THE DECADENTS
IT was some time after dinner when the Duke of Trent, faithful to his
promise to their mother, drove up to the gate of Alistair’s house in
Chelsea.
On the way James considered what line it would be best for him to take.
He reckoned on finding the prodigal in a despondent mood, perhaps half
estranged from the temptress already, under the stress of poverty and
disgrace. If so, it should prove an easy task to appeal to him by the
picture of the welcome awaiting him in Colonsay House. Alistair could
not but be touched by his brother’s generosity--and James meant to be
generous. He meant to say--to say a little condescendingly, perhaps,
but kindly: “I take your debts on myself. Your name is cleared. Your
mother and I only ask you not to forget that you have a home to come to
when you like.”
By the time he had reached the house the Duke had half persuaded
himself that he should be able to bring the repentant one away with him
that very night.
The house was surrounded on all sides by a high brick wall, pierced at
the entrance by a tall narrow gateway, the gate of Georgian ironwork.
Ordering his coachman to wait, the Minister strode up a covered pathway
that led to the door of the house, and knocked.
As he did so he was aware that the lower part of the house was
brilliantly lit up. He caught a murmur of voices coming through the
windows of a room which overlooked the front garden, and even heard
what sounded like applause.
Before he could frame any explanation to himself of these sights and
sounds the door was opened by a smart lad in a rather untidy page’s
livery, who stared at the visitor with the vulgar impertinence of a
servant who does not respect his employers.
At the same instant a loud burst of laughter came from the interior of
the building.
“Is Lord Alistair at home?” the Duke demanded sharply, incensed by this
reception.
“He’s engaged,” said the boy glibly, giving the Duke a cautious look.
“What name, please?”
“The Duke of Trent. I am his lordship’s brother,” returned the Home
Secretary, frowning.
“Oh, that’s all right, my lord--I mean Your Grace,” the page responded,
with an air of relief. “Come in, please.”
And, scarcely giving the visitor time to remove his hat, he threw
open the door of the room from whence the sounds had proceeded, and
announced him.
The new-comer took two steps through the doorway, and stopped
astounded.
He had arrived on the scene of a festivity. Around a dining-table,
crowded with a confusion of dessert-dishes, champagne-bottles,
coffee-cups, cigar-boxes, and spirit-stands, with the ashes of
innumerable cigars and cigarettes soaking in the spilt wine and coffee
on the tablecloth, were seated some seven or eight men, most of them
young, all wearing evening dress, and seeming to be in the highest
spirits. At the head of the table, facing the Duke as he came in, the
woman he had come to snatch his brother away from lolled back in her
chair, puffing a cigarette, her hands monstrously encumbered with
coloured stones, and her powdered bosom resplendent with five or six
chains of jewellery. At the foot of the table, beside the door by which
James had just entered, the brother he had come to pardon and to redeem
turned languidly in his seat, and, rising with studied nonchalance,
removed a cigar from his lips to say:
“That you, Trent? So good of you to join us.” And, turning to the
company again, he added the careless introduction: “My brother.”
His second glance round the room had warned the angry Duke that,
however he might be disposed to treat Molly Finucane, her guests were
not men whom he had any right to object to meet. Too well-bred to make
a scene under the circumstances, he choked down his indignation, and,
after a haughty bow, which neither included nor excluded the lady of
the house, he accepted the chair which someone offered him. It was with
a sense of satisfaction not unmingled with surprise that the Secretary
of State discovered on sitting down that his neighbour was a personal
acquaintance, the great Mendes, head of the South American Bank, and a
financier with whom Cabinet Ministers were obliged to reckon.
Lord Alistair vouchsafed a light word of explanation.
“Been having a little feed to celebrate my smash,” he said, waving
his hand over the dirty table. “These are my friends. You see before
you the members of the Dishonourable Brotherhood of Decadents, an
association for the spread of corruption among the upper classes.
Dishonourable Brother St. John, I call upon you for a speech.”
“What on earth is all this?” the Duke demanded in a whisper of his
neighbour.
The millionaire shrugged his shoulders, as though he were slightly
ashamed of his company.
“I suppose they intend it for humour,” he answered in the same key.
“It’s one of your brother’s ideas. He’s always starting something
of the kind. It used to be a Chinese Guild, and they all dressed as
mandarins and wore pigtails. Last year it was an anti-Semite show,
and Stuart had the cheek to ask me to join it.” The Jew’s smile as
he said this was a trifle threatening. “They parody everything. That
Frenchman opposite, Des Louvres”--he nodded towards a man with a thin,
wicked-looking face and small dark beard and moustache--“he is at the
bottom of it, I believe. They may know something about him in your
Office.”
The Home Secretary was staggered. Possessed of too little imagination
to see anything in the proceedings but a rather scandalous jest of
the kind that undergraduates indulge in at places like Cambridge and
Oxford, he felt that the mere fact of the jest being carried out by
grown men made it doubly unbecoming. And he felt personally aggrieved
that these men should be making merry over an event which had cast a
shadow on the house of which he was the head. He recalled his mother’s
grief, Prince Herbert’s gracious interest, the money sacrifice which he
himself was preparing to make; and his heart swelled with inward wrath
and shame.
He could not help wondering privately what Mendes was doing in such
company. The keen, remorseless man of business who had executed a
masterpiece of legal robbery, and thereby made himself one of the new
world powers which were taking the place of Kings and Cabinets, seemed
strangely out of place among that crew of mockers. The Brazilian sat
for the most part silent, his lips set in an ironical smile. But from
time to time his glance wandered in the direction of Molly Finucane,
who moved restively in, her chair whenever she caught Mendes’s black
eyes fixed on hers.
The rest of the revellers were all excited in different degrees by the
wine they had been drinking, and their remarks and interruptions formed
a sort of ground-bass to the speech which Alistair had called for. Mr.
Gerald St. John, whom the “Court Guide,” more tender of his dignity
than he seemed to be himself, described as “Honourable,” was a man of
about the same age as Stuart, though his bald forehead gave him the
appearance of being older. He had some little reputation as an amateur
in music and painting; he had composed songs which were occasionally
sung, and painted pictures which the New Gallery did not disdain.
Addressing his friends as “Dishonourable Brethren,” he hailed them as
the missionaries of a new gospel. Theirs was the task to purge society
of Puritanism and propriety. They were to set the example of becoming
artists in Beautiful Sin. It was impossible for Trent to tell how far
he was serious. His speech mingled echoes of the cant of a certain
class of literary and artistic critics with what appeared to be broad
farce.
But two passages in the address made an impression on the Minister, by
their curious connection with his recent interests. The first was a
surprising compliment to the Church of Rome; the second was a panegyric
in a much broader vein of the hooligans.
Of the Roman Church the speaker said that it was the only form of
Christianity which deserved their toleration and respect. He regarded
it as the true Church of the Decadence, and as such he called upon the
Brotherhood to support it. He was not himself a Catholic; he was a
polytheist. But he considered that, next to polytheism, the Church of
Rome afforded the best rallying-point for all that was beautiful and
corrupt in the art and life of the age.
This extraordinary eulogy was received with vociferous applause,
especially by the French Count, whose air was that of a man enjoying
a personal triumph. Molly Finucane, who had not been to Mass or
Confession for many years, but who had not quite shaken off her early
impressions, tried to disguise her nervousness by hammering the table
with her wineglass till it broke--an accident which she was half
disposed to interpret as the work of an offended Power.
The Duke of Trent, who entertained a vague respect for the Roman Church
as a venerable institution whose influence was generally exerted on
the side of the Conservative party, hardly knew what to think of this
equivocal homage to its merits. The Honourable Gerald St. John passed
on to the question of hooliganism, not without a shy glance in the
direction of the Home Secretary, which showed how much the jest was
enhanced by the presence of hooliganism’s official adversary.
The hooligans, he declared, were crusaders fighting for the same
cause as that Dishonourable Brotherhood. They were martyrs of the new
individualism. Their so-called outrages constituted a protest--the
only form of protest which dull and hidebound statesmen could
understand--against the iron yoke of Socialist civilization, under
which they were all groaning. He regarded the hooligans as saviours. It
was significant that so far the man whom they had selected for attack
was that embodiment of everything vulgar and virtuous, the suburban
ratepayer. When they had exterminated the ratepayer, he hoped they
would go on to the millionaire. He had always regretted that their
fellow-workers, the Anarchists, should show so much antipathy to Kings.
It was an unreasonable prejudice. Kings were picturesque survivals in
the midst of the hideous monotony of modern life. Kings were rarely
respectable, and were not seldom steeped in crime; and this applied
particularly to those romantic claimants--he, the speaker, preferred
the dear old name “Pretender”--whom their Dishonourable Brother on the
left was seeking to restore.
This allusion was accepted by Des Louvres with eager manifestations of
approval. Once more the Secretary of State felt an obscure uneasiness
as he compared these mocking utterances with the recent experience
of his own department, and he began to ask himself if he was indeed
listening to the first whispers of a coming storm.
Hero Vanbrugh’s question about the Legitimist Guild had not fallen on
deaf ears. He had had the curiosity to ask his permanent staff if they
knew anything of the Legitimists, and he found they knew very little.
There is nothing Government Departments dislike so much as information,
except the trouble of acting on it. No one in the Home Office could say
exactly who the Legitimists were, or how they had come into existence
as a guild. Their very number was unknown, but it was believed to be
insignificant. They were wholly without influence or following, and
would never have been heard of but for the fact that the newspapers
regarded their proceedings as a good joke. Every sensible person put
them down as a clique of vain and foolish young men who made themselves
supremely ridiculous by trying to revive a cause which had been dead
for a hundred and fifty years.
Such was the official view. Sixty or seventy years before a similar
view had been taken of the action of a little clique of Oxford men who
were setting themselves to undo the work of the Protestant Reformation.
That little clique had undertaken to break up a settlement which had
taken root for two hundred and fifty years, and had survived twelve
reigns and six rebellions. In the course of a single reign they had
come within sight of their goal. They had driven the word “Protestant”
out of polite conversation, and made it a synonym for everything base,
ignorant and malicious. They had made it dangerous for a Protestant to
object publicly to Catholic practices which were still forbidden by the
letter of the law. They had sent an informal embassy to the Vatican to
negotiate the re-entry of England into the Roman obedience; and they
had delivered the first open attack on the legislative bars which still
hindered that consummation.
Fresh from the assurances of the Home Office, it was a shock to the
Minister to find himself for the second time that day confronted with
this ridiculous but offensive movement. It was true that Mr. St. John’s
remarks bordered on satire, but the serious-minded are apt to resent
satire at the expense of what they fear, as much as at the expense of
what they revere; the only notes they wish to hear are the snap of
cavil and the rumble of denunciation.
If the Duke of Trent had consulted his own inclination he would have
risen and protested against this trifling with treason. But, like most
men who are deprived of the sense of humour, James Stuart was keenly
sensitive to ridicule, and he dared not expose himself to the merciless
wit of this crew of profligates. He bitterly repented the false step he
had taken in sitting down amongst them, but he sought in vain for any
means of extrication.
Meanwhile the orator concluded with a felicitous reference to the
occasion of the feast.
One Dishonourable Brother--in fact, the founder of their Order, he
said--had shown that it was possible to emulate, if not to surpass,
the exploits of the humble hooligan. By his magnificent defiance of
the day before he had struck dismay into the mercenary ranks of their
hereditary foes--he need not say he meant the trading class, whose
shameful supremacy had made England unfit to live in. Their gallant
host had plundered the hostile camp of a sum which represented one of
the greatest triumphs ever achieved over the Philistine. He called
upon him, in their name, not to pay this _canaille_ a farthing in the
pound. And he called upon them to drink confusion to the respectable
classes, coupled with the name of their Arch Decadent!
Everyone rose to his feet to drink the toast, with the exception of the
bankrupt himself, and his brother, who tried to conceal his disgust
under an air of amused tolerance.
Alistair Stuart was conscious of his brother’s real feeling, and
resented it all the more because he was half ashamed of his own part in
the buffoonery. His tone became louder and more insolent as he gulped
down glass after glass of spirits, and called upon one or other of his
guests to keep up the entertainment.
Nobody dared call upon the Secretary of State. They all knew enough to
feel that he was a stranger in the camp, if not a spy, and only the
emphasized indifference of Stuart to his brother’s presence gave them
courage to go on. The presence of this representative of all that they
professed to loathe and despise, looking on with chill disapproval,
dashed their spirits unexpectedly, and even to their own ears their
customary jests took on a hollow sound.
Presently it came to the turn of a youth seated opposite to the Duke.
He was of a pale and sickly countenance, the whiteness of his face
being accentuated by the black locks which he allowed to grow down to
his neck. His tie was a black sash with flowing ends like that worn by
French Art students in the quarter of Batignolles. He did not appear
to be much more than twenty, and answered to the name of Egerton Vane.
“Who is he?” Trent asked his neighbour.
“The lunatic with the scarf round his neck? That’s a minor poet.
I don’t suppose you have ever come across his works. He publishes
two volumes every year, at his own expense, of course, with about
twenty poems in each. No one ever reads them, except the provincial
reviewers. He has got an album filled with cuttings from papers like
the _Pembrokeshire News_ and the _Berwick-on-Tweed Gazette_. ‘A volume
of verse from the graceful pen of Mr. Egerton Vane’--that’s the kind
of incense he feeds on. Once he got a puff in a paper called the
_Librarian_, and carried it about with him for months. He said to me
with tears in his eyes: ‘This is recognition!’”
Everyone in the room seemed to have some literary or artistic vocation,
except Mendes himself. The motive which brought the South American
there remained unguessed by Trent, but it was clear that he extracted
some amusement from his strange associates.
“That other young fool over there is his brother, Wickham Vane,” the
millionaire continued, indicating a boy of eighteen or thereabouts, at
the other end of the table.
“Does he write poetry, too?”
“No, he doesn’t do anything so material as write. He thinks beautifully
about old tapestry.”
Wickham Vane might have been pursuing his peculiar vocation at that
moment from his absorbed expression. But he roused himself from his
abstraction to pay the homage of attention to his elder brother.
Egerton Vane held a large sheet of paper in his hand, but before
reading from it he prepared his hearers’ minds by a short allocution.
“The poem I am about to read you strikes an entirely new note in
literature, the note of the unreal. It is a ‘Sonnet to a Drawer in a
Japanese Cabinet.’ I have come to the conclusion that all the poets
who have preceded me have been mistaken in thinking that Nature was
poetical. The artificial only is poetical, because only Art can be
artistic. Nature is incapable of symbolism, and the symbol alone is
truly beautiful. All the glorious sins which reveal themselves crudely
and grossly in mere human beings are latent in exquisite suggestion in
the divinely precious works of Art. Even the handicrafts of the East
are steeped in the splendid sensuality of its peoples. In this poem
I have attempted to do justice to the subtle and elusive vice which
clings like the aroma of putrefying rose-leaves to the workmanship of a
Japanese cabinet in my possession.”
The poet proceeded to read:
SONNET
TO A DRAWER IN A JAPANESE CABINET
What shadow of dead secrets, lemon-eyed,
Lurks in thy black recesses, frightful drawer,
Crowned with the Pagan scent of delicate gore
Fresh from the veins of some green suicide?
Behold thy lacquered sins are glorified
In frantic fowls that round thy handle soar,
Mad with obscure desires, like those that tore
Unclean blue Mænads by the Phrygian tide!
And horrors like vermilion rats awake
And crawl about thee, crooning in my ears
Dim, vampire songs of shrivelled souls that ache
With the strange lust for torture-baths of pain;
Sick with the thirst of poison drunk in vain,
And bleeding with the clammy blood of tears.
The new note thus successfully struck in literature was applauded with
a vehemence that concealed some jealousy on the part of the other poets
present. Only Molly Finucane, who was beginning to feel herself left
out in the cold, asked the author impertinently what his work meant.
“Nothing!” was the rapt reply. “All Art is quite meaningless.”
The Duke of Trent turned to Mendes.
“And is that absurd and disgusting rubbish the sort of thing which
passes for poetry to-day?”
“Not to-day, perhaps, but it will pass for it to-morrow. If Egerton
Vane goes on long enough, I have no doubt he will found a school. But I
have noticed that most young fellows who begin like that end by going
into a monastery.”
The Duke began to see a new usefulness in the institutions which he had
been brought up to regard with aversion.
The Brazilian, who knew the weak spot in most of his fellow-men,
maliciously threw an apple of discord among the company by asking
Egerton Vane across the table what he thought of the poems of Rowley
Drummer.
The quarrel which instantly arose and raged over the merits of this
distinguished writer showed that envy of a rival’s renown may be a
stronger passion than hatred of the middle classes.
The chief apologist for the poet was a man who had recently achieved
a scandalous success with a novel in which he dealt faithfully with
the vices of all his most intimate friends. The terror inspired by
this performance had made him for the moment the most courted man in
London society, and persons like the brothers Vane followed him about
everywhere in the hope of finding themselves pilloried to fame in Basil
Dyke’s next libel.
Dyke, who found his antipathy to the _bourgeoisie_ sensibly diminished
by every cheque which reached him from his publisher, and who was
already meditating desertion from the decadent ranks in favour of
marriage with an heiress, put forward a claim on behalf of his client
which it did not seem easy to refute.
“He has made vice popular in the person of the British soldier,” he
urged. “He has stamped with brazen hoofs upon the Gordons and the
Havelocks and the prayer-meeting heroes of the Victorian Age, and has
called upon the drudging taxpayer to bow down and worship a swearing,
drinking blackguard. His patriotism is nauseous in itself, I grant,
but then he has made it patriotic to break the Ten Commandments. He has
identified Imperialism with immorality.”
“And therefore, I suppose, you would say with Art?” retorted Egerton
Vane, with ill-concealed annoyance. “All Art is immoral, but it does
not follow that all immorality is artistic.”
“Vulgarity is never artistic,” added the thinker about old tapestry,
coming to his brother’s support. “Rowley Drummer has no sense of the
unreal. He sees life in all its blinding vulgarity, and therefore the
better he paints it, the worse is the result.”
Dyke saw that he had gone too far. It is always bad manners to praise
one poet in the hearing of another. He tried to qualify his praise.
“I do not defend him as an artist,” he explained, “but as a demagogue.
I say that the coarse passion called patriotism, in his hands, has been
turned to a good purpose. After he has taught the public to acclaim the
hooligans of the barrack-room, they cannot very well flog the hooligans
of the street.”
To the Minister, fresh from his legislative essay, this remark sounded
like a challenge. Once more a doubt invaded his mind as to whether all
that he was listening to was sheer ribaldry, or whether there were not
underlying it some serious purpose, or at least some serious tendency,
of which Cabinet Ministers one day might have to take heed.
Molly Finucane had been feeling bored for some time, and, what was
worse, feeling that her exclusion from the conversation reflected on
her position as the lady of the house. She seized this opportunity to
assert her prerogative.
“Who talks of flogging the hooligans?” she asked, with a good deal of
scorn. “They’ll have to catch ’em first.”
She stopped short, warned by the uneasy looks of the rest that she had
committed herself in some way. Molly did not read the papers, and so
was ignorant of the recent proceedings of the House of Lords. But she
was aware that Lord Alistair’s brother was identified in some way with
the Government, and therefore with the cause of law and order, and she
guessed that her expressions might contain some element of offence.
There had been a time when Molly would have enjoyed nothing so much as
shocking a Cabinet Minister by telling him across her own table that
her brother was a corner-boy. But for the past year a great change
had come over her disposition, as great as that which transforms the
roystering medical student into the serious family practitioner. It had
not needed the letter from Lord Alistair’s mother to put before her
the idea of becoming Lord Alistair’s wife, nor to teach her the way in
which his friends would take such an alliance. To become Lady Alistair
without at the same time obtaining the social honours which other Lady
Alistairs enjoyed would do little to satisfy that yearning for other
women’s respect which is the torment appointed for such as Molly
Finucane. And there was enough good in Molly to make her anxious for
Alistair’s sake not to be a permanent blight on his career. It was for
his sake as much as for her own that she had been striving painfully
for the last twelve months to acquire the habitudes of a lady.
The unexpected arrival of the Duke of Trent had caused her a thrill of
pleasurable excitement. To make a good impression on the head of the
family, she felt, would bring her half-way to the goal. Now, at the
thought that she had been so near to disgracing herself, she could have
bitten her tongue.
Molly’s preoccupations were not shared by Alistair, who took it for
granted that his brother had come to reproach him, and resented what
seemed to him an impertinent intrusion. By this time he had drunk too
much to care what he said or did, and the desire was strong upon him to
wreak his bitter feelings on the head of his favoured elder.
Staggering to his feet, and casting a disdainful look at the silent and
annoyed Duke, he burst out:
“I am a hooligan. I’ve been trying to disguise it ever since I was a
boy, but I’m not going to try any more. I hate your law and order; I
hate your respectability; I hate your civilization. Our forefathers
were thieves and murderers, and I envy them. They lived a jolly life
among the heather and the hills, and they were gentlemen. They didn’t
cringe to cobblers and butchers for votes, and go to church on Sundays
to please their grocer. They swore and drank and diced as much as
they liked, and never asked what the Dissenters thought of them. I
am sick of the strait-waistcoat; I am sick of swallow-tail coats and
prayer-books. Why should I torture myself in the effort to lead your
unnatural life? I protest against it all. Life is one long persecution
of men like me, by men like you. Why can’t you leave me alone, as I
leave you alone? I don’t force you to drink and gamble, and lead what
you are pleased to call an immoral life. Why do you try to force me to
lead a moral one?”
He paused for a moment, and then, as if the overflow of his wrath had
sobered him, went on in a more serious vein:
“What is your ideal? Show me the man you honour, and I will show you
the value of your morality. The hero of to-day is the successful cheat,
the tradesman who has made a million by selling rotten food to the
poor or to your own soldiers in South Africa; the bandit of the Stock
Exchange; the monopolist who has broken the hearts and ruined the lives
of a hundred struggling rivals, and who three hundred years ago would
have been hanged as an engrosser. That is the man to whom you kneel,
for whom all the doors of all the churches are thrown open, in whose
name I am ordered to reform my ways.”
The speaker seemed to feel the need of pointing his denunciation with a
personal application.
“I am your victim. I am the man whose life is ground out beneath the
Juggernaut wheels of what you call your social system. Why? Because
I cannot become hard and selfish and stupid like your model. It is
monotony that you want; it is originality that you hate. Go to the
tombs of your martyrs--most of them are buried in Westminster Abbey
or St. Paul’s--Goldsmith the bankrupt, Nelson the adulterer, Pitt
the drunkard, Shakespeare the debauchee. Those are the men whom you
are trying to exterminate, and you have nearly succeeded. I--I had
something here, perhaps”--he smote his forehead with his hand--“and
I might have done something if I had ever had the chance. But you
have killed me. All the bright instincts, all the golden wings that
fluttered in the dawn, all the magic whispers, all the reveries and
dreams--they are dead and still and silent now. Your work is done.”
A slight shiver went round the room and touched even the Cabinet
Minister, who had been more than once on the point of rising and taking
his departure.
Suddenly Alistair Stuart broke into a loud laugh.
“Thank you, my Dishonourable friends--thank you for your support
to-night. You see before you a bankrupt, but a merry one. You will hear
of me again before long. I think of taking a house on the south side of
the river, and turning hooligan. I invite you to become members of my
band. I hope to give some trouble to the authorities. We are fortunate
in having one of them here to-night. I invite you to drink his health,
gentlemen--my brother, the Home Secretary, author of a Bill to punish
the hooligans by flogging. In your name I defy him, and drink damnation
to his Bill!”
The thickness of his speech and the increasing wildness of his
behaviour relieved Lord Alistair’s hearers from the necessity of
treating this as anything but the utterance of an intoxicated man. But
it was clearly necessary to put an end to the scene.
Mendes and the Duke of Trent rose together, but the financier was the
first to speak.
“Gentlemen, it is time we were going. Stuart, sit down! You don’t know
what you are doing!”
He thrust Lord Alistair down into a chair and held him there, while the
others made their hasty farewells and streamed out into the hall.
“I am obliged to you, Mendes,” said the Duke. “Do you think,” he added
in a whisper, “you could get that girl out of the way?”
“It’s her house, I believe, but I’ll try to send her to bed,” was the
answer.
The Brazilian went up to Molly, who sat looking rather frightened at
her end of the table. He said a few words in a low voice which appeared
to produce the right effect. Molly Finucane glanced timidly at the
Duke, and then came towards him with an evident desire to propitiate.
“I’ll leave him with you, if you like,” she said, “but you won’t find
it much good talking to him to-night, I expect. You’d better come again
in the morning, if it’s any business.”
Trent confined himself to bowing silently, and Mendes accompanied Miss
Finucane out of the room, leaving the brothers together.
Alistair had remained still, with his head resting in his hands, as
though exhausted by his passion. Hearing the door close, he looked up
sullenly.
“Well, what do you want with me?” he asked.
Faithful to his resolve to be gracious, in spite of the provocations he
had received, the Duke made a mild answer.
“I want you to come home, Alistair.”
“This is home.”
“My house is your home,” said James, not unkindly; and, with a tact of
which he was not always capable, he added: “Our mother’s house is the
home of both of us.”
Alistair reddened.
“How is she?” he muttered.
“She is very anxious and unhappy about you. I have promised her to save
you, if you will let me.”
This time the elder brother’s words were not so well chosen. It always
grated on Alistair to be reminded that he was dependent on James.
“I can’t leave my friends,” he said stubbornly.
Trent thought of the company he had just seen depart, and his
indignation got the better of him.
“Friends!” he repeated. “Friends who have landed you in the Bankruptcy
Court!”
“Well, you didn’t keep me out of it!”
Trent made a strong effort to keep his temper.
“I have seen my solicitor to-day with the object of preventing the
adjudication. Alistair, I will do it, if you will only pull yourself
together, and make it possible for your mother and me to help you. I
will pay your debts once more, though I can ill afford it, and start
you again with a clean sheet, if you will only take advantage of it.
Come! I have got the brougham waiting outside. Why shouldn’t you get up
now, and let me take you straight away with me?”
He tried to speak cheerfully and confidently. But there was no
encouragement in the bleared eyes that looked up at him.
“What! and leave Molly after she’s stuck to me all this time? D’you
think I’m a cad, Trent?”
“You called yourself a hooligan just now.”
Trent regretted the retort the moment it had passed his lips. But it
was too late. Alistair started up angrily.
“And, damn it! I’ll _be_ a hooligan before I will sell the little woman
for a few miserable thousands, like that! Go to the devil, you and your
clean sheet! I’m sorry for the old mater, if she feels it, but I can’t
stand your patronage, and I won’t have your moralizing; so you can just
leave me alone.”
“I will leave you alone!” exclaimed his brother. “God forgive me, I
sometimes wonder what I have done to deserve being cursed with such a
brother as you!”
He turned and strode out of the room, leaving Alistair to sway and sink
down with his head upon the table among the ashes and wine-stains of
the extinguished revel.