MOLLY FINUCANE AT HOME
AS he turned away from St. Jermyn’s schoolroom, after putting his
mother and Miss Vanbrugh into their carriage, Lord Alistair Stuart made
a curious discovery. Thrusting his hands into his pocket in the act of
nodding to a cabdriver, he found that he had no money.
The brother of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay had often known what it
was to want a thousand pounds, but he had never been without sovereigns
in his pocket, and it took him some moments to realize that this state
of things was not accidental, but natural in his new circumstances.
Much to his own surprise, he felt the first cold touch of poverty
distinctly exhilarating, like a bather’s first plunge into the sea. It
was not hardship so far; it was merely adventure. He apologized to the
disappointed cabman, and set off to walk to Chelsea, with that sense of
superiority to fortune which Aristippus may have felt when he bade his
tired slave throw away the bag of gold.
Voluntary suffering has always exercised a powerful charm over a
certain order of mankind. The starvation, the confinement, and the
self-torture of the Hindu fakir and the Catholic saint have not been
practised solely with a business-like view to reward in a future life;
they have satisfied a need--morbid, perhaps, but real, since it is
found among races that have scarcely risen to the conception of another
world. It is as if diseased human nature instinctively sought its own
remedy, as the suffering animal seeks out the herb possessed of healing
powers.
As Alistair Stuart took his way through the mean streets of Lambeth
and Vauxhall, with their narrow dirty pavements, their scanty shops
at the street-corners and their taverns in which the only touches of
brightness and prosperity seemed concentrated, he felt the temptation
growing strong upon him.
“After all, it would not be so bad to live this life,” he said
to himself. “One might be very cosy in one of these small old
houses, tucked up against some great dead wall, with unknown things
taking place on the other side of it, or buried beneath some huge
railway arch, with trains thundering overhead all night to unknown
destinations. I seem to be an outlaw; why shouldn’t I live among
outlaws? I could loaf about in flannel shirts and dressing-gowns all
day long, and Molly would fetch me my beer from the public-house. I
should smoke long clay pipes, and write an epic poem, like the ‘City of
Dreadful Night.’”
But the recollection of Thomson and his poem turned the current of his
thoughts into a darker channel.
“How many men of genius has London brained with her paving-stones!” he
reflected bitterly. “The poet asks for nothing but liberty to sing, and
the world will not give it to him. ‘Give me money’s worth for my bread
and raiment and shelter’ is her harsh demand; and she drags the poet
from his fountain in the wilderness to sweep the dust of the bazaar.”
His fellow-feeling for the poor drunken schoolmaster rested on
sentiment. In Alistair the seed of genius, delicate from the first,
had been choked, not by the pressure of physical needs, but by a
profound moral discouragement. During the years in which genius begins
to recognize itself, to try its wings, and point its first shy flight
towards the empyrean, he had found himself living the life of a
criminal on a ticket-of-leave. He had been kept in a state of spiritual
starvation, deprived of the food for which his nature pined, and choked
with the dry bread of Calvinism. The budding tendrils of his mind had
shrivelled, vainly searching for the air of sympathy and the warm sun
of praise. He had been made to feel afraid of his own intelligence,
his dreams and guesses after truth and beauty were imputed to him as
iniquity; and if he ever sought to give them expression, he wrote as
Crusoe might have written on his desert isle--for the ears of savages.
His genius had emerged from this ordeal maimed for life. If he sang
now, it was not as the birds sang, rejoicing in their Maker’s gift to
them, but stealthily, as prisoners sing in dungeons, apprehensive of
the passing warder’s tread. Even the desire for fame was now a broken
spring. He had tasted too deeply of the bitter cup of disapproval to
hope to cleanse his mouth with the honey of applause. He felt vaguely
that he had been sent into the world to teach his fellow-men to rejoice
with him in all its beauty and its wonder, and that they had struck
him brutally across the lips, and bidden him become dull and timid and
mean-hearted, like themselves.
A whole generation in England had endured an experience more or less
like Alistair’s, and the literature of the age still breathes a
suppressed bitterness against the cruelties of Evangelicalism. The
persecution was all the more oppressive because it was not sanctioned
by any public authority, nor embodied in any law. It was carried on
privately, around every hearth, and in every hour of family life,
poisoning the springs of truthfulness and self-respect, and breaking
the hearts of the young. It was the memory of such wrongs that had made
easy the triumph of the Catholic reaction; the Protestant tyranny had
fallen, as other tyrannies fall, more by its own abuses than by the
strength of its assailants. The fires of Smithfield were forgotten,
and the little pagan group who surrounded Alistair Stuart patronized
the Roman Church as their most powerful ally against the Nonconformist
conscience.
But Alistair was beginning to look deeper. The play he had just
witnessed, in spite of its absurdities, had embodied certain sentiments
of his own. “There is no cure,” he reflected as he walked along. “There
is no help for men like me; the crowd will always persecute us. They
have set up the image of the Crucified One that they might crucify
others in his name. The memory of Otway did not save Chatterton; the
sufferings of Chatterton did not redeem Poe. Their flattery of the
dead is only a deeper insult to the living. They kneel at the tomb of
Shakespeare, and if Shakespeare rose again they would cast him into
Reading Gaol.”
It was Alistair Stuart’s misfortune to be only a half-hearted sinner.
The world likes its men to be thorough-going. Confronted with a mixed
individuality it is disconcerted and annoyed, like a reviewer called
upon to judge a poem by a prose-writer, or a serious volume from a
humorist’s pen. Alistair’s natural instincts had been cowed by his
boyish experience. Without sharing the convictions of the righteous,
he lacked the courage to despise them utterly. He would have had them
pardon him, though he could not repent.
His embittered mood lasted till he came in sight of the river below
Battersea Park. The sunlight sparkling on the water, and the fresh
breeze blowing over the trees of the park, refreshed him for the
moment, and his thoughts turned to Hero Vanbrugh.
A sigh rose to his lips.
“If I had only met her a year ago!”
The rebuke which Hero had administered so delicately in the matter of
the royal autograph had moved him to the heart. It had been an appeal
to his self-respect, a proof that she credited him with honourable
instincts like her own, and at this crisis in his life the compliment
was like the touch of balm upon a sore. With such a hand as Hero’s
to restrain him, that plunge into the social underworld which he
was contemplating lost its fascination. How was it that in all the
years they had known him neither his mother nor his brother had ever
been able to strike the chord which this girl’s finger had touched
unerringly at their first meeting?
In searching for the answer to this riddle, he recollected whither his
steps were bound. The figure of Molly Finucane rose before him like a
faded portrait over which a breath of discoloration had passed, leaving
it tarnished and dingy, and he shivered slightly, and unconsciously
relaxed the quickness of his pace.
His heart sank within him as he ascended the familiar path, and let
himself in with his latchkey. Missing the expected figure of the page,
he hung up his hat himself, and passed into the drawing-room.
“Where’s Tom?” he inquired, not without some foreboding of the reply he
should receive.
Molly was lying on the sofa in a low-necked dress, pulling a cigarette,
and trying to amuse herself with an illustrated ladies’ paper, which
did not amuse her at all--it was much too severe in its decorum. She
sat up yawning at Stuart’s entrance, and frowned as he put his question.
“I had to get rid of him for insolence,” she replied, with still
smouldering wrath. “I told him my shoes hadn’t been cleaned this
morning, and the young brat contradicted me to my face, and said he
couldn’t do them any better. The lazy little wretch hadn’t touched
them. I asked him if he knew who he was talking to, and he became
insolent. So I just ordered him to pack up and leave the house.”
Stuart listened without much interest to this story, the counterpart
of which he had often heard before. Somehow Molly’s servants were
perpetually incurring dismissal for similar behaviour. It was rare for
her to keep them more than a couple of months, and it was not uncommon
for them to be sent away the day after they arrived; and always for the
same cause--disrespect to the mistress of the house.
“I can’t think what’s the matter with the servants nowadays,” Molly
complained. She was not the only mistress to whom it had never occurred
that there could be, by any possibility, a servants’ side to the great
question. “I had a Scotchwoman here to-day, applying for the cook’s
place”--the cook had been under notice to leave for some time--“and she
was most impertinent.”
Molly stopped rather unexpectedly, as though she had been going to give
particulars of the impertinence, but had suddenly thought better of it.
The Scotchwoman, in fact, had presumed so far as to inquire into the
character of the relationship between the lady of the house and the
Lord Alistair Stuart who was indicated as its master, and had withdrawn
her candidature for the situation on learning that the tie was merely
one of friendship. Being told rather fiercely by Miss Finucane that
this was not her business, the offender had replied uncompromisingly:
“Excuse me, miss, I don’t set up to blame you, but I have my character
to think of, and if it was known that I had taken a place in a house
that wasn’t respectable, I might not be able to suit myself elsewhere.”
It was no doubt the irritation caused by this plain speaking which had
vented itself on the unlucky page. Alistair shrugged his shoulders as
though in sympathy, but inwardly the question suggested itself whether
Miss Vanbrugh ever had to encounter insolence on the part of servants.
He did not think it likely.
He had to go upstairs to dress for dinner, this being a point about
which Miss Finucane was very particular. If ever a man ventured to
present himself at her dinner-table in morning dress she was apt to
take it as a carefully studied reflection on her character. Her own
time hung so heavily on her hands that she spent half her day over
her wardrobe. She breakfasted in a fur-lined dressing-gown, put on a
walking-dress during the morning, lunched in a third costume, wore an
æsthetic tea-gown in the afternoon, made a grand toilet for dinner,
and exchanged it for a loose night-robe in which she drank whisky
and water before going to bed. In all these changes of costume jewels
played a great part. Diamonds and sapphires meant to Molly much what
a table well covered with briefs means to a barrister, or the strips
of ribbon on his breast to a soldier; they were the tangible tokens of
success.
When Stuart came downstairs there was no sign of dinner. He sat down
and tried to talk to Molly about the bazaar, but she listened sulkily,
offended because he had not ventured to take her with him.
“There were lots of women there, I suppose?” she asked, in a grumbling
voice.
“Yes, a good many. Women belonging to the Church, most of them, I
expect.”
“Was there anyone you knew?”
She fixed a shrewdly questioning glance on him, and noted the momentary
hesitation that preceded his reply.
“No, no one.”
Molly gave a scornful smile.
“That’s a lie, Alistair. Was your mother there?”
“I prefer not to talk about my mother,” returned Alistair, who dreaded
Molly’s coarse tongue.
“Do you think I didn’t know why you wouldn’t take me?” Molly retorted.
“Who else was there?”
“No one I had ever met before.”
Molly pounced on the concealed admission.
“Your mother introduced you to someone. Who was it?”
Stuart rose to his feet, beginning to get angry.
“The only woman I spoke to the whole afternoon was a young lady who, I
believe, is going to marry my brother.”
“What’s her name?”
“I decline to tell you.” He walked over to the bell and rang it
impatiently. “What the deuce are they keeping dinner for?”
Molly sat silent, watching him with all the cunning of a narrow
intelligence concentrated on one point. No one in the world was more
ignorant than Molly Finucane was of the things that are written about
in books, but the keenest counsel who ever sifted the evidence of
a lying witness could not have matched the sureness with which she
detected anything in Alistair’s mind that threatened her supremacy over
him. Her instinct now warned her that some danger had arisen for her,
and her fear, overpowering her jealousy for the moment, made her hold
her tongue.
No notice was taken of Lord Alistair’s ring, but after another ten
minutes or so an untidy parlour-maid put her head into the room and
announced that dinner was ready.
The dinner was badly cooked, and not appetising, and the parlour-maid
had neglected to warm the claret. Molly called for champagne.
“There’s none left, ma’am,” the maid retorted, speaking in that hostile
tone which her servants generally assumed towards Miss Finucane.
“Yes, there is, unless you’ve drunk it in the kitchen.”
An altercation between mistress and maid followed, high words being
used on both sides. Stuart went on with his dinner in silent disgust,
trying not to listen. He had sat through similar scenes often enough
before, but they had not made the same impression on him. It was as
though his whole nature had been set throbbing like a bell with a
certain note, with which his surroundings were all out of tune.
The dinner was not only badly cooked, but it quickly appeared that
there was not enough of it. On seeing a few slices of ham set before
her in the place of a joint, the mistress of the house lost her temper.
“Go and tell the cook to make an omelette,” she ordered angrily. “It’s
disgraceful that we can’t have enough to eat.”
The parlour-maid departed. A minute or two afterwards the door was
flung open violently, and the cook advanced into the middle of the
dining-room.
“You can’t have an omelette. I’ve no eggs, and the fire’s gone out,”
she remarked loudly and aggressively.
“What do you mean, cook?” said Molly, evidently rather alarmed.
The cook saw her mistress quailing, and raised her voice.
“I mean that I’ve cooked as much as I mean to, and I’m not going to do
any more. I’m tired of it.”
“This is disgraceful!” exclaimed her mistress, appealing to Stuart.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, to come in and talk like that,
simply because I asked for an omelette.”
“Well, you can’t have it, then,” the cook returned, with a ring of
triumph.
“Very well; that’s enough. Go downstairs!” commanded Molly.
The cook tossed her head, and marched out of the room, slamming the
door behind her.
“Do you owe the woman any wages?” Stuart asked, as soon as she was
gone. He knew by experience that it was useless to interfere in these
periodical scenes between Molly and her household.
“Not a farthing,” Molly protested. “And I’ve always treated her kindly,
too. I can’t think what makes her presume like that.”
The cook went down fuming and snorting into the kitchen, and gave the
explanation to her sympathizing sisters.
“I’ll teach her to send haughty messages out to me, and me a
respectable woman whose father had a farm, and six men under him; and
her out of the gutter, and no better than a street-walker, if you come
to that, though she do ride in her carriage, and wear as many jewels as
a Martinet.”
“You mean a Marchioness, don’t you, Eleanor?” inquired the housemaid,
who had moved in higher spheres.
“I mean a lady, that’s what I mean,” said the cook, with grim emphasis.
“Consequently I don’t mean Miss Finucane, as she calls herself, though
her real name’s Finigan, and she’s low Irish down to her boot-soles.”
She took a long breath, and concluded: “And so I’d have told her to
her face if his lordship hadn’t been there; but he’s a gentleman, when
all’s said and done, and I’m sorry for him.”
The cook spoke for her sex. Most women were sorry for Lord Alistair
Stuart.
When Molly saw Alistair rise from the table immediately after the
cook’s stormy exit, her face fell.
“You’re not going out again?” she protested.
“I’ve got to,” was the answer.
“Take me with you, then,” Molly demanded.
“Can’t. I’m going to see Des Louvres.”
“You’re always going there. What do you want to see him for?”
“It’s on business to do with the Legitimists.”
“Bother the Legitimists!” Molly was not a politician. Beyond the vague
notion that all these pretenders of whom she heard so much enjoyed
the secret patronage of the Pope, and must therefore be in some way
inimical to that Protestantism which it had been her first lesson as
a child to abjure and abhor, she was completely indifferent to their
cause.
“I won’t have you go,” she continued. “You’ve been out all day, and
left me alone with those wretched servants. I want you to take me to
the theatre.”
“I’ve no money,” said Stuart impatiently.
“Can’t you borrow some?”
“Who from?”
A name rose to Molly’s lips, but she hesitated to pronounce it. She
looked at Stuart, and as their eyes met each knew what the other was
thinking of.
“No,” he declared hastily. “I’m sorry, Molly, but I must go. I
promised. There’s to be somebody there that I must meet.”
“Who?”
“Well, it’s a sort of secret. You won’t talk about it?”
“Who have I got to talk to?”
The retort struck painfully on Alistair. That compassion for Molly
which lay at the root of his refusal to leave her was stirred by the
reminder of the poor little woman’s loneliness. She had no friends,
she could have no friends in their present circumstances, and she had
no interests in life apart from him. He felt that he was ill-treating
her by this second absence in one day, and his voice softened as he
explained:
“It’s Don Juan. Des Louvres told me he doesn’t want it to be known that
he’s in England.”
The name was not familiar to Molly.
“Who is he?” she asked, more with the object of detaining Stuart than
from any real curiosity on the subject.
Don Juan, in fact, only ranked as an heir-apparent in the Legitimist
almanac, his father being still alive. He represented one of those
families of decrepit and priest-ridden despots which were everywhere
driven from the thrones of the Mediterranean by the great Liberal
flood of the nineteenth century. Now the flood was beginning to abate,
the wrongs of the past were fading from men’s minds, and the figures of
these discrowned Princes stood forth once more, surrounded by the halo
of romantic misfortune.
But all this did not concern Molly in the least. Don Juan’s only
importance for her was as a new acquaintance for Stuart. She took a
jealous interest in all Alistair’s friends, not as individuals, but as
influences over him which might or might not tend to detach him from
herself.
“Why are you going to meet him?” she asked, hardly waiting for the
answer to her first question.
Alistair gave a half-ashamed smile.
“Well, he is going to give me a decoration, I believe--the Order of the
Holy Sepulchre.”
Molly looked impressed. She was sensitive about Alistair’s social
position, which she was conscious of having compromised, and this
decoration, coming on the morrow of his bankruptcy, seemed a welcome
rehabilitation.
“Then he really is a Prince?” she asked, with floating recollections
of police-court cases in which adventurers had obtained money by
pretending to titles not really theirs.
Stuart laughed good-naturedly.
“Yes, he’s a Prince right enough; at least, he’s as good as the Comte
de Rouen.”
Molly had heard of the Comte de Rouen, whose party had just given
proof of its vitality in a neighbouring country in one of the most
extraordinary episodes recorded in history. A conflict, extending over
years, and threatening at one time to assume the character of a civil
war, had taken place between the heads of the army, on the one hand,
and the civil Government on the other, over the body of an obscure
Jewish officer. If the guilt or innocence of the victim of this famous
persecution had not yet been placed beyond the reach of doubt, at least
it was made clear that his enemies had steeped themselves in perjury,
forgery, and every kind of subornation and conspiracy. It became
equally evident that the motive of their action was rather religious
than political; a chasm was revealed running through the nation, and
sharply dividing the clerical persecutors from the anti-clerical
defenders of the accused man. The army chiefs appeared as the tools of
the priesthood, which was seen in full cry on the trail of a Semitic
victim. The contagion spread to other countries, and prelates of the
Roman Church in England proclaimed their sympathy with the crusade. A
shock ran through Europe and America. It was as if the mask of saintly
meekness under persecution worn so closely by the Roman Church for
a century had been suddenly lifted for a moment, and modern men had
obtained a glimpse of the Fury’s visage underneath, with its writhing
snakes and its teeth gnashing for blood, the visage which they had
almost come to think of as a fable of Protestant historians.
The name of the Comte de Rouen silenced Molly, and Alistair was
allowed to depart without further objection.
As soon as he had left the house she went upstairs, took out his
mother’s letter, and read it through again for the fourth or fifth
time, with her lips tightly pinched and her forehead wrinkled in the
effort to devise some reply calculated at once to teach the Duchess
manners, and yet to neutralize her opposition.
This was what she wrote:
“DEAR MADAM:
“Don’t worry about Alistair. You are about as likely to see me marry
him as you are to see”--she named a sacred personage--“riding down
Piccadilly on a bicycle.
“Yours truly,
“MARY FINUCANE.”