The God in the Car: A Novel
by Anthony Hope · English · Gutenberg #40583 · 415,502 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The God in the Car: A Novel
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The God in the Car: A Novel
Author: Anthony Hope
Release date: August 26, 2012 [eBook #40583]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40583
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Ernest Schaal, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOD IN THE CAR: A NOVEL ***
THE GOD IN THE CAR
_A NOVEL_
BY
ANTHONY HOPE
AUTHOR OF THE PRISONER OF ZENDA, ETC.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1894
COPYRIGHT, 1894.
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--AN INSOLENT MEMORY 1
II.--THE COINING OF A NICKNAME 14
III.--MRS. DENNISON'S ORDERS 26
IV.--TWO YOUNG GENTLEMEN 39
V.--A TELEGRAM TO FRANKFORT 52
VI.--WHOSE SHALL IT BE? 66
VII.--AN ATTEMPT TO STOP THE WHEELS 81
VIII.--CONVERTS AND HERETICS 96
IX.--AN OPPRESSIVE ATMOSPHERE 108
X.--A LADY'S BIT OF WORK 120
XI.--AGAINST HIS COMING 134
XII.--IT CAN WAIT 148
XIII.--A SPASM OF PENITENCE 160
XIV.--THE THING OR THE MAN 173
XV.--THE WORK OF A WEEK 185
XVI.--THE LAST BARRIERS 200
XVII.--A SOUND IN THE NIGHT 217
XVIII.--ON THE MATTER OF A RAILWAY 231
XIX.--PAST PRAYING FOR 248
XX.--THE BARON'S CONTRIBUTION 258
XXI.--A JOINT IN HIS ARMOUR 271
XXII.--A TOAST IN CHAMPAGNE 287
XXIII.--THE CUTTING OF THE KNOT 304
XXIV.--THE RETURN OF A FRIEND 317
XXV.--THE MOVING CAR 332
THE GOD IN THE CAR.
CHAPTER I.
AN INSOLENT MEMORY.
"I'm so blind," said Miss Ferrars plaintively. "Where are my glasses?"
"What do you want to see?" asked Lord Semingham.
"The man in the corner, talking to Mr. Loring."
"Oh, you won't know him even with the glasses. He's the sort of man you
must be introduced to three times before there's any chance of a
permanent impression."
"You seem to recognise him."
"I know him in business. We are, or rather are going to be,
fellow-directors of a company."
"Oh, then I shall see you in the dock together some day."
"What touching faith in the public prosecutor! Does nothing shake your
optimism?"
"Perhaps your witticisms."
"Peace, peace!"
"Well, who is he?"
"He was once," observed Lord Semingham, as though stating a curious
fact, "in a Government. His name is Foster Belford, and he is still
asked to the State Concerts."
"I knew I knew him! Why, Harry Dennison thinks great things of him!"
"It is possible."
"And he, not to be behindhand in politeness, thinks greater of Maggie
Dennison."
"His task is the easier."
"And you and he are going to have the effrontery to ask shareholders to
trust their money to you?"
"Oh, it isn't us; it's Ruston."
"Mr. Ruston? I've heard of him."
"You very rarely admit that about anybody."
"Moreover, I've met him."
"He's quite coming to the front, of late, I know."
"Is there any positive harm in being in the fashion? I like now and then
to talk to the people one is obliged to talk about."
"Go on," said Lord Semingham, urbanely.
"But, my dear Lord Semingham----"
"Hush! Keep the truth from me, like a kind woman. Ah! here comes Tom
Loring----How are you, Loring? Where's Dennison?"
"At the House. I ought to be there, too."
"Why, of course. The place of a private secretary is by the side of----"
"His chief's wife. We all know that," interposed Adela Ferrars.
"When you grow old, you'll be sorry for all the wicked things you've
said," observed Loring.
"Well, there'll be nothing else to do. Where are you going, Lord
Semingham?"
"Home."
"Why?"
"Because I've done my duty. Oh, but here's Dennison, and I want a word
with him."
Lord Semingham passed on, leaving the other two together.
"Has Harry Dennison been speaking to-day?" asked Miss Ferrars.
"Well, he had something prepared."
"He had something! You know you write them."
Mr. Loring frowned.
"Yes, and I know we aren't allowed to say so," pursued Adela.
"It's neither just nor kind to Dennison."
Miss Ferrars looked at him, her brows slightly raised.
"And you are both just and kind, really," he added.
"And you, Mr. Loring, are a wonderful man. You're not ashamed to be
serious! Oh, yes, I've annoyed--you're quite right. I was--whatever I
was--on the ninth of last March, and I think I'm too old to be
lectured."
Tom Loring laughed, and, an instant later, Adela followed suit.
"I suppose it was horrid of me," she said. "Can't we turn it round and
consider it as a compliment to you?"
Tom looked doubtful, but, before he could answer, Adela cried:
"Oh, here's Evan Haselden, and--yes--it's Mr. Ruston with him?"
As the two men entered, Mrs. Dennison rose from her chair. She was a
tall woman; her years fell one or two short of thirty. She was not a
beauty, but her broad brow and expressive features, joined to a certain
subdued dignity of manner and much grace of movement, made her
conspicuous among the women in her drawing-room. Young Evan Haselden
seemed to appreciate her, for he bowed his glossy curly head, and shook
hands in a way that almost turned the greeting into a deferentially
distant caress. Mrs. Dennison acknowledged his hinted homage with a
bright smile, and turned to Ruston.
"At last!" she said, with another smile. "The first time after--how many
years?"
"Eight, I believe," he answered.
"Oh, you're terribly definite. And what have you been doing with
yourself?"
He shrugged his square shoulders, and she did not press her question,
but let her eyes wander over him.
"Well?" he asked.
"Oh--improved. And I?"
Suddenly Ruston laughed.
"Last time we met," he said, "you swore you'd never speak to me again."
"I'd quite forgotten my fearful threat."
He looked straight in her face for a moment, as he asked--
"And the cause of it?"
Mrs. Dennison coloured.
"Yes, quite," she answered; and conscious that her words carried no
conviction to him, she added hastily, "Go and speak to Harry. There he
is."
Ruston obeyed her, and being left for a moment alone, she sat down on
the chair placed ready near the door for her short intervals of rest.
There was a slight pucker on her brow. The sight of Ruston and his
question stirred in her thoughts, which were never long dormant, and
which his coming woke into sudden activity. She had not anticipated that
he would venture to recall to her that incident--at least, not at
once--in the first instant of meeting, at such a time and such a place.
But as he had, she found herself yielding to the reminiscence he
induced. Forgotten the cause of her anger with him? For the first two or
three years of her married life, she would have answered, "Yes, I have
forgotten it." Then had come a period when now and again it recurred to
her, not for his sake or its own, but as a summary of her stifled
feeling; and during that period she had resolutely struggled not to
remember it. Of late that struggle had ceased, and the thing lay a
perpetual background to her thoughts: when there was nothing else to
think about, when the stage of her mind was empty of moving figures, it
snatched at the chance of prominence, and thus became a recurrent
consciousness from which her interests and her occupations could not
permanently rescue her. For example, here she was thinking of it in the
very midst of her party. Yet this persistence of memory seemed
impertinent, unreasonable, almost insolent. For, as she told herself,
finding it necessary to tell herself more and more often, her husband
was still all that he had been when he had won her heart--good-looking,
good-tempered, infinitely kind and devoted. When she married she had
triumphed confidently in these qualities; and the unanimous cry of
surprised congratulations at the match she was making had confirmed her
own joy and exultation in it. It had been a great match; and yet, beyond
all question, also a love match.
But now the chorus of wondering applause was forgotten, and there
remained only the one voice which had been raised to break the harmony
of approbation--a voice that nobody, herself least of all, had listened
to then. How should it be listened to? It came from a nobody--a young
man of no account, whose opinion none cared to ask; whose judgment, had
it been worth anything in itself, lay under suspicion of being biassed
by jealousy. Willie Ruston had never declared himself her suitor; yet
(she clung hard to this) he would not have said what he did had not the
chagrin of a defeated rival inspired him; and a defeated rival, as
everybody knows, will say anything. Certainly she had been right not to
listen, and was wrong to remember. To this she had often made up her
mind, and to this she returned now as she sat watching her husband and
Willie Ruston, forgetful of all the chattering crowd beside.
As to what it was she resolved not to remember, and did remember, it was
just one sentence--his only comment on the news of her engagement, his
only hint of any opinion or feeling about it. It was short, sharp,
decisive, and, as his judgments were, even in the days when he, alone of
all the world, held them of any moment, absolutely confident; it was
also, she had felt on hearing it, utterly untrue, unjust, and
ungenerous. It had rung out like a pistol-shot, "Maggie, you're marrying
a fool," and then a snap of tight-fitting lips, a glance of scornful
eyes, and a quick, unhesitating stride away that hardly waited for a
contemptuous smile at her angry cry, "I'll never speak to you again."
She had been in a fury of wrath--she had a power of wrath--that a plain,
awkward, penniless, and obscure youth--one whom she sometimes disliked
for his arrogance, and sometimes derided for his self-confidence--should
dare to say such a thing about her Harry, whom she was so proud to love,
and so proud to have won. It was indeed an insolent memory that flung
the thing again and again in her teeth.
The party began to melt away. The first good-bye roused Mrs. Dennison
from her enveloping reverie. Lady Valentine, from whom it came, lingered
for a gush of voluble confidences about the charm of the house, and the
people, and the smart little band that played softly in an alcove, and
what not; her daughter stood by, learning, it is to be hoped, how it is
meet to behave in society, and scanning Evan Haselden's trim figure with
wary, critical glances, alert to turn aside if he should glance her way.
Mrs. Dennison returned the ball of civility, and, released by several
more departures, joined Adela Ferrars. Adela stood facing Haselden and
Tom Loring, who were arm-in-arm. At the other end of the room Harry
Dennison and Ruston were still in conversation.
"These _men_, Maggie," began Adela--and it seemed a mere caprice of
pronunciation, that the word did not shape itself into "monkeys"--"are
the absurdest creatures. They say I'm not fit to take part in politics!
And why?"
Mrs. Dennison shook her head, and smiled.
"Because, if you please, I'm too emotional. Emotional, indeed! And I
can't generalise! Oh, couldn't I generalise about men!"
"Women can never say 'No,'" observed Evan Haselden, not in the least as
if he were repeating a commonplace.
"You'll find you're wrong when you grow up," retorted Adela.
"I doubt that," said Mrs. Dennison, with the kindest of smiles.
"Maggie, you spoil the boy. Isn't it enough that he should have gone
straight from the fourth form--where, I suppose, he learnt to
generalise----"
"At any rate, not to be emotional," murmured Loring.
"Into Parliament, without having his head turned by----"
"You'd better go, Evan," suggested Loring in a warning tone.
"I shall go too," announced Adela.
"I'm walking your way," said Evan, who seemed to bear no malice.
"How delightful!"
"You don't object?"
"Not the least. I'm driving."
"A mere schoolboy score!"
"How stupid of me! You haven't had time to forget them."
"Oh, take her away," said Mrs. Dennison, and they disappeared in a fire
of retorts, happy, or happy enough for happy people, and probably Evan
drove with the lady after all.
Mrs. Dennison walked towards where her husband and Ruston sat on a sofa
in talk.
"What are you two conspiring about?" she asked.
"Ruston had something to say to me about business."
"What, already?"
"Oh, we've met in the city, Mrs. Dennison," explained Ruston, with a
confidential nod to Harry.
"And that was the object of your appearance here to-day? I was
flattering my party, it seems."
"No. I didn't expect to find your husband. I thought he would be at the
House."
"Ah, Harry, how did the speech go?"
"Oh, really pretty well, I think," answered Harry Dennison, with a
contented air. "I got nearly half through before we were counted out."
A very faint smile showed on his wife's face.
"So you were counted out?" she asked.
"Yes, or I shouldn't be here."
"You see, I am acquitted, Mrs. Dennison. Only an accident brought him
here."
"An accident impossible to foresee," she acquiesced, with the slightest
trace of bitterness--so slight that her husband did not notice it.
Ruston rose.
"Well, you'd better talk to Semingham about it," he remarked to Harry
Dennison; "he's one of us, you know."
"Yes, I will. And I'll just get you that pamphlet of mine; you can put
it in your pocket."
He ran out of the room to fetch what he promised. Mrs. Dennison, still
faintly smiling, held out her hand to Ruston.
"It's been very pleasant to see you again," she said graciously. "I hope
it won't be eight years before our next meeting."
"Oh, no; you see I'm floating now."
"Floating?" she repeated, with a smile of enquiry.
"Yes; on the surface. I've been in the depths till very lately, and
there one meets no good society."
"Ah! You've had a struggle?"
"Yes," he answered, laughing; "you may call it a bit of a struggle."
She looked at him with grave curious eyes.
"And you are not married?" she asked abruptly.
"No, I'm glad to say."
"Why glad, Mr. Ruston? Some people like being married."
"Oh, I don't claim to be above it, Mrs. Dennison," he answered with a
laugh, "but a wife would have been a great hindrance to me all these
years."
There was a simple and _bona fide_ air about his statement; it was not
raillery; and Mrs. Dennison laughed in her turn.
"Oh, how like you!" she murmured.
Mr. Ruston, with a passing gleam of surprise at her merriment, bade her
a very unemotional farewell, and left her. She sat down and waited idly
for her husband's return. Presently he came in. He had caught Ruston in
the hall, delivered his pamphlet, and was whistling cheerfully. He took
a chair near his wife.
"Rum chap that!" he said. "But he's got a good deal of stuff in him;"
and he resumed his lively tune.
The tune annoyed Mrs. Dennison. To suffer whistling without visible
offence was one of her daily trials. Harry's emotions and reflections
were prone to express themselves through that medium.
"I didn't do half-badly, to-day," said Harry, breaking off again. "Old
Tom had got it all splendidly in shape for me--by Jove, I don't know
what I should do without Tom--and I think I put it pretty well. But, of
course, it's a subject that doesn't catch on with everybody."
It was the dullest subject in the world; it was also, in all likelihood,
one of the most unimportant; and dull subjects are so seldom unimportant
that the perversity of the combination moved Maggie Dennison to a
wondering pity. She rose and came behind the chair where her husband
sat. Leaning over the back, she rested her elbows on his shoulders, and
lightly clasped her hands round his neck. He stopped his whistle, which
had grown soft and contented, laughed, and kissed one of the encircling
hands, and she, bending lower, kissed him on the forehead as he turned
his face up to look at her.
"You poor dear old thing!" she said with a smile and a sigh.
CHAPTER II.
THE COINING OF A NICKNAME.
When it was no later than the middle of June, Adela Ferrars, having her
reputation to maintain, ventured to sum up the season. It was, she said,
a Ruston-cum-Violetta season. Violetta's doings and unexampled triumphs
have, perhaps luckily, no place here; her dancing was higher and her
songs more surpassing in another dimension than those of any performer
who had hitherto won the smiles of society; and young men who are
getting on in life still talk about her. Ruston's fame was less
widespread, but his appearance was an undeniable fact of the year. When
a man, the first five years of whose adult life have been spent on a
stool in a coal merchant's office, and the second five somewhere (an
absolutely vague somewhere) in Southern or Central Africa, comes before
the public, offering in one closed hand a new empire, or, to avoid all
exaggeration, at least a province, asking with the other opened hand for
three million pounds, the public is bound to afford him the tribute of
some curiosity. When he enlists in his scheme men of eminence like Mr.
Foster Belford, of rank like Lord Semingham, of great financial
resources like Dennison Sons & Company, he becomes one whom it is
expedient to bid to dinner and examine with scrutinising enquiry. He may
have a bag of gold for you; or you may enjoy the pleasure of exploding
his _prestige_; at least, you are timely and up-to-date, and none can
say that your house is a den of fogies, or yourself, in the language
made to express these things (for how otherwise should they get
themselves expressed?) on other than "the inner rail."
It chanced that Miss Ferrars arrived early at the Seminghams, and she
talked with her host on the hearth-rug, while Lady Semingham was
elaborately surveying her small but comely person in a mirror at the
other end of the long room. Lord Semingham was rather short and
rather stout; he hardly looked as if his ancestors had fought at
Hastings--perhaps they had not, though the peerage said they had. He
wore close-cut black whiskers, and the blue of his jowl witnessed a
suppressed beard of great vitality. His single eye-glass reflected
answering twinkles to Adela's _pince-nez_, and his mouth was puckered at
the world's constant entertainment; men said that he found his wife
alone a sufficient and inexhaustible amusement.
"The Heathers are coming," he said, "and Lady Val and Marjory, and young
Haselden, and Ruston."
"_Toujours_ Ruston," murmured Adela.
"And one or two more. What's wrong with Ruston? There is, my dear Adela,
no attitude more offensive than that of indifference to what the common
herd finds interesting."
"He's a fright," said Adela. "You'd spike yourself on that bristly beard
of his."
"If you happened to be near enough, you mean?--a danger my sex and our
national habits render remote. Bessie!"
Lady Semingham came towards them, with one last craning look at her own
back as she turned. She always left the neighbourhood of a mirror with
regret.
"Well?" she asked with a patient little sigh.
"Adela is abusing your friend Ruston."
"He's not my friend, Alfred. What's the matter, Adela?"
"I don't think I like him. He's hard."
"He's got a demon, you see," said Semingham. "For that matter we all
have, but his is a whopper."
"Oh, what's my demon?" cried Adela. Is not oneself always the most
interesting subject?
"Yours? Cleverness; He goads you into saying things one can't see the
meaning of."
"Thanks! And yours?"
"Grinning--so I grin at your things, though I don't understand 'em."
"And Bessie's?"
"Oh, forgive me. Leave us a quiet home."
"And now, Mr. Ruston's?"
"His is----"
But the door opened, and the guests, all arriving in a heap, just twenty
minutes late, flooded the room and drowned the topic. Another five
minutes passed, and people had begun furtively to count heads and wonder
whom they were waiting for, when Evan Haselden was announced. Hot on his
heels came Ruston, and the party was completed.
Mr. Otto Heather took Adela Ferrars in to dinner. Her heart sank as he
offered his arm. She had been heard to call him the silliest man in
Europe; on the other hand, his wife, and some half-dozen people besides,
thought him the cleverest in London.
"That man," he said, swallowing his soup and nodding his head towards
Ruston, "personifies all the hideous tendencies of the age--its
brutality, its commercialism, its selfishness, its----"
Miss Ferrars looked across the table. Ruston was seated at Lady
Semingham's left hand, and she was prattling to him in her sweet
indistinct little voice. Nothing in his appearance warranted Heather's
outburst, unless it were a sort of alert and almost defiant readiness,
smacking of a challenge to catch him napping.
"I'm not a mediævalist myself," she observed, and prepared to endure the
penalty of an _exposé_ of Heather's theories. During its progress, she
peered--for her near sight was no affectation--now and again at the
occasion of her sufferings. She had heard a good deal about
him--something from her host, something from Harry Dennison, more from
the paragraphists who had scented their prey, and gathered from the four
quarters of heaven (or wherever they dwelt) upon him. She knew about the
coal merchant's office, the impatient flight from it, and the rush over
the seas; there were stories of real naked want, where a bed and shelter
bounded for the moment all a life's aspirations. She summed him up as a
buccaneer modernised; and one does not expect buccaneers to be amiable,
while culture in them would be an incongruity. It was, on the whole, not
very surprising, she thought, that few people liked William Roger
Ruston--nor that many believed in him.
"Don't you agree with me?" asked Heather.
"Not in the least," said Adela at random.
The odds that he had been saying something foolish were very large.
"I thought you were such friends!" exclaimed Heather in surprise.
"Well, to confess, I was thinking of something else. Who do you mean?"
"Why, Mrs. Dennison. I was saying that her calm queenly manner----"
"Good gracious, Mr. Heather, don't call women 'queenly.' You're
like--what is it?--a 'dime novel.'"
If this comparison were meant to relieve her from the genius'
conversation for the rest of dinner, it was admirably conceived. He
turned his shoulder on her in undisguised dudgeon.
"And how's the great scheme?" asked somebody of Ruston.
"We hope to get the money," he said, turning for a moment from his
hostess. "And if we do that, we're all right."
"Everything's going on very well," called Semingham from the foot of the
table. "They've killed a missionary."
"How dreadful!" lisped his wife.
"Regrettable in itself, but the first step towards empire," explained
Semingham with a smile.
"It's to stop things of that kind that we are going there," Mr. Belford
pronounced; the speech was evidently meant to be repeated, and to rank
as authoritative.
"Of course," chuckled Semingham.
If he had been a shopman, he could not have resisted showing his
customers how the adulteration was done.
In spite of herself--for she strongly objected to being one of an
admiring crowd, and liked a personal _cachet_ on her emotions--Adela
felt pleasure when, after dinner, Ruston came straight to her and,
displacing Evan Haselden, sat down by her side. He assumed the position
with a business-like air, as though he meant to stay. She often, indeed
habitually, had two or three men round her, but to-night none contested
Ruston's exclusive possession; she fancied that the business-like air
had something to do with it. She had been taken possession of, she said
to herself, with a little impatience and yet a little pleasure also.
"You know everybody here, I suppose?" he asked. His tone cast a doubt on
the value of the knowledge.
"It's my tenth season," said Adela, with a laugh. "I stopped counting
them once, but there comes a time when one has to begin again."
He looked at her--critically, she thought--as he said,
"The ravages of time no longer to be ignored?"
"Well, the exaggerations of friends to be checked. Yes, I suppose I know
most of----"
She paused for a word.
"The gang," he suggested, leaning back and crossing his legs.
"Yes, we are a gang, and all on one chain. You're a recent captive,
though."
"Yes," he assented, "it's pretty new to me. A year ago I hadn't a dress
coat."
"The gods are giving you a second youth then."
"Well, I take it. I don't know that I have much to thank the gods for."
"They've been mostly against you, haven't they? However, what does that
matter, if you beat them?"
He did not disdain her compliment, but neither did he accept it. He
ignored it, and Adela, who paid very few compliments, was amused and
vexed.
"Perhaps," she added, "you think your victory still incomplete?"
This gained no better attention. Mr. Ruston seemed to be following his
own thoughts.
"It must be a curious thing," he remarked, "to be born to a place like
Semingham's."
"And to use it--or not to use it--like Lord Semingham?"
"Yes, I was thinking of that," he admitted.
"To be eminent requires some self-deception, doesn't it? Without that,
it would seem too absurd. I think Lord Semingham is overweighted with
humour." She paused and then--to show that she was not in awe of
him--she added,--"Now, I should say, you have very little."
"Very little, indeed, I should think," he agreed composedly.
"You're the only man I ever heard admit that of himself; we all say it
of one another."
"I know what I have and haven't got pretty well."
Adela was beginning to be more sure that she disliked him, but the topic
had its interest for her and she went on,
"Now I like to think I've got everything."
To her annoyance, the topic seemed to lose interest for him, just in
proportion as it gained interest for her. In fact, Mr. Ruston did not
apparently care to talk about what she liked or didn't like.
"Who's that pretty girl over there," he asked, "talking to young
Haselden?"
"Marjory Valentine," said Adela curtly.
"Oh! I think I should like to talk to her."
"Pray, don't let me prevent you," said Adela in very distant tones.
The man seemed to have no manners.
Mr. Ruston said nothing, but gave a short laugh. Adela was not
accustomed to be laughed at openly. Yet she felt defenceless; this
pachydermatous animal would be impervious to the pricks of her rapier.
"You're amused?" she asked sharply.
"Why were you in such a hurry to take offence? I didn't say I wanted to
go and talk to her now."
"It sounded like it."
"Oh, well, I'm very sorry," he conceded, still smiling, and obviously
thinking her very absurd.
She rose from her seat.
"Please do, though. She'll be going soon, and you mayn't get another
chance."
"Well, I will then," he answered simply, accompanying the remark with a
nod of approval for her sensible reminder. And he went at once.
She saw him touch Haselden on the shoulder, and make the young man
present him to Marjory. Ruston sat down and Haselden drifted, aimless
and forlorn, on a solitary passage along the length of the room.
Adela joined Lady Semingham.
"That's a dreadful man, Bessie," she said; "he's a regular Juggernaut."
She disturbed Lady Semingham in a moment of happiness; everybody had
been provided with conversation, and the hostess could sit in peaceful
silence, looking, and knowing that she looked, very dainty and pretty;
she liked that much better than talking.
"Who's what, dear?" she murmured.
"That man--Mr. Ruston. I say he's a Juggernaut. If you're in the way, he
just walks over you--and sometimes when you're not: for fun, I suppose."
"Alfred says he's very clever," observed Lady Semingham, in a tone that
evaded any personal responsibility for the truth of the statement.
"Well, I dislike him very much," declared Adela.
"We won't have him again when you're coming, dear," promised her friend
soothingly.
Adela looked at her, hesitated, opened her fan, shut it again, and
smiled.
"Oh, I didn't mean that, Bessie," she said with half a laugh. "Do,
please."
"But if you dislike him----"
"Why, my dear, doesn't one hate half the men one likes meeting--and all
the women!"
Lady Semingham smiled amiably. She did not care to think out what that
meant; it was Adela's way, just as it was her husband's way to laugh at
many things that seemed to her to afford no opening for mirth. But Adela
was not to escape. Semingham himself appeared suddenly at her elbow, and
observed,
"That's either nonsense or a truism, you know."
"Neither," said Adela with spirit; but her defence was interrupted by
Evan Haselden.
"I'm going," said he, and he looked out of temper. "I've got another
place to go to. And anyhow----"
"Well?"
"I'd like to be somewhere where that chap Ruston isn't for a little
while."
Adela glanced across. Ruston was still talking to Marjory Valentine.
"What can he find to say to her?" thought Adela.
"What the deuce she finds to talk about to that fellow, I can't think,"
pursued Evan, and he flung off to bid Lady Semingham good-night.
Adela caught her host's eye and laughed. Lord Semingham's eyes twinkled.
"It's a big province," he observed, "so there may be room for him--out
there."
"I," said Adela, with an air of affected modesty, "have ventured,
subject to your criticism, to dub him Juggernaut."
"H'm," said Semingham, "it's a little obvious, but not so bad for you."
CHAPTER III.
MRS. DENNISON'S ORDERS.
Next door to Mrs. Dennison's large house in Curzon Street there lived,
in a small house, a friend of hers, a certain Mrs. Cormack. She was a
Frenchwoman, who had been married to an Englishman, and was now his most
resigned widow. She did not pretend to herself, or to anybody else, that
Mr. Cormack's death had been a pure misfortune, and by virtue of her
past trials--perhaps, also, of her nationality--she was keenly awake to
the seamy side of matrimony. She would rhapsodise on the joys of an
ideal marriage, with a skilful hint of its rarity, and condemn
transgressors with a charitable reservation for insupportable miseries.
She was, she said, very romantic. Tom Loring, however (whose evidence
was tainted by an intense dislike of her), declared that _affaires du
coeur_ interested her only when one at least of the parties was lawfully
bound to a third person; when both were thus trammelled, the situation
was ideal. But the loves of those who were in a position to marry one
another, and had no particular reason for not following that legitimate
path to happiness, seemed to her (still according to Tom) dull,
uninspiring--all, in fact, that there was possible of English and
stupid. She hardly (Tom would go on, warming to his subject) believed in
them at all, and she was in the habit of regarding wedlock merely as a
condition precedent to its own violent dissolution. Whether this unhappy
mode of looking at the matter were due to her own peculiarities, or to
those of the late Mr. Cormack, or to those of her nation, Tom did not
pretend to say; he confined himself to denouncing it freely, and to
telling Mrs. Dennison that her next-door neighbour was in all respects a
most undesirable acquaintance; at which outbursts Mrs. Dennison would
smile.
Mrs. Dennison, coming out on to the balcony to see if her carriage were
in sight down the street, found her friend close to her elbow. Their
balconies adjoined, and friendship had led to a little gate being
substituted for the usual dwarf-wall of division. Tom Loring erected the
gate into an allegory of direful portent. Mrs. Cormack passed through
it, and laid an affectionate grasp on Maggie Dennison's arm.
"You're starting early," she remarked.
"I'm going a long way--right up to Hampstead. I've promised Harry to
call on some people there."
"Ah! Who?"
"Their name's Carlin. He knows Mr. Carlin in business. Mr. Carlin's a
friend of Mr. Ruston's."
"Oh, of Ruston's? I like that Ruston. He is interesting--inspiring."
"Is he?" said Mrs. Dennison, buttoning her glove. "You'd better marry
him, Berthe."
"Marry him? No, indeed. I think he would beat one."
"Is that being inspiring? I'm glad Harry's not inspiring."
"Oh, you know what I mean. He's a man who----"
Mrs. Cormack threw up her arms as though praying for the inspired word.
Mrs. Dennison did not wait for it.
"There's the carriage. Good-bye, dear," she said.
Mrs. Dennison started with a smile on her face. Berthe was so funny; she
was like a page out of a French novel. She loved anything not quite
respectable, and peopled the world with heroes of loose morals and
overpowering wills. She adored a dominating mind and lived in the
discovery of affinities. What nonsense it all was--so very remote from
the satisfactory humdrum of real life. One kept house, and gave dinners,
and made the children happy, and was fond of one's husband, and life
passed most----Here Mrs. Dennison suddenly yawned, and fell to hoping
that the Carlins would not be oppressively dull. She had been bored all
day long; the children had been fretful, and poor Harry was hurt and in
low spirits because of a cruel caricature in a comic paper, and Tom
Loring had scolded her for laughing at the caricature (it hit Harry off
so exactly), and nobody had come to see her, except a wretch who had
once been her kitchenmaid, and had come to terrible grief, and wanted to
be taken back, and of course couldn't be, and had to be sent away in
tears with a sovereign, and the tears were no use and the sovereign not
much.
The Carlins fortunately proved tolerably interesting in their own way.
Carlin was about fifty-five--an acute man of business, it seemed, and
possessed by an unwavering confidence in the abilities of Willie Ruston.
Mrs. Carlin was ten or fifteen years younger than her husband--a homely
little woman, with a swarm of children. Mrs. Dennison wondered how they
all fitted into the small house, but was told that it was larger by two
good rooms than their old dwelling in the country town, whence Willie
had summoned them to take a hand in his schemes. Willie had not insisted
on the coal business being altogether abandoned--as Mrs. Carlin said,
with a touch of timidity, it was well to have something to fall back
upon--but he required most of Carlin's time now, and the added work made
residence in London a necessity. In spite of Mr. Carlin's air of
hard-headedness, and his wife's prudent recognition of the business
aspect of life, they neither of them seemed to have a will of their own.
Willie--as they both called him--was the Providence, and the mixture of
reverence and familiarity presented her old acquaintance in a new light
to Maggie Dennison. Even the children prattled about "Willie," and their
mother's rebukes made "Mr. Ruston" no more than a strange and transitory
effort. Mrs. Dennison wondered what there was in the man--consulting her
own recollections of him in hope of enlightenment.
"He takes such broad views," said Carlin, and seemed to find this
characteristic the sufficient justification for his faith.
"I used to know him very well, you know," remarked Mrs. Dennison,
anxious to reach a more friendly footing, and realising that to connect
herself with Ruston offered the best chance of it. "I daresay he's
spoken of me--of Maggie Sherwood?"
They thought not, though Willie had been in Carlin's employ at the time
when he and Mrs. Dennison parted. She was even able, by comparison of
dates, to identify the holiday in which that scene had occurred and that
sentence been spoken; but he had never mentioned her name. She very much
doubted whether he had even thought of her. The fool and the fool's wife
had both been dismissed from his mind. She frowned impatiently. Why
should it be anything to her if they had?
There was a commotion among the children, starting from one who was
perched on the window-sill. Ruston himself was walking up to the door,
dressed in a light suit and a straw hat. After the greetings, while all
were busy getting him tea, he turned to Mrs. Dennison.
"This is very kind of you," he said in an undertone.
"My husband wished me to come," she replied.
He seemed in good spirits. He laughed, as he answered,
"Well, I didn't suppose you came to please me."
"You spoke as if you did," said she, still trying to resent his tone,
which she thought a better guide to the truth than his easy disclaimer.
"Why, you never did anything to please me!"
"Did you ever ask me?" she retorted.
He glanced at her for a moment, as he began to answer,
"Well, now, I don't believe I ever did; but I----"
Mrs. Carlin interposed with a proffered cup of tea, and he broke off.
"Thanks, Mrs. Carlin. I say, Carlin, it's going first-rate. Your
husband's help's simply invaluable, Mrs. Dennison."
"Harry?" she said, in a tone that she regretted a moment later, for
there was a passing gleam in Ruston's eye before he answered gravely,
"His firm carries great weight. Well, we're all in it here, sink or
swim; aren't we, Carlin?"
Carlin nodded emphatically, and his wife gave an anxious little sigh.
"And what's to be the end of it?" asked Mrs. Dennison.
"Ten per cent," said Carlin, with conviction. He could not have spoken
with more utter satisfaction of the millennium.
"The end?" echoed Ruston. "Oh, I don't know."
"At least he won't say," said Carlin admiringly.
Mrs. Dennison rose to go, engaging the Carlins to dine with her--an
invitation accepted with some nervousness, until the extension of it to
Ruston gave them a wing to come under. Ruston, with that directness of
his that shamed mere dexterity and superseded tact, bade Carlin stay
where he was, and himself escorted the visitor to her carriage. Half-way
down the garden walk she looked up at him and remarked,
"I expect you're the end."
His eyes had been wandering, but they came back sharply to hers.
"Then don't tell anybody," said he lightly.
She did not know whether what he said amounted to a confession or were
merely a jest. The next moment he was off at a tangent.
"I like your friend Miss Ferrars. She says a lot of sharp things, and
now and then something sensible."
"Now and then! Poor Adela!"
"Well, she doesn't often try. Besides, she's handsome."
"Oh, you've found time to notice that?"
"I notice that first," said Mr. Ruston.
They were at the carriage-door.
"I'm not dressed properly, so I mustn't drive with you," he said.
"Supposing that was the only reason," she replied, smiling, "would it
stop you?"
"Certainly."
"Why?"
"Because of other fools."
"I'll take you as far as Regent's Park. The other fools are on the other
side of that."
"I'll chance so far," and, waving his hand vaguely towards the house, he
got in. It did not seem to occur to him that there was any want of
ceremony in his farewell to the Carlins.
"I suppose," she said, "you think most of us fools?"
"I've been learning to think it less and to show it less still."
"You're not much changed, though."
"I've had some of my corners chipped off by collision with other hard
substances."
"Thank you for that 'other'!" cried Mrs. Dennison, with a little laugh.
"They must have been very hard ones."
"I didn't say that they weren't a little bit injured too."
"Poor things! I should think so."
"I have my human side."
"Generally the other side, isn't it?" she asked with a merry glance. The
talk had suddenly become very pleasant. He laughed, and stopped the
carriage. A sigh escaped from Mrs. Dennison.
"Next time," he said, "we'll talk about you, or Miss Ferrars, or that
little Miss Marjory Valentine, not about me. Good-bye," and he was gone
before she could say a word to him.
But it was natural that she should think a little about him. She had
not, she said to herself with a weary smile, too many interesting things
to think about, and she began to find him decidedly interesting; in
which fact again she found a certain strangeness and some material for
reflection, because she recollected very well that as a girl she had not
found him very attractive. Perhaps she demanded then more colouring of
romance than he had infused into their intercourse; she had indeed
suspected him of suppressed romance, but the suppression had been very
thorough, betraying itself only doubtfully here and there, as in his
judgment of her accepted suitor. Moreover, let his feelings then have
been what they might, he was not, she felt sure, the man to cherish a
fruitless love for eight or nine years, or to suffer any resurrection of
expired emotions on a renewed encounter with an old flame. He buried his
dead too deep for that; if they were in the way, she could fancy him
sometimes shovelling the earth over them and stamping it down without
looking too curiously whether life were actually extinct or only
flickering towards its extinction; if it were not quite gone at the
beginning of the gravedigger's work, it would be at the end, and the
result was the same. Nor did she suppose that ghosts gibbered or clanked
in the orderly trim mansions of his brain. In fact, she was to him a
more or less pleasant acquaintance, sandwiched in his mind between Adela
Ferrars and Marjory Valentine--with something attractive about her,
though she might lack the sparkle of the one and had been robbed of the
other's youthful freshness. This was the conclusion which she called
upon herself to draw as she drove back from Hampstead--the plain and
sensible conclusion. Yet, as she reached Curzon Street, there was a
smile on her face; and the conclusion was hardly such as to make her
smile--unless indeed she had added to it the reflection that it is ill
judging of things till they are finished. Her acquaintance with Willie
Ruston was not ended yet.
"Maggie, Maggie!" cried her husband through the open door of his study
as she passed up-stairs. "Great news! We're to go ahead. We settled it
at the meeting this morning."
Harry Dennison was in exuberant spirits. The great company was on the
verge of actual existence. From the chrysalis of its syndicate stage it
was to issue a bright butterfly.
"And Ruston was most complimentary to our house. He said he could never
have carried it through without us. He's in high feather."
Mrs. Dennison listened to more details, thinking, as her husband talked,
that Ruston's cheerful mood was fully explained, but wondering that he
had not himself thought it worth while to explain to her the cause of it
a little more fully. With that achievement fresh in his hand, he had
been content to hold his peace. Did he think her not worth telling?
With a cloud on her brow and her smile eclipsed, she passed on to the
drawing-room. The window was open and she saw Tom Loring's back in the
balcony. Then she heard her friend Mrs. Cormack's rather shrill voice.
"Not say such things?" the voice cried, and Mrs. Dennison could picture
the whirl of expostulatory hands that accompanied the question. "But why
not?"
Tom's voice answered in the careful tones of a man who is trying not to
lose his temper, or, anyhow, to conceal the loss.
"Well, apart from anything else, suppose Dennison heard you? It wouldn't
be over-pleasant for him."
Mrs. Dennison stood still, slowly peeling off her gloves.
"Oh, the poor man! I would not like to hurt him. I will be silent. Oh,
he does his very best! But you can't help it."
Mrs. Dennison stepped a yard nearer the window.
"Help what?" asked Tom in the deepest exasperation, no longer to be
hidden.
"Why, what must happen? It must be that the true man----"
A smile flickered over Maggie Dennison's face. How like Berthe! But
whence came this topic?
"Nonsense, I tell you!" cried Tom with a stamp of his foot.
And at the sound Mrs. Dennison smiled again, and drew yet nearer to the
window.
"Oh, it's always nonsense what I say! Well, we shall see, Mr. Loring,"
and Mrs. Cormack tripped in through her window, and wrote in her
diary--she kept a diary full of reflections--that Englishmen were all
stupid. She had written that before, but the deep truth bore repetition.
Tom went in too, and found himself face to face with Mrs. Dennison.
Bright spots of colour glowed on her cheeks; had she answered the
question of the origin of the topic? Tom blushed and looked furtively at
her.
"So the great scheme is launched," she remarked, "and Mr. Ruston
triumphs!"
Tom's manner betrayed intense relief, but he was still perturbed.
"We're having a precious lot of Ruston," he observed, leaning against
the mantelpiece and putting his hands in his pockets.
"_I_ like him," said Maggie Dennison.
"Those are the orders, are they?" asked Tom with a rather wry smile.
"Yes," she answered, smiling at Tom's smile. It amused her when he put
her manner into words.
"Then we all like him," said Tom, and, feeling quite secure now, he
added, "Mrs. Cormack said we should, which is rather against him."
"Oh, Berthe's a silly woman. Never mind her. Harry likes him too."
"Lucky for Ruston he does. Your husband's a useful friend. I fancy most
of Ruston's friends are of the useful variety."
"And why shouldn't we be useful to him?"
"On the contrary, it seems our destiny," grumbled Tom, whose destiny
appeared not to please him.
CHAPTER IV.
TWO YOUNG GENTLEMEN.
Lady Valentine was the widow of a baronet of good family and respectable
means; the one was to be continued and the other absorbed by her son,
young Sir Walter, now an Oxford undergraduate and just turned twenty-one
years of age. Lady Valentine had a jointure, and Marjory a pretty face.
The remaining family assets were a country-house of moderate dimensions
in the neighbourhood of Maidenhead, and a small flat in Cromwell Road.
Lady Valentine deplored the rise of the plutocracy, and had sometimes
secretly hoped that a plutocrat would marry her daughter. In other
respects she was an honest and unaffected woman.
Young Sir Walter, however, had his own views for his sister, and young
Sir Walter, when he surveyed the position which the laws and customs of
the realm gave him, was naturally led to suppose that his opinion had
some importance. He was hardly responsible for the error, and very
probably Mr. Ruston would have been better advised had his bearing
towards the young man not indicated so very plainly that the error was
an error. But in the course of the visits to Cromwell Road, which Ruston
found time to pay in the intervals of floating the Omofaga Company--and
he was a man who found time for many things--this impression of his made
itself tolerably evident, and, consequently, Sir Walter entertained
grave doubts whether Ruston were a gentleman. And, if a fellow is not a
gentleman, what, he asked, do brains and all the rest of it go for?
Moreover, how did the chap live? To which queries Marjory answered that
"Oxford boys" were very silly--a remark which embittered, without in the
least elucidating, the question.
Almost everybody has one disciple who looks up to him as master and
mentor, and, ill as he was suited to such a post, Evan Haselden filled
it for Walter Valentine. Evan had been in his fourth year when Walter
was a freshman, and the reverence engendered in those days had been
intensified when Evan had become, first, secretary to a minister and
then, as he showed diligence and aptitude, a member of Parliament. Evan
was a strong Tory, but payment of members had an unholy attraction for
him; this indication of his circumstances may suffice. Men thought him a
promising youth, women called him a nice boy, and young Sir Walter held
him for a statesman and a man of the world.
Seeing that what Sir Walter wanted was an unfavourable opinion of
Ruston, he could not have done better than consult his respected friend.
Juggernaut--Adela Ferrars was pleased with the nickname, and it began to
be repeated--had been crushing Evan in one or two little ways lately,
and he did it with an unconsciousness that increased the brutality.
Besides displacing him from the position he wished to occupy at more
than one social gathering, Ruston, being in the Lobby of the House one
day (perhaps on Omofaga business), had likened the pretty (it was his
epithet) young member, as he sped with a glass of water to his party
leader, to Ganymede in a frock coat--a description, Evan felt, injurious
to a serious politician.
"A gentleman?" he said, in reply to young Sir Walter's inquiry. "Well,
everybody's a gentleman now, so I suppose Ruston is."
"I call him an unmannerly brute," observed Walter, "and I can't think
why mother and Marjory are so civil to him."
Evan shook his head mournfully.
"You meet the fellow everywhere," he sighed.
"Such an ugly mug as he's got too," pursued young Sir Walter. "But
Marjory says it's full of character."
"Character! I should think so. Enough to hang him on sight," said Evan
bitterly.
"He's been a lot to our place. Marjory seems to like him. I say,
Haselden, do you remember what you spoke of after dinner at the Savoy
the other day?"
Evan nodded, looking rather embarrassed; indeed he blushed, and little
as he liked doing that, it became him very well.
"Did you mean it? Because, you know, I should like it awfully."
"Thanks, Val, old man. Oh, rather, I meant it."
Young Sir Walter lowered his voice and looked cautiously round--they
were in the club smoking-room.
"Because I thought, you know, that you were rather--you know--Adela
Ferrars?"
"Nothing in that, only _pour passer le temps_," Evan assured him with
that superb man-of-the-worldliness.
It was a pity that Adela could not hear him. But there was more to
follow.
"The truth is," resumed Evan--"and, of course, I rely on your discretion,
Val--I thought there might be a--an obstacle."
Young Sir Walter looked knowing.
"When you were good enough to suggest what you did--about your sister--I
doubted for a moment how such a thing would be received by--well, at a
certain house."
"Oh!"
"I shouldn't wonder if you could guess."
"N--no, I don't think so."
"Well, it doesn't matter where."
"Oh, but I say, you might as well tell me. Hang it, I've learnt to hold
my tongue."
"You hadn't noticed it? That's all right. I'm glad to hear it," said
Evan, whose satisfaction was not conspicuous in his tone.
"I'm so little in town, you see," said Walter tactfully.
"Well--for heaven's sake, don't let it go any farther--Curzon Street."
"What! Of course! Mrs.----"
"All right, yes. But I've made up my mind. I shall drop all that. Best,
isn't it?"
Walter nodded a sagacious assent.
"There was never anything in it, really," said Evan, and he was not
displeased with his friend's incredulous expression. It is a great
luxury to speak the truth and yet not be believed.
"Now, what you propose," continued Evan, "is most--but, I say, Val, what
does she think?"
"She likes you--and you'll have all my influence," said the Head of the
Family in a tone of importance.
"But how do you know she likes me?" insisted Evan, whose off-hand air
gave place to a manner betraying some trepidation.
"I don't know for certain, of course. And, I say, Haselden, I believe
mother's got an idea in her head about that fellow Ruston."
"The devil! That brute! Oh, hang it, Val, she can't--your sister, I
mean--I tell you what, I shan't play the fool any longer."
Sir Walter cordially approved of increased activity, and the two young
gentlemen, having settled one lady's future and disposed of the claims
of two others to their complete satisfaction, betook themselves to
recreation.
Evan was not, however, of opinion that anything in the conversation
above recorded, imposed upon him the obligation of avoiding entirely
Mrs. Dennison's society. On the contrary, he took an early opportunity
of going to see her. His attitude towards her was one of considerably
greater deference than Sir Walter understood it to be, and he had a high
idea of the value of her assistance. And he did not propose to deny
himself such savour of sentiment as the lady would allow; and she
generally allowed a little. He intended to say nothing about Ruston, but
as it happened that Mrs. Dennison's wishes set in an opposing direction,
he had not been long in the drawing room at Curzon Street before he
found himself again with the name of his enemy on his lips. He spoke
with refreshing frankness and an engaging confidence in his hostess'
sympathy. Mrs. Dennison had no difficulty in seeing that he had a
special reason for his bitterness.
"Is it only because he called you Ganymede? And it's a very good name
for you, Mr. Haselden."
To be compared to Ganymede in private by a lady and in public by a
scoffer, are things very different. Evan smiled complacently.
"There's more than that, isn't there?" asked Mrs. Dennison.
Evan admitted that there was more, and, in obedience to some skilful
guidance, he revealed what there was more--what beyond mere offended
dignity--between himself and Mr. Ruston. He had to complain of no lack
of interest on the part of his listener. Mrs. Dennison questioned him
closely as to his grounds for anticipating Ruston's rivalry. The idea
was evidently quite new to her; and Evan was glad to detect her
reluctance to accept it--she must think as he did about Willie Ruston.
The tangible evidence appeared on examination reassuringly small, and
Evan, by a strange conversion, found himself driven to defend his
apprehensions by insisting on just that power of attraction in his foe
which he had begun by denying altogether. But that, Mrs. Dennison
objected, only showed, even if it existed, that Marjory might like
Ruston, not that Ruston would return her liking. On the whole Mrs.
Dennison comforted him, and, dismissing Ruston from the discussion, said
with a smile,
"So you're thinking of settling down already, are you?"
"I say, Mrs. Dennison, you've always been awfully good to me; I wonder
if you'd help me in this?"
"How could I help you?"
"Oh, lots of ways. Well, for instance, old Lady Valentine doesn't ask me
there often. You see, I haven't got any money."
"Poor boy! Of course you haven't. Nice young men never have any money."
"So I don't get many chances of seeing her."
"And I might arrange meetings for you? That's how I could help? Now, why
should I help?"
Evan was encouraged by this last question, put in his friend's
doubtfully-serious doubtfully-playful manner.
"It needn't," he said, in a tone rather more timid than young Sir Walter
would have expected, "make any difference to our friendship, need it? If
it meant that----"
The sentence was left in expressive incompleteness.
Mrs. Dennison wanted to laugh; but why should she hurt his feelings? He
was a pleasant boy, and, in spite of his vanity, really a clever one. He
had been a little spoilt; that was all. She turned her laugh in another
direction.
"Berthe Cormack would tell you that it would be sure to intensify it,"
she said. "Seriously, I shan't hate you for marrying, and I don't
suppose Marjory will hate me."
"Then" (Mrs. Dennison had to smile at that little word), "you'll help
me?"
"Perhaps," said Mrs. Dennison, allowing her smile to become manifest.
"You won't be against me?"
"Perhaps not."
"Good-bye," said Evan, pressing her hand.
He had enjoyed himself very much, and Mrs. Dennison was glad that she
had been good-natured, and had not laughed.
"Good-bye, and I hope you'll be very happy, if you succeed.
And--Evan--don't kill Mr. Ruston!"
The laugh came at last, but he was out of the door in time, and Mrs.
Dennison had no leisure to enjoy it fully, for, the moment her visitor
was gone, Mr. Belford and Lord Semingham were announced. They came
together, seeking Harry Dennison. There was a "little hitch" of some
sort in the affairs of the Omofaga Company--nothing of consequence, said
Mr. Belford reassuringly. Mrs. Dennison explained that Harry Dennison
had gone off to call on Mr. Ruston.
"Oh, then he knows by now," said Semingham in a tone of relief.
"And it'll be all right," added Belford contentedly.
"Mr. Belford," said Mrs. Dennison, "I'm living in an atmosphere of
Omofaga. I eat it, and drink it, and wear it, and breathe it. And, what
in the end, is it?"
"Ask Ruston," interposed Semingham.
"I did; but I don't think he told me."
"But surely, my dear Mrs. Dennison, your husband takes you into his
confidence?" suggested Mr. Belford.
Mrs. Dennison smiled, as she replied,
"Oh, yes, I know what you're doing. But I want to know why you're doing
it. I don't believe you'll ever get anything out of it, you know."
"Oh, directors always get something," protested Semingham. "Penal
servitude sometimes, but always something."
"I've never had such implicit faith in any undertaking in my life,"
asserted Mr. Belford. "And I know that your husband shares my views.
It's bound to be the greatest success of the day. Ah, here's Dennison!"
Harry came in wiping his brow. Belford rushed to him, and drew him to
the window, button-holing him with decision. Lord Semingham smiled
lazily and pulled his whisker.
"Don't you want to hear the news?" Mrs. Dennison asked.
"No! He's been to Ruston."
Mrs. Dennison looked at him for an instant with something rather like
scorn in her eye. Lord Semingham laughed.
"I'm not quite as bad as that, really," he said.
"And the others?" she asked, leaning forward and taking care that her
voice did not reach the other pair.
"He turns Belford round his fingers."
"And Mr. Carlin?"
"In his pocket."
Mrs. Dennison cast a glance towards the window.
"Don't go on," implored Semingham, half-seriously.
"And my husband?" she asked in a still lower voice.
Lord Semingham protested with a gesture against such cross-examination.
"Surely it's a good thing for me to know?" she said.
"Well--a great influence."
"Thank you."
There was a pause for an instant. Then she rose with a laugh and rang
the bell for tea.
"I hope he won't ruin us all," she said.
"I've got Bessie's settlement," observed Lord Semingham; and he added
after a moment's pause, "What's the matter? I thought you were a
thoroughgoing believer."
"I'm a woman," she answered. "If I were a man----"
"You'd be the prophet, not the disciple, eh?"
She looked at him, and then across to the couple by the window.
"To do Belford justice," remarked Semingham, reading her glance, "he
never admits that he isn't a great man--though surely he must know it."
"Is it better to know it, or not to know it?" she asked, restlessly
fingering the teapot and cups which had been placed before her. "I
sometimes think that if you resolutely refuse to know it, you can alter
it."
Belford's name had been the only name mentioned in the conversation; yet
Semingham knew that she was not thinking of Belford nor of him.
"I knew it about myself very soon," he said. "It makes a man better to
know it, Mrs. Dennison."
"Oh, yes--better," she answered impatiently.
The two men came and joined them. Belford accepted a cup of tea, and, as
he took it, he said to Harry, continuing their conversation,
"Of course, I know his value; but, after all, we must judge for
ourselves."
"Of course," acquiesced Harry, handing him bread-and-butter.
"We are the masters," pursued Belford.
Mrs. Dennison glanced at him, and a smile so full of meaning--of meaning
which it was as well Mr. Belford should not see--appeared on her face,
that Lord Semingham deftly interposed his person between them, and said,
with apparent seriousness,
"Oh, he mustn't think he can do just what he likes with us."
"I am entirely of your opinion," said Belford, with a weighty nod.
After tea, Lord Semingham walked slowly back to his own house. He had a
trick of stopping still, when he fell into thought, and he was
motionless on the pavement of Piccadilly more than once on his way home.
The last time he paused for nearly three minutes, till an acquaintance,
passing by, clapped him on the back, and inquired what occupied his
mind.
"I was thinking," said Semingham, laying his forefinger on his friend's
arm, "that if you take what a clever man really is, and add to it what a
clever woman who is interested in him thinks he is, you get a most
astonishing person."
The friend stared. The speculation seemed hardly pressing enough to
excuse a man for blocking the pavement of Piccadilly.
"If, on the other hand," pursued Semingham, "you take what an ordinary
man isn't, and add all that a clever woman thinks he isn't, you get----"
"Hadn't we better go on, old fellow?" asked the friend.
"No, I think we'd better not," said Semingham, starting to walk again.
CHAPTER V.
A TELEGRAM TO FRANKFORT.
The success of Lady Valentine's Saturday to Monday party at Maidenhead
was spoilt by the unscrupulous, or (if the charitable view be possible)
the muddle-headed conduct of certain eminent African chiefs--so small is
the world, so strong the chain of gold (or shares) that binds it
together. The party was marred by Willie Ruston's absence; and he was
away because he had to go to Frankfort, and he had to go to Frankfort
because of that little hitch in the affairs of the Omofaga. The hitch
was, in truth, a somewhat grave one, and it occurred, most annoyingly,
immediately after a gathering, marked by uncommon enthusiasm and
composed of highly influential persons, had set the impress of approval
on the scheme. On the following morning, it was asserted that the said
African chiefs, from whom Ruston and his friends derived their title to
Omofaga, had acted in a manner that belied the character for honesty and
simplicity in commercial matters (existing side by side with intense
savagery and cruelty in social and political life) that Mr. Foster
Belford had attributed to them at the great meeting. They had, it was
said, sold Omofaga several times over in small parcels, and twice, at
least, _en bloc_--once to the Syndicate (from whom the Company was
acquiring it) and once to an association of German capitalists. The
writer of the article, who said that he knew the chiefs well, went so
far as to maintain that any person provided with a few guns and a dozen
or so bottles of ardent spirits could return from Omofaga with a
portmanteau full of treaties, and this facility in obtaining the article
could not, in accordance with the law of supply and demand, do other
than gravely affect the value of it. Willie Ruston was inclined to make
light of this disclosure; indeed, he attributed it to a desire--natural
but unprincipled--on the part of certain persons to obtain Omofaga
shares at less than their high intrinsic value; he called it a "bear
dodge" and sundry other opprobrious names, and snapped his fingers at
all possible treaties in the world except his own. Once let him set his
foot in Omofaga, and short would be the shrift of rival claims,
supposing them to exist at all! But the great house of Dennison, Sons &
Company, could not go on in this happy-go-lucky fashion--so the senior
partner emphatically told Harry Dennison--they were already, in his
opinion, deep enough in this affair; if they were to go any deeper, this
matter of the association of German capitalists must be inquired into.
The house had not only its money, but its credit and reputation to look
after; it could not touch any doubtful business, nor could it be left
with a block of Omofagas on its hands. In effect they were trusting too
much to this Mr. Ruston, for he, and he alone, was their security in the
matter. Not another step would the house move till the German
capitalists were dissolved into thin air. So Willie Ruston packed his
portmanteau--likely enough the very one that had carried the treaties
away from Omofaga--and went to Frankfort to track the German capitalists
to their lair. Meanwhile, the issue of the Omofaga was postponed, and
Mr. Carlin was set a-telegraphing to Africa.
Thus it also happened that, contrary to her fixed intention, Lady
Valentine was left with a bedroom to spare, and with no just or
producible reason whatever for refusing her son's request that Evan
Haselden might occupy it. This, perhaps, should, in the view of all true
lovers, be regarded as an item on the credit side of the African chiefs'
account, though in the hostess' eyes it aggravated their offence. Adela
Ferrars, Mr. Foster Belford and Tom Loring, who positively blessed the
African chiefs, were the remaining guests.
All parties cannot be successful, and, if truth be told, this of Lady
Valentine's was no conspicuous triumph. Belford and Loring quarrelled
about Omofaga, for Loring feared (he used that word) that there might be
a good deal in the German treaties, and Belford was loud-mouthed in
declaring there could be nothing. Marjory and her brother had a "row"
because Marjory, on the Saturday afternoon, would not go out in the
Canadian canoe with Evan, but insisted on taking a walk with Mr. Belford
and hearing all about Omofaga. Finally, Adela and Tom Loring had a
rather serious dissension because--well, just because Tom was so
intolerably stupid and narrow-minded and rude. That was Adela's own
account of it, given in her own words, which seems pretty good
authority.
The unfortunate discussion began with an expression of opinion from Tom.
They were lounging very comfortably down stream in a broad-bottomed
boat. It was a fine still evening and a lovely sunset. It was then most
wanton of Tom--even although he couched his remark in a speciously
general form--to say,
"I wonder at fellows who spend their life worming money out of other
people for wild-cat schemes instead of taking to some honest trade."
There was a pause. Then Adela fitted her glasses on her nose, and
observed, with a careful imitation of Tom's forms of expression,
"I wonder at fellows who drift through life in subordinate positions
without the--the _spunk_--to try and do anything for themselves."
"Women have no idea of honesty."
"Men are such jealous creatures."
"I'm not jealous of him," Tom blurted out.
"Of who?" asked Adela.
She was keeping the cooler of the pair.
"Confound those beastly flies," said Tom, peevishly. There was a fly or
two about, but Adela smiled in a superior way. "I suppose I've some
right to express an opinion," continued Tom. "You know what I feel about
the Dennisons, and--well, it's not only the Dennisons."
"Oh! the Valentines?"
"Blow the Valentines!" said Tom, very ungratefully, inasmuch as he sat
in their boat and had eaten their bread.
He bent over his sculls, and Adela looked at him with a doubtful little
smile. She thought Tom Loring, on the whole, the best man she knew, the
truest and loyalest; but, these qualities are not everything, and it
seemed as if he meant to be secretary to Harry Dennison all his life. Of
course he had no money, there was that excuse; but to some men want of
money is a reason, not for doing nothing, but for attempting everything;
it had struck Willie Ruston in that light. Therefore she was at times
angry with Tom--and all the more angry the more she admired him.
"You do me the honour to be anxious on my account?" she asked very
stiffly.
"He asked me how much money you had the other day."
"Oh, you're insufferable; you really are. Do you always tell women that
men care only for their money?"
"It's not a bad thing to tell them when it's true."
"I call this the very vulgarest dispute I was ever entrapped into."
"It's not my fault. It's----Hullo!"
His attention was arrested by Lady Valentine's footman, who stood on the
bank, calling "Mr. Loring, sir," and holding up a telegram.
"Thank goodness, we're interrupted," said Adela. "Row ashore, Mr.
Loring."
Loring obeyed, and took his despatch. It was from Harry Dennison, and he
read it aloud.
"Can you come up? News from Frankfort."
"I must go," said Tom.
"Oh, yes. If you're not there, Mr. Ruston will do something dreadful,
won't he? I should like to come too. News from Frankfort would be more
interesting than views from Mr. Belford."
They parted without any approach towards a reconciliation. Tom was
hopelessly sulky, Adela persistently flippant. The shadow of Omofaga lay
heavy on Lady Valentine's party, and still shrouded Tom Loring on his
way to town.
The important despatch from Frankfort had come in cipher, and when Tom
arrived in Curzon Street, he found Mr. Carlin, who had been sent for to
read it, just leaving the house. The men nodded to one another, and
Carlin hastily exclaimed,
"You must reassure Dennison! You can do it!" and leapt into a hansom.
Tom smiled. If the progress of Omofaga depended on encouragement from
him, Omofaga would remain in primitive barbarism, though missionaries
fell thick as the leaves in autumn.
Harry Dennison was walking up and down the library; his hair was
roughened and his appearance indicative of much unrest; his wife sat in
an armchair, looking at him and listening to Lord Semingham, who,
poising a cigarette between his fingers, was putting, or trying to put,
a meaning to Ruston's message.
"Position critical. Must act at once. Will you give me a free
hand? If not, wire how far I may go."
That was how it ran when faithfully interpreted by Mr. Carlin.
"You see," observed Lord Semingham, "it's clearly a matter of money."
Tom nodded.
"Of course it is," said he; "it's not likely to be a question of
anything else."
"Therefore the Germans have something worth paying for," continued
Semingham.
"Well," amended Tom, "something Ruston thinks it worth his while to pay
for, anyhow."
"That is to say they have treaties touching, or purporting to touch,
Omofaga."
"And," added Harry Dennison, who did not lack a certain business
shrewdness, "probably their Government behind them to some extent."
Tom flung himself into a chair.
"The thing's monstrous," he pronounced. "Semingham and you, Dennison,
are, besides himself--and he's got nothing--the only people responsible
up to now. And he asks you to give him an unlimited credit without
giving you a word of information! It's the coolest thing I ever heard of
in all my life."
"Of course he means the Company to pay in the end," Semingham reminded
the hostile critic.
"Time enough to talk of the Company when we see it," retorted Tom, with
an aggressive scepticism.
"Position critical! Hum. I suppose their treaties must be worth
something," pursued Semingham. "Dennison, I can't be drained dry over
this job."
Harry Dennison shook his head in a puzzled fashion.
"Carlin says it's all right," he remarked.
"Of course he does!" exclaimed Tom impatiently. "Two and two make five
for him if Ruston says they do."
"Well, Tom, what's your advice?" asked Semingham.
"You must tell him to do nothing till he's seen you, or at least sent
you full details of the position."
The two men nodded. Mrs. Dennison rose from her chair, walked to the
window, and stood looking out.
"Loring just confirms what I thought," said Semingham.
"He says he must act at once," Harry reminded them; he was still
wavering, and, as he spoke, he glanced uneasily at his wife; but there
was nothing to show that she even heard the conversation.
"Oh, he hates referring to anybody," said Tom. "He's to have a free
hand, and you're to pay the bill. That's his programme, and a very
pretty one it is--for him."
Tom's _animus_ was apparent, and Lord Semingham laughed gently.
"Still, you're right in substance," he conceded when the laugh was
ended, and as he spoke he drew a sheet of notepaper towards him and took
up a pen.
"We'd better settle just what to say," he observed. "Carlin will be back
in half an hour, and we promised to have it ready for him. What you
suggest seems all right, Loring."
Tom nodded. Harry Dennison stood stock still for an instant and then
said, with a sigh,
"I suppose so. He'll be furious--and I hope to God we shan't lose the
whole thing."
Lord Semingham's pen-point was in actual touch with the paper before
him, when Mrs. Dennison suddenly turned round and faced them. She rested
one hand on the window-sash, and held the other up in a gesture which
demanded attention.
"Are you really going to back out now?" she asked in a very quiet voice,
but with an intonation of contempt that made all the three men raise
their heads with the jerk of startled surprise. Lord Semingham checked
the movement of his pen, and leant back in his chair, looking at her.
Her face was a little flushed and she was breathing quickly.
"My dear," said Harry Dennison very apologetically, "do you think you
quite understand----?"
But Tom Loring's patience was exhausted. His interview with Adela left
him little reserve of toleration; and the discovery of another and even
worse case of Rustomania utterly overpowered his discretion.
"Mrs. Dennison," he said, "wants us to deliver ourselves, bound hand and
foot, to this fellow."
"Well, and if I do?" she demanded, turning on him. "Can't you even
follow, when you've found a man who can lead?"
And then, conscious perhaps of having been goaded to an excess of warmth
by Tom's open scorn, she turned her face away.
"Lead, yes! Lead us to ruin!" exclaimed Tom.
"You won't be ruined, anyhow," she retorted quickly, facing round on him
again, reckless in her anger how she might wound him.
"Tom's anxious for us, Maggie," her husband reminded her, and he laid
his hand on Tom Loring's shoulder.
Tom's excitement was not to be soothed.
"Why are we all to be his instruments?" he demanded angrily.
"I should be proud to be," she said haughtily.
Her husband smiled in an uneasy effort after nonchalance, and Lord
Semingham shot a quick glance at her out of his observant eyes.
"I should be proud of a friend like you if I were Ruston," he said
gently, hoping to smooth matters a little.
Mrs. Dennison ignored his attempt.
"Can't you see?" she asked. "Can't you see that he's a man to--to do
things? It's enough for us if we can help him."
She had forgotten her embarrassment; she spoke half in contempt, half in
entreaty, wholly in an earnest urgency, that made her unconscious of any
strangeness in her zeal. Harry looked uncomfortable. Semingham with a
sigh blew a cloud of smoke from his cigarette.
Tom Loring sat silent. He stretched out his legs to their full length,
rested the nape of his neck on the chair-back, and stared up at the
ceiling. His attitude eloquently and most rudely asserted folly--almost
lunacy--in Mrs. Dennison. She noticed it and her eyes flashed, but she
did not speak to him. She looked at Semingham and surprised an
expression in his eyes that made her drop her own for an instant; she
knew very well what he was thinking--what a man like him would think.
But she recovered herself and met his glance boldly.
Harry Dennison sat down and slowly rubbed his brow with his
handkerchief. Lord Semingham took up the pen and balanced it between his
fingers. There was silence in the room for full three minutes. Then came
a loud knock at the hall door.
"It's Carlin," said Harry Dennison.
No one else spoke, and for another moment there was silence. The steps
of the butler and the visitor were already audible in the hall when Lord
Semingham, with his own shrug and his own smile, as though nothing in
the world were worth so much dispute or so much bitterness, said to
Dennison,
"Hang it! Shall we chance it, Harry?"
Mrs. Dennison made one swift step forward towards him, her face all
alight; but she stopped before she reached the table and turned to her
husband. At the moment Carlin was announced. He entered with a rush of
eagerness. Tom Loring did not move. Semingham wrote on his paper,--
"Use your discretion, but make every effort to keep down
expenses. Wire progress."
"Will that do?" he asked, handing the paper to Harry Dennison and
leaning back with a smile on his face; and, though he handed the paper
to Harry, he looked at Mrs. Dennison.
Mrs. Dennison was standing by her husband now, her arm through his. As
he read she read also. Then she took the paper from his yielding hand
and came and bent over the table, shoulder to shoulder with Lord
Semingham. Taking the pen from his fingers, she dipped it in the ink,
and with a firm dash she erased all save the first three words of the
message. This done, she looked round into Semingham's face with a smile
of triumph.
"Well, it'll be cheap to send, anyhow," said he.
He got up and motioned Carlin to take his place.
Mrs. Dennison walked back to the window, and he followed her there. They
heard Carlin's cry of delight, and Harry Dennison beginning to make
excuses and trying to find business reasons for what had been done.
Suddenly Tom Loring leapt to his feet and strode swiftly out of the
room, slamming the door behind him. Mrs. Dennison heard the sound with a
smile of content. She seemed to have no misgivings and no regrets.
"Really," said Lord Semingham, sticking his eye-glass in his eye and
regarding her closely, "you ought to be the Queen of Omofaga."
With her slim fingers she began to drum gently on the window-pane.
"I think there's a king already," she said, looking out into the street.
"Oh, yes, a king," he answered with a laugh.
Mrs. Dennison looked round. He did not stop laughing, and presently she
laughed just a little herself.
"Oh, of course, it's always that in a woman, isn't it?" she asked
sarcastically.
"Generally," he answered, unashamed.
She grew grave, and looked in his face almost--so it seemed to him--as
though she sought there an answer to something that puzzled her. He gave
her none. She sighed and drummed on the window again; then she turned to
him with a sudden bright smile.
"I don't care; I'm glad I did it," she said defiantly.
CHAPTER VI.
WHOSE SHALL IT BE?
Probably no one is always wrong; at any rate, Mr. Otto Heather was right
now and then, and he had hit the mark when he accused Willie Ruston of
"commercialism." But he went astray when he concluded, _per saltum_,
that the object of his antipathy was a money-grubbing, profit-snatching,
upper-hand-getting machine, and nothing else in the world. Probably,
again, no one ever was. Ruston had not only feelings, but also what many
people consider a later development--a conscience. And, whatever the
springs on which his conscience moved, it acted as a restraint upon him.
Both his feelings and his conscience would have told him that it would
not do for him to delude his friends or the public with a scheme which
was a fraud. He would have delivered this inner verdict in calm and
temperate terms; it would have been accompanied by no disgust, no
remorse, no revulsion at the idea having made its way into his mind; it
was just that, on the whole, such a thing wouldn't do. The vagueness of
the phrase faithfully embodied the spirit of the decision, for whether
it wouldn't do, because it was in itself unseemly, or merely because, if
found out, it would look unseemly, was precisely one of those curious
points with which Mr. Ruston's practical intellect declined to trouble
itself. If Omofaga had been a fraud, then Ruston would have whistled it
down the wind. But Omofaga was no fraud--in his hands at least no fraud.
For, while he believed in Omofaga to a certain extent, Willie Ruston
believed in himself to an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, extent. He
thought Omofaga a fair security for anyone's money, but himself a superb
one. Omofaga without him--or other people's Omofagas--might be a
promising speculation; add him, and Omofaga became a certainty. It will
be seen, then, that Mr. Heather's inspiration had soon failed--unless,
that is, machines can see visions and dream dreams, and melt down hard
facts in crucibles heated to seven times in the fires of imagination.
But a man may do all this, and yet not be the passive victim of his
dreams and imaginings. The old buccaneers--and Adela Ferrars had thought
Ruston a buccaneer modernised--dreamt, but they sailed and fought too;
and they sailed and fought and won because they dreamt. And if many of
their dreams were tinted with the gleam of gold, they were none the less
powerful and alluring for that.
Ruston had laid the whole position before Baron von Geltschmidt of
Frankfort, with--as it seemed--the utmost candour. He and his friends
were not deeply committed in the matter; there was, as yet, only a small
syndicate; of course they had paid something for their rights, but, as
the Baron knew (and Willie's tone emphasised the fact that he must know)
the actual sums paid out of pocket in these cases were not of staggering
magnitude; no company was formed yet; none would be, unless all went
smoothly. If the Baron and his friends were sure of their ground, and
preferred to go on--why, he and his friends were not eager to commit
themselves to a long and arduous contest. There must, he supposed, be a
give-and-take between them.
"It looks," he said, "as far as I can judge, as if either we should have
to buy you out, or you would have to buy us out."
"Perhaps," suggested the Baron, blinking lazily behind his gold
spectacles, "we could get rid of you without buying you out."
"Oh, if you drove us to it, by refusing to treat, we should have a shot
at that too, of course," laughed Willie Ruston, swallowing a glass of
white wine. The Baron had asked him to discuss the matter over luncheon.
"It seems to me," observed the Baron, lighting a cigar, "that people are
rather cold about speculations just now."
"I should think so; but this is not a speculation; it's a certainty."
"Why do you tell me that, when you want to get rid of me?"
"Because you won't believe it. Wasn't that Bismarck's way?"
"You are not Bismarck--and a certainty is what the public thinks one."
"Is that philosophy or finance?" asked Ruston, laughing again.
The Baron, who had in his day loved both the subjects referred to, drank
a glass of wine and chuckled as he delivered himself of the following
doctrine:
"What the public thinks a certainty, is a certainty for the public--that
would be philosophy, eh?"
"I believe so. I never read much, and your extract doesn't raise my idea
of its value."
"But what the public thinks a certainty, is a certainty--for the
promotors--that is finance. You see the difference is simple."
"And the distinction luminous. This, Baron, seems to be the age of
finance."
"Ah, well, there are still honest men," said the Baron, with the
optimism of age.
"Yes, I'm one--and you're another."
"I'm much obliged. You've been in Omofaga?"
"Oh, yes. And you haven't, Baron."
"Friends of mine have."
"Yes. They came just after I left."
The Baron knew that this statement was true. As his study of Willie
Ruston progressed, he became inclined to think that it might be
important. Mere right (so far as such a thing could be given by prior
treaties) was not of much moment; but right and Ruston together might be
formidable. Now the Baron (and his friends were friends much in the way,
_mutatis mutandis_, that Mr. Wagg and Mr. Wenham were friends of the
Marquis of Steyne, and may therefore drop out of consideration) was old
and rich, and, by consequence, at a great disadvantage with a man who
was young and poor.
"I don't see the bearing of that," he observed, having paused for a
moment to consider all its bearings.
"It means that you can't have Omofaga," said Willie Ruston. "You were
too late, you see."
The Baron smoked and drank and laughed.
"You're a young fool, my boy--or something quite different," said he,
laying a hand on his companion's arm. Then he asked suddenly, "What
about Dennisons?"
"They're behind me if----"
"Well?"
"If you're not in front of me."
"But if I am, my son?" asked the Baron, almost caressingly.
"Then I leave for Omofaga by the next boat."
"Eh! And for what?"
"Never mind what. You'll find out when you come."
The Baron sighed and tugged his beard.
"You English!" said he. "Your Government won't help you."
"Damn my Government."
"You English!" said the Baron again, his tone struggling between
admiration and a sort of oppression, while his face wore the look a man
has who sees another push in front of him in a crowd, and wonders how
the fellow works his way through.
There was a long pause. Ruston lit his pipe, and, crossing his arms on
his breast, blinked at the sun; the Baron puffed away, shooting a glance
now and then at his young friend, then he asked,
"Well, my boy, what do you offer?"
"Shares," answered Ruston composedly.
The Baron laughed. The impudence of the offer pleased him.
"Yes, shares, of course. And besides?"
Willie Ruston turned to him.
"I shan't haggle," he announced. "I'll make you one offer, Baron, and
it's an uncommon handsome offer for a trunk of waste paper."
"What's the offer?" asked the Baron, smiling with rich subdued mirth.
"Fifty thousand down, and the same in shares fully paid."
"Not enough, my son."
"All right," and Mr. Ruston rose. "Much obliged for your hospitality,
Baron," he added, holding out his hand.
"Where are you going?" asked the Baron.
"Omofaga--_viâ_ London."
The Baron caught him by the arm, and whispered in his ear,
"There's not so much in it, first and last."
"Oh, isn't there? Then why don't you take the offer?"
"Is it your money?"
"It's good money. Come, Baron, you've always liked the safe side," and
Willie smiled down upon his host.
The Baron positively started. This young man stood over him and told him
calmly, face-to-face, the secret of his life. It was true. How he had
envied men of real nerve, of faith, of daring! But he had always liked
the safe side. Hence he was very rich--and a rather weary old man.
Two days later, Willie Ruston took a cab from Lord Semingham's, and
drove to Curzon Street. He arrived at twelve o'clock in the morning.
Harry Dennison had gone to a Committee at the House. The butler had just
told him so, when a voice cried from within,
"Is it you, Mr. Ruston?"
Mrs. Dennison was standing in the hall. He went in, and followed her
into the library.
"Well?" she asked, standing by the table, and wasting no time in formal
greetings.
"Oh, it's all right," said he.
"You got my telegram?"
"Your telegram, Mrs. Dennison?" said he with a smile.
"I mean--the telegram," she corrected herself, smiling in her turn.
"Oh, yes," said Ruston, and he took a step towards her. "I've seen Lord
Semingham," he added.
"Yes? And these horrid Germans are out of the way?"
"Yes; and Semingham is letting his shooting this year."
She laughed, and glanced at him as she asked,
"Then it cost a great deal?"
"Fifty thousand!"
"Oh, then we can't take Lord Semingham's shooting, or anybody else's.
Poor Harry!"
"He doesn't know yet?"
"Aren't you almost afraid to tell him, Mr. Ruston?"
"Aren't you, Mrs. Dennison?"
He smiled as he asked, and Mrs. Dennison lifted her eyes to his, and let
them dwell there.
"Why did you do it?" he asked.
"Will the money be lost?"
"Oh, I hope not; but money's always uncertain."
"The thing's not uncertain?"
"No; the thing's certain now."
She sat down with a sigh of satisfaction, and passed her hand over her
broad brow.
"Why did you do it?" Ruston repeated; and she laughed nervously.
"I hate going back," she said, twisting her hands in her lap.
He had asked her the question which she had been asking herself without
response.
He sat down opposite her, flinging his soft cloth hat--for he had not
been home since his arrival in London--on the table.
"What a bad hat!" said Mrs. Dennison, touching it with the end of a
forefinger.
"It's done a journey through Omofaga."
"Ah!" she laughed gently. "Dear old hat!"
"Thanks to you, it'll do another soon."
Mrs. Dennison sat up straight in her chair.
"You hope----?" she began.
"To be on my way in six months," he answered in solid satisfaction.
"And for long?"
"It must take time."
"What must?"
"My work there."
She rose and walked to the window, as she had when she was about to send
the telegram. Now also she was breathing quickly, and the flush, once so
rare on her cheeks, was there again.
"And we," she said in a low voice, looking out of the window, "shall
just hear of you once a year?"
"We shall have regular mails in no time," said he. "Once a year, indeed!
Once a month, Mrs. Dennison!"
With a curious laugh, she dashed the blind-tassel against the window. It
was not for the sake of hearing of her that he wanted the mails. With a
sudden impulse she crossed the room and stood opposite him.
"Do you care _that_," she asked, snapping her fingers, "for any soul
alive? You're delighted to leave us all and go to Omofaga!"
Willie Ruston seemed not to hear; he was mentally organizing the mail
service from Omofaga.
"I beg pardon?" he said, after a perceptible pause.
"Oh!" cried Maggie Dennison, and at last her tone caught his attention.
He looked up with a wrinkle of surprise on his brow.
"Why," said he, "I believe you're angry about something. You look just
as you did on--on the memorable occasion."
"Uh, we aren't all Carlins!" she exclaimed, carried away by her
feelings.
The least she had expected from him was grateful thanks; a homage tinged
with admiration was, in truth, no more than her due; if she had been an
ugly dull woman, yet she had done him a great service, and she was not
an ugly dull woman. But then neither was she Omofaga.
"If everybody was as good a fellow as old Carlin----" began Willie
Ruston.
"If everybody was as useful and docile, you mean; as good a tool for
you----"
At last it was too plain to be missed.
"Hullo!" he exclaimed. "What are you pitching into me for, Mrs.
Dennison?"
His words were ordinary enough, but at last he was looking at her, and
the mails of Omofaga were for a moment forgotten.
"I wish I'd never made them send the wretched telegram," she flashed out
passionately. "Much thanks I get!"
"You shall have a statue in the chief street of the chief town of----"
"How dare you! I'm not a girl to be chaffed."
The tears were standing in her eyes, as she threw herself back in a
chair. Willie Ruston got up and stood by her.
"You'll be proud of that telegram some day," he said, rather as though
he felt bound to pay her a compliment.
"Oh, you think that now?" she said, unconvinced of his sincerity.
"Yes. Though was it very difficult?" he asked with a sudden change of
tone most depreciatory of her exploit.
She glanced at him and smiled joyfully. She liked the depreciation
better than the compliment.
"Not a bit," she whispered, "for me."
He laughed slightly, and shut his lips close again. He began to
understand Mrs. Dennison better.
"Still, though it was easy for you, it was precious valuable to me," he
observed.
"And how you hate being obliged to me, don't you?"
He perceived that she understood him a little, but he smiled again as he
asked,
"Oh, but what made you do it, you know?"
"You mean you did? Mr. Ruston, I should like to see you at work in
Omofaga."
"Oh, a very humdrum business," said he, with a shrug.
"You'll have soldiers?"
"We shall call 'em police," he corrected, smiling.
"Yes; but they keep everybody down, and--and do as you order?"
"If not, I shall ask 'em why."
"And the natives?"
"Civilise 'em."
"You--you'll be governor?"
"Oh, dear, no. Local administrator."
She laughed in his face; and a grim smile from him seemed to justify
her.
"I'm glad I sent the telegram," she half-whispered, lying back in the
chair and looking up at him. "I shall have had something to do with all
that, shan't I? Do you want any more money?"
"Look here," said Willie Ruston, "Omofaga's mine. I'll find you another
place, if you like, when I've put this job through."
A luxury of pleasure rippled through her laugh. She darted out her hand
and caught his.
"No. I like Omofaga too!" she said, and as she said it, the door
suddenly opened, and in walked Tom Loring--that is to say--in Tom Loring
was about to walk; but when he saw what he did see, he stood still for a
moment, and then, without a single word, either of greeting or apology,
he turned his back, walked out again, and shut the door behind him. His
entrance and exit were so quick and sudden, that Mrs. Dennison had
hardly dropped Willie Ruston's hand before he was gone; she had
certainly not dropped it before he came.
Willie Ruston sat down squarely in a chair. Mrs. Dennison's hot mood had
been suddenly cooled. She would not ask him to go, but she glanced at
the hat that had been through Omofaga. He detected her.
"I shall stay ten minutes," he observed.
She understood and nodded assent. Very little was said during the ten
minutes. Mrs. Dennison seemed tired; her eyes dropped towards the
ground, and she reclined in her chair. Ruston was frowning and thrumming
at intervals on the table. But presently his brow cleared and he smiled.
Mrs. Dennison saw him from under her drooping lids.
"Well?" she asked in a petulant tone.
"I believe you were going to fight me for Omofaga."
"I don't know what I was doing."
"Is that fellow a fool?"
"He's a much better man than you'll ever be, Mr. Ruston. Really you
might go now."
"All right, I will. I'm going down to the city to see your husband and
Carlin."
"I'm afraid I've wasted your time."
She spoke with a bitterness which seemed impossible to miss. But he
appeared to miss it.
"Oh, not a bit, really," he assured her anxiously. "Good-bye," he added,
holding out his hand.
"Good-bye. I've shaken hands once."
He waited a moment to see if she would speak again, but she said
nothing. So he left her.
As he called a hansom, Mrs. Cormack was leaning over her balcony. She
took a little jewelled watch out of her pocket and looked at it.
"An hour and a quarter!" she cried. "And I know the poor man isn't at
home!"
CHAPTER VII.
AN ATTEMPT TO STOP THE WHEELS.
Miss Adela Ferrars lived in Queen's Gate, in company with her aunt, Mrs.
Topham. Mrs. Topham's husband had been the younger son of a peer of
ancient descent; and a practised observer might almost have detected the
fact in her manner, for she took her station in this life as seriously
as her position in the next, and, in virtue of it, assumed a
responsibility for the morals of her inferiors which betrayed a
considerable confidence in her own. But she was a good woman, and a
widow of the pattern most opposite to that of Mrs. Cormack. She dwelt
more truly in the grave of her husband than in Queen's Gate, and
permitted herself no recreations except such as may privily creep into
religious exercises and the ministrations of favourite clergymen; and it
is pleasant to think that she was very happy. As may be supposed,
however, Adela (who was a good woman in quite another way, and therefore
less congenial with her aunt than any mere sinner could have been) and
Mrs. Topham saw very little of one another, and would not have thought
of living together unless each had been able to supply what the other
wanted. Adela found money for the house, and Mrs. Topham lent the
shelter of her name to her niece's unprotected condition. There were
separate sitting-rooms for the two ladies, and, if rumour were true
(which, after all, it usually is not), a separate staircase for the
clergy.
Adela was in her drawing-room one afternoon when Lord Semingham was
announced. He appeared to be very warm, and he carried a bundle of
papers in his hand. Among the papers there was one of those little
smooth white volumes which epitomise so much of the joy and sorrow of
this transitory life. He gave himself a shake, as he sat down, and held
up the book.
"The car has begun to move," he observed.
"Juggernaut's?"
"Yes; and I have been to see my bankers. I take a trip to the seaside
instead of a moor this year, and have let my own pheasant shooting."
He paused and added,
"Dennison has not taken my shooting. They go to the seaside too--with
the children."
He paused again and concluded,
"The Omofaga prospectus will be out to-morrow."
Adela laughed.
"Bessie is really quite annoyed," remarked Lord Semingham. "I have
seldom seen her so perturbed--but I've sent Ruston to talk to her."
"And why did you do it?" asked Adela.
"I should like to tell you a little history," said he.
And he told her how Mrs. Dennison had sent a telegram to Frankfort. This
history was long, for Lord Semingham told it dramatically, as though he
enjoyed its quality. Yet Adela made no comment beyond asking,
"And wasn't she right?"
"Oh, for the Empire perhaps--for us, it means trips to the seaside."
He drew his chair a little nearer hers, and dropped his affectation of
comic plaintiveness.
"A most disgusting thing has happened in Curzon Street," he said. "Have
you heard?"
"No; I've seen nothing of Maggie lately. You've all been buried in
Omofaga."
"Hush! No words of ill-omen, please! Well, it's annoyed me immensely I
can't think what the foolish fellow means. Tom Loring's going."
"Tom--Loring--going?" she exclaimed with a punctuated pause between
every word. "What in the world for?"
"What is the ultimate cause of everything that happens to us now?" he
asked, sticking his glass in his eye.
Adela felt as though she were playing at some absurd game of questions
and answers, and must make her reply according to the rules.
"Oh, Mr. Ruston!" she said, with a grimace.
Her visitor nodded--as though he had been answered according to the
rules.
"Tom broke out in the most extraordinary manner. He said he couldn't
stay with Dennison, if Dennison let Ruston lead him by the nose
(_ipsissima verba_, my dear Adela), and told Ruston to his face that he
came for no good."
"Were you there?"
"Yes. The man seemed to choose the most public opportunity. Did you ever
hear such a thing?"
"He's mad about Mr. Ruston. He talked just the same way to me. What did
Harry Dennison say?"
"Harry went up to him and took his hand, and shook it, and, you know old
Harry's way, tried to smooth it all down, and get them to shake hands.
Then Ruston got up and said he'd go and leave them to settle it between
Tom and him. Oh, Ruston behaved very well. It was uncommonly awkward for
him, you know."
"Yes; and when he'd gone?"
"Harry told Tom that he must keep his engagements; but that, sooner than
lose him, he'd go no deeper. That was pretty handsome, I thought, but it
didn't suit Tom. 'I can't stay in the house while that fellow comes,' he
said."
"While he comes to the house?" cried Adela.
Lord Semingham nodded. "You've hit the point," he seemed to say, and he
went on,
"And then they both turned and looked at Maggie Dennison. She'd been
sitting there without speaking a single word the whole time. I couldn't
go--Harry wouldn't let me--so I got into a corner and looked at the
photograph book. I felt rather an ass, between ourselves, you know."
"And what did Maggie say?"
"Harry was looking as puzzled as an owl, and Tom as obstinate as a toad,
and both stared at her. She looked first at Harry, and then at Tom, and
smiled in that quiet way of hers. By the way, I never feel that I quite
understand----"
"Oh, never mind! Of course you don't. Go on."
"And then she said, 'What a fuss! I hope that after all this Omofaga
business is over Mr. Loring will come back to us.' Pretty straight for
Tom, eh? He turned crimson, and walked right out of the room, and she
sat down at the piano and began to play some infernal tune, and that
soft-hearted old baby, Harry, blew his nose, and damned the draught."
"And he's going?"
"Yes."
"But," she broke out, "how can he? He's got no money. What'll he live
on?"
"Harry offered him as much as he wanted; but he said he had some
savings, and wouldn't take a farthing. He said he'd write for papers, or
some such stuff."
"He's been with the Dennisons ever since--oh, years and years! Can't you
take him? He'd be awfully useful to you."
"My dear girl, I can't offer charity to Tom Loring," said Semingham, and
he added quickly, "No more can you, you know."
"I quarrelled with him desperately a week ago," said she mournfully.
"About Ruston?"
"Oh, yes. About Mr. Ruston, of course."
Lord Semingham whistled gently, and, after a pause, Adela leant forward
and asked,
"Do you feel quite comfortable about it?"
"Hang it, no! But I'm too deep in. I hope to heaven the public will
swallow it!"
"I didn't mean your wretched Company."
"Oh, you didn't?"
"No; I meant Curzon Street."
"It hardly lies in my mouth to blame Dennison, or his wife either. If
they've been foolish, so have I." Adela looked at him as if she thought
him profoundly unsatisfactory. He was vaguely conscious of her
depreciation, and added, "Ruston's not a rogue, you know."
"No. If I thought he was, I shouldn't be going to take shares in
Omofaga."
"You're not?"
"Oh, but I am!"
"Another spinster lady on my conscience! I shall certainly end in the
dock!" Lord Semingham took his hat and shook hands. Just as he got to
the door, he turned round, and, with an expression of deprecating
helplessness, fired a last shot. "Ruston came to see Bessie the other
day," he said. "The new mantle she's just invented is to be called--the
Omofaga: That is unless she changes it because of the moor. I suggested
the _Pis-aller_, but she didn't see it. She never does, you know.
Good-bye."
The moment he was gone, Adela put on her hat and drove to Curzon Street.
She found Mrs. Dennison alone, and opened fire at once.
"What have you done, Maggie?" she cried, flinging her gloves on the
table and facing her friend with accusing countenance.
Mrs. Dennison was smelling a rose; she smelt it a little longer, and
then replied with another question.
"Why can't men hate quietly? They must make a fuss. I can go on hating a
woman for years and never show it."
"We have the vices of servility," said Adela.
"Harry is a melancholy sight," resumed Mrs. Dennison. "He spends his
time looking for the blotting-paper; Tom Loring used to keep it, you
know."
Her tone deepened the expression of disapproval on Adela's face.
"I've never been so distressed about anything in my life," said she.
"Oh, my dear, he'll come back." As she spoke, a sudden mischievous smile
spread over her face. "You should hear Berthe Cormack on it!" she said.
"I don't want to hear Mrs. Cormack at all. I hate the woman--and I think
that I--at any rate--show it."
It surprised Adela to find her friend in such excellent spirits. The air
of listlessness, which was apt to mar her manner, and even to some
degree her appearance (for to look bored is not becoming), had entirely
vanished.
"You don't seem very sorry about poor Mr. Loring," Adela observed.
"Oh, I am; but Mr. Loring can't stop the wheels of the world. And it's
his own fault."
Adela sighed. It did not seem of consequence whose fault it was.
"I don't think I care much about the wheels of the world," she said.
"How are the children, Maggie?"
"Oh, splendid, and in great glee about the seaside"--and Mrs. Dennison
laughed.
"And about losing Tom Loring?"
"They cried at first."
"Does anyone ever do anything more than 'cry at first'?" exclaimed
Adela.
"Oh, my dear, don't be tragical, or cynical, or whatever you are being,"
said Maggie pettishly. "Mr. Loring has chosen to be very silly, and
there's an end of it. Have you seen the prospectus? Do you know Mr.
Ruston brought it to show me before it was submitted to Mr. Belford and
the others--the Board, I mean?"
"I think you see quite enough of Mr. Ruston," said Adela, putting up her
glass and examining Mrs. Dennison closely. She spoke coolly, but with a
nervous knowledge of her presumption.
Mrs. Dennison may have had a taste for diplomacy and the other arts of
government, but she was no diplomatist. She thought herself gravely
wronged by Adela's suggestion, and burst out angrily,
"Oh, you've been listening to Tom Loring!" and her heightened colour
seemed not to agree with the idea that, if Adela had listened, Tom had
talked of nothing but Omofaga. "I don't mind it from Berthe," Mrs.
Dennison continued, "but from you it's too bad. I suppose he told you
the whole thing? I declare I wasn't dreaming of anything of the kind; I
was just excited, and----"
"I haven't seen Mr. Loring," put in Adela as soon as she could.
"Then how do you know----?"
"Lord Semingham told me you quarrelled with Mr. Loring about Omofaga."
"Is that all?"
"Yes. Maggie, was there any more?"
"Do you want to quarrel with me too?"
"I believe Mr. Loring had good reasons."
"You must believe what you like," said Mrs. Dennison, tearing her rose
to pieces. "Yes, there was some more."
"What?" asked Adela, expecting to be told to mind her own business.
Mrs. Dennison flung away the rose and began to laugh.
"He found me holding Willie Ruston's hand and telling him I--liked
Omofaga! That's all."
"Holding his hand!" exclaimed Adela, justifiably scandalised and
hopelessly puzzled. "What did you do that for?"
"I don't know," said Mrs. Dennison. "It happened somehow as we were
talking. We got interested, you know."
Adela's next question was also one at which it was possible to take
offence; but she was careless now whether offence were taken or not.
"Are you and the children going to the seaside soon?"
"Oh, yes," rejoined her friend, still smiling. "We shall soon be deep in
pails and spades and bathing, and buckets and paddling, and a final
charming walk with Harry in the moonlight."
As the sentence went on, the smile became more fixed and less pleasant.
"You ought to be ashamed to talk like that," said Adela.
Mrs. Dennison walked up the room and down again.
"So I am," she said, pausing to look down on Adela, and then resuming
her walk.
"I wish to goodness this Omofaga affair--yes, and Mr. Ruston too--had
never been invented. It seems to set us all wrong."
"Wrong!" cried Mrs. Dennison. "Oh, yes, if it's wrong to have something
one can take a little interest in!"
"You're hopeless to-day, Maggie. I shall go away. What did you take his
hand for?"
"Nothing. I tell you I was excited."
"Well, I think he's a man one ought to keep cool with."
"Oh, he's cool enough. He'll keep you cool."
"But he didn't----"
"Oh, don't--pray don't!" cried Mrs. Dennison.
Adela took her leave; and, as luck would have it, opened the door just
as Tom Loring was walking downstairs with an enormous load of dusty
papers in his hands. She pulled the door close behind her hastily,
exclaiming,
"Why, I thought you'd gone!"
"So you've heard? I'm just putting things shipshape. I go this evening."
"Well, I'm sorry--still, for your sake, I'm glad."
"Why?"
"You may do something on your own account now."
"I don't want to do anything," said Tom obstinately.
"Come and see me some day. I've forgiven you, you know."
"So I will."
"Mr. Loring, are you going to say good-bye to Maggie?"
"I don't know. I suppose so." Then he added, detecting Adela's
unexpressed hope, "Oh, it's not a bit of use, you know."
Adela passed on, and, later, Loring, having finished his work and being
about to go, sought out Mrs. Dennison.
"You're determined to go, are you?" she asked, with the air of one who
surrenders before an inexplicable whim.
"Yes," said Tom. "You know I must go."
"Why?"
"I'm not a saint--nor a rogue; if I were either, I might stay."
"Or even if you were a sensible man," suggested Maggie Dennison.
"Being merely an honest man, I think I'll go. I've tried to put all
Harry's things right for him, and to make it as easy for him to get
along as I can."
"Can he find his papers and blue-books and things?"
"Oh, yes; and I got abstracts ready on all the things he cares about."
"He'll miss you horribly. Ah, well!"
"I suppose a little; but, really, I think he'll learn to get along----"
Mrs. Dennison interrupted with a laugh.
"Do you know," she asked, "what we remind me of? Why, of a husband and
wife separating, and wondering whether the children will miss poor
papa--though poor papa insists in going, and mamma is sure he must."
"I never mentioned the children," said Tom angrily.
"I know you didn't."
Tom looked at her for an instant.
"For God's sake," said he, "don't let him see that!"
"Oh, how you twist things!" she cried in impatient protest.
Tom only shook his head. The charge was not sincere.
"Good-bye, Tom," she went on after a pause. "I believe, some day or
other, you'll come back--or, at any rate, come and live next
door--instead of Berthe Cormack, you know. But I don't know in what
state you'll find us."
"I'd just like to tell you one thing, if I may," said Tom, resolutely
refusing to meet the softened look in her eyes with any answering
friendliness.
"Yes?"
"You've got one of the best fellows in the world for a husband."
"Well, I know that, I suppose, at least, as well as you do."
"That's all. Good-bye."
Without more he left her. She drew the window-curtain aside and watched
him get into his cab and be driven away. The house was very still. Her
husband was in his place at Westminster, and the children had gone to a
party. She went upstairs to the nursery, hoping to find something to
criticise; then to Harry's dressing-room, where she filled his
pin-cushion with pins and put fresh water to the flowers in the vase.
She could find no other offices of wife or mother to do, and she
presently found herself looking into Tom's room, which was very bare and
desolate, stripped of the homelike growth of a five years' tenancy. Her
excitement was over; she felt terribly like a child after a tantrum; she
flung open the window of the room and stood listening to the noise of
the town. It was the noise of happy people, who had plenty to do; or of
happier still, who did not want to do anything, and thus found content.
She turned away and walked downstairs with a step as heavy as physical
weariness brings with it. It came as a curious aggravation--light
itself, but gaining weight from its surroundings--that, for once in a
way, she had no engagements that evening. All the tide seemed to be
flowing by, leaving her behind high and dry on the shore. Even the
children had their party, even Harry his toy at Westminster; and Willie
Ruston was working might and main to give a good start to Omofaga. Only
of her had the world no need--and no heed.
CHAPTER VIII.
CONVERTS AND HERETICS.
Had Lord Semingham and Harry Dennison taken an opportunity which many
persons would have thought that they had a right to take, they might
have shifted the burden of the Baron's _douceur_ and of sundry other not
trifling expenses on to the shoulders of the public, and enjoyed their
moors that year after all; for at the beginning Omofaga obtained such a
moderate and reasonable "boom" as would have enabled them to perform the
operation known as "unloading" (and literary men must often admire the
terse and condensed expressiveness of "City" metaphors) with much profit
to themselves. But either they conceived this course of conduct to be
beneath them, or they were so firm of faith in Mr. Ruston that they
stood to their guns and their shares, and took their seats at the Board,
over which Mr. Foster Belford magniloquently presided, still possessed
of the strongest personal interest in the success of Omofaga. Lady
Semingham, having been made aware that Omofaga shares were selling at
forty shillings a piece, was quite unable to understand why Alfred and
Mr. Dennison did not sell all they had, and thereby procure moors or
whatever else they wanted. Willie Ruston had to be sent for again, and
when he told her that the same shares would shortly be worth five pounds
(which he did with the most perfect confidence), she was equally at a
loss to see why they were on sale to anybody who chose to pay forty
shillings. Ruston, who liked to make everybody a convert to his own
point of view, spent the best part of an afternoon conversing with the
little lady, but, when he came away, he left her placidly admiring the
Omofaga mantle which had just arrived from the milliner's, and promised
to create an immense sensation.
"I believe she's all gown," said he despairingly, at the Valentines in
the evening. "If you undressed her there'd be no one there."
"Well, there oughtn't to be many people," said young Sir Walter, with a
hearty laugh at his boyish joke.
"Walter, how can you!" cried Marjory.
This little conversation, trivial though it be, has its importance, as
indicating the very remarkable change which had occurred in young Sir
Walter. There at least Ruston had made a notable convert, and he had
effected this result by the simple but audacious device of offering to
take Sir Walter with him to Omofaga. Sir Walter was dazzled. Between
spending another year or two at Oxford _in statu pupillari_, vexed by
schools and disciplined by proctors--between being required to be in by
twelve at night and unable to visit London without permission--between
this unfledged state and the position of a man among the men who were in
the vanguard of the empire there rolled a flood; and the flood was
mighty enough to sweep away all young Sir Walter's doubts about Mr.
Ruston being a gentleman, to obliterate Evan Haselden's sneers, to
uproot his influence--in a word, to transform that youthful legislator
from a paragon of wisdom and accomplishments into "a good chap, but
rather a lot of side on, you know."
Marjory, having learnt from literature that hers was supposed to be the
fickle sex, might well open her eyes and begin to feel very sorry indeed
for poor Evan Haselden. But she also was under the spell and hailed the
sun of glory rising for her brother out of the mists of Omofaga; and if
poor Lady Valentine shed some tears before Willie Ruston convinced her
of the rare chance it was for her only boy--and a few more after he had
so convinced her--why, it would be lucky if these were the only tears
lost in the process of developing Omofaga; for it seems that great
enterprises must always be watered by the tears of mothers and nourished
on the blood of sons. _Sic fortis Etruria crevit._
One or two other facts may here be chronicled about Omofaga. There were
three great meetings: one at the Cannon Street Hotel, purely commercial;
another at the Westminster Town Hall, commercial-political; a third at
Exeter Hall, commercial-religious. They were all very successful, and,
taken together, were considered to cover the ground pretty completely.
The most unlike persons and the most disparate views found a point of
union in Omofaga. Adela Ferrars put three thousand pounds into it, Lady
Valentine a thousand. Mr. Carlin finally disposed of the coal business,
and his wife dreamt of the workhouse all night and scolded herself for
her lack of faith all the morning. Willie Ruston spoke of being off in
five months, and Sir Walter immediately bought a complete up-country
outfit.
Suddenly there was a cloud. Omofaga began to be "written down," in the
most determined and able manner. The anonymous detractor--in such terms
did Mr. Foster Belford refer to the writer--used the columns of a
business paper of high standing, and his letters, while preserving a
judicial and temperate tone, were uncompromisingly hostile and
exceedingly damaging. A large part of Omofaga (he said) had not been
explored, indeed, nobody knew exactly what was and what was not Omofaga;
let the shareholders get what comfort they could out of that; but, so
far as Omofaga had been explored, it had been proved to be barren of all
sources of wealth. The writer grudgingly admitted that it might feed a
certain head of cattle, though he hastened to add that the flies were
fatal all the hot months; but as for gold, or diamonds, or any such
things as companies most love, there were none, and if there were, they
could not be won, and if they could be won no European could live to win
them. It was a timid time on the markets then, and people took fright
easily. In a few days any temptation that might have assailed Lord
Semingham and Harry Dennison lost its power. Omofagas were far below
par, and Lady Semingham was entreating her husband to buy all he could
against the hour when they should be worth five pounds a piece, because,
as she said, Mr. Ruston was quite sure that they were going to be, and
who knew more about it than Mr. Ruston?
It was just about this time that Tom Loring, who had vanished completely
for a week or two, after his departure from Curzon Street, came up out
of the depths and called on Adela Ferrars in Queen's Gate; and her first
remark showed that she was a person of some perspicacity.
"Isn't this rather small of you?" she asked, putting on her eyeglasses
and finding an article which she indicated. "You may not like him, but
still----"
"How like a woman!" said Tom Loring in the tone of a man who expects
and, on the whole, welcomes ill-usage. "How did you know it was mine?"
"It's so like that article of Harry Dennison's. I think you might put
your name, anyhow."
"Yes, and rob what I say of all weight. Who knows my name?"
Adela felt an impulse to ask him angrily why nobody knew his name, but
she inquired instead what he thought he knew about Omofaga. She put this
question in a rather offensive tone.
It appeared that Tom Loring knew a great deal about Omofaga, all, in
fact, that there was to be learnt from blue-books, consular reports,
gazetteers, travels, and other heavy works of a like kind.
"You've been moling in the British Museum," cried Adela accusingly.
Tom admitted it without the least shame.
"I knew this thing was a fraud and the man a fraud, and I determined to
show him up if I could," said he.
"It's because you hate him."
"Then it's lucky for the British investor that I do hate him."
"It's not lucky for me," said Adela.
"You don't mean to say you've been----"
"Fool enough? Yes, I have. No, don't quarrel again. It won't ruin me,
anyhow. Are the things you say really true?"
Tom replied by another question.
"Do you think I'd write 'em if I didn't believe they were?"
"No, but you might believe they were because you hate him."
Tom seemed put out at this idea. It is not one that generally suggests
itself to a man when his own views are in question.
"I admit I began because I hate him," he said, with remarkable candour,
after a moment's consideration; "but, by Jove, as I went on I found
plenty of justification. Look here, you mustn't tell anyone I'm writing
them."
Tom looked a little embarrassed as he made this request.
Adela hesitated for a moment. She did not like the request, either.
"No, I won't," she said at last; and she added, "I'm beginning to think
I hate him, too. He's turning me into an hospital."
"What?"
"People he wounds come to me. Old Lady Valentine came and cried because
Walter's going to Omofaga; and Evan came and--well, swore because Walter
worships Mr. Ruston; and Harry Dennison came and looked bewildered,
and--you know--because--oh, because of you, and so on."
"And now I come, don't I?"
"Yes, and now you."
"And has Mrs. Dennison come?" asked Tom, with a look of disconcerting
directness.
"No," snapped Adela, and she looked at the floor, whereupon Tom diverted
his eyes from her and stared at the ceiling.
Presently he searched in his waistcoat pocket and brought out a little
note.
"Read that," he said, a world of disgust in his tone.
"'I told you so.--B.C.'" read Adela. "Oh, it's that Cormack woman!" she
cried.
"You see what it means? She means I've been got rid of in order
that----" Tom stopped, and brought his clenched fist down on his opened
palm. "If I thought it, I'd shoot the fellow," he ended.
He looked at her for the answer to his unexpressed question.
Adela turned the pestilential note over and over in her fingers,
handling it daintily as though it might stain.
"I don't think he means it," she said at last, without trying to blink
the truth of Tom's interpretation.
Tom rose and began to walk about.
"Women beat me," he broke out. "I don't understand 'em. How should I?
I'm not one of these fellows who catch women's fancy--thank God!"
"If you continue to dislike the idea, you'll probably manage to escape
the reality," observed Adela, and her tone, for some reason or
other--perhaps merely through natural championship of her sex--was
rather cold and her manner stiff.
"Oh, some women are all right;" and Adela acknowledged the concession
with a satirical bow. "Look here, can't you help?" he burst out. "Tell
her what a brute he is."
"Oh, you do not understand women!"
"Well, then, I shall tell Dennison. He won't stand nonsense of that
kind."
"You'll deserve horsewhipping if you do," remarked Adela.
"Then what am I to do?"
"Nothing. In fact, Mr. Loring, you have no genius for delicate
operations."
"Of course I'm a fool."
Adela played with her _pince-nez_ for a minute or two, put it on, looked
at him, and then said, with just a touch of unwonted timidity in her
voice,
"Anyhow, you happen to be a gentleman."
Poor Tom had been a good deal buffeted of late, and a friendly stroking
was a pleasant change. He looked up with a smile, but as he looked up
Adela looked away.
"I think I'll stop those articles," said he.
"Yes, do," she cried, a bright smile on her face.
"They've pretty well done their work, too."
"Don't! Don't spoil it! But--but don't you get money for them?"
Tom was in better humour now. He held out his hand with his old friendly
smile.
"Oh, wait till I am in the workhouse, and then you shall take me out."
"I don't believe I did mean that," protested Adela.
"You always mean everything that--that the best woman in the world could
mean," and Tom wrung her hand and disappeared.
Adela's hand was rather crushed and hurt, and for a moment she stood
regarding it ruefully.
"I thought he was going to kiss it," she said. "One of those fellows who
take women's fancy, perhaps, would have! And--and it wouldn't have hurt
so much. Ah, well, I'm very glad he's going to stop the articles."
And the articles did stop; and perhaps things might have fallen out
worse than that an honest man, driven hard by bitterness, should do a
useful thing from a doubtful motive, and having done just enough of it,
should repent and sin no more; for unquestionably the articles prevented
a great many persons from paying an unduly high price for Omofaga
shares. This line of thought seems defensible, but it was not Adela's.
She rejoiced purely that Tom should turn away from the doubtful thing;
and if Tom had been a man of greater acuteness, it would have struck him
as worthy of note, perhaps even of gratification, that Miss Adela
Ferrars should care so much whether he did or did not do doubtful
things. But then Miss Ferrars--for it seems useless to keep her secret
any longer, the above recorded interview having somewhat impaired its
mystery--was an improbably romantic person--such are to be met even at
an age beyond twenty-five--and was very naturally ashamed of her
weakness. People often are ashamed of being better than their
surroundings. Being better they feel better, and feeling better they
feel priggish, and then they try not to be better, and happily fail. So
Adela was very shamefaced over her ideal, and would as soon have thought
of preaching on a platform--of which practice she harboured a most
bigoted horror--as of proclaiming the part that love must play in her
marriage. The romantic resolve lay snug in its hidden nest, sheltered
from cold gusts of ridicule by a thick screen of worldly sayings, and,
when she sent away a suitor, of worldly-wise excuses. Thus no one
suspected it, not even Tom Loring, although he thought her "the best of
women;" a form of praise, by the way, that gave the lady honoured by it
less pleasure than less valuable commendation might have done. Why best?
Why not most charming? Well, probably because he thought the one and
didn't think the other. She was the best; but there was another whose
doings and whose peril had robbed Tom Loring of his peace, and made him
do the doubtful thing. Why had he done it? Or (and Adela smiled
mockingly at this resurrection of the Old Woman), if he did do it, why
did he do it for Maggie Dennison? She didn't believe he would ever do a
doubtful thing for her. For that she loved him; but perhaps she would
have loved him--well, not less--if he did; for how she would forgive
him!
After half-an-hour of this kind of thing--it was her own summary of her
meditations--she dressed, went out to dinner, sat next Evan Haselden,
and said cynical things all the evening; so that, at last Evan told her
that she had no more feeling than a mummified Methodist. This was
exactly what she wanted.
CHAPTER IX.
AN OPPRESSIVE ATMOSPHERE.
The Right Honourable Foster Belford, although not, like Mr. Pitt, famous
for "ruining Great Britain gratis"--perhaps merely from want of the
opportunity--had yet not made a fortune out of political life, and it
had suggested a pleasant addition to his means, when Willie Ruston
offered him the chairmanship of the Omofaga Company, with the promise of
a very comfortable yearly honorarium. He accepted the post with
alacrity, but without undue gratitude, for he considered himself well
worth the price; and the surprising fact is that he was well worth it.
He bulked large to the physical and mental view. His colleagues in the
Cabinet had taken a year or two to find out his limits, and the public
had not found them out yet. Therefore he was not exactly a fool. On the
other hand, the limits were certainly there, and so there was no danger
of his developing an inconvenient greatness. As has been previously
hinted, he enjoyed Harry Dennison's entire confidence; and he could be
relied upon not to understand Lord Semingham's irreverence. Thus his
appointment did good to the Omofaga as well as to himself, and only the
initiated winked when Willie Ruston hid himself behind this imposing
figure and pulled the strings.
"The best of it is," Ruston remarked to Semingham, "that you and Carlin
will have the whole thing in your own hands when I've gone out. Belford
won't give you any trouble."
"But, my dear fellow, I don't want it all in my hands. I want to grow
rich out of it without any trouble."
Ruston twisted his cigar in his mouth. The prospect of immediate wealth
flowing in from Omofaga was, as Lord Semingham knew very well, not
assured.
"Loring's stopped hammering us," said Ruston; "that's one thing."
"Oh, you found out he wrote them?"
"Yes; and uncommonly well he did it, confound him. I wish we could get
that fellow. There's a good deal in him."
"You see," observed Lord Semingham, "he doesn't like you. I don't know
that you went the right way about to make him."
The remark sounded blunt, but Semingham had learnt not to waste delicate
phrases on Willie Ruston.
"Well, I didn't know he was worth the trouble."
"One path to greatness is said to be to make no enemies."
"A very roundabout one, I should think. I'm going to make a good many
enemies in Omofaga."
Lord Semingham suddenly rose, put on his hat, and left the offices of
the Company. Mrs. Dennison had, a little while ago, complained to him
that she ate, drank, breathed and wore Omofaga. He had detected the
insincerity of her complaint, but he was becoming inclined to echo it in
all genuineness on his own account. There were moments when he wondered
how and why he had allowed this young man to lead him so far and so
deep; moments when a convulsion of Nature, redistributing Africa and
blotting out Omofaga, would have left him some thousands of pounds
poorer in purse, but appreciably more cheerful in spirit. Perhaps
matters would mend when the Local Administrator had departed to his
local administration, and only the mild shadow of him which bore the
name of Carlin trod the boards of Queen Street, Cheapside. Ruston began
to be oppressive. The restless energy and domineering mind of the man
wearied Semingham's indolent and dilettante spirit, and he hailed the
end of the season as an excellent excuse for putting himself beyond the
reach of his colleague for a few weeks. Yet, the more he quailed, the
more he trusted; and when a very great man, holding a very great office,
met him in the House of Lords, and expressed the opinion that when the
Company and Mr. Ruston went to Omofaga they would find themselves in a
pretty hornets' nest, Lord Semingham only said that he should be sorry
for the hornets.
"Don't ask us to fetch your man out for you, that's all," said the very
great man.
And for an instant Lord Semingham, still feeling that load upon his
shoulders, fancied that it would be far from his heart to prefer such a
request. There might be things less just and fitting than that Willie
Ruston and those savage tribes of Omofaga should be left to fight out
the quarrel by themselves, the civilised world standing aloof. And the
dividends--well, of course, there were the dividends, but Lord Semingham
had in his haste forgotten them.
"Ah, you don't know Ruston," said he, shaking a forefinger at the great
man.
"Don't I? He came every day to my office for a fortnight."
"Wanted something?"
"Yes, he wanted something certainly, or he wouldn't have come, you
know."
"Got it, I suppose?" asked Lord Semingham, in a tone curiously
indicative of resignation rather than triumph.
"Well, yes; I did, at last, not without hesitation, accede to his
request."
Then Lord Semingham, with no apparent excuse, laughed in the face of the
great man, left the House (much in the same sudden way as he had left
Queen Street, Cheapside), and passed rapidly through the lobbies till he
reached Westminster Hall. Here he met a young man, clad to perfection,
but looking sad. It was Evan Haselden. With a sigh of relief at meeting
no one of heavier metal, Semingham stopped him and began to talk. Evan's
melancholy air enveloped his answers in a mist of gloom. Moreover there
was a large streak on his hat, where the nap had been rubbed the wrong
way; evidently he was in trouble. Presently he seized his friend by the
arm, and proposed a walk in the Park.
"But are you paired?" asked Semingham; for an important division was to
occur that day in the Commons.
"No," said Evan fiercely. "Come along;" and Lord Semingham went,
exclaiming inwardly, "A girl!"
"I'm the most miserable devil alive," said Evan, as they left the Horse
Guards on the right hand.
Semingham put up his eyeglass.
"I've always regarded you as the favourite of fortune," he said. "What's
the matter?"
The matter unfolded itself some half-hour after they had reached the Row
and sat down. It came forth with difficulty; pride obstructed the
passage, and something better than pride made the young man diffuse in
the telling of his trouble. Lord Semingham grew very grave indeed. Let
who would laugh at happy lovers, he had a groan for the unfortunate--a
groan with reservations.
"She said she liked me very much, but didn't feel--didn't, you know,
look up to me enough, and so on," said poor Evan in puzzled pain. "I--I
can't think what's come over her. She used to be quite different. I
don't know what she means by talking like that."
Lord Semingham played a tune on his knee with the fingers of one hand.
He was waiting.
"Young Val's gone back on me too," moaned Evan, who took the brother's
deposal of him hardly more easily than the sister's rejection. Suddenly
he brightened up; a smile, but a bitter one, gleamed across his face.
"I think I've put one spoke in his wheel, though," he said.
"Ruston's?" inquired Semingham, still playing his tune.
"Yes. A fortnight ago, old Detchmore" (Lord Detchmore was the very great
man before referred to) "asked me if I knew Loring. You know Ruston's
been trying to get Detchmore to back him up in making a railway to
Omofaga?"
"I didn't know," said Lord Semingham, with an unmoved face.
"You're a director, aren't you?"
"Yes. Go on, my dear boy."
"And Detchmore had seen Loring's articles. Well, I took Tom to him, and
we left him quite decided to have nothing to do with it. Oh, by Jove,
though, I forgot; I suppose you'd be on the other side there, wouldn't
you?"
"I suppose I should, but it doesn't matter."
"Why not?"
"Because I fancy Ruston's got what he wanted;" and Lord Semingham
related what he had heard from the Earl of Detchmore.
Evan listened in silence, and, the tale ended, the two lay back in their
chairs, and idly looked at the passing carriages. At last Lord Semingham
spoke.
"He's going to Omofaga in a few months," he observed. "And, Evan, you
don't mean that he's your rival at the Valentines'?"
"I'm not so sure, confound him. You know how pretty she is."
Semingham knew that she was pretty; but he also knew that she was poor,
and thought that she was, if not too insipid (for he recognised the
unusual taste of his own mind), at least too immature to carry Willie
Ruston off his feet, and into a love affair that promised no worldly
gain.
"I asked Mrs. Dennison what she thought," pursued Evan.
"Oh, you did?"
"But the idea seemed quite a new one to her. That's good, you know. I
expect she'd have noticed if he'd shown any signs."
Lord Semingham thought it very likely.
"Anyhow," Evan continued, "Marjory's awfully keen about him."
"He'll be in Omofaga in three or four months," Semingham repeated. It
was all the consolation he could offer.
Presently Evan got up and strode away. Lord Semingham sat on, musing on
the strange turmoil the coming of the man had made in the little corner
of the world he dwelt in. He was reminded of what was said concerning
Lord Byron by another poet. They all felt Ruston. His intrusion into the
circle had changed all the currents, so that sympathy ran no longer
between old friends, and hearts answered to a new stimulus. Some he
attracted, some he repelled; none did he leave alone. From great to
small his influence ran; from the expulsion of Tom Loring to the
christening of the Omofaga mantle. Semingham had an acute sense of the
absurdity of it all, but he had seen absurd things happen too often to
be much relieved by his intuition. And when absurd things happen, they
have consequences just as other things have. And the most exasperating
fact was the utter unconsciousness of the disturber. He had no
mystery-airs, no graces, no seeming fascinations. He was relentlessly
business-like, unsentimental, downright; he took it all as a matter of
course. He did not pry for weak spots. He went right on--on and
over--and seemed not to know when he was going over. A very Juggernaut
indeed! Semingham thanked Adela for teaching him the word.
He was suddenly roused by the merry laughter of children. Three or four
little ones were scampering along the path in the height of glee. As
they came up, he recognised them. He had seen them once before. They
were Carlin's children. Five there were, he counted now; three ran
ahead; two little girls held each a hand of Willie Ruston's, who was
laughing as merrily as his companions. The whole group knew Semingham,
and the eldest child was by his knees in a moment.
"We've been to the Exhibition," she cried exultantly; "and now
Willie--Mr. Ruston, I mean--is taking us to have ices in Bond Street."
"A human devil!" said the astonished man to himself, as Willie Ruston
plumped down beside him, imploring a brief halt, and earnestly
asseverating that his request was in good faith, and concealed no
lurking desire to evade the ices.
"I met young Haselden as we came along," Ruston observed, wiping his
brow.
"Ah! Yes, he's been with me."
The children had wandered a few yards off, and stood impatiently looking
at their hero.
"He's had a bit of a facer, I fancy," pursued Willie Ruston. "Heard
about it?"
"Something."
"It'll come all right, I should think," said Ruston, in a comfortably
careless tone. "He's not a bad fellow, you know, though he's not
over-appreciative of me." Lord Semingham found no comment. "I hear
you're going to Dieppe next week?" asked Ruston.
"Yes. My wife and Mrs. Dennison have put their heads together, and fixed
on that. You know we're economising."
Ruston laughed.
"I suppose you are," he said through his white teeth. The idea seemed to
amuse him. "We may meet there. I've promised to run over for a few days
if I can."
"The deuce you have!" would have expressed his companion's feelings; but
Lord Semingham only said, "Oh, really?"
"All right, I'm coming directly," Ruston cried a moment later to his
young friends, and, with a friendly nod, he rose and went on his way.
Lord Semingham watched the party till it disappeared through the Park
gates, hearing in turn the children's shrill laugh and Willie Ruston's
deeper notes. The effect of the chance meeting was to make his fancies
and his fancied feelings look still more absurd. That he perceived at
once; the devil appeared so very human in such a mood and such
surroundings. Yet that attribute--that most demoniac attribute--of
ubiquity loomed larger and larger. For not even a foreign land--not even
a watering-place of pronounced frivolity--was to be a refuge. The man
was coming to Dieppe! And on whose bidding? Semingham had no doubt on
whose bidding; and, out of the airy forms of those absurd fancies, there
seemed to rise a more material shape, a reality, a fabric not compounded
wholly of dreams, but mixed of stuff that had made human comedies and
human tragedies since the world began. Mrs. Dennison had bidden Willie
Ruston to Dieppe. That was Semingham's instant conclusion; she had
bidden him, not merely by a formal invitation, or by a simple
acquiescence, but by the will and determination which possessed her to
be of his mind and in his schemes. And perhaps Evan Haselden's innocent
asking of her views had carried its weight also. For nearly an hour
Semingham sat and mused. For awhile he thought he would act; but how
should he act? And why? And to what end? Since what must be must, and in
vain do we meddle with fate. An easy, almost eager, recognition of the
inevitable in the threatened, of the necessary in everything that
demanded effort for its avoidance, had stamped his life and grown deep
into his mind. Wherefore now, faced with possibilities that set his
nerves on edge, and wrung his heart for good friends, he found nothing
better to do than shrug his shoulders and thank God that his own wife's
submission to the man went no deeper than the inside lining of that
famous Omofaga mantle, nor his own than the bottom, or near the bottom,
of his trousers' pocket.
"Though that, in faith," he exclaimed ruefully, as at last he rose, "is,
in this world of ours, pretty deep!"
CHAPTER X.
A LADY'S BIT OF WORK.
The Dennison children, after a two nights' banishment, had come down to
dessert again. They had been in sore disgrace, caused (it was stated to
Mrs. Cormack, who had been invited to dine _en famille_) by a grave
breach of hospitality and good manners which Madge had led the younger
ones--who tried to look plaintively innocent--into committing.
The Carlin children had come to tea, and a great dissension had arisen
between the two parties. The Carlins had belauded the generous donor of
ices; Madge had taken up the cudgels fiercely on Tom Loring's behalf,
and Dora and Alfred had backed her up. Each side proceeded from praise
of its own favourite to sneers--by no means covert--at the other's man,
and the feud had passed from the stage of words to that of deeds before
it was discovered by the superior powers and crushed. On the hosts, of
course, the blame had to fall; they were sent to bed, while the guests
drove off in triumph, comforted by sweets and shillings. Madge did not
think, or pretend to think, that this was justice, and her mother's
recital of her crimes to Mrs. Cormack, so far from reducing her to
penitence, brought back to her cheeks and eyes the glow they had worn
when she slapped (there is no use in blinking facts) Jessie Carlin, and
told her that she hated Mr. Ruston. Madge Dennison was like her mother
in face and temper. That may have been the reason why Harry Dennison
squeezed her hand under the table, and by his tacit aid broke the force
of his wife's cold reproofs. But there was perhaps another reason also.
Mrs. Cormack said that she was shocked, and looked very much amused. The
little history made up for the bore of having the children brought in.
That was a thing she objected to very much; it stopped all rational
conversation. But now her curiosity was stirred.
"Why don't you like Mr. Ruston, my child?" she asked Madge.
"I don't dislike him," said Madge, rosy red, and speaking with elaborate
slowness. She said it as though it were a lesson she had learnt.
"But why, then," said Mrs. Cormack, whirling her hands, "beat the little
Carlin?"
"That was before mamma told me," answered Madge, the two younger ones
sitting by, open-mouthed, to hear her explanation.
"Oh, what an obedient child! How I should have liked a little girl like
you, darling!"
Madge hated sarcasm, and her feelings towards Mrs. Cormack reflected
those of her idol, Tom Loring.
"I don't know what you mean," she said curtly; and then she looked
anxiously at her mother.
But Mrs. Dennison was smiling.
"Let her alone, Berthe," she said. "She's been punished. Give her some
fruit, Harry."
Harry Dennison piled up the plate eagerly held out to him.
"Who'll give you fruit at Dieppe?" he asked, stroking his daughter's
hair.
Mrs. Cormack pricked up her ears.
"Didn't we tell you?" asked Mrs. Dennison. "Harry can't come for a
fortnight. That tiresome old Sir George" (Sir George was the senior
partner in Dennison, Sons & Company) "is down with the gout, and Harry's
got to stay in town. But I'll give Madge fruit--if she's good."
"Papa gives it me anyhow," said Madge, who preferred unconditional
benefits.
Harry laughed dolefully. He had been looking forward to a holiday with
his children. Their uninterrupted society would have easily consoled him
for the loss of the moor.
"It's an awful bore," he said; "but there's no help for it. Sir George
can't put a foot to the ground."
"Anyhow," suggested Mrs. Cormack, "you will be able to help Mr. Ruston
with the Omofaga."
"Papa," broke out Madge, her face bright with a really happy idea, which
must, she thought, meet with general acceptance, "since you can't come,
why shouldn't Tom?"
Mrs. Cormack grew more amused. Oh, it was quite worth while to have the
children! They were so good at saying things one couldn't say oneself;
and then one could watch the effect. In an impulse of gratitude, she
slid a banana on to Madge's plate.
"Marjory Valentine's coming," said Mrs. Dennison. "You like her, don't
you, Madge?"
"She's a girl," said Madge scornfully; and Harry, with a laugh, stroked
her hair again.
"You're a little flirt," said he.
"But why can't Tom?" persisted Madge, as she attacked the banana. It was
Mrs. Cormack's gift, but--_non olet_.
For a moment nobody answered. Then Harry Dennison said--not in the least
as though he believed it, or expected anybody else to believe it--
"Tom's got to stay and work."
"Have all the gentlemen we know got to stay and work?"
Harry nodded assent.
Mrs. Cormack was leaning forward. A moment later she sank back, hiding a
smile behind her napkin; for Madge observed, in a tone of utter
contentment,
"Oh, then, Mr Ruston won't come;" and she wagged her head reassuringly
at the open-mouthed little ones. They were satisfied, and fell again to
eating.
After a few moments, Mrs. Dennison, who had made no comment on her
daughter's inference, swept the flock off to bed, praying Berthe to
excuse her temporary absence. It was her habit to go upstairs with them
when possible, and Harry would see that coffee came.
"Poor Madge!" said Harry, when the door was shut, "what'll she say when
Ruston turns up?"
"Then he does go?"
"I think so. We'd asked him to stay with us, and though he can't do that
now, he and young Walter Valentine talk of running over for a few days.
I hope they will."
Mrs. Cormack, playing with her teaspoon, glanced at her host out of the
corner of her eye.
"He can go all the better, as I shall be here," continued Harry. "I can
look after Omofaga."
Mrs. Cormack rapped the teaspoon sharply on her cup. The man was such a
fool. Harry, dimly recognising her irritation, looked up inquiringly;
but she hesitated before she spoke. Would it spoil sport or make sport
if she stirred a suspicion in him? A thought threw its weight in the
balance. Maggie Dennison's friendship had been a trifle condescending,
and the grateful friend pictured her under the indignity of enforced
explanations, of protests, even of orders to alter her conduct. But how
would Harry take a hint? There were men silly enough to resent such
hints. Caution was the word.
"Well, I almost wish he wasn't going," she said at last. "For Maggie's
sake, I mean. She wants a complete rest."
"Oh, but she likes him. He amuses her. Why, she's tremendously
interested in Omofaga, Mrs. Cormack."
"Ah, but he excites her too. We poor women have nerves, Mr. Dennison. It
would be much better for her to hear nothing of Omofaga for a few
weeks."
"Has she been talking to you much about it?" asked Harry, beginning to
feel anxious at his guest's immensely solemn tone.
Indeed, little Mrs. Cormack spoke for the nonce quite like a family
physician.
"Oh, yes, about it and him," she replied. "She's never off the subject.
Mr. Loring was half right."
"Tom's objections were based on quite other grounds."
"Oh, were they really? I thought--well, anyhow, Mr. Ruston being there
will do her no good. She'll like it immensely, of course."
Harry Dennison rubbed his hand over his chin.
"I see what you mean," he said. "Yes, she'd have been better away from
everything. But I can't object to Ruston going. I asked him myself."
"Yes, when you were going."
"That makes no difference."
Mrs. Cormack said nothing. She tapped her spoon against the cup once
more.
"Why, we should have talked all the more about it if I'd been there."
His companion was still silent, her eyes turned down towards the table.
Harry looked at her with perplexity, and when he next spoke, there was a
curious appealing note in his voice.
"Surely it doesn't make any difference?" he asked. "What difference can
it make?"
No answer came. Mrs. Cormack laid down the spoon and sat back in her
chair.
"You mean there'll be no one to make a change for her--to distract her
thoughts?"
Mrs. Cormack flung her hands out with an air of impatience.
"Oh, I meant nothing," said she petulantly.
The clock seemed to tick very loud in the silence that followed her
words.
"I wish I could go," said Harry at last, in a low tone.
"Oh, I wish you could, Mr. Dennison;" and as she spoke she raised her
eyes, and, for the first time, looked full in his face.
Harry rose from his chair; at the same moment his wife re-entered the
room. He started a little at the sight of her.
She held a letter in her hand.
"Mr. Ruston will be at Dieppe on the 15th with Walter Valentine," she
said, referring to it. "Give me some coffee, Harry."
He poured it out and gave it to her, saying,
"A letter from Ruston? Let's see what he says."
"Oh, there's nothing else," she answered, laying it beside her.
Mrs. Cormack sat looking on.
"May I see?" asked Harry Dennison.
"If you like," she answered, a little surprised; and, turning to Mrs.
Cormack, she added, "Mr. Ruston's a man of few words on paper."
"Ah, he makes every word mean something, I expect," returned that lady,
who was quite capable of the same achievement herself, and exhibited it
in this very speech.
"What does he mean by the postscript?--'Have you found another kingdom
yet?'" asked Harry, with a puzzled frown.
"It's a joke, dear."
"But what does it mean?"
"Oh, my dear Harry, I can't explain jokes."
Harry laid the note down again.
"It's a joke between ourselves," Mrs. Dennison went on. "I oughtn't to
have shown you the letter. Come, Berthe, we'll go upstairs."
And Mrs. Cormack had no alternative but to obey.
Left alone, Harry Dennison drew his chair up to the hearthrug. There was
no fire, but he acted as though there were, leaning forward with his
elbows on his knees, and gazing into the grate. He felt hurt and
disconsolate. His old grievance--that people left him out--was strong
upon him. He had delighted in the Omofaga scheme, because he had been in
the inside ring there--because he was of importance to it--because it
showed him to his wife as a mover in great affairs. And now--somehow--he
seemed to be being pushed outside there too. What was this joke between
themselves? At Dieppe they would have all that out; he would not be in
the way there. Then he did not understand what Berthe Cormack would be
at. She had looked at him so curiously. He did not know what to make of
it, and he wished that Tom Loring were on the other side of the
fireplace. Then he could ask him all about it. Tom! Why, Tom had looked
at him almost in the same way as Berthe Cormack had--just when he was
wringing his hand in farewell. No, it was not the same way--and yet in
part the same. Tom's look had pity in it, and no derision. Mrs.
Cormack's derision was but touched with pity. Yet both seemed to ask,
"Don't you see?" See what? Why had Tom gone away? He could rely on Tom.
See what? There was nothing to see.
He sat longer than he meant. It was past ten when he went upstairs. Mrs.
Cormack had gone, and his wife was in an armchair by the open window. He
came in softly and surprised her with her head thrown back on the
cushions and a smile on her lips. And the letter was in her hands.
Hearing his step when he was close by her, she sat up, letting the note
fall to the ground.
"What a time you've been! Berthe's gone. Were you asleep?"
"No. I was thinking; Maggie, I wish I could come to Dieppe with you."
"Ah, I wish you could," said she graciously. "But you're left in charge
of Omofaga."
She spoke as though in that charge lay consolation more than enough.
"I believe you care--I mean you think more about Omofaga than about----"
"Anything in the world?" she asked, in playful mockery.
"Than about me," he went on stubbornly.
"Than about your coming to Dieppe, you mean?"
"I mean, than about me," he repeated.
She looked at him wonderingly.
"My dear man," said she, taking his hand, "what's the matter?"
"You do wish I could come?"
"Must I say?" smiled Mrs. Dennison. "For shame, Harry! You might be on
your honeymoon."
He moved away, and flung himself into a chair.
"I don't think it's fair of Ruston," he broke out, "to run away and
leave it all to me."
"Why, you told him you could do it perfectly! I heard you say so."
"How could I say anything else, when--when----"
"And originally you were both to be away! After all, you're not stopping
because of Omofaga, but because Sir George has got the gout."
Harry Dennison, convicted of folly, had no answer, though he was hurt
that he should be convicted out of his wife's mouth. He shuffled his
feet about and began to whistle dolefully.
Mrs. Dennison looked at him with smothered impatience. Their little boy
behaved like that when he was in a naughty mood--when he wanted the
moon, or something of that kind, and thought mother and nurse cruel
because it didn't come. Mrs. Dennison forgot that mother and nurse were
fate to her little boy, or she might have sympathised with his naughty
moods a little better.
She rose now and walked slowly over to her husband. She had a hand on
his chair, and was about to speak, when he stopped his whistling and
jerked out abruptly,
"What did he mean about the kingdom?"
Mrs. Dennison's hand slid away and fell by her side. Harry caught her
look of cold anger. He leapt to his feet.
"Maggie, I'm a fool," he cried. "I don't know what's wrong with me. Sit
down here."
He made her sit, and half-crouched, half-knelt beside her.
"Maggie," he went on, "are you angry? Damn the joke! I don't want to
know. Are you sorry I'm not coming?"
"What a baby you are, Harry! Oh, yes, awfully sorry."
He knew so well what he wanted to say: he wanted to tell her that she
was everything to him, that to be out of her heart was death: that to
feel her slipping away was a torture: he wanted to woo and win her over
again--win her more truly than he had even in those triumphant days when
she gave herself to him. He wanted to show her that he understood
her--that he was not a fool--that he was man enough for her! Yes, that
she need not turn to Ruston or anybody else. Oh, yes, he could
understand her, really he could.
Not a word of it would come. He dared not begin: he feared that he would
look--that she would find him--more silly still, if he began to say that
sort of thing. She was smiling satirically now--indulgently but
satirically, and the emphasis of her purposely childish "awfully"
betrayed her estimation of his question. She did not understand the
mood. She was accustomed to his admiration--worship would hardly be too
strong a word. But the implied demand for a response to it seemed
strange to her. Her air bore in upon him the utter difference between
his thoughts of her and the way she thought about him. Always dimly
felt, it had never pressed on him like this before.
"Really, I'm very sorry, dear," she said, just a little more seriously.
"But it's only a fortnight. We're not separating for ever," and her
smile broke out again.
With a queer feeling of hopelessness, he rose to his feet. No, he
couldn't make her feel it. He had suffered in the same way over his
speeches; he couldn't make people feel them either. She didn't
understand. It was no use. He began to whistle again, staring out of the
open window.
"I shall go to bed, Harry. I'm tired. I've been seeing that the maid's
packed what I wanted, and it's harder work than packing oneself."
"Give me a kiss, Meg," he said, turning round.
She did not do that, but she accepted his kiss, and he, turning away
abruptly, shaped his lips to resume his tune. But now the tune wouldn't
come. His wife left him alone. The tune came when she was there. Now it
wouldn't. Ah, but the words would. He muttered them inaudibly to himself
as he stood looking out of the window. They sounded as though they must
touch any woman's heart. With an oath he threw himself on to the sofa,
trying now to banish the haunting words--the words that would not come
at his call, and came, in belated uselessness, to mock him now. He lay
still; and they ran through his head. At last they ceased; but, before
he could thank God for that, a strange sense of desolation came over
him. He looked round the empty, silent room, that seemed larger now than
in its busy daylight hours. The house was all still; there might have
been one lying dead in it. It might have been the house of a man who had
lost his wife.
CHAPTER XI.
AGAINST HIS COMING.
"The great Napoleon once observed----"
"Don't quote from 'Anecdotes, New and Old,'" interrupted Adela unkindly.
"That when his death was announced," pursued Lord Semingham, who thought
it good for Adela to take no notice of such interruptions, "everybody
would say _Ouf_. I say '_Ouf_' now," and he stretched his arms
luxuriously to their full length. "There's room here," he added,
explaining the gesture.
"Well, who's dead?" asked Adela, choosing to be exasperatingly literal.
"Nobody's dead; but a lot of people--and things--are a long way off."
"That's not so satisfactorily final," said Adela.
"No, but it serves for the time. Did you see me on my bicycle this
morning?"
"What, going round here?" and Adela waved her hand circularly, as though
embracing the broad path that runs round the grass by the sea at Dieppe.
"Yes--just behind a charming _Parisienne_ in a pair of--behind a
charming _Parisienne_ in an appropriate costume."
"Bessie must get one," said Adela.
"Good heavens!"
"I mean a bicycle."
"Oh, certainly, if she likes; but she'd as soon mount Salisbury Spire."
"How did you learn?"
"I really beg your pardon," said Semingham, "but the fact is--Ruston
taught me."
"Let's change the subject," said Adela, smiling.
"A charming child, this Marjory Valentine," observed Semingham. "She's
too good for young Evan. I'm very glad she wouldn't have him."
"I'm not."
"You're always sorry other girls don't marry. Heaven knows why."
"Well, I'm sorry she didn't take Evan."
"Why?"
"I can't tell you."
"Not--not the forbidden topic?"
"I half believe so."
"But she's here with Maggie Dennison."
"Well, everybody doesn't chatter as you do," said Adela incisively.
"I don't believe it. She----Hallo! here she is!"
Marjory Valentine came along, bending her slim figure a little, the
better to resist a fresh breeze that blew her skirts out behind her, and
threatened to carry off her broad-brimmed hat. She had been bathing; the
water was warm, and her cheeks glowed with a fine colour. As she came
up, both Adela and Lord Semingham put on their eyeglasses.
"An uncommon pretty girl," observed the latter.
"Isn't it glorious?" cried Marjory, yet several yards away. "Walter will
enjoy the bathing tremendously."
"When's he coming?"
"Saturday," answered Marjory. "Where is Lady Semingham?"
"Dressing," said Semingham solemnly. "Costume number one, off at 11.30.
Costume number two, on at 12. Costume number two, off at 3.30.
Costume----"
"After all, she's your wife," said Adela, in tones of grave reproach.
"But for that, I shouldn't have a word to say against it. Women are very
queer reasoners."
Marjory sat down next to Adela.
"Women do waste a lot of time on dress, don't they?" she asked, in a
meditative tone; "and a lot of thought, too!"
"Hallo!" exclaimed Lord Semingham.
"I mean, thought they might give to really important things. You can't
imagine George Eliot----"
"What about Queen Elizabeth?" interrupted Semingham.
"She was a horrible woman," said Adela.
"Phryne attached no importance to it," added Semingham.
"Oh, I forgot! Tell me about her," cried Marjory.
"A strong-minded woman, Miss Marjory."
"He's talking nonsense, Marjory."
"I supplied a historical instance in Miss Valentine's favour."
"I shall look her up," said Marjory, at which Lord Semingham smiled in
quiet amusement. He was a man who saw his joke a long way off, and could
wait patiently for it.
"Yes, do," he said, lighting a cigarette.
Adela had grown grave, and was watching the girl's face. It was a pretty
face, and not a silly one; and Marjory's blue eyes gazed out to sea, as
though she were looking at something a great way off. Adela, with a
frown of impatience, turned to her other neighbour. She would not be
troubled with aspirations there. In fact, she was still annoyed with her
young friend on Evan Haselden's account. But it was no use turning to
Lord Semingham. His eyes were more than half-closed, and he was beating
time gently to the Casino band, audible in the distance. Adela sighed.
At last Marjory broke the silence.
"When Mr. Ruston comes," she began, "I shall ask him whether----"
The sentence was not finished.
"When who comes?" cried Adela; and Semingham opened his eyes and stilled
his foot-pats.
"Mr. Ruston."
"Is he coming after all? I thought, now that Dennison----"
"Oh, yes--he's coming with Walter. Didn't you know?"
"Is he coming to-day?"
"I suppose so. Aren't you glad?"
"Of course," from Adela, and "Oh, uncommonly," from Lord Semingham,
seemed at first sight answers satisfactory enough; but Marjory's
inquiring gaze rested on their faces.
"Come for a stroll," said Adela abruptly, and passing her arm through
Marjory's, she made her rise. Semingham, having gasped out his
conventional reply, sat like a man of stone, but Adela, for all that it
was needless, whispered imperatively, "Stay where you are."
"Well, Marjory," she went on, as they began to walk, "I don't know that
I am glad after all."
"I believe you don't like him."
"I believe I don't," said Adela slowly. It was a point she had not yet
quite decided.
"I didn't use to."
"But you do now?"
"Yes."
Adela hated the pregnant brevity of this affirmative.
"Mamma doesn't," laughed Marjory. "She's so angry with him carrying off
Walter. As if it wasn't a grand thing for Walter! So she's quite turned
round about him."
"He's not staying in--with you, I suppose?"
"Oh, no. Though I don't see why he shouldn't. Conventions are so stupid,
aren't they? Mrs. Dennison's there," and Marjory looked up with an
appeal to calm reason as personified in Adela.
At another time, nineteen's view of twenty-nine--Marjory's conception of
Maggie Dennison as a sufficing chaperon--would have amused Adela. But
she was past amusement. Her patience snapped, as it were, in two. She
turned almost fiercely on her companion, forgetting all prudence in her
irritation.
"For heaven's sake, child, what do you mean? Do you think he's coming to
see you?"
Marjory drew her arm out from Adela's, and retreated a step from her.
"Adela! I never thought----" She did not end, conscious, perhaps, that
her flushed face gave her words the lie. Adela swept on.
"You! He's not coming to see you. I don't believe he's coming to see
anyone--no, not even Maggie--I mean no one, at all."
The girl's look marked the fatal slip.
"Oh!" she gasped, just audibly.
"I don't believe he cares _that_ for any of us--for anyone alive.
Marjory, I didn't mean what I said about Maggie, I didn't indeed. Don't
look like that. Oh, what a stupid girl you are!" and she ended with a
half-hysterical laugh.
For some moments they stood facing one another, saying nothing. The
meaning of Adela's words was sinking into Marjory's mind.
"Let's walk on. People will wonder," said she at last; and she enlaced
Adela's arm again. After another long pause, during which her face
expressed the turmoil of her thoughts, she whispered,
"Adela, is that why Mr. Loring went away?"
"I don't know why he went away."
"You think me a child, so you say you don't mean it now. You do mean it,
you know. You wouldn't say a thing like that for nothing. Tell me what
you do mean, Adela." It was almost an order. Adela suddenly realised
that she had struck down to a force and a character. "Tell me exactly
what you mean," insisted Marjory; "you ought to tell me, Adela."
Adela found herself obeying.
"I don't know about him; but I'm afraid of her," she stammered, as if
confessing a shameful deed of her own. A moment later she broke into
entreaty. "Go away, dear. Don't get mixed up in it. Don't have anything
to do with him."
"Do you go away when your friends are in trouble or in danger?"
Adela felt suddenly small--then wise--then small because her wisdom was
of a small kind. Yet she gave it utterance.
"But, Marjory, think of--think of yourself. If you----."
"I know what you're going to say. If I care for him? I don't. I hardly
know him. But, if I did, I might--I might be of some use. And are you
going to leave her all alone? I thought you were her friend. Are you
just going to look on? Though you think--what you think!"
Adela caught hold of the girl's hands. There was a choking in her
throat, and she could say nothing.
"But if he sees?" she murmured, when she found speech.
"He won't see. There's nothing to see. I shan't show it. Adela, I shall
stay. Why do you think what--what you think?"
People might wonder, if they would--perhaps they did--when Adela drew
Marjory towards her, and kissed her lips.
"I couldn't, my dear," she said, "but, if you can, for heaven's sake do.
I may be wrong, but--I'm uneasy."
Marjory's lips quivered, but she held her head proudly up; then she
sobbed a short quick-stifled sob, and then smiled.
"I daresay it's not a bit true," she said.
Adela pressed her hand again, saying,
"I'm an emotional old creature."
"Why did Mr. Loring go away?" demanded Marjory.
"I don't know. He thought it----"
"Best? Well, he was wrong."
Adela could not hear Tom attacked.
"Maggie turned him out," she said--which account of the matter was,
perhaps, just a little one-sided, though containing a part of the truth.
Marjory meditated on it for a moment, Adela still covertly looking at
her. The discovery was very strange. Half-an-hour ago she had smiled
because the girl hinted a longing after something beyond frocks, and had
laughed at her simple acceptance of Semingham's joke. Now she found
herself turning to her, looking to her for help in the trouble that had
puzzled her. In her admiration of the girl's courage, she forgot to
wonder at her intuition, her grasp of evil possibilities, the knowledge
of Maggie Dennison that her resolve implied. Adda watched her, as, their
farewell said, she walked, first quickly, then very slowly, towards the
villa which Mrs. Dennison had hired, on the cliff-side, near the old
Castle. Then, with a last sigh, she put up her parasol and sauntered
back to the Hôtel de Rome. Costume number two would be on by now, and
Bessie Semingham ready for luncheon.
Marjory, finally sunk into the slow gait that means either idleness or
deep thought, made her way up to the villa. With every step she drew
nearer, the burden she had taken up seemed heavier. It was not sorrow
for the dawning dream that the storm-cloud had eclipsed that she really
thought of. But the task loomed large in its true difficulty, as her
first enthusiasm spent itself. If Adela were right, what could she do?
If Adela were wrong, what unpardonable offence she might give. Ah, was
Adela right? Strange and new as the idea was, there was an unquestioning
conviction in her manner that Marjory could hardly resist. Save under
the stress of a conviction, speech on such a matter would have been an
impossible crime. And Marjory remembered, with a sinking heart, Maggie
Dennison's smile of happy triumph when she read out the lines in which
Ruston told of his coming. Yes, it was, or it might be, true. But where
lay her power to help?
Coming round the elbow of the rising path, she caught sight of Maggie
Dennison sitting in the garden. Mrs. Dennison wore white; her pale,
clear-cut profile was towards Marjory; she rested her chin on her hand,
and her elbow on her knee, and she was looking on the ground. Softly
Marjory drew near. An unopened letter from Harry lay on a little table;
the children had begun their mid-day meal in the room, whose open window
was but a few feet behind; Mrs. Dennison's thoughts were far away.
Marjory stopped short. A stronger buffet of fear, a more overwhelming
sense of helplessness, smote her. She understood better why Adela had
been driven to do nothing--to look on. She smiled for an instant; the
idea put itself so whimsically; but she thought that, had Mrs. Dennison
been walking over a precipice, it would need all one's courage to
interfere with her. She would think it such an impertinence. And Ruston?
Marjory saw, all in a minute, his cheerful scorn, his unshaken
determination, his rapid dismissal of one more obstacle. She drew in her
breath in a long inspiration, and Mrs. Dennison raised her eyes and
smiled.
"I believe I felt you there," she said, smiling. "At least, I began to
think of you."
Marjory sat near her hostess.
"Did you meet anyone?" asked Mrs. Dennison.
"Adela Ferrars and Lord Semingham."
"Well, had they anything to say?"
"No--I don't think so," she answered slowly.
"What should they have to say in this place? The children have begun.
Aren't you hungry?"
"Not very."
"Well, I am," and Mrs. Dennison arose. "I forgot it, but I am."
"They didn't know Mr. Ruston was coming."
"Didn't they?" smiled Mrs. Dennison. "And has Adela forgiven you? Oh,
you know, the poor boy is a friend of hers, as he is of mine."
"We didn't talk about it."
"And you don't want to? Very well, we won't. See, here's a long
letter--it's very heavy, at least--from Harry. I must read it
afterwards."
"Perhaps it's to say he can come sooner."
"I expect not," said Mrs. Dennison, and she opened the letter. "No; a
fortnight hence at the soonest," she announced, after reading a few
lines.
Marjory was both looking and listening closely, but she detected neither
disappointment nor relief.
"He's seen Tom Loring! Oh, and Tom sends me his best remembrances. Poor
Tom! Marjory, does Adela talk about Mr. Loring?"
"She mentioned him once."
"She thinks it was all my fault," laughed Mrs. Dennison. "A woman always
thinks it's a woman's fault; at least, that's our natural tendency,
though we're being taught to overcome it. Marjory, you look dull! It
will be livelier for you when your brother and Mr. Ruston come."
The hardest thing about great resolves and lofty moods is their
intermixture with everyday life. The intervals, the "waits," the mass of
irrelevant trivialities that life inartistically mingles with its drama,
flinging down pell-mell a heap of great and small--these cool courage
and make discernment distrust itself. Mrs. Dennison seemed so quiet, so
placid, so completely the affectionate but not anxious wife, the kind
hostess, and even the human gossip, that Marjory wanted to rub her eyes,
wondering if all her heroics were nonsense--a girl's romance gone wrong.
There was nothing to be done but eat and drink, and talk and lounge in
the sun--there was no hint of a drama, no call for a rescue, no place
for a sacrifice. And Marjory had been all aglow to begin. Her face grew
dull and her eyelids half-dropped as she leant her head on the back of
her chair.
"_Déjeuner!_" cried Mrs. Dennison merrily. "And this afternoon we're all
going to gamble at _petits chevaux_, and if we win we're going to buy
more Omofagas. There's a picture of a speculator's family!"
"Mr. Dennison's not a speculator, is he?"
"Oh, it depends on what you mean. Anyhow, I am;" and Mrs. Dennison,
waving her letter in the air and singing softly, almost danced in her
merry walk to the house. Then, crying her last words, "Be quick!" from
the door, she disappeared.
A moment later she was laughing and chattering to her children. Marjory
heard her burlesque complaints over the utter disappearance of an
omelette she had set her heart upon.
That afternoon they all played at _petits chevaux_, and the only one to
win was Madge. But Madge utterly refused to invest her gains in
Omofagas. She assigned no reasons, slating that her mother did not like
her to declare the feeling which influenced her, and Mrs. Dennison
laughed again. But Adela Ferrars would not look towards Marjory, but
kept her eyes on an old gentleman who had been playing also, and playing
with good fortune. He had looked round curiously when, in the course of
the chaff, they had mentioned Omofaga, and Adela detected in him the
wish to look again. She wondered who he was, scrutinising his faded blue
eyes and the wrinkles of weariness on his brow. Willie Ruston could have
told her. It was Baron von Geltschmidt of Frankfort.
CHAPTER XII.
IT CAN WAIT.
In all things evil and good, to the world, and--a thing quite rare--to
himself, Willie Ruston was an unaffected man. Success, the evidence of
power and the earnest of more power, gave him his greatest pleasure, and
he received it with his greatest and most open satisfaction. It did not
surprise him, but it elated him, and his habit was to conceal neither
the presence of elation nor the absence of surprise. That irony in the
old sense, which means the well-bred though hardly sincere depreciation
of a man's own qualities and achievements, was not his. When he had done
anything, he liked to dine with his friends and talk it over. He had
been sharing the Carlins' unfashionable six o'clock meal at Hampstead
this evening, and had taken the train to Baker Street, and was now
sauntering home with a cigar. He had talked the whole thing over with
them. Carlin had said that no one could have managed the affair so well
as he had, and Mrs. Carlin had not once referred to that lost _tabula in
naufragio_, the coal business. Yes, his attack on London had been a
success. He had known nothing of London, save that its denizens were
human beings, and that knowledge, whether in business or society, had
been enough. His great scheme was floated; a few months more would see
him in Omofaga; there was money to last for a long time to come; and he
had been cordially received and even made a lion of in the
drawing-rooms. They would look for his name in the papers ("and find it,
by Jove," he interpolated). Men in high places would think of him when
there was a job to be "put through;" and women, famous in regions
inaccessible to the vulgar, would recollect their talks with Mr. Ruston.
Decidedly they were human beings, and therefore, raw as he was (he just
knew that he had come to them a little raw), he had succeeded.
Yet they were, some of them, strange folk. There were complications in
them which he found it necessary to reconnoitre. They said a great many
things which they did not think, and, _en revanche_, would often only
hint what they did. And----But here he yawned, and, finding his cigar
out, relit it. He was not in the mood for analysing his acquaintance. He
let his fancy play more lightly. It was evening, and work was done. He
liked London evenings. He had liked bandying repartees with Adela
Ferrars (though she had been too much for him if she could have kept her
temper); he liked talking to Marjory Valentine and seeing her occupied
with his ideas. Most of all, he liked trying to catch Maggie Dennison's
thought as it flashed out for a moment, and fled to shelter again. He
had laughed again and again over the talk that Tom Loring had
interrupted--and not less because of the interruption. There was little
malice in him, and he bore no grudge against Tom. Even his anger at the
Omofaga articles had been chiefly for public purposes and public
consumption. It was always somebody's "game" to spoil his game, and one
must not quarrel with men for playing their own hands. Tom amused him,
and had amused him, especially by his behaviour over that talk. No doubt
the position had looked a strange one. Tom had been so shocked. Poor
Tom, it must be very serious to be so easily shocked. Mr. Ruston was not
easily shocked.
Unaffected, free from self-consciousness, undividedly bent on his
schemes, unheeding of everything but their accomplishment, he had spent
little time in considering the considerable stir which he had, in fact,
created in the circle of his more intimate associates. They had proved
pliable and pleasant, and these were the qualities he liked in his
neighbours. They said agreeable things to him, and they did what he
wanted. He had stayed not (save once, and half in jest, with Maggie
Dennison) to inquire why, and the quasi-real, quasi-burlesque
apprehension of him--burlesqued perhaps lest it should seem too
real--which had grown up among such close observers as Adela Ferrars and
Semingham, would have struck him as absurd, the outcome of that idle
business of brain which weaves webs of fine fancies round the obvious,
and loses the power of action in the fascination of self-created
puzzles. The _nuances_ of a woman's attraction towards a man, whether it
be admiration, or interest, or pass beyond--whether it be liking and
just not love--or interest running into love--or love masquerading as
interest, or what-not, Willie Ruston recked little of. He was a man, and
a young man. He liked women and clever women--yes, and handsome women.
But to spend your time thinking of or about women, or, worse still, of
or about what women thought of you, seemed poor economy of precious
days--amusing to do, maybe, in spare hours, inevitable now and
again--but to be driven or laughed away when there was work to be done.
Such was the colour of his floating thoughts, and the loose-hung
meditation brought him to his own dwelling, in a great building which
overlooked Hyde Park. He lived high up in a small, irregular,
many-cornered room, sparely-furnished, dull and pictureless. The only
thing hanging on the walls was a large scale map of Omofaga and the
neighbouring territories; in lieu of nicnacks there stood on the
mantlepiece lumps of ore, specimens from the mines of Omofaga (would not
these convince the most obstinate unbeliever?), and half-smothered by
ill-dusted papers, a small photograph of Ruston and a potent Omofagan
chief seated on the ground with a large piece of paper before them--a
treaty no doubt. A well-worn sofa, second-hand and soft, and a deep
arm-chair redeemed the place from utter comfortlessness, but it was
plain that beauty in his daily surroundings was not essential to Willie
Ruston. He did not notice furniture.
He walked in briskly, but stopped short with his hand still on the knob
of the door. Harry Dennison lay on the sofa, with his arm flung across
his face. He sprang up on Ruston's entrance.
"Hullo! Been here long? I've been dining with Carlin," said Ruston, and,
going to a cupboard, he brought out whisky and soda water.
Harry Dennison began to explain his presence. In the first place he had
nothing to do; in the second he wanted someone to talk to; in the
third--at last he blurted it out--the first, second, third and only
reason for his presence.
"I don't believe I can manage alone in town," he said.
"Not manage? There's nothing to do. And Carlin's here."
"You see I've got other work besides Omofaga," pleaded Harry.
"Oh, I know Dennisons have lots of irons in the fire. But Omofaga won't
trouble you. I've told Carlin to wire me if any news comes, and I can be
back in a few hours."
Harry had come to suggest that the expedition to Dieppe should be
abandoned for a week or two. He got no chance and sat silent.
"It's all done," continued Ruston. "The stores are all on their way.
Jackson is waiting for them on the coast. Why, the train will start
inland in a couple of months from now. They'll go very slow though. I
shall catch them up all right."
Harry brightened a little.
"Belford said it was uncertain when you would start," he said.
"It may be uncertain to Belford, it's not to me," observed Mr. Ruston,
lighting his pipe.
The speech sounded unkind; but Mr. Belford's mind dwelt in uncertainty
contentedly.
"Then you think of----?"
"My dear Dennison, I don't 'think' at all. To-day's the 12th of August.
Happen what may, I sail on the 10th of November. Nothing will keep me
after that--nothing."
"Belford started for the Engadine to-day."
"Well, he won't worry you then. Let it alone, my dear fellow. It's all
right."
Clearly Mr. Ruston meant to go to Dieppe. That was now to Harry Dennison
bad news; but he meant to go to Omofaga also, and to go soon; that was
good. Harry, however, had still something that he wished to convey--a
bit of diplomacy to carry out.
"I hope you'll find Maggie better," he began. "She was rather knocked up
when she went."
"A few days will have put her all right," responded Ruston cheerfully.
He was never ill and treated fatigue with a cheery incredulousness. But,
at least, he spoke with an utter absence of undue anxiety on the score
of another man's wife.
Harry Dennison, primed by Mrs. Cormack's suggestions, went on,
"I wish you'd talk to her as little as you can about Omofaga. She's very
interested in it, you know, and--and very excitable--and all that. We
want her mind to get a complete rest."
"Hum. I expect, then, I mustn't talk to her at all."
The manifest impossibility of making such a request did not prevent
Harry yearning after it.
"I don't ask that," he said, smiling weakly.
"It won't hurt her," said Willie Ruston. "And she likes it."
She liked it beyond question.
"It tires her," Harry persisted. "It--it gets on her nerves. It absorbs
her too much."
His face was turned up to Ruston. As he spoke the last words, Ruston
directed his eyes, suddenly and rapidly, upon him. Harry could not
escape the encounter of eyes; hastily he averted his head, and his face
flushed. Ruston continued to look at him, a slight smile on his lips.
"Absorbs her?" he repeated slowly, fingering his beard.
"Well, you know what I mean."
Another long stare showed Ruston's meditative preoccupation. Harry sat
uncomfortable under it, wishing he had not let fall the word.
"Well, I'll be careful," said Ruston at last. "Anything else?"
Harry rose. Ruston carried an atmosphere of business about with him, and
the visit seemed naturally to end with the business of it. Taking his
hat, Harry moved towards the door. Then, pausing, he smiled in an
embarrassed way, and remarked,
"You can talk to Marjory Valentine, you know."
"So I can. She's a nice girl."
Harry twirled his hat in his fingers. His brain had conceived more
diplomacy.
"It'll be a fine chance for you to win her heart," he suggested with a
tentative laugh.
"I might do worse," said Willie Ruston.
"You might--much worse," said Harry eagerly.
"Aren't you rather giving away your friend young Haselden?"
"Who told you, Ruston?"
"Lady Val. Who told you?"
"Semingham."
"Ah! Well, what would Haselden say to your idea?"
"Well, she won't have him--he's got no chance anyhow."
"All right. I'll think about it. Good-night."
He watched his guest depart, but did not accompany him on his way, and,
left alone, sat down in the deep arm-chair. His smile was still on his
lips. Poor Harry Dennison was a transparent schemer--one of those whose
clumsy efforts to avert what they fear effects naught save to suggest
the doing of it. Yet Willie Ruston's smile had more pity than scorn in
it. True, it had more of amusement than of either. He could have taken a
slate and written down all Harry's thoughts during the interview. But
whence had come the change? Why had Dennison himself bidden him to
Dieppe, to come now, a fortnight later, and beg him not to go? Why did
he now desire his wife to hear no more of Omofaga, whose chief delight
in it had been that it caught her fancy and imparted to him some of the
interest she found in it? Ruston saw in the transformation the working
of another mind.
"Somebody's been putting it into his head," he muttered, still
half-amused, but now half-angry also.
And, with his usual rapidity of judgment, he darted unhesitatingly to a
conclusion. He identified the hand in the business; he recognised whose
more subtle thoughts Harry Dennison had stumbled over and mauled in his
painful devices. But to none is it given to be infallible, and want of
doubt does not always mean absence of error. Forgetting this commonplace
truth, Willie Ruston slapped his thigh, leapt up from his chair and,
standing on the rug, exclaimed,
"Loring--by Jove!"
It was clear to him. Loring was his enemy; he had displaced Loring.
Loring hated him and Omofaga. Loring had stirred a husband's jealousy to
further his own grudge. The same temper of mind that made his anger fade
away when he had arrived at this certainty, prevented any surprise at
the discovery. It was natural in man to seek revenge, to use the nearest
weapon, to counter stroke with stroke, not to throw away any advantages
for the sake of foibles of generosity. So, then, it was Loring who bade
him not go to Dieppe, who prayed him to not to "absorb" Mrs. Dennison in
Omofaga, who was ready, notwithstanding his hatred and distrust, to see
him the lover of Marjory Valentine sooner than the too engrossing friend
of Mrs. Dennison! What a fool they must think him!--and, with this
reflection, he put the whole matter out of his head. It could wait till
he was at Dieppe, and, taking hold of the great map by the roller at the
bottom, he drew it to him. Then he reached and lifted the lamp from the
table, and set it high on the mantlepiece. Its light shone now on his
path, and with his finger he traced the red line that ran, curving and
winding, inwards from the coast, till it touched the blue letters of the
"Omofaga" that sprawled across the map. The line ended in a cross of red
paint. The cross was Fort Imperial--was to be Fort Imperial, at least;
but Willie Ruston's mind overleapt all difference of tenses. He stood
and looked, pulling hard and fast at his pipe. He was there--there in
Fort Imperial already--far away from London and London folk--from weak
husbands and their causes of anxiety--from the pleasing recreations of
fascinating society, from the covert attacks of men whose noses he had
put out of joint. He forgot them all; their feelings became naught to
him. What mattered their graces, their assaults, their weal or woe? He
was in Omofaga, carving out of its rock a stable seat, carving on the
rock face, above the seat, a name that should live.
At last he turned away, flinging his empty pipe on the table and
dropping the map from his hand.
"I shall go to bed," he said. "Three months more of it!"
And to bed he went, never having thought once during the whole evening
of a French lady, who liked to get amusement out of her neighbours, and
had stayed in town on purpose to have some more talks with Harry
Dennison. Had Willie Ruston not been quite so sure that he read Tom
Loring's character aright, he might have spared a thought for Mrs.
Cormack.
CHAPTER XIII.
A SPASM OF PENITENCE.
Tom Loring had arranged to spend the whole of the autumn in London. His
Omofaga articles had gained such favourable notice that his editor had
engaged him to contribute a series dealing with African questions and
African companies (and the latter are in the habit of producing the
former), while he was occupied, on his own account, at the British
Museum, in making way with a treatise of a politico-philosophical
description, which had been in his head for several years. He hailed
with pleasure the prospect of getting on with it; the leisure afforded
him by his departure from the Dennisons was, in its way, a consolation
for the wrench involved in the parting. Could he have felt more at ease
about the course of events in his absence, he would have endured his
sojourn in town with equanimity.
Of course, the place was fast becoming a desert, but, at this moment,
chance, which always objects to our taking things for granted, brought a
carriage exactly opposite the bench on which Tom was seated, and he
heard his name called in a high-pitched voice that he recognised.
Looking up, he saw Mrs. Cormack leaning over the side of her victoria,
smiling effusively and beckoning to him. That everyone should go save
Mrs. Cormack seemed to Tom the irony of circumstance. With a mutter to
himself, he rose and walked up to the carriage. He then perceived, to
his surprise, that it contained, hidden behind Mrs. Cormack's
sleeves--sleeves were large that year--another inmate. It was Evan
Haselden, and he greeted Tom with an off-hand nod.
"The good God," cried Mrs. Cormack, "evidently kept me here to console
young men! Are you left desolate like Mr. Haselden here?"
"Well, it's not very lively," responded Tom, as amiably as he could.
"No, it isn't," she agreed, with the slightest, quickest glance at Evan,
who was staring moodily at the tops of the trees.
Tom laughed. The woman amused him in spite of himself. And her failures
to extract entertainment from poor heart-broken Evan struck him as
humorous.
"But I'm at work," he went on, "so I don't mind."
"Ah! Are you still crushing----?"
"No," interrupted Tom quickly. "That's done."
"I should not have guessed it," said Mrs. Cormack, opening her eyes.
"I mean, I've finished the articles on that point."
"That is rather a different thing," laughed she.
"I'm afraid so," said Tom.
"I wish to heaven it wasn't!" ejaculated Evan suddenly, without shifting
his gaze from the treetops.
"Oh, he is very very bad," whispered Mrs. Cormack. "Poor young man! Are
you bad too?"
"Eh?"
"Oh, but I know."
"Oh, no, you don't," said Tom.
Suddenly Evan rose, opened the carriage door, got out, shut it, and
lifted his hat.
"Good-bye," said Mrs. Cormack, smiling merrily.
"Good-bye. Thanks," said Evan, with unchanged melancholy, and, with
another nod to Tom, he walked round to the path and strode quickly away.
"How absurd!" said she.
"Not at all. I like to see him honest about it. He's hard hit--and he's
not ashamed of it."
"Oh, well," said Mrs. Cormack, shrugging the subject away in weariness
of it. "And how do you stand banishment? Will you get in?"
"Yes, if you won't assume----"
"Too great familiarity, Mr. Loring?"
"Oh, I was only going to say--with my affairs. With me--I should be
charmed," and Tom settled himself in the victoria.
He had, now he came to think of it, been really very much bored; and the
little woman was quite a resource.
She rewarded his ironical gallantry with a look that told him she took
it for what it was worth, but liked it all the same; and, after a pause,
asked,
"And you see Mr. Dennison often?"
"Very seldom, on the contrary. I don't know what he does with himself."
"The poor man! He walks up and down. I hear him walking up and down."
"What does he do that for?"
"Ah! what? Well, he cannot be happy, can he?"
"Can't he?" said Tom, determined to understand nothing.
"You are very discreet," she said, with a malicious smile.
"I'm obliged to be. Somebody must be."
"Mr. Loring," she said abruptly, "you don't like me, neither you nor
Miss Ferrars."
"I never answer for others. For myself----"
"Oh, I know. What does it matter? Well, anyhow, I'm sorry for that poor
man."
"Your sympathy is very ready, Mrs. Cormack."
"You mean it is too soon--premature?"
"I mean it's altogether unnecessary, to my humble thinking."
"But I'm not a fool," she protested.
Tom could not help laughing. The laugh, however, rather spoilt his
argument.
"Have it your own way," he conceded, conscious of his error, and trying
to cover it by a burlesque surrender. "He's miserable."
"Well, he is."
There was a placid certainty about her that disturbed Tom's attitude of
incredulity.
"Why is he?" he asked curiously.
"I have talked to him. I know," she answered, with a nod full of
meaning.
"Oh, have you?"
"Yes, and he--well, do you want to hear, or will you be angry and
despise me as you used?"
"I want to hear."
"What did I use to say? That the man would come? Well, he has come.
_Voilà tout!_"
"Oh, so you say. But Harry doesn't think such--I beg pardon, I was about
to say, nonsense."
"Yes, he does. At least, he is afraid of it."
"How do you know?"
"I tell you, we have talked. And I saw. He almost cried that he couldn't
go to Dieppe, and that somebody else----"
Tom suddenly turned upon her.
"Who began the talk?" he demanded.
"What do you say?"
"Who began?"
"Oh, what nonsense! Who does begin to talk? How do I know? It came, Mr.
Loring."
Tom said nothing.
"You look as if you didn't believe me," she remarked, pouting.
"I don't. He's the most unsuspicious fellow alive."
"Well, if you like, I began. I'm not ashamed. But I said very little.
When he asked me if I thought it good that she and--the other--should be
together out there and he here--well, was I to say yes?"
"I think," observed Tom, in quiet and deliberate tones, "that it's a
great pity that some women can't be gagged."
"They can, but only with kisses," said Mrs. Cormack, not at all
offended. "Oh, don't be frightened. I do not wish to be gagged at all.
If I did--there is more than one man in the world."
Tom despised and half-hated her; but he liked her good-nature, and, in
his heart, admired her for not flinching. Her shamelessness was crossed
with courage.
"So you've made him miserable?"
"Well, I might say, I, a wicked Frenchwoman, that it is better to be
deceived than to be wretched. But you, an Englishman----! Oh, never, Mr.
Loring!"
Tom sat silent a little while.
"I don't know what to do," he said, half in reverie.
"Who thought you would?" asked Mrs. Cormack, unkindly.
"I believe it's all a mare's nest."
"That means a mistake, a delusion?"
"It does."
"Then I don't think you do believe it. And, if you do, you are wrong. It
is not all a--a mare's nest."
She pronounced the word with unfamiliar delicateness.
Tom knew that he did not believe that it was all a mare's nest. He would
have given everything in the world--save one thing--and that, he
thought, he had not got--to believe it.
"Then, if you believed it, why didn't you do something?" he asked rather
fiercely.
"What have you all done? I, at least, warned him. Yes, since you insist,
I hinted it. But you--you ran away; and your Adela Ferrars, she looks
prim and pained, oh! and shocked, and doesn't come so much."
It was a queer source to learn lessons from, and Tom was no less
surprised than Adela had been a day or two before at Dieppe.
"What should you do?" he asked, in new-born humility.
"I? Nothing. What is it to me?"
"What should you do, if you were me?"
"Make love to her myself," smiled Mrs. Cormack. She was having her
revenge on Tom for many a scornful speech.
"If you'd held your tongue, it would all have blown over!" he exclaimed
in exasperation.
"It will blow over still; but it will blow first," she said. "If that
contents you, hold your tongue."
Then she turned to Tom, and laid a small fore-finger on his arm.
"Mark this," said she, "he does not care for her. He cares for himself;
she is--what would you say? an incident--an accident--I do not know how
to say it--to him."
"Well, if you're right there----" began Tom in some relief.
"If I'm right there, it will make no difference--at first. But, as you
say, it will blow over--and sooner."
Tom looked at her, and thought, and looked again.
"By Jove, you're not a fool, Mrs. Cormack," said he, almost under his
breath.
Then he added, louder,
"It's the wisdom of the devil."
"Oh, you surpass yourself," she smiled. "Your compliments are
magnificent."
"You must have learnt it from him."
"Oh, no. From my husband," said Mrs. Cormack.
The carriage, which during their talk had moved slowly round the circle,
stopped again.
Mrs. Cormack turned to Tom. He was already looking at her.
"I don't understand you," said he.
"No? Well, you'll hardly believe it, but that does not surprise me."
"I'm not sure you don't mean well, if you weren't ashamed to confess
it," said Tom.
For the first time since he had known her, she blushed and looked
embarrassed. Then she began, in a quick tone,
"Well, I talked. I wanted to see how he took it; and it amused me.
And--well, our dear Maggie--she is so very magnificent at times. She
looks down so calmly--oh! from such a height--on one. She had told me
that day--well, never mind that; it was true, I daresay. I don't love
truth. I don't see what right people have to say things to me, just
because one may know they are true."
"So you made a little mischief?"
"Well, I hear that poor man walking up and down. I want to comfort him.
I asked him to come in, and he refused. Then I offered to go in--he was
very frightened. Oh, _mon Dieu_!" and she laughed almost hysterically.
This very indirect confession proved in the end to be all that Mrs.
Cormack's penitence could drive her to, and Tom left her, feeling a
little softened towards her, but hardly better equipped for action.
What, indeed, could be done? Tom's sense of futility expressed itself in
a long letter to Adela Ferrars. As he had no suggestions for present
action, he took refuge in future promises.
"It will be very awkward for me to come, but if, as time goes on, you
think I should be any good, I will come."
And Adela, when she read it, was tempted to send for him on the spot; he
would have been of no use, but he would have comforted her. But then his
presence would unquestionably exasperate Maggie Dennison. Adela decided
to wait.
Now, by the time Tom Loring's letter reached Dieppe, young Sir Walter
and Willie Ruston were on the boat, and they arrived hard on its heels.
They took up their abode at a hotel a few doors from where the
Seminghams were staying, and Walter at once went round to pay his
respects.
Ruston stayed in to write letters. So he said; but when he was alone he
stood smoking at the window and looking at the people down below.
Presently, to his surprise, he saw the same old gentleman whom Adela had
noticed in the Casino.
"The Baron, by Jove!" he exclaimed. "Now, what brings him here?"
The Baron was sauntering slowly by, wrapped in a cloak, and leaning
heavily on a malacca cane. In a moment Willie Ruston was down the stairs
and after him.
Hearing his name cried, the Baron stopped and turned round.
"What chance brings you here?" asked Willie, holding out his hand.
"Oh, hardly chance," said the Baron. "I always go to some seaside place,
and I thought I might meet friends here," and he smiled significantly.
"Yes," said Ruston, after a pause; "I believe I did mention it in
Threadneedle Street. I went in there the other day."
By the general term Threadneedle Street he meant to indicate the offices
of the Baron's London correspondents, which were situate there.
"They keep you informed, it seems?"
"I live by being kept informed," said the Baron.
Ruston was walking by him, accommodating his pace to the old man's
feeble walk.
"You mean you came to see me?" he asked.
"Well, if you'll forgive the liberty--in part."
"And why did you want me?"
"Oh, I've not lost all interest in Omofaga."
"No, you haven't," said Ruston. "On the contrary, you've been increasing
your interest."
The Baron stopped and looked at him.
"Oh, you know that?"
"Certainly."
The Baron laughed.
"Then you can tell me whether I shall lose my money," he said.
"Do you ever lose your money, Baron?"
"But am I to hear about Omofaga?" asked the Baron, countering question
by question.
"As much as you like," answered Ruston, with the indifference of perfect
candour.
"Ah, by the way, I have heard about it already. Who are the ladies here
who talk about it?"
Willie Ruston gave a careful catalogue of all the persons in Dieppe who
were interested in the Omofaga Company. The Baron identified the
Seminghams and Adela. Then he observed,
"And the other lady is Mrs. Dennison, is she?"
"She is. I'm going to her house to-morrow. Shall I take you?"
"I should be charmed."
"Very well. To-morrow afternoon."
"And you'll dine with me to-night?"
Ruston was about to refuse; but the Baron added, half seriously,
"I've come a long way to see you."
"All right, I'll come," he said. Then he paused a moment, and looked at
the Baron curiously. "And perhaps you'll tell me then," he added.
"Why I've come?"
"Yes; and why you've been buying. You were bought out. What do you want
to come in again for?"
"I'll tell you all that now," said the Baron. "I've come because I
thought I should
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/40583