CHAPTER X
Belchamber’s first feeling was that it was a judgment on him for having allowed his mind to wander to worldly frivolities and thoughts of personal amusement. Certainly he had been brought up with a round turn. His next was one of bewilderment as to what it behoved him to do under the circumstances. Ought he to let his mother or Lord Firth know what he had seen? He recoiled with all the force of schoolboy traditions from the idea of telling tales. Had Arthur recognised him? he wondered, and would he come to the rendezvous at the club next day, even supposing that he got his message? He had been on his way to call on his grandmother, and, as he omitted to give the driver any fresh instructions, he presently found himself at Sunborough House. Having ascertained from the porter that the duchess was out, he was turning away when he saw some one signalling to him from one of the ground-floor windows, and Claude came running bareheaded down the steps.
‘My dear old boy! this is nice,’ he said. ‘I’d no idea you were in town. I saw you from the window of my room. Come in and have some tea, and I’ll tell them to let us know when grandmamma comes in.’
Sainty was drawn affectionately into a large room near the front-door, which Claude explained was his peculiar sanctum. ‘It used just to be a sort of waiting-room, and was much wasted, so I got the Pompier to let me have it for mine. That bell rings from his study, so he can get at me whenever he wants me.’
It was a pleasant room, with two high windows draped with some sombre, respectable, woollen fabric. Its original furniture consisted of a large writing-table with a gallery, and a set of green leather chairs, two high-backed mahogany bookcases with brass lattice-work in their doors, and several good old engravings on the walls, the duke’s father, mother, and grandfather, after Lawrence, Mesdames Taglioni, and Fanny Ellsler, Count d’Orsay, the Queen on horseback, and the Duke of Wellington. On this severe ground Claude had, so to speak, embroidered a fantasia of more modern objects—little tables, low easy-chairs, cigarette-cases, a vase or two of flowers, several books, reviews, and paper-knives, and a vast quantity of signed and framed photographs of all shapes and sizes. With the exception of an eminent man or two, and a few sleek young peers, they all represented beautiful ladies—ladies looking over their shoulders, with their hands behind their backs, ladies with sheaves of lilies and baskets of flowers, ladies looking out of paper-mullioned windows wreathed in sham ivy, ladies with children in lace frocks, ladies in ball dress, court dress, fancy dress, or simply what may be called photographic dress, consisting of the sitter’s best low-necked gown and a hat, a combination which no one could be expected to believe was ever worn outside the studio. Three large official dispatch-boxes with paper tags hanging out of their ends stood on the writing-table, and a receptacle like a good-sized dog-basket bulged with letters for the post.
His cousin was so cordial and affectionate, did the honours of his official residence with such charming grace, that Sainty felt impelled rather against his will to tell him of his late encounter. Perhaps if circumstances had not thrown him so immediately in his way, he might not have selected Claude as his confidant; but he desperately needed help and counsel, and here was some one ready with both, some one whom to tell would have none of the grave, official importance of a report to Lady Charmington or his uncle. Warmed by tea and his cousin’s enthusiastic welcome, he had not been ten minutes in the room before he had confided to its occupant all his uneasiness and its latest cause.
‘Really! Arthur is an ass!’ was Claude’s comment. ‘What strikes me first of all is the infernal imprudence of the whole thing. Why can’t he go and see the lady quietly, instead of flourishing about Piccadilly in a hansom with her at five o’clock in the afternoon? He’s just as likely as not to meet grandmamma or your uncle as any one else, and then all the fat will be in the fire.’
There was a ring of very genuine annoyance in Claude’s voice; and Sainty, though he smiled at the aspect of the matter that so characteristically presented itself to Morland as the important one, felt that he had not brought his troubles to an indifferent or unsympathetic person.
‘But who do you suppose it is?’ he asked, ‘and where can Arthur have made her acquaintance? Perhaps it may not be—what I fear; but she looked rather—well, rather——’
‘Yes,’ said Claude, laughing; ‘I should say it was ten to one she was “rather.”’
‘It’s no laughing matter,’ cried Sainty. ‘It was bad enough when I thought he was only neglecting his work, and just idling and amusing himself; but this makes it all much more serious. But Claude, can’t you help? Can you not guess who it might be?’
‘Oh, it might be any one of a dozen people,’ said Claude indifferently. ‘It doesn’t so much matter who it is,’ he added; ‘the great thing is to try and get him not to make a fool of himself. You know, dear Saint, it is useless to expect the high moral view from me. What you want is that Arthur shan’t go and do anything idiotic, isn’t it? Well, I’m much more likely to prevent his giving the whole show away than you are, ain’t I? You leave it to me; I’ll see what can be done.’
It was on the tip of Sainty’s tongue to say that the eye which Claude had promised him at Belchamber to keep on Arthur, could not have been peculiarly vigilant; but he did not wish to alienate the one person who might perhaps help him, so he expressed gratitude and a confidence he did not wholly feel; and just then a footman came in to say that ‘’Er grace had come in, but was dining out, and must rest before dressing, and she ‘oped Lord Belchamber would come to luncheon next day.’
‘By the way, yes,’ said Claude, when the man had left them. ‘To-night is the dinner at the French Embassy, and then there is the ball at What’s-their-names, and grandmamma must shed her day-skin and give the new one time to harden.’
‘What do you call her, Claude?’ asked Sainty. ‘I never feel as if I could call her “grandmamma.”’
‘Oh, I never call her that to her face, bien entendu. It was a dreadful question at first. I couldn’t call her Hélo as her stepsons do; but I’ve hit on a lovely plan. I call her ‘Grace,’ suggesting facetiously ‘Your grace,’ do you see? and it sounds like a cross between a Christian name and a sort of compliment, grace personified, that kind of business. Well, good-night, old chap, if you must go. Don’t worry about the little blessing; you had much better let me see what I can do. Right you are. And for the Lord’s sake, don’t say a word to your uncle or any of ’em.’
‘Don’t worry,’ that was still the burthen of such very various counsellors, as Gerald Newby and Claude Morland, and more or less the line his mother took, who was again so unlike either of them; and meanwhile he was expected to stand by and see Arthur drifting to ruin under his eyes. However, he so far obeyed Claude’s injunctions as to say nothing to Lord Firth on the subject, when they presently dined together, though his principal object in coming to town had been to ask his advice.
‘Have you seen Arthur?’ his uncle asked in the course of dinner, and Sainty only said, ‘I called at Monkton’s and at his lodgings, but I didn’t find him.’
‘It was a rum idea of your mother’s, letting him come to London, but it seems to be working, and so does he. I’ve asked him once or twice to come and dine, but he hardly ever comes. He says the evening is one of the best times he has for work.’
Sainty had but little chance of private talk with Claude the next day, when he lunched at Sunborough House. His cousin drew him gently to a window when he arrived, while the numerous chance guests were awaiting the appearance of their hostess.
‘I’ve thought of who it very likely was,’ he said, with engaging frankness. ‘If it’s the person I think, she’s a good girl, and won’t do him any harm. You know you can’t expect to keep Arthur away from women; the important thing is that he shouldn’t get into bad hands, and I’ll drop him a hint to be more careful and not to go and afficher himself. Hush! here’s our respectable ancestress. Well, Grace, here’s your good boy come to see you, to make a change from your bad one.’
Sainty never knew whether it was circumstances or design that made it impossible for him to get another word alone with Claude. He did not feel that Morland’s help would be exactly of the kind or in the direction that he wanted, and he was more than ever anxious to see his brother himself, and try and find out just how much was wrong. He went early in the afternoon to a club in St. James’s Street, of which he had lately become a member, so as to be sure not to miss Arthur if he should come there. To his surprise, the porter handed him a letter as he went in, which proved to be a note from Lady Eccleston asking him to dine the same evening. He thought it would be pleasant to accept, but decided to keep it till he had found out if Arthur had any plans for the evening; so he put it into his pocket, and turned into a room on the ground floor, where some of the latest publications were displayed on a long table.
A group of young men who were laughing uproariously over a book desisted rather suddenly on his entrance, as one of them, in whom he recognised the young stockbroker Pryor, looked towards him and whispered something to the rest. They faced round and stared at him much as sheep look at a dog, while Austin Pryor came forward holding out his right hand, with the book still in his left.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘how odd you should come in just this minute! Have you seen this book of your friend Parsons’? It’s only out to-day, and they say you can’t get a copy for love or money. Wasn’t he that untidy chap with a fishy eye who was at your coming of age last year? I’m blowed if he hasn’t gone and stuck the whole show into his book, only he’s made your brother the hero instead of you, he’s turned you into a girl, a great heiress with rather jimmy health and a cork leg, who’s in love with the villain. But the rest of us are there, even down to poor little me. Your mother, your uncle—oh! and the duchess—he’s touched the old duchess off to the life, even to the colour of the gowns she wore at dinner. Well—he’s made his fortune. They say he’s been offered ten thousand for his next book, if he’ll only guarantee two well-known people bein’ in it. It’s better biz than the House; here am I come away at three-thirty; absolutely nothing doing, I give you my word. I haven’t made a fiver this account. Here—would you like the book? I’ve got to go out, and some one’ll grab it like a shot if you don’t lay hold of it.’
The other youths seemed to have melted away during this speech, so that when Mr. Pryor, convinced that he had made himself most agreeable, handed him the fortunate novel of the season, and hurried away to gossip about it in as many drawing-rooms as he could work in before dressing-time, Sainty found himself alone with the book in his hand. He sat down to wait for Arthur, and began turning over the pages.
So it was for this that Parsons had wanted to come to Belchamber. Now he understood. As Pryor had said, they were all drawn to the life. ‘Well, it doesn’t demand much imagination to write a book in that way,’ he thought. Presently he came to the passage about the young don, and found he was smiling in spite of himself at Newby’s happy confidence that the character could by no possibility have been drawn from him. The portrait was one-sided and most malevolent, but quite unmistakable. A year ago he would have been beyond words indignant at this ill-natured caricature of his friend and hero. Now he could not repress a faint feeling of amusement. What had happened to him in the meanwhile, he wondered; he felt ashamed of his want of loyalty. ‘Lord Arthur Chambers askin’ for you, m’lud,’ a discreet club waiter murmured in his ear; and he remembered with a start that in life as in Ned Parsons’ story, the protagonist of the moment was not himself but his younger brother.
‘Infernally thirsty weather,’ Arthur remarked, as he dropped gracefully into a chair. ‘May I have a whisky and soda?—thanks.’ Then to the waiter, without allowing Sainty time to answer, ‘A large whisky and soda, please, with some ice and a slice of lemon. Well, old chap,’ he continued, turning again to his brother as the man departed, ‘and what’s brought you to town?’
‘You,’ answered Sainty severely.
‘O God! old man, not a jaw,’ Arthur pleaded wearily; ‘it’s too hot’
‘Did you see me yesterday?’ Sainty asked suddenly.
‘No, old boy—where?’ said Arthur, with slightly awakened interest.
‘About five o’clock, in Piccadilly. You were in a hansom.’
Arthur flushed crimson all over his handsome face. ‘The devil!’ he said simply, in a manner which told more plainly than words that he had not seen his brother.
‘Think of the imprudence of it,’ Sainty remonstrated (quoting Claude, rather to his own surprise; it was not in the least what he had meant to say). ‘You might just as likely have met Uncle Cor as me, or some one who knew you, and might have written to mother.’ He did not like to name Lady Eccleston, who was the person he had in his mind.
‘I wasn’t doing anything I was ashamed of,’ Arthur answered doggedly.
Then there was a little pause, during which the waiter reappeared with a long clanking tumbler, and the brothers sat and looked at one another gloomily.
‘Well?’ asked the younger, as he sipped his refreshment.
‘Do you often drink between meals?’ Sainty asked. ‘Are there none of the stereotyped bad habits that you haven’t contracted yet?’
‘An occasional whisky and soda when one’s thirsty doesn’t make a man an habitual drunkard——’
After a second pause, ‘I suppose you want to know who it was?’ Arthur suggested, with another blush.
‘I don’t know that I do,’ Sainty answered. ‘It was evident enough the sort of person——’
But Arthur cut him short. ‘I won’t hear a word against her,’ he said hotly. ‘Of course she’s an actress, and that’s enough to make people say deuced ill-natured things; but she’s as good a girl——’
‘Do you mean to say——’ Sainty was beginning, when Arthur suddenly melted, leaned forward, and laid an affectionate hand on his.
‘Look here, old man,’ he said, ‘of course I don’t mean that she’s immaculate; but she’s told me a lot about herself, and I’m sure she’s more sinned against than sinning, you know, and all that. And I’m awfully in love with her; you may as well know it first as last. And I can’t stand hearing her talked about as if she was just a common woman. What are you doing to-night? I’ve persuaded her to come to supper with me, and asked some of her pals; will you come to the theatre with me and see her act, and come and meet her at supper? You’ll see for yourself how awfully respectable and jolly and all that she is.’
Sainty’s mind flew to the little note in his pocket; he would much rather have dined with the Ecclestons, but perhaps it was his duty to go and inspect the syren who had captured his brother, and he was not without curiosity as to a side of life with regard to which he was as ignorant as a girl. ‘How can I help him,’ he thought, ‘if I know no more of his life and temptations than mother does?’ And he shuddered to think of the light in which Lady Charmington would view his acceptance of the proffered supper-party.
‘You had better dine here with me first,’ he said resignedly; ‘Uncle Cor is dining out.’
Arthur was so delighted at the ease with which he had brought his brother into line with his plans, and so excited by the anticipation of the evening’s amusement, that Sainty found it impossible to get anything out of him as to the extent to which he had been neglecting his work. All mere prosaic questions of that sort seemed to the enamoured swain so entirely trivial that Sainty himself began to wonder why he attached such undue importance to them. Under the influence of what seemed almost like an unselfish passion, Arthur appeared so much more amiable than usual, that he, who had come to lecture, came perilously near remaining to sympathise. He learned that the lady of the hansom was Miss Cynthia de Vere, who was performing in a piece called ‘Africa Limited, or the Day of All Jeers,’ a really rattling piece, in which she was perfectly ripping, that she had a not very important rôle, as far as words went, which was of course due to professional jealousies, but she was on the stage nearly all the time, and wore some ‘clinking’ costumes.
‘By the way,’ Sainty inquired, just as Arthur was about to leave him, ‘how did you come to meet Miss de Vere?’
‘Oh, Claude introduced me to her, one of the few good things I owe him.’
‘Claude!’ Sainty bounded. He could only gasp, as the full measure of his cousin’s duplicity forced itself upon him.
‘You needn’t think the worse of her on that account,’ Arthur said. ‘She doesn’t like our slimy cousin; she told me so. She says he’s a bad lot, and so he is. Between you and me, I think he’s behaved badly to her in some way. She said she’d no cause to love him, but of course I couldn’t ask her anything about it. Tata, old chap; see you later. I must go and tell a certain person you’re coming; she’ll be awfully pleased.’
Africa Limited was one of the first of those musical farces which have revolutionised the English stage; it had a great quantity of characters, and no particular plot. The first act took place in England, the second in what was supposed to be Algeria, and was represented by a mixture of the tropics and a pantomime transformation scene. There were any number of songs and dances, that could be introduced or omitted at will, and the time of day was morning, sunset, limelight, or back to high noon, with bewildering rapidity, and a total disregard of the ordinary sequence of the hours. There were a pair of serious and lyrical lovers, who discoursed sentimental ballads and duets; a pair of secondary lovers, more facetious and less sentimental; an excruciatingly funny comic man from the halls, who assumed every kind of disguise for no particular reason; a barbarous potentate, who turned out to be Irish, and the comic man’s long lost grandfather; several dancers of pas-seuls, and last, but not least, a number of extremely handsome young ladies, who did not seem to have much connection with the story, but who turned up in the most unlikely places, always gorgeously dressed, and had each three sentences to say in the course of the evening. It was one of this frolic band whom Arthur shyly indicated to his brother as Miss Cynthia de Vere, and in whom Sainty without much difficulty recognised the damsel he had seen in Piccadilly. Across the footlights and out of the pitiless sunshine of a summer day, she made a striking and picturesque appearance enough. She smiled affably at the brothers, and at several other acquaintances in the stalls and boxes, and took a most perfunctory interest in what was going on upon the stage.
A rather recherché dandyism was at that moment the correct style for young men about town, and Arthur was got up to kill, with a vast expanse of shirt-front illuminated by a single jewel, white kid gloves, and a cane, his fair curls cropped, flattened, and darkened as near to the accepted model as nature would allow, and his face very pink and solemn over his high collar. He went out between the acts ‘to smoke a cigarette,’ and returned with a new buttonhole and a peculiarly fatuous smile never produced by tobacco.
As they drove to the restaurant where they were to sup, he obliged Sainty with a catalogue raisonné of the guests. ‘Charley Hunter’s coming, and Agnes Baines, the girl next but two to Cynthia, because Charley’s awfully mashed on her; Mabel Hodgson, that handsome girl at the other corner from Cynthia; and I had to ask that little cad Harry Atides, because he won’t let her go anywhere without him; they say he beats her. Cynthia has such an awfully good heart; she asked me to ask her, because she has such a dull life. I don’t see why she stays with that little beast. Then there is Elise Balbullier, the French girl—she’s awfully amusing and clever; Clara Bingham, one of the chorus girls—she’s a pal of Cynthia’s; and Colonel Hoby—he knows all the girls, and they like him, and he chaffs ’em, don’t you know.’
Some of us not yet in our dotage can remember when it was by no means an easy thing to find a place in London whereat to sup; but about the time that pieces of the type of Africa Limited came into fashion, the play-going public discovered that it was unequal to the intellectual effort of witnessing them without the support of two dinners, and the first house of entertainment to cater for this new need was the Hotel and Restaurant Fritz, so called after its enterprising manager. Everything was on a scale of hitherto unprecedented luxury and proportionate expense; the waiters, of every conceivable nationality, wore short jackets and white aprons like those in a French café. A real chef directed an army of myrmidons in the adjoining kitchen. There were shaded electric lights, and little vases of flowers on the tables, among which dignified head-waiters walked like dethroned potentates in irreproachable evening dress, while a string-band made conversation appear a superfluity. A negro in a fez made Turkish coffee at a sort of altar in the midst, and the decorations suggested the saloon of the most expensive Atlantic liner.
The brothers had to struggle to the cloak-room through a crowd of all ages and sexes, the women with fresh powder on their noses pulling out their crushed laces, the men settling their ties and stroking their back hair. Among these latter they suddenly found themselves face to face with Claude. Arthur pushed past him with a sulky nod. Claude jerked his head after him. ‘So you’ve got hold of the culprit,’ he said; ‘is it all right? have you got anything satisfactory out of him?’
‘I have got the most surprising things out of him,’ answered Sainty witheringly, looking his cousin straight in the eye.
Claude did not seem to notice. ‘I’m waiting for Lady Deans and Lady Dalsany,’ he said. ‘Women take such an infernal time prinking. Have you seen your cousin Trafford? He’s supposed to be supping with us, or rather we with him; but what are you doing in this unlikely place?’
‘Oh, I’m supping in quite a different monde,’ said Sainty in a low vibrating voice, which he tried to keep very steady and sarcastic; ‘my brother has invited me to meet the girl of his heart. I really must offer you my sincerest thanks for the admirable way you’ve looked after him for me.’ He was swelling with righteous indignation and a consciousness of having driven a nail of incisive bitterness through the counterfeit coin of his cousin’s sympathy, as he rejoined Arthur and delivered up his hat to the attendant.
Possibly with some touch of quite new prudence born of his conversation with Sainty, but much more probably with a view to doing proper honour to his fair guest, Arthur had retained a private room, rather, as it appeared, to the disappointment of the ladies, who had looked forward to seeing and being seen in the big restaurant, but immensely to the relief of his elder brother. The table was profusely decked with long trails of smilax and a quantity of those florists’ roses that are all of one size and shape and colour, and seem to have been manufactured by the dozen, ready packed in cardboard boxes, having no more suggestion about them of growth by any natural process than the little red silk shades on the electric lights.
Miss de Vere, resplendent in green velvet, with a vast number of diamond ornaments, hearts, stars, crescents, arrows, and even frogs and spiders, pinned into the front of her gown, sat on Arthur’s right and between the two brothers. She just touched a string of pearls at her throat, smiling archly on her host, as she took her seat. Long afterwards, Sainty had the opportunity of verifying his surmise that it was a present from that open-handed youth, when, in settling his brother’s outstanding liabilities, he came across it in Messrs. Rumond & Diby’s little account in company with the claret jug that had figured on the occasion of his own majority.
Seen at close quarters, the fair Cynthia was a little coarse looking, and it seemed to Sainty that a person to whom the art of painting her face must be professionally familiar, ought to have acquired more delicacy of touch. Her eyes were very large, and what the French call à fleur de tête; her lips were too full, too red, and seemed to show too much of their linings; and her teeth, which had flashed so brilliantly across the footlights, were less dazzling on a nearer inspection. Her figure and carriage were superb, but her hands, though unnaturally whitened, were not pretty, and her nails were ill-cared for and perhaps a little bitten. She was extremely gracious to Sainty, and evidently anxious to impress him with her tenue and the elegance of her manners.
‘I met Lady Deans in the cloakroom,’ she began; ‘isn’t she a handsome woman? I do admire her. Isn’t it odd, her Christian name’s Vere, and so’s my surname? and we’re both so tall. Some one once said we might be sisters, but of course that’s nonsense. I know she’s a great deal better lookin’ than me.’
‘It had not occurred to me that you were alike——’ Sainty was beginning, but Arthur cut in. ‘Rats,’ he said. ‘You know she isn’t a patch on you,’ for which gallant speech he was rewarded by a rap on the knuckles from his enslaver’s fork. Though he gazed enraptured in her face, she paid him very little attention, and continued to address her conversation to Sainty.
‘We had a little supper at my place last night; I wish I’d known you were in town; your brother was there. Oh, all very quiet, of course; only a little soup, and lobster cutlets, and nothing else hot but the fowls; a few little things in aspic, and some plover’s eggs, that’s all; but we were very jolly. Straddles came, the famous comique, and sang some of his songs and made us roar; and one or two other people sang, and then we cleared away the furniture and had some dancing. We kept it up till four o’clock. I declare I’m quite sleepy; ain’t you, Clara?’
Miss Bingham, a little, heavily painted black and red lady, replied from the other end of the table that she couldn’t keep her eyes open. ‘Lor! we did have fun, though,’ she said; ‘how was the poor piano this morning, after those boys pouring the champagne into it?’
‘Oh, don’t speak of it,’ said Miss de Vere. ‘You know that lovely new drapery I’d got for it, plush and Liberty silk; they completely ruined it. I was really cross. I don’t see any fun in spoiling people’s things.’
‘What a shame!’ said Arthur. ‘May I give you a new one?’
‘No, naughty boy, don’t you be extravagant. Why didn’t you come?’ she added, turning to Miss Hodgson, the beautiful statuesque lady who sat on Arthur’s left with a fixed smile on her lovely mouth that recalled the hairdresser’s window. She was eating a good deal, but not adding much to the conversation. Thus appealed to, she glanced towards the little Greek, still with the same amiable absence of expression, and nodded gently.
‘Do you mean I wouldn’t let you go?’ snarled Mr. Atides.
‘Oh no,’ she cooed.
‘Then why the devil didn’t you go? I don’t know——’
‘Petit monstre,’ murmured Miss Balbullier to Sainty. ‘Est-il insupportable! V’là longtemps que je l’aurais planté là si j’etais Mabel. ‘Oby, what is “planted there” in English?’
‘Chuck ‘im, give ‘im the mitten,’ promptly responded that gallant officer.
Sainty wondered just what kind of weird irregular regiment could once have been commanded by this blue-nosed veteran, with his dyed moustache and damp grizzled curls; his hands and eyes were so much older than anything else about him, as to give an uncanny suggestion of magic, as of some imperfectly transformed Faust.
‘Tiens! la mitaine? I ignore the phrase,’ said mademoiselle.
Mr. Atides continued to growl into his plate with a very evil expression, like a dog over a bone, and Agnes Baines, a very pretty fair girl with a pronounced Cockney accent pursued an eager conversation across him with Miss Bingham, as though he were an empty chair.
‘’E’s given ’er a tiara,’ Sainty heard her say; ‘none of your little ‘undred-pounders, a real fine one with big stones in it.’
‘Isn’t Agnes vulgar?’ Cynthia murmured to him, very impressive and supercilious from the heights of her superior gentility. ‘She’s had so few advantages, poor girl! but she is pretty, don’t you think?’
‘They say he’s goin’ to marry ’er,’ Miss Baines continued.
‘Your English girls are so kveer,’ the French lady remarked to Sainty; ‘zay sink of nozzing but gettin’ married. To me zat seem so sorrrdid,’ As Mademoiselle Elise was credited with having already ruined three young men during the brief period of her sojourn on these shores, without any thought of ceremonial formalities, this sentiment was perhaps not so disinterestedly high-minded as it sounded.
Charley Hunter, who had been vainly trying to attract Miss Baines’ attention—though perhaps more of her conversation was addressed to him than he realised—and gnawing his beardless lips at the ill success of his manœuvres, here turned his back squarely on her and addressed himself to Arthur.
‘They say they’re going to raise the standard; isn’t it beastly? as if the damned exams. weren’t hard enough as it is.’
‘My little feller from Aldershot says they are going to make ’em so stiff that none of you Johnnies will be able to pass unless you jolly well buck up,’ remarked Miss Bingham cheerfully.
‘I hope you will use your influence with my brother to make him work,’ Sainty said, turning to Cynthia; ‘it’s very important he should pass.’
‘He’s a bad boy,’ said Miss de Vere playfully, ‘but I’m always at him not to be so idle.’
This speech being greeted with derisive laughter by some of the company, the lady indignantly demanded if they didn’t believe her.
‘There were no exams. in my day,’ cried Colonel Hoby, ‘and damn me if I think they turned out less good officers than the damned spindle-shanked round-shouldered crew of short-sighted asses you have in the army nowadays. They ought to be parsons.’
‘Hear, hear! Fieldmarshal,’ said Arthur. ‘I wish we had you in Pall Mall; there’d be a lot more good fellows in the army than there are, if you were Commander-in-chief.’
Sainty was growing weak with the effort of trying to find something agreeable to say to either of his neighbours. He was oppressed with a sense of the dreariness of the whole function. He had come prepared to be a little shocked, but half hoping for a touch of reckless gaiety. If this was the sort of entertainment Tannhäuser found in the Venusberg, he thought the pilgrimage to Rome must have been an exhilarating change. He found himself almost wishing for the young men who had poured champagne into Miss de Vere’s piano, to lend some semblance of liveliness to the proceedings. With its banal unimaginative luxury and sordid second-rate chatter, this one excursion of his into Bohemia was as dull as one of his mother’s religious dinner-parties. And to think that it was for the privilege of frequenting this sort of society that dozens of young men of Arthur’s stamp ruined themselves yearly, on the very threshold of life! Uncle Cor might not be very exciting, but he surely was better company than Atides or Colonel Hoby. But then Sainty was constitutionally unfitted to give its due importance to love’s young dream.
CHAPTER XI
Sainty rather expected a letter with some attempt at exculpation from his cousin; but Claude was evidently aware that in many awkward positions there is no course so expedient as silence. Had circumstances made a meeting with Sainty seem imminent, he might have thought otherwise; but, as things were, having nothing to say, he said nothing, and trusted to time to take the edge off the situation. Sainty composed several very withering answers to the possible letter, but as it never came he had no occasion to send them.
He had not contrived to get a word with Arthur after the memorable supper. ‘Hope you won’t mind, old man, promised to see Miss de Vere home; only civil,’ the boy had murmured, as he slipped into the little hired coupé that was waiting. Mademoiselle Balbullier had hinted that a like attention would not be unwelcome from himself, but finding her hints disregarded, had driven off in a hansom with Miss Bingham, laughing very shrilly at some joke that seemed to tickle them hugely.
Sainty returned to Cambridge more than ever persuaded that if anything was to be done for Arthur it must be done quickly. He had for some time had a scheme in his head, which had been germinating slowly, but for it to come to blossom, let alone fruit, he needed above all things the co-operation of Gerald Newby. He therefore made haste to seek his friend and lay his plans before him. He found Newby for a wonder alone.
‘So you’re back,’ Gerald said, pushing the papers together on his desk and pulling the blotting-paper over them, a little trick of his which always exasperated Sainty, who would rather have died than look at anything not meant for him.
‘Are you busy?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got something special to talk to you about.’
‘I’m not too busy to be at the service of any one who wants me,’ said Newby. ‘Mere college work never seems to me as important as real human needs.’
‘Ah! I’m so glad to hear you say that; it gives me a better hope in what I have to say to you.’ Sainty had thought so much over the scheme he had to propose—it was so important to him—that now it was trembling on the threshold of utterance he feared lest he should not put it before Newby to the best advantage.
There was so long a pause that the young don came round from his writing-table to a position from which he faced and dominated his interlocutor. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m all attention.’
‘First of all about my brother,’ Sainty began, with some hesitation. ‘You must know that I’ve found things even worse than I expected; it’s not merely idleness and waste of time, as I feared; there’s a woman in the case.’
Newby frowned. He had an almost feminine prudery. The fact was he knew very little of such things, and what he did not know always seemed to him dark and dangerous, a subject to be as much as possible avoided in conversation. ‘I am very little qualified to advise——’ he began.
‘Oh! that’s not what I wanted your help about,’ Sainty assured him; ‘at least, not directly; but you know I’ve often told you how I wished I could get rid of my most unsuitable part in life.’
Newby made an almost imperceptible gesture of impatience, as who should say, ‘We are back to that old game, are we?’
‘It was not mere talk,’ Sainty went on. ‘I have thought and thought about it, till I really have evolved something; I have once or twice wanted to speak to you about it, but have been afraid. Why I mentioned Arthur just now, was that a great factor in my desire for a change of life was that I thought I saw my way to helping him, perhaps to saving him; and what I’ve seen in this visit to London convinces me that I’ve no time to lose.’
‘You interest me,’ said Newby patronisingly. He went across and fastened his outer door. ‘If what you have to say to me is so important,’ he said, ‘we may as well secure ourselves against interruption.’
‘Ever since I was a child,’ Sainty began again, ‘it has been borne in on me that my brother was as pre-eminently fitted for my place in the world as I was unfitted for it. I used to think I was sure to die young, and that so matters would adjust themselves naturally without my intervention. Well—I’m nearly twenty-two, and I seem to get stronger every year. I don’t say I’m a tower of strength, but I fancy I’m less likely to die than many more robust men. For one thing, I do no dangerous things. You can understand that the idea is not a pleasant one to me that my one business in life is to keep my brother out of his birthright.’
‘It isn’t his birthright; it’s yours.’
‘That’s as you happen to look at it; it’s not my view. I can’t feel as if I had any right to what is only a hindrance and clog to me, and would be such a help to him.’
‘But you can’t change places with him, however much you may wish to.’
‘Legally and physically, no; virtually, yes. For ever so long I’ve been hatching a pet scheme, but I can’t carry it out without your help. I’ve not the health, the will, nor the intellect necessary; but you would be the ideal person to do it, and you would help and cheer me when I failed.’
‘May I know what this wonderful idea of yours is?’
‘I can’t make him Lord Belchamber—I wish I could; but I can practically give him the position, if I hand over the place and income to him. He would be able to marry some nice girl; he is one of those who ought to marry young. With a healthy, out-of-door life and plenty of innocent congenial occupation, and the influence of a good woman at his side, all that is kindly in him would have room to develop. He is not naturally vicious, only weak and incurably headstrong and obstinate.’
‘And what do you propose to do with yourself?’
‘Ah! that is it; that’s where you come in. The whole thing hangs on you.’ Sainty looked appealingly in his friend’s face. ‘I’m half afraid to put it to the touch,’ he said; ‘I have it so much at heart.’
‘I can’t give you my views on your Utopia unless you tell me what it is.’
Sainty detected and grieved at the faint sneer in the use of the word ‘Utopia.’
‘You don’t encourage me,’ he said.
‘How can I, till I know what you propose?’
‘I thought we might go, you and I, into one of those East End parishes and start a place something on the lines of Toynbee Hall, a sort of university for the poor, a centre of culture and light and civilisation in the middle of all that dreariness and barbarity; I to find the money, and you practically everything else, with me for your lieutenant to work under your orders.’
Sainty brought it all out with a rush, when once he had come to the point, and then paused breathless to hear how his idea would be received. Newby sat silent for a moment or two; at least he took the matter seriously.
‘Have you thought at all what it will cost?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ cried Sainty eagerly, ‘I’ve gone into all that rather carefully. Say that it costs £20,000 to build the place—it could be done for that, very simple and plain; a big hall to begin with, and perhaps a cloister, and a few sets of rooms like college rooms. After the initial expense I don’t think it could cost more than £2000 or £3000 a year. Of course we should live in the simplest way—there would be no luxury; and gradually I should hope the place would begin to help pay for itself; it wouldn’t be a charity, you know.’
‘And the land?’ asked Newby; ‘is that included in your £20,000? You would want a good big plot, for the heart of London, to put up such buildings as you propose.’
‘Oh, that could be managed. I might pay for half and raise the other half by mortgage on the property, or even the whole. There need be no difficulty about the money part of it; I’d see to that. The question is, will you help? All the rules, all the details of the working of the thing would have to come from you. You would be absolute master. I thought,’ he added a little piteously, ‘that it would appeal to you as an opportunity of carrying out some of your ideals. It would, of course, be entirely undenominational; people of all creeds should be invited to explain their views. It might be the beginning, the nucleus of your idea of universal belief and brotherhood.’
The pleading eyes fixed on his face seemed to make Newby vaguely ill at ease. While Sainty was talking he had shifted his position, got up and walked to the window, and sat down again at his desk, on which he drummed a little with his fingers. Now he rose and came back to his friend. There was a touch of embarrassment and something like compunction, as he said—
‘My dear fellow, it’s impossible, simply impossible.’
Sainty, glancing round the charming room with its air of dignified calm and severe luxury, saw suddenly how sham was its austerity, how real its comfort.
‘I am asking a great deal of you,’ he said; ‘too much, I’m afraid.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said Newby eagerly. ‘Don’t think I would hesitate at any little personal sacrifice; that is indeed a low view of me. But, believe me, I see the impracticability of the whole thing.’
For a few seconds there was an uneasy silence. The summer breeze from the open windows faintly stirred the pictures on the wall. Voices softened by distance and pleasant outdoor sounds came wafted to them where they sat. It occurred to Sainty that it was not necessary for a young man to ‘have great possessions’ ‘to go away sorrowful’ when confronted by the opportunity of the supreme sacrifice for others. No one knew better than he that Newby’s way of life would have been far harder for him to give up than his own; and this knowledge lent a great tenderness and humility to his voice as he asked, ‘Why impracticable if we are both willing?’
‘Take yourself to begin with,’ Newby answered; ‘think of your people, your mother, your uncle, the duke and duchess—what would they say to such a scheme?’
‘Oh, they’d be horrified at first; but I don’t think they would offer any very strenuous opposition to such a simple plan of disposing of me in favour of Arthur.’
‘Then, think how I should appear in the matter. What would they say of me?—that I had acquired a great influence over you, and then used it to make you devote yourself and your money to the support of myself and the furtherance of my crack-brained schemes. It’s ten to one against their even allowing me any sincerity; far more likely they would think my one object was to advertise myself while living at your expense.’
‘And do you care so greatly what people say of you?’
‘Yes, I do. My dear boy, you are one of the great ones of the earth and can afford to be thought eccentric if you please; but I am a poor scholar—my good name is everything to me.’
‘You said once that we could never hope to do anything unless we were prepared to be misunderstood; that no man could really be good for anything of whom the commonplace respectable people spoke well.’
‘Good heavens!’ cried Newby, with not unnatural exasperation, ‘I wish you wouldn’t cast snatches of things I may have said in some quite different connection in my teeth.’ He made another excursion to the window and stood looking out for a second or two. Presently he turned and said in a much more chastened manner, ‘Then there’s what I’m doing here. You yourself can bear witness that I am not without influence on a number of young men, an influence you have told me was good. Have I a right to give up my work here, my power of influencing unnumbered young lives towards higher and purer ideals, for a quite problematical chance of doing good to costermongers, and incidentally enabling your brother to stand in your shoes?’
For a few moments neither spoke.
‘Then you refuse?’ said Sainty almost under his breath. ‘Is it quite, quite irrevocable?’
‘My dear boy, some day you will see the matter in its true light and will thank me for having saved you from following the will-o’-the-wisp of your own too precipitate philanthropy. The idea is purely fanciful; believe me, it would never work. In the first place, the mortifications, the disappointments, the roughness of the life, would kill you in a year.’
‘And if meanwhile my money and my feeble efforts had served to start a really useful work, to launch you on a career of helpfulness, what would that matter? Would it not even be the simplest solution of all? Arthur would then step into the place in which it is so much my object to establish him.’
‘Quâ method of suicide the machinery is cumbrous and expensive,’ said Newby, with dreary facetiousness; ‘and you can’t seriously expect me to aid and abet you in committing the happy dispatch.’
They talked much longer, Sainty still pleading for his idea, though without much hope of success, Newby, gaining assurance from the sound of his own voice, pouring more and more cold water on the project and abounding in excellent reason. Sainty could not but see the sense of much that Gerald said; yet he came away from the interview not only depressed and disappointed at the ruthless killing of his cherished scheme, but with an uncomfortable sense of having caught a glimpse of his idol’s clay feet, always one of the saddest experiences of life. He felt too a certain closing in on him as of fate; his attempts to mould events or to avert catastrophes had met with singularly little success. Was all struggle useless, then? was it true that we were only puppets in the iron grip of destiny? To a person of his temperament it was only too easy to believe it, yet youth’s everlasting assertion of free-will dies hard in our twenty-second year, and it was not without many searchings of heart that Belchamber settled down to the conviction that there was nothing to be done. To say that his brother was never out of his thoughts would be an exaggeration. Happily for us, there is no such thing as complete absorption in one idea. When we have lost all that made life worth having, if we were honest we should own that at certain moments the most trivial of daily preoccupations drove our grief completely out of our minds. There is no evidence to show that the inhabitants of Herculaneum were other than cheerfully busy; and we all pursue a hundred frivolous objects, though lying every one of us inexorably under sentence of death.
In the year that followed Sainty thought much and anxiously of Arthur, but he also thought of many other things. For one thing, the management of his estate was beginning to interest him. Having originally turned his attention that way purely to please his mother, he had gradually come to some appreciation of what he could do for his fellow-creatures over an area for which he was more or less responsible. Whatever his views might be as to the position of the land-owning class, while he held such a position it undoubtedly entailed many duties and responsibilities. Whether his land were eventually to pass to the State or be cut up into peasant properties, as long as it remained his it was clearly better that the people on it should live in well-drained, weathertight houses, than in insanitary hovels; that they should be as far as possible provided with regular employment, educated, amused, kept from the public-house. While Cambridge and his work for the tripos held him, he had thought less of all these things, secure in the conviction that his mother and uncle were giving them careful attention. To tell the truth, he had a little feared to absorb himself in them while he still cherished a hope that his work in life might lie in far other fields, that all this might be Arthur’s business, not his. In his immediate neighbourhood there was no very terrible distress to stir his imagination; by the poor on the place Lady Charmington had scrupulously done something more than her duty, and hard as were the lives of the agricultural labourers, at least their lot had fallen to them in pleasant places—their work was done in the pure air of heaven. It was for the huddled degraded masses of the great cities, and especially of London, that his soul felt the overwhelming sickening pity which had threatened to drive him out into the wilderness. Now that he personally seemed to be barred from effort in that direction, that his long-cherished hopes of seating his brother in his place had proved quite impracticable, and all the fabric raised by his dreams on that foundation had fallen in ruins about his ears at the blast of Newby’s inexorable common-sense, the plain duties that lay immediately around him presented themselves as something to be clutched with an almost despairing intensity. Here, at least, was work ready to his hand, and he promised himself it should be done thoroughly. He absorbed himself in his mother’s big ledgers, her detailed and carefully kept accounts of all the workings of the great property, with the same student’s passion for mastering his subject that he had brought to his Cambridge studies. Had Lady Charmington been a less conscientious woman, the thought that her power was passing from her might not have been without a sting; but she had talked so much of ‘giving an account of her stewardship,’ and so often lamented Sainty’s want of interest in his own possessions, that, whatever slight pangs she may have had to stifle, she had not the face to express anything but pleasure at his changed attitude. So far, too, he was still her pupil, eagerly learning all she had to tell, and accepting her word as final. It is possible that she took a genuine pleasure in introducing him to his duties, and she may well have been forgiven some moments of pride in displaying to him both the quantity and quality of her work during his minority. Sainty, on his side, began to understand all that his mother had done for him, and his wonder was only equalled by his gratitude.
Lady Charmington’s confidence in Arthur’s application to his studies began to be shaken about this time by his ignominious failure to pass his examination; and here it was she who turned to Sainty for help—Sainty who, impossible as it seemed, had been right where she was wrong.
‘I can’t make it out at all,’ she would say; ‘he seemed to be working so hard. You recollect he wouldn’t even come home last Easter; and then in the summer he went off on that reading party.’
Arthur, in fact, after a fortnight at Belchamber—a fortnight during which he had been moody, restless, unlike himself, and had carefully shunned all possibilities of private or personal talk with either his mother or brother—had left hurriedly on a mysterious ‘reading party.’
Sainty wrote often to the London lodgings, but seldom got any answers, and doubted whether many of his letters ever reached the person to whom they were written. It became increasingly difficult to pacify Lady Charmington, who passed by a rapid transition from her serene optimism to the depths of the gloomiest apprehension. Sometimes for days she would hardly talk of anything else, expressing wonder, surprise, disappointment, all of which Sainty had more or less to pretend to share, with a sense of deceit when he reflected how little surprised he really was, and how much he could have enlightened the poor lady.
At Sainty’s earnest request Arthur came again to Belchamber in November for the shooting, his last visit, as it proved, for many a long day. Sainty argued, remonstrated, implored. ‘What was he doing? What did he intend to do? Didn’t he want to go into the army? He must know he could never get in if he didn’t work or pass his exams.’ It was all to no purpose. The boy took refuge in a surly silence. He had two such terrible scenes with his mother that for the first time in his life he spent Christmas away from home. ‘I’m going to the Hunters,’ he wrote. ‘If I come to Belchamber there will only be a repetition of the ghastly rows I had with mother in November, and what’s the good? I hate rows; jawing never did me any good yet.’
Lady Charmington appealed to her brother. Lord Firth saw Arthur when he came up for the meeting of parliament. Sainty could never learn accurately what passed between them, but his uncle, that most amiable gentleman, said he would not willingly speak to the boy again.
The spring wore away miserably in sickening suspense. Arthur was still nominally working at ‘Monkton’s,’ but several letters had come from the principal of the establishment, complaining of the slackness of his attendance, which had not tended to soothe his mother’s feelings.
It was getting on for a year after the supper at the Hotel Fritz, when Sainty, seeing a number of letters, most of which had a bill-like look about them, on the hall table for Arthur, took them to his room to re-direct. He was just about to do so, when he noticed that they had all originally been sent to Monkton’s, and had been forwarded from there. The postmarks of some of them were several weeks old, from which it was evident not only that Arthur had not been at the crammer’s at all for some time past, but that the people there believed him to be at home. The pen dropped from Sainty’s hand, and he sat staring at the envelopes, shuffling them idly from behind one another, as though they were a hand at cards. Finally, shutting them sharply together, he thrust them into his pocket, and went in search of his mother.
Since his defection at Christmas and the failure of Lord Firth to bring the culprit to reason, Lady Charmington had talked much less of her second son; for the most part she maintained a grim and offended silence. Sainty wondered sometimes what this changed attitude might mean. He was certain that she did not think less of Arthur, or worry less about him. Was it possible that she had begun to distrust his co-operation for any reason, and was trying to find out something for herself without his help? Her manner, when he spoke to her on this particular day, was stranger than ever, and she looked at him with a sudden hard scrutiny which chilled him, when he asked if she did not think it might be well for him to go to London and look Arthur up.
‘He never writes, and we don’t know what he may be doing,’ he said. ‘I can’t let things drift in this way any longer.’
He said nothing of the letters in his pocket. Lady Charmington looked as if she were on the point of saying something, and then decided not to.
‘Very well,’ she answered quietly; ‘how long shall you be gone?’
‘I don’t know; it will depend on what I find. Mother,’ he added, ‘don’t you agree? don’t you think it will be well for me to go?’
Again his mother looked at him as if she would have read his soul; it was the old glance that had made him stammer and look down as a child, the look that said more clearly than words that she thought him a liar. He had never been able to meet it. Instinctively he looked away.
‘Go, by all means,’ he heard her say, and he knew that her eyes were still upon his face, the eyes of a judge, almost an accuser. ‘Go and see what you can do. You may have means of getting at the truth not open to me.’
CHAPTER XII
Without seeing any one at Monkton’s but the servant, or even disclosing his identity, Sainty was able in a very few words to establish the correctness of his surmises. Arthur had not been there for weeks. ‘I can get you ‘is address, if you’ll wait a minute,’ the man said; ‘’e’s down at ‘is own ‘ome; I forwarded some letters to him a day or two back.’
‘Oh, thanks; if he’s there, I know the address and need not trouble you,’ and Sainty turned again to his hansom. He reflected that to find Miss de Vere was to find his brother, and supposed, in his innocence, that he had only to apply at the theatre to learn the young lady’s address. But when he presented himself at the stage-door and blushingly demanded it, he was informed that Miss de Vere was not acting at present, and that, in any case, they were strictly forbidden to give the private address of any of their ladies or gentlemen. A letter sent to the theatre for Miss de Vere would be forwarded.
This was an unlooked-for check, and he wondered blankly what he was to do next. He sent away his cab and began to wander slowly westward again; he could think better on foot. He was walking sadly along Pall Mall, when he was passed by a young man with wonderfully broad shoulders and a wonderfully small waist, who paused, looked at him, and finally held out his hand. Sainty recognised Algy Montgomery.
‘Hulloa!’ said the guardsman, with the smileless gloom of the fashionable London young man. ‘Where are you off to? I’m just on my way to call on my stepmother; I understand she says I never come near her. Why don’t you come along and see your revered grandmother?’
Sainty had been trying to make himself go and ask Claude for the address he wanted; he had not once set eyes on his cousin during the past year, and to appeal to him again for help was a bitter pill. Think as he would, he could evolve no other way of arriving at his end, and this chance meeting and invitation to Sunborough House seemed like a leading. He would go and see the duchess—what more natural? and if Claude happened to be there, how could he help it?
‘All right,’ he said; ‘I don’t mind if I do.’
The pair walked in silence for a few seconds, Lord Algernon trying to accommodate his long stride to his companion’s limp.
‘Come up to look after your young brother?’ he asked presently, through the cigar which he held tightly between his teeth. ‘He’s making no end of an ass of himself with Topsy de Vere; he never leaves her for a minute——’
To talk casually to a comparative stranger of what was gnawing his vitals was gall and wormwood to Sainty, but he grunted some sort of an assent, and then asked as indifferently as he could, ‘You don’t happen to know Miss de Vere’s address, do you?’
Lord Algy laughed. ‘No, for a wonder, I don’t,’ he said; ‘but I tell you who ought to—your precious cousin Morland. I fancy he knew his way there quite well at one time.’
‘Oh! did Claude——’
‘Got tired of the lady; or perhaps found her rather too expensive (I suspect his grace don’t do his secretary particularly well), so passed her on to the little cousin. Sharp fellow, Morland.’
The duchess, whom presently they found having tea in company with Lady Rugby and Lady Eva, had also a word to say of her prodigal grandson. ‘Arthur s’encanaille,’ she remarked. ‘He is bad form; he lets himself be seen everywhere with cocottes; the young men of to-day have no tenue—none. Formerly, yes, I don’t say men were any better—they have always been monsters; but they did not throw ces demoiselles in the face of the world.’
Lady Eva murmured something to the effect that Arthur was a dear, and dropped a platitude about wild oats.
‘Oh, I don’t want a boy to be a merle blanc,’ her mother rejoined.’ Sainty would be all the better if he were just a little naughty, wouldn’t you, my child? I don’t suppose Algy here, or your own boy, are models of virtue, but there are ways of doing things. By the way, where is Claude? Ring the bell, Algy, and we will see if he is in; he will like to see his cousin.’
Sainty did not feel at all sure that he would, but when Morland presently appeared in answer to the duchess’s message, he was as easy and unembarrassed as usual; it was Belchamber who was awkward and ill at ease. There was, perhaps, just a shade of reproachful tenderness in Claude’s greeting, an eloquent glance, a silent pressure of the hand, as who should say, ‘You may be as cantankerous and unreasonable as you like, my patience with those I love is practically inexhaustible.’ At the merest hint from Sainty that he had something to ask him, he carried him off to his own room, and when the request for Miss de Vere’s address had been stammered out, produced a little address-book from a locked drawer, and began to search in it with a great appearance of assiduity.
‘Here it is—no, let me see, she left there, that’s her old address; how stupid of me. Ah! this is it, a flat she took; I remember now. But she’s always moving, I don’t guarantee that you’ll find her there; but they’ll be able to tell you if she’s flitted again.’ His voice was dry and business-like; Sainty wanted an address, he was trying to help him to it, as he would try to do anything he wanted. Why he had need of it was no affair of his. Claude prided himself on his power of implying much that his tongue never uttered.
He wrung Sainty’s hand at parting. ‘Good luck to you,’ he whispered. ‘I could do no good; may you be more fortunate! And oh! by the way, I wouldn’t mention me there; I’m not popular in that quarter. Cynthia has taken one of those absurd unreasoning dislikes to me that half-educated people do, and has set Arthur against me. I suppose she was afraid I might try and get him away from her. It’s a bad business. Well, addio, and best wishes.’
Oddly enough, Claude was right in his surmise that Miss de Vere might have moved, but Sainty did at last discover her present abode, and arriving there about noon of the following day, found that she had gone to a rehearsal, ‘but the gentleman was in.’ Sainty was not sorry to find Arthur alone. The boy was at first of course very much on the defensive; the elder brother had to walk most warily among the eggshells of suspicion and susceptibility, but he soon discovered that his coming was not altogether unwelcome. Arthur did not attempt to disguise the fact that he was living with Cynthia; ‘he had made her give up her flat, and had taken these rooms for her; they had the whole house, and the people of the house looked after them; it saved the bother of servants; he was answerable for the rent and the housekeeping; naturally he couldn’t live at her expense; otherwise she wouldn’t take a penny from him, she was very high-minded; it was as much as ever she would let him give her a little present now and then. Anything she made professionally was no business of his; she had gone about a new engagement this morning.’
‘But how do you do it? Surely to take a whole house like this on the footing of lodgings is the most expensive arrangement you can make.’
‘It ain’t done for nothing, I can tell you,’ Arthur said ruefully. He was not sorry to unburthen himself a little to his brother. Sainty had had no idea to what extent a young man of family could live on credit in London, for a time at least. By carefully never paying ready money where it was not absolutely necessary, it was astonishing what a lot you could do.
‘But what’s it all going to lead to?’ Sainty asked. ‘Do you propose to give up the army, never do anything—just live on here with her from day to day? Even supposing you were me, and had all the money you wanted, would this life satisfy you?’
‘I believe you, my boy,’ said Arthur heartily.
‘It may for a time; it won’t, it can’t, for long,’ Sainty said eagerly. ‘And mother? Don’t you care about her? Mother’s awfully cut up about your not passing your exam. There’s another coming on in the autumn; it’ll be your last chance. Don’t you mean to try?’
Arthur’s brow grew dark at the mention of his mother. ‘By Jove!’ he said, ‘you don’t know the things she said to me. She can let you have it, when she isn’t pleased, the mater can.’
‘Well, you must admit she had some reason not to be pleased,’ said Sainty.
‘Lots of fellows muff the first time,’ said Arthur lamely. ‘I’ve got another try.’
‘But are you any more likely to pass the next time? Are you doing a stroke of work for it?’ And he narrated to Arthur how it had come to his knowledge that he had not been at Monkton’s for weeks. ‘I happened on these,’ he said, producing the letters he had found in the hall at Belchamber, ‘but mother might just as well have found them. She doesn’t know yet that you’ve dropped work altogether, but she must find it out soon. Monkton may write to her any day and ask when you are coming back.’
‘Damn it all! I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘No. You never think of anything half an hour ahead, do you?’
Then Sainty told him how people were talking about him—his grandmother, Aunt Eva, Algy Montgomery (he did not mention Claude). ‘Don’t you see that in a dozen ways the whole thing may come out to mother at any moment?’
Arthur was very stubborn, took refuge in the reiteration of his devotion to Cynthia and his determination not to be parted from her. Once or twice Sainty almost lost patience.
‘You say you won’t leave her, and you won’t do this or that or anything you don’t choose,’ he said with some warmth; ‘but what are you going to live on? You own you’re up to your ears in debt, and that people are getting impatient. What can you do if mother cuts off your allowance?’
‘I’m of age; I’ve got my own money.’
‘Five hundred a year! You can keep up this sort of life so easily on that, can’t you? You know you can’t touch the principal. I don’t suppose the next two years’ income would begin to pay what you owe now.’
Arthur looked doubtful; he began to see the weakness of his position. He tried a few platitudes about ‘working his fingers to the bone for her,’ at which Sainty, miserable as he felt, couldn’t help laughing.
‘You’ve never done a stroke of work in your life,’ he said, ‘and you would find it so easy to get employment, wouldn’t you? You would be so valuable in a house of business!’
He wisely refrained from any suggestion that the lady’s affection might not be proof against the trials of poverty.
Finally, after long argument and entreaty, Arthur was persuaded to say he would go to a new crammer in the country till after the next examination, and would do his best to pass. ‘It is no good my trying to work at Monkton’s,’ he said candidly; ‘I should always be bolting back to Cynthia. You can’t think how good she is; she’s always telling me I ought to work and pass my exams, and please you. Don’t try and make me give her up or say I won’t have anything more to do with her, or any rot of that sort.’
Sainty, too glad to have carried his point about the work, was ready to promise anything—payment of debts, help in the support of the lady, in short, whatever Arthur liked to demand. ‘And first of all,’ he said pleadingly, ‘you will come down home for a few days before you go to the new place. Poor mother’s sore and wretched at the way you’ve treated her. She doesn’t show much, but she feels a lot, and you’ve always been her favourite. Come and be nice to her for a bit before you take up your work again.’
‘By Jove! you make me do everything you want,’ said Arthur tenderly. Sainty could not help smiling at the thought of how very far this was from being the case, but he was thankful for small mercies. He reflected that he had been lucky in hitting on a propitious moment, when the narrow matters of the house had begun to press rather importunately on Miss de Vere’s lover. To grant a favour, accepting the money he needed as a condition, was in every way pleasanter to Arthur than having to sue for help.