Читать книгу Lord Alistair's Rebellion - Upward Allen - Страница 5

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Alistair walked past the lights of Palace Yard, and turned into the broad avenue of Parliament Street, bordered by the vast offices of the British Empire. When he had gone half-way to Charing Cross, he turned aside again, and presently found himself in front of a high and sombre house, one of a row whose windows overlooked the river and the bridge. It stood back in a bleak garden enclosed in tall iron railings, where nothing grew but grass and trees and ivy, all of the same shade of soot-encrusted green. This was Colonsay house, a relic of the days when the Thames had been a glorious highway between the cities of London and Westminster, a highway lined with the dwellings of great nobles, and bright with painted barges and fluttering banners.

Now a slight air of decay hung over the old house, and it seemed conscious that it had outlived its generation. The tide no longer washed the foot of its lawn, and rich brocades and jewelled sword-hilts no longer sparkled under its trees. It stood there with its few neighbours, isolated among the encroaching buildings of a newer age, and waiting its own turn to be devoured.

Stuart hesitated for a moment as he stood outside the door. There had been a time when he would have walked through that door as of right. But it was long since he had lived under his brother’s roof, and more than a year since he had passed this doorway last. During the time that he had been living in Chelsea he had shunned all intercourse with his family. His mother had written to him more than once, but her letters had remained unanswered. The letters were entreaties to him to abandon the woman who was dragging him down, and he had not abandoned her.

He raised his hand to the bell, and jerked it roughly. Then he stood waiting, half ashamed to encounter the gaze of his brother’s servants, and resenting their curiosity in advance.

“Is the Duke in?” he asked of the man who opened the door. He had no wish to meet his brother that night.

In the first moment the footman did not recognize his questioner. The next his face lit up with an expression of respectful sympathy.

“No, my lord; his Grace is at the House of Lords. But will your lordship come in?”

As he threw the door wider the butler, an old family retainer, stepped forward. His face wore the same expression as the footman’s, a little less subdued, and he ventured on a word of welcome.

“I hope I see your lordship well? Her Grace is upstairs, and I believe would be very glad to see your lordship.”

“Very well, Stokes,” said Stuart shortly, giving the footman his hat and stick. “I’ll go up.”

The servants fell back with faces of demure congratulation as he passed between them to the foot of the staircase. It was evident that they viewed this home-coming of the prodigal as the pleasant and appropriate ending to a deeply interesting history. Perhaps Lord Alistair’s transgressions had aroused in their breasts a secret fellow-feeling such as they could never have for their upright, decorous master. The conduct which had disgraced Lord Alistair in the eyes of his equals had made him a hero in theirs. Disgrace, after all, is a relative term; what is ignominy in the schoolroom is often glory in the playground.

Alistair reached the first floor, and took his way to the well-remembered little drawing-room, where his mother always sat when she was alone. Tapping softly on the panel, he opened the door and went in.

It was an old-fashioned room with narrow Georgian windows, and the walls were decorated with painted panels, set in elaborate gilt scrollwork, with small tail-pieces underneath, in the style of an Italian altar-piece. A picture of sportsmen in a coppice was completed by a dead pheasant below, and a sea-piece was similarly finished off with a group of shells. In contrast with this eighteenth-century elegance the furniture was of that ungraceful, stereotyped pattern which has not yet been out of date long enough to be esteemed for its curiosity. It was the work of an age which valued the useful above the beautiful, and preferred the accurate production of machinery to the irregular handiwork of the craftsman. It was the age of the political economists, when Free Trade was the gospel of humanity, and the world’s ideal took shape in a huge bazaar. It was an age in which England ruled the world, and the shopkeeper ruled England, and men deemed that the millennium could not be far away.

The religion of this age was Evangelical Christianity. The work of Wellesley and Whitefield still leavened the national life from the cottage to the throne. The Catholic conspiracy had not become formidable; the rising tide of knowledge had not yet sapped the foundations of the old beliefs. A miscellany of Hebrew literature, half savage, half sublime, bound up with the cryptic legends of the Roman catacombs, and rendered into English by the intellect of the sixteenth century, was accepted as the personal composition of the Creator, inspired, infallible, and irrevocable, from the first letter in the word Genesis to the last in the word Amen. Salvation by faith was the watchword of the Churches; the unbeliever was assured that his best actions were but additional sins until he had gone through that spiritual experience which brought him within the pale of the redeemed.

Yet this strait, remorseless creed educated women who were gracious and beautiful in their lives, and of such women Caroline, Duchess of Trent, was one. She accepted her creed, as the scientist accepts the law of cause and effect, without understanding it, but her logic was able to reconcile it with hope and charity, and with a tireless devotion to the good of all about her.

They who are willing to sacrifice themselves will never want those who are willing to accept the sacrifice. In her girlhood Caroline had been a maid of honour in the Court of Queen Victoria, and she had ever since been one of that small circle whom the widowed monarch counted as her personal friends. The needs of selfish parents had forced her into an early marriage with a sickly old man whom she nursed faithfully and kindly, but whom she could not love. He died before she was thirty, leaving her with enough wealth to attract Lord Alexander Stuart, the penniless younger son of a great but impoverished house.

To this man, as handsome as he was worthless, she gave her heart and her fortune, in accordance with the common law which mates the best with the worst, and he had become the father of her children before she made the discovery that he was an irreclaimable drunkard and gambler. For their own sakes she consented to part with her children, and she passed the next ten years of her life in accompanying the man to whom she believed herself bound, from Continental hotel to hotel, keeping up a hopeless struggle against the vices which were dragging him down to the grave.

Her loyalty, and perhaps some relic of her love, survived him, and no word of hers had ever betrayed his memory to his sons. In the face of the younger she found a resemblance to his father which had insensibly gained on her affection, and although she had tried to disguise it from them, and from herself, both the boys soon knew that Alistair was their mother’s favourite. When the courtesy rank of Duchess was conferred on her by royal patent, she did not value the distinction for herself, but her mother’s heart felt a secret pride that her handsome, naughty Alistair should be given the style of Lord.

The catastrophe which opened her eyes to the meaning of heredity rendered her frantic with grief and shame. That likeness between Alistair and his father which had fascinated her for so long now became a source of terror. The handsome boyish face, with its ruddy cheeks and bright eyes and clustering curls, which had gladdened her sight, was now a dreadful chart in which she read prophecies of evil to come.

Under the stress of panic she took that step which she had since bitterly regretted, which had cost Alistair his religion, and had cost her his confidence. Ever since that miserable time mother and son had remained apart, gazing at each other wistfully across a chasm which neither could bridge.

The life which he had been leading since his manhood seemed to her a dangerous, if not an evil one. She saw him moving in a world which was wholly strange to her, a world in which her own ideals of conduct were ignored or despised. She heard that he had written poems which she was advised not to see. Trent told her they were unfit for any decent woman to read, and the Archbishop added that they were blasphemous. When she ventured on a remonstrance with Alistair he replied by telling her that art was above morality, and that a poet must be a law unto himself.

Like all the mothers of her generation, she would fain have shut her eyes to one side of her son’s life. But even she could not help but hear of such a portent as Molly Finucane. The Archbishop felt it his duty to warn her. Trent openly complained that his brother was disgracing the family, and threatened to forbid him the house. He might have carried out the threat if Alistair had not ceased his visits of his own accord.

By this time sorrow had helped her sixty years to make the Duchess an old woman. Her figure was still upright, but her hair was silvered. Her face, at once sweet and venerable, was marked by a settled sadness. Her elder son had been as great a comfort to her as his brother had been a trial, and she had learned to value him more and more. Yet not all her pride in Trent’s career could soothe her inward grief and yearning over the marred life of the son who had gone astray.

Alistair came in softly, and found his mother in tears. At the sound of his footstep on the threshold her face flushed, and she rose up, breathing fast, and went quickly to meet him, with a great joy shining in her eyes.

“My boy!” she cried hysterically. “My boy Alistair!”

They stood there silently for a space, with their arms round one another’s necks, and both felt comforted, for these two loved each other very tenderly, and they had not met for a long time.

Such moments do not last. The first gush of affection spent, they were left face to face, two natures belonging to different worlds.

While Alistair led his mother to a seat he asked anxiously:

“When is Trent likely to be back? I don’t want to see him.”

The Duchess looked troubled.

“He won’t be in till late, I expect. He is introducing a Bill in the House to-night, and he told me not to sit up for him. I think there is another debate on first, about the Church.”

Alistair heard her listlessly. The doings of the House of Lords sounded in his ears just then like the fretting of phantoms on a stage. He had struck his foot for the first time against reality. What does anyone know of life who has never risen in the morning wondering under what roof he shall lay his head at night?

“But you ought to see him,” the mother went on to say. “He is your brother—neither of you should ever forget that. You want his help, dear, and I am sure he will help you if you will only let him.”

“He should have helped me before,” Alistair returned in a resentful tone. “I know Trent; he would not lift a finger to save me from being hanged unless he were afraid of what people would say.”

“Don’t be bitter,” the mother pleaded. “Your brother means well by you, I am sure.”

“Nonsense, mother; he would be only too glad to get rid of me altogether. I have always been a thorn in his side. He looks upon me as the black sheep of the family, and always will. Trent would like to pack me off to the Klondike for the next ten years, I expect.”

As this was one of the suggestions which had actually fallen from the Duke’s lips that day, when the news of his brother’s insolvency had been brought to the house, the Duchess found it difficult to answer.

“Klondike would be better for you than the life you have been leading here,” she said as gently as she could. “Don’t you think it would be better for you to leave London and go abroad for a time out of the reach of temptation?”

The young man frowned. He knew very well what was meant by the word “temptation.”

“I can’t go without money,” he said shortly.

“I could let you have a little, dear, and James, I know, will let you have as much as you want, as long as he knows that it won’t be spent”—she hesitated an instant—“in bad ways.”

Alistair scowled.

“What business is it of his how I spend my money?”

His mother raised her hand with a certain quiet dignity.

“It is my business, at all events, to know what kind of life my boy is living, and to sorrow when I know that he is living in open sin and shame.”

To this speech Alistair made no answer. He could have made none that would not have added to his mother’s pain.

“How much do you want?” the Duchess asked presently in a weary tone. It was not the first conversation between them that had ended at the same point.

The young man started up.

“Look here, mother, I didn’t come here to ask for money; I’m past that now. It doesn’t matter to me whether I stay in London or go abroad. Trent can decide for himself about that. Anyway, I must go under for a time, I suppose, and I don’t much care if I ever come up again. I was out on Westminster Bridge just now, wondering whether it wouldn’t be the easiest way to drop over, and put an end to it all; and then I thought of you, and felt sorry for your sake more than my own; and so I made up my mind to come and see you—and here I am.”

The poor lady shook a good deal as she listened to this speech; and, remembering her prayer just before Alistair came in, she breathed a silent thanksgiving, and the tears came back into her eyes.

“Oh, my poor boy, can’t you see that all this is the result of the life you have chosen!” She would have liked to make a more direct reference to her religious belief, but feared to do so. She had learnt by this time that her son and she had no common ground in that direction. “Why—why don’t you leave that wicked woman, and start a new life? She is ruining you, body and soul.”

Alistair frowned impatiently.

“I can’t let you say that, mother. It’s not her fault, Heaven knows! The poor little thing has tried to do her best for me. She is a great deal better than some of your good women, who would draw their skirts aside if they passed her in the street.”

He spoke roughly, but not disrespectfully.

The Duchess sighed heavily.

“My unhappy boy, you know nothing about good women. You never meet them; you might be a different man if you did. If I could only bring you under the influence of some really good, devoted girl, such as I know”—a name rose to the Duchess’s lips, but she deemed it wiser not to pronounce it at that moment—“who would love you well enough to overlook the past, she might redeem you even now.”

Alistair sighed, too, at the picture called up by his mother’s words. He thought of poor little neurotic Molly, with her spasms of utter wretchedness, her hysterical fits, her occasional drunken outbreaks in which all the gutter in her blood came to the surface; he thought of her perpetual, feverish craving for excitement, of her secret hatred of his intellectual pursuits, of their ill-managed, disorderly household, with insolent servants going and coming every month. And then he contrasted the portrait with that of some sweet and gracious maiden—such a girl as his mother must have been in her youth—who would bring peace into his life, whose presence would be soothing as the sound of church bells heard at evening across the autumn fields, who would guide and rule their home through happy years of wedded friendship. Alistair sighed.

His mother heard and drew courage from the sigh. Already her mind was busy in working out a scheme for her boy’s salvation. Her eagerness led her to make a false step at the outset.

“If you will go away even for a short time I shall feel happier,” she pleaded. “Won’t you try to separate yourself from this woman? If you like to go abroad I could come with you, perhaps. You have often said that you should like to visit Rome?”

Alistair shook his head stubbornly.

“I cannot go away without Molly.”

The Duchess of Trent flushed. It seemed to her that this answer was an insult, even though she had in a manner forced it from him.

“I wonder that you dare say that to me,” she said, with a touch of anger.

“I beg your pardon, mother. But it’s no good our discussing such things. I can’t expect you to understand how I feel about her. She has given up everything—you may say she has reformed—for my sake, and if I were to send her adrift now I should feel myself a blackguard. Why, God help me, I believe the poor little thing’s been selling her jewels to pay the housekeeping bills for the last few months. If she’d been my wife she couldn’t have done more than that.”

His mother started, and a look of dreadful apprehension came into her eyes.

“Don’t talk like that, Alistair! I’m getting old, and it frightens me. Promise me, promise me, my own dear son, that you will never marry her?”

In her agitation the poor lady rose and went to him, laying a pleading hand on his shoulder as she looked into his face.

“No, I don’t suppose I shall ever do that,” he said.

But he spoke in a tone of dejection, like a man not certain of himself, and the mother’s fear was not relieved.