Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  “But not every girl— “Hubert began.

  Sir Emilius snapped his fingers with subdued impatience. “Don’t talk nonsense to me, sir,” he said. “It’s as plain as a pikestaff. You fall in love with the girls you see; I know that very well. How the dickens can you fall in love with the girls you don’t see? “And he snapped his jaw firmly.

  Hubert gazed up at the sky through his half-closed eyelids. Red rifts of cloud flecked it.

  “My dear uncle,” he answered, “if the poet in me gets the better of the anatomist, doesn’t the anatomist in you get the better of the poet? Quite too much the better? Can’t you see in turn that the world you ignore is every bit as real, every bit as important, as the world you acknowledge?”

  Sir Emilius shook his head. “No, I can’t,” he responded, testily. “I say, you fell in love with the little Italian girl because you met her; you didn’t meet her because you were predestined by nature to fall in love with her.”

  Hubert turned the subject. He was a consistent determinist, and it is not worth while for determinists to argue. “My one fear now,” he said, “is about the Marchese.”

  “So is mine.” Sir Emilius assented with promptitude.

  “A Florentine gentleman of the oldest descent,” Hubert mused on, stroking his mother’s hand in his. “It seems so presumptuous of me!”

  “To take his daughter off his hands,” Sir Emilius answered, smiling. “I didn’t mean quite what you mean, Hubert. A Florentine nobleman is generally poor, and always grasping. I meant I had my doubts as to his solvency and respectability.” For Sir Emilius, being a true-born Briton, had a low opinion of mere Foreigners.

  “Why, the Tornabuoni were great folk in Florence,” Hubert cried, astonished, “when the Egremonts were nothing more than Lancashire farmers! He may consider me — as I am — whole worlds beneath Fede.”

  “He may think small beer of our English gentility, no doubt,” Sir Emilius answered, “but he’ll think precious well of our English consols, you may be certain, Hubert. They touched 114 yesterday, I see by the Standard. I know these Florentines, my boy; and you may take my word for it they are not the romantic Italians of Covent Garden opera. They know the precise worth of twenty shillings 4 sterling in King Humbert’s currency to half a centesimo.”

  “Well, I’m anxious, at anyrate, to see Fede’s father,” Hubert went on, gazing upward. He had lived so frankly in the bosom of his family that he had none of the mauvaise honte so many young men feel in discussing their future wife before their relations. “So much depends upon one’s father and mother!”

  “Everything,” Sir Emilius assented, promptly. There, he was entirely at one with his nephew.

  “The Marchese must be a splendid and high-minded man,” Hubert continued, shading his eyes with his hand as he gazed at the mountains. “I only wish I could ever have seen my own father. One would like to know what noble characteristics, what intellectual traits one has a chance of inheriting; for to a physiologist, of course, heredity’s everything.”

  Sir Emilius was just about to cut short this awkward colloquy by observing diplomatically, “Colonel Egremont was one of the finest-built soldiers in the British army,” when his sister anticipated him by answering in his place, “Your father was a man to be proud of, Hubert.”

  Sir Emilius raised his eyebrows, and glanced hard at his sister. He did not exclaim, “Eh? what!” He merely whistled a tune unobtrusively. But he uttered not a word. He would not interfere in so delicate a matter. Still, it was all very well to say in the abstract, “Honor thy father and thy mother;” but how any one who had ever known Walter Egremont could, for a moment, describe him as “a man to be proud of,” passed Sir Emilius’s comprehension. However, it was Julia’s business, not his; and as long as she chose to keep Hubert in ignorance of his father’s real history, Sir Emilius did not feel quixotically inclined to enlighten him. Nevertheless, he rose, and, still whistling to himself, moved away some twenty yards, picking a late autumn flower or two ostentatiously as he went, lest it should embarrass Julia to know he was mentally criticising her veracity.

  Mother and son were left alone. There was a moment’s pause.’ Then Mrs. Egremont began again. “Though I sometimes fancy, Hubert,” she said, in a grave voice, “you make too much of heredity.”

  “You can’t make too much of it,” Hubert answered, with decision. “In mankind, it’s omnipotent. My studies at my hospital, and afterwards my psychological observations at the asylum, have shown me, on the contrary, that not even men of science themselves have yet appreciated the whole wonder, the full marvel and mystery of heredity. Look at this case, for example — one only out of hundreds. I had a man on my list who had always kept a diary from the time he was twenty. He was a medical man; and he noted everything with medical accuracy. At four-and-twenty and two weeks, he lost his first tooth — the second left molar in the upper jaw. He had two twin sons. At four-and-twenty and three weeks, one of the twins lost his first tooth in turn. I asked which tooth, and found it was the second left molar in the upper jaw. The other twin’s teeth were apparently sound; but, a fortnight later, he had a violent toothache. I inquired in what tooth — exactly as I expected — the second left molar! That’s the kind of result that has met me every day in the course of my researches. We seem like clocks, set each to run our appointed course in so many years and days and minutes. I know it so well now, that I almost feel at times as if I had no individuality at all of my own; I recognize myself as nothing more in the end than the sum of my joint parental tendencies.”

  “It seems a dangerous doctrine,” Mrs. Egremont murmured, with the feminine habit of seeing everything in an ethical light. “It may lead to fatalism, and strike at the root of all moral endeavor.”

  “If it is the truth, it is not dangerous,” Hubert answered, with firmer faith. “The truth, dearest, is never dangerous. Truth never fears truth. Only a lie is liable to lead us into error.”

  Mrs. Egremont winced. “Perhaps so,” she answered, with a pang of doubt. “But are we all of us strong enough for the truth, my boy? I sometimes feel as if — as if it might crush and kill us.”

  Hubert gazed at her tenderly. “Dear mother,” he said, with an affectionate smile, “you of all women to urge such a fallacy! Why, you couldn’t tell anything but the truth if you tried! You must be true! The truth is native to you.”

  His mother winced again. “Well, I hope you will be satisfied with Fede’s father,” she said, very slowly, to change the subject.

  “I hope Fede’s father will be satisfied with me; that’s more to the point,” her son answered, gaily, bending his arm, and feeling the biceps. “I shall do my best to please him. I shall make myself all things to all men to suit him. After all, the Egremonts are English gentlefolk; and you have one of the prettiest places in Devonshire. I don’t see why he shouldn’t be ready to accept me as a son-in-law. Though, to be sure, the Tornabuoni were great lords in Florence before we and our kind were ever dreamt of.”

  Mrs. Egremont rose again. “We ought to be getting back to the inn,” she said, wearily. “It has been hot to-day, and I feel rather tired. I don’t know why, but I always feel tired on the Continent nowadays.”

  “Not only tired, but frightened, I fancy,”

  Hubert went on, without attaching much importance to his words. “It seems to me you’re half afraid of foreigners. Uncle Mill despises them: you seem to fear them. Come along, Uncle Mill; we’re going back to the Black Eagle.”

  Mrs. Egremont’s look was certainly one of fright as Hubert said those words. It was clear he had stirred some deep chord within her. She walked back to the inn by her son’s side in silence. When they reached the door, the Tornabuoni had just gone in to their rooms from the balcony. And the concierge, as directed, said nothing as to their arrival.

  Sir Emilius and his sister strolled into the hotel, leaving Hubert on the veranda. While they went up in the lift, the doctor turned a searching glance on Mrs. Egremont.

 
; “Do you think, Julia,” he said, slowly, “it’s quite wise — never to tell him?”

  Mrs. Egremont flushed up, and evaded the question. “I have told him — as much as it’s well for him to know,” she answered. She paused for a second, then she began again. “Truth,” she mused, “is relative. He knows the truth — as far as I conceive it.”

  “Very relative indeed,” Sir Emilius assented. “So relative, that it seems to come out quite upside down in some relations, doesn’t it?” Mrs. Egremont said nothing: for she knew when to be silent.

  CHAPTER IV.

  AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN.

  IT was still day. The delicate rose-colored glow within rather than upon the ice of the Alps had not yet given place to the cold steel-blue of twilight. Hubert, weary from his climb, waited outside in the cool for a minute or two, calling for a glass of light beer to refresh him after his toil before going in to his room to get ready for dinner. Autumn was in the air, but the day was summer-like. As he sat at the table outside the veranda and drank his lager, the concierge came down and began talking to him quite humanly. Towards the end of the season, indeed, even a concierge often discovers unsuspected human traits that are really refreshing. He unbends from the long restraint of summer.

  “Beautiful lights just now on the Himmelberg, sir,” he said, turning to Hubert. “It’s a glorious mountain. Such a rearing mass! Go where you will in the world, you’ll find nothing lovelier.”

  “You know the world, then?” Hubert interposed, smiling, and amused at his air of universal travel.

  “I ought to know it,” the concierge retorted, speaking fluently in English, “for I’ve lived in half the best hotels in Europe.”

  “For example?” Hubert queried.

  The concierge ran them over, ransacking the distant cells of his memory. “The Métropole in London,” he said; “I was interpreter there; the Continental, the Grand, and the Chatham in Paris; the Italie in Rome; the Hotel de Bavière in Munich; the Bristol at Naples — half-a-dozen others.”

  “Why, you know the Continent well,” Hubert observed, surprised to find the man so widely diffused.

  “Yes, and a little beyond it — Shepheard’s at Cairo, the Kirsch at Algiers, the Brunswick at Boston, Cook’s Hotel at Jerusalem. Yet, go where you will in the world — I say it still — you won’t find a finer view anywhere than the Himmelberg.”

  “But you’re not a Bernese Swiss,” Hubert interposed, eyeing him. “I can see that instantly.”

  “Why not?” the concierge asked, surprised in turn at his visitor’s confidence.

  “Oh, I can tell it at a glance by your build and features. You come from the Grisons, I’ll bet; you were brought up Roumansch-speaking.”

  “Quite right,” the concierge answered, with a smile of amusement at the young Englishman’s penetration. “I come from the Grisons, as you say; I have the face and figure of the Rhaetian mountaineers. But how did you guess I was brought up Roumansch-speaking?”

  “If you were a true Bernese,” Hubert answered, after a second’s reflection, “you would have a more distinctive German accent — the Thuringian accent — in speaking English. But you speak it admirably — as most of your countrymen do; and what foreign tinge you have — very little indeed — is not Thuringian at all, but belongs to the type of the Latin races.”

  The concierge was flattered. He drew himself up at once. “You are right,” he answered again. “We of the Rhaetian Alps all know our descent, and all are proud of it. It is a thing to remember. We are the original Etruscans!”

  “You are,” Hubert replied. “And, if I may venture to say it, only in the Grisons would a man in your position be likely to know it.”

  “That is true, too,” the concierge admitted. “We are like your own Scotch. We are all of us educated. And we learn languages easily. You see, our native Roumansch stands nearest of any modern Latin dialect to the original Latin. Therefore we learn French, Italian, Spanish easily; because the roots of all of them are contained in purer forms in our own dialect. And we speak German, too, for the most part from childhood; so that languages come naturally to us. Besides which,” and he drew himself up with a curious pride, “we inherit the old Etruscan intelligence.” He spoke in quite another tone, now he had begun to discuss a subject which interested him, from the servile accent, half cringing, half familiar, which was habitual to him in the exercise of his office as concierge. He had dropped the recollection of a distinction of class. He saw that his hearer was interested; and he went off into that not unnatural eulogy of his native canton which every intelligent Graubünder always delivers to all willing listeners.

  “Then you saw I was from the Grisons?” he said, inquiringly, at last.

  “Yes,” Hubert answered. “I was sure of it. I gathered it both from your bodily appearance and your liquid accent. You have the true Etruscan build and features, and the Etruscan lips. You remind me exactly of the figures one sees on the Etruscan sarcophagi — strong, short, and thickset.”

  “That is so once more,” the concierge asserted, delighted. “Have you ever seen the tombs of the Volumnii, near Assisi?”

  “I visited them last year,” Hubert answered, growing interested.

  “Well, do you remember the sculptured nobles all carved in white stone who lounged on the lids? There was one of them near the door, an old Etruscan chief, who might easily have been taken for a portrait of my father.”

  “That would not be surprising,” Hubert replied. “I know such cases elsewhere. A wooden statue belonging to the old Egyptian Empire, six thousand years ago, was dug up at Memphis, and it exactly resembled the Arab sheikh of the neighboring modern Egyptian village. I have studied these questions of heredity for some years, and I find that when one can compare family portraits together for several generations, the most surprising likenesses often reveal themselves between kinsmen who are separated from one another by centuries.”

  “That is so, I know,” the concierge answered, without any consciousness of obtruding into a scientific field where his observation was scanty. “For in the Grisons to this day I find hundreds of faces which exactly reproduce the Etruscan statues, and the wall-paintings on the tombs I have been to see at Corneto and Volaterra.” Where else in the world, Hubert thought to himself — except, perhaps, as the concierge said, in Scotland — would a man of the people have observed or remembered such a class of facts as this Rhaetian peasant?

  Hubert was just going on to hazard a guess at the nationality of the various waiters and chambermaids — for he had a curious knack of jumping at correct conclusions on these matters — when their attention was suddenly diverted by the appearance of a stranger, who wound slowly down the dusty high road from the direction of the Gotthard.

  He was a singular-looking figure, very tall and erect, of military bearing, with a knapsack on his back, and a hat stuck jauntily on one side of his head in an ostentatiously rakish fashion. From a little distance, he looked at first sight like an English gentleman; seen nearer, he still preserved some relics of gentility, almost obscured, however, by the shabbiness of his dress and the obvious marks of vulgar dissipation on his bloated features. Even his erectness itself turned out on closer view to be somewhat deceptive; the man held himself straight, it is true, with an almost exaggerated air of self-respect; yet his back was bent at the neck, and his knees were uncertain. The broad and cynical face had once most probably been handsome; now, drink and hard living had utterly degraded it. As he strolled up to the table, with a roll in his gait, trying his best to assume an attitude of careless ease, Hubert saw at a glance he was indeed an English gentleman — most likely an officer — but in the very last stage of drunken downfall.

  The stranger nodded, and flung his knapsack on the table by Hubert’s side. “Phew! Hot walking,” he said, mopping his mouth and forehead with a rather dirty handkerchief. He concealed his still dirtier cuffs by a little jerk under his sleeves with a dexterity which argued long use and practice. “I’ve just
tramped over the Col from Goeschenen.”

  “It’s a beautiful walk,” Hubert answered, coldly, finishing his beer and half rising.

  “It’s a damned hot walk,” the newcomer responded, with a quaint air of easy bonhomie. “It may be beautiful: I’m not much judge of that, for I never noticed it; but I know it’s confoundedly long and hilly. And the dust — oh, I’ll trouble you! Haven’t had such a pull for close on twenty years. As an officer and a gentleman, I’m unaccustomed to walking; I take carriage exercise.” He drew himself up, hid one shabby trouser behind the other leg, and turned to the concierge. “Here you, young fellow,” he said, in an overbearing tone; “got anything to drink, eh?”

  The concierge surveyed him contemptuously from head to foot. The stranger’s clothes were certainly much more than merely dusty: they were threadbare and dirty. “You can call the waiter,” the concierge said, with slow distinctness, “and give him your order: whatever you like — coffee, lemonade, seltzer, soda-water.”

  The officer and gentleman flung him back his contempt with interest. “Lemonade!

  Seltzer! Soda-water!” he cried. “Do I look like a teetotaller? I suppose you take me for one of Dr. Lunn’s psalm-singing Grindel-walders! No, sir. Not soda-water. I’m not taking any. Brandy, neat brandy, the best cognac you’ve got — and plenty of it!”

  The concierge answered nothing. He just pressed a little hand-bell. “Alphonse,” he said to the close-cropped waiter who answered it, “take this — gentleman’s order.”

  The newcomer, quite undisconcerted at the tone, repeated his instructions in excellent French.

  “Cognac, monsieur; oui, monsieur,” the waiter answered mechanically, with a glance at the trousers.

  He turned on his heel. The stranger called out after him. “And look here,” he added in English, “while you’re about it, young man, you may as well bring me some absinthe and some vermouth.”