Читать книгу The Sins of the Children - Cosmo Hamilton - Страница 7

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Nicholas Kenyon more than lived up to his promise. In clothes into which he seemed to have been poured in liquid form, he handed hot toast and cakes to Peter's family at tea-time with that air of deferential impertinence which was his peculiar property. He had the same effect on the Doctor and Mrs. Guthrie and the two girls as he had on Peter when he first saw him on the train. His complete self-control, his indolent assurance, his greyhound look of thoroughbredness and the decorative way in which he phrased his sentences all charmed and amused them. For Peter's sake he came right out of his shell at once and behaved like a man who had been a favorite in that family circle for years. In the most subtle manner he implied to the Doctor that his fame as a bacteriologist had spread all over Oxford, and even England. He refused to believe that Mrs. Guthrie was the mother of her children and not her own eldest daughter. He asked Graham almost at once to do him the favor of giving him the name of his tailor, and told Betty that he had shot with her father, Lord Townsend, many times, well-knowing that he was a portrait painter in New York. With consummate ease and tact he put everybody on the best of terms with one another and themselves, thereby winning still more of Peter's admiration and liking. With great pleasure he accepted the Doctor's invitation to dine at the Randolph Hotel, and in return invited all present to be his guests at the Open Air Performance of "Twelfth Night," later in the week, by the O.U.D.S., in the beautiful gardens of Worcester. In a word, he played with these people as a cat plays with a mouse and as he had always played with Peter. He used all his brain not only to win their confidence and friendship but to make an impression which might afterwards be of use to himself.

Nicholas Kenyon was one of those men who are born and not made. He opened his eyes to find himself in an atmosphere of aristocratic roguery. The beautiful old house in which his father lived was mortgaged to the very tops of the chimneys. It was maintained on money borrowed from the loan sharks at an exorbitant interest. It was filled with men and women who, like his own parents, were clever and intellectual enough to work for their livelihood, but who preferred to live on their wits and cling to society by the skin of their teeth. In this atmosphere of expert parasites—an atmosphere as false as it was light-hearted—Nicholas was brought up. He was a complete man of the world at fourteen. Even at that age he gambled, raced and borrowed money; and in order to provide himself with the necessities of life he ran a roulette table in secret at Eton and made a book for the racing bets of the little boys of his own kidney. Highly gifted and endowed with a most likable personality, with the art of eluding punishment for misdeeds brought to a masterly completeness, he could have been shaped, under different circumstances, into a man whose name would stand high in his country. With the proper training and discipline and the right sense of duty which is given to those lucky lads whose parents are responsible and honorable he had it in his power to become a famous diplomat. As it was, he entered Oxford as a parasite and would leave the university for the world in the same capacity. He was entirely unscrupulous. He had no code of honor. He quietly used the men about him to provide him with amusement, money, hospitality, and to insure him against having to work. He turned his personality into a sort of business asset—a kind of limited liability company—which brought him in regular dividends. His breeding and good form, his well-known name and his inherent ability to slide comfortably into any set or society, made him wholly irresistible. No one suspected him, because his frankness disarmed suspicion. His knowledge of human nature told him that the paradox of his being poor lent him a sort of romance, and he always began by telling new acquaintances that he was broke to the wide. In this way he struck the honest note of the men who disdain to convey false impressions. He was poor, but proud, and made himself so attractive and companionable that men were delighted to be put to great expense in order to entertain him,—and he wanted everything of the very best. His clothes were immaculate. His cigarettes were freshly rolled. When he drove a car it had to be of the best known make. He was a most fastidious reader and had once read a paper on modern poetry which had startled the Dons of his college. He contributed short satirical articles to the Isis from time to time which tickled the intellect of the more discriminating; and as a fresher had given a performance of Puck in one of the productions of the O.U.D.S., over which undergraduate critics went raving mad. Even in his dealings with his friends, the chorus girls, there was a certain touch of humour which made it impossible even for the most straightlaced to say hard things of him.

In a word, Nicholas Kenyon was a very dangerous man. His influence was as subtly bad and pernicious as a beautifully made cigarette heavily charged with dope; and he would at any time if necessary have stolen his mother's toilet set in order to provide himself with caviar, plover's eggs and a small bottle of champagne.

And this was the man who had shared rooms with Peter Guthrie during his terms at Oxford, and of whom the Doctor spoke that first night of his stay at the Randolph Hotel as an unusually charming person whom it was a pleasure to meet.

In fact, he was the sole topic of conversation in all the bedrooms of Peter's family party before the lights were turned out. Mrs. Guthrie said, as she sat in front of the dressing-table combing her hair: "How lucky it is, dear, that Peter has found such a wonderful friend here! He is so English and so refined—in every sense of the word a gentleman." The Doctor thoroughly agreed with her and made a mental note to invite Kenyon to his house in New York in the autumn.

Belle Guthrie took her brushes into Betty's room, which was next to her own, and looking extremely attractive in a pale pink kimono, with her dark hair all about her shoulders and her naked feet in pink, heel-less slippers, gave a ripple of excited laughter and confided to her friend that she was going to have a more bully time even than she had hoped. "I love St. John's College," she said, "and these wonderful old streets and all the church bells which strike so frequently—but I'm perfectly crazy about Nicholas Kenyon. He is so,—so different—so witty—says such perfectly wonderful things—and oh, my dear! did you see the way he looked at me when he said 'good-night'?"

Betty shook her head—her little golden head—her rather wise little head. "I didn't look," she said. "The light was shining on Peter's face, and that was good enough for me."

What Graham thought of Kenyon came out in Peter's rooms, to which he had gone back with his brother when the family were left at the hotel after their return from a jaunt on the river in the moonlight after dinner,—the quiet, soothing, narrow stream on which they had floated in punts all among cushions and listened with keen appreciation to the throbbing song of the nightingale and the deep voice of an undergraduate singing "Annie Laurie" in the back water to the thrumming accompaniment of a mandolin.

Kenyon himself had gone round to the rooms of some friends of his to play bridge, so the two brothers were able to talk undisturbed. The night was deliciously warm and Peter's old windows, with their numerous leaded panes, were wide open. It was eleven o'clock and the life of the town had almost ceased, although from time to time little parties of undergraduates passed along St. Giles and their high-spirited laughter drifted up.

After having put cigarettes in front of his brother, Peter flung himself full stretch upon his sofa, with a pipe between his teeth. "Now for your news, old man!" he said. "I'm glad you like Nick. He certainly is one of the best. What seems perfectly amazing to me is that while I'm still a sort of schoolboy, rowing and reading, you're a full-blown man earning your living. I'd give something to see you buzzing about Wall Street with your head full of stocks and shares and the rise and fall of prices. How do you do it?"

Graham ran his hand rather nervously over his mouth. "It's great!" he said excitedly. "That's what I call life. Gee! You've no idea how fascinating it is to gamble on the tape and get a thrill every time you hear it tick. It's like living among earthquakes. I love it!"

"Gamble!" Peter echoed the word with a touch of fright. "Good Lord; but you don't gamble surely? I thought you were a broker and looked after other people's concerns!"

Graham shot out a short laugh. "Other people's concerns? Why, yes; but we're not in Wall Street for other people. I've had the luck of the devil lately though,—everything I've touched has gone wrong. However, don't let's talk about that. I'm here for a holiday and a rest, and I need 'em. I believe I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown before I came away. When I get back I shall have to straighten things out. At the present moment I'm out about twenty thousand dollars."

It was his young brother who said these things—the boy who two years ago was only just out of Harvard. Peter sat up—in two senses. "You? Twenty thousand dollars! Have you told father?"

"My God, no!" said Graham. "I shall get it all back of course; otherwise,—Phut! As to telling father,—well—well, do you ever tell father anything? I'd rather face electrocution than go into father's room with such a tale. Once before—about six months ago—when I had to meet a bill for five thousand dollars, I had a little talk with mother, and after she had a fit she gave me a handful of her jewels to pawn. She was afraid of father, too. Within two months I got them out again. Steel did me very well that time; and mother,—bless her dear heart!—called me a very clever boy, and said: 'What a brain you have, darling, but please don't do it again!' Oh, my God, Peter! You don't know what Wall Street means. It's hell! It's marvellous! It's life! One of these days when a real good chance comes I'll go some plunge, and then you'll see me living quietly in the country breeding ponies or dogs or chickens or something, and I'll marry and settle down."

Peter got up, re-loaded his pipe, and said: "Just think of it! You're two years younger than I am. I've not begun to live and you're in the whirl of money and risk. In the meantime there's father so busy experimenting with microbes that he hasn't one idea of what his boys are doing, or are likely to do—absolutely content to let them find their feet unaided! Well, I suppose he knows what he's doing,—but what you've just told me makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be wise for him to experiment a little bit with us for a change. What d'you think?"

Graham shrugged his shoulders. With the light on his face he looked older than his brother, and there was something in his eyes which showed that he had already gazed at life very much more closely than the big healthy fellow who was his host. "Oh, well," he said—pouring himself out a rather stiff whiskey—"we've never known quite what it was to have a father,—I mean except as a sort of aloof institution, a vague person who educated us and placed us out. I should resent his butting in now. There's someone coming up your stairs, isn't there?"

There was. It was Kenyon, who rattled money in his trousers pocket with a little smile at the corners of his sophisticated mouth.