by Grant Allen
Sir Emery raised his whip with an evident effort. “I’m a-goin’, miss,” he answered, and his voice was thick. “But it’s a main cold night, and the road’s ‘eavy, and the ‘osses is tired.”
“Good gracious, what impertinence!” Miss Boyd-Galloway observed, withdrawing her head and shivering audibly. “It’s my belief, Louisa, that man’s been drinking.”
“He certainly didn’t seem able to move on the box,” her companion retorted, “I noticed his manner.”
“Oh, he’s drunk,” Miss Boyd-Galloway answered with prompt decisiveness. “Dead drunk, I’m certain. Just see how he’s driving. He hasn’t even got sense enough left to guide his horses, and it runs in the blood, you know; they’re a precious bad lot all through, these Gascoynes! To think that a man should have come down to this, whose ancestors were gentlemen born and bred and real Welsh baronets! A common cab-driver, and drunk at that! And the daughter’s just as bad — that horrid girl at the National School at Hillborough. A proud, discontented, impertinent hussey! Why, she won’t even say ‘miss’ to my face when she speaks to me.”
“Phew, what a jolt!” the other lady exclaimed, seizing Miss Boyd-Galloway’s arm as the cab tipped up over a rut in the roadway.
“Drunk! quite drunk!” Miss Boyd-Galloway repeated with a meditative air, now confirmed in her opinion. “I only hope to goodness he won’t upset us in the snow — it’s awfully drifted — anywhere here by the roadside.”
And, indeed, to do the fare full justice, there seemed good reason that particular evening to blame Sir Emery Gascoyne’s driving. As a rule, the baronet was a careful and cautious whip, little given to wild or reckless coachmanship, and inclined to be sparing, both by inclination and policy, of his valuable horseflesh. But to-night he seemed to let the horses wander at their own sweet will, from side to side, hardly guiding them at all through the snow and the crossings. At times they swerved dangerously close to the off-hedge; at others they almost neared the edge of the slope that led down the zigzag. “We shall never get out of this alive,” Miss Boyd-Galloway remarked, leaning back philosophically; “but if we do, Louisa, I shall certainly get Gascoyne’s licence taken away, or have him well fined at Uncle Edward’s petty sessions for reckless driving.”
At the corner by the larches the horses turned sharp into the main road. They turned so abruptly that they almost upset the cab and its precious freight. Miss Boyd-Galloway’s patient soul could stand it no longer. In spite of the cold air and the driving snow she opened the window wide, pushed out her woolen-enveloped head, and expostulated vigorously. “If you don’t take more care, Gascoyne, I shall have you fined. You’re endangering our lives. You’ve been drinking, I’m sure. Pull yourself together, man, and drive carefully now, or else we’ll get out and walk, and then report you.”
Sir Emery essayed an inarticulate answer. But his breath was feeble, and the words stuck in his throat. Miss Boyd-Galloway withdrew her indignant head more angry than ever. “He’s absolutely stupid and dumb with drink,” she said, musing with positive pleasure over the cabman’s delinquencies. “He can’t get out a word, lie’s too drunk to sit straight. It’ll be a mercy if we all get back alive. But I’m morally confident we won’t, so make up your mind for the worst, Louisa.”
Near the entrance to the town, Miss Boyd-Galloway didn’t notice through the dimmed window-panes that their coachman was taking them in the wrong direction. Or, rather, to speak more accurately, the horses, now left to their own devices, were returning at their own pace to their familiar stable.
They plodded along slowly, slowly now, for the snow on the road grew ever deeper and deeper. Their gait was reduced to a shambling walk, with occasional interludes of stumbling and slipping. Miss Boyd-Galloway’s wrath waxed deep and still. She didn’t remonstrate any longer: she felt sure in her own heart Gascoyne had got beyond all that long since: she meditated “fourteen days without the option of a fine,” as the very slightest punishment Uncle Edward could in reason award him.
Finally, and suddenly, a jerk, a halt. They turned unexpectedly down a narrow side entrance. Miss Boyd-Galloway was aware of a courtlike shadow. Houses rose sheer around her on every side. Surely, surely, this was not the Priory, not the paternal mansion. Miss Boyd-Galloway put out her head and looked about her once more. “Oh, Louisa, Louisa, what on earth are we to do?” she cried, in impotent despair. “The man’s so drunk that instead of taking us home he’s allowed the horses to come back to their own stables!”
“I shall get out this minute and walk!” her friend ejaculated sleepily.
They got out and stood by the side of the cab. “Now, Gascoyne,” Miss Boyd-Galloway began in a very shrill tone, “this is really too bad. You’re asleep on the box, sir. Wake up, I say; wake up now, will you?”
But Sir Emery sat stiff and stark in his place, and never-heeded even the admonition of Miss Boyd-Galloway’s stout umbrella, poked hard against his side in practical remonstrance.
As they stood there, wondering, the back door of the house was flung open wide, and Faith Gascoyne, with her head uncovered, rushed hastily out into the dark, cold courtyard. She took no notice of the two ladies who stood there, shivering, in their wraps and shawls, on the snow-clad stones, but darted wildly forward toward the figure on the box. “Father, father!” she cried in an agonized voice, “are you all right, darling?”
“No, he’s not all right,” Miss Boyd-Galloway answered testily, retreating toward the passage. “He’s anything but right, and you ought to be ashamed of him. He’s as drunk as an owl, and he’s brought us back here to his own place, instead of taking us home as he ought to the Priory.”
-But Faith paid little heed to the lady’s words. She was far too agitated and frightened for that. She flung her arms wildly round that stiff, stark figure, and kissed its mouth over and over again with a terrible foreboding. Sir Emery sat there unheeding still. Then Faith started back aghast, with a sudden flash of discovery, and held up her hands in an agony of horror and alarm to heaven. A fierce cry burst from her quivering lips. “He’s dead!” she sobbed out in her agony. “He’s dead! Oh, father, father!”
And so he was. He had died in harness. “Acute pleurisy, aggravated by exposure,” the doctor called it in his official statement next day. But for the present, all Faith knew and felt was that her father was gone, and that she stood there that moment alone with her bereavement.
In time, as she stood there, helpless and unnerved, a neighbor or two came out and carried him in. He was quite, quite dead: almost as stiff and cold as stone with the frost already. They laid him down tenderly on the horsehair sofa in the little parlor. Sir Emery Gascoyne, Baronet, had met his death well, performing his duty.
And Miss Boyd-Galloway in the yard without, staring hard at her friend, and wringing her hands, remarked more than once in a hushed voice, “This is very awkward indeed, Louisa! How on earth are we to get home without any carriage, I wonder? I really believe we shall have to tramp it!”
CHAPTER XXXI.
“LE ROI EST MORT: VIVE LE ROI!”
WITH a heavy heart, and with vague forebodings of evil, Paul tramped wearily home along the frozen roadway. As he neared Plowden’s Court, at the end of that slow and painful march, he saw for himself there were lights in the windows, and signs within of great bustle and commotion.
Cold as it was and late at night, the news had already spread over the neighborhood that “Gascoyne was gone,” and more than one sympathizing friend had risen from bed and dropped in to comfort Faith and her mother in their great sorrow. The working classes and the smaller tradesfolk are prompter and franker in their expressions of sympathy with one another than those whom in our self-satisfied way we call their betters. They come to help in the day of trouble, where servants and dependants are not ready at call to do the mere necessary physical work entailed on every house by moments of bereavement.
At the door Mr. Solomons was waiting to receive the poor weary young man. He raised his hat respectfully
as Paul staggered in. “Good-evening, Sir Paul,” he said, with marked courtesy. And that unwonted salute was the first intimation Paul received of his sudden and terrible loss that awful evening.
“No, no, Mr. Solomons,” he cried, grasping the old man’s hand with the fervid warmth which rises up spontaneous within us all at moments of deep emotion. “Not that! Not that! Don’t tell me so, don’t tell me so! Not that! He isn’t dead! Not dead! Oh no, not dead! Don’t say so!”
Mr. Solomons shook his head gravely. “Doctor’s been here and found him quite dead,” he answered with solemn calmness. “He drove Miss Boyd-Galloway back from the dean’s, through the snow and the wind, till he froze on the box. He was too ill to go, and he died at his post, like a Gascoyne ought to do.”
Paul flung himself back on a chair and burst at once into a wild flood of tears. His heart was full. He didn’t dare to ask for Faith or his mother. Yet even in that first full flush of a great sorrow, strange to say, he was dimly conscious within himself of that indefinable self-satisfaction which so often buoys us up for the moment under similar circumstances. He felt it would always be a comfort to him to remember that he had done his very best to avert that terrible incident, had done his very best to take his father’s place that night, and to follow in his footsteps on his last sad journey.
Mr. Solomons moved slowly to the foot of the stairs. “Sir Paul has returned,” he called softly to Faith in the room above, where she sat and sobbed beside her dead father.
And, indeed, from that time forth Mr. Solomons seldom forgot to give the new baronet the full benefit of his title whenever he spoke to him, and to exact the rigorous use of it from all and sundry. It was part of his claims on Paul, in fact, that Paul should accept the heavy burden of the baronetcy. Meaning to float him in the social and financial sense, Mr. Solomons appreciated the immense importance of starting Sir Paul as Sir Paul Gascoyne, Baronet, from the very beginning. It must be understood at the outset that this was a genuine titled Gascoyne, and no shadow of a doubt or an incognito of any sort must hang over the fact or the nature of the evidence. It was all very well for Sir Emery to hide his light under a bushel in a country town; but Sir Paul, as exhibited by his financial adviser, must be carefully proclaimed from the housetops in the city of Westminster.
In his own interests Mr. Solomons was determined that everybody should recognize his protégé as a man of fashion.
Faith came down and threw herself into her brother’s arms. You did your best, Paul,” she cried, faltering. “I know it. I know it.”
The tears stood dim in Mr. Solomons’ eyes. He could stand an execution for debt with stoical stolidity, but he could not stand this. He took out his pocket handkerchief and retired into the stairway, leaving brother and sister to their own silent sympathy.
Slowly and gradually it came home to each of them how great a change that night had wrought in their joint existences. The old life at Hillborough would now be broken up for them both altogether. New ways and fields lay open before them.
The next few days, indeed, were, of course, taken up by the needful preparations for Sir Emery’s funeral. It was a new sensation for Paul to find himself the head of the family, with his mother and sister dependent upon him for aid and advice, and compelled to decide all questions as they arose upon his own responsibility. Mr. Solomons, however, who had his good side, though he kept it often most studiously in the background, was kindness itself to Paul in this sudden emergency. To say the truth, he liked the young man; and, with his ingrained Jewish respect for rank, he was proud of being able to patronize a real British baronet. He had patronized Sir Emery already, to be sure; but then Sir Emery had never been born in the purple. He was at best but a country cabman who had unexpectedly inherited a barren baronetcy. It was otherwise with Paul. Mr. Solomons was determined that, as his young friend had had an Oxford education, so he should be received everywhere from the very beginning in his own proper place in English society. The fact was, Mr. Solomons’ relations with Paul had made him feel, at last, a certain parental interest in his young debtor’s position and prospects. Regarding him, at first, merely in the light of a precarious investment, to be diligently exploited for Mr. Lionel’s ultimate benefit, he had come in the end to regard him with some personal liking and fondness, as a pupil with whose progress in life he might be fairly satisfied. So he came out well on this occasion; so well, indeed, that for several days after the sad event he never mentioned to Paul the disagreeable fact about his having neglected to pay Sir Emery’s life-premium on the very night of that fatal engagement.
The neglect left Paul still more heavily indebted than he might otherwise have been. But as he had voluntarily assumed all responsibility for the debt himself, he had really nothing on this ground to complain of.
The funeral was fixed for Wednesday, the 10th. On Tuesday afternoon, as Paul sat alone in the little front parlor with the spotted dog on the mantelpiece — that spotted dog of his father’s that Faith had so longed for years to remove, and that she wouldn’t now have removed from its familiar place for untold thousands — he heard a well-known sturdy voice inquire of the stable-boy who lounged about the door, “Is this Sir Paul Gascoyne’s? Does he happen to be in? Will you give him my card then?”
With no shadow of shame or compunction on his face, Paul flung open the door and welcomed his old college friend into that dingy little sitting room. “Why, Thistleton,” he cried, “this is so kind, so good of you! You’re the only one of all my Oxford acquaintances who’s come to see me, although, of course, I didn’t expect them. But you were in Yorkshire last week and meant to stay there.
What on earth’s brought you down to this part of England so suddenly?”
The blond young man’s face, on receiving this question, was a study to behold. It would have made the fortune of a rising dramatic artist. He changed his hat in his hand awkwardly as he answered with a distinctly shamefaced air, “I thought — as a mark of respect for the family — I — I ought to be present at Sir Emery’s funeral. And, indeed, my father and mother thought that — in view of existing and future circumstances — I couldn’t possibly absent myself.”
Paul failed to grasp the precise reason for this interposition on the part of the senior Thistletons in so strictly private and personal an affair as his father’s funeral; for as yet he had no idea of the state of relations between Faith and his friend; but he confined himself for the moment to asking in some surprise, “Why, how did you hear at all about my poor father?”
The blond young man hesitated even more remarkably and distinctly than before. Then he blurted out the truth with that simple-hearted directness of speech which was natural to him, “Faith wrote and told me,” he answered in his straightforwardness.
It struck Paul as odd, even in that time of trouble, that Thistleton should speak of his sister as “Faith” and not as “Miss Gascoyne,” as he had always been accustomed to do at Oxford; but he set it down to the privilege of intimacy with the family, and to the greater frankness of tongue which we all of us use when death breaks down for a moment the conventions and barriers of our artificial intercourse. Still, it certainly did strike him as odd that Faith should have found time at such a moment to write of their loss to a mere casual acquaintance.
Thistleton rightly interpreted the puzzled look upon Paul’s face, and went on sheepishly, though with charming frankness, “I hadn’t heard for several days, much longer than usual, indeed, so I telegraphed night before last to ask the reason.”
Then a light burst in all at once upon Paul’s mind; he saw it all, and was glad; but he forebore to speak of it under existing circumstances.
“Might I see Faith?” the blond young man inquired timidly.
“I’ll ask her,” Paul answered, moving slowly up the stairs to the room where his sister sat alone in her grief with their mother.
But Faith only shook her head decidedly. “Not now, Paul,” she said; “it was kind of him to come; but tell him I can’t se
e him — till, till, after to-morrow.”
“Perhaps he won’t stay,” Paul put in, without attaching much importance himself to the remark.
“Oh, yes,” Faith answered with simple confidence. “Now he’s once come, he’ll stop, of course — at least until he’s seen me.”
Paul went back to his friend in the dull little parlor. To his immense surprise, Thistleton, after receiving the message with a frank, satisfied nod, began at once talking about the family plans with an interest that really astonished him. Paul had always liked the blond young man, and he knew the blond young man liked him. But he was hardly prepared for so much personal sympathy in all their arrangements as Thistleton manifested. The blond young man was most anxious to know where Paul would live and what he would do; whether or not he would at once assume his title; what would become of his mother and Faith; and whether the family headquarters were likely, under these new circumstances, to be shifted from Hillborough, say, in the direction of London.
All these questions took Paul very much at a disadvantage. Absorbed only in their own immediate and personal loss, he had found no time as yet to think or arrange in any way about the future. All he could say was that he would consider these things at some later time, but that for the moment their plans were wholly undecided.
Thistleton sat still and gazed blankly into the fire. “I shall have to talk it over with Faith, you know,” he said quietly at last. “I see many reasons for taking things promptly in hand at the moment of the crisis.”
“I’m afraid Faith won’t be able to talk things over calmly for some weeks at least,” Paul answered, with deepening wonderment. “This sudden blow, of course, has quite unnerved us. It was all so instantaneous, so terrible, so unexpected.”
“Oh, I’m in no hurry,” Thistleton replied, still gazing straight ahead into the embers of the fire. “Now I’m here I may as well stop here for the next few weeks or so. They’ve given me a very comfortable room at the Red Lion. And one thing’s clear, now your father’s gone, Gascoyne, you’ve enough to do with those claims alone; your sister mustn’t be allowed to be a further burden upon you.”
