Читать книгу The Usurper - William J. Locke - Страница 6

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He left Aix-les-Bains the next day by the morning train, having despatched a note to Lady Alicia, regretting the suddenness of his departure. Urgency of affairs summoned him to London. He had to thank her for pleasant hours. A matter of courtesy; nothing more. On the following evening he appeared before an astonished Cudby, and vouchsafed little explanation of his unexpected return. He was sick of the place, said he; pined for the comforting routine of work. Yes, he was cured of his gout. Incidentally he mentioned his meeting with Lady Alicia, and in the same breath discussed Judge Blenkinson the Chicago millionaire. The lady’s name gave Cudby the key of the situation, and he smiled ironically at the diplomatic airiness of his patron.

Jasper took up the threads of affairs somewhat feverishly, sent Cudby off against his will on a short holiday, and worked from morning to night. He had several important schemes on hand. There was a fever hospital in a northern town; an experiment in farming on the lines of the Salvation Army settlement in Essex; an attempt to solve the housing problem in Bermondsey. The election at North Ham was drawing near. This involved speech-making, canvassing, interviewing party agents, endless correspondence. When Cudby returned he found him a cheerful Atlas, bearing a world of work upon his shoulders.

Meanwhile Lady Alicia remained at Aix till her aunt’s cure was accomplished, accompanied her for the traditional week or ten days’ after-cure in Switzerland, and returned to England. A dutiful fortnight was spent with her parents at the family seat in Norfolk, after which she was free to rejoin Lady Luxmoore at her own little place in Hertfordshire. It was not till the middle of November that she came back to London.

Besides the little place in Hertfordshire, Lady Alicia had a charmingly appointed house in Onslow Square. She had inherited them, together with a considerable fortune, from her uncle, Simon Vellacot, who in marked contrast with his scapegrace brother, Jasper, had led a decorous life as a stockbroker, and, though a bachelor, had died in the richest odour of respectability. Her mother, the late Countess, had died during Alicia’s girlhood. Her father after a few years’ widowhood had married again, and had followed his wife into the paths of extreme and militant nonconformity. The Countess was an agreeable woman; the old Earl a kind and accomplished gentleman; and for a while Lady Alicia bore with the new austerities she saw practised in her home. But when her father formally joined the confraternity of Plymouth Brethren, Lady Alicia bade him adieu and set up for herself. She was young, independent, and the bright world seemed to her everything else than the Aceldama of Sin which it was proclaimed to be at the Castle. Besides, during her girlhood she had been trained in a nice appreciation of its graces and its pleasures. If she could not join her parents in their discovery that these same pleasures were snares and vanities, it was scarcely her fault. They bemoaned her blindness, but as sweet reasonableness was the distinguishing quality of all Lady Alicia’s actions, they could not accuse her of unfilial behaviour. The stepmother comforted herself with the feminine reflection that, after all, the daughter would eventually have to go the way of a husband, and all the old Earl’s fervour could not drive away a lurking unregenerate surmise that the Almighty would not send to perdition a lady of her quality. So Lady Alicia set up her two establishments without committing the tiniest breach of the Fifth Commandment, and played the dutiful daughter for a fortnight a year in the dreary, preacher-haunted Castle.

She had been leading this independent existence, with Lady Luxmoore as chaperon, for the last six years. She was now three and thirty. Her continued spinsterhood surprised her friends. So sweet a woman they chorussed. So sympathetic. So pretty. So exceedingly well off. Such a favourite with men. She had a dozen or two always at her disposal at a moment’s notice. Men whom one had to implore almost abjectly to come to one’s parties went to Alicia’s uninvited—actually to afternoon tea. She could take her pick of all the eligibles in London, said her friends; but they were unaware of any affair of the heart. She smiled serenely on everyone. There was not an instance of a man retiring from her circle discomforted and rushing off to shoot rhinoceroses in South Africa or bears at the North Pole. Her friends could not even hear of proposals. When they asked her point-blank whether she had had any, she laughed a bright “Of course I have!” but, further, remained sweetly impenetrable. In this way she provided them with food for much conversation. She was getting on. In a few years, did she continue in her celibacy, she would be irrevocably on the shelf. They wished Alicia would marry—why, the lady herself could never rightly determine. But her hopeless behaviour brought with it one advantage. Her friends allowed her a freedom in her relations with men which they would not have tolerated among each other. She became a chartered though chaste libertine, a Diana of South Kensington, whose doings were unquestioned. In her heart she was rather proud of her free-pass through the lines of scandal; perhaps, being human, she used it somewhat frequently.

“Alicia,” said Lady Luxmoore, “that man will certainly fall in love with you.”

“My dear aunt, which man?” asked Lady Alicia, turning round in her chair, with a mother-of-pearl pen-holder in her hand. It was a November afternoon, the day after her arrival in London, and she was sitting at her escritoire sending off to her friends intimations of her return. The room was cosily lit only by the fire and the rose-shaded lamp on the escritoire. Lady Luxmoore had been dozing over her knitting by the fireside.

“Why, Jasper Vellacot. Didn’t you ask me just now whether I thought he was in town?”

“That was twenty minutes ago,” laughed Alicia. “You have been asleep, dear. I had forgotten all about him.”

“Anyhow, he will fall in love with you. Mark my words.”

“They all do, according to you, Aunt Phœbe. To listen to you, one would think I was the most be-fallen-in-love-with woman in London. There’s Bunny and Charteris and Mainwaring, and hosts of others—and now Jasper Vellacot.”

“Well, you’ll see,” said the elder lady, in placid prophecy.

“On the contrary, I think he has treated me rather shabbily. He ran away from Aix without a hint of good-bye, and I’ve had two wooden little notes from him since,—one, when I offered to come and canvass for him, to say that his canvassing had been done already, and the other acknowledging my congratulations on his election. I think I am very forgiving to write to him now.”

“Oh, yes,” she went on, in answer to a murmured reiteration from the fireside, “he likes me in an abstract, far-away fashion, from somewhere behind his hospitals and institutes and industrial dwellings, but those fill his heart. Besides, why should men and women be always falling in love with each other? Can’t we be frank and friendly? He is just the dear sort of person to be a friend to a woman. He is like a shy, elderly child.”

“If you think Jasper Vellacot is nothing but a shy, elderly child, you are making a mistake, Alicia,” said Lady Luxmoore, clicking her knitting-needles.

“Fundamentally he is that,” replied Lady Alicia, with cheerful assurance. “I saw a good deal of him at Aix, remember. Of course he is shrewd in business matters; but that is not saying anything. It is his general attitude toward life that is so timid and childlike. He is a pathetic figure with all his wealth. Do you know that he asked me one evening what that green stuff was with ice in it which people were drinking through straws? He had never heard of crême de menthe. It was a trivial thing, but it signified so much!”

“I am not saying anything against him, dear,” said Lady Luxmoore. “Don’t think that for one moment.”

“Why, of course not, Aunt Phœbe. How could you?” smiled Lady Alicia, resuming her note-writing. “Doesn’t he practically sell all that he has and give it to the poor? Besides,” she added, looking round over her shoulder, “he is my cousin, you know.”

Of that she was firmly convinced. His obvious disinclination to discuss the question she attributed to his shyness, to the tragedy of his birth. His mother, he had told her truly, had dragged herself midway between life and death, whence no mortal knew, into a rough mining-camp. She had lived there three hours, during which he was born. That was all he knew, all he had been able to discover of his parentage. The rough people who had reared him during early childhood had told him, said he, that his name was Jasper Vellacot. Now it was certain that Lady Illingham’s brother had married in Australia; so much Lady Alicia had discovered. The presumed date of the marriage corresponded with the millionaire’s confessed age. Then the name, or rather the conjunction of the two uncommon names, was in itself an identification; the long arm of coincidence could scarcely be held accountable. The whole story was romantic—the mysterious entry into the world, the many years of obscure wandering, the sudden possession of colossal wealth, the Midas touch that turned everything into gold, the pathetic frugality and the earnest purpose of his life. Unconsciously the unsatisfied emotionality of the woman drank in the romance, and she was unaware how deep her interest in him lay.

The noise of her aunt’s knitting-needles ceased. Lady Alicia bit the end of her mother-of-pearl pen-holder, and contracted her brows as she looked at her half-finished note to Vellacot. Her aunt’s words had created a moment’s misgiving. She really knew very little of this man to whom she was writing in so friendly a way. But if it came to that, what did she know of any of her men friends? Even the most independent and frank of women have these little frightening doubts, and the doubts become more frightening in proportion as the women are proud and innocent-minded. Then they feel humiliated by the limitations of their sex; they rebel, being women of spirit, and forthwith deceive themselves into greater confidence than ever in their own serene judgment. Thus did Lady Alicia. She smiled with renewed self-establishment, and dashing the pen into ink wrote off a very friendly little note indeed, which she regarded with satisfaction. Then she wrote to Bonamy Tredgold, which was a longer affair. Her eyes grew tender over it, and as she put up the letter in its envelope she breathed a sentimental little sigh.

The result of all this note-writing was a small gathering of friends a few evenings later in Onslow Gardens. There came Vane Edory, R.A., and his wife and his daughter Paulina; Guy Charteris, home on leave from his legation; John Mainwaring, a younger son about town; Sir Samuel and Lady Dykes; Elinor Currey, who had gone everywhere and had done everything and adored Lady Alicia; Bonamy Tredgold, slight, wiry, nervous, athletic, with brown, bright eyes and short, black curly hair, and, latest to arrive, Jasper Vellacot, M.P.

Lady Alicia rose smilingly to meet him as he entered.

“How charming of you to have come! I should have felt myself incomplete if you hadn’t. I have been longing to congratulate you on your victory—it was more than that—a triumph!”

He could look her in the face now without any fear of the heart leaping to the eyes. He had schooled himself to it during the months of absence. Yet her genuine welcome, her stately fairness, the graciousness of her presence harmonising with the subtle refinement of her drawing-room, all forced itself upon his consciousness with a pang. They conversed awhile.

“You are not looking as well as you did in Aix,” she said with friendly concern.

“I was getting fat and lazy. Now I am normal. You—you are just the same—except—Do you know that this is the first time I have seen you without a bonnet?”

“You mean a hat!” laughed Lady Alicia. “I’m sure no one has ever seen me in a bonnet for years. Yes, at Aix one lives in a hat from the time one gets up till one goes to bed. I hope now you’ll often see me without a hat.”

“As often as you’ll let me,” said Vellacot, with his little awkward bow.

She launched Vellacot into the circle, effected introductions. Sir Samuel and Lady Dykes he knew. The ex-member offered his congratulations, discussed the election, drew a critical sketch of personalities in the constituency. Could give Vellacot any number of tips in that way,—indicate all the constituent corns that lay in the way of incautious treading.

“There’s a tremendous potentate in North Ham,” said Sir Samuel. “Wickens, I hear he’s the new Mayor this year. He has about seventeen little butcher’s shops about London and owns a rookery in Bethnal Green. You know the kind of man—sweats the blood out of pauper tenants.”

“The brute!” said Jasper.

“Yes, I suppose he is. And he’s a nasty-tempered beggar; but he’s got a deuce of an influence down there and you’ll have to conciliate him.”

The word was a touch of the spur to Jasper. He drew himself up sharply.

“I’ll be shot if I do,” said he.

“You’ll have to fight him.”

“Well, what then? One can crush a brute like that, I suppose.”

“Oh, no doubt he can be crushed,” replied the amiable Sir Samuel. “No doubt, no doubt. And so he ought to be. I saw it myself. Only it required a younger man. That’s one of the reasons why I resigned, you know. But, my dear Vellacot, if you set to work to reform the morals of that constituency, you’ll have your hands full.”

“I’m going to be master there anyway,” said Jasper. “And it’s just that type of blood-sucker landlord that I have been longing to get my knife into.”

Sir Samuel’s time-serving suggestion roused his indignation. The prospect of battle pleased him. He held up his head proudly, feeling his strength. Sir Samuel shifted his ground and rambled on pleasantly. After all, politically speaking, it was a beautifully organised borough. The conservative club was a model throughout the country. Of course there were Radicals who bombarded you with caustic letters; but a soft-answering secretary could turn away a lot of wrath. While listening, Jasper forgot his anger in speculative interest in the other’s attitude towards life. No scourges had ever lashed this well-fed elderly gentleman into action. No spiritual suffering had ever cleared his vision to ideals. With easy good-nature he had adopted—nay, been born with—the Panglossian theory of the universe. How many Sir Samuels sat on the government side of the House, below the gangway, serving time under the placid misapprehension that they were serving their country! And yet these men were held in honour in the state; their position was unassailable, their fathers had built it up for generations. And what was he, Jasper Vellacot, with all his millions? A nameless man, belonging to no social caste, an Ishmaelite—a Pariah if the whole truth were known. He stood remote, fighting for his own hand.

Lady Alicia broke upon his musing and carried him off from Sir Samuel to a group where Elinor Currey was talking animatedly. She was a thin dark girl with a sallow complexion, and no points of beauty save luminous dark eyes and white teeth.

“Please support me, Mr. Vellacot,” she said, making room for him on the couch. “I am maintaining that there is no material for romance in modern life.”

“And I maintain there is,” cried Bonamy Tredgold, boyishly.

“First tell me what is romance,” said Jasper, the usual wistfulness returning to his eyes.

“It is the picturesque, the unusual, the unexpected. It is colour, imagination, mystery, religion,” said Elinor Currey.

“Romance is the artistic expression of the joy of life,” cried the young poet. “Miss Currey has only enumerated some of the things of which the joy of life is made up.”

“It comes to the same thing. Bunny is too logical for a poet. But take the quality of mystery, which he allows is a component of the joy of life whose artistic expression is romance—”

“Oh, dear lady! what a house-that-Jack-built sentence!” interrupted Bunny.

“It isn’t finished yet,” said the lady. “I’ve a good mind to say it all over again. But I continue. Where can one find mystery in these modern days of spiritual negation and of scientific explanation of phenomena, like thunder and wind, that once were supposed to be voices of gods and wailing of lost souls? There is no mystery about unknown parts of the earth,—the railway and telegraph have made practically every square inch as unromantic as this drawing-room.”

“How on earth do you know there is no mystery, nothing romantic in this drawing-room?” said Bunny. “What more awful mystery can there be than another human being? What do you know of the extraordinary, subtle, complex, secret thing that is I? What do I know of you? Just think of a man and a woman who love one another,—with one of the immemorial passions of old romance,—whose hearts and souls and beings seem to be fused into one,—in spite of all must not each remain an inscrutable sphynx to the other? It is the constant striving to solve this mystery that is the joy of love, and any expression of this joy is romance. And as regards the wind and the rain, the wind will always blow and the rain will fall, and flowers will bloom, and the earth will be magical with beauty, and man will face it all and speculate on its relation with himself; and that is an eternal mystery.”

“Well, I’ll yield you the mystery,” said Elinor Currey. “But colour has died out. Everything is dull monotone.”

“The sunset, for instance; the night-fires in the black country; Oxford Street with its whirling mass of colour.”

“But the grey lives of people.”

“Our lives are kaleidoscopic compared with those of our ancestors,” exclaimed Bunny, excitedly. “Because people don’t wear cloaks and swords, and fight duels, and catch young women up round the waist and carry them off on horses, you say romance is dead. It’s idiotic. You say our lives are restricted by law, by convention, that we can’t do any of the wild and wicked old things that people used to do. By Jove, can’t we! And it’s because we have to crash through the Statute Book, the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes of Mrs. Grundy, in order to do them, that they show up all the more vividly. As for the unexpected, isn’t it happening day by day? Aren’t great crimes committed? Don’t great tragedies occur? Do you mean to tell me that grand passions are dead? I say there is infinite material for romance in the world. The earth is full of its glory! What do you think, Mr. Vellacot?”

The eager, boyish face appealed strongly to the wearier man. He would have given much to have such radiant faith in life. Thus challenged, he could not but agree, but he spoke more soberly, out of a deeper experience.

“As long as the two elemental passions—Hunger and Love—remain,” said he, “there will be eternal material for romance.”

“But the ordinary person does not suffer from hunger,” remarked Lady Dykes, with complacent stupidity.

The eyes of Jasper and Bunny chanced to meet, and the mutual gaze was held for some seconds; and the freemasonry of sensitives who have suffered worked reciprocal understanding. The two men’s natures went out to meet each other, and the moment was the beginning of their friendship.

The evening wore on. Guests departed. Bunny came to Lady Alicia to bid her good-bye. She withdrew with him into the curtained-off back drawing-room, and scanned his face, which was paler than usual.

“You are not looking well,” she said. “What is the matter?”

“Nothing, Alicia. I’m as strong as a horse.”

“You have been working too hard, Bunny, without a holiday. Why didn’t you come down last month to Greybrooke? It was lovely; the whole place breathed of peace. And,” she added with a smile, “there were hundreds of partridges dying to be killed.”

“I was kept in town,” said he. “I really was.”

“If I only could get you to go down, now, even,” said Lady Alicia, somewhat wistfully. “The house and all that is in it are at your disposal. You know that.”

He took her hand—no one was in sight, the thick portière hiding them from the drawing-room—and kissed it, and held it for a while in his.

“You are the sweetest and dearest and generousest lady living,” said he. “And I should be an unhung wretch if I weren’t grateful to you. But I couldn’t—I really couldn’t come to you last month. And now—”

“And now?”

“I am still kept in town. Besides,” said he, with his frank laugh, “what should I do there without you? Don’t you know how tremendously good it is to see you again?”

“Is it?” she asked with a little turn of the head.

“Of course,” said he. “Who would look after me, if you didn’t?”

A sigh fluttered at her throat. She pressed his hand.

“Well, good-bye, Bunny dear. Let me see you looking less white when you come again. And come soon.”

He promised, went out with her into the drawing-room. Jasper came forward to take his leave.

“I am delighted with Tredgold,” he said. Lady Alicia’s eyes grew bright. She expressed her gladness. It was his youth, so strong and sane and joyous, that captivated him, said Jasper.

“Youth? Yes, he has youth,” she replied, rather blankly.

Jasper met him at the foot of the stairs getting into his overcoat, and they went out of the house together.

“Which way are you going?” asked Jasper.

“Bloomsbury.”

“So am I. How are you going—cab, train, walk—?”

“I must walk,” said Bunny. “But you, Mr. Vellacot—”

“I always walk, if I can.”

They trudged along at a brisk pace. There was a first touch of frost in the air. The sky was clear, and now and then a meteor flashed like a sword across the firmament. Bunny flung up a hand.

“The dear young lady saying there was no mystery!” said he.

They discussed the question further, Jasper glad to hear the fresh young talk. Suddenly, before they had reached the top of Sloane Street, the young man swung round, staggered, and caught hold of a lamp-post. Jasper had his arm round him at once, saw by the gas-light that his face was white. “I feel queer—half dizzy—fainting.”

Jasper hailed a cab, helped him in, stopped at a tavern, and brought out a glass of brandy. Bunny put it to his lips, shrank from it, gulped some of it down. The drive was resumed. Arrived at Gower Street, Jasper and the cabman conveyed him to the dining-room. He lay on the sofa for a few moments with closed eyes. Then he roused himself, looked round somewhat astonished.

“Better?” asked Jasper, taking off his hat and laying it on the table.

“Yes,” said Bunny, sitting up. “I still feel a bit queer—but I must get home to Great Coram Street.” Then he coughed a little nervous, throaty cough. The light from the electric wall-bracket fell full upon him, shewed pitilessly white seams in his dress-coat, a patch on boots that were not of patent-leather. The cough awoke Jasper’s suspicions. He had heard it before. He remembered the exchanged glance at Lady Alicia’s. The sight of the patched boots made him certain. With rough kindness he gripped the young fellow’s shoulders.

“Look here, when did you have your dinner?”

Bunny laughed foolishly, and rested his head on his hand.

“I’m afraid I didn’t have any dinner,” said he.

Jasper seized biscuits and wine from the sideboard.

“Go on with this till I come back,” he said, and left the room.

All his modest household were abed. Even Cudby was sleeping peacefully upstairs. Jasper entered his kitchen and pantry with the excitement of a man exploring the blank unknown. But he had too often in past years conjured up meals from impossible places to have forgotten the trick of it. He clattered noisily upstairs with a tray full of food, and set it before his guest, who had been nibbling biscuits. Bunny began to apologise. Jasper cut him short. He, and thousands of better men than he, had been there before.

“Eat and don’t talk,” said he, and he sat down by the side of Bunny and cut himself a hunk of bread and cheese which he ate while the distressed young poet attacked his plateful of cold pie. The food and wine soon revived him.

“It’s awfully good of you, Mr. Vellacot,” he said boyishly. “I don’t know what I should have done—but I’m horribly ashamed of running down like that.”

“It’s no good being ashamed of Nature,” said Jasper. “She is too frank. Now tell me straight. Do you often go without your dinner?”

Bonamy Tredgold glanced around him with the quick artist’s sense of observation. The quiet homely room, furnished with less ostentation than a hundred other dining-rooms in the same street, the table with its simple red cloth on which lay the tray and plates and simple food and Jasper’s hat and gloves, the careworn, kind face of his host, and his homely munching of household bread and gruyère cheese—all, contrasting with his knowledge of the man’s enormous wealth, impressed the young fellow with a great feeling of respect for him, of trust in him, of faith in the mere man, of comradeship. At first, when he had been alone, gnawing the biscuits, the pride of the well-born gentleman had risen up and stabbed him as hard as the pangs of hunger. That he, Bonamy Tredgold, should be beholden to a rich man for a meal to save him from starvation was a thought almost unendurable. But now it was different. With those kindly, wistful eyes looking at him from behind the rugged brows, he felt that reserve would be no longer pride, but only that which was contemptible. He answered with a laugh.

“Not often. I’ve only gone from breakfast to breakfast once before this year. You see,” he said with engaging confidence, “it would be all right if these infernal editors and publishers would pay up to time. But they won’t. I ought to have had some money this morning. It didn’t come. Went round to-day. Proprietor had a cold, and they didn’t like to bother him to sign the cheque. Anyway it will turn up to-morrow morning.”

“But at the present moment you haven’t a penny in the world?”

“Not a halfpenny,” replied Bunny, cheerfully. “What does it matter?”

“By God!” cried Jasper, “it doesn’t matter the half-penny that you haven’t got!”