Lord Alistair's Rebellion

On his arrival at the house, weighed down by this new and dreary sense of discomfiture, Alistair found Molly in a state of pleased excitement.

“There’s a letter for you from Easterthorpe. It’s from the Duke of Gloucester!” was her greeting.

Alistair flushed as he recognized Prince Herbert’s handwriting. He had not forgotten the bazaar, and he tore open the envelope with some fear of encountering a reproach.

The Duke addressed him as “Dear Alistair,” just as in their boyish days, and begged him to come down to Gloucester Lodge for the week-end.

“There will be no one here but my wife and children,” the royal note ended, “and we can talk about old times.”

Left to himself, Alistair would have declined the invitation, in spite of the courtly theory that invitations from such a quarter are in the nature of commands. He was too much disgusted with the way in which life had dealt with him, and he with life, to have any more heart in the struggle. It would be simpler to go under, to efface himself, and cease to keep before the world.

But he found that Molly was determined that he should go. She had made up her mind that the Prince’s invitation was a repudiation of the Duke of Trent, and an intimation that Stuart’s irregular connection with herself had not lowered him in the royal estimation.

Alistair, of course, knew better. He saw perfectly well that Prince Herbert’s reference to his family was a delicate way of saying that the visit must be a private one. The Court Circular would not know of Lord Alistair’s presence at Gloucester Lodge.

For this reason his acceptance was a little stiffer than the Prince’s invitation. He began it “My dear Prince,” and signed himself “Yours ever.” The Prince had written “Yours affectionately.”

Nevertheless, Alistair was a good deal more touched by the overture than he was willing to betray.

He had not yet been adjudicated a bankrupt. But the Duke of Trent had suspended negotiations on his behalf, and he was to meet his creditors on the Monday to undergo the customary useless cross-examination as to how he had managed to get rid of the money.

At the very moment of departure he was confronted with the new difficulty of cash. Neither he nor Molly found themselves in possession of the price of a first-class ticket, and Alistair was too proud to go on such a visit unless he could do so in the way befitting his rank.

He solved the problem by ordering a cab to drive him to the railway-station, and making it stop at a famous pawnbroker’s on the way. It was his first visit to such an establishment, but the prospect of the journey put him in good spirits, and he tendered his French watch to the shopman with a certain enjoyment of the situation.

“I am going down to stay with the Duke of Gloucester, and I haven’t got my railway-fare,” he said, with perfect self-possession.

The shopman grinned at what appeared to him a lively witticism, and after examining the piece, offered ten pounds.

“What name shall I put?” he inquired, as Alistair signified his consent, preparing to write “Jackson” or “Thompson,” at his customer’s pleasure.

“Stuart—Lord Alistair Stuart,” came in the same assured tone.

This time the pawnbroker laughed out.

“You will have your joke, sir. I’ll put ‘Mr. Stuart.’”

“But I have told you my name,” said Alistair. “You can see it on my coat if you like.”

He slipped off the light overcoat he was wearing, and gravely exhibited to the eyes of the wondering shopman the tailor’s parchment label, on which his name and rank were clearly legible.

“I beg your lordship’s pardon, I’m sure,” stammered the man. “It’s so seldom that our clients give us their real names that I thought your lordship was pretending. The address, please?”

“Care of Miss Finucane, Elm Side, Chelsea.”

The shopman, scarcely able to believe his ears, wrote down the address with an amazement which he made no attempt to conceal. As he handed over the ticket he asked:

“Would your lordship like a cheap watch to wear while this is with us?”

“Thanks, no,” said Alistair, with easy indifference. “Time is of no consequence to me just now—I am a bankrupt.”

He strolled out of the shop, charmed with his victory over the hateful traditions of hypocrisy and self-shame embodied in the pawnbroker. In his exhilaration he could have challenged the whole middle class.

His spirits rose steadily as he came to the terminus, and he lavished half a crown on the porter who carried his light dressing-case to the railway-carriage.

He found himself intruding on the privacy of a stout, vulgar-looking man of sixty or thereabouts, whose name was too freely displayed over all his belongings, from a giant portmanteau down to a rug-strap, to leave the least observant fellow-passenger ignorant of his identity. It was the great Sir Gilbert Lawthorn, whose discovery that pickles could be sold three-halfpence a bottle cheaper than the prevailing price, and still be made to yield a profit, had earned him seven hundred thousand pounds and a baronetcy.

This great personage scowled on the inspector who admitted Stuart into his compartment, and then, after a scornful glance at the modest dressing-case, he remarked rudely:

“I generally have a carriage reserved for me, but this time I thought no one would be in the train. Are you going far?”

“I am going to Easterthorpe,” said Alistair, lowering a window.

The pickle-seller gazed at him in displeasure.

“I live there,” he announced, with conscious superiority. “My place is close to the Prince’s. I don’t think I have seen you in the neighbourhood.”

“I am going down to stay with friends,” said Stuart carelessly, as he took up a paper.

“Do your friends know the Prince?” Sir Gilbert inquired, with patronage. “He called on me last week.”

Alistair lowered his paper and looked at the fat baronet over with unfeigned surprise.

“I have not the honour of your acquaintance, sir,” he said deliberately, beginning to read again.

“I am Sir Gilbert Lawthorn!” burst out the indignant magnate.

“Thank you. Your pickles are excellent,” replied Alistair. And this time he was allowed to read his paper in peace.

When the train stopped at Easterthorpe a groom in neat black livery appeared at the door of the carriage, and touched his hat. Sir Gilbert, who evidently recognized him, took the salute to himself.

“His Royal Highness is not in here,” he proclaimed pompously. “Did you expect him by this train?”

The groom, without replying, took the case which Lord Alistair passed out to him.

“This way, my lord, if you please,” he said deferentially, as Alistair prepared to follow his luggage.

The baronet turned crimson.

“I—I beg your pardon,” he stammered awkwardly, half holding out his hand. “I had no idea that you were going to stay with the Prince.”

But Alistair was not in a merciful mood as far as the middle class was concerned.

“Who the devil do you suppose cares what you think, or who you are, or anything about you? I wish I had come third class.”

He followed the secretly delighted servant out to a smart dogcart, and Sir Gilbert Lawthorn’s fat coachman meekly drew a heavy barouche and two fat horses out of the way of the royal conveyance.

It was with a slight sense of embarrassment that Alistair entered the pleasant dwelling in which the Duke of Gloucester and his wife were able to enjoy some of the pleasures of English home life. But his uneasiness was quickly dispelled by the reception he found waiting for him. The Prince himself sprang up from a lounge chair in the bright little hall, and grasped him cordially by the hand, exclaiming as he did so:

“Ada, my dear, here is my old chum, Alistair Stuart.”

A woman some years younger than her husband, with a face in which womanly grace and keen intelligence were harmoniously united, rose from the midst of a group of small children, and offered her hand with equal friendliness.

“I am so glad you have come. I have heard so much about you from Bertie that I hope you will let me treat you as an old friend. Do you like children?”

It was evident that children liked Alistair, for almost before he had sat down two youngsters of five or six, in white sailors’ suits, were romping round him, while a small girl of three, safely sheltered by her mother’s skirts, regarded him with grave but friendly curiosity.

“I know something about you,” the elder boy said presently, with an amusing note of condescension in his voice. “You used to go fishing with father when he was a boy.”

Alistair remembered the unfortunate letter he had sent to the Legitimist bazaar, and was ashamed.

The tactful Princess gave him no time to indulge in such thoughts. She poured him out a cup of tea, and bade her eldest son carry a plate of toast to the visitor—an order which he obeyed with an evident sense that he was conferring a considerable favour.

Lord Alistair was not long in awakening in the mind of the Duchess of Gloucester the same feeling that he awakened in most good women—a regret that such a life should be running to waste, and a desire to save him. It happened that the Duchess had literary tastes, she had heard of Stuart’s poems, and she engaged him in conversation on that ground.

“Have you given up writing?” she asked. “I don’t think you have published anything for a long time.”

“Everyone has given up writing,” Alistair returned with a bitterness that surprised himself. It had grown up in his mind unconsciously; his literary disappointments had become part of his general feud with the successful order of mankind.

The look on the face of the Princess made him hasten to explain himself.

“The English public will not tolerate literature; that is the simple truth. The publishers will not publish it, the booksellers will not sell it, the public will not read it, and the police have orders to suppress it. My old publisher told me plainly the other day that it was a waste of time to print anything but four-and-sixpenny novels. He said the booksellers have got used to making up their accounts in items of four-and-sixpence, and they consider it a nuisance to handle anything else. And even the novels are falling more and more into a stereotyped pattern; they must be exactly the same length—a hundred thousand words, I think he said—and be written well down to the level of the vulgar provincial mind.”

“Surely things are not quite so bad as that?”

“Very nearly. The worst of it is that the persecution of literature is purely for reasons of hypocrisy. The public likes what it calls immorality—will have it, in fact: no book that is really pure has much chance of success—but it insists on the writer pandering to the proprieties. Either he must slobber over his adulteress in the Nonconformist vein, or else he must tell the whole thing in an epigrammatic falsetto. It is a choice between ‘East Lynne’ and ‘The Innocence of Henrietta.’”

“But are there no writers before the public now whom you look upon as on a higher level?” And the Princess suggested one or two names.

Stuart shook his head.

“What is their position?” he said. “Granted that they have genius, the conditions of the age give them no chance. Unless they go on producing, and keeping themselves constantly before the public, they are cast on one side. The greatest genius, as a rule, can only give the world one or two masterpieces. Coleridge wrote three short poems, Poe a dozen short stories. Dante and Cervantes each wrote one book—their other work is of no account. Everyone of them would have starved to-day, just as they starved in their own day, while the vulgar novelists made fortunes round them. Writers such as you speak of have to go on writing worse and worse, conscious of their own degradation, and freely reminded of it by the press, and by their publishers’ accounts. It is the torture of the damned.”

“It seems to me there ought to be some remedy,” the Princess said thoughtfully. “I know so many rich men who seem to me only anxious to find some way of doing good with their money.”

Alistair shrugged his shoulders.

“A man of genius does not like to accept charity. The rich men would expect too much gratitude. They prefer building cathedrals—each poem of Coleridge is worth a cathedral—but you could not expect a millionaire to see that.”

“There are pensions, and literary funds, are there not?”

“Pensions, yes, for the bad writers who have fallen below the level of even the British public. And there are literary funds, yes. I was once asked to act as a steward at one of their annual dinners. The secretary sent me the rules, by which I saw that no grant was ever made to writers whose lives or whose works were open to objection on religious or moral grounds. I wrote back to say that I did not see my way to support a literary fund from whose benefits Shakespeare and Shelley would have been excluded.”

The Princess saw that she was handling a sore. She sighed, and changed the conversation.

After dinner Prince Herbert played billiards with his guest, and their talk ran on the past. Alistair was softened by the boyish memories recalled by his old playfellow, and when he went to bed it was with more peaceful and happier thoughts than had come to him for a long time.

He was sipping his cup of tea in bed the next morning when he heard light footsteps, followed by excited whispering, outside his door. The next moment the handle was turned cautiously, and then the door was thrust open with a bang, and two small boys invaded the room.

“May we come in?” demanded the elder. And satisfied with the expression on Lord Alistair’s face, he turned and beckoned through the doorway.

“It’s all right; don’t be afraid, Tissy.”

The apprehension felt by the unseen Tissy communicated itself to Alistair, who hastened to say:

“Hadn’t you better go away till I’ve dressed?”

“We want to stay and see you dress,” the leader responded.

“I’m not worth seeing, I assure you,” said Alistair. “I dress very badly.”

It seemed doubtful whether the excuse would be accepted, when fortunately a warning cry was heard from the doorway, and a voice as of one speaking with authority called out: “Come here directly!”

The head of the invading party cast a hasty glance round the room, and only remarking regretfully to his brother: “I can’t see his teeth,” withdrew in good order.

Stuart did not offer to accompany his hosts to their little country church. But the sight of the family party setting out across the park, and the far-off sound of the bell, had a soothing effect upon his spirit. Contrast is the secret of all beauty, and perhaps the prodigal had never considered how much of their charm would depart from the rocks and valleys of Bohemia were there no Puritan plain without.

In the afternoon he found himself left alone with the Princess, after they had taken tea in the garden. The scent of the roses was all about them, and the bees drummed restlessly as they went by. It was a perfect piece of English landscape, and the perfect type of English womanhood fitted into it like a picture in its natural frame.

“Lord Alistair,” she said, with quiet seriousness, “I want to ask you if you will let the Prince help you. He has never forgotten your boyish friendship; he is attached to you still, and he only wants to see his way clear to do something for you.”

Alistair murmured an expression of gratitude.

“I hope you will look on me as a friend too,” the Duchess of Gloucester went on. “Will you let me speak to you frankly, and will you be frank with me in return?”

“Will you pardon me if I am?” asked Alistair. “It is easy for some men to be frank; but when I am frank I find I only shock good people.”

“But why should that be so? Are you sure that when you are shocking good people, as you put it, it is your true self that is speaking?”

“Madam, I do not know what is my true self; or if I have got one any longer. I used to have one when I was a boy, but twenty years of enforced hypocrisy have pretty well knocked it out of me.”

The Princess sighed, and paused for a moment.

“Perhaps I can help you to find it. Do you really love the woman you are living with?”

“No.” The truth came up from the depth of his consciousness, exploded by surprise.

“Then why don’t you leave her?”

It was Alistair’s turn to pause.

“She has given up everything for me. Sometimes I think I ought to marry her.”

“What had she to give up?”

This question offered a new light to Alistair, and he took time to consider it. He might have answered superficially that Molly had, in fact, given up the offers of Mendes; and latterly she had given up a great many pleasures that almost ranked as necessities for her. But he saw the point of Princess Adelaide’s question. What Molly had done was to quit the life of a courtesan for that of a concubine, with some prospect of becoming a wife. Now, a swimmer who climbs on to a raft to save him from exhaustion can hardly be said to give up the sea.

“Do you consider that she has a greater claim on you than your mother?” the Princess unfortunately added.

This time Alistair answered deliberately.

“Yes. I do not consider that my mother has any claim on me whatever. In my opinion the obligations of a child towards its parents are trifling beside those of the parent to the child. My mother has been the worst enemy I have had. She has been to me the ordinary type of the Christian persecutor, the race of the Inquisitors and Nonconformists and Churchmen of every church. I have forgiven her because she does not know how wicked she has been. Her crimes are the crimes of her creed. Her brain has been warped and maimed by the training she herself received, as much as the foot of a Chinese girl is warped and maimed by bandages to make it small. I forgive her, and I think I love her, but I should no more think of trying to shape my life according to her prejudices than if she were a cannibal and wanted me to eat human flesh.”

The Duchess of Gloucester felt that she had bound herself in honour not to show any disapproval of these outspoken utterances. But she began to see what Lord Alistair meant by saying that it is not equally easy for all men to be frank.

She returned to the subject of Molly Finucane.

“It seems to me that you must leave this woman sooner or later, and that you will never have a better opportunity than now. If you really feel that you owe her anything, I don’t think you would find it impossible to get your friends to make some provision for her, if she needs it.”

Alistair remembered Mendes and his empty house. He did not think Molly was likely to be in need if he left her.

“And what should I do?” he asked.

The unexpected question baffled the Princess for a moment. She had not heard of Hero Vanbrugh.

“Return to your literary work,” she suggested. “You have not the excuse of being obliged to write something that will sell. Write to please yourself, and in time you will find your audience.”

“If I were to write to please myself, the world and my own family in particular would think worse of me than they do at present.” And seeing that the Princess was not disposed to interrupt him, he went on: “The supreme sin in English eyes is truthfulness. Truthful thinking, truthful speaking, and truthful living are all equally under the ban. And the worst of it is that those who clamour most for freedom of thought are most severe on freedom of life, and those who live most freely are the least tolerant of free speech. The Dissenter persecutes the sportsman, and the sportsman persecutes the sage. All the racing men I have ever met have been bigoted High Churchmen, who would have cheerfully burnt Darwin and the late Mr. Spurgeon. And if they had begun with Darwin, they would have had Spurgeon’s help.”

Princess Adelaide sat silent for some time. The task of rescuing Alistair Stuart seemed to be more difficult than she and her husband had foreseen.

“I wish we could help you,” she said gently, at last.

“I am afraid I am not to be helped,” Alistair confessed sadly. “When I look back over my life, it seems to me that ever since I was twelve years old I have been surrounded by people knocking me over the head, and saying to me: ‘Don’t be Alistair Stuart.’ I have tried not to be Alistair Stuart, but I have failed. And the worst of it is that I am no longer ashamed of being Alistair Stuart. It seems to me that all these complaints ought to be addressed to my Creator. I did not make myself: God made me; let Him repent, not me.”