LORD ALISTAIR’S REBELLION
LORD ALISTAIR’S
REBELLION
BY
ALLEN UPWARD
In the Pot it is called Scum
In the Sea it is called Foam:
In the Sky it is called Light.
[Illustration]
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
NEW YORK MCMX
_Copyright 1910 by
Mitchell Kennerley_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I WESTMINSTER BRIDGE 9
II BIOGRAPHICAL 23
III THE PRODIGAL SON 45
IV A FAMILY COUNCIL 58
V BEERS COOPERAGE 70
VI THE WHOLE DUTY OF WOMAN 94
VII THE DECADENTS 109
VIII A LEGITIMIST DEMONSTRATION 132
IX MOLLY FINUCANE AT HOME 158
X A SCIENTIFIC OPINION 175
XI THE PRETENDER 197
XII THE POWERS THAT BE 217
XIII ROYAL PATRONAGE 237
XIV VIRTUE TRIUMPHANT 253
XV MAGIC CASEMENTS 264
XVI NEW LAMPS FOR OLD 274
XVII A SPOKE IN THE WHEEL 290
XVIII THE LAST WORD OF SCIENCE 304
XIX POET’S CORNER 316
XX LADY ALISTAIR 328
XXI THE HOUSE OF CATILINE 346
XXII HIGH TREASON 361
XXIII A PERSONAL EXPLANATION 374
AFTERWARDS 393
LORD ALISTAIR’S REBELLION
CHAPTER I
WESTMINSTER BRIDGE
NIGHT clad the imperial city in a black robe stitched with fire.
The misty river rolled in from the sea through its illuminated bridges
with the subdued swish of some great snake writhing its way through
hoops of gold.
Out in the fog-haunted region between the bridges the movement of the
red and green-eyed steam-tugs, clutching invisible barges and dragging
them away into the darkness, seemed like a shadow-show in which
grotesque demons were hunting the souls of men.
The two banks of the river offered a contrast full of significance.
Along the left bank white lamps that slit the dusk with the hard,
bright glare of diamonds were strung like beads at measured spaces
apart. A broad, smooth-paven road rattled with the wheels of traffic,
and the long bend of the river revealed a sweep of stately buildings
representing the power and splendour of a great civilization.
Education, law, science, government, police, had their homes side by
side along that mighty façade, which thus became an entablature on
which the characters of civilization were legibly impressed. Beside
the ancient universities of the law stood the headquarters of the vast
machinery for the teaching of the populace--that is to say, for the
taming of successive generations of barbarians. The power of wealth was
expressed in luxurious hotels and club-houses, in the mansion of the
noble and the estate-office of the millionaire. The revenues of empire
flowed in and out through the gates of one majestic pile; from another
the guardians of the social order waged war against the restless
ranks of crime. Last in place towered the huge palace of the imperial
Legislature, supreme over all.
Across the river the low mass of the southern shore lay in obscurity.
All that could be distinguished over there was a dark roof-line broken
by a few tall, smokeless chimneys, rising above the water like the
walls and towers of a beleaguered city encompassed by its moat. The
solitary illumination on that side of the river was afforded by a high
square building which broke the gloom from instant to instant with huge
letters of yellow fire, spelling out uncouth, barbaric syllables in
what might have been the jargon of some subterranean race of men. Seen
across the river mist the tower flared out like those burning mosques
beheld from afar by the voyager in the Underworld as he drew near to
the city of Dis.
All night the square, ugly minaret continued to flash its monstrous
hieroglyphs upon the darkness, as though the dwellers on the southern
shore were signalling a message from their camp. And from time to
time, when the rattle of the wheels on the hither side stayed for a
moment, there was borne across the water the low, sullen hum as of a
vast multitude swarming in the narrow streets and stunted houses of the
hidden region beyond.
Thus the two banks of the river faced each other with something of a
mutual threat.
On one side of the gulf, that low, sombre roof-line with its fitful
torch-fires; on the other side, the broad illuminated rampart of
civilization, crowned by its imperial keep.
A light more brilliant than the rest streamed from the summit of the
ponderous clock-tower that guards the foot of Westminster Bridge.
This was the answering signal of the northern shore to that sullen camp
across the river. It burned there to proclaim that the sovereign power
of empire was at work beneath, judging over five hundred millions of
men, and two and a half continents. All the forces of the mightiest
society the world has yet beheld were focused here in the High Court of
Parliament, the Board of the Anglo-Roman Raj.
Here the decrees were shaped in obedience to which invincible fleets
crossed the ocean; armies were transported from one hemisphere to the
conquest of another; kings were dethroned in Africa and other kings
were crowned in Asia; warlike republics were extinguished under the
Southern Pole, and tottering dynasties propped up in the shadow of the
Himalayas; whole races of men, speaking strange tongues, and reckoning
time by other constellations, had their laws and manners and religions
changed for them; immemorial savagery was thrust into the forcing-house
of civilization, and immemorial civilizations were rooted up; from
this centre the hardy freemen of the Baltic North spread the ancient
Mediterranean culture and Semitic folklore wherever the Raj extended
round the globe.
Here throbbed the great piston-rod which drove the myriad wheels
of government and slowly stamped deeper age after age the same
Roman-Semitic imprint upon the subjugated populace at home.
Night after night, as the dwellers on the southern shore gazed across
at the majestic citadel of the Raj, they saw that beacon burning,
the symbol of the unresting watchfulness of their rulers against the
assaults of foes within and without. That steady flame shone out
defiance alike to the foreign invader and the traitor within the gates;
to the rebels who scoured the African veldt, and the more dangerous
rebels who skulked through the streets and alleys of the imperial
capital. On all alike, on the encroaching Tsar as on the plotting
Maharajah, on far-off savages and on felons crouching at the gates,
the Genius of the Raj was seen to keep its never-closing eye.
More than a mile away, round the curving bank of the river, where the
warehouses of Mammon clustered thickly round the temple of Jehovah,
there rose another Symbol, invisible in the night, soaring high above
the intervening territory of squalor.
This Symbol was intended to represent a Roman gibbet, the gibbet on
which a Redeemer had been put to death two thousand years ago, in a
remote corner of that ancient Mediterranean realm of which this modern
civilization was heir.
In the night these two Symbols confronted each other, the Flame and
the Cross, as though they were the warring ensigns of Ahura-Mazda, the
Spirit of Light, and Anru-Mainya, the Spirit of Darkness.
* * * * *
On the midmost arch of Westminster Bridge a young man stood alone,
leaning over the parapet, and sounding with his eyes the black depth of
the water below.
His whole air and appearance were out of harmony with the spot where he
found himself, and suggested that he must have strayed there from some
gayer quarter of the town. An opera hat was thrust back on his head,
and a silk-lined overcoat, thrown open in front, allowed his waistcoat,
of white satin, to become soiled by contact with the grime of the
bridge. He held a cane of rich and fanciful design in one hand; the
other hand, resting loosely on the ironwork of the balustrade, showed
more than one curious and valuable ring.
He leaned on the bridge dully, his head drooping as though he were
tired. Although his face was that of a man not yet thirty years of
age, it bore marks which showed that he had lived too eagerly, without
heed to life’s immitigable laws. Already the forehead was crossed with
faint lines, though there was no thinning of the black hair that curled
above. The beauty of the face was marred by the flush of intemperance,
and the sensuous underlip contradicted the refinement of the sensitive
nostrils. The dark, restless eyes and delicate chin completed the
impression of passion and weakness which was left by the whole face.
On the pavement of St. James’s such a figure would have seemed at home.
Seen where it was, like a tropical bird blown ashore on some bleaker
landscape, it provoked the curiosity of the passers-by.
Some of them took offence at the unusual sight. A group of roughs
returning from some haunt of vice on the north side to their dens
across the river eyed the well-dressed loiterer with envious contempt,
and tried to hustle him as they went by. Their leader, a hulking
Irishman, encouraged them in a coarse speech, which still breathed
faintly of the sea-scented glens of Connemara.
Something in the voice or in the words startled the lounger. He turned
his head quickly, and gave the ruffian a questioning look, under
which he slunk to one side, and passed on with his friends. In the
dark streets where their homes lay they might not have been abashed
so easily. But their courage for violence ebbed on the well-lighted
bridge. Few crimes are committed at high noon.
A policeman sauntering on to the bridge shortly afterwards caught sight
of the stranger, and seemed to become interested in his doings. Instead
of pursuing his way when he had reached the farther end of the bridge,
the officer halted, and stood about on the pavement by St. Thomas’s
Hospital, keeping his eyes fixed on the figure that overhung the
balustrade so persistently.
Two shop-boys coming along in their turn had their sense of humour
tickled by the young man’s forlorn attitude. One of them gave vent to a
ribald jest.
“Look,” he said aloud to his comrade, “there’s Jesus Christ.”
So closely wrapped in his own thoughts was the lounger that it was
many seconds after they had been uttered before the words succeeded
in penetrating to his consciousness. The last sound of the youths’
trampling feet had died away at the end of the bridge before he woke up
sufficiently to ask himself with a resentful air: “What made him say
that?”
He found himself unable to dismiss the jeer from his mind, in which it
went on echoing with such tormenting insistence that at last he stood
up and shook himself, unconsciously making a physical effort to change
the pattern in the brain’s kaleidoscope.
But the suggestion which so irritated him was not to be got rid of
in that fashion. It chimed in too well with the whole tenor of his
meditation since he had found his way on to the bridge. The half-formed
questions which had been baffling his attempts to give them definite
shape now all at once began to come together and settle down into one
question, precipitated, as it were, by that profane mockery.
“Why,” he reflected, with a growing sense of anger at the
comparison--“why did he call me that?”
It was not because he attributed any serious intention to the jester
that he argued thus with himself. He was in that mood when everything
around us appears mysterious and fraught with some revelation to which
we only need a key. The words of the shop-boy became for him a hint
from the night itself, like the cryptic utterances of the characters in
a play of Maeterlinck’s.
“What likeness is there between Christ and me?” he went on, putting the
problem before himself more distinctly.
What likeness, indeed, between this spoilt child of civilization, to
whom the world seemed to have given of its best, for whom Christianity
could be no more than a legend, and that buffeted Redeemer hanging on
his gibbet in the Syrian sun of two thousand years ago?
And yet an insult cannot rankle unless it is barbed with truth. From
the inner cells of memory, where they had been stored up in past
days by a religious mother, certain words and phrases were already
coming forth, as though moved by some subtle affinity, to answer that
uncomfortable question.
_Despised and rejected of men_--they ran something like that. And
again: _Stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted_. There were other
words which should have followed, surely, but he tried in vain to draw
them forth.
_Despised and rejected of men._ The flush darkened on the young man’s
cheek as he flung back his head with a rebellious and angry glance at
the river’s northern bank, where the shining walls and towers of the
city of Ormuzd seemed to overhang the gulf--the glance which an exile
gives at the city which has driven him forth.
He had fled to the spot, stunned by one of those buffets which life is
ever waiting to deal to those who have not learnt their lesson aright.
And his ears still smarted with the scream of the newsboys who were
proclaiming in every street that Lord Alistair Stuart had failed.
* * * * *
In London men like Alistair Stuart fail every day, and go under,
leaving scarcely a ripple on the smooth surface of a society which
hastens to forget all disagreeable things. But Lord Alistair’s
catastrophe had been able to eclipse for one night the comedy of
politics and the tragedy of war. For he happened to be one of the few
in whom the world is interested, and when the world is interested
in a man it will not suffer him to go down to sheol in peace. Its
hisses are the reaction of its cheers, and those who court its notice
put their lives to the hazard, like Esther when she went to touch the
sceptre of Ahasuerus.
The world knew Alistair Stuart in two characters--as the brother and
heir-presumptive of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay, and as the lover of
Molly Finucane.
To the outer world, for which newspapers are written and formal
histories compiled, he was the brother of one of its most important
citizens. The Duke of Trent was distinguished not only by his rank,
but by his service to the State. By an ironical coincidence the same
_Gazette_ which revealed the fact that Lord Alistair Stuart had
filed his petition also contained the notification that his brother
had kissed hands as Secretary of State. It was impossible that the
moralists of the pulpit and the press should overlook the striking
example of the idle and industrious apprentice, and the younger
brother’s disgrace was deepened by the elder’s triumph.
In that inner world whose newspapers are the boudoirs and the
smoking-rooms, and which goes for its history to memoirs and chronicles
of the back-stairs, the name of Alistair Stuart had gained celebrity in
connection with a personage of whom the pulpit might not know, and the
press might not tell.
Molly Finucane had achieved one of those reputations which have given
certain women a place in history. In the ancient world she might have
had princes to fight for her, and poets to sing her praise. In the
modern world she was a figure of evil, regarded with a feeling like
that which inspired the legends of the succubi. An element of mystery
attached to her extraordinary career. It was said that she could
neither dance nor sing, that she was astonishingly ignorant, and that
her speech and ways smelt of the gutter. Even beauty was denied her.
The men whom she had ruined themselves could not explain the secret of
her power over them; she overcame her victims like a malarial fever.
Some men could meet her day after day without succumbing; others lost
themselves from the first; others again began by despising her as an
ugly little street-girl, and ended by giving her their wives’ jewels.
How many had perished in the maelstrom of desire which she created
none could say. But there was a ghastly story of the young Earl of
St. Luc, who had put an end to his life at the age of twenty because
his trustees refused him the means to set up an establishment for
Molly Finucane. An ineffaceable impression had been made by the two
contrasted pictures of the desolate mother weeping over her boy’s
dead body, as it was dragged all stained and dripping from the moat
surrounding the ancient keep of the St. Lucs, and of the wide-mouthed,
stupid Irish girl, planted in a reek of tobacco smoke on a table
crowded by tipsy youths, repeating to them in her cracked, shameless
voice the latest and most brutally coarse refrain of the street.
It was a year, perhaps two years, since the tongue of scandal had first
singled out the name of Alistair Stuart from among the rest of those
who singed their wings in this fatal flame. Gradually it became known
that Molly Finucane had given him a devotion which no other man had
ever been able to buy with gold or blood or tears. For his sake she
had refused at the last moment to take possession of the miniature
palace furnished for her by the great Brazilian broker, Mendes; who had
simply shrugged his shoulders and ordered the house to be kept vacant
and ready for her. Stuart and she had gone to live together in a faded
corner of Chelsea, in a house surrounded by elms with black trunks and
yellow leaves.
The house in Chelsea loomed large in the mind of the new generation.
It was regarded as a citadel of sin, as the headquarters of a cult
which gloried in its moral degeneracy. Alistair Stuart assumed the
character of a high-priest among the pagans, as they chose to call
themselves--poets whose verses echoed still more faintly the faint
autumnal sighs of Verlaine; wits whose epigrams were brilliant with the
phosphorescence of corruption; men in whom genius was a vice, and vice
an affectation. Hatred of the middle classes was the watchword of this
sect, which was recruited from penniless younger sons, from university
failures, from a whole class for whom the Protestant Church has no
refuge, but who in Catholic countries end often in the monastery. They
waged war on the Victorian Age, on its religion, on its art, on its
commercialism, but, above all, on its Puritanism.
In the eyes of this brotherhood of the unfit bankruptcy was rather
meritorious than disgraceful, and the fifty thousand pounds which
Stuart had spent without possessing represented so much spoil taken
from the Philistines. Stuart’s own first proceeding after he had
signed the warrant for his civil degradation had been to send forth
invitations for a supper to celebrate the event.
His bankruptcy had been in one sense voluntary. Although he had cut
himself off from intercourse with his family when he took the house in
Chelsea, he knew that Trent would have helped him to make terms with
his creditors. But he knew also that Trent would have required him to
give up Molly Finucane. He had filed his petition with a light heart,
in the belief that the disgrace would fall more heavily on his brother
than on himself.
For the éclat resulting from his act he had been prepared, but not for
the effect of the éclat on his own mind.
He had been on his way to a club in Piccadilly overlooking the Green
Park, which served as a meeting-ground for those members of the cult
who kept on terms with respectability. Almost on the club steps he was
arrested by the sight of his name in large letters on a news-bill,
bringing the sharp reminder that he had forfeited his right of entry.
It was a shock to him to find that his exploit had suddenly lost its
charm. He bought a paper as he walked on, and read of his brother’s
promotion to the Cabinet. The unforeseen coincidence intensified his
discomfiture. This brother of his, whom he had always looked on as
a dullard and a prig, whom he had so often sneered at among his own
friends, was standing there crowned in front of the footlights, while
he, Alistair, was being hissed off the stage. In a flash he saw the
ruin he had made of his life, and was dismayed.
And as he wandered miserably through the streets the question that
had risen and struggled for expression in his mind was--Why? Why had
his brother so far surpassed him in the race? Why were the honours
and rewards of life bestowed on some and not on others? Why had he,
Alistair, steered his bark upon the rocks?
Standing there between that visible theatre of his brother’s triumph,
on the north side of the river, and the unknown hooligan realm upon the
south, with which there stole upon him a daunting sense of affinity, he
pondered the question; and while he pondered it, the feeling grew upon
him that it would not be answered by itself, that it was a part of a
more tremendous issue, that the meaning of life was involved in it, and
the eternal mystery of the world.
Alistair looked back for some clue to the tangled skein of his career;
and by-and-by the vista of the past took on distinctness, like one of
those marvellous canvases of Rembrandt from whose dingy surface there
gradually peeps out a whole magical landscape charged with light.