The Arbiter: A Novel

by Lady Florence Eveleen Eleanore Olliffe Bell

  CHAPTER XI

  The Miss Pateleys, sisters of Robert Pateley, lived together. The deathof their parents, as we have said, had taken place when their brotherwas already launched on his successful career as a journalist. They hadat first gone on living in the little country town in which their fatherhad been a solicitor. It had not occurred to them to do anything else.They were surrounded there by people who knew them, who considered them,towards whom their social position needed no explaining and by whom itwas taken for granted. When they went shopping, the tradespeople wouldreply in a friendly way, "Yes, Miss Pateley,--No, Miss Jane. This is thestocking you generally prefer"; or, "These were the pens you had lasttime," with an intimate understanding of the needs of their customers,forming a most pleasing contrast to the detached attitude of the staffof big shops. The sisters had a very small income between them, eked outby skilful management, and also, it must be said, by constant help fromtheir brother, who represented to them the moving principle of theuniverse embodied in a visible form. He it was who knew things thefemale mind cannot grasp, how to read the gas meter, what to do when thecistern was blocked, or when the landlord said it was not his businessto mend the roof. These things which appeared so preoccupying to Annaand Jane seemed to sit very lightly on their brother Robert, and whenthey saw him shoulder each detail and deal with it with instant andconsummate ease they admired him as much as they did when they saw himcarrying upstairs his own big portmanteau which the united femalestrength of the house was powerless to deal with. After a time Robert,devoted brother though he was, found that it complicated existence tohave to settle these matters by correspondence, still more to havesuddenly to take a journey of several hours from London in order to dealwith them on the spot. He proposed to his sisters that they should comeand live in London. With many misgivings, and yet not without somesecret excitement, they assented, and for a few months before our storybegins they had been established in the same house as their brother, onthe floor above the lodgings he inhabited in Vernon Street, Bloomsbury.Vernon Street, Bloomsbury, was perhaps a fortunate place for them tobegin their London life in, if London life, except as a geographicalterm, it can be called, for two poor little ladies living moreabsolutely outside what is commonly described by that name it would behard to find. Indeed, if it had not been for the courage andadventurous spirit of Jane, the younger of the two, their hearts mightwell have failed them during those first months in which the autumn daysshortened over the district of Bloomsbury. Since they knew no one, theyhad nobody to visit, and nobody came to see them. They were still not alittle bewildered by London. There were, it was true, a great manysights of an inanimate kind; but how to get at them? They did notconsider themselves justified in taking cabs, and omnibuses were atfirst, to two people who had lived all their lives in a tramless town, adisconcerting and complicated means of locomotion. However, as the timewent on they shook down, they found their little niche in existence;they made acquaintance with the clergyman's wife and some of thedistrict visitors, and when the first summer of their London life cameround, the summer following Rachel's marriage, everything seemed to themmore possible. London was bright, sunshiny, and welcoming, instead ofbeing austere and repellent. Pateley had succeeded in obtaining a key ofthe square close to which they lived, and they sat there and revelled inthe summer weather. The mere fact of having him so near them, of knowingthat at any moment in the day he might come in with the loud voice andheartiness of manner which always cheered and uplifted them, albeit someof his acquaintances ventured to find it too audible, gave them a freshsense of being in touch with all the great things happening in theworld. Then came a moment in which, indeed, the larger issues of lifeseemed to present themselves to be dealt with. Pateley, under whoseauspices the _Arbiter_ had prospered exceedingly, and who had aninterest in it from the point of view of a commercial enterprise as wellas of a political organ, found himself one day the possessor of a largersum of ready money than he had expected. He made up his mind that someof it should be given to his sisters, and that the rest should jointheir own savings invested in the "Equator," which seemed to presentevery prospect of succeeding when once the moment should come to workit. Pateley was altogether in a high state of jubilation in those days.The Cape to Cairo railway was actually on the verge of being completed.In a week more the gigantic scheme would be an accomplished fact. Theexcitement in London respecting it was immense. A small piece of Germanterritory still remained to be crossed, but if no unforeseen incidentarose to jeopardise the situation at the last moment all would yet bewell. The rejoicings of Englishmen commonly take a sturdy and obviousform, and two days after the great junction was expected to take place,the _Arbiter_ was to give a dinner at the Colossus Hotel in the Strandto the representatives of the Cape to Cairo Railway in London, afterwhich the Hotel would be illuminated on all sides, and fireworks overthe river were to proclaim to the whole town that Africa had beenspanned. Pateley was to take the chair at the dinner. He had some sharesin the railway himself, although the rush upon it had been too greatfor him to secure any large amount of them. He had golden hopes,however, in the future of the "Equator," when once the railway was atits doors. Anderson had gone back again to Africa, this time with aneager staff of companions, and was only waiting for his time to come.

  "Now then," Pateley said jovially, one evening, as he went into thelodgings in Vernon Street and found his sisters sitting over theirsomewhat inadequate evening meal, "Times are looking up, I must tellyou. I shouldn't wonder if you were better off before long. When therailway's finished, and if the "Equator" mine is all we believe it tobe, you ought to get something handsome out of it--and I have gotsomething for you to go on with which will keep you going in themeantime. So now I hope you will think yourselves justified in sittingdown to a decent dinner every evening, instead of that kind of thing,"and he pointed, with his loud, jovial laugh, to the cocoa and eggs onthe rather dingily appointed table.

  Jane's eyes sparkled and her cheeks flushed with an incredulous joy.Anna's breath came quickly. What a fairy prince of a brother this was!

  "But, Robert, we had better not make much difference in our way ofliving at first, had we?" Anna said, timidly, calling to mind theinstances in fiction of imprudent persons who had launched out wildly onan accession of fortune and then been overtaken by ruin.

  "Well, I don't suppose you are either of you likely to want to cut a bigdash," he said with another loud laugh. "At least, I don't see you doingit."

  "It is a great responsibility," Anna said timidly. "I hope we shall useit the right way."

  "Right way!" said Pateley. "Of course you will. Go to the play with it,get yourself a fur cloak, have a fire in your bedroom----"

  "Oh!" said Jane.

  "But, Robert," Anna said, "I don't feel it is sent to us for that."

  "Sent!" said Pateley. "Well, that is one way of putting it."

  But he did not enlarge upon the point. He accepted his sisters just asthey were, with their limitations, their principles, and everything. Hewas not particularly susceptible to beauty and distinction, in the senseof these qualities being necessary to his belongings, and perhaps it wasas well. Anna and Jane, though they looked undeniably like gentlewomen,had nothing else about them that was particularly agreeable to lookupon. Nor were they either of them very strikingly ugly, or, indeed,strikingly anything. Jane was the better looking of the two. It was,perhaps, a rather heartless freak of destiny that life should haveordained her to live with somebody who was like a parody of herself,older, rounder, thicker, plainer. Living apart they might each havepassed muster; living together they somehow made their ugliness, liketheir income, go further. But in the composite photograph it was Annawho predominated. It was a pity, for she was the stumpier of the two.

  Long and earnest were the discussions the little sisters had that nightafter their splendid brother had departed, until by the time they wentto bed they were prepared, or so it seemed to them, to launch theirexistence on a dizzy career of extravagance. They were go
ing, as theyexpressed it, to put their establishment on another footing, which meantthat instead of being attended by an inexperienced young person ofeighteen they were to have an arrogant one of twenty-five. Their ownelderly servant had declined to face the temptations of London, and hadremained behind, living close to their old home. And, greatest event ofall, they had at length--it was now summer, but that didn't matter, furswere cheaper--yielded to the thought which they had been alternatelycaressing and dismissing for months, and they were each going to buy aFur Cloak. The days in which this all important purchase was beingconsidered were to the Miss Pateleys days of pure enjoyment. Days ofwalks along Oxford Street, no longer so bewildered by the noise ofLondon traffic, the discovery of some shop in an out of the way placewhose wares were about half the price of the more fashionable quarters.The days were full of glorious possibilities.

  It was two days after that evening visit of Pateley's to his sisters,which had so gilded and transformed their existence, that sinisterrumours began to float over London, bringing deadly anxiety in theirwake. Telegrams kept pouring in, and were posted all over the town,becoming more and more serious as the day went on: "Disturbances inSouth Africa. Hostile encounter between English and Germans. Cape toCairo Railway stopped. Collapse of the 'Equator, Ltd.,'" until bynightfall the whole of England knew the pitifully unimportant incidentsfrom which such tragic consequences were springing--that a group oftravelling missionaries, halting unawares on German territory andchanting their evening hymns, had been disturbed by a rough fellow whocame jeering into their midst, that one of the devout group had finallyejected him, with such force that he had rolled over with his head on astone and died then and there; and that the Germans were insisting uponhaving vengeance. As for the "Equator, Ltd.," nobody knew exactly inwhat the collapse consisted. The wildest reports were circulatedrespecting it; one saying that it was in the hands of the Germans,another that they had destroyed the plant that was ready to work it,another again, and it was the one that gained the most credence, thatthere was no gold in the mine at all, and that the whole thing was aswindle. The offices of the "Equator" were closed for the night. Theywould probably be besieged the next morning by an angry crowd eager tosell out, but the shares would now be hardly worth the paper they werewritten upon. Pateley, in a frenzy of anxiety, in whichever directionhe looked--for his sisters, for himself, for his party, for the Cape toCairo Railway--spent the night at his office to see which way eventswere going to turn. In his unreasoning anger, as the day of misfortunedawned next morning, against destiny, against the far-away unknownmissionaries, against all the adverse forces that were standing in theway of his wishes, there was one concrete figure in the foreground uponwhom he could justifiably pour out his wrath: Sir William Gore, theChairman of the "Equator," who, in the public opinion, was responsiblefor the undertaking. He would go to see Sir William that very day assoon as it was possible. In the meantime he would go round to hissisters to try to prepare them for the unfavourable turn that theircircumstances after all might possibly take. As, sorely troubled at whathe had to say, he came up into their little sitting-room, he found itbright with flowers; the fragrance of sweet peas filled the air. Anna,who had longed for flowers all her life and had welcomed with tremulousgratitude the rare opportunities that had come in her way of receivingany, had suddenly realised that it might not be sinful to buy them. Thejoy that she had in the handful bought from a street vendor was cheap,after all, at the price that might have seemed exorbitant if it had beenspent on the flowers alone.

  "Robert," said Jane, almost before he was inside the room, "guess whatwe are going to do?"

  "Something very naughty, I'm afraid," Anna said, excited and shy at thesame time. She was generally less able than Jane to overcome the awethat they both felt of a relation so great and so beneficent, soaltogether perfect, as their brother Robert, but at this moment she wasintoxicated by the possession of wealth, by the sense of luxury, ofwell-being, by that fragrance of the spirit her imagination added to thefragrance of the flowers that stood near her. "We're each going to buy afur cloak like that, look!" And she held out to him proudly the picturein the inside cover of the _Realm of Fashion_, representing a tall,slender, undulating lady, about as unlike herself as could well havebeen imagined, wrapped in a beautiful clinging garment of which thelining, turned back, displayed an exquisite fur. Pateley, as we havesaid, was not as a rule given to an excess of sensibility. He did notridicule sentiment in others, but neither did he share it; that point ofview was simply not visible to him. Suddenly, however, on this eveninghe had a moment of what felt to himself a most inconvenient access ofemotion. There was a plain and obvious pathos in this particularsituation that it needed no very fine sensibilities to grasp, in thesight of his sister, her small, thickset little figure encased in herugly little gown, looking up appealingly to him over her spectacles withthe joy of a child in the toy she was going to buy. It was probably thefirst, the very first time in her life, that she had had that particularexperience. Added to the joy of getting the thing she coveted was thesense of having looked a conscientious scruple in the face, and seen itfly before her like an evil spirit before a spell. She had routed theenemy, pushed aside the obstacle in front of her, and, excited, andflushed with victory, was looking round on a bigger world and a fairerview. Pateley, to his own surprise, found himself absolutely incapableof putting into words what he had come to say, not a thing that oftenhappened to him. In wonder at his not answering at once, Anna,misinterpreting his very slight pause, caught herself up quickly andsaid anxiously--

  "That is what you suggested, isn't it, Robert? You are quite sure youapprove of it?"

  "Yes, yes, I approve," he said heartily, recovering himself. "Of course.Go ahead."

  "You must not think," she went on, reassured, "that we mean to spend allour money in things like this, but of course a fur cloak is useful; itis a possession, isn't it? and it is, after all, one's duty to keepone's health."

  "Of course it is," Pateley said. "No need of any further argument."

  "I am so glad," she said, "so glad you approve!" and she smiled againwith delight.

  Again Pateley felt an unreasoning fury rising in his mind that peoplewho were so easily satisfied should not be allowed to have their heart'sdesire. Perhaps after all, it was not true about the "Equator"; perhapsthings might be better than they seemed. At any rate, he would not sayanything to his sisters until he had seen Gore. And with some hurriedexplanation of the number of engagements that obliged him to leave them,he strode out.