Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  Sir Austen’s brow gathered slightly.

  ‘A painter fellow?’ he asked with a contemptuous intonation.

  ‘Well, he certainly paints,’ the General answered, with some faint undercurrent of asperity in his tone, for he didn’t quite care to hear a possible son-in-law of the Maitlands of High Ash thus cavalierly described; ‘but I’m not sure whether he’s a regular artist or only an amateur. I think he paints for amusement chiefly. He seems to be coiny. Do you know anything of him?’

  ‘I’ve heard of him,’ Sir Austen replied curtly, perusing the ceiling.

  ‘His name’s Austen Linnell too, by the way,’ the General went on with bland suggestiveness. ‘Charles Austen Linnell, he calls himself. He must belong to your family, I fancy.’

  Sir Austen raised his shoulders almost imperceptibly.

  ‘A’ Stuarts are na sib to the king,’ he answered oracularly, with the air of a man who desires to close, offhand, an unseasonable discussion. And he tapped the table as he spoke with one impatient forefinger.

  But General Maitland, once fairly on the scent, was not thus to be lightly put down. He kept his point well in view, and he meant to make for it, with soldierly instinct, in spite of all obstacles.

  ‘The man has money,’ he said, eyeing Sir Austen close and sharp. ‘He’s a gentleman, you know, and very well educated. He was at Christ Church, I imagine, and he travels in Africa.’

  ‘I dare say he has money,’ Sir Austen retorted with a certain show of unwonted petulance, taking up a copy of Vanity Fair from the table, and pretending to be vastly interested in the cartoon. ‘And I dare say he travels in Africa also. A great many fellows have money nowadays. Some of them make it out of cats’-meat sausages. For my own part, I think a sort of gentlemanly indigence is more of a credential to good society at the present day than any amount of unaccountable money. I know I can never raise any cash myself, however much I want it. Land in Rutland’s a drug in the market, to be had for the asking. If your friend wants to rent an ancestral estate, now, on easy terms, on the strength of a singular coincidence in our Christian and surnames, I shall be happy to meet him through my agent any day, with a most equitable arrangement for taking Thorpe Manor. If he chose to live in the house while I’m away in Africa (where those confounded Jews can’t get at me anyhow), he might make a great deal of social capital in the county out of the double-barrelled resemblance, and perhaps marry into some good family, which I suppose is the height of the fellow’s ambition.’ And Sir Austen, laying down the paper once more, and puffing away most vigorously at his cigar, strode off with long strides, and without further explanation vouchsafed, to the secure retreat of the club billiard-room.

  His reticence roused General Maitland’s curiosity to almost boiling-point.

  ‘A’ Stuarts are na sib to the king,’ Sir Austen had said; but he had never explicitly denied the relationship. Who could this painter Linnell really be, then; and why should the putative head of his house speak with so evident a mixture of dislike and envy about his supposed fortune? The General was puzzled. He looked around him with a comical air of utter despair, and roped his gray moustache to right and left in sore perplexity.

  As he gazed round the room, airing his doubts visibly, his eyes chanced to fall upon old Admiral Rolt, seated on a divan in the far corner, and looking up from his perusal of the Piccadilly Gazette with a curious twinkle about his small, fat pigs’-eyes. General Maitland nodded a cursory recognition; and the Admiral, laying down his paper nothing loath, in the midst of a brilliant and vehement leader on the supineness of the service and the wickedness of the Administration, waddled across the room on his short fat legs slowly to meet him.

  ‘You were asking Linnell about that Yankee cousin of his,’ he said with his oily, gossipy smile — for the Admiral is the licensed tattle-monger of the Senior United Service. ‘Well, if you care to hear it, I know that story well from beginning to end. Seen it all through from the day it was launched. Met my old shipmate, the painter fellow’s father, in Boston long ago, when I was cruising about on the North American station, and gave him a lift once to Halifax in the old wooden Bellerophon, the one that was broken up after Bosanquet’s haul-down, you recollect, when I got my promotion. Knew all his people in Rutland, too, from the time I was a baby; and the lady as well: dear me, dear me, she was a clever one! Best hand at a page or a saucy chambermaid I ever saw in my born days; and as full of cunning as Canton is of Chinamen.’

  ‘Then they are related?’ the General asked cautiously.

  ‘Related! Who? Linnell and the painter? My dear sir, I believe you. First-cousins, that’s all: own brother’s sons: and unless Sir Austen has a boy of his own before he dies, you take my word for it, that lame painter man’s the heir to the baronetcy.’

  ‘You don’t mean to say so!’ the General cried, surprised.

  ‘Yes, I do, though. That’s it. You may take my word for it. Very few people nowadays know anything about the story — blown over long ago, as things do blow over: and Linnell himself — Sir Austen, I mean — won’t for a moment so much as acknowledge the relationship. It’s not in the Peerage. Linnell don’t allow it to be put in — he disclaims the connection: and the lame fellow’s a sight too proud and too quixotic to meddle with the family dirty linen. He doesn’t want to have the whole bundle dragged to light, and Sir Austen blackguarding his father and mother in every house in all London. But if ever Sir Austen dies, you mark my words, the painter fellow ‘ll come into Thorpe Manor as sure as my name’s John Antony Rolt, sir. It’s strictly entailed: property follows the baronetcy in tail male. Linnell’s done his very best to break the entail, to my certain knowledge, in order to cut off this Yankee cousin: but it’s no go: the law can’t manage it. The lame man’ll follow him as master at Thorpe to a dead certainty, unless Lady Linnell presents him with an heir to the title beforehand — which isn’t likely, seeing that they’ve been over five years married.’

  ‘But why does Linnell object to acknowledging him?’ the General asked curiously.

  ‘Well, it’s a precious long story,’ the old sailor answered, button-holing his willing listener with great joy — a willing listener was a godsend to the Admiral: ‘but I’ll tell you all about it in strict confidence, as I know the ins and outs of the whole question from the very beginning. It seems Sir Austen Linnell the elder — you remember him? — the thin old fellow with the cracked voice who was once in the F.O., worse luck! and got us into that precious nasty mess with the Siamese about the Bangkok bombardment — well, that Sir Austen, the present man’s father, had a brother Charles, a harum-scarum creature with a handsome face and a wild eye, who was a messmate of mine as midshipman on board the Cockatrice. The Cockatrice one time was stationed at Plymouth, and there we all fell in with an awfully pretty dancing-girl — one Sally Withers her real name was, I believe, in private circles; but they called her at the theatre, if you please, Miss Violet Fitzgerald. So what must Charlie Linnell and this girl Sally do, by George! but get very thick indeed with one another: so thick at last that there was a jolly row over it, and Sir Austen the eldest, who was then living — not the F.O. man, you understand, but his father again, the Peninsular hero, who died afterwards of the cholera in India — came down to Plymouth and broke the whole thing completely up. He carried off Charlie in disgrace to town, dismissed Miss Sally Violet Fitzgerald to her own profession, spirited her away with her troupe to Australia, and made poor Charlie resign his commission, which he was permitted to do at headquarters on easy terms, to prevent some scandal about a forged leave of absence or something from the Port Admiral.’

  ‘But then this man Linnell the painter isn’t — —’

  ‘Just you wait and hear. That ain’t by any means the end of the story. An old sailor must take his own time to spin his yarn. Well, Charlie, he settled down to a respectable life in town, and was pitchforked by his father into a jolly good berth in the backstairs of the War Office, and grew religious, and forswore the theatre, and
took to getting up penny readings, and altogether astonished his friends and acquaintances by developing into a most exemplary member of society. Quite an evolution, as folks say nowadays. Some of us had our doubts about the change, of course, who’d known Charlie in the noisy old days on board the Cockatrice: but, bless your heart, we said nothing: we waited to see what ‘ud be the end of it all. In time, if you please, Master Charlie announces, to our great surprise, he’s going to be married — to a second-cousin of his, twice removed, the daughter of a Dean, too, an excellent match, down at Melbury Cathedral. So in due course the marriage comes off, the Dean officiating, and everybody goes into raptures over the bride, and says how wonderfully Charlie has quieted down, and what an excellent man lay hid so long under his brass buttons and his midshipman’s uniform. It was “West African Mission Meeting; Charles Linnell, Esquire, will take the chair at eight precisely.” It was “Melbury Soup Kitchen; Charles Linnell, Esquire, Ten Guineas.” It was “Loamshire Auxiliary, Charles Linnell, Esquire, President and Treasurer.” You never in your life saw such a smooth-faced, clean-shaven, philanthropic, methodistical, mealy-mouthed gentleman. He was the very moral of a blameless ratepayer. But under it all, he was always Charlie.’

  ‘And the painter, I suppose, is a son of this man’s and the Dean’s daughter?’ General Maitland interposed, anxious to get at the pith of the long-winded story.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ the Admiral answered energetically, with a small fat wink. ‘The Dean’s daughter had one nice little boy, to be sure, whom the present Sir Austen still acknowledges as a sort of cousin: but that’s neither here nor there, I tell you: he’s a parson in Northumberland now, the Dean’s grandson, and nothing at all to do with this present history. About three months after that boy was born, however, what should happen but a party of strolling players comes round to Melbury, where Charlie happened to be stopping at the time with his papa-in-law, the Dean, and accepting hospitality from his revered and right reverend friend, the Bishop. Well, the Dean, who was a good sort of body in his way, was all for converting the actors and actresses; so he invited them in the lump from their penny gaff to a meeting at the Deanery, Charles Linnell, Esquire, the eminent philanthropist, to deliver a nice little fatherly address to them. Charlie made them a most affecting speech, and everything went off as well as could be expected till the very last moment, when, just as they’d finished their weak tea and penny buns, and Charlie was moving away with great dignity from the chair, which he’d filled so beautifully, what should happen but a bold, good-looking player woman, whom he hadn’t noticed in a dark corner, gave him a dig in the ribs, and called out to him in a fine broad Irish brogue — she’d played some Irish part when Charlie was stationed on the Cockatrice at Plymouth— “Och, Charlie, ohone, sure an’ it’s yourself’s the hoary old hypocrite! Don’t ye know me, thin, for your wedded wife, Mistress Linnell, me darlin’, fresh back from Australia?” And true enough that’s just what she was, as it turned out afterwards: for Charlie’d married Miss Sally Violet quite regularly at Plymouth half a dozen years before.’

  ‘What, bigamy!’ the General cried in almost mute surprise.

  ‘Ah, bigamy, if you choose to put an ugly name to it: that’s just about the long and short of it. But anyhow, there was a regular burst-up that very evening. In twenty-four hours Charlie had disappeared: the eminent philanthropic gentleman had ceased to exist. Miss Sally Violet, who was a clever one, and no mistake, and as handsome a woman as ever I set eyes upon, bar none, had got him straight under her pretty little thumb again: he was just fascinated, clean taken by surprise; and next week, it was all about over every club in London that Charlie Linnell had eloped with her from Liverpool for somewhere in America, and the Dean’s daughter was once more a spinster.’

  ‘What a painful surprise!’ the General said constrainedly.

  ‘Painful? You may say so. Poor Mrs. Linnell the Second, the Dean’s daughter, nearly cried her wretched little black eyes out. But the family stuck by her like bricks, I must say. Sir Austen the eldest declared he’d never acknowledge Mrs. Linnell the First as one of the family, and he left what he could to Mrs. Linnell the Second and her poor little baby, the parson in Northumberland. Meanwhile, Charlie’d gone off on his own hook to Boston, you see, with five thousand pounds, saved from the wreck, in his waistcoat pocket, unable to come to England again, of course, as long as he lived, for fear Mr. Dean should prosecute him for bigamy; but with that clever little wife of his, the Sally Violet creature, ready to make his fortune for him over again in America. She hadn’t been there but a year and a day, as the old song says, when this new painter baby appears upon the scene, the legitimate heir to the Linnells of Thorpe Manor. Well, clever little Mrs. Sally Violet, she says, says she to Charlie: “Charlie, my boy,” says she, “you must make money for the precious baby.” “How?” says Charlie. “A pill,” says Sally. “But what the dickens do I know about pills, my dear?” says Charlie, flabbergasted. “What’s that got to do with the question, stupid?” says sharp Mrs. Sally. “Advertise, advertise, advertise, is the motto! Nothing can be done in this world without advertisements.” So she took Charlie’s five thousand into her own hands and advertised like winking, all over the shop, till you couldn’t go up the White Mountain peak without seeing in letters as big as yourself on every rock, “Use Linnell’s Instantaneous Lion Liver Pills.” Podophyllin and rhubarb did all the rest, and Charlie died a mild sort of a millionaire at last in a big house in Beacon Street, Boston. This fellow with the game leg inherited the lot — the ballet-girl having predeceased him in the odour of sanctity — but I understand he made over a moiety of the fortune to his half-brother, the parson in Northumberland, Mr. Dean’s grandson. He said his father’s son was his father’s son, acknowledged or unacknowledged, and he for his part would never do another the cruel wrong which the rest of the world would be glad enough to do to himself if they had the opportunity.’

  ‘That was honourable of him, at any rate,’ the General said dryly.

  ‘Honourable of him? Well, yes, I grant you that; honourable, of course, but confoundedly quixotic. The fellow’s all full of this sentimental nonsense, though. He won’t lay claim to the heirship to the baronetcy in the Peerage, it seems, because the other son’s well known in England, and he won’t brand his own half-brother with bastardy, he says, whatever comes of it. His own half-brother, by the way, the parson in Northumberland, though he owes his fortune to him, hates him like poison, and would brand him with bastardy or anything else as soon as look at him. And then he’s got ridiculous ideas about his money generally: doesn’t feel sure the paternal pills ever did any good in the world to anybody to speak of, though I believe they’re harmless, quite harmless, and I used to take them myself for years on the North American Station, where one needs such things in the hot season. But this young fellow has doubts as to their efficacy after all, it seems, and is sensitive about the way his money was made: says he holds it in trust for humanity, or some such high-falutin, new-fangled nonsense, and would like to earn his living honestly if he could by his own exertions. Charlie sent him over to be educated at Oxford (though of course he couldn’t come himself), as he wanted to make an English gentleman of him. He spends the best part of his fortune in charity, I believe, encouraging people he thinks should be encouraged, and pensioning off everybody who suffered in any way, however remotely, by his father’s doings. He’s quite quixotic, in fact — quite quixotic.’

  ‘If he thinks it’s right,’ the General said quietly — for he believed in duty, like an old-fashioned soldier, and was not ashamed to deal in moral platitudes, ‘he ought to stick to it. But,’ he added after a short pause, ‘if he were to marry any nice girl anywhere, I expect he’d turn out much like all the rest of us.’

  ‘Eh, what’s that?’ the Admiral cried sharply, peering out of his fat little black eyes like a wide-awake hedgehog. ‘Marry a nice girl? Ah, yes, I dare say — if any nice girl can only manage to catch him. But the man’s as full o
f fads and fancies as a schoolgirl. Suspicious, suspicious, suspicious of everybody. Thinks people look down upon him because he’s lame. Thinks they look down upon him because his mother was only a ballet-girl. Thinks they look down upon him because his father ran away to America. Thinks they look down upon him because the Linnells of Thorpe Manor won’t acknowledge him. Thinks they look down upon him because his money was made out of pills. Thinks they look down upon him for what he is and for what he isn’t, for what they think him and what they don’t think him. And all the time, mind you, knows his own worth, and doesn’t mean to be caught for nothing: has as keen an idea of the value of his money, as perfect a sense of how much the world runs after seven thousand a year, and as good a notion of his own position as heir-presumptive to an old English baronetcy, as any other man in the three kingdoms. But the Linnells were always unaccountable people — most odd mixtures: and even Charlie, in spite of his high jinks and his bare-faced hypocrisy, was chock-full of all sorts of high-flown notions. They say he loved the ballet-girl right through, like a perfect fool, and was only persuaded to marry the Dean’s daughter at last by his father swearing she was dead and buried long ago at Plymouth. When I met him at Boston, years after, in the liver-pill business, there he was, billing and cooing with Miss Sally Violet as fondly as ever, and as madly devoted to this lame boy of theirs as if his mother had been a Duchess’s daughter.’

  And later in the day, when General Maitland had retired to his own room at the Métropole, the Admiral was button-holing every other flag-officer in the whole club, and remarking, with his little pig’s-eyes as wide open as the lids would permit: ‘I say, So-and-so, have you heard the latest thing out in society? Maitland’s girl’s trying to catch that Yankee artist fellow, Linnell’s cousin!’

  CHAPTER VIII.