In the new order upon which he had entered, one principle of the old survived: the point of honour between allies. And Millner had promised Mr. Spence to speak to Draper about his Bible Class. …
Draper, thrown back in his chair, and swinging a loose leg across a meagre knee, listened with his habitual gravity. His downcast eyes seemed to pursue the vision which Millner’s words evoked; and the words, to their speaker, took on a new sound as that candid consciousness refracted them.
“You know, dear boy, I perfectly see your father’s point. It’s naturally distressing to him, at this particular time, to have any hint of civil war leak out—”
Draper sat upright, laying his lank legs knee to knee.
“That’s it, then? I thought that was it!”
Millner raised a surprised glance. ” What’s it?”
“That it should be at this particular time—”
“Why, naturally, as I say! Just as he’s making, as it were, his public profession of faith. You know, to men like your father convictions are irreducible elements—they can’t be split up, and differently combined. And your exegetical scruples seem to him to strike at the very root of his convictions.”
Draper pulled himself to his feet and shuffled across the room. Then he turned about, and stood before his friend.
“Is it that—or is it this?” he said; and with the word he drew a letter from his pocket and proffered it silently to Millner.
The latter, as he unfolded it, was first aware of an intense surprise at the young man’s abruptness of tone and gesture. Usually Draper fluttered long about his point before making it; and his sudden movement seemed as mechanical as the impulsion conveyed by some strong spring. The spring, of course, was in the letter; and to it Millner turned his startled glance, feeling the while that, by some curious cleavage of perception, he was continuing to watch Draper while he read.
“Oh, the beasts!” he cried.
He and Draper were face to face across the sheet which had dropped between them. The youth’s features were tightened by a smile that was like the ligature of a wound. He looked white and withered.
“Ah—you knew, then?”
Millner sat still, and after a moment Draper turned from him, walked to the hearth, and leaned against the chimney, propping his chin on his hands. Millner, his head thrown back, stared up at the ceiling, which had suddenly become to him the image of the universal sounding-board hanging over his consciousness.
“You knew, then?” Draper repeated.
Millner remained silent. He had perceived, with the surprise of a mathematician working out a new problem, that the lie which Mr. Spence had just bought of him was exactly the one gift he could give of his own free will to Mr. Spence’s son. This discovery gave the world a strange new topsy-turvyness, and set Millner’s theories spinning about his brain like the cabin furniture of a tossing ship.
“You knew,” said Draper, in a tone of quiet affirmation.
Millner righted himself, and grasped the arms of his chair as if that too were reeling. “About this blackguardly charge?”
Draper was studying him intently. “What does it matter if it’s blackguardly?”
“Matter—?” Millner stammered.
“It’s that, of course, in any case. But the point is whether it’s true or not.” Draper bent down, and picking up the crumpled letter, smoothed it out between his fingers. “The point, is, whether my father, when he was publicly denouncing the peonage abuses on the San Pablo plantations over a year ago, had actually sold out his stock, as he announced at the time; or whether, as they say here—how do they put it?—he had simply transferred it to a dummy till the scandal should blow over, and has meanwhile gone on drawing his forty per cent interest on five thousand shares? There’s the point.”
Millner had never before heard his young friend put a case with such unadorned precision. His language was like that of Mr. Spence making a statement to a committee meeting; and the resemblance to his father flashed out with ironic incongruity.
“You see why I’ve brought this letter to you—I couldn’t go to him with it!” Draper’s voice faltered, and the resemblance vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
“No; you couldn’t go to him with it,” said Millner slowly.
“And since they say here that you know: that they’ve got your letter proving it—” The muscles of Draper’s face quivered as if a blinding light had been swept over it. “For God’s sake, Millner—it’s all right?”
“It’s all right,” said Millner, rising to his feet.
Draper caught him by the wrist. “You’re sure—you’re absolutely sure?”
“Sure. They know they’ve got nothing to go on.”
Draper fell back a step and looked almost sternly at his friend. “You know that’s not what I mean. I don’t care a straw what they think they’ve got to go on. I want to know if my father’s all right. If he is, they can say what they please.”
Millner, again, felt himself under the concentrated scrutiny of the ceiling. “Of course, of course. I understand.”
“You understand? Then why don’t you answer?”
Millner looked compassionately at the boy’s struggling face. Decidedly, the battle was to the strong, and he was not sorry to be on the side of the legions. But Draper’s pain was as awkward as a material obstacle, as something that one stumbled over in a race.
“You know what I’m driving at, Millner.” Again Mr. Spence’s committee-meeting tone sounded oddly through his son’s strained voice. “If my father’s so awfully upset about my giving up my Bible Class, and letting it be known that I do so on conscientious grounds, is it because he’s afraid it may be considered a criticism on something he has done which—which won’t bear the test of the doctrines he believes in?”
Draper, with the last question, squared himself in front of Millner, as if suspecting that the latter meant to evade it by flight. But Millner had never felt more disposed to stand his ground than at that moment.
“No—by Jove, no! It’s not that.” His relief almost escaped him in a cry, as he lifted his head to give back Draper’s look.
“On your honour?” the other passionately pressed him.
“Oh, on anybody’s you like—on yours!“ Millner could hardly restrain a laugh of relief. It was vertiginous to find himself spared, after all, the need of an altruistic lie: he perceived that they were the kind he least liked.
Draper took a deep breath. “You don’t—Millner, a lot depends on this—you don’t really think my father has any ulterior motive?”
“I think he has none but his horror of seeing you go straight to perdition!”
They looked at each other again, and Draper’s tension was suddenly relieved by a free boyish laugh. “It’s his convictions—it’s just his funny old convictions?”
“It’s that, and nothing else on earth!”
Draper turned back to the armchair he had left, and let his narrow figure sink down into it as into a bath. Then he looked over at Millner with a smile. “I can see that I’ve been worrying him horribly. So he really thinks I’m on the road to perdition? Of course you can fancy what a sick minute I had when I thought it might be this other reason—the damnable insinuation in this letter.” Draper crumpled the paper in his hand, and leaned forward to toss it into the coals of the grate. “I ought to have known better, of course. I ought to have remembered that, as you say, my father can’t conceive how conduct may be independent of creed. That’s where I was stupid—and rather base. But that letter made me dizzy—I couldn’t think. Even now I can’t very clearly. I’m not sure what my convictions require of me: they seem to me so much less to be considered than his! When I’ve done half the good to people that he has, it will be time enough to begin attacking their beliefs. Meanwhile—meanwhile I can’t touch his. …” Draper leaned forward, stretching his lank arms along his knees. His face was as clear as a spring sky. “I won’t touch them, Millner—Go and tell him so. …”
V
In the study a half hour later Mr. Spence, watch in hand, was doling out his minutes again. The peril conjured, he had recovered his dominion over time. He turned his commanding eye-glasses on Millner.
“It’s all settled, then? Tell Draper I’m sorry not to see him again to-night—but I’m to speak at the dinner of the Legal Relief Association, and I’m due there in five minutes. You and he dine alone here, I suppose? Tell him I appreciate what he’s done. Some day he’ll see that to leave the world better than we find it is the best we can hope to do. (You’ve finished the notes for the Investigator? Be sure you don’t forget that phrase.) Well, good evening: that’s all, I think.”
Smooth and compact in his glossy evening clothes, Mr. Spence advanced toward the study door; but as he reached it, his secretary stood there before him.
“It’s not quite all, Mr. Spence.”
Mr. Spence turned on him a look in which impatience was faintly tinged with apprehension. “What else is there? It’s two and a half minutes to eight.”
Millner stood his ground. “It won’t take longer than that. I want to tell you that, if you can conveniently replace me, I’d like—there are reasons why I shall have to leave you.”
Millner was conscious of reddening as he spoke. His redness deepened under Mr. Spence’s dispassionate scrutiny. He saw at once that the banker was not surprised at his announcement.
“Well, I suppose that’s natural enough. You’ll want to make a start for yourself now. Only, of course, for the sake of appearances—”
“Oh, certainly,” Millner hastily agreed.
“Well, then: is that all?” Mr. Spence repeated.
“Nearly.” Millner paused, as if in search of an appropriate formula. But after a moment he gave up the search, and pulled from his pocket an envelope which he held out to his employer. “I merely want to give this back.”
The hand which Mr. Spence had extended dropped to his side, and his sand-coloured face grew chalky. “Give it back?” His voice was as thick as Millner’s. “What’s happened? Is the bargain off?”
“Oh, no. I’ve given you my word.”
“Your word?” Mr. Spence lowered at him. “I’d like to know what that’s worth!”
Millner continued to hold out the envelope. “You do know, now. It’s worth that. It’s worth my place.”
Mr. Spence, standing motionless before him, hesitated for an appreciable space of time. His lips parted once or twice under their square-clipped stubble, and at last emitted: “How much more do you want?”
Millner broke into a laugh. “Oh, I’ve got all I want—all and more!”
“What—from the others? Are you crazy?”
“No, you are,” said Millner with a sudden recovery of composure. “But you’re safe—you’re as safe as you’ll ever be. Only I don’t care to take this for making you so.”
Mr. Spence slowly moistened his lips with his tongue, and removing his pince-nez, took a long hard look at Millner.
“I don’t understand. What other guarantee have I got?”
“That I mean what I say?” Millner glanced past the banker’s figure at his rich densely coloured background of Spanish leather and mahogany. He remembered that it was from this very threshold that he had first seen Mr. Spence’s son.
“What guarantee? You’ve got Draper!” he said.
AFTERWARD
I
“Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.”
The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp perception of its latent significance as she stood, in the December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the library.
The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very house of which the library in question was the central, the pivotal “feature.” Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties, had, on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own case; but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously, several practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it out: “Well, there’s Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo’s cousins, and you can get it for a song.”
The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms—its remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes, and other vulgar necessities—were exactly those pleading in its favor with two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition, with unusual architectural felicities.
“I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was thoroughly uncomfortable,” Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the two, had jocosely insisted; “the least hint of ‘convenience’ would make me think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with the pieces numbered, and set up again.” And they had proceeded to enumerate, with humorous precision, their various suspicions and exactions, refusing to believe that the house their cousin recommended was really Tudor till they learned it had no heating system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds till she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the water-supply.
“It’s too uncomfortable to be true!” Edward Boyne had continued to exult as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively wrung from her; but he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a sudden relapse to distrust: “And the ghost? You’ve been concealing from us the fact that there is no ghost!”
Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent perceptions, had noted a sudden flatness of tone in Alida’s answering hilarity.
“Oh, Dorsetshire’s full of ghosts, you know.”
“Yes, yes; but that won’t do. I don’t want to have to drive ten miles to see somebody else’s ghost. I want one of my own on the premises. Is there a ghost at Lyng?”
His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had flung back tantalizingly: “Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.”
“Never know it?” Boyne pulled her up. “But what in the world constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?”
“I can’t say. But that’s the story.”
“That there’s a ghost, but that nobody knows it’s a ghost?”
“Well—not till afterward, at any rate.”
“Till afterward?”
“Not till long, long afterward.”
“But if it’s once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why hasn’t its signalement been handed down in the family? How has it managed to preserve its incognito?”
Alida could only shake her head. “Don’t ask me. But it has.”
“And then suddenly—” Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous depth of divination—“suddenly, long afterward, one says to one’s self, ‘That was it?’”
She was oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida’s clear pupils. “I suppose so. One just has to wait.”
“Oh, hang waiting!” Ned broke in. “Life’s too short for a ghost who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can’t we do better than that, Mary?”
But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to, for within three months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair they were established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for to the point of planning it out in all its daily details had actually begun for them.
It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a wide-hooded fireplace, under just such black oak rafters, with the sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkening to a deeper solitude: it was for the ultimate indulgence in such sensations that Mary Boyne had endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West, and that Boyne had ground on doggedly at his engineerin
g till, with a suddenness that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the leisure to taste it. They had never for a moment meant their new state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves only to harmonious activities. She had her vision of painting and gardening (against a background of gray walls), he dreamed of the production of his long-planned book on the “Economic Basis of Culture”; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could be too sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world, or plunge deep enough into the past.
Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position. But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the whole incredibly compressed island—a nest of counties, as they put it—that for the production of its effects so little of a given quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and so short a distance a difference.
“It’s that,” Ned had once enthusiastically explained, “that gives such depth to their effects, such relief to their least contrasts. They’ve been able to lay the butter so thick on every exquisite mouthful.”
The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray house, hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the finer marks of commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes, abound the more richly in its special sense—the sense of having been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond between the yews; but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an intenser memory.
The feeling had never been stronger than on the December afternoon when, waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth. Her husband had gone off, after luncheon, for one of his long tramps on the downs. She had noticed of late that he preferred to be unaccompanied on these occasions; and, in the tried security of their personal relations, had been driven to conclude that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the morning’s work. Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as she had imagined it would, and the lines of perplexity between his eyes had never been there in his engineering days. Then he had often looked fagged to the verge of illness, but the native demon of “worry” had never branded his brow. Yet the few pages he had so far read to her—the introduction, and a synopsis of the opening chapter—gave evidences of a firm possession of his subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.
Tales of Men and Ghosts Page 22
