by Grant Allen
“Why not?” Mr. Lionel asked, with a flush of pride.
“Oh, you’re not in the very least like a city man,” Mme. Ceriolo replied, looking up at him archly. “Why, I thought from your manners you were one of the people who pass their lives dawdling between their club and the Row. I never should have believed you could possibly be in the city. What is your club, by the way?” she added with an afterthought, “in case I should ever want to write to you.”
Mr. Lionel’s lips trembled with pleasure. “I’m down for the Garrick,” he said (which was, in point of fact, an inexact remark); “but until I get in there, you know — it’s such a long job nowadays — I hang out for the present at the Junior Financial. It’s a small place in Duke Street, St. James’. If ever you should do me the honor to write to me, though, I think you’d better write to my chambers in Pimlico.” He called them “chambers” instead of lodgings, because it sounded more swell and rakish. And he produced a card with his name and address on it.
Mme. Ceriolo placed it with marked care in an inner compartment of her pretty little tortoiseshell purse — the purse with the coronet and initials on the case, which had been given her in Paris by — well, never mind those forgotten little episodes. “And so you live with Mr. Gascoyne!” she said, noting the address. “Dear Mr. Gascoyne! so quaint, so original! Though we all laughed at him, we all liked him. He was the life and soul of our party at Mentone.”
“Well, I live with him only because I find it convenient,” Mr. Lionel interposed. “He’s not exactly the sort of chap I should take to naturally.”
Mme. Ceriolo caught at her cue at once. “I should think not,” she echoed. “A deal too slow for you, one can see that at a glance. A very good fellow in his way, of course; but, oh my! so strait-laced, so absurdly puritanical.” And she laughed melodiously.
“And how about the American heiress you spoke of in the Park?” Mr. Lionel inquired with professional eagerness.
“Oh, that was all chaff,” Mme. Ceriolo answered, after an imperceptible pause, to gain time for her invention. She was a good-natured little swindler, after all, was Mme. Ceriolo; and, from the way he asked it, she jumped to the conclusion he wanted the information for no friendly purpose, so she withheld it sternly. Why should she want to do a bad turn to the poor little scallywag?
So the conversation glided off upon Paul, his Quixotic ideas and his moral absurdities; and, before it had ended, the simple minded young cynic, like clay in the hands of the easy-going but cunning adventuress, had told her all about Mr. Solomons and himself, and the plan for exploiting the British baronet, and the confounded time an uncle always contrived to live, and the difficulty of extracting blood from a stone, and the trials and troubles of the genus nephew in its endeavor to perform that arduous surgical operation. To all of which Mme. Ceriolo, feeling her way with caution by tentative steps, had extended a ready and sympathetic ear, and had made a rapid mental note, “Bad heart, weak head, good material to work upon — fool, vain, impressionable, unscrupulous.” Such men as that were madame’s stock-in-trade. She battened on their money, sucked them dry as fast as she could, and then left them. —
Not that madame was ever what British respectability in its exactest sense describes as disreputable. The wise adventuress knew a more excellent way than that. Never throw away the essentials of a good name. She traded entirely upon promises and expectations. Her method was to make a man head over ears in love, and then to delude him into the fallacious belief that she meant to marry him. As soon as he was reduced to the flaccid condition, by constant draining, she retired gracefully. Some day, when she found a man rich enough and endurable enough, she intended to carry the programme of marriage into execution and end her days in the odor of respectability. But that was for the remote future, no doubt. Meanwhile, she was content to take what she could get by her drainage operations, and live her own Bohemian life untrammeled.
At last, most unwillingly, Mr. Lionel rose and took up his hat to go. “I may come again soon?” he said interrogatively.
Madame’s professional amiability never forsook her in similar circumstances. “As often as you like,” she answered, smiling a benign smile upon the captured victim; “I’m always glad to see nice people; except on Fridays,” she added after a pause. Friday was the day when Armitage most often called, and she didn’t wish to let her two principal visitors clash unnecessarily.
At the door Mr. Lionel pressed her hand with a tender squeeze. Mme. Ceriolo returned the pressure with a demure and well-calculated diminution of intensity. It doesn’t do to let them think they can make the running too fast or too easily. Draw them on by degrees and they stick the longer. Mr. Lionel gazed into those languid eyes of hers. Mme. Ceriolo dropped the lids with most maidenly modesty. “Don’t mention to Mr. Gascoyne,” she murmured, withdrawing her hand, which Lionel showed a tendency to hold too long, “that you’ve been here this afternoon, I beg of you as a favor.”
“How curious!” her new admirer exclaimed with surprise. “Why, I was just going to ask you not to say anything to him for worlds about it.”
“Sympathy,” Mme. Ceriolo murmured. “The common brain-wave. When people arc cast in corresponding molds these curious things often happen pat, just so. Figurez-vous si je suis sympathique.” And she took his hand once more and let it drop suddenly; then she turned and fled, like a girl, to the sofa, as if half ashamed of her own unwise emotion.
Mr. Lionel went down the stairs in the seventh heaven. At last he had found a beautiful woman really to admire him. She saw his good points and appreciated him at once at his full worth. Forty? What malevolent, ill-natured nonsense. Not a day more than twenty-seven, he’d be bound on affidavit. And then, what mattered the disparity of age? Such grace, such knowledge of the world and society, such noble birth, such a countess’ coronet embroidered on her handkerchief.
“Zébie,” madame cried from her sofa in the corner, as that well-trained domestic answered her double ring (“sonnez deux fois pour la fille de chambre”) — while Lionel’s footfall still echoed on the stair, “if that little fool of a Jew calls again you can show him up straight off at any time. Do you understand, idiot? at any time — unless Mr. Armitage is here already.”
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE BARONETCY IN THE BALANCE.
SUMMER and autumn Paul worked away, very much uphill, at journalism in London, pushing his road ahead slowly but surely into steady occupation, and not only covering all his modest expenses, but even laying by a trifle at odd times toward wiping out those terrible claims of Mr. Solomons.
It was hard work and uphill work, undeniably. No matter how good a start a man may get in literature — and, thanks to indefatigable Mrs. Douglas, with her backstairs instinct, Paul’s start had been an unusually easy one — the profession of letters must needs be an arduous craft for every beginner. The doors are crowded; the apprenticeship is long, toilsome, and ill-paid. Paul had to endure that painful fate, common to all of us who earn our bread by spinning material out of our own brains for public consumption, of seeing manuscript after manuscript “declined with thanks,” and of laboring for hours and hours together on that which, after all, profited nothing. Nevertheless, a certain proportion of his work was accepted and paid for; and that proportion brought him enough to pay for his half of the rooms he shared with his uncongenial fellow-lodger, and to keep him in food, clothing, and washing. It was a great joy to him when he began to find his weekly receipts outbalance expenditure, and to lay by, were it only a few shillings at a time, toward the final extinguishment of his debt to Mr. Solomons.
Had it been the national debt of England that he had to wipe out, it could not have seemed to him at the time much more hopeless of accomplishment, But still he toiled on, determined at least to do his best by it — with Nea in the background watching over him from a distance.
Summer and autumn passed away, and at Christmas, when Faith was freed once more from the tyranny of the infants, and business was slack in L
ondon offices, he determined to run down for a week or two’s rest and change to Hillborough. But he must pay for his board and lodging, he told his mother; he was a free man now, earning his own livelihood, and he must no longer be a burden to his family in any way. With many remonstrances, he was at last allowed to have his wish, and to contribute the modest sum of fifteen shillings a week, in return for his keep, to the exchequer.
He had only been home one day when Faith took him for their favorite walk on the Knoll, and confided to him all her most recent family observations.
“Do you notice any difference in father, Paul?” she asked a little anxiously, as they walked along the springy turf on that long ridge, looking down upon the wide weald, in the beautiful bright December morning.
Paul hesitated to answer. “Well, Lionel Solomons said to me in the summer,” he replied at last, after a long pause, “that he was getting shaky, and that made me nervous; so I’ve been watching him close yesterday and to-day, and, to tell you the truth, I’m afraid, Faith, he isn’t quite as strong on his legs as he used to be.”
Faith’s eyes filled with tears. To her and to Paul, it was nothing that their father s “h’s” were weak or nonexistent and that their father’s grammar was deficient in concords. They loved him as dearly as if he had been a lily-handed baronet of many broad acres, with courtly manners and an elegant drawl, but possessing no final “g’s” to his name, and hardly a trace of the letter “r” to speak of. To say the truth, they loved him even much better. They realized how hard he had worked all his days to keep them, and how, according to his light, feeble and flickering enough, he had tried to do the very best in life for them. He had always been a kind and indulgent father; and the bare thought of losing him was to Faith and to Paul a terrible source of coming trouble.
“His life’s so hard,” Faith murmured through her rising tears. “At his age, he oughtn’t to have to be driving about all day or all night in the rain and the cold. He isn’t strong enough for it now — I’m sure he isn’t, Paul — and it makes my heart bleed to see how he has to go and do it.”
“The fact is,” Paul answered, “a man in his position ought to have a son who can fill his place, and take the heaviest work, at least, off his shoulders. If dear father’d done what he ought to have done with me, I really believe he’d have brought me up to his own trade, and to carry on the business now he isn’t fit for it.”
Faith’s womanly soul revolted at the alternative. She was proud of Paul, her clever, well-educated Oxford brother, and she couldn’t bear to think of him, even in fancy, degraded to the level of a mere common horsey hanger-on of stables. “Oh, don’t say that, Paul, darling!” she cried, half aghast. “I wish dear father had somebody to help him and take his place, now he’s old, of course; but not you, Paul — not you — oh, never, never! Don’t talk of it even. It seems such a perfect desecration.”
“I’d come back now and help him,” Paul answered stubbornly. “I’d come back and help him, even as it is, only I know the shock of it would break his heart. He could never put up with the disappointment. I can manage a horse as well as anybody even now, and I wouldn’t mind the work one bit — I hope I’m strong-minded enough not to be ashamed of my father’s trade — but I’m sure he himself would never consent to it. He’s brought me up to be a gentleman as well as he could, and he’s fixed his heart on my being a credit to the title, whenever the miserable thing falls in to me; and if I were to turn back on it now and come home to help him, he’d feel it was a come down from all his high hopes and ideals for my future, and he’d be a disappointed man henceforth and forever.”
“Oh, yes, and to think of the disgrace before all the county!” Faith added with a sigh. A woman must always see things mainly from the social point of view. “I should hate all the nasty rich people — the Hamiltons, and the Boyd-Galloways, and all that horrid lot — to go sniggering and chuckling over it among themselves, as I know they would, and to say, ‘So that fellow Gascoyne, after sending his son to Oxford and trying to make a gentleman of him, has had to come down from his high horse at last, and bring him back to Hillborough in the end to look after the stables!’ The wretched, sneering things! I know the nasty ways of them!”
“Father could never stand that,” Paul answered reflectively.
“No, never,” Faith replied. “Paul, don’t you ever even speak of it to him.”
But for the three weeks of his stay at Hillborough Paul watched his father with close attention. The baronet cabman wasn’t well, that was clear. He complained constantly of a dull pain in his side, and manifested an unwonted dislike to going out at nights whenever the sky was cold or frosty. The wind seemed to ketch him, he said, as it’d never ketched him in all his life afore, out Kent’s Hill way, specially, where it blew most hard enough to take a man off the box these bitter evenings. He didn’t want no jobs out there by Kent’s Hill this weather, if he could help it.
New Year’s week, however, was a busy week; there were parties and dances at many country houses, and Sir Emery’s slate, hung up behind the door, was thick with orders. Paul was busy, too, with work for editors, which kept him close at his desk, writing for dear life, the best part of the day; for journalism knows no such word as holiday. As much as Sir Emery would let him, however, Paul went out to the yard at odd moments to harness in the horses and do small ends of work whenever the hired man was off on a job, but that wasn’t often; for Sir Emery fretted and fumed to see Paul so occupied, and Faith declared the worry it engendered in her father’s mind was almost worse for him, she believed, than the cold and exposure. Pulled two ways, in fact, by her double devotion, she conspired with Paul to help her father, and then conspired in turn to keep Paul, their own precious Paul, outside the stables at all hazards.
The 4th of January was a bitter cold day. So cold a day had not been known for years at Hillborough. In the morning, Mr. Solomons met Sir Emery by chance at the station. “Why, bless my soul, Gascoyne!” he cried, with a start, “how ill you look, to be sure!” Then he made a mental note to himself that the premium on the noble baronet’s life-policy should have been paid yesterday, and that by all appearances settlement ought not to be delayed longer than to-morrow. You never know what a day may bring forth; and, indeed, if Mr. Solomons hadn’t had an execution to put in that very morning at Shillingford, he would have rushed off there and then, with money in hand, to make sure of his insurance at the London office.
Instead of which he merely remarked in a casual tone as he jumped into his train, “My thermometer registered thirty-nine degrees of frost last night. Take care, Gascoyne, how you expose yourself this weather.”
At ten o’clock that evening, as they sat round the fire, chatting family gossip in a group together, Sir Emery suddenly rose, and looked at the clock. “I must be going now,” he said in a shuffling way. “‘Arf past ten was the hour Miss Boyd-Galloway told me.”
Faith glanced up at him sharply with a pained look.
“Why, you’re not going out again to-night, father,” she exclaimed in surprise. “There’s nothing on the slate. I looked myself to see about it.”
“Well, this ’ere was a verbal border,” Sir Emery answered, putting on his coat with evident difficulty, and some marks of pain in his right side. “Miss Boyd-Galloway, she met me down in the ‘Igh Street this morning, and she told me I was to go out to Kent’s ‘Ill to fetch ‘er. Dinner, I expect, or else a small an’ early. But I reckon it’s dinner; it’s most too soon to go to take up even for a children’s or a Cindereller.”
Paul glanced at Faith, and Faith glanced at Paul. Sir Emery had evidently omitted to note it on the slate on purpose. A rapid signaling went on between their eyes. “Dare I venture?” Paul asked in a mute pantomime of Faith’s: and Faith’s, with a droop of extreme reluctance, made answer dumbly, “I suppose you must. He’s too ill to go; but oh, Paul, Paul, the disgrace and humiliation of it!”
The young man made up his mind at once and irrevocably. “Father,” he sa
id, rising and fronting him as he stood, still struggling with his coat, “sit down where you are. I can’t allow you to go up to Kent’s Hill to-night. You’re not feeling well. I can see you’re suffering. You’re unfit for work. You must let me go to take up Miss Boyd-Galloway instead of you.”
Sir Emery burst into a sudden laugh of genuine amusement. His Paul to go cab-driving! It was too ridiculous. Then the laugh seemed to catch him violently in the side, and he subsided once more with a pained expression of face. “Paul, my boy,” he answered, sinking back into his chair to hide the twinge, “I wouldn’t let you go, no, not for five ‘untired pounds down. You, as is a gentleman born and bred; and out there, afore the eyes of all ‘Illborough and Surrey!”
Faith looked at her mother with an imperious look. “Father,” she cried, seizing his arm convulsively in her grasp, “you know I hate it as much as you do. You know I can’t bear for Paul to do it. But it must be done. It’s a hard wrench, but you must let him go. I can see you’re ill. Dear father, you ought to have told us before, and then perhaps we might have managed to get some other driver.”
“There aint no other driver nor other ‘oss disengaged in all ‘Illborough to-night,” her father answered confidently, shaking his head as he looked at her.
Once more Faith telegraphed with her eyes to Paul, and Paul telegraphed back to Faith. “Father,” he said, laying his hand on the old man’s shoulder persuasively, “you must let me go. There’s no other way out of it. I’ll wrap myself up tight and muffle my throat, if you like, so that nobody’ll notice me; and in the dark, at the door, they’re not likely to look close. But go I must; of that I’m determined.”
The father humored him for a moment. “Well, you can go anyway and put in the ‘osses,” he answered reluctantly. For he hated his son to do anything at all about the stables and coachhouse.
Paul went out and put them in at once with the confidence of old habituation. Then he left them standing alone in the yard while he ran upstairs to get his ulster and comforter. “Wait a minute,” he said, “I’ll soon be down.” Faith went up with him to see that all was snug and warm. “Mind you wrap up well, Paul,” she cried, with her eyes dimmed sadly for the family disgrace. “It’s a bitter cold night. If father was to go up to Kent’s Hill this evening, I’m sure it’d very nearly be the death of him.”
