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Masterman and Son

by W. J. Dawson · English · Gutenberg #35608 · 535,524 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Masterman and Son

Author: W. J. Dawson


        
Release date: August 21, 2011 [eBook #35608]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35608

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MASTERMAN AND SON ***




Produced by Al Haines










Masterman and Son


by

W. J. DAWSON

_Author of "A Prophet in Babylon," etc._




NEW YORK ---- CHICAGO ---- TORONTO

Fleming H. Revell Company

LONDON AND EDINBURGH




Copyright, 1909, by

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY




  New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
  Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue
  Toronto: 25 Richmond St., W.
  London: 21 Paternoster Square
  Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street




CONTENTS


PART ONE

ARCHIBOLD MASTERMAN

CHAPTER

     I. THE MASTER-BUILDER
    II. A DISCUSSION
   III. THE BIG STRONG BEAST
    IV. MRS. BUNDY
     V. THE MAGIC NIGHT
    VI. YOUNG LOVE
   VII. ENTER SCALES
  VIII. THE ACCUSATION
    IX. THE CONTEST
     X. THE FAREWELL


PART TWO

THE AMERICAN MADONNA

    XI. NEW YORK
   XII. MR. WILBUR MEREDITH LEGION
  XIII. ADVENTURES OF AN INCOMPETENT
   XIV. HE FINDS A FRIEND
    XV. THE MILLIONAIRE
   XVI. KOOTENAY
  XVII. THE NEW LIFE


PART THREE

FATHER AND SON

 XVIII. THE AMALGAMATED BRICK CO.
   XIX. THE FEAR
    XX. THE RETURN
   XXI. THE VERDICT
  XXII. MRS. BUNDY PHILOSOPHISES
 XXIII. THE LAST HOME
  XXIV. THE NEW WORLD




PART ONE

ARCHIBOLD MASTERMAN


I

THE MASTER-BUILDER

Archibold Masterman, tall, heavily-built, muscular, and on the wrong
side of fifty, was universally esteemed an excellent specimen of that
dubious product of modern commerce, the self-made man.  At twenty he
was a day-labourer, at thirty a jobbing builder, at forty a contractor
in a large way of business.  At that point may be dated the beginning
of his social efflorescence.  It was then that he began to wear
broadcloth on week-days, and insisted on a fresh shirt every other day.
Hitherto careless of his appearance, he now took a quiet pride in
clothes, and discovered the uses of the manicure.  A little later he
discovered that a man's position in society is judged by the kind of
house he lives in, and that it is social wisdom to pay a high rent for
a small house in a discreetly "good" locality, rather than a low rent
for a much better house in a deteriorated suburb.  That was the year in
which he purchased Eagle House, a pompous, old-fashioned residence
standing in its own grounds in Highbourne Gardens.

Highbourne Gardens was one of those London suburbs which contrive to
preserve a faint aroma of gentility for many years after the real
gentlefolk have left it.  It had many old houses of the plain and
specious order, inhabited a century ago by great London merchants.  In
the floors of these houses might be found vast beams of some foreign
wood, hard enough to turn the keenest chisel; in the gardens at their
backs were copper beeches, mulberry trees, and an occasional cedar of
Lebanon.  Modern London, with its vast invasion of mean streets,
stopped respectfully before the proud exclusiveness of Highbourne
Gardens.  It was one of the last localities to have roads which were
marked "Private," guarded by locked gates, and to employ watchmen in
faded liveries, who dwelt in tiny sentry-boxes and at stated hours
collected the letters of the residents.

It was precisely the kind of neighbourhood for such a man as Archibold
Masterman to make his first social experiment, and he was quick to
recognise its advantages.  Eagle House, Highbourne Gardens, was a
thoroughly respectable address; if it did not convey the impression of
social distinction, it clearly did imply solid competence, which was a
good deal better.  Jones, the well-known city tailor, lived there, and
drove a pair of horses which any lord might envy; there were half a
dozen brokers who kept as good tables as any man in London; and there
was Loker, the famous manufacturer of soaps, whose rhymed
advertisements met the eye in every railway-carriage.  According to the
views of Archibold Masterman, in his present stage of social
enlightenment, these illustrious persons composed a real aristocracy of
solid merit.

Above all, there was in Highbourne Gardens a church, at which most of
these prosperous persons were regular attendants, and Archibold
Masterman was shrewd enough to see that such a church was admirably
adapted to the plan of social advancement which he had in view.  It was
not an Episcopal church, it was true; but that scarcely mattered in a
neighbourhood which was by long tradition Non-conformist.  It was
enough for him that it contained the people he wished most to know, and
his first act on settling at Eagle House was to rent the most expensive
pew in the church which then chanced to be at liberty.  The day when he
took possession of this pew was a red-letter day in his life.  He was
conscious that he was well-dressed, and that he and his family were
favourably remarked.  Loker, the soap manufacturer, took the collection
in his aisle, and when Masterman put a new five-pound note upon the
plate, he knew that he had created a sensation.  When he left the
church, Loker shook his hand with great cordiality, and from that hour
his position was assured.

All this was, of course, many years ago.  Since then he had played his
cards so well that he had become almost the best-known man in the
locality.  He was certainly esteemed the wealthiest.  He was a deacon
in the church, _vice_ Loker deceased, and he now trod the aisles with
the collection plate, and kept a jealous eye upon its contents.  Among
the church folk his record for generosity stood high.  Among the
younger men the story of his life had become a stimulating tradition.
There were two versions of this tradition.  In the young men's
societies, and at their annual club dinner, he was accustomed to tell a
touching story of how he once did a piece of humble work which no one
else would touch, and found his fidelity rewarded by sudden promotion,
which gave him his first real chance in life.  This story never failed
to arouse loud cheers, and when irate parents found their boys
unwilling to black their own shoes or weed the garden, they would cry,
"Remember Masterman."  Among a few old cronies in the building trade,
in convivial moments, this tradition took a different form.  To them he
boasted that he bought his first plot of land by issuing a cheque when
he had nothing in the bank, only borrowing the money just in time to
prevent discovery.

"It was a prison or a fortune," he was accustomed to remark.  "And I
took the risk.  I took the risk, and see what I am to-day."  Whereat
his old cronies, particularly Grimes, a small builder in Tottenham, who
were all more or less under financial obligations to him, would applaud
him even more vigorously than the church young men.

The whole character of the man may be discerned in the incident.  That
he should have risked a prison to make a fortune was nothing to be
ashamed of; although he had sense enough to know that it was not the
kind of story which would be received with acclamation by the church
young men.  Therefore to them he gave a milder version, suited to their
innocence.  But in his heart he was proud of his own daring, still
prouder of his triumph.  His blood thrilled pleasurably whenever he
recalled that perilous and nearly fatal morning--his sudden decision to
buy the land whose speculative value none but he could recognise, the
bold bluff he practised on the sellers, the false cheque which he knew
put the handcuffs oh his wrists, the mad, breathless rush across London
to secure the money at any rate of interest from any kind of lender.
And then the ecstatic moment when, just ten minutes before the bank
closed, he had paid in the five thousand pounds which saved his credit.
In the end he had made twenty thousand pounds out of that land, and
from that moment he dated his prosperity.  He had taken risks, and that
was to him the equivalent of heroism.  Life was full of risks, and the
man who dared nothing was a coward.  It was the simple philosophy of
the buccaneer, the pirate, the adventurer.  Had he lived a hundred
years earlier and been bred to the sea, he would have gloried in the
black flag, and would have competed with Captain Kidd for terrifying
fame.  The very joy of living lay in taking risks.

He had been taking risks ever since, although time and prosperity had
taught him caution and a more sober craft.  Sometimes, and especially
since he had become a resident in Highbourne Gardens, he had resolved
to content himself with the kind of business which avoided speculative
perils, but the old instinct always proved too strong for him.  Show
him an opportunity that offered the chance of great and sudden profit,
and he could no more help putting all he had in jeopardy to secure it
than can the old gambler refuse one more cast of the dice.  But under
the chastenings of his new respectability he had become more and more
secretive in these dubious transactions.  His own family never once
suspected them.  All that they knew was that there were recurring
periods when he went about the house in grim silence, and sat up half
the night in the little room which he called his office.  At such times
his face seemed to harden; new lines appeared about the eyes and the
firm mouth; but it always remained impassive and inscrutable.  Some day
the cloud would lift suddenly; the grim toiler in the midnight office
came forth, jovial, loud-voiced, ten years younger; and there was a
period of joyous extravagance, a new pair of horses in the stable, a
conservatory added to the drawing-room, a large subscription to the
church funds, and the genial stir and tumult of dinner and lawn-tennis
parties.  After a time the cloud rolled back again, but his friends
were alike ignorant of the causes that produced or the triumphs which
dissolved it.

So Masterman lived his life, and it was part of the man that the church
had come to occupy a considerable place in it.  He felt that he owed it
gratitude, for had it not done much to forward his social ambitions?
He no longer moved in it humbly, as a man sedulous of notice; he had
long since become its undisputed king.  The day was past when he was
grateful for the hand-shake of a Loker: it was his turn now to confer
the favours which he once had sought.  It represented an essential
feature in his triumph.  When the time came that he sought public
honours, which he meant to do, the church would prove a valuable factor
in his ambitions.  He would then get back all that he had given it, in
willing service.  It pleased him to think that the church itself would
turn out a good investment when that time came.

Not that he was destitute of all sense of religion; in his own way he
valued it, though not upon the grounds that were common with ordinary
pious folk.  He thought it a good thing that men should have definite
views of truth, especially when their views encouraged them in the
belief that they would become in another world persons of as much
importance as they had been in this.  As he understood the matter, it
was necessary for a man to have certain right beliefs in order that he
might become secure of the reversion of eternal happiness; and if that
were true, a man would be a fool who did not accept these beliefs.
Hence he was severely orthodox, and insisted on orthodoxy in his
family.  He liked a good sermon, he liked good music, and it was part
of his pride that the Highbourne Gardens Church had both in all
excellence unapproachable by any of the lesser churches in the
neighbourhood.  This was the limit of his apprehension as regards the
church.  He recognised in it one of the great proprieties of life, a
kind of etiquette toward God which no moral human creature would refuse.

That he was moral, in the ordinary meaning of the word, there could be
no doubt.  Long ago, when he was a mere day-labourer, he had indulged
in a week's drunkenness, and had learned once for all the lesson that
success in life is not compatible with insobriety.  He had been
discharged from his employment, and had spent a miserable month in
hunting work with a damaged character.  From that hour he was a
water-drinker.  Life, having taught him this lesson, proceeded to teach
him a second, that the man who means to succeed must not meddle with
the coarser passions.  He had come near to an entanglement with an evil
woman, and had issued from it with a fixed conviction that the
pleasures of passion were never worth the price men paid for them.
Here the original hardness of his nature served him, and this was soon
reinforced by the temper of ambition.  Cool, shrewd, alert, he became
too much enamoured of success to stop for wayside pleasures; he knew
the more recondite joy of climbing over the shoulders of disabled men
to seize the prize which they had forfeited.  In a word, it paid him to
be moral, and his temperament jumped with his self-interest.

But of morality in its higher forms of ethical ideals he knew nothing.
Deacon of a church as he was, he was still a pirate, a buccaneer, a
highwayman of commerce, thirsting for illicit adventure.  There was a
grim humour in the situation of which he himself caught brief glimpses.
Like the bandit who makes a gift to the Virgin from his spoils, and
holds himself henceforth reconciled to heaven, so Masterman paid his
tithe to God, in the comfortable faith that no one had the right to
examine too closely the means by which it was obtained.

"A hypocrite," the shallow reader will exclaim, but no word would be
farther from the truth, for the real and only hypocrite is he who,
having light to see the highest things, deliberately uses them to serve
his lower instincts.  Masterman did nothing of the kind.  He simply had
no higher light.  Not even a jury with a damaging verdict, or a judge
with a scathing allocution, could have convinced him that it was a
wrong time to write a bogus cheque in an emergency, when twenty
thousand pounds hung upon the chance of his deceit being undiscovered.
He would have done it again to-morrow, done it proudly, with a kind of
fearless, misguided heroism.  Life was like that, he would have said;
you took your chances.  And what he would have said and done at
thirty-five, he would have said and done at fifty.  There was a hard,
unmalleable quality in the man that turned the edge of all those fine
ethics which the preachers uttered.  It was their duty to utter them,
no doubt; it was what they were paid to do; but what did they know of
life?  What did John Clark, the minister of Highbourne Gardens Church,
comfortably paid, and living in a good house, know of life as Masterman
had found it?  He was like a child playing in the shallows; he had
never known deadly contest with tides, and waves, and tempests.  So
Masterman listened to him with a kindly irony, and went upon his way
totally unmoved by any delicate displays of pulpit rhetoric.

Yet of late things had somewhat altered; he was conscious that there
was a changed atmosphere in the world.  John Clark was preaching a
different kind of sermon, a bolder, plainer sermon, full of pungent
references to public evils and daily conduct.  That would not have
mattered much, for Masterman was perfectly aware that he was John
Clark's master whenever he might choose to assert the rights of the
purse.  But a much more pertinent and painful problem was gradually
rising in Masterman's own household.  He had but two children, Helen
and Arthur, and upon the boy all his hopes were set.  He had sent him
to Oxford, where he had done tolerably well; from the University he had
returned with a fund of new ideas which were to his father strange and
detestable.  And among them was a vague socialism, which displayed
itself in vehement attacks on the common processes by which wealth was
acquired.  There came a day when Masterman was aware, for the first
time, that he was face to face with a separate personality in his son,
which had its own springs of action and claimed its own liberty of
thought.  And as the boy uttered his youthful diatribes, the father
began to wonder how much he knew about his own life, how far those
diatribes might be directed obliquely against himself.

He listened in silence, with a difficult good-humour.  He never
attempted to retort.  When he did speak, he meant to speak once for
all, but he would choose his time.  He often wondered what he should
say; whether he would tell the boy with a brutal frankness all about
his methods of business, or leave him to discover a little at a time,
when he entered the office, as in due time Masterman meant that he
should.  But whatever he said or did, he would act with finality when
the time came.  There were means of bringing Arthur to heel as well as
John Clark.

The present trouble was that Arthur seemed greatly to approve John
Clark's teaching.  He quoted it, amplified it, and insisted on its
rightness.  And yet in all this the father knew quite well that his son
could intend no disloyalty to him.  The boy's frank gray eyes had no
deceit in them.  But they also flashed an unmistakable challenge on the
world.  The father could not but admire the boy.  He was no fool, he
often told himself with a bitter smile.  Perhaps these new opinions of
his were, after all, mere froth; it might be wise to let him talk
himself out.  Surely he must come to see life from the commonsense
point of view, which of course was Masterman's.  So the father eagerly
debated, and once more the light burned late in the little office, and
as the days passed, his mouth grew grim and the lines deepened on his
face.  Here was a problem much more difficult than buying land without
money, and it was not solved by mere daring.

So matters stood when John Clark preached his notorious sermon on
jerry-building, in which he accused without mercy the men who ran up
rotten buildings for the poor as thieves and assassins.

Archibold Masterman heard the sermon, and left the church with a
frowning face.  For the rest of the Sabbath he shut himself up in his
office, and a heavy silence dwelt in Eagle House.




II

A DISCUSSION

It was in Masterman's office that the informal
meeting of some of the leading church officials
took place next day.  The meeting had been
preceded by what was known as "a high tea,"
for the customary evening dinner was dispensed with
when deacons were the guests.  This was done out
of deference to the inferior position of some of the
younger deacons, who had not yet attained the social
dignity of late dinners.

Masterman, however, took care that this substitutionary
meal did credit to his own social superiority.
Where the younger deacons were accustomed to
provide for the entertainment of their brethren plates of
exiguous ham, manifestly bought at the cookshop,
insufficient salads frugally overlaid with sliced eggs, and
a sparse variety of home-made cake and pastry,
Masterman spread a groaning table with a cold sirloin
of beef, a pair of fowls, and an entire ham, to say
nothing of thick cream and expensive fruits.  Masterman's
coffee, too, was of a richness quite unapproachable
by the inferior decoctions of Beverley and Luke,
whose wives dealt at local shops, and were not above
using a certain detestable invention known as coffee
essence.  Luke and Beverley also used gas fires in
their dining- and drawing-rooms, to save labour,
which was necessary when but one maid was kept;
whereas Masterman had a coal fire even in the hall,
and burned logs of wood in his living-rooms.  Upon
Masterman's table there was also real silver of
undeniable price, and a vast silver urn; whereas Beverley
and Luke could pretend to nothing better than electro
imitations, which were not even silver-plated.  So
that it was clear that though Masterman gave high
teas, they were scarcely distinguishable from evening
dinners; and if he was a deacon, he was by no means
a common deacon.

Arthur Masterman had long ago come to regard
those diaconal high teas with a kind of sombre
merriment.  It amused him to remark his father's difficult
adjustment to a form of meal to which he was not
used; his conflict between condescension and
hospitality; his manifest, and not quite successful, effort to
modify his blunt, domineering outspokenness to the
sensitive susceptibilities of his guests.  He was aware
also, with a sort of pride, how big his father seemed
beside these men.  He loomed above them like some
vast cathedral front over huddled houses.  They were
city dwellers all, and had never been anything else.
They had the precise, neat manners of men accustomed
to formal ways of life.  Their talk rarely went
beyond the gossip of church affairs, or the recapitulation
of something in the morning's paper.  But no one
could look at Archibold Masterman without a sense
of something primitive and massive in the man.  The
heavy frame, the great breadth of shoulder, the
clean-shaven face with its firm lines, the eyes, clear,
watchful, dominating, with a certain almost vulpine
intensity and hardness--all these declared a man at all
times unusual, but most unusual in contrast with
these men, who bore in every feature the evidence
of how cities by mere attrition grind men down into
conventional similarities.  That the boy should fear
his father was natural, for Archibold Masterman was
a man whose will was law; that he should not wholly
understand him was also natural, for a vast world
of experience lay between them: but his pride in him
was a genuine and steadfast feeling, all the more
remarkable because the father was uneducated, and
the son had drunk deep of the waters of Oxford
scholarship.

With the sister, Helen, the case was very different.
Arthur had inherited from his father the gift of
self-poise.  He knew how to look at things with a single
eye, to meditate on them in silence, and to take up
an attitude of his own toward them.  Helen's whole
nature was of lighter calibre.  She was a girl easily
influenced by chance acquaintance, more ready to
enjoy life than to examine its underlying elements, in
all things more comformable to conventions.  When
she came home from an expensive finishing-school,
she brought with her less her own character than a
character imposed upon her by her teachers.  She took
her place in life with an instant alacrity of
adaptation; formed a dozen light-hearted friendships,
became popular for her vivacity and gaiety, and in her
heart thought her father dull.  She had none of the
sense of his essential bigness that Arthur had.  She
had no curiosity about him: he was simply an element
in the convenient furniture of her own life.  She
sometimes wished him a little more polished, resented
his brusque manners, misunderstood his heavy silence,
and was inclined to be ironical about his social
ambitions.  Yet these same social ambitions were the
chief common bond between them.  Through them she
saw her road to a life that would gratify her vanity.
Somewhere, in the dim future, she discerned a golden
world, which she hoped to enter when her father's
force of character had broken down the barriers of
social caste.  What her father's character really was, or
by what means he meant to reach that desirable golden
world, she did not ask.  As long as the result was
reached, she had no curiosity about the process.

The last person in the family group to be remarked
is the mother.  She sat at the end of the long table,
dispensing tea and coffee with an air of weary
assiduity.  In her youth she had had some claim to beauty,
and there still clung to her a kind of tired elegance.
Her hair, once blond, had become almost white, and
lay in rippled fullness over a forehead much lined.
Her face was without colour, the eyebrows dark and
beautifully curved, the eyes gray and clear, with a
certain startled expression, as if life had presented to
her little else than a series of unforeseen surprises.
She was a very silent woman; silence was her
dominating quality, but it was enigmatic silence.  Persons
of effusive and flamboyant manners found her silence
scarcely distinguishable from scorn; people of
vivacious temperament called it stolidity; the general
impression among her acquaintance was that it was
significant of a nature at once cold and colourless.  They
were all wrong, however.  And those were yet further
from the truth who confused her silence with placidity.
There were times when a sudden flash of fire in the
gray, watchful eyes witnessed to an inner heat.  If
she spoke little, it was not because she felt little--it
was rather because she realised the total ineffectiveness
of language to express her thought.  Helen had
characteristically never tried to understand her mother.
But as Arthur had grown older, and especially since
his return from Oxford, he had often found himself
speculating on the real nature of his mother's
character.  He saw her, an apparent automaton, content
to fill an automatic place in life, making no claims
for herself, offering no opposition to the claims of
others, apparently desirous of squeezing herself into
a position of neglected insignificance; but he was acute
enough to know that all this self-effacement was
artificial.  What were her real relations with his father?
Was she a woman simply overborne by his superior
weight?  How much of her silence sprang from fear
of his heavy-handed judgments?  But no sooner did
such thoughts visit him than the boy recoiled from
them with a sense of their indelicacy.  Not to
speculate at times upon the relations of his parents was
impossible in one who was just at that stage of
observation when the entire area of life is an object of
intense curiosity; but to cherish or pursue such
thoughts was too much like violating a privacy which
both nature and custom had declared sacred.  Yet of
one thing he was sure: his mother's native force of
character was not inferior to his father's, and her
silence rested on a deep-lying intensity of
temperament, not on apathy.

The meal pursued its common course of dullness.
Luke retailed some petty gossip about a family named
Vickars, who had recently joined the church; and
Beverley contrived to get upon his usual topic of fiscal
reform, producing as his own opinions the substance
of a leading article which had appeared in the
morning paper.  No one took any notice of Beverley, but
Luke's topic of conversation proved more interesting,
especially to the only other deacon present, a middle-aged,
slightly gray man, with quick, crafty eyes, called
Scales.  Scales kept the record of the seat-holders, and
felt that Beverley was intruding on his own peculiar
domain when he described the Hilary Vickars, the
new family which had joined the congregation.

"I know them very well," he remarked.  "They
have only taken two sittings, and they are not the
sort of people who will add much strength to the
church.  They live in a small house in Lonsdale
Road--one of your houses, sir," he added, turning to
Masterman.

"A very good class of people live in Lonsdale Road,
I believe," said Masterman drily.

"Oh yes, of course--I know that; and in the changing
conditions of the neighbourhood a street of houses
like Lonsdale Road is a great benefit to the locality.
But this Hilary Vickars only rents a part of a house,
I am informed, and that is what I meant when I said
he wouldn't add much strength to the church."

"Hilary Vickars," said Arthur.  "Why, isn't he
a writer?  I think I saw his name mentioned the other
day as the author of a novel which appeared this spring."

"Very likely," said Scales.  "Now I think of it,
some one told me he wrote for the papers.  I wonder
now if he couldn't give the church a write-up in _The
Weekly Journal_ some day?"

"In that case he might prove a greater accession
to the church than you imagine," said Beverley, who
was always glad to score a point against Scales, whose
assumption of authority he disliked.

Scales made no reply.  He really had no information
about Hilary Vickars, beyond the fact that he
had taken a sitting in the church.  As he never read
a book of any kind, nor a literary journal, he was
quite ignorant of Hilary Vickar's pretensions as a
writer.  But since Beverley appeared to think Vickars
an acquisition of some value, he was eager to prove
the contrary.  He remembered opportunely that it was
immediately after John Clark's sermon on jerry-building
that Vickars had applied for sittings, and
immediately said so, with a crafty glance at Masterman.

"Of course I don't know what other people think,"
he added, "but I consider that sermon an outrage."

Arthur flushed.

"Do you really?" he asked.  "It seems to me that
to say that is to beg the whole question.  The real,
and therefore the only, question is, Was it true?"

Masterman turned his heavy, frowning gaze on Arthur.

"We won't discuss that here," he said.  "If you
are ready, gentlemen, we will adjourn to my office."

The men rose and left the room, Masterman leading
the way.  When the office door closed, Masterman
at once began to speak.

"I don't propose to beat about the bush," he said;
"it isn't my way.  You all know just why we are
here, and what the subject of discussion is.  It's Clark."

The others remained silent.

"Have you nothing to say?" he asked, with a
sombre glance at Scales.

"We would all prefer to hear you first," said Scales.
"Have you any course to propose?"

"Yes, I have," said Masterman, in a formidable
voice.  "I've had about enough of Clark.  I know
he's a good preacher and all that, but he's greatly
changed.  For weeks past he has been attacking people
from the pulpit.  That's not the kind of thing we pay
him for, and it must stop.  Unless it stops, either
he or I must leave the church, and it's for you to choose."

Thus bluntly adjured, the fountains of discussion
were at once open.  Masterman lit a cigar, and sat
before the big writing-table, smoking stolidly.  He
had shot his bolt, and was pretty sure of its effect.
He had the great advantage of having meditated on
his course with sober boldness.  He knew very well
that he could do without the church better than it
could do without him.  He did not wish to leave it,
but he had now reached a point in his career when
he was relatively indifferent to its advantages.  It
would not hurt him much if he did join the rival
Episcopal church in the neighbourhood, which had
recently become quite popular under a new incumbent
of mellifluous voice and no particular convictions.  It
might even help him socially--conceivably it might.
But that was a course which he did not mean to take
except under extreme pressure.  It would certainly
have the aspect of defeat, and to be defeated by John
Clark was intolerable.

As he saw the matter, the issue was absolutely clear.
Clark could no longer hold his own if he should oppose
him.  A church can always get a minister, but a
minister could not always get a church.  If Clark should
recognise the weakness of his position, and amend his
ways--well, he was not vindictive, and he would accept
any reasonable compromise.  No, he was neither
vindictive nor unreasonable, but he meant to have his way,
and the only question in debate was by what means he
should secure it.

To Beverley's cautious platitudes and Luke's halting
remonstrances he scarcely listened, but when at last
Scales began to speak, he was all attention.  He knew
better than to place Scales in the category with Luke
and Beverley.  Although his social position was not
much superior to theirs, yet he had by suavity and
some real ability insinuated himself into a place of
some authority in the counsels of the church.  People
listened to him.  He always spoke with gravity, and
with a certain air of deprecation, as of one who
admitted his humility, but was quietly aware of his
importance.  And he usually knew exactly what to say
to influence opinion, for he had a habit of collecting
privately the opinions of other people before he
announced his own.  Nothing sounds so like wisdom in
debate as for a speaker to give back in clear form the
half-articulated opinions of his audience, and in this
art Scales was an adept.  Therefore Masterman
listened to him eagerly, when he began in his usually
non-committal voice to array reasons and suggest a course.

Open opposition would not do, he remarked.  That
would in all probability stiffen Clark in his views,
and rally round him those who agreed with him.  But
it was a known fact that Clark was about to pay a
long-projected visit to the Holy Land.  Let them give
him a cordial send-off--they might even give him a
cheque toward his expenses.  Then, when he was
gone, would be the time to call a special meeting to
inquire into the condition of the church.  At such
a meeting people would speak freely, as they would
not if Clark were present.  Of course no one could
prophesy exactly what might happen, but it would not
be surprising if a good deal of opposition developed
both to the minister and his views.

"Which means in plain words?" interrupted Masterman.

"That possibly he may not come back," said Scales
quietly.

"I will be no party to getting rid of the minister,"
said Beverley.

"Certainly not," said Scales.  "But it is possible--I
only say it is possible, you know--that he may resign."

"Under compulsion, you mean?"

"Not at all.  Simply in recognition of inevitable facts."

Masterman's grim mouth relaxed in a broad smile.
His eye rested on Scales with a glance of ironic
admiration.  What a pity such a man was after all
only a superior clerk, with no opportunity to display
his diplomatic gifts except upon the narrow stage
of church affairs.  Yet he was conscious too of a
curious element of repulsion which mingled with his
admiration of the clerk's astuteness.  His mind, which
half an hour before had been filled with hot enmity
against the minister, now recoiled swiftly and inclined
to his defence, when he saw the kind of weapons
which Scales meant to use against him.  He was a
man both by nature and by habit not delicate in his
use of means to attain an end; he could be both cruel
and unscrupulous upon occasion; but he had no taste
for deliberate perfidy, he had no capacity for
meanness, and he contemplated the narrow-shouldered,
suave-tongued clerk with a rising disgust.

"I don't like your plan," he broke forth loudly.
"That Holy Land scheme of yours, getting rid of
Clark and then attacking him, it's mean, it's too much
like tying a rope across a road to trip up a man in
the dark whom you dare not tackle openly."

"It's only a suggestion, sir," said Scales deferentially.

"It had better remain a suggestion, then."

He turned his back on Scales, and began to arrange
the papers on his desk.  It was the signal that the
conference was over.  Luke and Beverley soon left,
but Scales remained.

"I don't think you quite appreciate your own
position in this affair," Scales remarked.

"My position?  What do you know of my position?"

"More than I cared to say before the others.  I
would like to ask you a question."

"Ask away," Masterman retorted grimly.

"Well then, do you know the real reason why Clark
preached that sermon?"

"Oh, I suppose it was the expression of the
new-fangled socialism he professes."

"In part, yes.  But there was a personal element,
too.  Do you recollect a church you built at Orchard
Green about ten years ago?"

Masterman's face darkened, for he knew very well
what was coming.  He had received more than one
letter lately from the trustees of Orchard Green Church,
who complained that the west wall of the edifice was
sinking, owing to imperfect foundations.  It would
have to be rebuilt, and they naturally traced their
disaster to his bad workmanship.  Hitherto he had
taken no notice of these letters.  The people who
wrote them were not persons of any influence.  They
had no legal claim upon him.  Of course his work
had been properly certified by the architect at the
time of its completion, and in any case the lapse
of ten years made him immune from all responsibility.
Nevertheless, it was not an affair that
he cared to have generally known, and he was
startled at Scales' reference to the Orchard Green Church.

"Well," Scales continued, "it seems Clark has
friends at Orchard Green.  When he went to see them
a little time ago, they told him that the walls of the
church were sinking.  They had uncovered a part of
the foundations to discover the cause, and had found
instead of sound concrete a rotten mixture of
oyster-shells and road-gravel.  Of course they told him that
you were the builder, and he came back raging.  Then
he preached his sermon."

"And you disapproved his sermon?"

"Certainly--certainly," Scales replied in an eager voice.

"Even though his facts were right?"

"Ah!  I couldn't agree to that, sir.  And I'm sure
you wouldn't admit it."

Masterman threw away his cigar, lit another, and
stood regarding Scales with a sardonic eye.
Somehow the craft of the clerk did not appear to him the
admirable quality that it had seemed half an hour
earlier.  To rob upon a large scale was one thing;
to cheat the mind into false conclusions was quite
another.  The first he had done, and would do again;
but by a strange paradox this robber in action
remained honest in thought, and could not bring himself
to say the thing he did not mean.  He felt again that
spasm of aversion to Scales, and with his aversion
there was mixed a strong curiosity to know just how
far the clerk's supple conscience would serve him, and
what was the part he wished to play.

He wheeled suddenly upon Scales, and broke into
a harsh laugh.

"Is that all you have to say?" he asked.

"Yes, that is all."

"Well, now listen to me.  The facts about the
Orchard Green Church are all right.  I admit them.
They wanted everything as cheap as could be; they
wanted me cheap; so I gave them cheap work just to
balance matters.  Don't think that's an apology, for
it isn't.  As for Clark, I don't object to his saying
anything he likes about the business, but I do object
to his saying it from a pulpit.  He wants to injure me,
and so he can't complain if I get back at him.  But
there's two ways of fighting a man--one's face to face,
and the other's by hitting him behind.  I'm going to
fight honest.  And do you know, Scales, much as I
dislike Clark, I really think I like him better than I
like you, after all."

"I fail to understand----" Scales began.

"Oh no, you don't; you're much too clever for that.
But if you do really want a little light, I'd have you
remember this--that Archibold Masterman was never
frightened yet by threats, and when he fights he fights fair."




III

THE BIG STRONG BEAST

The next morning Masterman wrote a letter to the overjoyed trustees of
the Orchard Green Church, offering to make good without cost all
defects of workmanship in the building which might be justly charged to
him.  He was careful to explain that while they had no legal claim on
him, he regarded this work as a debt of honour.

He had just finished the letter when Arthur came into the office.
Arthur's manner was constrained and almost timid.  Masterman, on the
contrary, was in his most jovial mood.  He had just performed an act
which was not only good in itself, but wise and politic; for, of
course, he knew that his action toward the Orchard Green trustees would
become public, and would be quoted to his credit.

"Well," he began, "getting a bit tired of doing nothing?  Not that I
grudge you your liberty, you know.  I promised you a year to look
around, before you settle to your life-work, and I shall stick to my
bargain.  But I confess it will be a glad day for me when I write
'Masterman & Son' over my doors."

"I'm very far from doing nothing, sir," he answered.  "Oxford is one
world, and London quite another.  I am learning every day a lot of
things Oxford never taught me."

"Of course you are.  London's a big world, and the things it has to
teach are the things that count.  Not that Oxford isn't worth while
too.  It gives a man a start in life nothing else can give.  That's why
I sent you there, you know."

"Yes, I know, father, and I am grateful to you."

"Nothing to be grateful for, my boy.  I owed it to you."  His face
softened with a musing look very unusual with him.  "I got no kind of
start myself, you know," he continued.  "At fifteen I was working in a
brickfield.  When I went home at night, my father used to beat me.  I
don't think I ever hated any one as I hated my father.  One day I
struck back, and ran away from home.  Queer thing--I was always sorry
for that blow.  I used to lie awake at nights for weeks after,
wondering if I really hurt the old man.  From that day to this I never
saw him any more.  But I'm still sorry for that blow.  Sons shouldn't
hit their parents, anyway.  I ought to have let him go on beating me;
he'd got the habit, and I could have stood it all right.  Well, well,
it's such a long time ago that I can hardly believe it ever happened."

He stopped suddenly, with a lift of the shoulders, as if he shook off
the burden of that squalid past.  But the rude words had left the son
inexpressibly touched.  A swift picture passed before his mind of a
gaunt boy toiling over heavy tasks, ill-paid, cruelly used, wandering
out into the world lonely and unguided, and a strong passion of pity
and of wonder shook his heart.  Above all, those artless words, "Sons
shouldn't hit their fathers, anyway," fell upon him with the weight of
a reproach.  Had he not already condemned his father in his thoughts?
He had known very well to whom Clark alluded in his sermon, and yet he
had approved.  He had entered the office that morning with the fixed
intent of endorsing Clark's tacit accusation of his father.  And now he
found himself suddenly disarmed.  That old sense of something big about
his father came back to him with redoubled force.  To start like that,
shovelling clay in a brickyard for twelve hours a day, and to become
what he was--oh! it needed a big man to do that, an Esau who was
scarcely to be judged by the standards of smooth-skinned, home-staying
Jacobs.

"I didn't know you had suffered all that, father.  You never told me
that before."

"There's a sight of things I've suffered that I wouldn't like you to
know.  But they were all in the day's work, and I don't complain.  And
that's one thing I want to say to you, and I may as well say it now.
You've got a start I never had, and you won't suffer what I suffered,
but I want you to know that the world's a pretty hard place to live in
anyway.  You can't go through it without being badly hurt somewhere.
You've got to take what you want, or you won't get it.  Talking isn't
going to mend things: life's a big strong beast, and it isn't words but
a bit and bridle and a whip a man needs who is going to succeed.  Now
you're at the talking stage, and I don't complain.  You admire talkers
like Clark, and you think they are doing no end of good, don't you?
Well, you'll learn better presently.  You'll find that the world goes
on much the same as it ever did, in spite of the talkers.  I want you
to digest that fact just as soon as you can, and then you'll be ready
to step down into the thick of life where I am, and help me do the
things I want to do."

"But, father, is what Clark said concerning you true?"

"Do you want to discuss it with me?"

"No; I have no right to ask that."

"Yes, you have.  I want you to join in the business when you're ready,
and you've a right to know what kind of business it is, and, if you
like to put it so, what kind of person your partner is."

"He is my father, and I love him.  That is enough," said Arthur proudly.

"No, it isn't enough.  I had a father, and I didn't love him.  But as
to this business of Clark's.  He found out something against me, and
instead of coming to me about it, he preached a sermon on it, and for
that I don't forgive him.  Well, what was it he found out?  No more
than this--that ten years ago I had to do a cheap job, and I did it
cheaply.  My work has held together ten years, which is about all that
could be expected at the price.  Now I'll tell you what I've done.
I've agreed to do the work over again for nothing.  There's the letter
which I've just written.  You had better read it."

Arthur took the letter, and read it slowly.  His father had risen from
his desk, and stood watching him narrowly.  Perhaps until that moment
he had never quite realised how much his heart was set on having his
son in the business with him.  And he wanted above all things to win
the son's approval.  Perhaps there was some underlying thought of this
kind in his mind when he wrote the letter.  Not that he meant to alter
all the methods of his business to suit his son.  Once in the business,
Arthur would learn what these were by imperceptible degrees, and would
grow accustomed to them.  But just now the father's heart was wholly
set upon concession and conciliation.  He remembered, with a rush of
tenderness, how he had long ago taught the boy to swim.  He could still
see the slight, childish form shivering on the rock above the
swimming-pool.  He had begun with threats, but had soon found them
useless.  Then he had used persuasion and cajolery, until at last the
boy had slipt into the pool, and in a week was swimming with the best
of them.  Well, it was like that now.  If he could but cajole him into
the deep stream of life, that was enough; when the deep water heaved
beneath his feet, he would have to do what the others did in pure
self-defence.

"Well?" he said at last.

Arthur laid down the letter and turned a shining face upon his father.

"It is a noble letter, father.  Forgive me that I misjudged you."

"That's all right, then."

"You have taught me a lesson.  I shall not forget it."

"Oh! don't take it too seriously, my boy.  It is only a small affair,
after all."

But each knew that it was not a small affair.  In that moment these two
opposite natures were nearer together than they had ever been before,
and, although neither knew it, nearer than they would ever be again.

Arthur left his father with a strong sense of exaltation.  The cloud of
misgiving concerning his father's methods of business had miraculously
dissolved.  In the quick rebound of feeling he was inclined to judge
himself intolerant and unjust, and his father's image glowed before his
mind, endued with heroic virtues.  He shuddered when he thought of his
father's youth, with its dreadful disabilities; he kindled with
admiring ardour when the thought of his father's triumph over a weight
of circumstance which would have crushed a weaker man.  If some of the
mire of the pit yet clung to him, if in many things he was crude,
violent, narrow, it was not surprising; the marvel was that his faults
were not more numerous and more unpardonable.  As Arthur went to his
room, he caught a vision of himself in the mirror of his wardrobe--a
slight figure admirably clothed, a face fresh and unlined, with white
forehead and close curling hair, the picture of youth delicately
nurtured, upon whom the winds of life had not blown roughly--and he was
filled with compunction at the contrast afforded by that other picture
of a poor drudging boy toiling in a brickfield and beaten by a drunken
parent.  In spite of all his superficial superiorities, he seemed a
creature of small significance beside this Titanic father of his.

It was an exquisite spring morning, one of those mornings when London
draws her first fresh, unimpeded breath after the long, choking fogs of
winter.  The lawn lay green beneath the window, presided over by a busy
thrush, who flirted his wings in the strong sunlight, and stopped at
intervals to address a long mellow note of rapture to the blue sky; the
japonica had hung the garden wall with crimson blossoms; the poplars
took the light upon their slender spires, till each burned with yellow
flame.  Nature, unconquered by the gross antipathy of man, was invading
the brick Babylon, flinging brocades of light upon the beaten ways, and
filling them with the music of the pipes of Pan.  Arthur could not
resist the call.

He felt a need of solitude.  He had many thoughts that cried aloud for
readjustment.  He stepped out in the blither air, and took his way to
Hampstead Heath.  Soon the narrow streets were left behind, the long
hill rose above him, and his feet trod the furze-clad slopes, little
altered since the day when Roman legions camped upon their crests, and
eighteenth-century highwaymen concealed themselves among their hollows.
He walked far and fast, meditating much on life.  It seemed a wonderful
thing to be alive, where so many generations of men had fought and
perished, to be for a little time sole possessor of a world that had
cast off such myriads of tenants; and there came to him, with an almost
painful wonder, the sense of the richness of his opportunity.  He would
make his own life something worthy.  It was true, as his father had
said, that he started at a point of vantage not given to every one.  By
so much that he started higher, he must soar higher, go farther.  But
in the midst of all his exultant thoughts there intruded his father's
terse picture of life as a big strong beast only to be mastered by bit
and whip and bridle.  And at that thought the tide of exaltation began
to leave him.  He walked more slowly, became listless, was conscious of
weariness.  It no longer seemed an easy and a rapturous thing to live;
life rose before him as a menace.

In the early afternoon he came to the Spaniards' Inn, and entered it.
Coming from the brilliant air into the dim room of the inn, he did not
at first recognise a man already seated there, finishing a frugal meal
of bread and cheese and ale.  The man was tall, with somewhat stooping
shoulders; his face was long and bearded, his forehead high, with thin
dark hair, his eyes dark and penetrating.  He wore a flannel shirt with
a silk tie of some indeterminate colour akin to dull crimson.  He held
a book in one hand, and read as he ate.

As Arthur entered the room he looked up.

"You don't know me, I suppose," he said genially.  "But I know you by
sight at least.  My name is Hilary Vickars."

So this was Hilary Vickars, of whom he had heard Scales speaking at the
deacon's tea.  Now that he looked at him more closely he recognised him
at once.  Among the crowd of ordinary faces in the church, that face
had stood out with a singular distinctness.  It was a face at once
grave and composed, sad and humorous; the face of a man who had striven
much and suffered much, but had retained through all a certain
vivacity, which was distinct from gaiety while including it.  And all
these qualities seemed to rest upon a deeper quality of composure, so
that the final impression was of a man who through suffering had won
his way to some secret knowledge which gave him an air of gentle
authority.

"I have often wished to know you," said Arthur.

"And I you."

"Why should you wish to know me?"

"Oh! a fancy of mine.  It is my business to study people.  And you do
not look like the run of folk in Highbourne Gardens.  Most of the folk
in Highbourne Gardens are dear, good, comfortable folk, but stodgy.
They are as alike as peas.  I could tell you their exact method of
life, even to what they have for breakfast.  They are products of
manufacture, all turned out just alike to the last hair, and all doing
just the same things every day, without the least variation.  That is
what stodginess means."

"And I am not stodgy?" Arthur laughed.

"No; you are fluid.  You have not hardened into shape yet.  You are a
problem."

Arthur looked at the dark, ironic face, and felt a sudden friendliness
for the man.  It was a long time since he had conversed with a man of
ideas; he had scarcely done so since he had left Oxford.  The church
young men he had found distasteful to him.  They were good young men
for the most part, much enamoured of respectability, laboriously
virtuous, cherishing many mild scruples about the use of the world and
inclined to judge it by standards quite foreign to their real tastes;
but they had no mental horizons.  They were also inclined to be a
little shy of him, as a rich man's son with a superior education; a
little envious, too, and not at home in his presence, so that
intercourse with them had not been easy.  But here was a man who spoke
another kind of language; it was that language of ideas which at once
asserts kinship, among those to whom it is intelligible.

Arthur drew his chair to the table, and soon found himself absorbed in
conversation.  Hilary Vickars talked slowly, with hesitating pauses--a
trick which lent emphasis to what he said.  It was as though he fumbled
for the right word, and then flashed it out like a sudden torch.
Arthur noticed, too, that he occasionally did not pronounce a word in
the way common among educated men.  The variation was slight; it could
scarcely have been called erroneous; but it suggested some deficiency
of early training.  Perhaps the boy's face betrayed his surprise too
ingenuously, for after one of these variations Vickars said abruptly:

"I envy you.  It was my dream to go to Oxford.  I didn't dream true in
that case."

"Perhaps you have done just as well without Oxford," said Arthur
generously.

"No, I have never cherished that--delusion.  Deprivations in middle
life don't matter; but deprivations in early life can never be made
up."  He paused a moment, and then added.  "I was a gardener before I
became an author."

Arthur looked his surprise, whereat Vickars laughed.

"Oh!  I assure you," he said, "even gardeners have their dreams.  Mine,
as I said, was Oxford, for I spent my youth within sight of her spires,
within sound of her bells.  I believed I could become a scholar;
indeed, I still believe my old belief not quite foolish.  I spent all
my money on grammars and dictionaries which I did not know were
obsolete, got to know the classics in a crude fashion, and went on
imagining that some day I might enter the University.  Of course it was
all an absurd dream; you do not need to be told that.  My first real
discovery in life was that learning is the privilege of wealth.  That
led me to some other discoveries of the same nature, the sum of which
was that the great mass of mankind are born disinherited, and that I
was one of them.  It hurt me dreadfully at the time, but in the long
run it was the making of me.  It set me studying life as it is, not as
it once was in ancient times.  And the more I studied it, the more I
came to admire common men and women, until at last I was glad that I
belonged to them.  It is a great thing to know just to whom you belong;
no man does any kind of good work till he knows that."

"But you are not a common man," Arthur interrupted.  "You are a writer."

"Oh!  I have some aptitudes that are not common, no doubt; I am
immodest enough to think that.  But if I am a writer, I write of common
people.  It is common life that interests me, the virtues, vices,
trials, heroisms, debasements, and nobilities of plain people.  But I
did not mean to talk about myself, and you must forgive me."

"There is nothing to forgive.  What you say deeply interests me.  My
father said a thing to-day about life which has been in my thoughts a
good deal, and you make me recall it.  By the way, do you know my
father?"

"Yes, I know him."

He spoke the words with a certain caustic accent which did not pass
unnoticed.

"You mean you do not like him," Arthur replied with a flash of anger.

"No, I don't say that.  I know him merely as a type.  But what did he
say?"

"He said life was a hard business, in which one was sure to be hurt;
that it was a big strong beast which could only be subdued by whip and
bridle."

"An excellent definition.  Life is strong and cruel and hard.  Men who
really live soon discover that."

"Have you found it so?"

"Yes.  And I've seen the big strong beast tread thousands down--the
people who haven't got the whip and bridle."

He spoke the words with remarkable intensity.  They were flashed from
him rather than spoken.  Then, as if ashamed of his display of feeling,
he rose from the table, and said in a matter-of-fact tone, "The evening
is coming on.  I must be going."

They went out of the inn together.  The long gray road with its groups
of trees and dim houses lay before them; and, as the darkness deepened,
the distant lights of London flung a yellow conflagration on the sky.
"That's where the big strong beast lies," said Vickars.  "You can hear
his mighty hooves at work."  And, as he spoke, from that great caldron
of life, that lay packed and mist-swathed to the eastward of the road,
there did come up a sound as of waves upon a groaning beach, a sound of
crashing and rending, mingled with the dull thud of wheels and the
demoniac shriek of engine and of factory whistles.

But he did not recur to the theme.  The talk became trivial,
commonplace; once only did it touch a theme of interest, when Vickars
recalled how Coleridge and Keats and Haydon and Leigh Hunt had trodden
that same road, each with his own separate vision of what life meant,
and what man was meant to do in it.

It was nearly dark when they reached the neighbourhood of Highbourne
Gardens.  Presently Vickars stopped before a small house, one of many,
in a long gravelled street.  The houses were all alike; each had its
strip of garden, its bow-window, its door with glass panels, its aspect
of decent mediocrity.  There was still enough light to see that though
the houses were comparatively new, a kind of premature decay had
overtaken them.  The iron garden-gates sagged upon their hinges, and
the bricks appeared to be joined with sand, which errand-boys had
picked out in deep grooves while waiting in the porch for orders.  The
dilapidation of age may be respectable and even romantic, but in this
dilapidation of newness there was something inexpressibly depressing.

"This is where I live," said Vickars.

"I don't think I was ever in this street before," said Arthur.  "It
must have been built while I was at Oxford."

"It was," said Vickars.  "Your father built it."

They said good-night and parted.




IV

MRS. BUNDY

A few days after Arthur's memorable conversation with his father,
Archibold Masterman entered on one of his recurring fits of gloom.  He
went about the house silently, ate and drank in silence, took little
notice of any member of his family, and sat alone in his office till
long past midnight.  The causes of his silence were, as usual,
inscrutable.  Sometimes he looked on Arthur with a long, brooding,
wistful gaze, as if he would like to confide in him, but the confidence
never came.  Possibly if he had followed up his recent burst of
tenderness with complete confidence, the boy might have been won.  But
in Masterman's nature there was a curious element of perversity, which
often prevailed over the dictates of reason and even of self-interest.
It was this element of perversity that lay at the root of much that
seemed complex in his character, exhibiting itself sometimes in gusty
tenderness, sometimes in unscrupulous hardness, so that to the casual
observer he appeared a man of formidable moods, none of whose actions
could be predicated from any precedent experience.

Once, when Arthur said timidly, "Can I be of any help to you in the
office, sir?" he replied curtly, "None whatever.  I'll tell you when I
want you," and the boy said no more.  His sister had gone away to spend
some weeks with a friend, his mother was as silent as his father, and
he was left more completely to himself than he had ever been.

It was little wonder that he turned eagerly from that gloomy house to
the society of such friends as were available.  Among these was Hilary
Vickars, for whom he had conceived a strong liking.  He walked with him
occasionally in the afternoons, but as yet Arthur had not visited the
house.  Another friend, whose house was always open to him, and had
been since he was a boy, was a certain Mrs. Bundy, a motherly,
cheerful, eccentric Scotchwoman.  She was a person of extraordinary
slovenliness and good-humour, indefatigably kind, generous, and
light-hearted, who had been so used to carrying burdens herself that
she cheerfully shouldered other people's burdens as a kind of right.
Every one knew where Mrs. Bundy lived; lonely Scotch youths who had
come to London to push their fortunes found in her an ardent
sympathiser; and should one come to her sick with the shame of some
sudden defeat of virtue, he never failed to find in her a shrewd and
optimistic friend.  Over such youths she exercised a directorship as
complete as that of a Jesuit Father; she inspected with a jealous eye
their morals and their underwear; mended for them, dosed them when they
had colds, fed them with anything that came to hand, took charge of
their money, made them small loans, and addressed them with apostolic
fervour upon the perils and the pitfalls of London life.

"Poor laddies!" she would say, "they need mothering," and her ample
breast swelled with pity at the picture of their loneliness in shabby
London lodgings, where they did unequal battle with rapacious
land-ladies.  Not that she herself was childless; she was the proud
mother of two of the most odious children in the locality, who spent
their whole time in making life intolerable to their neighbours.  But
to her, of course, they were merely riotous young angels, whose
mischief was the proof of hearty spirits, and whose worst faults
reposed upon a solid base of good intentions.

Life for these youngsters was merely a joke and an adventure, and, to
tell the truth, Mrs. Bundy's view of life was not unlike theirs.  Her
whole existence had been fugitive and precarious, for her husband was a
speculator who had followed for thirty years the will-o'-the-wisp of
sudden fortune.  He was a solemn little man, with large, dreamlike
eyes, whose immense power of industry had been almost uniformly turned
in wrong directions.  At the whisper of gold, silver, lead, coal,
nitrates, oil, land-booms, he was ready at a moment's notice to wander
off into the most inaccessible places of the earth, from which he
returned sometimes penniless, and sometimes with a profusion of spoil
which he soon contrived to lose again.  Most women would have tired of
these fruitless quests, but Mrs. Bundy's faith in her husband never
faltered, and all the strange caprices of his fortune did not
disconcert her.  When her adventurer returned with bags of gold, she at
once rose to the occasion, moved into a larger house, rode in her
carriage for a few weeks, and thoroughly enjoyed the sunshine while it
lasted.  When the luck failed, she went back contentedly to the
cheapest house she could find, used up her fine gowns in household
service, and waited hopefully for the return of Bundy.  He always came
back, though more than once he had been away a whole year; and his
return was sometimes dramatic--as, for instance, when he appeared at
midnight, and flung a diamond necklace round her throat, while she hid
in her pocket a county-court summons for a year's milk bills which she
could not pay.

"Come in wi' you, my bonny lad," was the usual greeting to Arthur, and
she would lead him into the kitchen with the air of a duchess
introducing him to a salon; for it should be said that at this time the
Bundy star was in eclipse.  And then she would sit down and tell him
wondrous tales of people she had known, much too grotesque and tragic
for any reasonable world, with stories still more grotesque of the
wanderings of Bundy in Brazil and South Africa, and the narrow escapes
he had had of being a multimillionaire.  Just now, it appeared, he was
engaged on some mysterious business in Canada, where a handful of
dollars judiciously expended might purchase an estate as large as
England.  And she would tell these stories with such a vivid art, and
with such good faith and humour, that Arthur would roar with laughter,
which perhaps was what she wished him to do, for he often came to her
with a clouded brow.

"It's small good staying in England these days, if you want to
prosper," she would remark.  "What wi' all the ships upon the sea and
all the new lands that lie beyond, it's a shame for a youth to sit at
home.  You don't get any fun out of life that way."

Arthur might have retorted that there did not seem to be much fun in a
kind of life that left Mrs. Bundy sole tenant of a ruinous old house in
Lion Row, whose rent she could scarcely pay, while Bundy wandered in
Brazil or Canada, but Mrs. Bundy was so unaffectedly enamoured of her
lot that he never said it.  On the contrary, there was sown in his mind
a little germ of adventure which was to ripen later on, and he got
exhilarating glimpses of the romance and bigness of life.

She examined his hand one night, for she affected a knowledge of
palmistry, and ended by saying, "You'll have your adventures before
long"; and in spite of his entire scepticism, a pleasurable thrill shot
through his veins at the prophecy.

"You've got a hand like Bundy's," she remarked; whereat he laughed, and
said rather rudely that he had no wish to resemble Bundy.

"Bundy's had his bad times," she retorted, "but he's had his good times
too.  But if you asked him, I don't think he'd regret anything, and
he'd live the same life again if he had the choice.  And so would I,
for that matter."

And then she swept across the kitchen in her soiled silk dress with the
air of pride and dignity that would have become a palace, and Arthur
was left reflecting on the happy courage of her temperament as
something to be greatly envied.

He learned much from Mrs. Bundy in those weeks, and above all he
learned to love her.  She was, in spite of all her eccentricities, so
motherly, and such a fountain of inexhaustible sympathy, that he got
into the way of confiding to her many of his private thoughts.

One night he spoke to her about his father, and of his father's plans
for him.

"He wants me to enter the business," he said.

"And why not, laddie?"

"Frankly, I don't like it."

"That's neither here nor there.  You've got to live, and as long as a
business is honest, one business is as good as another."

"But is it honest?"

He had not meant to ask the question.  It came from him unawares.  It
was a long-silent, long-concealed thought, suddenly become audible.

"What is dishonest in it?"

"I can't quite tell.  But I do know that my father buys land for
speculative building, and puts up houses that are built of the
rottenest material, and sells them to ignorant people."

"Aye, laddie, your father's like the man in the parable, 'an austere
man, gathering where he has not strawed.'  But he's a strong man, is
your father.  There's few stronger men than Archibold Masterman.

"Strong, but is he good?  I mean, is his way of life right?"

"I canna' tell about that, laddie.  But if I was you, I think I
wouldn't ask that question about my father.  There's a lot of goodness
in men, and my conviction is that most men are about as good as they
know how to be.  There's many people wouldn't call Bundy good, because
he's what they call a speculator, and has to live with wild men, and
doesn't go to church when he's home; but I know he's got a heart of
gold.  He never cheated any man knowingly.  He's lost himself much more
than men have lost by him.  And he'd always give away his last penny to
the poor."

"Ah, but that's not the point.  I know my father is good in that way.
Why, only the other day he rebuilt a church entirely at his own expense
for people who had no legal claim at all on him.  But it's his
business, it's the method of it.  And I must find an answer, for I must
join him in the business or refuse it."

"Well, if you feel like that, refuse it, laddie.  Not that I'll say
you're wise, nor even right.  Fathers have some claims on their sons
after all, and these claims ought to come before your own tastes.  Only
if you know you couldn't draw together with your father, and would only
make him and yourself unhappy trying to, then the best thing is to say
so at once."

"I suppose you are right," he said in a lugubrious voice.  And then he
added, "There's another trouble, too.  How am I to get my living?"

"You'll find that out fast enough when you become acquainted with
hunger," she said with a laugh.

"But if I don't go into my father's business, God only knows what I can
do.  I don't seem to be fitted for anything in particular."

"I wouldn't worry about that, either," she replied.  "There's very few
men do the things they think they're fitted for; but they find out how
to do other things that are just as important.  There's Bundy, now;
you'll never guess what he thought himself fitted for when I married
him."

"Well, what?"

"A clergyman."

Arthur laughed profanely.  The thought of the nefarious Bundy, whose
life had been spent in the promotion of companies of a singular
collapsibility, as a clergyman was too ridiculous.

"Ah! you may laugh, but let me tell you he'd have made a first-rate
parson if he'd gone to college, and started fair."

She spoke with heat, which immediately passed into laughter, as she
caught a glimpse of the whimsicality of the thing.

"Ye canna' say Bundy has not a fine flow of language when he chooses,
and he can look as solemn as a bishop, and I'm sure he would have had a
fine bedside manner," she continued.  "But my belief is that a man who
can do one thing well can do any other thing just as well."

"That's a consoling faith, at any rate."

"It isn't a faith, it's a fact.  It's just a question of ability.  The
worst of you London-bred lads is that you all want a place made for
you, and you don't see that the strong man makes a place for himself."

Arthur did not quite like that, and he liked it the less because he
knew that it was true.  For was not he London bred?  Had not his path
been made easy for him?  And how could that happen without some
emasculation of nature?  To grow up in streets, carefully paved and
graded, punctually lit at night; to live in houses where a hundred
conveniences sprang up to meet the idle hand, to be guarded from
offence, provided for without exertion--ah, how different that life
from the primitive life of man, familiar with rain and tempest, with a
hundred rude and moving accidents, always poised upon the edge of
peril, and existing instant by instant by an indomitable exercise of
will and strength!  For the first time he caught a vital glimpse of the
primeval life of man, and recognised its self-sufficing dignity.  For
the first time he realised that the essence of all true living lay in
daring.  It was a truth which neither London nor Oxford had imparted to
him.  He had not even learned it through his own father, whom he knew
conventionally rather than really.  Strangely enough, it came to him
now through the talk of Mrs. Bundy, wise with a wisdom which
vicissitude alone could teach, and through the somewhat sorry epic of
her husband's hazardous adventures.

"The strong man makes a place for himself"--it was sound doctrine and
indubitable fact as well; but was he one of the strong?  The question
hung upon the confines of his mind, a whispered interrogation, which
disturbed and sometimes tortured him.  Youth is always a little
ludicrous, often pathetically ludicrous, and in nothing so much as in
its capacity for taking itself seriously.  Life seems such an immensely
solemn business at one-and-twenty.  Later on we discover that the
decisions on which we supposed angels waited are of scant interest to
any one but ourselves, and that the world goes on much the same
whatever we do or say.

Yet youth is right, even in its crude vanity and egoism, for the
history of the world would be poor reading if it recorded nothing
better than the commonsense and commonplace performances of middle-age.
Mrs. Bundy, from her fifty years' coign of vantage, saw life as Arthur
could not see it; above all, she saw its width, which was a great
vision to attain.

"No man really enjoys life," she said to him one day, "unless he starts
poor."

"How do you make that out?"

"Because the poor are the only people capable of adventures," she
replied.  "As long as a man is poor, anything may happen to him; but
after he becomes rich, nothing happens."

"But you would like to be rich, wouldn't you?"

"Not rich enough to want for nothing," she replied.

As usual she fell back upon her own experience for wisdom, and drew a
shrewd and humorous sketch of one of her episodic emergences into
wealth.

"Bundy was really rich that time," she remarked.  "He'd struck oil in
Texas, and had only to sit still and let the oil work for him.  It was
good fun at first.  We took a big house at Kensington, and Bundy spent
his time getting cheated over horses, and I spent mine being cheated
over sham Sheraton furniture, and when we tired of that we bought
pictures, until at last the house was so full of things we couldn't get
another stick into it.  'What shall we do now?' says Bundy.  'Let us
try being fashionable,' says I."  [She uttered the word
"fash-ee-on-abell," with an indescribable drawling accent of contempt.]
"So we tried that, too, and drove in the Park, and gave dinner-parties,
and Bundy had to wear dress-clothes, though he never could make out how
to tie his white tie, and made more fuss than enough of it.  We got
plenty of folk to eat our dinners, but a duller lot I never met.  The
men all wanted to talk oil, and the women couldn't talk of anything but
dress, and men and women alike hung round Bundy, and let him know as
plainly as they dared that all they came for was to see if they could
get any oil-shares out of him.  After a time we grew tired of being
fashionable, and Bundy says, 'I think we'll have a yacht.'  So we
bought a yacht, though neither of us liked the sea, and we made out a
summer that way.  And all the while the oil was pouring out of those
wells in Texas, and the money was pouring in, and we saw no end to it.
Then Bundy tried being a philanthropist, and that was really
interesting while it lasted.  There wasn't a crank in London--nor, one
would suppose, in Europe, from the look of his mail-bag--that didn't
find him out.  They sat upon his doorstep to catch him coming out, and
hunted him down the street, and all the men he'd ever known anywhere
claimed him as an old friend, so that the poor man lived the life of a
partridge on the mountains, as the saying is.  He grew quite
old-looking, and lost his sleep, and after a time he didn't even read
what the papers said about him, which is a pretty bad sign in a man."

"Poor Mr. Bundy!" said Arthur, in mock commiseration.

"Ah! you may well say it, laddie, and poor Mrs. Bundy, too, for I'd
never been so miserable in my life.  You see, it was the dullness of
the thing that made us miserable.  When you can get everything you
want, you don't want anything after a time."

"And how did it end?"

"Well, one morning I lay a-bed late, for there was nothing particular
to get up for, and I could hear Bundy in his dressing-room, opening and
shutting drawers, as though he couldn't make up his mind what clothes
he wanted to wear.  There came a knock on the outer door, and I heard a
crumpling of paper, and then he whistled.

"'What is it?' I called out.

"He didn't answer, but I heard him rampaging round.  So I jumped out of
bed, and ran into the dressing-room, and there stood Bundy laughing to
himself, and upon my word he looked happier than I had seen him for
twelve months or more.

"'What is it?' I says again.

"And then he looked at me mighty solemn and queer, and says, 'Can ye
bear it?'

"'Bear what?' says I.

"'Oh! nothing much,' says he, 'only we're bust.  The oil's given out.'

"'Then we're poor?' says I.

"'Poor we are,' says he--'poor as Job.  For, you see, I've been
spending everything as it came, thinking that that oil would last for
ever, and now we're bust.'

"'Hallelujah!' says I.  'That's the best news I've heard a long time.'

"He looked at me a minute, kind of doubtful, and then he burst out
laughing, and says, 'I rather think I feel that way myself.'

"'I knew you would,' says I.  And then I put my arms round him, and we
danced round the room, and I give you my word that was the happiest
hour I ever spent in that big house at Kensington.  You see, we'd both
been dying of dullness, though neither of us liked to say it.  We'd got
where there weren't any adventures; and that's why life didn't seem
worth living."

She looked at Arthur with humorous eyes, in which also there was the
gleam of motherly affection and solicitude.

"You're dreadfully afraid of being poor, aren't you, my dear?" she
concluded.  "London makes men feel like that.  And it's because men get
afraid of life that they take the first comfortable groove that offers,
and then all the fun is over for them.  Well, don't you be like that.
If I was you, I'd live my life, and let the question of getting a
living shift for itself.  And remember what I say, for it's true--the
only people who really enjoy life are the poor, because they're the
only people who have lots to look forward to."




V

THE MAGIC NIGHT

Coming home one night along the Lonsdale Road, Arthur found Hilary
Vickars standing at his garden gate, taking the air.  It was June, that
most exquisite of all months in London, when the perfume of summer
finds its way into the narrowest streets, and the imprisoned people
thrill with a new sense of freedom and deliverance.  In the soft
twilight even Lonsdale Road was touched with the idyllic; its impudence
of newness was concealed under a faint wash of mauve, and its tiny
gardens were fresh with the scent of mown grass.

Hilary Vickars himself seemed softened with the hour; when he spoke to
Arthur there was a new kindness in his voice.  Perhaps he could not
have explained his mood; few of us can explain these sudden softenings
that come to us, sometimes through the influence of external things,
sometimes from the welling up in us of founts of tenderness which we
had thought for ever sealed.  A gust of wind among the trees, a bird's
song in the dusk, a girl's voice at her piano, in its first fresh,
unrestrained sweetness--who of us cannot recall how things as slight as
these have had a strange power to provoke some crisis of emotion, which
perhaps has coloured all our after-life?  Hilary Vickars had been
listening that night to his daughter as she sang.  She had sung a song
her mother had been fond of, and in the mind of the widowed man all the
past had leapt into agonised distinctness.  And from that he had passed
to the perception of the daughter's likeness to her mother, and to the
pathos of her youth.  Her voice yet lingered in the air, as he stole
out of the room, and stood bareheaded at the garden gate.  And then he
saw Arthur coming up the road, and as his eye rested on the slim,
graceful figure he again realised this infinite pathos of youth.

"He wants help, and I ought to help him," was his instant thought.

Hitherto a kind of pride had imposed a barrier of reserve between
himself and Arthur.  He had seen him as a rich man's son, the member of
a class for which he had only scorn and anger.  But now he saw him
simply as a youth launching his frail bark upon the perilous sea of
life, and he loved him.  So Nature wrought within him, using his
softened mood for her own ends, and with Nature came Destiny, casting
the first threads of her inscrutable design upon the loom of life.

He held his hand with a lingering pressure, and then said, as if
obeying a resolve imposed upon his own will rather than suggested by
it, "Won't you come in?"

He led the way into the house, and Arthur followed with a glad alacrity.

The narrow hall-way opened upon a room at the back of the house, which
served both as living-room and library.  The only light in the room
came from two candles on the piano brackets.  Between them sat a young
girl, her fingers still upon the keys, her face, rayed with the nimbus
of the candlelight, turned upward with a charming air of expectation
and surprise.

She was not beautiful, judged by the canons of exacting art; yet there
was no artist who could have been indifferent to her, for she possessed
an element of charm much more rare than beauty.  The hair, dark and
abundant, was very simply dressed above a low white forehead; the face
was beautifully moulded, and expressed a delicate fatigue; the mouth,
too large for beauty, was mobile and eager; the eyes were a stag's
eyes, brown and full and limpid.  It was in these that her charm was
concentrated.  They held depth beyond depth, eyes into which the gaze
sank, fathomless as water in a well.

She rose as her father and his guest entered the room.

"My daughter, Elizabeth," he said.

She bowed, and turned toward Arthur the regard of her unfathomable
eyes.  Arthur stood transfixed.  For a long moment his gaze clung to
hers, and a new, strange, pleasurable heat thrilled his blood.  A
subtle, undecipherable telegraphy was in that clinging gaze.  It was as
though soul challenged soul; the citadel of sentience in each awoke to
sudden life, and quivered at the shock of contact, with an emotion half
alarm and half delight.  Then the veil fell between them, and the soul
of each receded into secrecy.

It was a relief to each when Vickars lit the gas, and began to speak in
accents of conventional courtesy.

"This is my work-room," he said.

And indeed the room told its own tale.  Bookshelves, closely packed,
covered each wall; the books lay in heaps upon the floor; and in their
midst stood a wide table piled with manuscripts, proofs, and notebooks.
There was not a single picture in the room, not an ornament of any
kind.  Near the window stood a typewriter and a small table, and on the
other side of the window the piano.

"I suppose there are few rooms in London that know more about
brain-toil than this room--that is, if rooms can receive impressions,
as I sometimes think they can," he continued.  "Certainly none in
Lonsdale Road," he added with a smile.  "Ah! that reminds me of a
story.  When I first came to live here, there was the greatest
curiosity to know what I did for a living.  Lonsdale Road could not
account for any man who did not go to the city every day, and therefore
refused to accept his credentials of respectability.  I never knew how
far this aversion went till one day our little servant told us with
tears that she must leave us.  It took a long time to draw from her her
reason.  You would never guess it.  At last she said, 'Mother say she
thinks you are a burglar.'  And then I found that our neighbours had
actually woven this ingenious romance about us, and I am not sure that
they have discarded it even yet."

He spoke lightly, and yet with an accent of resentment and of hurt
pride.  To Arthur the story was a revelation of the social loneliness
of Vickars's life.  But he was thinking less of the father than the
daughter.  Once more his eyes sought that fair face, and he was
surprised to find no laughter in it; it was evident the story had
pained her.

"Elizabeth does not like that story," said her father, noticing her
silence.

"No, father, I do not.  It makes me hate the world to think it treats
you unjustly."

"Oh! the world's very well, little girl," he replied.  "One doesn't
expect justice from it.  One should be content if the world merely
allows him to live."

"Yet you are always fighting for justice.  You know you are, father."

"Ah! justice for other people--that's a different thing.  But the
condition of such a fight as that is to be indifferent to the question
of justice to one's self.  That is a very small matter indeed."

"That is how he always talks," she answered, with a charming
friendliness of appeal to Arthur.  "He never thinks about himself."

"There, there! we're getting very serious, little girl," Vickars
replied.  "Suppose we change the subject.  We don't often have a guest.
Don't you think a little supper and some music afterwards might fit the
occasion?"

"How forgetful of me!" she said.  She rose and left the room.

"You mustn't take my fine sentiments too seriously, so I give you due
warning," he remarked.  "Men who write books get into the way of
talking their own books.  You'll find, as you come to know me better,
that there's a good deal of--of the artificial in me.  The only merit I
have above other men is that I am conscious of it."

"I have read your last book," said Arthur, "and I found nothing
artificial in it.  I thought it a great book."

"Have you?  Well, I'm glad."  His pale face was illumined for an
instant by the boy's ingenuous praise.  "No, Arthur," he added, "it's
not great.  It is merely true.  And I think I can say this with real
sincerity--I care much more for its truth than for its greatness."

"Are they not the same?" said Arthur.

"Not for this generation.  This is the age of 'best sellers,' and the
book that is called great is usually the book that has least to say
about the truth of life."

"I was not thinking of contemporary opinion."

"Contemporary opinion is the only court of appeal we have.  A book must
justify itself to the generation in which it is written, or be sure of
it no other generation will know anything about it.  Yet I do sometimes
think that truth must make itself heard.  I cherish the belief, in
spite of history and experience."

He spoke with an accent of infinite dejection.  Arthur could find no
words of reply.  If, an hour before, he had been asked what kind of
life came nearest his ideal, perhaps he would have replied, "The
literary life," and he would have instanced Vickars.  Now, as he looked
at the writer's tired face, it was as though the naked realities of
such a life lay before him, stripped of all delusive trappings.  To
drain one's life-blood into books that no one read, to prophesy to deaf
ears and undiscerning eyes, ah! surely there must be a better way of
life than this; and on the instant he knew what that way was.  That
warmth which still pierced his veins spoke to him more clearly than any
voice.  To love--that was life.  To live the lyric life of love--that
was better than to write of it.  And straightway there came to him a
vision of wide plains and deep forests, dotted with the homes of men,
beneath whose roofs lip met lip in faithful kisses, and heart beat to
heart through long nights of sleep, and all the primeval life of man
went on in birth and death, as it had done since the gates of Eden
closed.  Ah! infinite desirable delight of love, strong, and natural,
and enduring, on which the great seal of God had always rested!  In
that moment he ceased to be a boy; his manhood rushed upon him; he
blushed, and in his heart a voice cried, "Elizabeth!"

She re-entered the room at that moment, carrying a supper-tray, and
Arthur could not but observe the supple poise and grace of her young
figure.  She moved easily, with a soft gliding motion; she was dressed
wholly in white, and conveyed an impression of a creature inimitably
virginal.  The face had not lost its look of delicate fatigue, but it
was clear that this fatigue was of the mind rather than the body, and
owed itself to no physical defect.  Both he and Vickars rose together
to clear a place upon the littered writing-table for the supper-tray,
and in performing this act his hand touched hers.  It was but a
feather's touch, but it thrilled him, and his very flesh seemed to
dissolve in a fire of rapture.  Again he sought her eyes, but now they
were averted.  The moment passed like a chord of music that left the
air vibrating.  It seemed to him that all the world must know what had
happened.

Then the current of his life ran back into its normal channels, and he
found himself talking with excited eagerness.  The meal was as simple
as a meal could be, but for him it had ambrosial flavours.  She sat
quite silent, listening, apparently unaware that he talked for her
alone.  Vickars caught the gaiety of his good spirits, and talked as
eagerly as he.  The conversation soon found its accustomed
grooves--books, and London, and the interminable comedy and tragedy of
man.  Presently Vickars happened to mention a young poet who had lately
died, and Arthur asked if he had known him.

"Yes, he came here once.  It was in his last days, when he had finally
discovered that the world had rejected him.  But he never knew why he
was rejected."

"Why was he rejected?"

"Because he could only sing of the past.  He had no vision of the
modern world.  He despised it, and his contempt blinded him to its real
significance.

"I do not think that is quite just, father," said Elizabeth.

"Ah!  I forgot to say," said Vickars, with an admiring glance at his
daughter, "that Elizabeth is a much better critic than I.  She is a
better critic because she is a kinder."

"No, it's not that, father.  My criticism, such as it is, is only
feeling, and I felt that poor Lawson was just finding his way to the
right method when he died.  Don't you remember those lines on London in
his last sonnet?--

  O Calvaries of the poor, dim hills of pain,
    Whose utmost anguish is not nail or thorn,
    The beaten blood-smeared brow, the soft flesh torn,
  But this, that ye are crucified in vain.

The man who wrote those lines surely saw the modern world, and realised
its significance."

She recited the lines slowly, in a low fluty voice which would have
imparted dignity and music to much worse lines.  Arthur listened
entranced.  Surely there was magic in this summer's night, a magic of
the soul as well as of the flesh.  His hand had touched hers, but now
her mind revealed itself, and thrilled his with a subtler contact.  In
one swift glimpse he understood her exquisite sensitiveness, her
pitifulness and tenderness, her strength and goodness; it was as though
the Madonna's halo rested for an instant on that fair brow, and awed
him into worship.  He drew a long breath, and now, when his eyes sought
hers, her gaze was not averted.  She accepted the challenge of his eyes
with complete sincerity, and with a frankness which was the last effect
of complete innocence and modesty.

The voice of Vickars broke the spell.

"Yes, you are right," he said; "you usually are."  And then, turning to
Arthur with a whimsical smile, "Do you know Elizabeth writes my books
for me?"

"Typewrites, he means.  That is all, I assure you," she said.

"And corrects my blunders, which are many."

"Only the spelling.  Father never could spell, and when he is in
difficulties he makes a hieroglyphic with his pen, and leaves me to
decipher it."

"I am afraid the critics find it hieroglyphic too," said Vickars, with
a return to his dejected manner.  "I sometimes wish we had Grub Street
back again, with all its tribe of famished hacks; they at least would
understand a book that deals with poverty.  But who are the critics
to-day?  They are gentlemen with settled incomes who write in
comfortable armchairs, and know as little about real life as the
tadpole knows of the ocean.  The result is they simply cannot
understand the things I write about.  They persuade themselves that
such things don't exist.  What can one say of them but the accusation
which is as old as time--'having eyes they see not, and ears they hear
not, and hearts they do not understand'?"

"They will surely understand one day," said Arthur.

"Ah! one day--but when?  When the common people have forced them to see
and understand.  For there is my real hope, after all--the common
people.  They know what they want, and don't go to the critics for
their opinions.  A venomous review may do much to injure a young
author; but if he goes on writing undismayed, the time comes when
reviews, whether bad or good, don't affect him.  If he can justify
himself to the common people, he is certain to triumph in the long run.
But there, we are getting too serious again.  Let us forget books, and
have some music.  One can find solace for any kind of disappointment in
music.  It is the only art that makes a universal appeal."

Elizabeth rose and went to the piano, stooping as she went to kiss her
father's brow.

She played nothing that was not familiar, but it seemed to Arthur that
all she played was the expression of her own personality.  She played
on and on, wandering at will from Chopin to Tchaikowsky, and in the
profound melodies of the great Russian her whole spirit spoke.  And it
seemed to Arthur that the Spirit of the World spoke too--a romantic and
enchanted world, and yet a world of infinite yearning and pain, of love
and battle and heroism, till he saw, as it were, the weird procession
of human life, with white faces strained in final kisses, hands that
rose above encroaching waves to touch and part, hearts that broke in
ecstasies of love and joy and sorrow.  The cool night breeze came in at
the open window, the leaves whispered as it passed, and at intervals
the deep voice of London ran like an undertone inwoven with the music.
O wonderful, various, inscrutable world, what, bliss to be alive in it,
even though it be for the briefest moment!  But there was a bliss
beyond bliss, unspeakable, unimaginable, not to live alone, but to love
as the greatest hearts have loved, and surely that was the final
message of this magic hour!  Time, and the years, and all the
centuries, and all events and histories, seemed to concentrate
themselves in one fair girl, from whose slender fingers came this music
of the world; she alone was important; she was the race itself in its
final flower of love and loveliness.  So ran the incoherent thoughts of
youth, songs rather than thoughts, the wordless musical out-cries of a
heart waking to a knowledge of itself, and finding all outer objects
lit with the glamour of the magic hour.

The music ceased abruptly.  There was a dull repeated thud upon the
wall.

"What on earth is that?" cried Arthur.

"Oh, merely our neighbours," said Vickars.  "Poor souls! they rise
early and work hard, and I suppose they want to go to bed."

"Why, I shouldn't have thought they could have heard as plainly as
that."

"That's because you don't live in Lonsdale Road," said Vickars with a
smile.  "Why, I can hear the children sneeze next door.  And there's a
crack in the party wall, big enough for light to shine through, and I
know when the light appears that they are going to bed.  My dear
fellow, I honestly believe it's only the paper that holds the walls
together at all."

Arthur blushed furiously, for he had remembered what Vickars had
forgotten, that the house was the work of Archibold Masterman.  It was
a horrible irruption of the commonplace upon the magic hour.

Vickars, recognising his mistake, turned the conversation into ordinary
channels.  Arthur still clung to the vanishing skirts of his romance.
Once more he thrilled as he touched Elizabeth's hand in farewell, but
as he went out into the cool dusk it seemed as though Life strode
beside him, a dark and menacing figure, no longer lyrical and friendly.

"What can they think of my father?" he thought, as he walked home.  And
behind this lay another thought: "If they think ill of my father, as
they have a right to, can they think well of me?"




VI

YOUNG LOVE

A month had passed, a wonderful month; it was as though the whole of
life had flowered in that month.  All the days and years that had
preceded it had been but so many roots and tendrils which had stored
the strong essences of life, that at last they might display themselves
in this miraculous bloom!  It is the flower that blooms but once, this
exquisite flower of young, adoring love.  Maturer years may bring the
strength of calm affection, the heat of turbulent passion, but, in the
incredible romance of sex, once only comes the wonder-hour, when the
whole world is dipped in splendour, winged with song, glittering with
the fresh dew of young desire.  We who are older recall that hour with
a kind of mournful wonder.  Just to wake and think she wakes too, she
breathes the same morning air, was an intoxicating thought.  And what
beautiful and foolish things we did: how we kissed the scrap of paper
that bore the adored name, watched the adored shadow on the blind, were
at once so bold and shy, so determined and so fearful, so daring and so
absurdly sensitive.  No one else had ever loved as we loved; we alone
possessed the immortal secret, and the knowledge of that secret
separated us from common men and common life.  Yes, we are older now,
wiser and colder too, and the flesh no longer thrills with ecstasy at
the touch of lip or hand; but who would not give all this late-found
wisdom to recapture for a moment this divine folly of first love?

Arthur gave himself to the divine folly with complete abandonment.  He
did all the foolish things that lovers do: sat night after night in
Vickars' room, pretending interest in the father while his eyes never
left the daughter; trembled when she spoke, shivered when her dress
touched his hand, shrank from her as if unworthy to touch the hem of
her garment, and in the same moment longed to clasp her in his arms.
He waited long hours just to gaze an instant into the depths of her
timid eyes; gazed with ardour, and then flushed for shame, as one
convicted of an outrage.  When he left the house he walked only to the
end of the street, came back again, and in the darkness watched the
house, wondering what room was hers, and picturing her silent in the
innocence of sleep.  What if the house should burn?  What if some
outrageous wrong should violate her slumber?  What if she should die in
the night?  When he went home at last, to the grim silence of Eagle
House, it was to dream of her; and no sooner did he wake than he must
seek Lonsdale Road, finding fresh joy and amazement in the impossible
fact that she was still alive.

All this time his father said not a word to him, and made no question
of his comings and goings.  He passed him with averted face, his eyes
not unkindly but absorbed, for it was a time of panic in the city, when
richer men than he watched the trembling balance of events, which meant
sudden triumph or sudden ruin.  But with the unconscious cruelty of
youth Arthur discerned none of these things.  The material life had
practically ceased for him; wealth and poverty were alike terms of no
significance; they belonged to a world so far removed that he no longer
apprehended it.  It was enough for him that the punctual day awoke him
with a new cup of happiness; with its first beam he mounted to the
heaven of his romance, and there dwelt among rosy clouds, with the
singing of the morning stars in his ears.

With Vickars it was different; him Arthur saw daily, and he could not
dismiss him from his consideration.  He had begun by admiring him with
youthful ardour; he sincerely liked him; but now a new question
disturbed their relationship--did Vickars approve of him?  He was at
pains to understand Vickars' view of life, for he knew that whatever
his view was, it was Elizabeth's too.  Had she not typewritten all his
books for him?  Did not her mind speak in them as well as his?  And he
knew instinctively that in both father and daughter there was a certain
resolute fibre of conviction which could not be softened by mere
sentiment.  They each lived by some kind of definite creed; in a sense
they were Crusaders pledged to loyalty to that belief; and if he were
to become to either what he hoped to be, he knew that he must
understand their attitude to life.

It piqued Arthur that Vickars said so little to him on these matters.
But one night the opportunity arrived.  Vickars had been busy over some
literary task; when Arthur came into the room, Elizabeth was putting
the cover on her typewriter and gathering up a mass of MSS.

"Come in," said Vickars.  "You find me at a good moment.  I have just
finished a piece of work that has given me a vast deal of trouble."

"Another novel?"

"No, not exactly.  I suppose it is fiction in form, and no doubt most
people will regard it as fiction in essence too; but as a matter of
fact it is a plain statement of what is wrong with the world, and a
proposition for its remedy."

"That sounds rather formidable, doesn't it?"

"It would be formidable if the world would take it seriously.  But they
won't.  I don't suppose it will even get read.  I am by no means sure
that it will even get printed.  My publishers are considered bold men,
but they are only bold along lines thoroughly familiar to them.  Show
them something new, really and truly new, and they will most likely be
frightened out of their wits."

"Is it as bad as that?"

"It's not bad at all.  It's absolutely plain commonsense.  I wonder who
the fool was who first talked of commonsense?  My experience teaches me
that sense is the most uncommon thing in the world.  Most men are so at
home with folly that nothing is so likely to alarm them as the
irruption of real rational sense."

"I wish you would tell me all about it," said Arthur earnestly.

"Do you?" said Vickars, with an ironic smile.  "Well, I don't know
about that.  You see, at heart I am a fanatic, and, like all fanatics,
I should expect you to agree with me.  If you didn't, I might not--like
you.  And then there's Elizabeth.  I rather think she agrees with me.
And she might not--like you."

"Oh no, father," Elizabeth began, and then flushed and dropped her eyes.

"Oh yes," he retorted.  "Why, don't you know that the one great
divisive force in society is opinion?  I like the man who agrees with
me, and I dislike the man who doesn't; and although I may accuse myself
of intolerance, and persuade myself that he possesses all kinds of
virtues, I shall still go on disliking him, because I think him stupid.
And he will dislike me for the same reason--he will think me stupid."

He rose from his writing-table, lit a pipe, and stood with his hands
behind him, with that whimsical smile upon his face which Arthur knew
so well.

"No," he continued, with a sudden flash of passion, "I don't suppose I
shall get heard.  The nearer truth you come in your writing, the less
likely are you to get heard, for above all things men hate truth.  They
crucified truth two thousand years ago on Calvary; and they have been
doing it ever since.  Yet truth is the most obvious thing in the world,
to any one who is sincere enough to discern it.  You want to know what
I think, what I have been writing about.  Well, I will tell you.  I
have simply put down in plain English a series of facts which are all
indisputable.  That war is folly, to begin with, and if the cost of
armies and navies were removed, the prosperity of Europe would be
instantly doubled.  That the reckless growth of cities is folly, and if
you could make the people stay upon the land by giving them land on
equitable terms, three-fourths of the poverty would disappear.  That
unlimited commercial competition is folly, and that if you could make
nations act as a great co-operative trust, only producing what each
nation is best fitted to produce, and only as much of any commodity as
was really needed, you would cure all the ills of labour.  And I say
all this is absolutely obvious.  Every one knows it, though every one
ignores it.  It is so obvious that if God would make me sole dictator
of the world for a single year, I would guarantee to make the world a
Paradise.  I wonder God doesn't do it Himself, instead of letting man
go on age after age mismanaging everything, with the result that a few
are rich and not happy, and the multitude are poor--and miserable.  So
now you know just the sort of man I am.  Didn't I tell you I was a
fanatic?"  He broke off his harangue with a laugh.  "Now how do you
like me?" he asked.

"I like you better than I ever did," said Arthur.

"Ah! you think you do.  But remember my definition: you only really
like the man with whom you agree.  Do you agree with me?"

"I think I do."

"Then what are you going to do with your own life?"

The abrupt question struck upon the mind with a sharp clang, like the
sudden breaking of a string on a violin.  It was the old question which
Arthur had debated so often and so wearily.  During this lyric month of
love it had been forgotten, his mind had been bathed in delicious
languor; but now the question returned upon him with singular and
painful force, and his mind woke from its trance.  What was he to do
with his life?  And as he asked the question, for the first time he
caught a full vision of the gravity and splendour of existence.  Man
was born to do, not alone to feel, to act as well as love.  And
beautiful as love was, he saw with instant certainty that in creatures
like Elizabeth it rested on a solid base of intellectual idealism.
That was its final evolution: it was no longer the wild, passionate
mating of forest lovers; it was a thing infinitely delicate and pure,
infinitely complex and sensitive, in which the spirit, with all its
agonies and exultations, was the dominating force.

For a breathless moment he was conscious of the grave eyes of Elizabeth
resting on him with an anxious tenderness of inquisition.  Then he
answered in a low voice, "I wish to make my life worthy of the highest.
That is as far as I can see."  The speech was the implied offer of
himself to Elizabeth, and she knew it.  Her face was suffused with
happy light, and her breast rose and fell in a long satisfied sigh.

"That is as far as any one need see," said Vickars.  And then the tense
moment broke, and the conversation flowed back into ordinary channels.

From that hour began a real intimacy with Vickars which had a great
influence over his own character.  Hitherto he had admired the man
without understanding his real aims.  Now he began to comprehend these
aims.  Vickars had spoken truly when he described himself as a fanatic,
but his fanaticism was so wise and so gentle that it provoked love
rather than antagonism.  And it had also a certain restful and
melancholy quality which was infinitely touching.  He did not expect to
be heard, and he knew that he would not prevail; yet he would at any
time have suffered martyrdom with cheerful courage.  Many men have
found it not difficult to die for a faith which they believed would
move on to triumph by the way of their Golgotha; but Vickars was
prepared to die for a faith which he knew must fail.  He had no
illusions; he saw all things in a clear bleak light of actual fact,
knew the world ill-governed and man incurably foolish, but not the less
he was willing to sacrifice himself for convictions which the world
called absurd.  His speech about what he would do were he dictator of
the world was not mere rhetoric; it was his genuine belief that life
was at bottom a very simple business, and that mankind missed available
happiness merely by perverse repudiation of the simplest principles of
happiness.  So he gave himself in hopeless consecration to the
exposition of these principles; and if the martyr is great who can die
because he sees the crown and palm waiting for him in the skies, how
much greater is he who can die expecting no reward?

It was only by degrees that Arthur came to recognise these qualities in
Vickars.  What he did not recognise at all was that the influence of
Vickars was slowly loosening all the moorings that held him to his own
former life.  Although he had not said it openly, he knew now that he
could not join his father in the business.  He was careful to frame no
accusation of his father even in his own most secret thoughts, but he
knew that their ways lay apart.  This life his father loved of scheming
and of toiling, with its empty wealth and emptier social rewards, had
no attraction for him.  It was too crude, too barbarous; and beside it
the life of Vickars, in its noble poverty, shone like a gem.  He did
not judge his father, but he judged unmercifully the society in which
he moved, especially the church society, with its pettiness of
interest, its lack of idealism, and its honour for smooth hypocrites
like Scales; and this set him wondering why Vickars went to church at
all.  He asked him the question one day.

"I go for Clark's sake principally," he replied.  "He is the one
pulpit-man in the neighbourhood who has a real glimpse of truth, and I
feel it my duty to support him."

"But what about the Church itself?"

"You mean, what do I think of it?"

"Yes."

"I think that it will disappear, that, in fact, it is in process of
disappearance.  Dry rot has set in, and so, though it looks stately and
stable, it is like the towering mast of a ship, only held upright by a
thin varnished skin, but rotten at the core.  It will last as long as
the weather is fine; when a storm comes, it will fall."

"Well, but what has happened?  I don't think I understand."

"Something has happened that very few persons have observed.  Wealth
has bought the Church; it is in the proprietorship of the rich.  They
finance it, they dictate its policies, and naturally those policies are
not going to be hostile to themselves.  Then it has ceased to be
democratic in any true sense.  It will be charitable to the poor, but
it will not be just.  Thus its very charity is a bribe to make men
forget justice.  And besides this, the note of conviction has left the
pulpit.  Half the preachers spend their time in apologies for
Christianity, and the apologetic person soon finds himself despised.
The centre of gravity has shifted, and the people who do believe most
heartily in Christianity are people outside the churches--men like
Tolstoi, for example.  Why is it that the Church is always complaining
of its want of success?  It ought to succeed as nothing else can.  It
has privileges and attractions which no other institution has.  The
reason is that its vitality has run out.  It has the dry rot, as I
said, and the only skin that holds the thing together is the custom of
worship.  That also is becoming spotted with decay, and when the decay
eats through the outer skin, the end will come."

"But we must have religion."

"Yes, we must have religion; but the Church and religion are not
synonymous terms.  The Founder of the Christian religion stood outside
the Church."  He paused a moment, with that curious hesitation which
marked the movement of emotion in him.  Then he laid his hand upon
Arthur's shoulder, and said in a gentle voice, "Do you remember what
you said you would do with your life?  You said you wished to make it
worthy of the highest.  'The utmost for the highest'--that's it, isn't
it?  Well, you needn't bother your head about the Church.  That saying
of yours is a tolerably complete definition of religion.  You'll find
it more than sufficient, if you'll be true to it."

There were many conversations such as this between Arthur and Vickars
in this wonderful summer month.  Life and love, like twin flowers on
one stem, were opening, their petals simultaneously for Arthur.  His
mind flowered in contact with Vickars, his heart in contact with
Elizabeth; for though the girl said little, her silence was eloquent of
the bond of complete sympathy which existed between her father and
herself.  He tacitly included her in all his views of life.  And it was
clear that she gave him adoring discipleship--the discipleship of a
young girl, long motherless, who had drawn from him all the elements of
thought and will in her own character.  It was a beautiful
relationship, rare always, but especially rare in that conventional
society which surrounded them, in which women were merely the butterfly
appendages of men whose chief work in life was to provide them with the
means of easy gaiety.

Vickars did not press his opinions upon Arthur; he was much too wise
and gentle to play the pedant.  If Arthur learned much from him, it was
by indirection; knowledge came to him unconsciously, as an atmosphere
to be breathed, rather than as a lesson to be mastered.  Vickars had a
curious knack of evading controversy.  He would flash a winged sentence
on the air, satisfied that it would find its mark; and then dismiss the
subject with a laugh, or with the usual comment, "But we are growing
too serious; let us have some music."  Then Elizabeth would open the
piano, and find her way to some solemn theme of Beethoven or
Tchaikowsky, and the soft, perfumed wind would blow across the room
from the open window, and the divine melodies would lift the spirit
into worlds of unimaginable agony or rapture.  But all the time the
word that had been spoken would vibrate through the music, till the
music seemed its real interpretation; and thus it was endowed with new
vitality and emphasis by Elizabeth's playing.  "How well she
understands him!" Arthur would reflect, wondering at the perfect bond
of sympathy between them; and then, with a pang of yearning, "Will she
ever understand me like that?"

In such moments he trod the lover's hell, which is as real as the
lover's heaven.  He could never attain to her.  He saw the miraculous
freshness and richness of her nature, and knew the crudeness of his
own.  What was there in him that she should desire him?  This very bond
of sympathy between her and her father, so rare and sensitive, became
his menace.  She could not _want_ him; but, O God! with what an agony
of yearning did he want her!  And then, as he sat disconsolate, with
head resting on his hand, she would turn to him, as if she divined his
thoughts, with a gaze infinitely pitiful and kind; and his eyes clung
to hers for an instant in mute appeal and adoration, and something told
him that there was yet a void in that virgin heart that he alone could
fill.  O exquisite terrors, authentic agonies, brief sky-daring hopes,
surely it were worth all the millions of years of slow evolution from
the brute to touch but for an instant so painful and delicate a bliss!

One night--it was a Sunday night--the three sat together in the little
room.

Vickars was unusually silent.

"You look depressed, father.  What is it?" said Elizabeth.

"Oh, nothing personal, my child.  I think it's merely the spectacle of
the congregation at church to-night that has disturbed me."

"What was wrong with the congregation?"

"Nothing was right, I think.  Didn't you notice how stolid they
looked--and in the presence of truths and hopes so vast, that had they
believed them, they must have leapt to their feet and shouted in
ecstasy?"

"That would be a novelty indeed," she smiled.

"It would have been natural," he replied.  "But alas! who is natural?
Most people never live at first-hand.  They are plagiarists.  Arthur,
don't be a plagiarist.  It cuts the fibre of sincerity.  It's like
drinking stale water from a dirty cup.  But there," and then came the
usual comment, "let us have some music."

And Elizabeth began to play.  Perhaps it was the suggestion of the
Sabbath evening that made her play sweet and solemn airs from Handel.
Presently she wandered into old hymn-tunes, and finally began to play
"Nearer, my God, to Thee."

Suddenly she stopped, for Vickars had left the room.

"Oh, I forgot!" she cried.  "I ought not to have played that."

While she spoke, her father returned.  His face was pale: he held in
his hand a miniature of a woman.

"Do you remember what to-day is?" he said in a soft, shaken voice.
"Twenty years ago to-day.  And that was the last thing she played ...
and then she went ... in the night ... upon her long journey.  And it
all seems but an hour ago.  O my child! you are so like your mother."

He kissed her forehead.

Twenty years ago, and love still fresh!  Arthur bowed his head before
the sacred vision.  He rose to go.  He felt he had no right to look on
that unveiled immortal sorrow.

Elizabeth stood for a moment with him at the garden gate.

"Could you?" ... He stopped, for emotion choked him.  "Could you ...
love me like that?"

He could see her tremble, and in the dim light he could divine her
startled gaze.  His hand clasped hers.

She pressed his for a single moment, turned, and fled.




VII

ENTER SCALES

August had come with its heavy, brooding heat, and the idyllic weather
had disappeared.  There were no more fresh breezes, tempering the hot
sunlight, no more cool nights of lingering twilight; over the weary
city spread a pall of stifling haze, and the atmosphere had the
flatness of an unaired room.  The trees turned brown, and the leaves
began to fall, as though it were autumn, not summer.  The greenness of
the parks had vanished, and the pleasant sward had become a dirty gray,
upon which vast tribes of ragged children camped.  August in London,
when from countless miles of brick walls and stone pavements heat is
radiated; when roads steam beneath the casual visitations of the
water-cart, and barefooted urchins paddle in the gutters, and the city
sprawls like a languid drab too tired to be conscious of her
dishevelment; August, when a million hearts feel a dull ache of
yearning for green fields and open spaces, and in fortunate homes
guide-books are being studied, routes of travel discussed, boxes
packed, fishing-tackle and golf-clubs overhauled, and carriages, piled
high with trunks, with pale, excited children gazing from their
windows, day by day roll down every street, and converge at last in the
wild pandemonium of the great terminal stations which are the doorways
of the country.

In Eagle House such preparations were in process, but it was a joyless
business.  Masterman had informed his family that there would be no
Scotland for them this year; times were hard, and they must make the
best they could of Brighton.

"I'm sure Brighton will cost just as much as Scotland," objected his
daughter.

"It's near London, and I can't afford to be far from town this year,"
he replied.

"We don't know any one there, father.  All the people we know are going
north.  Why can't we?"

For this young lady was accustomed to get her own way in most things,
and to consider every one her enemy who opposed her.  There was not
much of her physically; she was _petite_ and graceful, with irregular
features, pretty hair, and shallow blue eyes which showed no evidence
of a soul; but like many small persons, she had a wonderful gift of
obstinacy.  As a rule, she could do as she liked with her father in
small ways, by means of a childish wheedling manner, which concealed
her obstinacy; but every now and again she came upon a hard strata in
his nature which turned the edge of her assaults, and it was so now.
Of course, she did not so much as perceive the grim lines that had
written themselves upon his tired face during the past two months.
Neither did she believe his plea of poverty.  It was merely a selfish
whim of his to be near London through August, and she must needs be
sacrificed to his whim.

"At any rate, you might choose a better place than Brighton," she
retorted petulantly.

"I might choose, but I don't," he retorted.  "There's a good train
service to Brighton, and it suits me.  It will have to suit you, too."

"I'm sure I would just as soon stay in London," Arthur interrupted; and
he was rewarded by a glance of intense disdain from his sister's eyes.

"No; you'll go to Brighton with the others."  And Masterman, not
knowing the private thoughts of Arthur, was gratified with his remark.
He saw in it the evidence of that serious sense of duty which was
presently to make him the kind of man for whom business is an imperious
master.  "You see, we must go somewhere.  If we didn't, folk might
talk.  I've had a pretty hard time, my boy, but it's nearly over now.
And I want you to go to Brighton for a reason of my own.  There are
some people there I'd like you to meet."

"Of course I'll do as you wish, father."

"That's the proper spirit," he replied kindly.

But when Masterman left the room, Helen turned upon her brother
spitefully.

"Oh! you needn't think I don't know why you want to stop in London,"
she cried.  "I know where you spend your evenings.  You're not nearly
so clever as you think you are."

"Do you?" he replied, trying in vain to subdue the hot blood that
rushed to his cheeks.

"Yes, I do.  And you just wait until father knows.  I've a great mind
to tell him."

"You can tell him anything you wish," he replied proudly.

"And do you wish it?"

And with this Parthian shot she drew her small figure up in anger, and
left the room.

But the Parthian arrow left its wound, for it was tipped with subtle
poison.  Magic months are exquisite experiences; but the pity of it is
that the magic is rarely so complete that the outlines of the plain
world are totally obliterated.  Helen's words were a sword that slashed
a great rent in the purple curtains of young love, and the outer world
lay visible.  No use to turn the eyes away or to patch the rent; there
lay the fact of things, palpable enough.  Did he wish his father to
know his love for Elizabeth?  He had never yet faced the question.  But
the moment it was asked he saw with fatal prescience all that it
implied.  He had chosen not alone Elizabeth, but with her a path of
life, an ideal of conduct.  That path led out into a strange, uncharted
world, the very existence of which his father had not so much as
surmised.  And he knew that his father never could be brought to see it.

He knew this, but he knew also that he himself had reached a clearness
of vision of which nothing could deprive him.  He had seen the land
very far off, and henceforth his eyes could see no other.  He was vowed
to the highest, as men had been in days of knighthood, and he must
follow the gleam wheresoever it led.  To his father it would all seem
the wildest folly; no doubt in that forgotten dream-time of the world,
to men bartering in the market-place or reaping in the fields, young
Sir Galahad must have seemed mad as he rode past singing, into the
haunted forest.  It would be no better now; nay, it would be far worse,
for was not the world one vast clamorous marketplace, no longer merely
disdainful but actively antagonistic to the dreamer?  Not that he was
worthy to rank himself with the Sir Galahads; he was merely a boy,
intoxicated with the new wine of love and life; but nevertheless he had
his ideal of what life should be, and he meant to pursue it.  To one
thing at least he had attained--he was not afraid of poverty.  Hilary
Vickars had taught him that, by showing him how little outward
circumstance can affect the inner peace of the soul.  And when all
things are said and done, perhaps that is the greatest truth that a
youth can learn, for if it does not necessarily produce heroism, it at
least makes it possible.  For it is through fear of poverty that men
sell their souls; and not until that ignoble fear is gone does the soul
have a chance to live.

But he did not wish to challenge his father to the conflict till the
proper hour came.  The clash must come, but he would leave the foreseen
moment in the hands of time.  It could not be long delayed, but he
would not anticipate it.  And in so determining he was thinking of his
father rather than himself.  His father might be wholly wrong in his
method of life, but that old sense of his father's bigness still
dominated him.  Primeval, proud, scarred with savage conflict, he saw
his father rise before him; he could not but admire even while he
censured; and simply because he knew that it was in his power to wound
the giant in a vital part, he was afraid to strike.

So in the first week of August the Masterman household accomplished its
annual exodus, and Arthur found himself one of five hundred tenants in
a vast hotel at Brighton.  Brighton is not precisely a pleasant place
in August--"a sea without a ship, and a shore without a tree"--but
undeniably it has at all seasons a certain strong glitter of life, and
its shipless sea is an inexhaustible reservoir of tonic breezes.  But
poetry does not breathe in the air of Brighton, and Arthur's heart was
at the stage when poetry is indispensable to happiness.  He could have
been relatively happy in some deep Scotch glen, whipping a stream for
the infrequent trout, and listening unconsciously to the wind-music in
the fir-tops; for though he would still have been separated from
Elizabeth, he would have seen her face mirrored in the stream, and
heard her voice in the wind, and have felt her presence in the wide
peacefulness.  But the hard materialism of Brighton jarred upon his
senses.  It was London over again, a cleaner and a meaner London.  The
same kind of face met him everywhere--the heavy, soulless face of men
who have their portion in this world.  In the men it was a
clean-shaved, rubicund face, in the women it was puffed and sometimes
rouged; and this face was reduplicated everywhere--in the hotel, on the
parade, on the pier, till it became a persecution such as one suffers
in dreams.  Looking at these faces, Arthur had not only a strong
repulsion, but he knew the cause of it; these faces were the mirror of
unclean souls.  There was something dark and turbid in them, a mire of
sin washed up from the abhorred depth of life; these eyes all had the
same expression, something of greed and glassy insolence and vulpine
shrewdness, and the mouths had the same looseness of sensual thirst.
Perhaps he did not see with entire justice, for Elizabeth's face hung
like a picture in his heart, before which he had built a shrine and lit
a lamp of faith; or perhaps he did see with perfect lucidity the souls
of these fellow creatures of his, simply because that lamp of pure love
in his heart gave him light.  At all events, he hated Brighton, and
betook himself daily to the green empty Downs, and sometimes as far as
Chantlebury Ring, where the width of the world could be felt once more,
and the shy voice of love might be heard, like a cuckoo-note, in the
great sylvan silences.

Helen had soon found friends, and was now quite reconciled to Brighton;
his mother, more fragile than ever in appearance, was content to sit
still all day, looking at the smooth sea-plain with its gem-like
glitter.  More than once he was moved to open all his heart to his
mother, and there were times when her eyes seemed to invite his
confidence; but always between them was that gulf of silence, for which
speech could frame no bridge.  He wondered much about this silence of
hers.  It was scarcely apathy; no eyes could be as bright as hers if
the heart were apathetic.  It seemed rather to be a resolved
incuriousness about things around her, a turning away of the face from
life, as from something dreadful, that had only pain to offer her.
Could one imagine a human creature, with "a bright, sunshiny day after
shipwreck," sitting beside an empty sea, willing to think of nothing
that came before or after, but just to breathe, and watch, and
wait--that was the kind of impression Mrs. Masterman made upon the
mind.  Arthur was always delicately tender with her.  He hung about her
chair, arranged her shawl or pillows, was quick to perceive her wishes;
but in the very kiss with which she rewarded him there was restraint.
The time was to come when he was to know what it meant, but that time
was not yet.  Now, as in all the later years which he could recall, her
one wish seemed to be to efface herself, and to take up as little room
in life and in the thoughts of others as possible.

He was greatly surprised one night, when he came back to the hotel from
a long walk over the Downs, to find his father in conference with
Scales.  There was a mass of papers lying on the table, and it was
clear the two men were deeply interested in them.

"Come in," said Masterman.  "We're busy, you see, but we'll soon be
through now."

Scales greeted him with his usual smooth civility, and, as usual, it
was a little overdone.

"Shall I wait?" said Arthur.

"No.  You'd better dress for dinner.  Scales is going to spend the
night here.  I have something to say to you later on."

Arthur left the room without remark; but as he was dressing the thought
suddenly took hold on him, What did his father want with Scales?

He knew that his father did not like the man, and that made their
present relation the more unintelligible.  He had heard his father
speak with brusque scorn of Scales' plan to punish John Clark, by
getting him off to the Holy Land, and then starting a church revolution
in his absence.  That the man was false was beyond doubt.  Falsity
looked out of his narrow, deprecating eyes, falsity breathed in his
smooth voice, falsity declared itself in his obsequious manners.  Under
no possible circumstances could such a man play fair either as friend
or foe.  Judas was such another as Elisha Scales, and Judas was an
apostle as Scales was a deacon.

And here Arthur laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion.

"He'll find it hard to betray father," he said.

But not the less he was uneasy.  There was something in the man that
was sinister, supple, diabolically adroit, and he felt instinctively
that his presence in his father's room boded no good for any one.
Suddenly there recurred to his memory his father's statement that there
were persons in Brighton he wanted him to meet, and he felt sure that
it was to Scales he referred.  Yes, it must be so, because no one else
who could claim his father's acquaintance had appeared in Brighton;
and, if it were so, it argued some kind of compact or pre-arrangement
with Scales.

That night, however, nothing was said that could illumine the
situation.  Scales spent the night in the hotel, was closeted late with
his father, and accompanied him to London on the following day.

Another day passed, and then his father sent for him.

"Arthur," he began, "I'm not going to interfere with our compact.  I
gave you till the end of September to make your mind up about the
business, and I don't want you to speak a word until then.  But there's
a matter of business on which I want your help now."

"I'm not much good at business, father.  I don't think I ever shall be."

Masterman ignored the confession.

"You don't know that until you try."

"Of course, if there's anything in which I can help you, father, I'll
do my best."

"Well, you're old enough to use your eyes, and that's all I want of
you.  Sit down, and let me explain."

Thereupon he explained.  It seemed that Scales had got wind in the
broker's office where he was managing clerk of a certain amalgamation
of several brick companies which was likely to come off before long.
One of these companies was in Sussex, not far from Brighton.  It was in
difficulties, had been a long time, and might be bought cheap.
Masterman proposed to buy it, and then resell to the trust when it
should be formed.  Properly handled, there might be a fortune in the
transaction.

"I thought you didn't trust Scales," said Arthur quietly.

"And I don't.  Not an inch farther than I can see him.  I know very
well he'd sell the shirt off my back if he got a chance."

"Of course he's not working for nothing."

"Certainly not.  If he were, I should distrust him still more.  You'll
find that in business no one does anything for nothing."

"But I don't see anything I can do, father."

"That's the point I am coming to.  I dare not go to look at this Sussex
property.  I'm known.  If I appeared upon the scene, they'd spring the
price at once.  But you can go to see it.  It's at Leatham, not more
than twenty miles away.  What I want you to do is to go to the village,
stop at the inn for a few days, make all the inquiries you can,
quietly, and then report to me.  Will you do it?"

How could he refuse?  It was at least a break in the dull monotony of
Brighton.  And he was really touched, too, by his father's faith in him.

"But I have no expert knowledge, father, and surely that is what you
need."

"Not at all.  They'd suspect an expert.  All that is wanted is a pair
of good eyes, and good commonsense.  I think you have these."

"Very well, father, I will go.  When do you want me to start?"

"At once.  You can't be too quick."

"I will start this morning, sir."

"That's the spirit I like," said Master-man.  "It will be the first bit
of business you ever did for me, and it won't be the last."

On that pious hope Arthur made no comment.  He could not refuse to do
what his father asked, and he did it the more readily because in his
own mind he knew it would be likely to prove both the first and the
last act of the kind he would perform.

"I daresay Scales will turn up at Leatham.  Behave to him as civilly as
you can."

"I'll try, sir."  But he said it with so wry a smile that his father
laughed.

"He'll be civil enough to you, never fear."

Of course, thought Arthur.  Judas was no doubt a pleasant-mannered
gentleman, and the very pattern of civility--until he bared his fangs.

So Arthur went to Leatham, and for the first time found himself in
contact with that mysterious world of business in which his father
lived.  At first this contact produced an almost pleasurable sensation,
such as the swimmer feels when the sting of the salt water thrills his
nerves.  It was all so new, this contact with rough reality.  He found
the owner of the brickfield an old man, as skilled in craft as Ulysses.
The old man came to see him in the village inn, and played the game of
cross-purposes with inimitable subtlety.  He supposed the young
gentleman wanted to settle there?  No?  Well, it was a fine
neighbourhood, few better, and the sport was considered good.
Interested in business?  Well, for a safe paying business there was few
things like bricks.  People must have bricks, because they must have
houses.  He was an old man, and had an idea of retiring.  If the young
gentleman was interested in bricks, he'd like him to come over the
works some day.  Not that it could be supposed he was interested.
Bookish, wasn't he?  Been to college?  Well, lots of college men went
into business now, and even titled ladies kept bonnet-shops.  So he'd
heard.  He was really an amusing old man, and Arthur enjoyed his
company more than could have been supposed of a young Sir Galahad.

His father had not been mistaken when he had credited him with a pair
of good eyes and cool commonsense, and the more he used his eyes the
less he thought of the possibilities of the Leatham brick-works.  It
was clearly a bankrupt concern.  It was handicapped by being four miles
from the rail.  It had been able to do a small local trade for several
years, and that was about all it was ever likely to do.  If there was a
fortune in it, it was of such microscopic proportions that it needed
keener eyes than Arthur's to discover it.

On the Saturday night Scales came down, deferential and obsequious as
usual, but clearly a little ill at ease.  Arthur dined with him in the
old-fashioned inn-parlour, and after dinner came at once to the point.
He said bluntly that he believed the Leatham Brick Manufacturing Co.
was a worthless property.

Scales smiled enigmatically.

"You appear to dissent," said Arthur.

"No, not altogether.  I never thought much of it myself."

"Then why do you want my father to buy it?"

"Why, to resell it, of course."

"If it's worthless, you can't resell it."

"It won't be worthless if your father gets it.  If it's worthless now,
it's because it hasn't been developed.  The present owner hasn't had
the money to put into it.  Your father will develop it."

"And then?

"Make it a company."

"And then?"

"Resell it to the Amalgamated Brick Trust."

"And if the Amalgamated doesn't want it?"

"But they will.  It's my business to look after that."

"Then why not let the present owner sell it to the Amalgamated?  He's
worked it all his life.  If there's a fortune to be made out of it, as
my father seemed to think, it's that poor old man who ought to get
it--not my father."

"That's not the way business is done."

"It seems to me the way it should be done.  It's the only honest way."

Thereupon Scales entered on an exposition of the methods of modern
business, according to which it seemed that fortunes were only made by
snatching advantages from the weak who could not hold them.  Arthur
listened in silence, and as Scales proceeded the boy's face had a
curious likeness to his father's in his grimmest mood.

"It's no good," he broke out at length.  "If that is what business
means, it seems to me to be nothing better than organised theft.  I'm
sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Scales--for no doubt you hope to make
something yourself out of this fine scheme--but my father expects me to
report honestly what I think, and I shall report against the purchase."

"You'll regret it if you do."

"I should regret it all my life if I didn't."

"Think over it.  Don't act hastily."

And as he spoke there was something like a tremor of anger in the suave
voice.

"I've done my thinking already," said Arthur.  "There's only one thing
more I want to say.  If the transaction were never so honest, there's a
weak place in your scheme which I think my father will appreciate.  It
is that he has only your word for it, Mr. Scales, that the Amalgamated
will, buy the property, and, to be quite frank, I don't trust your
word."

He left the room and went to bed.  The next morning he returned to
Brighton.  The first thing that met his eyes as he entered his room was
a letter from Elizabeth.




VIII

THE ACCUSATION

It was a very brief note, simply informing him that Hilary Vickars was
ill, and wished to see him.

An hour later he was in the train.  Fortunately he had written his
report of the Leatham business before he left the village, and this he
left upon his father's desk.  As he went up to London he read and
re-read Elizabeth's brief note, in a conflict of torture and delight.
There was but one phrase in it which impressed the personality of the
writer.  "I am alone with father, and very anxious," she wrote.  He
felt the throb of her heart in those words, and he realised that she
leaned on him for strength.  His own heart swelled with tenderness at
the thought.  There is a kind of pain which is so exquisite that it
becomes joy; he realised such a pain now, an immense yearning to take
the lonely girl to his bosom, and kiss her wet eyelids, and defend her
from the imminent sword of sorrow.

He stood at the door of the little house in Lonsdale Road.  The street
lay silent in the August heat, the little patch of grass was brown and
parched, there was an aspect of forlornness over everything.  A sudden
terror smote him: what if it were Elizabeth herself who was ill?  His
hand trembled as he rang the bell.  The door opened softly, and there
stood Elizabeth, pale and quiet as a spectre.

"Elizabeth!"

Her hand lay in his, her beautiful eyes, swimming in tears, met his; he
drew her to him in one long kiss.  It was the first time he had kissed
her, and how often had he imagined the ecstasy of that kiss!  It had
come at last, but not with the kind of ecstasy he had imagined, yet
with the diviner ecstasy of sorrow.  The rose of her heart was yielded
to him, but it was wet with tears.

"Elizabeth!"

She withdrew herself from his embrace, saying simply, "I wanted you so
much."

And in that brief phrase all was said, and each knew that henceforth an
irrevocable vow bound their hearts together.

She took his hand, and together they went into the room where they had
so often talked.  The desk was littered with papers, half-corrected
proofs, unanswered letters, the mute, pathetic witness of an arrested
hand.

"How long ago is it?" he whispered

"Four days."

"What is it?"

"Typhoid, the doctor thinks."

"Can I see him?"

"It was he who told me to write you.  He wants to see you."

"And you?"

"Yes, I wanted you too."

There was a tender reproach in the words, which he was quick to
recognise.

"I should not have asked the question.  Forgive me."

"No, you need not have asked it."

They went upstairs together.  Vickars lay very straight and quiet in
the bed, his face pallid, his eyes closed.  He roused instantly at
their entrance, and at once began to speak in a weak, eager voice.

"So you see I'm caught at last," he said with difficult cheerfulness.
"I've never had an illness--ailments, but not illness--and I don't
quite know what to make of it.  It's an experience that makes one
humble."

"Don't talk, father.  It exhausts you," said Elizabeth.

"On the contrary, it keeps me cheerful," he said, with the old
whimsical smile.  "Habit, I suppose.  And besides, I have certain
things to say to Arthur."

Elizabeth took the hint and left the room.  Arthur sat beside the bed
in awkward silence.

Presently Vickars said abruptly, "You love her?"

"Yes, with all my heart."

"I thought so."

He was silent for some moments.  Then he said, "A month ago I suppose I
should almost have hated you for that confession.  She is all I have; I
have always wanted to keep her wholly to myself....  I have dreaded
this hour....  But I see now it is the course of nature.  I may have to
leave her soon--I don't know.  But I'm glad now you love her.  Yes, I
think I'm glad, and I wished to tell you so."

"I hope you'll soon be better."

"Ah! do you?  But then, you see, I might not feel the same toward you.
But there--that's irony.  You know that.  Honestly, I'm glad you love
her."

His eyes closed, and Arthur, sitting silently beside the bed, could not
but mark the change in Vickars since last he saw him.  The bones of the
face showed white through the stretched, transparent skin, the eyes
were sunken, and new lines had been etched upon the forehead.  It came
to him, in a rush of pity and of admiration, that he loved this man.
And there came to him also some dim perception of the depth of that
sacrifice which Vickars endured in resigning his sole jealous claim
upon Elizabeth.  It is seldom that young love attains to this vision.
It is all hot eagerness, imperious and intense with the overmastering
impulse of sex, and blind to the tendrils of old affection which it
tears apart to reach its goal.  But to Arthur there was granted a truer
vision, a nobler temper, because love in him had always had a sacred
meaning, and had never been the more clamorous cry of sex.

It was as though Vickars divined his thoughts.  He opened his eyes, and
said, "Bring me my notebook.  It is lying on the table."

Arthur brought the book.

"I want to read you something.  It was written by a wayward man of
genius, who made many blunders both in thought and morals, but he
understood love, and the one best thing in all his life was that he did
know how to love.  Listen.  'To love we must render up body and soul,
heart and mind, all interests and all desires, all prudences and all
ambitions, and identify our being with that of another....  To love is
for the soul to choose a companion, and travel with it along the
perilous defiles and winding ways of life; mutually sustaining when the
path is terrible with dangers, mutually exhorting when it is rugged
with obstructions, and mutually rejoicing when rich broad plains and
sunny slopes make the journey a delight, showing in the quiet distance
the resting-place we all seek in this world.'"

The words, beautiful in themselves, had a strange solemnity as Vickars
read them.  It was as though all the ages spoke in them, as though one
overheard in some dim cathedral the low whispering of multitudes of
lovers, confessing the ultimate secret of both life and love.

He put the book down, sank back upon his pillow, and began to talk in a
low, intense voice.

"Yes, I loved like that....  A companion of the soul, that was what I
found.  Women are such delicate and fragile creatures, but oh! so
strong--much stronger than we are; and a good woman is the strongest of
all.  The heavier the load you lay upon them, the happier they are.  I
know.  I should have fallen by the way but for her.  She always smiled
at difficulty ... such a tender, smiling mouth she had ... like a fresh
flower in the sun.  Then God took her.  She went smiling--her last word
a word of encouragement to me, her eyes signalling courage as they
closed.  And Elizabeth is like her.  She has carried my burdens and
borne my sorrows....  Poor child! it may be I have leaned too heavily
on her.  Well, well.  God forbid I should grudge her her right to joy.
Take her, Arthur, and don't lean too heavily upon her."

Instinctively Arthur knelt beside the bed.  His eyes were full of
tears.  Vickars stretched out his hand, and laid it on his head.  There
was no need of further words.

When he next spoke, it was with his old manner of whimsical humour.

"If I must needs have a son, I don't want an idle one," he said.  "I
want you to help me, Arthur."

"I'll do anything I can."

"Well, this is what I want you to do.  You will find the proofs of my
new book downstairs on my desk.  They must be corrected at once, or the
book will miss the autumn season.  Will you correct them for me?"

"If Elizabeth will let me," he said with a smile.

"I think she will let you.  I am sure she would let no one else."

"Then I'll begin at once."

"Well, that's a load off my mind.  And don't you think I'm going to
die, for I'm not.  But I'm in for a hard fight, there's no doubt of
that.  Now go to Elizabeth--and the proofs.  I'm tired out, and will
sleep.  I've never been lazy in my life before, and it's a new and
quite exquisite sensation."

From that hour a strange chapter of life began for Arthur.  Eagle House
was closed, and he took refuge with Mrs. Bundy.  He wrote his father a
brief note, saying he was detained in London, and would not return to
Brighton.  He had not the courage to tell him the whole truth; that
revelation would come soon enough, and he did not wish to antagonise
his father by an abrupt declaration of his position.  To this note his
father made no reply.

Most of his hours were spent in the little house in Lonsdale Road.
There he toiled over Vickars's new book.  Much of it consisted of rough
drafts, which he had to copy and piece together as best he could.  In
this delicate work he could obtain no counsel from Vickars.

Of Elizabeth he saw much, and yet far less than he would have imagined
possible.  She was constantly at her father's bedside.  And as the days
wore on, the fight for life in that shadowed room became intense.  A
silent pressure of her hand, a silent kiss--and she would glide from
him like a ghost, and disappear into the gloom of that upper chamber.

One night it happened that she had gone to rest, worn out with long
watching, and Arthur took her place at Vickars' bedside.  For a long
time Vickars lay in complete stupor.  The gray dawn was near, and a
milk-cart rattled down the road.  The noise roused him for a moment,
and he began to speak in half-delirious words.

"The old story," he said.  "Rotten work, and human lives to pay for it.
The poor ... the poor pay for everything in this world ... with their
blood.  And the rich sit in houses splashed with the blood of the poor,
and don't even know it....  I always knew the drains were bad.  I
always said they smelt of death.  But that damned builder didn't
care--not he.  He only laughed ... laughed."

The voice trailed off into an incoherent whisper.

When Vickars began to speak, Arthur listened drowsily; but as he
finished, his entire mind sprang into vivid apprehension.  It was as
though a sudden torch flared through his brain.

What did the sick man mean?  And with the question there came back to
Arthur's memory a snatch of conversation at the deacons' tea, when he
had first heard the name of Hilary Vickars.  He recalled the suave,
purring voice of Scales explaining to his father that the Vickars were
inconsiderable people, living in Lonsdale Road--"in one of your houses,
sir."

"I always said the drains smelt of death.  But that damned builder
didn't care.  He only laughed."

And the builder was his father.

A blackness of great horror fell upon him.  He struggled against it, as
against an overwhelming tide.  Could it be that Vickars knew this
dreadful thing all the time, knew it even when he had laid his hand
upon his head, and welcomed him as a son?  It seemed hardly possible.
He told himself that after all he had nothing to go upon but a few
delirious words.  Perhaps Vickars was not thinking of his own case at
all.  It might have been simply some scene in one of his books which he
rehearsed--a snatch of drama flung out by the toiling, unconscious
brain.  But in his heart he knew that such an explanation was untrue.
An inner force of conviction, stronger than reason, affirmed the
reality of Vickars' words.  The delirious mind had uttered a tragic
truth which the conscious mind had concealed.

The dawn had now come.  He heard Elizabeth going down the stairs
silently.  How could he meet her?  Perhaps she also knew the truth, had
known it all the time.  He hastily wrote a note, saying that he had
gone for a walk, and would return in an hour.  Vickars still slept.  He
knew that in a few minutes Elizabeth would be with him.  He went softly
down the stairs, and let himself out into the Lonsdale Road.

In the freshness of the morning air his tragic suppositions seemed
incredible.  Life lay round him in its wide security of joy; birds
sang, flowers bloomed, men were astir; everything breathed of honest
industry, honest kindness, and it seemed a thing impossible that behind
this fair show of things there lay unimaginable depths of cruelty.  He
passed Eagle House, shuttered and silent, and he fell to thinking of
his father.  Stern, inscrutable, resolute he knew his father to be, but
he had never known him cruel.  Yet if he had done this thing he was a
monster.  He had made a compact with death for money.  Over the porch
of Eagle House there hung a Virginia creeper, already touched with the
first rusty crimson of autumn, and to the boy's wild imagination it was
a stain of blood.  "Splashed with blood of the poor," Vickars had
said....  Yet, at that moment, every memory of his father that he could
summon up was kind and gracious.  He remembered his generosities to him
during his university career, his patience with him while he waited for
a decision on which his heart was set in burning eagerness, his trust
in him over the Leatham business, and all that pride and love which had
a thousand times met him in his father's glance.  But he knew also that
in the scales of justice even such memories as these were worthless.
They could not outweigh deliberate fraud.  He must know the truth; he
was merciless in his appetite for truth; until that hunger was
satisfied there was no place for kinder thoughts.

It struck him all at once that there was an easy way to satisfy his
doubts.  The doctor would know the exact truth, and to the doctor he
would go.

Ten minutes later he stood in the doctor's waiting-room.  Dr. Leet was
not yet up.  He would be down in half an hour.

Presently the doctor entered, a somewhat formal, gray, middle-aged man,
with a hesitating manner which had grown upon him in the constant
effort to avoid hurting the susceptibilities of patients who asked
awkward questions which he was unwilling to answer.

"Ah, you come from Mr. Vickars?  Nothing wrong, I hope?"

"No, doctor.  I left him asleep."

The doctor nodded and waited.

"I came to ask you a question, doctor."

"Yes."

"It's about Vickars.  I want to know the cause of his illness.  I have
a good reason for asking."

"The cause?  Well, you see, Vickars had been run down for a long time
before he became ill.  He had probably worked too hard for years.  That
meant a certain devitalisation, which made him susceptible to fever."

"And is that all?"

"Well, not altogether, of course.  There is still the question of the
fever itself."

"That is what I want to know, doctor.  I shall be very glad if you tell
me plainly what you think."

"Oh, there's not much room for conjectures.  Drains, of course.
Lonsdale Road had been a perfect nest of typhoid germs for years.  I
don't know who built the street, but I do know that, whoever he was, he
was a scoundrel.  The drains run under the kitchen floors, and I'll be
bound that there isn't one that is not a death-trap.  I've seen some of
these drains exposed, and I give you my word for it that the pipes are
not so much as cemented together."

Arthur turned sick and pale.  Then he said quietly, "My father built
those houses."

"Oh, my dear sir," began the doctor, "I'm sorry I spoke.  I had no
idea."

"You need not apologise," said Arthur.  "I asked a plain question and
expected a plain answer.  I understand that Vickars is the victim of
bad drains?"

"Well, yes, primarily.  Of course, run down as he was, he might have
fallen ill, any way.  But honestly I can't say that I believe this.
The real cause is only too clear."

"Then Eliz--Miss Vickars is in danger too?"

"Any one is in danger who lives in those houses," said the doctor
hotly, forgetting his usual caution.  "They are mere death-traps, I
tell you.  And though I don't want to hurt your feelings, yet I am
bound to say that in my opinion a highway robber who takes your purse
upon a public road is a respectable person compared with the rascal who
condemns scores of decent people to certain suffering, and some to
certain death, for the sake of a few pounds of illicit gain."

"Thank you, doctor.  I think I'll go now."

He groped for his hat, like a blind man.

"You'd better wait a little while," said the doctor.  "Stop, and have
some breakfast with me."

And then Arthur's self-control broke.  He leant against the library
shelves, covering his face with his hands.

"O my father," he cried, "how could you do it?"

"Don't take it too hardly," said the doctor.  "Perhaps he didn't know
... surely he didn't think."

"Yes, he knew," said Arthur, turning on the doctor a pair of flaming,
tear-wet eyes.  "He's done it before.  He once put oyster-shells and
road-gravel into the foundations of a church instead of concrete.  I
heard him say so.  He must have done it many times.  And he doesn't
care.  People die, and he doesn't care.  And I'm his son ... the son of
a man who is a scoundrel."

He pushed the astonished doctor aside, and somehow found his way into
the open air.  There lay the world, even as he had left it, but its
aspect was wholly changed.  In the fresh morning light it had smiled
upon him, it had seemed honest, it had breathed security of joy; now
the mask of hypocrisy was gone, and it was an old, evil, wrinkled face
that leered at him.  It was the stage of tragic passions, it was full
of the habitations of cruelty.

"Splashed with blood of the poor"--so he saw the world at that moment,
a red grotesque, a grim crimson horror.  And he saw his father, too,
clothed in the same blood-red livery of crime.




IX

THE CONTEST

The troubles of the young are apt to move the ridicule of the mature,
who have long since discovered that even tragedies can be outlived,
disasters forgotten, and the worst defeats repaired.  That there is a
strange and stubborn resilience in life, which enables us to survive a
thousand shocks, is indeed a wonderful quality which is needed to
explain the persistence of the race.  But the final view of life is
never the immediate view, and, whatever we may think now of ancient
sorrows, unless the memory is quite dulled we know well that they were
once real and terrible enough.  The child's terror of the dark, his
bitter tears over slight or injustice, his first agony of homesickness,
his rage against acts of cruelty or tyranny, the wounds inflicted on
his tenderness or pride--these things may appear to us now absurd or
insignificant episodes in the process by which we adjusted ourselves to
the social scheme; but it may be doubted if any tears were bitterer
than these, any later sorrow comparable with these young sorrows that
left us dumb with fury and astonishment.  The years bring healing and
forgetfulness--or perhaps it were truer to say, a tougher skin, a less
sensitive organism; but, if we care to examine our hearts, most of us
would find that the scars of these earliest wounds run deep and are
ineffaceable.

How well does the writer recollect a certain mournful morning when he
stood at bay in the corner of a large school playground, tormented by
the jeers and blows of a jovial crowd of young bullies, who found
occasion for fresh mirth in every fresh impotent spasm of rage and
grief.  Since that day he has wept over open graves, said farewell to
so many of those he loved that the unseen world seems less uninhabited
than the seen, been betrayed by friends he trusted, been humiliated in
a thousand ways by the cruelty or stupidity of men, but he has known no
sorrow quite as keen as that sorrow, and no betrayal that seemed quite
so cruel as the act by which his parents gave him to the wolves in that
brutal playground.  He can jest about the story now, but in his own
private heart that fatal morning still looms tragic, and there are
times when he still wakes out of painful dreams with the old horrible
sense of forsakenness that he felt then.

So he finds it impossible to treat lightly Arthur Masterman's first
cruel astonishment when the revelation of his father's misdoing was
made plain to him.  If Arthur had been more observant, he would have
learned it by degrees, and so its force would have been broken; if he
had not built up for himself an admired image of his father, the shock
would have been easier to bear.  As it was, the revelation came with a
shattering blow which shook his life to the centre.  And the blow
struck him precisely at the point where he was most sensitive.  His
father had all but slain Vickars, who was his friend, and he might yet
strike down the daughter who was dearer to him than his own life.  He
had as good as planned their death, for what he did he had done
deliberately, well knowing the issue of his deeds.  And how many more
were there who were his helpless victims?  How many graves had he
filled?  Where would the harvest of disgrace and death end?  The doctor
was right--the highwayman who took a purse was a reputable citizen
compared with the criminal who wilfully sowed the seeds of death among
innocent people for a few pounds of illicit gain!  And he was the son
of the man who had done this; the very clothes he wore, the food he
ate, the books he read, were purchased by his father's sin.

To Vickars, slowly recovering from a mortal sickness, he dared not
speak, to Elizabeth still less.  So he took refuge with Mrs. Bundy,
whose bosom was an open hospice for all sorts of vicarious sorrows.

"Well, well!" she said cheerfully, "Didn't I tell you that your father
was like the man in the parable, 'an austere man, gathering where he
had not strawed'?  But it takes all sorts to make a world, laddie, and
your father's none so bad as some."

"That's poor comfort," he replied gloomily.

"Poor it may be, but it's not to be forgotten.  I mind the time when
Bundy was in trouble, and it was your father helped him.  Did I ever
tell you that?"

"No."

"Well, he did.  He lent Bundy what he asked, and did it cheerfully."

"Oh!  I don't doubt he can be generous, but that's not the point.  It's
not what he may do with his money, but how he makes it."

And then he proceeded to pour out all the bitterness of his heart in
hot, indignant words.  He raged like a man blind with pain, who knows
not how or where his blows fall.

"You cannot justify him," he cried.  "God knows I've tried hard enough,
but I cannot.  Dr. Leet said he was a scoundrel, and I, his son, could
not contradict him.  I have tried to think he did not know, but this is
a thing he must have known.  It's a hard thing to hear your father
called a scoundrel, and be silent.  And I was silent, for I knew that
it was true."

"Hush, hush, laddie!  It's not for you to say that."

"I must say it.  There are hundreds of people saying it.  And I am his
son--the son of a scoundrel."

If Arthur had not been blinded by his anger he would have known why
Mrs. Bundy sought to stop the torrent of his words.  For, while he was
speaking, young Scales had entered the house, and stood in the doorway
watching this unusual scene.  The Scales family had returned that
evening from their holiday, and it had occurred to young Benjamin
Scales to call at Mrs. Bundy's, where he would be sure to find some of
his acquaintance.  Young Benjamin was not a pleasant youth; he had a
mean, narrow face, like his father, and wore eye-glasses, not from any
defect of vision, but because he imagined that they gave him an air of
cleverness, and among his strong antipathies was jealousy of Arthur.
So what more natural than that he should seize avidly on Arthur's angry
words, and duly report them to his father, who in turn waited his
opportunity of reporting them to Archibold Masterman.

The opportunity came a few days later, when Scales went to Brighton to
see Masterman upon the Leatham business, which was still undecided.
Scales knew very well why it was undecided, and his grudge against
Arthur had grown by careful nursing.  And now, thanks to Arthur's angry
words, he had the means of avenging himself.

Masterman had, of course, read Arthur's report, and was secretly
delighted with it.  It was an admirable piece of writing, plain and
convincing, and it was expressed with a lucidity to which he was not
accustomed in similar documents.  "The boy has brains," he said, as he
read it; "he will go far."  It was the first time he had tested those
brains on any practical affair, and his pride in his son was great.

"I'm not at all sure Arthur isn't right," he said to Scales, and so he
had postponed decision from day to day.

But the time had now come when the decision must be made, and Scales
was fully resolved that that decision should be favourable to his own
interests.

"I don't deny," he said, "that your son's report is admirably done, but
you must recollect that he has no real experience of business.  And
besides----"

"Besides what?"

"I don't think he will ever understand business."

"Why not?"

"From words he said to me.  From words he has said to others."

"What words?  Tell me plainly what you mean?"

"I had rather not."

"Now look here, Scales," said Masterman, "either you have said too much
or not enough.  In a few weeks Arthur will be my partner, and the
sooner you begin to think of him in that way the better for our future
relations."

"I don't think he will ever be your partner," said Scales quietly.

"Why not?"

"Because he is a wild, impracticable boy," said Scales, throwing away
his caution.  "Because he told me that business--your business and
mine--was, in his opinion, organised theft.  Because he has been going
about saying that you are a scoundrel----"

"What's that?" cried Masterman, rising to his feet.  His face was pale
and terrible, and his attitude so menacing that Scales was afraid.  But
in that mean heart hate was stronger than fear, and it supplied a
certain desperate courage.

"I didn't mean to tell you, sir.  But you ought to know it.  Ask what
he has been doing in London this last fortnight.  Ask him where he has
been.  I can tell you.  He has been living with Hilary Vickars, he has
been making love to his daughter.  Vickars is a Socialist.  And your
son shares his views, and he has said publicly that your methods of
business prove you a scoundrel."

"Is that true?" said Masterman.

"It is God's truth.  Do you think I would have come between father and
son with a lie that was bound to be found out."

"No; I believe if you lied, you'd choose a safe lie, Scales," he said
bitterly.

"You are unjust to me, sir.  I have never lied to you.  I don't lie
now."

"That will do," said Masterman.

"But what will you do?"

"That's my affair," he retorted grimly.

"But it's my affair too, sir.  I want to know whether your son's report
is to go against my experience and yours? whether you will complete
this Leatham purchase or not?"

"Ah!  I wasn't thinking of that."  He turned away, and stood for some
moments looking out of the window in silence.  Then he walked rapidly
to his desk, unlocked a drawer, and took out Arthur's report.  "This is
my reply," he said.  He tore it in pieces, slowly, almost methodically,
and trampled it beneath his feet.  "Come in an hour," he added.  "I
will sign the purchase papers.  Now go."

"I hope you'll forgive me, sir----"

"What's that?" he roared in sudden rage.  "'Go!' I said.  Man, can't
you see I'm dangerous?  Go----"

The door banged behind the retreating Scales, and Archibold Masterman
was alone.

So this was the end of all his hopes, his dreams, his ambitious
purposes for Arthur!  For he did not think of doubting the story Scales
had told him.  He knew very well that Scales would never have dared to
tell the story if it were not true.  In a swift moment of agonised
apprehension he knew also that there had always been an element of
insecurity in those very hopes and purposes on which he had set his
heart so eagerly.  His son had always stood aloof from him, there had
always been some impalpable barrier between them.  Yet of late he had
been much less conscious of this barrier than he had ever been.  Arthur
had shown himself willing to meet his father's wishes, and in the
Leatham business he had displayed practical faculties for which he had
not given him credit.  Instinctively Masterman knew that something had
happened of which even Scales had not the clue.

If Arthur had been guilty of any of the common indiscretions of youth,
he could have forgiven him readily; he would indeed have almost
welcomed the opportunity, since it would have destroyed the barrier
between them.  But this was a different matter.  He caught a galling
vision of his son as his judge and critic publicly condemning him; no
father could condone that.  He had been too lenient with him, too
generous.  He had as good as admitted his superiority, he had even been
humble before him.  And this was the result--his son forgot all
gratitude, all decency even, and denounced him as a scoundrel.  The
word stung him like a gadfly.  His heart began to harden into cold,
pitiless anger towards his son.

Yet he must give him a hearing.  That was only fair.  And he was too
proud to seek it.  His first instinct was to wire Arthur to come to
Brighton at once, but this would be to admit an importance in the
situation which he was resolved to ignore.  In a day or two the family
would be back in London, and then the opportunity would come.

The opportunity came a few days later.

Eagle House was reopened, and the common forms of life were
re-established.  Dinner was just over.  Helen was chattering about the
new friends she had made at Brighton, but no one else had anything to
say.  A heavy restraint rested like a cloud over the family.  Mrs.
Masterman sat silent as usual, Arthur had not said a word during the
meal, Masterman had replied to Helen's ceaseless small talk in curt
monosyllables.

Arthur rose quietly to leave the room, when his father's voice arrested
him.

"Arthur."

"Yes, father."

"I want to see you."

"Very well, sir."

The words were colourless in themselves, but to one ear in that room
they rang like a clash of swords.  Mrs. Masterman looked up, her face
quivering and eager.  Her eyes sought Arthur, and as he passed her
chair she pressed his hand.  Arthur understood that silent overture,
and was grateful for it.

"Come into the office," said Masterman, rising from the table.

Arthur followed obediently.  The hour long foreseen had come, and upon
the whole he was glad.  He was sick of suspense, sick of the deceit of
eating his father's bread with bitter resentment in his heart, but not
the less he trembled.  There was a strangling pressure in his throat,
his heart swelled, a vein in his temple throbbed painfully.  He had
long rehearsed the hour; he had shaped every phrase that he would use
to sharpest meaning; but now he felt unaccountably dumb.  And, as if
memory herself turned traitor, a sudden picture flashed before him of
how, years ago, in some childish illness, his father had sat beside his
bed, had taken him upon his knee, and had hushed him to sleep upon his
bosom.  It passed through his thoughts like a strain of music, like the
fragrance of incense from an altar, subtly suggestive of a forgotten
sacredness in old affections and of their inalienable claim upon his
heart.  And with it came that old sense of bigness in his father.
Strange how that persisted, but it did.  This rough mass of man, this
big fighting figure, this man of many combats, did he really understand
him?  And he replied with the sadness of a great pity that he
understood him too well, and he saw the gulf between them.

But there was no such touch of grace or tenderness in the father's
mind.  He also had rehearsed this hour, but with an extraordinary
vehemence of rage, which grew by what it fed on.  He had come to
conceive himself a too generous and indulgent parent wronged by an
ungrateful child.  And worse still, he had come to conceive of Arthur
as a weakling, who refused the battle of life; a fool, who wanted life
arranged on a plan of his own; an attitudinising Pharisee, who held
himself aloof from realities, and said to the man who grappled them,
"Stand aside, I am holier than thou."  Well, he would teach him!  He
would give him a lesson which he would never forget.  His only mistake
had been that he had not done it long ago.

The moment the door was closed he wheeled round upon him with a
formidable gesture.

"I want a word with you," he said, "and I'll thank you not to interrupt
till I'm done.  It seems I've got a son that doesn't approve me.  Well,
I could bear that, but what I can't bear is to have a son that is fool
enough to go about saying so.  It seems I'm not good enough to be the
father of this son.  I'm a scoundrel, so he says, and he says it with
my meat in his belly and my clothes on his back.  My father was a hard
man, and beat me, but I never told other folk what I thought of him.  I
never went whining to other folk and called my father names.  I bore
what I had to bear, and kept my mouth shut.  But it seems I've got a
son that must be talking.  Well, I'm going to take care that he talks
where I can't hear him.  I thought to take him into my business--the
more fool I.  Business!  Let me tell you business needs commonsense,
which it seems you haven't got.  And business needs a still tongue,
which you'll never get, to say nothing of some kind of decent faith
between partners, which you haven't a notion of.  Partners!  Why, let
me tell you, I'd sooner take the most ignorant boy in my office and
make him my partner than you!  He'd at least have commonsense enough to
know which side his bread's buttered, which you'll never know.  So
that's at an end, and you know my mind."

"But, father, you are unjust to me.  You don't understand."

"What don't I understand?"

"What was in my thought."

"It's not a thing I'm at all anxious to understand," he retorted grimly.

"But you must.  I won't be condemned unheard."

"But you condemned me unheard."

This was a shaft that drew blood.  It was true, Arthur knew it to be
true; he had taken the word of other people against his father.

"There were circumstances----" he began.

"Circumstances?  Every fool pleads circumstances," Masterman
interrupted.  "Give it the right name, you that are so honest, and say
lying gossip."

"No, it was not gossip, father."

And thereupon he went over the whole story of the illness of Vickars,
his visit to Dr. Leet, and the doctor's angry denunciation of the
builder of the Lonsdale Road houses as a scoundrel.  He spoke with
quiet force, and his father listened in perfect silence, but with
averted face.

"Have you done?"

"Yes, father."

"Are you sure you've omitted nothing?"

"No, that is all."

"Well, now listen to me.  Dr. Leet may be right or wrong in what he
says--I don't know, and I don't care.  The only thing I know is that
when I built those houses I gave the best value I could at the price.
I've told you before that if I am paid a cheap price I give cheap work.
All the talking in the world can't upset that position--it's plain
business."

"But if people die through the cheap work!  O father, you can't mean
what you say!"

"A good many people have lived in Lonsdale Road and haven't died.  Your
doctor is an old woman, telling fairy-tales.  But even if he were
right, I disclaim responsibility.  I give the best value I can for the
money; if people won't pay for things, they can't have them.  _I_
didn't set the standards of business.  They existed before me, and
they'll exist after me.  If I hadn't built those houses, some one else
would have built them, and probably worse."

"But the dishonesty of it!" cried Arthur.

"Dishonest?  Well, I'll admit that too, if you like.  But whose
dishonesty?  Find me a business in London that isn't dishonest.  It's
London itself that is dishonest.  It insists on having what it hasn't
paid for, and won't pay for.  It prefers shoddy because it's cheap.  It
has no right to complain of what it gets."

Arthur listened in appalled silence; before this brutally lucid
exposition of what business meant, it seemed as though all his fine
ideals of right and justice were so many burst bubbles.  For a long
moment it was as though he saw the world streaming past him, like a
dark torrent thronged with dead faces, upon whose agonised pale lips
was the eternal accusation of things as they are.

"Father, it can't be right!" he cried.

"There's a power of things isn't right in this world, as you'll find
out some day.  And talking won't put 'em right, either.  But that
brings me to what I wanted to say.  It's about the thing you omitted to
mention when you told me your story."

"What was that, father?"

"I'll tell you.  You can show me what's wrong in my business, and now
I'm going to show you something that's wrong in your conduct.  If I
told you you'd behaved like a sulky young whelp, you'd say I was
unjust, wouldn't you?  Well, that's just what you've done."

"Father----"

"Don't interrupt.  You've had your say, and I mean now to have mine,
and be done with it.  If you'd come to me when this thing began to
trouble you, I'd have talked it over with you frankly.  But what did
you do?  You kept away from me.  You did worse.  You went about
repeating what Dr. Leet said.  You hadn't even the common decency to
wait until you'd seen me.  You hadn't even the gratitude to recollect
that I'd done the best I could for you, and was planning to do more.
You behaved just like a bad-hearted little boy who goes about letting
folks think that his father is his enemy.  That's pretty behaviour in a
son, isn't it?  But it seems that's the kind of son I've got.  And for
that I don't forgive you.  You've made it clear that you and I can't
draw together."

"I never meant anything of the kind."

"Never meant!  What kind of excuse is that?  It's what every
slack-baked youth in the office says when he's played the fool.  And
when a youth can find nothing better to say than that, I fire him.  And
I'm going to fire you."

"I am entirely in your hands, father.  I can see that I was wrong in
not coming to you at once.  What more can I say?"

"It's too late to say anything.  You can't undo wrong by just saying
you are wrong.  The plain fact is, I can't trust you.  There's only one
end for it--you must go your way, and I mine."

There was a rough dignity in Masterman as he uttered these words which
was profoundly moving.  Had he been only angry, violent, or satirical,
Arthur could have borne it.  He would have been sustained by the
justice of his cause.  But now that very justice on which he had relied
for strength broke beneath him like a rotten prop.  He who had been so
keen for justice was himself unjust.  He saw himself--an implicit
parricide, a child who had taken arms against his father.  And he saw
with a sudden agonised clearness of perception his father's nature,
with its strange blending of rugged virtue and unscrupulous craft, its
hard, indomitable fibre shot through by soft veins of tenderness, his
public traffic with dishonour almost counterbalanced by his stern
reticence under the early cruelties he had endured, and his honourable,
stoical silence under their brutal ignominies--he saw all this, and he
saw himself as weak, hysteric, foolish, crying out for justice in
another, but blind to the folly of his own behaviour.

"I am sorry, father," he said in a broken voice.

"That's the first sensible word you've said to-night.  Only, you see,
it comes too late.  You and me's got to part.  Our roads lie different."

"What do you wish me to do, father?"

"I don't know.  I want to think things over.  You'd better go now."

And then with a sudden savage burst of anger, as Arthur left the room,
he shouted after him: "You can take my compliments to Dr. Leet, and
tell him he's a confounded interfering fool!"

But there was more of pain than anger in this violent dismissal.




X

THE FAREWELL

The night had fallen upon Eagle House.  Arthur sat alone in his bedroom
at the open window.  A soft wind talked to itself in the branches of
the big mulberry tree on the lawn; a few placid stars shone in the
blue-black heavens, then the late moon like a yellow fire; a nested
sparrow chirped contentedly beneath the eaves; and, like a solemn wash
of waves upon a hidden beach, London moaned and murmured through all
its vast circumference.  Out of the deep night the Spirit of his own
Youth arose, and sat beside him.

"Listen to me," said the Spirit.  "I bring with me two swords--Faith
and Courage.  Gird them on."

But London laughed.  A soft derision shook the leaves upon the mulberry
tree, and the waves upon the hidden beach were scornful.

"You have your life to live.  Live it," said the Spirit.

But the stars, like eyes, turned slowly toward him in despairing irony.
"How many millions have we heard say that," they whispered, "and each
has been overcome in turn, and has sunk in nameless dust."

"You are not as the nameless millions," said the Spirit.  "You are
yourself, with your own right and power to live."

And at that the heavens moved, and an infinite procession of scarred
brows and sad eyes, passed by, and a multitude of lips whispered, "We
said that once, but Life was too strong for us."

"Nevertheless, thou canst conquer Life," said the Spirit.

"Nay, Life will conquer thee," replied the legions of the dead.  "Let
be.  Submit.  Why strive when all strife is vain?"

And then, out of the deep well of his misery, a bubble of light swam
up, and something in his soul cried, "I will not submit!  I will gird
on the two swords of Faith and Courage.  I will conquer Life!"

      *      *      *      *      *

He had sat so long in absorbed silence that he was unconscious that the
door of the room had opened and shut.  The noise of the closing door,
gentle as it was, roused him like a clap of thunder.  He turned at the
sound, and saw his mother.

She was robed in white, a white silk shawl was drawn over her head, and
in the dim light she looked like a gentle apparition.

"Mother!" he cried.

She came toward him with outstretched arms.

And then, as by a magic touch, he became a little child again.  She sat
besides him, drew his head down upon her warm bosom, put her arm round
his neck, and whispered, "I know."  And beneath her gentle caress,
thawed as it were by the mere warmth of contact with her, something
hard and cold in his own heart dissolved and drained itself away in
delicious tears.  He wept unrestrainedly, as a child weeps who is in no
haste to cease from weeping, lest the consolation for his tears should
cease with the tears themselves.  And the chief sweetness of it all lay
in the silence of their communion.  Neither spoke because there was no
need of speech.  He knew that he was comprehended, and this is the
final ecstasy of all communion.  From this faithful bosom he had drawn
his life; these hands had been the first to touch him; and as they had
long ago bound up his childish bruises, so now their very touch drew
the hurt out of his pained heart.  He drank life from her again; he was
conscious of a warm inflowing flood of strength, of restful power, of
quiet blessedness.

When at last he lifted his eyes he saw her transfigured.  The frost of
silence had melted from her face; he caught in the dim light the
sparkle of her eyes, divined rather than discerned the flush of her
cheek and the new youth and vehemence of her aspect.

"Mother!" he said again.

She quietly pushed him from her, and gazed deep into his eyes.

"And now let us talk," she whispered.

"You know what has happened?" he said.

"Yes, I know."

"O mother, what am I to do?"

"You must do right, my son."

She was silent for a moment, and he felt her hand tighten as it held
his own.  Then she said abruptly, "I have my confession to make before
I can counsel you."

"Your confession, mother?"

"Can't you see that one is needed?  Have you never asked yourself the
reason for my silence, my aloofness, and my lack of interest in life?
Did you never feel yourself that these things were unnatural, that
there must be a reason for them, and that the reason must be tragic?  I
am going to tell you that reason.  I have waited for this hour for
years--O my God, what dreary, fearful years!  I have watched your
growth with terror, Arthur--yes, with terror, because I feared what you
might become.  Do you know what I feared?  God forgive me!  I feared
you might be like your father.  I watched every little seed of thought
as it opened in you, fearful of what flower it might bear.  I studied
every glance, every sign of disposition, every drift of temperament;
weighed your words, analysed them endlessly through sleepless nights,
gazed into your mind and heart with dread and yearning.  No one knows
what I suffered when you went to Oxford.  There was not a night when I
did not lie awake for hours thinking of you.  I said, 'Here he will
meet the world in all its grossness, and he will succumb to it, as a
thousand others have done.  He will lose his fineness; he will become
like the rest.'  Each time when you came home I met you with a kind of
terror.  I dared scarcely look into your face for fear of the record I
might find written there.  A mother reads the signs that no one else
can read.  She knows, as no one else can know, the secret potencies
within the nature of her child.  And knowing what I did of life, I was
terrified; and it was because I feared to look I stood aloof, that I
shunned even speech with you, that I have shut myself for years within
a wall of ice.  Arthur, can you forgive me?"

"O my poor mother! it is I who should ask forgiveness, because I did
not understand you better."

She stooped to kiss his forehead, and went on relentlessly: "No; I see
now that I was wrong.  I denied myself to you.  I should have given
myself to you all the more because I feared for you.  But surely I have
been punished--punished by the loss of how many moments like this!  And
I might have had them!  What can ever give me back the kisses I have
never kissed?"

"Mother, I will not have you talk like that.  I have never doubted that
you loved me.  And I love you all the more for what you have endured
for me.  Yes, I knew you suffered--I always understood that."

"I suffered--but I have not yet told you the deepest cause.  I must
tell you that too."

"I don't want to know, mother.  I have no right to know."

"Yes; it is your right to know."

There was anguish in her voice now.  The yellow rays of the sinking
moon, falling on her face, revealed a white, strained contour, as
though flame and marble mingled.

"Listen, Arthur.  I must go back through the years to the time when I
married your father.  I was young, gay, inexperienced, and as
lighthearted as a girl could be.  Your father had a greatness of his
own--never think that I doubt that--and when I first met him I thought
him the most wonderful man in all the world.  No man was ever better
calculated to impress the senses of a young girl.  I gave him what was
almost adoration, unthinking adoration.  Of course I knew that I shared
only one part of his life, but what did I care?  Women are usually
content if men love them; they do not care to ask what kind of life the
men they trust live when they are away from them.  Of the nature of
your father's business life I could hardly form a guess.  It was not my
concern, and I was happy in my ignorance until--until a day came when I
had to know.

"I will spare you details, Arthur.  I have said enough when I say that
the discovery I made was that your father's business was based on
merciless chicanery and fraud.  I begged him on my knees to alter it.
I told him that I was willing to live anywhere, to do anything, to
suffer any privation, rather than eat dishonest bread.  At first he
argued with me, as one might with a foolish child.  He told me he was
no worse than other people--all businesses were like that; he was as
good as circumstances permitted; and he laughed at what he called my
pretty Puritanism.  Then, when he saw that I was in earnest, he grew
angry.

"'Haven't I given you everything you possess?' he cried.

"'You shall give me no more,' I answered.  'You have taken from me much
more than you gave.'

"'What have I taken?'

"'My belief in you, my belief in life,' I answered.  And then, in my
hot anger, I told him all that I had learned, and how I abhorred to
live softly at the price of cruel suffering in others, and refused to
profit by the wages of robbery.  He turned pale at that, for he saw
that I knew something which went beyond legalised dishonesty.

"From that hour our lives were separate.  I never again wore my girlish
finery; I ate as little as I could; I lived in solitude.  I knew that
nothing I could say would influence him.  I was condemned to futility.
It was in that year of our final quarrel you were born.  O my boy, can
you understand now with what terror I looked at your little innocent
face as it lay upon my bosom?  For many, many months I wished you dead
for fear of what you might become.  I have watched the growth of your
father's wealth with far deeper alarm than men have ever watched the
coming of poverty.  I could discern in it nothing but a threat to you.
I have wasted myself in tears and prayers for you, all the time telling
myself that prayers were in vain.  And now--praise be to the God I have
insulted!--I find my prayers miraculously answered.  Arthur, my son,
you have stood the test.  Your soul has overcome the forces of your
blood.  I live to-night, I live for the first time in twenty years, and
God restores to me the years that the locust has eaten."

Her impassioned speech thrilled him like the note of rapture in the
voice of a saint.  And as she spoke, with that pale moonlight lighting
her face like a flame, it was as though the saint's halo rested on her
brow; she was the creature of a vision, ineffably pure and tender,
clothed in the eternal sacredness of motherhood.  He had rested his
head upon her bosom while he wept; he knelt now, and laid it on her
knees.

"O my son, my son," she cried, "I planned for this long before you were
born, but I never thought it would come true.  It was for this I
chastened myself with tears and fasting, hoping that the life I
nourished might be freed from the stain I feared.  But I had no faith.
I could only bring God my timidity; I could only plead my agony; I had
no strength to bring to Him.  Yet He heard me, and after all the
doubting years He has given me the desire of my heart."

"And I never understood," he whispered.

"But you understand now, and I am repaid in full," she answered.  "When
I saw you go out with your father to-night into the office, I knew the
great battle of your life had come, and something told me you would not
fail."

"Yet I did fail, mother.  He made me feel that I had wronged him."

"I know.  He told me."

"He said I had behaved like a bad-hearted little boy.  He humbled me to
the dust."

"I know that too.  That is why I came to you, my dear.  I knew that you
would need me."

"I do need you, mother.  Everything is dark and perplexed to me.  It
seems that though I have done right, I have done it in the wrong way."

"The great thing is to have done right.  That atones for everything
with God, I think."

"But I don't see the next step, mother."

"We never do, till we take it.  But I can see it.  Shall I tell you
what it is?"

"Yes, mother."

"It is the step I did not take--that is why I see it so clearly.  You
must go away.  You must take your life into your own hands.  You must
begin it all over again.  Women cannot do that; men can.  Only now and
then does a woman claim her own personality, and for her the risk is
terrible.  But a man can do it; he is meant to do it.  That is where he
finds his greatness."

"But that will be to leave you, mother.  How can I do that, especially
now, when I know what your life has been?"

"It is the fate of mothers, dearest, and it is a joyous fate.  What
matter where you go?  I shall still live in you.  Don't you see, dear,
that my life reaches its height to-night, and through you?  I have paid
twenty years of loneliness and tears for this hour, and I find the
price light.  Do you think I grudge a few more years of separation?
And they will not be lonely.  I have wept my last tears for you.  I
have triumphed after all, and nothing can rob me of my triumph."

The supreme self-abnegation of that speech was too great to be
understood all at once.  It came upon him by degrees; perhaps it would
be true to say that it was only after many years, when he stood beside
his mother's grave, that he understood its full significance.  But
enough of that significance was felt even now to fill his soul with
wonder.  He saw only the first page in the sacred gospel of motherhood,
but he caught its meaning.  To ask nothing, to give everything, to
purchase momentary rapture with the grief of years, to toil without
reward, to love and be forgotten, to yield flesh and heart for the
nurture of the seeds of life in others, to create for them the
unparticipated victory--that was the destiny of motherhood, a thing not
less sacred than the love that once endured the Cross for man.  To find
himself so loved was an overwhelming thought.  Beneath its weight he
lay breathless, in an ecstasy of marvel.

"Yes, you must go away," she continued.  "Shall I tell you why?"

"Yes, mother, tell me."

"Because if you stay in London you will never find your freedom.  In
London the net is drawn so close that individuality is strangled.
London insists upon conformity.  It grinds men down by slow attrition
to a common likeness.  I have thought it all over.  It is because there
are cities like London, full of avarice and pleasure, that the best men
grow into criminals without knowing it.  Your father might have been a
good man if he had never seen London.

"And there is another reason too.  Your father, in spite of his anger,
will not give you up.  He will try to keep you near him, even though
you are not his partner in the business.  He will bribe you by his
generosity, subdue you by his forgiveness.  And he is a strong man,
remember, who always gets his own way sooner or later.  Don't you know
that, Arthur?"

"Do you mean that his very love for me is a peril, mother?"

"Yes, that is what I mean, my dear.  You don't know what it means to be
subject to the constant pressure of a strong man who loves you.  But I
know.  It is that which has reduced my own life to futility.  If I had
hated your father, my hatred would have given me strength to leave him.
But because I loved him, I learned to distinguish between him and his
sin.  Oh! there have been many times when I have been almost overcome;
times when I have said, 'What is the use of struggle?'  It were wiser
to submit at once, to accept a strong man's love with gratitude, to ask
no questions, to become like the rest.  I have never really submitted,
but I have compromised, and that has meant futility!  But you are
different.  You have your chance to escape, to build your own life.  I
don't want your life to be futile, as mine has been.  It is the torture
of all tortures.  Arthur, I think I would rather see you dead!"

"But you, mother, how can I leave you?"

"Have I not told you I wish you to go?  Do you think I am so selfish,
dear, that I would have you stay with me to your loss?  That would be
my loss too, and a worse loss than any I have yet endured.  My heart
says, Stay; but see, I pluck the weakness from my heart.  Arthur, I
command you to go."

She rose as she spoke.  The moon had sunk.  The first gray gleam of day
was in the sky, and suddenly the earliest sunbeam clothed her.  In that
fuller light he saw her face irradiated.

"I will go," he said.

She drew him to her, and kissed his brow.

"There speaks my own true son," she said.

For some moments a deep silence filled the room.  A bird twittered in
the dawn-light; London turned like a weary sleeper on a couch of pain;
a wind, fresh from the fountains of the day, blew hopefully, with a
hint of free seas and far-off lands.

"Promise me one thing, my son."

"What is that, mother?"

"It is that whatever your life may be, it shall be honest.  Rich or
poor, defeated or successful, accept no gain by violence, win no
pleasure by dishonour.  O my son, you know why I say this, you know
what I mean by it."

"Yes, I know, mother, and I promise."

"And go at once, my dear.  I have foreseen this hour and have provided
for it.  You will not go without money.  You need not be ashamed to
take it; it is yours.  I have saved it, and for you.  And now God bless
you, my dear, dear son!"

She withdrew herself from his arms and was gone.  The full day shone
now, and from its shining summits Arthur heard the bugle cry, calling
him to distant lands and new life.




PART TWO

THE AMERICAN MADONNA



XI

NEW YORK

If he had been able to earn his living in any conventional and accepted
way, he would not have been on his way to join the S.S. _Saurian_ as
she lay off the landing-stage at Southampton on that bright September
morning.  The poor must needs learn a trade, because a trade is
necessary to mere existence; but it is the tragedy of the rich and the
semi-rich that, when once deprived of the artificial security of
riches, they are helpless.

Arthur had plenty of time to do battle with this afflicting thought as
he travelled down to Southampton.  It accompanied him, like a voice of
irony, in the rushing wheels; flashed upon him in the sentinel
telegraph posts, each bearing aloft its spark of silent fire; saluted
him from a hundred fields where men stood bare-armed beside the loaded
wains; mocked him in casual glimpses of firm faces behind the glass of
signal-boxes, in hurrying porters at the points of stoppage, in groups
of labourers leaning lightly on spade or mattock, as the train
thundered past.  In all these faces, common as they were, there was a
look of proud efficiency.  In every sight and sound was the vindication
of human toil.  These men, each in his several way, had solved the
problem of life.  Each had learned to do something which the world
wanted done.  They did the work required of them, undistracted by
problems and philosophies; asked no questions concerning the structure
of society or the nature of life; were content to add their stone to
the cairn, to pass on and be forgotten, and to earn the final simple
elegy, "home have gone and ta'en their wages."

But Arthur--what did he know of this primeval life of man, which had
gone on from the dawn of the world, unchanged by change of dynasties,
by the readjustment of nations, by the birth and death of a hundred
intricate philosophies, literatures, reforms, social experiments,
social reconstructions?  He knew less than the humblest child who
followed the reapers in the field, or began the perilous process of
existence by earning casual pence in the mine or factory.  Like so many
youths in an age when all forms of hand-labour have lost their dignity,
he had learned a hundred things which lent a false glamour to
existence, but not one which supplied its vital needs.  He had
accumulated accomplishments, but had not developed efficiencies, as
though one should adorn and decorate a machine in which the works were
lacking.

"Let me reckon up my capital," he thought as the train rushed on; "let
me ascertain my authentic stock-in-trade.  I have some knowledge of
Greek literature and Roman history, but it is probable that in all this
train-load of human creatures there are not half a dozen who would
attach the least value to my knowledge.  I can decipher old French
chronicles with fair success; I know enough of music to understand the
theory of counterpoint, and enough of poetry to construct a decent
sonnet; and, so far as I can see, these are not commodities which
possess any marketable value.  I have thirty pounds given me by my
mother; but if my life depended upon my earning thirty pence, I know no
possible method by which I might wrest the most wretched pittance from
the world's closed fist.  I am, in fact, an incompetent, but through no
fault of my own.  It seems that I have been elaborately trained to do a
great number of things which no one wants done, but not one of the
things for which the world makes eager compensation.  What were mere
pastime to the savage is to me an inaccessible display of effort; left
alone with the whole open world for my kingdom, it is doubtful if I
could build a house, grow a potato, bake a loaf, or secure the barest
means of life.  Such is my deplorable condition that it is
possible--no, entirely certain, that the poorest emigrant in this
rushing freight of men and women would scruple to change places with
me.  That's a pretty situation for a gentleman of England and an Oxford
graduate, isn't it?"

He smiled mirthlessly at the thought.  Yet while it humiliated him,
youth asserted its right sufficiently to extract from it a certain
flavour of exhilaration.  He was at all events coming to grips with the
reality of living.  He had been like a boy swimming upon bladders; the
bladders were now removed, and a potent and tremendous sea throbbed
beneath him.  Since he could depend no more on artificial aids to life,
it followed that life must needs develop its own latent forces.  There
surely must be such forces in himself, an elemental manhood which must
justify itself.  There recurred to him a saying of Hilary Vickars.
They had been discussing one night the infinite and elusive question of
wherein lay the wisdom of life, when Vickars had abruptly said,
"Practice is the only teacher.  You learn to walk by walking, to swim
by swimming, to live by living.  The child has no theory about walking:
he simply walks, at the price of a thousand tears and bruises.  In the
same way we must make the experiment of living in order to learn how to
live.  It is the same with religion.  We make the experiment of God
before we can find God.  The particular folly of men to-day is that
they think wisdom comes by talking about wisdom.  One honest attempt to
do something, however blunderingly, is worth a lifetime of discussion
about how it should be done."

"Yet Browning held that the great thing planned was better than the
little thing achieved," he had responded.

"Browning also was a talker rather than a doer," Vickars had replied.
"He misleads men by the very robustness of his talk into the notion
that great dreams can take the place of great actions.  Don't let him
mislead you.  Remember what I say, that the great business of life is
to live, not to criticise life."

He remembered the words now, and they acquired new significance as he
studied the faces of his

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