The Sunday after Grahame had brought me the news of Sibella’s
engagement I visited the Hallwards. I managed to get through a
conventional speech of congratulation, stung to self-possession by a
certain radiance and exhilaration in Sibella’s bearing. Grahame had
told them of my good fortune, and there was a distinct change of
manner towards me on the part of the other members of the family. They
had never wholly believed that I was related to the Gascoynes, or had
thought that if it were true I was making the most of a very remote
connection. To them I had been the object for as much patronage as
they dared display towards one not prone to endure condescension. I
could see that Sibella looked at me with a new interest. She was
growing into a truly beautiful woman, and all trace of the slightly
suburban minx was becoming rapidly obliterated by a crescendo of style
and distinction. It was quite evident that she would have the manners
and self-possession of a thoroughly well-bred beauty, and she had
acquired a facility for putting on her clothes with an altogether
overpowering effect of distinction. It seemed to me a little curious
that a character which I knew to be somewhat small should have
achieved a certain impression of breadth and ease in her personality.
Probably it was the result of the unquestionable fact of her extreme
beauty. At any rate, she was rapidly learning the secret of
predominance, and she showed, captivating and delicious, in distinct
relief to her surroundings.
Mr. Gascoyne’s twenty pounds had enabled me, through the purchase of
decent boots, gloves, etc., to bring my wardrobe into play again. I
had dressed as rakishly as possible, determined that Sibella should
have no satisfaction in the dejection of an unsuccessful lover. I knew
her character and the pleasure she would have derived from it. I
simulated the best of spirits, and Grahame loyally helped me to
sustain the illusion. I was inwardly consumed with jealousy whenever
my hungry eyes fell upon her, but I roused myself for a _tour de
force_ in acting and succeeded. Lionel Holland came in later. I saw
him through the large drawing-room windows coming up the path,
supremely confident and jaunty. He was evidently surprised to see me.
We had not met since the evening of my humiliation. I greeted him
cordially, however, and he was obliged to be civil, but I had the
satisfaction of feeling that he was by no means at his ease. He was so
perfectly assured that, being poor, I was an interloper in a
well-to-do house, that he would have liked, I am sure, to ask me what
the devil I meant by intruding. I on my part was galled by the
attitude of superior intimacy he assumed in a house where I had been
intimate when he was a stranger to it. I was perfectly determined that
he should not dislodge me, and that nothing he said or did should
interfere with my visits to the Hallward establishment. He was staying
to supper as a matter of course, and I detected a shade of annoyance
on his face when Mrs. Hallward, in consequence of an aside from
Grahame, extended an invitation to me to do likewise. I accepted,
although I was compelled to submit to the disappearance of the lovers
to the schoolroom for fully an hour previous to the meal. I sang and
played to the others as I had been in the habit of doing, and worked
hard to make myself agreeable. I was so far successful that Mrs.
Hallward asked me why I came so seldom, and discussed the Gascoyne
family in a corner of the drawing-room with me after supper. She was
herself the great-grand-daughter of a Nova Scotian baronet and never
forgot it, although she had saving perception enough not to allude to
it directly. As a rule she brought it in with some such remark
as—“There is I believe a baronetcy knocking about in our own family
somewhere—where exactly I don’t know—but it is there,” a remark subtly
framed, so as to convey the impression that, being no snob, she
forbore to mention how very near the said baronetcy was, in fact, that
it was knocking about so very near that it was quite possible a
collision might occur at any moment.
She was most decidedly a snob, but not of an objectionable kind. As a
matter of fact, I have always considered well-bred snobs rather
pleasant people, and have often wondered whether they would have been
as well bred if they had not been snobs. People who love the
pleasantly decorative in life have at least taste, and the preference
for titles, fine surroundings and social paraphernalia may be a form
of art.
“Do you and Lionel ever see each other in the City?” asked Sibella,
who, I had already remarked, was not so much in love that she could
refrain from teasing her lover.
“Never,” said Lionel shortly.
“For eighteen months I hardly went near the City,” I answered.
“Doing other things?” asked Lionel, in an unpleasant tone.
“Living on my capital,” I answered airily, giving him a keen, steady
glance of daring. “It was the most beautiful time I have ever had, and
I don’t regret it. It will never come again, and I might have spent it
in a dingy City office.”
“Earning your living,” put in Lionel.
“There was no necessity,” I laughed.
Grahame gazed at Lionel in haughty inquiry as if desirous of knowing
what he meant by being rude to his guest.
In fact, Lionel’s airs of intimacy and general at-homeness obviously
irritated Grahame not less than the constant use of his Christian
name.
I declined to be drawn into displaying the least sign of annoyance,
although Holland seized every opportunity to deliver innuendo or
satire, the latter weapon in his hands becoming more often than not
mere clumsy facetiousness. I made a point of being gay, and without
talking of my prospects in Mr. Gascoyne’s firm took very good care to
leave the impression that it was their promising nature that accounted
for my good-humour. I managed by judicious circumlocution and tact to
bring the conversation round to reminiscences, throwing them far
enough back to prevent his joining in, and slyly flattering Sibella on
the subject of her childish achievements so that she revived memories
with zest, and became engrossed with the recapitulation of events and
bygone adventures in which I, and not Lionel Holland, appeared as her
cavalier.
“I believe Lionel is getting jealous,” she remarked towards the end of
supper, noticing her lover’s sulky taciturnity.
I had been secretly sure of that fact for the last twenty minutes, and
had been enjoying a discomfiture which the rest of the company had not
appreciated. He had also, as I perceived, grasped that whenever I
chose I was quick and dexterous enough to leave him conversationally a
laggard every time.
Not that I relied on these qualities to pass him in the race for
Sibella’s appreciation. My instinct in female psychology was too sure.
Certainly, if such superficial qualities could have dazzled any woman,
they would have dazzled Sibella, whose mind was prone to skim airily
and gracefully the surface of things. Even the most transparent of
women, however—if there be such things as transparent women—elude
analysis when the exact qualities which attract them in their lovers
come under consideration.
Sibella was hardly the character one would have imagined overlooking
the pinchbeck in Lionel Holland, and yet she had accepted it with a
most surprising ease. Such a surrender seemed to negative all her
leanings, at any rate in surface matters, to the well-bred and
socially ascending scale. True, he would be rich, but Sibella had
other admirers who would be richer. He had personality, and perhaps
this wins with women more than anything. With all his faults he was
not insignificant, and he was undeniably a very beautiful young man,
notwithstanding his obvious veneer.
I had taken my courage in my hands and stayed and smoked with Grahame
in the library, knowing full well that Lionel and Sibella were in each
other’s arms in the schoolroom. It is strange how we manage to endure
the things which in anticipation were to slay us with their mere
agony.
Mr. and Mrs. Hallward were lax in their supervision of the engaged
couple, as they had been about everything else in connection with
their children. Sibella and her lover remained undisturbed when her
father and mother retired for the night, and it was passably late for
a young woman of respectable family to be letting her lover out when
the front door closed behind him. She evidently heard our voices, for
she came into the library.
“You two still here?”
She seated herself on the club-fender. She was wide awake, and I
remembered that as a child she had never betrayed sleepiness at
children’s parties—she always expressed her capacity to stay up to any
hour. Her family complained that she never could be induced to rise in
proper time in the morning.
“Isn’t it lovely, Israel, for you to have had such a piece of luck!”
“Oh, I shall always fall on my feet,” I answered, easily. “You see, I
was born lucky, and that is better than being born rich.”
“How do you know you were born lucky?” she asked with interest.
I was not to be questioned out of my pose. “It’s like genius. An
instinct teaches the genius to know himself, and something of the same
thought instructs the lucky man.”
I spoke with such perfect good spirits and conviction that I could see
she found herself believing me. She perched herself on the edge of the
great desk which occupied the centre of the library and asked for a
cigarette.
“Don’t smoke, Sibella,” said Grahame. He was the sort of man who would
not have objected to the female belongings of anyone else smoking, but
who objected to his own doing so, on the ground that it was his
business to see that they suffered no material damage in the eyes of
the world.
“What nonsense, Grahame! Of course I shall smoke—as much as I
like—well no, not quite as much as I like because that would spoil my
teeth, and I don’t intend to do anything that would injure my personal
appearance.”
“That is a very patriotic resolve,” I laughed. “There is some beauty
so striking that it becomes a national property.”
Sibella made a face.
“Thank you. I’m nothing of the kind.”
“For goodness’ sake don’t flatter Sibella,” said Grahame. “She is vain
enough already.”
“So long as she is vain and not conceited it does not matter.”
“The difference?”
“Well, vanity is a determination to make the best of our superiorities
whilst frankly admitting them; conceit is a morbid desire to enforce
the fact on other people.”
“Subtle,” murmured Grahame, who never spoke above his middle tones,
“but I am not convinced. Sibella thinks a great deal too much of
herself.”
“It is better than thinking too little of one’s self,” said Sibella,
blowing rings of smoke and pursing up her lips deliciously, till I
could have cried out on her for heartlessness.
“Very much better,” I assented. “People who think too little of
themselves generally end by a mock humility which is a form of conceit
infinitely tedious. No, believe me, the vanity you decry has in it
something of virtue.”
Grahame turned to Sibella.
“Haven’t you noticed, Sibella, how much older Israel has grown of
late?”
“Not in looks,” cried Sibella. “To-night he looks like a boy.”
This idea pleased me. The author of the secret that lay in young
Gascoyne’s grave looking almost a boy savoured of the incongruous, for
which I had developed an appetite.
“I didn’t mean in appearance,” said Grahame. “Israel looks as if he
had never had a trouble.”
The idea pleased me even more. Grahame’s criticism showed that I was
playing my game with the right effect, and that the weeks of
prostration following on the successful _coup_ at Lowhaven had left no
effect. Sibella, from her very nature, could not forbear giving me one
or two glances with just enough of feeling in them to fill the
atmosphere with a vague suggestion of sentimentality, but I behaved as
if the very air she breathed was not to me love’s own narcotic. I
fought fiercely against myself lest I should give the least sign that
her power over me was supreme as ever.
“What lovely chocolates you used to bring me, Israel!”
I laughed buoyantly.
“Ah, but you remember the first Lionel brought you. They cost more.”
“As if I cared for that!”
Grahame laughed in his turn.
“As if, Sibella dear, you ever cared for anything else.”
Grahame had the most incomparable way of pointing out people’s faults
to their faces without offence.
Sibella, however, looked angry.
“No one can say that I am mercenary.”
I was at some pains not to join Grahame in the roar of laughter
provoked by this remark. Sibella knew of old how impossible it was for
her to cope with Grahame, so she turned the batteries of her anger on
me.
“I believe you quite agree with Grahame.”
“What about?”
“About my being mercenary.”
“I am sure I don’t.”
“Then why did you laugh?”
“I didn’t.”
“Well, I’m not mercenary, am I?”
“Of course not.” I smiled.
She detected the irony.
“Lionel never says such things to me.” For one instant I felt the lash
and smarted. I was half inclined to retort “Lionel is the prince of
good manners,” but that would have given her the satisfaction she was
waiting for, and most likely she would have gone to bed.
Grahame at heart was very proud of Sibella, but he, like myself, was
under no delusions about her. His special fondness was also partly a
result of their having been so much together as children. Mr. and Mrs.
Hallward’s other children were much older, and with the exception of
Miss Hallward, an unmarried spinster verging on forty, were either
married or out in the world. Miss Hallward, who must have been
singularly handsome in her youth, and who as a matter of fact was so
still, had devoted her whole life to her brothers and sisters, and was
particularly fond of Sibella, who made use of her in every possible
way. Miss Hallward had always been singularly kind to me, and I liked
her.
I could well remember an incident which occurred on the occasion of
one of my first visits to the house. Sibella had been asked to do
something by Miss Hallward and had refused, and, working herself into
a rage, had told her sister, who at that time could not have been more
than thirty, that she was a disappointed old maid and that nobody had
wanted to marry her because she was so unattractive. Miss Hallward had
grown very white, and had turned on Sibella with a fierceness I never
saw her display before or after. The occurrence was unimportant,
except that it served to frame her, as it were, in the past of an
unhappy love story, and she was always the more interesting to me
because of it.
When I said good-bye to Sibella I felt sure that she was more
interested in me than she had been since as a boy of sixteen I had
declared my passion and had been granted the privilege of kissing her
when opportunity offered, little love passages of which Grahame had
remained in entire ignorance. I also saw that I had succeeded in
giving her the impression I was aiming at—that I was wholly freed from
her spell. To a girl of Sibella’s temperament this is at all times
amazing, and so far from being glad at her rejected lover being in
spirits she was at pains to detect the unhealed wound. Still, she was
in her way really in love with Lionel Holland, and was not prepared to
invest more than the smallest superfluity of coquetry and fascination
in bringing me again into her net. I verily believe it would have
given her some pleasure to see Holland and myself at each other’s
throats. Then she would probably have been content to leave me to some
other woman. Had she known how near I was at times to seizing her in
my arms and kissing her, with or without her will, she would have been
satisfied—more, I think she would have been frightened.
She had a peculiar and unexpected effect on me. I found myself
wavering in my purpose, and returning once more to the question which
I had thought decided as to whether the risk I ran was worth the
prize. I even found myself troubled with scruples as to the taking of
life, and for some weeks was in serious danger of abandoning my
undertaking.
And yet I cannot say that Sibella had any direct influence for good
upon me, and it would have been hard to define why she should have
exercised a restraining influence upon me at all.
I continued my visits to the Hallwards and saw that her pique at my
apparent indifference to her engagement grew.
She might have been content with the number of admirers to whom it had
obviously been a matter of some moment, but Sibella wanted the one
admirer to care who was apparently indifferent.
I evidently pleased Mr. Gascoyne at the office, for his cordiality
towards me increased daily. I threw into my manner towards him just as
much of the filial attitude as I could without suggesting the least
desire to usurp the place of his dead son.
After a few weeks he asked me to come and dine and meet his wife.
“By the way, Rank, my wife does not know that you are a relative of
mine, and for certain reasons I would sooner you did not mention it—at
least yet.”
He was evidently nervous lest his wife might think he had been quick
to fill their dead son’s place.
“I have my reasons, and I am asking you to oblige me,” he added
cordially, noting the faint look of surprise I thought it policy to
assume; it would never have done to let him think I could be treated
unceremoniously.
I dined at the house in South Kensington, outside which I had so often
watched. It seemed a quiet and sad household. Mrs. Gascoyne possessed
the feminine capacity for filling the house with the presence of her
dead, and turning a home into a tomb. Mr. Gascoyne was pleased that I
managed to make her smile once or twice, and said as much as we sat
over our wine.
“I am afraid there is very little to amuse you here, but I should be
glad if you would dine with us now and then. I think my wife likes
you. You have dignity, and she always likes people with dignity.”
I laughed.
“You have been very good to me, sir,” I said.
“I see in you excellent qualities, Israel.” It was the first time he
had ever called me by my Christian name. I was obviously progressing
in his esteem.
He was right. I had excellent qualities. I always had. I am
affectionate, naturally truthful and kind-hearted. My secret deeds have
been an abstraction, in no way in tune with the middle tones of my
character.
Mr. Gascoyne was essentially a business man, and it was my business
qualities which appealed to him most. I had a natural gift for order
and method, and although he was not given to praise, I detected a look
of pleased surprise when I displayed some unusual perception of what
was wanted in a particular situation. Lionel Holland, who at least
seemed to have imbibed a wholesome fear of irritating me when we were
together, could not witness my progress in the scale of prosperity
without making an attempt to injure me in the eyes of my employer.
It appeared that he knew a fellow-clerk of mine, a youth who
considered that I had ousted him from the place which should in time
have been his. I had not been in the office a couple of hours before I
grasped this fact. He was a pleasant fellow enough in an ordinary way,
but his disappointment had brought out—as far as his relations towards
me were concerned—his worst points. He had a slight acquaintance with
Lionel Holland. This acquaintance the latter improved upon, and I was
not a little surprised to find Harry Cust one Sunday afternoon sitting
in the Hallwards’ drawing-room. He was staying with Lionel from
Saturday till Monday, and I think it gave his host infinite pleasure
to introduce him where I had been known from childhood—though what
particular satisfaction it was to him I could not quite see.
I soon realised that my life’s history was in the possession of my
fellow-clerks. I was too much in favour with Mr. Gascoyne for them to
venture to show the contempt they felt because my mother had let
lodgings. I would have been glad if one of them had had the temerity
to throw it in my teeth, for an insult to my dead mother would have
found me a perfectly normal person with an absolutely primal sense of
loyalty.