by Grant Allen
This is a common trait in the highly stratified English mind. It ignores the existence of strata above, except when it wants to get into them, but it recognises the existence of strata below as vastly beneath it.
Once, indeed, in the course of the afternoon, Basil came up a second time with Mrs. Bouverie-Barton, who was imparting her views on the present crisis in the marriage market to his fellow-lodger, Douglas Harrison, much as she had imparted them, in a full-flowing river of speech, to his own attentive ears somewhat earlier in the day’s entertainment. ‘For my part,’ she was saying, as Basil joined their colloquy, ‘I’ve always maintained it was an error for any person, either man or woman, to marry for money. Why, the Bible even tells us how Rebekah, daughter of Laban — or was it his sister? I really forget which; these things go from one so unless one teaches in a Sunday-school — was tempted by jewels of gold and fine raiment to marry a man she’d never seen and couldn’t possibly love; and what was the consequence? She became a tricky, deceitful, rapacious wife, and brought misery into his house unto the third and fourth generation. What I say is, a man and a woman ought to marry to please themselves. They ought to take the person who will make them happy.’
‘Yes,’ Basil interposed briskly, turning the conversation in the direction of his own thoughts. ‘How absurd that a woman should be taught to look down upon a man who is really and truly her equal in everything, just on the ground of some foolish difference in the accidentals of position.’
‘Quite so,’ Douglas Harrison answered, veering towards him sharply with a look full of suggestion. ‘And how absurd that a man should venture to look down upon a woman immeasurably his superior in every valuable quality, just because he thinks her relations have something or other to do with some decent trade or some honest handicraft which he considers beneath him.’
Basil Maclaine winced, and said no more for the moment. He hardly recovered his equanimity, indeed, till Mrs. Bouverie-Barton turned to him, on the eve of her departure, and said in her blandest society tone, ‘I’m at home every Wednesday during the season at ten, Mr. Maclaine, if you care to drop in at my little gathering some evening. Wednesday, at ten; don’t forget! But there! — I’ll send you a card in the course of a day or two.’
Then Basil’s spirits rose high in that internal barometric tube of his with a sudden rebound of anti-cyclonic energy. He felt he was indeed making progress by rapid strides among the Best People.
They went home by train together, Charlie Simmons and all; and, by extreme good luck, just as they were on the point of leaving the station, who should espy them but Lord Adalbert Montgomery, who, with astounding condescension, to Basil’s immense surprise, jumped into their third-class carriage without a moment’s hesitation, and rode all the way up to town with them in a very good humour. ‘That’s the way with your great swells,’ Basil thought to himself admiringly. ‘They’re too sure of their position to be afraid of belittling themselves.’ He talked to Basil, too, more than to any of the rest; perhaps because Basil took most pains to cultivate him; and when they shook one another’s hands warmly at parting, he said, with most marked friendliness, ‘Good-bye, Maclaine. Drop in and see me some night at the Die and Hazard when you’re passing.’ Basil hadn’t the slightest idea in the world what particular club he meant to indicate by that affectionate nickname, and he didn’t like to display his ignorance of the subject before both the Harrisons by asking him; but he thought to himself, as he walked home with his two friends, that, after all, these Really Big People aren’t such bad sort of fellows when you come to know them; and he reflected with pride that he had now earned the right to speak before all and sundry of ‘Bertie Montgomery’ without the liability to be stumped any more by that awkward and disconcerting little question, ‘Do you know him?’ ‘Know him? Of course I do!’ he could retort glibly in future, with the joyous exuberance of his kind. ‘Met him down at my friends, the Venables’, at Hurst Croft, near Leatherhead, at a garden-party; and he asked me to look in upon him some evening at the Die and Hazard.’
Only once in the course of their homeward walk (for Hubert was to dine with them) did either of the Harrisons allude in any way to their distinguished acquaintance, and even then they didn’t overtly mention him by name. It was at the end of a long and deep pause, during which each man pursued his own train of thought uninterruptedly. Then Douglas broke the silence with an abrupt sentence, whose personal pronouns bore no obvious relation to any known antecedent. ‘I don’t believe she’d take him,’ he said, ‘even if he asked her.’
‘Don’t know, I’m sure,’ Hubert answered gloomily. ‘She’s such an enigma. Her father’d do his best, of course, to make her accept him.’
‘I don’t think he asked her to-day,’ Douglas went on reflectively.
‘I don’t think he did. He can’t quite make up his mind to take the plunge. That’s the worst of these fellows. They feel so beastly sure they can throw their handkerchief at whoever they like, that they keep watching and waiting till they’re certain they’ve got the pick of all possible chances. Confound their impudence!’
‘She doesn’t care a pin for him,’ Douglas went on decisively.
‘Oh no, she doesn’t care a pin for him, of course! but she’s so very uncertain. There are such a lot of sides to the question to be considered. I’m never quite sure she won’t do in the end exactly as her father tells her.’
That same evening, at Hurst Croft, when dinner was finished and the servants had withdrawn, and Mrs. Walker had retired to her own room, the typical British Philistine, sitting bolt upright at the head of his table, with his clean-shaven face and mutton-chop whiskers, looking the pink of respectability, raised his eyes suddenly and met his daughter’s. ‘Well, Sabine?’ he murmured with an inquiring gaze.
‘Well, papa?’
‘Did anything happen?’
‘Why, lots of things happened, of course, didn’t they?’
‘Oh yes; but did he ask you?’
‘Did who ask me?’
‘Lord Adalbert.’
‘Ask me what?’
The typical British Philistine stroked his chin softly. ‘Ask you anything, Sabine,’ he said in an evasive way. He had too much respect for the conventionalities of his Philistine creed to commit himself right out even before his own daughter.
‘No, papa; he asked me nothing’ — this almost snappishly.
‘He was very attentive,’ her father interposed.
‘They’re all attentive, always,’ Sabine muttered, unconcerned.
The typical British Philistine stroked his chin once more. ‘If he were to ask you anything — —’ he began in an inquiring voice.
But Sabine cut him short at once with an angry flash of those fierce Southern eyes of hers. ‘If he were to ask me anything, how on earth can I tell you,’ she said, ‘what answer I’d give him until I’ve heard his question? How on earth do I know what he’s likely to ask? Why on earth should I bother about him? The young man doesn’t interest me. That’s all I know about it.’
The typical British Philistine stroked his chin, somewhat dismayed at her vehemence, for the third time. ‘It’s very annoying,’ he said once more in an aggrieved tone, ‘that this matter doesn’t come to a head one way or the other. I’ve reasons of my own — very important reasons — for wishing to get the matter settled offhand before I go on to ... eh ... to other business arrangements.’
CHAPTER VII.
SHARP PRACTICE.
‘I’ve never been inside a court before,’ Linda said to her brother on the morning appointed for Mr. Arthur Roper’s trial; ‘but I really think I must spare time to go, just for once, to-day. Mr. Harrison tells me he can pass me in; and I want to see what any other barrister can possibly find to say in the burglar’s defence — it seems so hopeless.’
Cecil Figgins looked up from the wheels and cranks of his model at the table by the window, and wiped his greasy hands on the duster at his side as he answered slowly, ‘Well, do as you like, Li
nda. In fact, now I come to think of it, you usually do do as you like, whether I ask you to or not. But mind you don’t forget to call on the way for that cyanide of potassium. I can’t do without it much longer. I’m getting the thing splendidly into working order this morning. It almost runs now. Another sleepless night or two’ll set the wheels going all round like wildfire.’
‘I wish you didn’t depend quite so much on sleepless nights, Cecil,’ Linda put in with a faint sigh. ‘I know it’s the time your best ideas always come to you, but I think, in the end, you must certainly pay for it. Mr. Harrison says the physiological cost’s too great in the long-run. You’ve got to make up for it, sooner or later, one way or the other.’
‘Bother the physiological cost!’ Cecil responded frankly. ‘The machine’s the thing; and the machine’s progressing like a high-pressure steam-engine. It’s the high-pressure that does it; and it’s a hundred times better than a steam-engine, too. It’s the motor of the future, I can tell you that. There’s nothing like it. It’s going to lick creation.’
So in due time Linda set off alone for the Central Criminal Court, as the newspapers call it, at the door of which Douglas Harrison, in wig and gown, was waiting to receive her and pass her in to a place reserved for her. She looked so neat and trim in her plain jacket and hat — all home-made, but all fitting like tailor work — that Douglas wondered how even Basil Maclaine, with his conventional measures, could fail to take her for the lady she really was. But it was no time just then for him to indulge in sentimentalities; for Mr. Arthur Roper’s case was on, as he himself phrased it, and Mr. Arthur Roper, in propriâ personâ, resplendent in new clothes, a perfect triumph of the sartorial art, stood smiling in the dock with easy assurance, and quizzed the witness through his single eye-glass like one who took but a distant interest in the legal proceedings.
It was wonderful how different Mr. Roper appeared, now that he stood there on his best behaviour, with innocence on his front and a rose in his buttonhole, from the cynical criminal who had disgusted Douglas Harrison in that bare cell at Holloway Gaol by his undisguised wickedness. He was, to all outward appearance, a most unblemished gentleman of scholastic taste, neatly arrayed in a black morning suit, and with linen as spotless as Basil Maclaine’s own; for Mr. Roper was a person who thoroughly understood the value of the contrast between his own external appearance (at its best) and the nature of the profession he so gaily exercised. He looked that moment the exact embodiment of British respectability. He was posing, in fact, as the victim of misapprehension. Douglas Harrison saw at a glance that the defence to be set up would evidently be one of mistaken identity. So much, indeed, the brief he received had already informed him.
But how was a plea of mistaken identity possible after Mr. Roper’s own frank — not to say brutal — admissions as to the details of his costume at the moment of his capture? A man who walks about the streets of London with the instrument playfully described as ‘a sectional jemmy’ concealed upon his person, and who is taken red-handed in hiding in an attic in somebody else’s house, at an advanced hour of the evening, must surely be ipso facto proclaimed a burglar! Douglas Harrison waited with professional interest to see what some less puritanical counsel than himself could manage to do in the way of gratifying Mr. Roper’s aspirations after continued freedom.
A brilliant young barrister, Erskine by name, and Scotch by ancestry, with an inquiring face, thick sensuous lips, and a wig pushed back somewhat from his freckled forehead, had stepped into the brief Douglas Harrison had vacated. Linda, gazing hard at his shifty gray eyes and dubious mouth, came at once to the conclusion that the brilliant young barrister, for all his jauntiness, was well equipped for the battle of life by possession of the invaluable quality of unscrupulousness. While the police witnesses and the servants at the house were giving their evidence in chief, the brilliant young barrister, leaning back in his seat with his hands in his pockets and his lips pursed up into a critical sneer, regarded them keenly, yet with a well-assumed air of complete indifference. But as soon as it came to his turn to cross-examine, he rose in his place exulting, and pounced down upon them at once, like a hawk upon its quarry. Those helpless, floundering, blundering policemen, with their hazy ideas and their easy identifications, were as rats in the terrier’s mouth to the acute and well-trained intelligence of the brilliant young barrister. He muddled their thick brains by his subtle distinctions; he shook them till they were too terrified to answer yes or no; he reduced them at once by his ingenious questions and ingenuous suggestions to a complete pulp of general vague scepticism as to everybody’s individuality and everybody’s identity.
‘Did they arrest his client then and there in the attic?’
‘No, not just at first; he gave them a run for it.’
‘Oh! he gave them a run for it, did he? Who? the man in the attic?’
‘Yes, the prisoner.’
The brilliant young barrister, throwing back his head and adjusting his pince-nez with an infinite air of forensic cunning, would be obliged if they would carefully answer his question — yes or no. ‘Which gave them a run for it — the man in the attic, or that gentleman in the dock there?’
Witnesses, one after another, each scratching his head, or fumbling with his buttons, and regarding the prisoner askance with very doubtful eyes, repeated vaguely, ‘The man in the attic.’
Then the brilliant young barrister followed them up briskly. ‘He gave them a run for it, did he, this man in the attic? Well, which way did he run? Was he in sight all the time? How far did they follow him?’
‘Oh, they followed him, as it might be, a little way round the corner, and there they caught him at last, running up against a lady.’
‘Ah, yes, exactly so; we knew all that. But did they ever lose sight of him?’
Witnesses faltered and prevaricated feebly. Some of them did, some of them didn’t. Then the brilliant young barrister, leaning forward inquisitively, like a weasel on the trail, pursued them once more with doubts and suggestions. ‘They saw a man running away; yes, that was clear; but what man exactly? There were several people in the street at the time, weren’t there?’
‘Well, a good few, certainly.’
‘Oh, a good few! He thought so. And the man in the attic lost his hat as he ran out into the street, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, he lost his hat.’
‘And round the corner they caught a man, his client, this gentleman in the dock here, who was also hatless?’
‘Yes, that was so.’
‘And the reason they identified the man in the attic with that gentleman in the dock there, at a moment’s sight, on a dark night, under the glare of the lamps, in a street with a good few people in it, was simply and solely because he’d lost his hat, wasn’t it?’
Witnesses faltered, and could hardly be certain. They thought he was the same man. He looked like him, and was dressed like him then. But now he was dressed differently.
‘Oh, he looked like him, and was dressed like him! Well, now we are getting to it. But the man in the attic was wearing a hat with the lining turned down so as to form a mask, the hat that Constable B 38 had produced — yes, I see it, thank you — so that witnesses never saw his face at all. They must have judged, therefore, entirely by his clothes and his figure. Now, would they please be very careful; they were on their oaths, remember. What sort of clothes was the man in the attic wearing when they saw him?’
And there, of course, the brilliant young barrister got all the usual contradictions and cross-statements with which frequenters of courts are only too familiar, half the witnesses being a great deal too vague, and the other half a great deal too definite.
At last the brilliant young barrister played his trump card, as far as cross-examination went. ‘Would the police kindly hand him that hat — the hat they picked up in the road immediately after the arrest — the hat with the lining cut into a mask — the hat that had undoubtedly belonged to the man in the attic?’
The
constable, with some reluctance and many misgivings, handed over the crucial incriminating object.
Then counsel turned, very apologetically, to the gentleman in the dock there. ‘Will you excuse me, sir,’ he said, in his politest and blandest voice, as one who ventures upon asking a very great favour. ‘I know it must be most unpleasant to you to have to try on another man’s hat — and that man a common burglar, too — but under the circumstances, you know, to further the ends of justice.... Oh, thank you, so much, thank you. Of course, it may just happen to fit you, or, again, it may not; it’s a mere idea of mine — but, still, as a matter of experiment — no, not that way please; turn down the lining; the burglar was wearing it over his face as a mask, you know, and that’s what I want to see, whether it would fit you or not that way.’
Mr. Roper took the hat gingerly, between finger and thumb, and, holding it so at arm’s length for a moment, examined it with an air of profound disgust. Then, like a man who makes up his mind to perform a disagreeable duty in the cause of truth and justice, at no matter what cost to his personal feelings, he placed it on his head, with an evident effort, and let it fall down naturally, as it would, about him.
