A PARLEY WITH THE ENEMY.
Mr. Fladgate was one of those domestically inclined bachelors who are
never really at ease in rooms or chambers, and whose tastes lead them,
as soon as they possess the necessary means, to set up a substantial
and well-regulated household of their own. He had a large
old-fashioned house in the neighbourhood of Russell Square, where he
entertained rather frequently in a solid unpretentious fashion. At his
Sunday dinners especially, one or two of the minor celebrities of the
day were generally to be met, and it was to one of these gatherings
that Mark was invited, as one of the natural consequences of the
success of 'Illusion.' He found himself, on arriving, in company with
several faces familiar to him from photographs, and heard names
announced which were already common property. There were some there
who had been famous once and were already beginning to be forgotten,
others now obscure who were destined to be famous some day, and a few,
and these by no means the least gifted, who neither had been nor would
be famous at any time. There were two or three constellations of some
magnitude on this occasion, surrounded by a kind of 'milky way' of
minor stars, amongst which the bar, the studios, and the stage were
all more or less represented.
Mark, as a rising man who had yet to justify a first success, occupied
a position somewhere between the greater and lesser division, and Mr.
Fladgate took care to make him known to many of the leading men in
the room, by whom he found himself welcomed with cordial
encouragement.
Presently, when he had shifted for a moment out of the nearest focus
of conversation, his host, who had been 'distributing himself,' as the
French say, amongst the various knots of talkers, came bustling up to
him. 'Er--Mr. Ashburn,' he began, 'I want you to know a very clever
young fellow here--known him from a boy--he's on the stage now, and
going to surprise us all some of these days. You'll like him. Come
along and I'll introduce him to you; he's very anxious to know _you_.'
And when Mark had followed him as he threaded his way across the room,
he found himself hurriedly introduced to the man with the cold light
eyes whom he had met at the Featherstones' on the day when he had
recognised Mabel Langton's portrait. Mr. Fladgate had already bustled
away again, and the two were left together in a corner of the room.
Dolly's revelations of the terrorism this man had exercised over her
had strengthened the prejudice and dislike Mark had felt on their
first meeting; he felt angry and a little uncomfortable now, at being
forced to come in contact with him, but there was no way of avoiding
it just then, and Caffyn himself was perfectly at his ease.
'I think we have met before--at Grosvenor Place,' he began blandly;
'but I dare say you have forgotten.'
'No,' said Mark, 'I remember you very well; and besides,' he added,
with a significance that he hoped would not be thrown away, 'I have
been hearing a good deal about you lately from the Langtons--from Miss
Langton, that is.'
'Ah!' said Caffyn; 'that would be flattering to most men, but when one
has the bad luck, like myself, to displease such a very impulsive
young lady as Miss Langton, the less she mentions you the better.'
'I may as well say,' returned Mark coldly, 'that, as to that
particular affair in which you were concerned, whatever my opinions
are, I formed them without assistance.'
'And you don't care to have them unsettled again by any plea for the
defence? That's very natural. Well, with Miss Langton's remarks to
guide me, I think I can guess what your own opinion of me is likely to
be just now. And I'm going to ask you, as a mere matter of fair play,
to hear my side of the question. You think that's very ridiculous, of
course?'
'I think we can do no good by discussing it any farther,' said Mark;
'we had better let the matter drop.'
'But you see,' urged Caffyn, 'as it is, the matter _has_ dropped--on
me, and really I do think that you, who I understand were the
means--of course from the best possible motives--of exposing me as a
designing villain, might give me an opportunity of defending myself. I
took the liberty of getting Fladgate to bring us together, expressly
because I can't be comfortable while I know you have your present
impressions of me. I don't expect to persuade Miss Langton to have a
little charity--she's a woman; but I hoped you at least would give me
a hearing.'
Mark felt some of his prejudice leaving him already; Caffyn had not
the air of a man who had been detected in a course of secret tyranny.
There was something flattering, too, in his evident wish to recover
Mark's good opinion; he certainly ought to hear both sides before
judging so harshly. Perhaps, after all, they had been making a little
too much of this business. 'Well,' he said at last, 'I should be very
glad if I could think things were not as bad as they seem. I will hear
anything you would like to say about it.'
'Quite the high moral censor,' thought the other savagely. 'Confound
his condescension!'
'I was sure you would give me a chance of putting myself right,' he
said, 'but I can't do it now. They're going down to dinner; we will
talk it over afterwards.'
At dinner conversation was lively and well sustained, though perhaps
not quite so sparkling as might have been expected from such an
assembly. As a rule, those who talked most and best were the men who
still had their reputation to make, and many of the great men there
seemed content to expose themselves to such brilliancy as there was
around them, as if silently absorbing it for future reproduction, by
some process analogous to the action of luminous paint.
Caffyn was placed at some distance from Mark, and as, after dinner, he
was entreated to sit down to the piano, which stood in a corner of the
room to which they had adjourned for cigars and coffee, it was some
time before their conversation was resumed.
Caffyn was at his best as he sat there rippling out snatches of
operatic _morceaux_, and turning round with a smile to know if they
were recognised. His performance was not remarkable for accuracy, as
he had never troubled himself to study music, or anything else,
seriously, but it was effective enough with a non-critical audience;
his voice, too, when he sang, though scarcely strong enough to fill a
room of much larger size, was pleasant and not untrained, and it was
some time before he was permitted to leave the music-stool.
He rattled off a rollicking hunting song, full of gaiety and _verve_,
and followed it up with a little pathetic ballad, sung with an accent
of real feeling (he could throw more emotion into his singing than his
acting), while, although it was after dinner, the room was hushed
until the last notes had died away, and when he rose at length with a
laughing plea of exhaustion, he was instantly surrounded by a buzz of
genuine gratitude. Mark heard all this, and the last remnants of his
dislike and distrust vanished; it seemed impossible that this man,
with the sympathetic voice, and the personal charm which was felt by
most of those present, could be capable of finding pleasure in working
on a child's terrors. So that when Caffyn, disengaging himself at
length from the rest, made his way to where Mark was sitting, the
latter felt this almost as a distinction, and made room for him with
cordiality. Somebody was at the piano again, but as all around were
talking, the most confidential conversations could be carried on in
perfect security, and Caffyn, seating himself next to Mark, set
himself to remove all prejudices.
He put his case very well, without obsequiousness or temper, appealing
to Mark as a fellow man-of-the-world against a girl's rash judgment.
'You know,' he said, in the course of his arguments, 'I'm not really
an incarnate fiend in private life. Miss Langton is quite convinced I
am. I believe I saw her looking suspiciously at my boots the other
day; but then she's a trifle hard on me. My worst fault is that I
don't happen to understand children. I'd got into a way of saying
extravagant things; you know the way one does talk rubbish to
children; well, of joking in that sort of way with little
What's-her-name. She always seemed to understand it well enough, and I
should have thought she was old enough to see the simpler kind of
joke, at all events. One day I chanced to chaff her about a stamp she
took off some envelope. Well, I daresay I said something about
stealing and prisons, all in fun, of course, never dreaming she would
think any more about it. A fortnight afterwards, suddenly there's a
tremendous hullabaloo. You began it. Oh, I know it was natural enough,
but you did begin it. You see the child looking pale and seedy, and
say at once, "something on her mind." Well, I don't know, and she
might have been such a little idiot as to take a chance word _au grand
sérieux_; it might have been something else on her mind; or she
mightn't have had anything on her mind at all. Anyway, she tells you a
long story about prisons, and how one Harold Caffyn had told her she
would go there, and so on, and you, with that vivid imagination of
yours, conjure up a tearful picture of a diabolical young man (me, you
know) coldly gloating over the terrors of a poor little innocent
ignorant child, eh? (Miss Dolly's nearly ten, and anything but
backward for her age; but that's of no consequence.) Well, then you go
and impart some of your generous indignation to Miss Langton; she
takes it in a very aggravated form, and gives it to me. Upon my word,
I think I've had rather hard lines!'
Mark really felt a little remorseful just then, but he made one more
attempt to maintain his high ground. 'I don't know that I should have
thought so much of the joke itself,' he said, 'but you carried it on
so long; you saw her brooding over it and getting worse and worse, and
yet you never said a word to undeceive the poor child!'
'Now, you know, with all respect to you, Ashburn,' said Caffyn, who
was gradually losing all ceremony, 'that about seeing her brooding is
rubbish--pure rubbish! I saw the child, I suppose, now and again; but
I didn't notice her particularly, and if I had, I don't exactly know
how to detect the signs of brooding. How do you tell it from
indigestion? and how are you to guess what the brooding is about? I
tell you I'd forgotten the whole thing. And _that_ was what all your
righteous wrath was based upon, was it? Well, it's very delightful, no
doubt, to figure as a knight-errant, or a champion, and all that kind
of thing--particularly when you make your own dragon--but when you
come prancing down and spit some unlucky lizard, it's rather a cheap
triumph. But there, I forgive you. You've made a little mistake which
has played the very deuce with me at Kensington Park Gardens. It's too
late to alter that now, and if I can only make you see that there has
been a mistake, and I'm not one of the venomous sort of reptiles after
all, why, I suppose I must be content with that!'
He succeeded in giving Mark an uneasy impression that he had made a
fool of himself. He had quite lost the feeling of superiority under
the tone of half-humorous, half-bitter remonstrance which Caffyn had
chosen to take, and was chiefly anxious now to make the other forget
his share in the matter. 'Perhaps I was too ready to put the worst
construction on what I heard,' he said apologetically, 'but after what
you've told me, why----'
'Well, we'll say no more about it,' said Caffyn; 'you understand me
now, and that's all _I_ cared about.' ('You may be a great genius, my
friend,' he was thinking, 'but it's not so very difficult to get round
you, after all!') 'Look here,' he continued, 'will you come and see me
one of these days--it would be a great kindness to me. I've got rooms
in Kremlin Road, Bayswater, No. 72.'
Mark changed countenance very slightly as he heard the address--it had
been Holroyd's. There was nothing in that to alarm him, and yet he
could not resist a superstitious terror at the coincidence. Caffyn
noticed the effect directly. 'Do you know Kremlin Road?' he said.
Something made Mark anxious to explain the emotion he felt he had
given way to. 'Yes,' he said, 'a--a very old friend of mine had
lodgings at that very house. He was lost at sea, so when you mentioned
the place I----'
'I see,' said Caffyn. 'Of course. Was your friend Vincent Holroyd, I
wonder?'
'You knew him?' cried Mark; 'you!'
('Got the Railway Station effect that _time_!' thought Caffyn. 'I
begin to believe my dear uncle touched a weak spot after all. If he
_has_ a secret, it's ten to one Holroyd knew it--knows it, by Jove!')
'Oh, yes, I knew poor old Holroyd,' he said; 'that's how I came to
take his rooms. Sad thing, his going down like that, wasn't it? It
must have been a great shock for you--I can see you haven't got over
it even yet.'
'No,' stammered Mark, 'no--yes, I felt it a great deal. I--I didn't
know you were a friend of his, too; did--did you know him well?'
'Very well; in fact I don't fancy he had any secrets from me.'
Like lightning the thought flashed across Mark's mind, what if Caffyn
had been entrusted with Holroyd's literary projects? But he remembered
the next moment that Holroyd had expressly said that he had never told
a soul of his cherished work until that last evening in Rotten Row.
Caffyn had lied, but with a purpose, and as the result confirmed his
suspicions he changed the subject, and was amused at Mark's evident
relief.
Towards the end of the evening Mr. Fladgate came up in his amiable way
and laid his hand jocularly on Caffyn's shoulder. 'Let me give you a
word of advice,' he said laughing; 'don't talk to Mr. Ashburn here
about his book.'
'Shouldn't presume to,' said Caffyn. 'But do you come down so heavily
on ignorant admiration, Ashburn, eh?'
'Oh, it isn't that,' said Mr. Fladgate; 'it's his confounded modesty.
I shall be afraid to tell him when we think about bringing out another
edition. I really believe he'd like never to hear of it again!'
Mark felt himself flush. 'Come,' he said, with a nervous laugh, 'I'm
not so bad as all that!'
'Oh, you're beginning to stand fire better. But (it's such a good
story you _must_ let me tell it, Mr. Ashburn, particularly as it only
does you credit). Well, he was so ashamed of having it known that he
was the author of "Illusion," that he actually took the trouble to get
the manuscript all copied out in a different hand! Thought he'd take
me in that way, but he didn't. No, no, as you young fellows say, I
"spotted" him directly; eh, Mr. Ashburn?'
'I'm afraid it's time for me to be off,' said Mark, dreading further
revelations, and too nervous to see that they could do him no possible
harm. But the fact was, Caffyn's presence filled him with a vague
alarm which he could not shake off.
Good-natured Mr. Fladgate was afraid he had offended him. 'I do hope
you weren't annoyed at my mentioning that about the manuscript?' he
said, as he accompanied Mark to the door. 'It struck me as so curious,
considering the success the book has had, that I really couldn't
resist telling it.'
'No, no,' said Mark, 'it's all right; I didn't mind in the least.
I--I'm not ashamed of it!'
'Why, of course not,' said his host; 'it will be something for your
biographer to record, eh? You won't have another cigar to take you
home? Well, good-night.'
'Good-night,' said Mark, and added some words of thanks for a pleasant
evening.
_Had_ he had such a pleasant evening? he asked himself, as he walked
home alone in the warm night air. He had been well treated by
everybody, and there had been men present whose attention was a
distinction in itself, and yet he felt an uneasiness which he found it
difficult to trace back to any particular cause. He decided at last
that he was annoyed to find that the casual mention of Holroyd's name
should still have power to discompose him--that was a weakness which
he must set himself to overcome.
At the same time no one could possibly discover his secret; there was
no harm done. And before he reached his lodgings, he decided that the
evening had been pleasant enough.