Now, at last, the occasion is complete, the parts of the comedy all
filled: the persons of the play bear themselves with becoming suspense:
and the scene is richly set with age, dignity, devilry and youth, one
and all essential to the true spirit of comedy.
The grandeur of distress, the lofty silence of disdain--there is the
girl’s mother in her shadowed chair and Sir Guy Conduit de Gramercy at
his writing-table, the light of the shaded lamp by his elbow laying a
rich gloss on his thick white hair. The indifference that masks the
depths of emotion, the faint mockery, the deep gravity, and the cunning
candour of love----there is Joan de Gramercy coiled in a chair near her
mother, a girl with those cool eyes that dare a man to surprise in them
any secret that they will not, in their own good time, completely
surrender to him.
Mr. Maturin, handsome Beau Maturin, is talking. He generally is. A
talkative man, let’s face it.
“Joan,” he addressed the girl’s eyes, “your mother and your grandfather
have objected to our engagement. We guessed they would, you remember?
Just lately, in fact, we’ve been guessing nothing else. Unfortunately
for their authority, however, they are not in a position to prevent it.
Now, Joan, we have had quite a long conversation in here, a little about
you, but considerably more about me. That I am as God made me is a truth
your grandfather will not for a moment admit. He is convinced that I am
a good deal worse. That I am in love, your mother is unkind enough to
doubt. She is convinced that I am suffering from a physical distemper.
And so, just as you were not swayed by your guardians’ arguments to-day,
I have not been swayed by them to-night----”
“How, sir!” cried Sir Guy hotly. “Are you----”
“I am talking, Sir Guy. But, Joan,” continued Mr. Maturin, “they
insisted that I could cure you of your attachment to me, if I wished. I
pointed out that I had already put myself before you as a man whose
character contained certain grave flaws; and that you had, while
deploring my recent and second bankruptcy and my only too frequent
lapses from the strictly moral code, chosen to believe that there is
still some good in me, and had therefore remained by your decision to
become my wife. Your mother and grandfather, however, have dared me to
tell you the complete truth about myself and yet hold you. Joan, did I
think for one moment that I would lose you in this way, I frankly
admit,” said Mr. Maturin emphatically, “that I would not put my hand to
any such quixotic folly----”
“After all,” said Joan de Gramercy, “the past is dead.”
“My point exactly, child. And that is why,” said Mr. Maturin, “if only
to satisfy your mother and grandfather of the inevitability of your
choice and of my complete faith in your love, I have decided to do what
I will do. Listen, Joan----”
It was Sir Guy’s stern voice that fell on the room like an axe.
“You live up to my description of you completely, Mr. Maturin. You are
indeed the ace of cads! For now you are betraying your word of a few
minutes ago.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t interrupt,” said Mr. Maturin warmly. “I am
embarked, let’s face it, on a suspension-bridge of very doubtful
strength and you keep on trying to upset my balance with sweeping
comments on my character. My tale, Joan,” he continued into the middle
air, and spoke from this moment on with his eyes fixed absently in the
shadows of the books on the shelves opposite, “my tale has to do with
many years ago. Now I have been and I have done many things in my time;
and have become one of those men of whom it is vaguely said, ‘He could
write a book about his life,’ which of course means that I have done
everything in my life except write a book. At the time I speak of I was
a subaltern in a Guards regiment; a mode of life which, it may distress
you to hear, Sir Guy, bored me in the extreme. As, however, the small
allowance my father gave me was contingent on my retaining my
commission, and as even the smallest allowance is better than a poke in
the eye, I endured in patience the while I gave myself up to the
pleasures of the town. You must not for a moment think,” protested Mr.
Maturin with feeling, “that I am trying to belittle the gentlemen of the
Brigade, for better men than I have tried and failed at that game: nor
that I am a slave to malice, for as you know I was later expelled from
their company: but truth compels me to confess that my companions of
those days were notable rather for the correctness of their appearance
than for their learning, while their charm was of that static, profound
sort which no one could call ingratiating and a certain kind of
primitive _badinage_ was held among them to be the superior of wit. And
as time went on I came to be esteemed among the lighter sort for those
qualities of the tongue and mind that are calculated to send any man,
in due course, headlong down the crooked path.
“But I must tell you I had one very great friend among them. This was a
man who had everything I had not: a simple frankness, a plain but almost
painfully honest bearing, and a heart like gold; which was then, of
course, more evidently in circulation than it is now. I cannot imagine
how a boy of that sort could have loved and admired me; but he
undoubtedly did, and to a singular degree, so that I was frequently
enabled to borrow money from him almost painlessly, for he was heir to a
great fortune, with which went a great name; although, to be sure, he
was often as hard put to it as I was to fit a morsel of caviare to a
piece of toast, for his father had ideas about real estate quite
contrary to ours.
“My friend became engaged to a beautiful girl. What she saw in the boy,
I do not know. Women are, let’s face it, odd. That she loved him, I was
instantly certain. Even my youthful cynicism could not ascribe to her
the mean calculation of a fortune-hunter. That he loved her, madly and
madly again, he frequently made clear to me in those broken and
inarticulate periods that are the hall-mark of all honest Englishmen in
love: and which, being often quite inaudible, have earned for Englishmen
a delightful reputation for restraint. But let us not generalise when we
can so profitably be particular.
“We were at that time in the barracks that guard the frontiers of
Chelsea: my friend and I in adjacent rooms. Our ways of life, however,
were at that time vastly different; for as I was passing through a
financial void I would, with that resignation which no one can deny has
been my one consistent virtue, go early to bed every night: whereas my
friend would return night after night at about this hour, having
escorted his betrothed home after a play and a ball; and night after
night, as he prepared himself for bed in the adjoining room, he would
softly whistle a tune. Thus, you understand, he expressed his happiness;
and killed it, for the walls were thin and the tune intolerable.
“It was Mendelssohn’s _Spring Song_; and, Sir Guy, I have already told
you,” said Mr. Maturin with a glance at the old gentleman, who was
listening with every mark of attention if not of approval, “how my
distaste for that composition led me, some months after the time I speak
of, to a hasty action. But what that same distaste caused me to do to
that boy was not done hastily.
“One day I borrowed a sum of money from him. He, poor boy, was so
absorbed in his happiness that he scarcely noticed the third zero which,
having seen how readily he had already attached two, I persuaded him to
add to the primary numeral on the cheque. Whereupon, with his full
permission, and a thousand pounds of his money, I prepared to make
myself agreeable to his _fiancée_.
“He trusted me implicitly, that boy. And who,” Mr. Maturin asked
dreamily of the middle distance, “who will tell the tale of the
ramifications and subtleties and intrigues of the next few weeks, how I
used every art on that beautiful girl, how she came to believe in my
love for her--and maybe I believed in it myself--how she came to look
wearily on the honest but plain features of her _fiancé_, how she came
to suffer his inarticulate periods with a doubtful smile; and how
finally--though he had long since ceased to whistle the _Spring
Song_--she broke her engagement to him, and had certainly become my wife
but that I was at about that time expelled from the Brigade and was
never, until quite lately, a marrying man. That is all; and, I think,”
said Beau Maturin softly, looking round at the chair which had until a
moment ago been occupied by the figure of Joan de Gramercy, “quite
enough.”
Sir Guy was silent: his thin long hands clasped nervously together on
the surface of the writing-table, he stared fixedly at a point on the
carpet. Mrs. de Gramercy was silent. Mr. Maturin examined, for quite a
while, the points of his shoes. At last he murmured: “Well....”
Sir Guy said, as though to himself: “That was a very dreadful story.”
“Wasn’t it!” Mr. Maturin agreed gravely. “Well, good-night, Mrs. de
Gramercy. Good-night, Sir Guy.” And he strode towards the distant
shadows by the door.
“A moment!” the old gentleman seemed to awake. “Mr. Maturin, my
daughter-in-law and I have to thank you. Good-bye.”
The tall shadow by the door, as though on the impulse of a sudden
memory, seemed to touch the outside of his breast-pocket. “Oh, by the
way,” he said, “I will, if you don’t mind, keep this bank-note. Your
house owes it to me. Good-bye, good de Gramercys!”
Through the silence of the house the two heard the steps of Beau Maturin
on the flags of the hall, the closing of the front-door, the faint echo
of his passage down the square. Sir Guy was staring bemused at the
still, distant figure of his daughter-in-law.
“What did he say, Eleanour? that our house owed him that money? What on
earth did the man mean?”
“What he said,” the shadow whispered, and then it laughed, and old Sir
Guy jumped from his chair with the queer shock of that laugh.
“Eleanour!”
As she came towards him he took her hands in his and looked intently
down at her. Her eyes were very, very tired. She said: “I am very tired.
I will go to bed now.”
Old Sir Guy held her hands very tenderly. “But what is on your mind,
Eleanour? Why did you laugh in that dreadful way?”
She opened those tired eyes very wide. “Oh, surely, dear, I am allowed
that--to laugh at your having called Beau Maturin the ace of cads!”
Old Sir Guy said sternly: “Yes, you are tired, Eleanour. You are not
yourself.”
“Poor old gentleman!” she tenderly, bitterly, smiled up at him. “Poor
old gentleman! Dear, like all your generation you have been wrong about
everything in ours, but everything! Oh, you have been so wrong about
what was good and what was rotten in young people! Wrong about your
son, about me, about Beau Maturin----”
Sir Guy snapped with savage impatience: “You will kindly explain,
Eleanour, what all this fantastic nonsense is about.”
“Of course,” she said thoughtfully, “there was a certain amount of
excuse for your son Basil. I made it rather easy for him. You see, dear,
Capel Maturin lied. As usual, you might say. Well, yes. He just told the
story the wrong way round. You know, I was once engaged to be married to
Mr. Maturin. And he introduced me to his best friend, Basil de Gramercy.
Oh, dear, why did you give your son such a very small allowance? Whereas
to be able to seduce his best friend’s _fiancée_ he needed money. But
Capel Maturin had done very well on the Derby that year, and Basil
easily managed to borrow a thousand from him, for no one, let’s face it,
could ever call Beau Maturin mean with money. And one day Mr. Maturin,
who used to whistle the _Spring Song_ to himself because he and I both
loved it, suddenly found that I preferred Basil’s prospects to his good
looks. I don’t suppose you can even yet realise, dear, the exquisite
revenge that Mr. Maturin has had of me and of your house to-night. He
intended, obviously, to marry my daughter: how, you might say, could I
have borne that? But I tell you I could have borne it infinitely better
than the memory of this night. Here I have sat, a faded woman, while
Capel Maturin, fresher and more handsome in bankruptcy than ever I have
been in success, having won my daughter’s love, killed it out of pity
for you--Oh, not for me!--with a tale which, however he had told it,
does me very little honour. And, for pity’s sake, for your sake, he
spared you your son. I should not have told you now; I have done wrong,
but I had to. Even the old, dear, cannot be allowed to be wrong about
everything _all_ the time! But don’t look so sad! Why do you, why should
you, look so sad? After all, the de Gramercys have had everything they
ever wanted from me and my daughter--and the ace of cads certainly
hasn’t! Good-night, dear.”