III
THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND IS MAN
For several days Lucian was kept dumb by the tactics of his host, who walked punctually out of the room as soon as the invalid opened his lips. In half an hour he would return to the chafing guest; and then, if Lucian remained silent, he heard the paper read aloud, but if he dared to speak he was once more left to himself. As Lucian was eminently gregarious and hated his own society, the discipline achieved its object. He was treated like a royal guest, and repaid his host by vivisecting his character. The ground of his suspicions seemed trivial, but was substantial. Feeling the letter in its old place, Lucian sometimes wondered if he had dreamed that scene. But, no, he knew it was real; for the reason that he had seen on Farquhar’s face as he read an expression which he could never have imagined. What he suspected was not very clear; but Lucian had an inquisitive disposition, and his interests at this time were limited in number. Hence his exaggerated curiosity.
The church at Monkswell was heated by pipes which on mild days brought the temperature up to seventy degrees Fahrenheit, and in cold weather left the air in such a condition that to uncover his bald head was a severe trial of the parson’s faith. The weather had changed, and Farquhar, coming in after service on Sunday afternoon, went straight to the fire to warm his hands. He was an exemplary church-goer.
“Cold?” inquired Lucian, who was now allowed to talk a little.
“Bitterly. The snow-wind’s blowing; we shall be white to-morrow, if I don’t err.”
“Gale at seventy miles an hour, temperature twenty degrees below zero; yes, I’ve tried that out in Athabasca, and it didn’t suit me,” said Lucian, whose rebellious body appreciated luxury though his hardy spirit despised it.
“My faith, no! but I’m not sure that twenty degrees below isn’t better than a hundred and twenty above.”
“That’s a nice preparation for the bad time coming,” said the incorrigible Lucian. “Talking of which, what was that devilry you used when you carried in my fainting form?”
“Devilry, indeed! It was massage.”
“Not the ordinary, common or garden English massage, sonny; I’ve tried that.”
“Massage is massage all the world over, I should have said. However, I learned mine in Africa.”
“And who was your moonshee?”
“An old Arab sheikh who wore immaculate robes, and carried a dagger with a handle of silver filigree and a very sharp point, with which he prodded his slaves when they failed in their duties. Are you satisfied now?”
“No, not in the least; but I didn’t expect to be. Who’s old Fane?”
“My dear fellow,” said Farquhar, mildly, “your mind reminds me of a flea. Mr. Fane is a farmer hereabouts, a kind of local squire.”
“Is he well off?”
“Tolerably, I believe. Why do you ask?”
“Old curmudgeon!” said Lucian. “Stingy old miserly murderer!”
“One at a time, I beg,” said Farquhar.
“Well, he may be an angel incognito, but his war-paint’s unco guid, that’s all.”
“How has he roused your righteous wrath?”
Lucian related Mrs. Searle’s story, waxing eloquent over her wrongs, and illustrating his points with rapid foreign gestures, as his manner was. Farquhar compressed his lips, which already joined in a sufficiently firm line. “I know those houses,” he said; “they are unfit for habitation. I tried to get them condemned a year ago. Want a copper, do they? They’ll never get it from Fane.”
“I wish he’d tried what starvation’s like, that’s all.”
“Have you?”
“Have I? I was a thousandaire till I was four-and-twenty,” said Lucian, clasping his lean, brown hands behind his head—“but since then, devil a penny have I had to spend! My head is bloody but unbowed beneath the bludgeonings of Fate—W. E. Henley. I’m proud to say I could take the shine out of Orestes.”
Farquhar sat down by the fire and pulled the tea-table towards him. He was very useful at an afternoon party: could always remember the precise formula for every person’s several cup. “How did you lose your money?” he inquired, flavoring his own tea with lemon, in the Russian style.
“Sixteen thousand in one night playing écarté, sonny. No, don’t preach; I never gamble now I’ve got no money. Besides, on that memorable occasion my circumstances were exceptional.”
“Exceptionally bad, I should think. What did you do?”
“What did I do? Commenced author, and I flatter myself I should have made a decided hit, only I was overtaken by what another distinguished author calls Bluidy Jack. The medico swore it was the writing brought it on. I also swore, in many tongues, and had a second go; I held on gallantly for three months, and then went to a hospital, and a nurse fell in love with me. ‘Those lips so sweet, so honey-sweet—’ We swore fidelity. I shared with her my fortune—we broke a sixpence. She had three hundred a year and a large soul. Inconstant creature! On getting my ticket-of-leave from the hospital I introduced her to my chief pal; and would you believe it? the base villain borrowed my first fiver to elope with her with.”
“Good Heavens, de Saumarez!” said Farquhar, laughing against his will, “you don’t mean to tell me that all this is true?”
“True? True? Every blessed word of it. I then tried to ’list, but couldn’t pass the medical. So I got another pal and started as a tomato-johnny in Guernsey. We’re Guernsey people, you know,” he added, his voice taking a different intonation. “I’ve a certain affection for it, too; there I’ll hope to lay these carious old bones of mine when I’ve done with them. Mighty poor crops they’ll make, too. Well, I thought Guernsey, being my own, my native land, might be a sort of all-inclusive mascot for me. But, Lord bless you, sonny, it rained thunderbolts! Give you my word, no sooner were our glass-houses up than there arrived a record shower of aerolites; sticky, shiny, black things they were, for all the world like liquorice. Two-thirds of the panes went. As I didn’t want to wreck the bosom friend’s boat, we dissolved partnership, and Jonah went off on his own.”
Farquhar could himself corroborate this story; he remembered the meteoric shower, which had attracted some attention.
“The stars in their courses came out of them to fight against me, you see. Well, I went back to town and held horses. I fared sumptuously every day at coffee-stalls, or at Lockhart’s when I was in funds. I draw a veil over this period. I was submerged. Then, in hospital, I met a very decent fellow who got me a berth in Miss Inez Montroni’s travelling company, where I lived gaily on a pound a week till that memorable Sawbath which I broke by knocking up. I was discovered by a kind angel: adsum. Are you insured against fire?”
“Oh, I’m not afraid of ill-luck!” said Farquhar.
“Aren’t you, now? I detect a kind of arrogance, a sort of healthy scepticism in your tone, my friend. I wonder what you are afraid of? Not much, I guess.”
“Was your ill-health hereditary?” asked Farquhar, who as a temperance advocate studied the question of transmission.
“Don’t know. My parents died ere I was born, and never saw their son, you see. I inherited my bad luck, anyway.
“It hasn’t depressed your spirits.”
“Oh, I don’t believe in letting trouble beat you.”
“You talk as though trouble were a living personality.”
“So it is; a force inimical, to be conquered, held down, and trampled into the earth.”
“I don’t see how you’re going to conquer trouble. It has its way, and that’s all.”
“It’s not all. Trouble will make a man despair, or drink, or gamble, or go mad, or maybe even shoot himself. Well, I’d defy it to make me deflect a hair’s-breadth from myself, come all the shafts of fate. As long as I’ve lips I’ll grin.”
“That’s how you take things?” said Farquhar. “Well, it’s not my way.” His face lighted up with a heady defiance, his lips shut in a straight line, his eyes sparkled with quite unregenerate fire.
“What is your way, then?”
Farquhar’s expression went instantly out, and he lowered his eyelids. “Well, you know, things are different for you and me,” he said, diffidently. “I’m lucky in having a religious faith to fall back on.”
“Oh, I do like you!” said Lucian, after a few seconds, smitten with an admiration which was not wholly admirable. He solemnly stretched out his hand. “Sonny, you’re a great man,” he declared. “I wish I had your cheek. Shake!”
Farquhar smiled politely, deprecated the compliment, and evaded the point at issue; and shortly afterwards conveyed himself out of the room on the plea that the invalid had done enough talking. It was fortunate for him that the language of the eye cannot be put in as evidence, for Lucian knew that he had detected, in Farquhar’s too candid orbs, a tacit acknowledgment of all the deceit wherewith he was desirous of charging him.
Next morning in country and city men awoke to a white, silent world under a dome of blue, immaculate sky. There was no wind; and the breath of horse and rider hung still in the air after Noel Farquhar as he rode up to Burnt House. A huge sweep of bare, white country lay outspread, sparkling in the sun; the hedges were so thickly thatched with snow that they did not break the even whiteness of the prospect. The miserable little group of black, wooden cottages, Farquhar’s goal, was discernible a great way off; they were so lonely that when Farquhar rode back an hour later only his own tracks, black where the crushed snow had melted, confronted him upon the road.
The day passed, and several beside, and a week later the soiled rags of the snow still lingered under hedges and by tussocks in the fields when Farquhar took another morning ride, this time in the direction of Fanes. The house lay low; its E-shaped façade, built of bright-red brick and ornamented with facings of freestone, and with diagonal bands of dark brown crossing one another, looked across shaven lawns and wide gravel paths to a stream formally laid out with cascades and little islands, in summer bright with roses. Some noble trees sprang from the lawn; in particular, a most beautiful silver birch, whose slight, tapering branches sustained a colony of ragged black blots, which were the nests of the rooks of Fanes. The birds took toll from all the orchards around, and were almost as well hated as their owners.
Mr. Fane had a thin, tall figure, with stooping shoulders and forward-thrusting head. A pair of keen, cold eyes looked suspiciously forth from under penthouse brows; self-sufficiency had compressed his lips, selfish study had hollowed his cheeks, and his thin, even voice, precise in enunciation even to pedantry, was the true index of a steadfastly unamiable character. The Fanes enjoyed great unpopularity; father, son, and daughter, they were all shunned like lepers. Old Fane had married abroad; no one heard his wife’s maiden name, and when he came back as a widower nobody cared to ask. The two children grew up as they would. The son, Bernard, was notoriously a poacher; the daughter was a beauty, a wild rider, untutored and untamed, and shared, so it was said, her brother’s heinous crimes in the preserves. It was this business which shut off the young Fanes from the society of their peers. Once in past years they had made their appearance at the first meet of the season, but they never went again; and thenceforward avoided society more scrupulously than society avoided them.
All this happened before Noel Farquhar came to The Lilacs. He had more than once tried to make friends with young Fane, and had been snubbed for his pains; and thus to this hour matters stood. Nobody knew much about them, but they possessed a fearsome reputation, which caused nervous ladies to skip nimbly over fences when they saw Bernard Fane approaching on his big black horse.
Eumenes Fane received in his library, a long, low room walled with books. One case held tier on tier of novels in their native French, both old and new; another was devoted to theology, and put a row of Blair’s most unchristian sermons across the middle shelf as a gilded breastplate against the assaults of modern heresies. Mr. Fane was a ferocious Calvinist; he felt it his duty to go in for hell, and wished to exact consent in the same beliefs from his children, his servants, and in ever-widening circles from the ends of the earth. Over the mantel hung an interesting old design in black and white, which represented the Last Day: a small queue of saints in stained-glass attitudes ascending the celestial mountains under the convoy of woolly angels, a large corps of sinners being haled out of their tombs by demons armed with three-pronged spears, which they used as toasting-forks. His Satanic Majesty was gleefully directing their operations, amid tongues of realistic flame. On the card-board mount of the picture the following verse was inscribed in youthful round-hand:
The signature seemed to indicate that Mr. Fane was not always implicitly obeyed by his children.
He remained sitting when Farquhar was announced, and looked as forbidding as possible. Farquhar bowed, and looked as pleasant as possible. The interview promised to be unconventional.
“You are Noel Farquhar?”
“That’s my name, sir,” said Farquhar, always particularly respectful to an elderly man.
“You write to me that you have made some alterations in my cottages at Burnt House,” continued old Fane, referring to a letter in his hand.
“I have, sir; and I hope you will forgive my officiousness in acting without your leave.”
“I understand that you have put in a copper.”
“It hasn’t damaged the property; I’ll answer for that; and it was pretty badly wanted. If you’d looked at the place yourself—”
“Where is the copper set?”
“As a lean-to on the last house.”
“What are the dimensions?”
Farquhar supplied him with precise particulars. “I happened to hear the story from one of your tenants, and I ordered the thing at once, without a thought of the landlord’s right in the matter. When I did remember, it was too late; the work was begun. I can assure you, sir, that it actually adds to the value of the property.”
“So I supposed. What should you say at a guess is the rental worth of the improvement?”
“Oh, something very small; not more than sixpence a week, sir.”
Mr. Fane made an entry in his book. “Thank you; I am much obliged to you. Good-morning.”
“You’ll overlook my indiscretion?”
“Overlook it? Indiscretion? I am a poor man, and you have put into my pocket three shillings a week, Mr. Farquhar; I am greatly indebted to you.”
“I have put into your pocket three shillings a week?”
“The additional rent of the six houses, you understand.”
“You mean to raise the rent?”
“Certainly. Indiscriminate charity is against my principles.”
“But, sir, they’ll never be able to pay it.”
“I shall, I hope, find other tenants who will.”
“And the charity is mine, Mr. Fane.”
“And the houses are mine, Mr. Farquhar. Would you be so good as to let yourself out? The men are out on the farm. You cannot well miss your way.”
Farquhar took up his hat and retired. He really could not attempt to argue the matter, and was aware that he had been neatly outwitted. So great a philanthropist should have been saddened by thoughts of the Searles, victims of his blunder; but Noel Farquhar, as he walked down the hall, was smiling, in candid appreciation of the nice precision of his defeat.