toll, but they would never dream of speaking to
their employers about them, as they should." He sighed impatiently.
"But what can you expect? Where are the fundamental principles of fair
dealing taught in England? Nowhere!"
"Hullo, Woods!" remarked Ned with a laugh, "Don't throw over '_caveat
emptor_.' It is the foundation stone of England's power." Then he
frowned. "By the way, how are the men down at Biggie getting on--you
gave them their wage every week for a month, I suppose?"
"I did," replied Woods gravely, "There is a lot of distress down
there. You see it is not like a strike; you have definitely closed the
works and paid forfeit on contracts. So the unions won't help. Some of
these men have drifted away; but the trade is slack all over England.
I won't say because of dumping; but the fact remains. It is slack."
Lord Blackborough looked at his secretary narrowly. "Woods!" he said,
"what would you do?"
The keen face lit up. "Do," he echoed, "I know what I should dearly
like to do--try an experiment. There are a lot of clever men in that
factory, your lordship; I should lend them the capital to run the
concern at one and a half per cent. interest, and--and await the
result. Either way it would be an object-lesson."
"It would pay me," said Lord Blackborough, "if the state of affairs is
to remain as bad as it has been. I'll--I'll see about it, Woods. Then
I may take it that the hospital is really working on the lines I laid
down?"
Woods coughed. "We are all very much on the lookout for fraud, your
lordship," he said meekly, "but there must always be a percentage of
error, so long as every one wishes to coin his neighbour into golden
sovereigns."
"And that will be always, Woods," remarked Lord Blackborough with a
laugh, "I believe it to be an entrancing occupation, and I mean to try
it myself."
He sought out Helen after this, and found her also up to the ears in
business.
"It is a terrible responsibility, Ned," she remarked, "and I am afraid
I have to deluge poor Mr. Woods with references; but really I cannot
trust to any one--I mean outside the hospital. Within it we are a
picked lot and we do--fairly well."
The doubtful praise fell almost wearily from her lips.
"And how is No. 36?" he asked.
She brightened up. "Going on, Sister Ann says, splendidly. Dr. Ramsay
operated on him a fortnight after we started, and it was a complete
success. The doctors from St. Peter's were over seeing him yesterday,
and even they allowed it was splendid."
"And how about the expenses; will the parents pay anything reasonable
for board?"
She shook her head. "Mr. Woods says you cannot expect it. You see the
children get their education free, very often their dinners free; so
why shouldn't they get cured by charity? There isn't much
responsibility left to poor parents now-a-days. It--it doesn't pay."
"And Ramsay?" asked Ned with a smile. "I hope his shirts are in decent
order."
She flushed up a brilliant carmine. "Has Dr. Ramsay been complaining?"
she asked.
"Great heavens above! No!" exclaimed Ned aghast. "Has it come to
that?--no--I haven't seen him yet."
"Perhaps you had better ask him yourself," she said coldly. Then she
looked at him. "And about yourself, Ned. You've told me nothing."
"Because, dear," he replied lightly, "there is nothing to tell. By the
way, have you heard that Aura Graham married my friend Ted Cruttenden
on Valentine's Day? You hadn't? Well, it's a fact anyhow; and she has
just lost her grandfather."
"Ned!" she cried rising in swift sympathy, "I--I am so sorry."
"Yes! it is rather sad," he remarked coolly. "Of course it breaks up
that jolly little unconventional home. By Jove! I daresay it will have
to be sold; and in that case I shouldn't mind buying it. It would
remind me of rather a jolly time."
His insouciance silenced her, and he went off on his tour of
inspection to Sister Ann, whom he found in the convalescent ward, very
spic and span, very precise and satisfied.
"He has not had a single drawback," she said glancing complacently at
No. 36, who lay looking like an angel for virtue on a wheeled bed. "If
he goes on like this, he will be discharged in a month at most. Of
course he will not be quite sound; he is too radically disease-sodden
for that, but he will be able to make his own living and----"
"And marry," put in Lord Blackborough calmly. "It is altogether a most
satisfactory business."
Sister Ann looked at him doubtfully. "So far as I am concerned it is
so, certainly. I disclaim responsibility after a patient leaves my
hospital."
"My dear Sister Ann," laughed Lord Blackborough, "I disclaim all
responsibility for anything. It is the only possible way of feeling
moral."
He found Dr. Ramsay looking a trifle _egare_ in a room of surpassing
tidiness. Helen's hand was visible also in the doctor's dress. He had
nothing but good to report in every way except that he had found it
extremely difficult to ensure a supply of absolutely undeniable drugs.
"It is not that any one deliberately means to cheat, but that the real
thing is so difficult to get," he remarked ruefully. "You see, if a
fellow sells wine or spirits that isn't genuine he can be run in; but
you may kill half a dozen babies by selling stale ipecacuhana wine or
any other filth and no one asks questions."
He was loud in praise of his assistants, the secretary, Sister Ann.
Each and all were first-class.
"And Helen--Mrs. Tresillian, I mean?" asked Ned drily, "I hope she is
satisfactory as matron."
Peter Ramsay's face showed a trifle more colour. "Satisfactory," he
echoed, "she is more than satisfactory! Do you know--" his voice sank
to an almost awed tone--"I believe she looks after my--my underclothes
herself."
Ned Blackborough burst into a roar of laughter.
"My poor Peter!" he said, "vested interests again! It's too bad!" Then
he sobered down and looked quite gravely at the doctor, who was
laughing too.
"Ramsay," he said, "why don't you ask my cousin to marry you?"
"I asked her yesterday," replied the doctor gloomily.
"The devil you did!" ejaculated Ned. Vaguely all this interested him,
made him forget himself. "What did she say?"
Peter Ramsay got up and walked about the room. "What did she say? It
is an odd thing, Blackborough, what different ideas people have about
love. I used to think it was a kind of fever that would yield to
strict diet, and a saline treatment. It isn't. At least something
which has got mixed up in it may be so; but--now on the other hand
your cousin, who is a sensible woman, mind you, seems to me somehow to
have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. She thinks--oh! hang it
all I can't go vivisecting what she thinks--it's bad enough to do it
for oneself--but because she can't at nine-and-twenty feel the
same--yes! I'll say it--purely physical attraction for me that she
felt for that poor sick man at nineteen, she says that it is a
desecration for any one even to speak of marriage to her. I often wish
the good women of the world could be made to understand how purely
evanescent that sort of thing is, for how little it counts in the
aggregate sum of life. Here is Helen--Mrs. Tressilian--giving it first
place, while other good women relegate it to the nethermost hell; and
all the while they prate about love with a big L."
"My dear Ramsay," remarked Ned, "I'll give you ten thousand a year to
go about the country and preach your views--and I'll give you a
thousand extra for every woman you convert to them."
"Quite safe," assented Dr. Ramsay with a growl. "I should be lynched
before my first quarter's salary was due."
"Meanwhile you will stick to it--and manage?"
"Oh! I'll manage all right. I have an A1 prescription for the febrile
part of the disease--I--I should like to give it to you----"
The red brown eyes looked into the blue ones. "Yes!" replied Ned
coolly, "she has married the other fellow because, no doubt, love
seemed to her to be the devil. You are about right, Ramsay. Women are
_impayable_ in that connection. Good-bye."
He tried to amuse himself in a thousand ways that afternoon, but they
all failed, so he took to business the next day, and went back to New
Park in the evening and drank another bottle of champagne and smoked
still more cigarettes.
The next day brought him a letter in an unknown hand. Was it a man's
or a woman's, he wondered. A woman's surely, since the black-edged
envelope smelt horribly of scent as he opened it.
Aura Cruttenden! The signature gave him quite a shock. The idea of her
using either black-edged paper or scent revolted him, but the letter
was--passable.
"Dear Ned," it ran, "I suppose I ought to call you Lord Blackborough,
but I can't. I shall never forget you. You have taught me, I think,
everything I know that's worth knowing. Perhaps ever so long age you
and I were the same Am[oe]ba. What are we going to be in the end. That
is the question. Don't--don't quarrel with us, please.--Yours,
"Aura Cruttenden."
"Don't quarrel!" That was all very well; but what else was there to
do? It was impossible for him to go on drinking champagne and smoking
cigarettes till he died.
Finally, he tried London and a round of the theatres and music-halls.
He amused himself immensely and was never for one instant content. He
played bridge at the club, and went no trumps until a choleric old
gentleman remarked that it was no wonder he had such a dislike to the
Day of Judgment. Whereupon he laughed and played no more. Then he
sought out Mr. Hirsch, and went gold-bugging in the city, but after
dining _en petit comite_ with many Jews, Turks, Infidels and Heretics
at every smart set restaurant in London, at every one of which Mr.
Hirsch called the waiters by their names as if they were his own
servants, he gave it up in sheer disgust, and tried to feel an
interest in the Grand National, even to the extent of allowing himself
to bet freely with his friends. He did everything in fact that a man
can do to please himself, short of buying cheap or dear kisses; and
even that he might have done, being for the time quite reckless, but
for the fact he was soul-weary of womanhood, her ways and works.
Finally he went back to Blackborough and felt the first really keen
and natural emotion of which he had been capable for a month, when he
met Ted Cruttenden by chance in the street.
"I hope your wife is quite well," he said sedately, feeling then and
there a desire to throttle his successful rival. It was a most
wholesome feeling, he recognised, for it sent the blood coursing
through his veins once more in honest antagonism to something of which
he disapproved. Ted seemed to feel this antagonism pierce through him,
decorously dressed in a black business suit though he was, for he said
hurriedly--"Oh! all right. Won't you come into the office for a
moment. I--I should like to speak to you."
Ned, regarding himself once more from the outside, felt vaguely
amused, and acquiesced.
"Of course," began Ted, for his part feeling absolutely a somewhat
ill-used and thoroughly misunderstood man, "I know the whole affair
must seem, as it were underhand; but--" he looked doubtfully at his
companion as if uncertain how much he knew, before resolving on the
whole truth as safest. "I suppose you know now, or guess, that when
you came here last Aura and I were engaged. Well! it was so. Your
coming and telling me you had asked her, put me in an awful hole for I
had no right, on my part, to tell you--anything. The whole affair was
strictly private, I hope you understand."
"I understand that you wished it to be private," remarked Ned clearly.
"It had to be, my dear fellow," replied Ted eagerly. "To begin
with, we were engaged rather hurriedly in order to please her
grandfather--chiefly; and I--I felt I had no right to presume on it;
it might never have come to anything. It couldn't for a long time, for
I wasn't in a position to marry." Here his face fell, and he threw
down the pen with which he had been fiddling in sudden impatience.
"For the matter of that, I'm not in it now. These confounded
interruptions have played the dickens, and we shall have to begin in a
small way; for she hasn't a penny. The place is over-mortgaged and
even the furniture has to be sold. In fact, if it doesn't realise a
decent price, I might be let in. Where was I? Oh! yes. Then in
February, just as I was in the throes of a really good thing, I was
telegraphed for again. I had been down twice before, and really, only
because the old man was not satisfied, that we would keep to our
engagement. So----" he paused.
"Well?" remarked Ned.
"I took down a marriage license with me--it was absolutely necessary,
you see, that I should get away again as soon as I could, and I
thought, if the worst came to the worst, it would calm the old man to
feel that we were married. So you see there was no time to give any
one any notice."
"And you were married," remarked Ned again in the same clear, hard
voice.
"Yes! The rector married us in the old man's room, with Martha and him
as witnesses, half an hour before I started. That is really the whole
story--exactly how it came about."
"And you went back, when?" asked Ned Blackborough quickly.
"I never went back. It was awfully important that I should have a free
hand, and that is how it came--about the telegrams, I mean--I had
purposely left no address----"
The tapping of Ned's stick on the floor, which had been going on as he
sat, his elbow on his knees, listening, ceased. "Then you mean to
say," he said slowly, rising as he spoke, "that when I saw--Aura--the
other day--she----" Suddenly he laughed--"Good-bye, Ted; you're not a
bad sort of a chap on the whole--but you have the devil's own luck! If
I had only known--if I had guessed that she----" His voice rose in
sudden anger, then paused. What was the good?
"Are you going to finish your sentence, Lord Blackborough?" flared up
Ted in anger also.
"Yes!" replied Ned without an instant's hesitation, reverting to his
usual tone, "I am going to finish it. I am going to tell you the
truth--though you haven't told it to me. There is no use in your not
facing it, man. Aura doesn't by right belong to you--she belongs to
me. If I'd known then--when I was at Cwnfairnog, I mean--what I know
now, I--I should have tried to take her away from all your cursed
money-getting even then. It's different now ... if you make her happy.
And if you don't--I--I won't be such a fool again! That's fair and
square and above board. So--good-bye!"
As he walked through the streets once more, he felt that this was the
last straw. Why had he not made her understand herself? Why had he not
carried her off then and there to Avilion? Truly, he was cursed as a
fool. He ought to have known, he ought to have guessed, he ought to
have understood.
So, as he wandered aimlessly through the city, looking with a
lack-lustre eye upon all its hideous sights and sounds, having in his
ears the silly giggles of girls as they crowded round the shop
windows, having in his eyes an endless procession in those windows, of
hats and garments, and flowers and frocks, and fal-lals set there by
men as a bait to the only barter which is allowed to womanhood without
restraint, he told himself that he would have done right if he had
carried her away from contamination to that island in the southern
seas, where she would have lived to rear his children and be....
Ye Gods! What should she not have been?
For an instant he caught a glimpse of reality, and then the Dream of
Life was his again; but though the Dancer of the World had on all the
charms of money and civilisation and culture, her dancing did not hold
his eyes.
That evening he went over to the hospital and found Helen, darning
away busily at something which she hastily thrust into her work-basket
as he came in. Vested interests, of course!
"I am going away, Helen," he said.
"Going away," she echoed. "Why, Ned! you have only just come back. My
dear! I do wish you--you would settle down."
"That was exactly what I came to say to you," he replied. "Helen! why
won't you marry Ramsay? You--you are not likely to find a better
fellow, or one whom--you like better. Why not marry him, instead of
darning his underclothes on the sly?" He pointed to the workbasket.
"My duty as a matron," she began, flushing gloriously.
"That will be cold comfort by--and--by," he replied kindly. "Your duty
as _mater_ would be more satisfying."
Helen held her breath for a moment, then it exhaled in a little
childless sigh.
"That is true, Ned," she said quietly, "but when a woman knows what
Love is, she cannot give herself without it. And Love comes but once
to a woman; at any rate it will only come once to me."
"I wonder," said Ned reflectively, "what womanhood would be like if
one were to pound down every one who possessed it in a mortar and
fashioned them afresh. Well! I am off--for six months."
"Where?"
"I will say India this time," he replied cheerfully. "Then my letters
can be forwarded to Algiers--but----" this he added, seeing her
remonstrant face--"I will leave my address with my agents, so you can
write through them if anything is wanted--but it won't be wanted. The
world gets on as well without me, as I get on without the world."
He went round afterwards to the secretary's office.
"How much capital do you think they would require to run that factory
on co-operative lines?" he asked.
Woods shook his head.
"More--more than you ought to afford, Lord Blackborough," he replied
evasively; "I can't keep the expenses down as I should wish, even
here."
"Have you enough to go on with?"
"Plenty--but----"
"Then work out a scheme, please, for the other and have it ready
against my return. And--and stop a bit! There is a place in
Wales--I'll write it down--coming in to the market before long. Buy it
in, furniture and all. And if the woman who is in charge--Martha's her
name--wants to stop on--let her stop. I am off to--to India--for six
months."