by Grant Allen
His wife rose wildly again, and approached him in her despair. “No, finish it off at once,” she cried, pulling out her purse. “How much do you want? Name your own price! I know one thing alone ever brings you near me. Say what you demand, and go. But don’t shame me before Hubert. If he were to come — oh, my God, it would kill me!”
“No, it wouldn’t,” the Colonel answered, with the air of one who has tried, and knows. “It takes a good deal to kill a woman. You’re too tough for that, by half. Besides, you needn’t be in such an unseemly hurry.” He assumed once more his mock-pathetic tone. “Why accuse your own lawful husband of mercenary conduct?” he asked, holding out both hands in a theatrical appeal. “Is filthy lucre everything? Don’t you allow some weight to the strength of the natural affections? It’s five years since we had the mutual pleasure of meeting. It will, doubtless, be five years more before we have a chance of that pleasure again. Let us enjoy at least some little interchange of social amenities before we proceed to the dull and dry details of pecuniary arrangements.” Mrs. Egremont drew back from him. “Are you absolutely heartless?” she murmured.
“Not at all, my love; not at all,” the creature replied, with that unspeakable ogle. “I’m insisting on the sacred privileges of domestic intercourse. It’s you, my dear, who display a base desire to reduce the relations between us to the barest rudiments of a commercial basis.” He lunged forward, awkwardly, with an attempt to kiss her. Mrs. Egremont sprang back with a wild little scream of horror. “Walter,” she cried, “you’re drunk!” And she tore herself away from him.
“Why, of course; yes, I’m drunk,” the man answered, laughing hoarsely. “You don’t suppose I was going to take the trouble to get sober, just because I was coming to see you, do you? But I’m not so drunk as usual by a long way, for all that.” He drew himself up with tipsy solemnity. “Matter has three states,” he said, “solid, liquid, and gaseous. I have three states — drunk, very drunk, and dead drunk. I’m only just simple drunk at present; and that’s quite as much as you could expect from me, Julia.”
He drew a step closer. Mrs. Egremont held out her hand to repel him. “Stand off, sir!” she cried. “Don’t come one pace nearer, and don’t presume to address me by my Christian name! Take your money and go! If you don’t respect me, you might at least respect Hubert.”
She glanced around her, terrified lest Hubert should come up. But Colonel Egremont only gazed back at her with a vacant smile. “Might I, really?” he murmured. “What! get sober for Hubert? Oh, no; hang it all, I’m as sober this moment as ever I mean to be.” He drew himself up for a moment. “Do you remember when I had charge of the casting at Woolwich Arsenal?” he inquired.
“Do I remember?” his wife answered. “Can I ever forget it?”
“Well, don’t you recollect, if we once let the fires down in the blast-furnace, it took us a week, and two hundred tons of coal, ever to get them back properly into working order. Now, I’m just like a blast-furnace. If once I got sober, it ‘ud take me a week, and two dozen of brandy, to get comfortably drunk again.” Mrs. Egremont’s fingers trembled on her purse. She looked round her once more with a piteous glance. “Oh, Walter!” she cried, “for heaven’s sake, have mercy upon me! Name your own price; but name it quickly!” Colonel Egremont gazed down through his pince-nez most contemptuously on the purse. “What, gold?” he said. “Notes? Do you take me for an idiot? Do you think I came all the way from Lugano for that? No, no, my dear Julia, I value the domestic affections a world too high to dream of curtailing this delightful visit under a couple of hundred pounds. I suppose you have your chequebook?”
“A couple of hundred pounds!” Mrs. Egremont echoed. “Walter, it’s impossible.”
“Impossible! Not at all! Or — I come back to Milworth. Now, don’t look so appalled; and don’t plead poverty. When I married you, you had a nice little fortune of your own, dear lady. Consider how you’ve treated me. We’d lived only five years together, like a pair of turtle-doves — coo, coo, and nestle — when, all at once, you refuse me the privilege of residing with you any longer.”
“Because no self-respecting woman could degrade herself one day more by admitting your presence in her house, Walter.”
The Colonel took no notice of the interruption, but continued his monologue. “And as you had, by settlement, the power of the purse — all through your father’s confounded pig-headedness — you extort from me an absurd and ridiculous bargain that I must pass my winters at Nice, Cannes, Algiers, Monte Carlo, and my summers in the Apennines or Lord knows where, so long as it’s a good three hundred miles away from you. I ask you, is that the right way to treat the man you promised to love, honor, obey, and cherish? Well, now, I’ve broken loose! I’m not going to stand it! I’m a free man, am I not? I’m an English gentleman?”
“You were once,” Mrs. Egremont answered, surveying him despairingly.
The Colonel drew himself up with military pride. “And I mean henceforth,” he said, “to resume my proper place in society. I will no longer accept your miserable pittance.” He reeled for a second, and steadied himself, repeating once more the words, “miserable pittance.”
“That’s not intoxication,” he went on; “that’s this beastly ataxy. But my terms are simple — two hundred down, I say, and an advance to a thousand a year in future!”
“Walter, I can’t do it. The estate won’t stand it.”
The bloated face was wrinkled with a cynical smile of disbelief. “It won’t do,” the man answered, shaking his head. “You can’t come it over me. I know that silly cry — agricultural depression. Everybody uses it now as an excuse for meanness. But it won’t go down here! You must pay up, I say — or take me back at Milworth.”
Mrs. Egremont’s face was deadly white; but her voice was resolute. “I will not pay you,” she said. “I will not — and I cannot.” The Colonel sprang forward unsteadily, and seized her wrists in his hands. He was a powerful man still, in spite of the ataxy. “You won’t pay up, won’t you?” he cried, in a threatening voice. “We’ll see about that!” He wrenched her wrists hard. “Will you or won’t you?” he cried angrily, twisting them.
“Let me go, sir,” Mrs. Egremont exclaimed, with a little cry of pain. “Remember, if Hubert comes and finds out who you are, you lose your last hold on me. Only for his sake do I allow you anything.”
“Will you sign?” the Colonel asked, giving her wrist another wrench.
“I will not,” Mrs. Egremont answered, in great pain, but immovable. “Oh, let go; you hurt me!”
“I mean to hurt you. Sign?”
“Take your hands off me, I say! How dare you touch me?”
The Colonel wrenched again. “I won’t let you go,” he said, “till you’ve promised to arrange with me.”
“Never!” Mrs. Egremont cried, “never!” She lifted her voice and called aloud in her torture, “Emilius! Emilius!”
Next moment, an apparition of a dainty morning dress round a corner of the shrubbery — and — Fede and Hubert stood full in view of them.
CHAPTER IX.
THE COLONEL SCORES.
HUBERT saw nothing but a man — a vile-looking man, the hardened drunkard of the previous evening — holding his mother’s wrists and evidently trying to bully her. In a second he had rushed forward and seized the fellow’s hands. “Stand back, sir!” he cried, flinging him off. “How dare you? How dare you?” And he threw the Colonel aside with a violent effort. “Mother, what does this mean?” he exclaimed, gazing gently at her. “Who is this man that’s frightening you!”
The worst had come! At sight of her son, Mrs. Egremont sank back, pale and trembling, into her seat, and covered her face with her hands, shame and fear fighting hard in her. “Oh, Hubert, what shall I do? “she moaned aloud, through her sobs. Then she turned to the Colonel. “Go, go,” she wailed again. “I can’t stand it! Go!” And she trembled violently.
Hubert faced the man again. The Colonel posed there, with an affected ai
r of gentlemanly indifference. “Explain, sir!” Hubert cried, confronting him. “How dare you lay your hands on this lady?” And a twitch in his foot displayed his first impulse.
Colonel Egremont drew himself up with a conscious effort. “You demand an explanation?” he said slowly, facing him.
“I do,” the young man answered, hardly able to address him.
“No, Hubert, no,” Mrs. Egremont moaned, pleading, and holding his arm.
“I demand it,” Hubert answered again, laying one soothing hand on his mother’s shoulder.
“Then you shall have it,” the Colonel replied, with what shred of dignity was left him. He drew a card from his pocket, and handed it to Hubert. “There is my name, young man,’ he went on in a very deliberate way. “This lady is my wife. And you, I presume, are my son — Hubert Egremont.”
Hubert glanced at the card in a whirl of amazement. The world swam round him. “Colonel Walter Egremont, late Royal Engineers!” He turned, half faint, to the drooping figure on the seat. “Mother, mother,” he cried, “what does it mean? Who is this man? How dare he use my father’s name — my father’s?”
Mrs. Egremont bowed her head in a fierce burst of remorse. “I did it for your sake,” she answered, cowering. “Oh, Hubert, don’t hate me for it. What he says is true, my boy. I married that creature! He is my husband!” Hubert drew back, appalled. One hand was on his forehead. He scanned the man over from head to foot, disdainfully. Colonel Egremont tried to stand before his gaze without reeling. “Your husband!” Hubert echoed. “My father! That thing! That creature! Oh, mother, can you mean it? Don’t say so, dear mother!”
The quaver in his voice was concentrated agony. Mrs. Egremont dared not raise her eyes to meet her son’s. She only murmured again, “For your own sake, my boy, I tried to hide it from you. I paid him to keep away. I have paid him for years. You know why now. What he says is true. This man is my husband.”
“And your father,” Colonel Egremont added, with malicious satisfaction.
“But he died — he died twenty years ago!” Hubert broke out wildly, unable to believe the hideous truth, now he heard it.
“So she told you,” the Colonel answered, with a smile of triumph. “So she told you, no doubt. But” — he dug his own ribs demonstratively with his thumbs—” I venture to say, she was quite mistaken. I’m alive and kicking. I can kick hard still, thank heaven. Oh, she poses, of course, as a model mother.
But she’s brought you up, my boy, on a pack of lies. Come to your father’s bosom, my long-lost son!” He stretched out his arms melodramatically — then reeled again, and caught hold of the rustic seat with one hand to balance himself. “We have been too long apart!” he went on. “This woman, this wretched woman, has separated us!”
“Sir!” Hubert cried, springing forward and raising one fist instinctively.
The Colonel retreated a step, and buttoned up his coat with significant symbolism. “Oh, very well,” he said, “if you renounce your own flesh and blood, of course I’ve nothing more to say against it. But you’ll have to put up with me when I return to Milworth.”
Till that moment Fede had stood back, unperceived, among the rhododendrons. But as Hubert advanced with one fist raised to strike the wretched creature, she rushed forward to stop him. “Oh, don’t!” she cried, seizing his arm; “oh, don’t! Who is this man, dear Hubert?”
Hubert fell back on the seat, crouching. The full terror and horror of it came home to him at that moment. “This man?” he repeated, only realizing it by degrees. “This man! Who is this man? Fede, Fede, my darling, go away, I implore of you! I can never be yours now. It’s too hateful to face! Who is this man? My father! My father!”
Fede drew back, incredulous. “Your father! oh, no! “she cried, “he can’t be your father! Hubert, Hubert, my darling, I don’t believe it — I won’t believe it!”
She flung herself upon him, embracing him passionately. Mrs. Egremont, with her face in her hands, sat inconsolable by his side. Hubert bowed himself down in his abject wretchedness. The Colonel alone, bolt upright, with arms crossed and a smile of victory, surveyed the whole group in an ecstasy of triumph.
“It is this that you have brought about with your régime of lies!” he said, slowly and bitterly. “You have taught your son to hate and despise his own father!”
CHAPTER X.
REACTION.
HUBERT sat there immovable. It takes some minutes for revulsions of feeling like his to rise fully into consciousness. He sat there long, bowed down with utter shame, unable to look upon Fede’s face, holding her hand in his, and endeavoring to realize this incredible catastrophe. Slowly the truth shaped itself at last in his mind. He began to understand it. His mother had married this hateful wretch — married him how he could not imagine; and then, finding his company and his vices insupportable, had broken away from him, given him an ample yearly allowance. But all these years she had hid the truth from her son, pretending her husband was dead; and now that Hubert saw the man as he actually was, he could not wonder at it.
His son! That man’s son! As the ghastly blind terror of it came home to him bit by bit, he rose up at last in his shame, withdrew his hand abruptly from Fede’s, and rushed off in a wild burst of feeling to his own bedroom.
Mrs. Egremont, for her part, did not attempt to follow him. She sat there still, alone with her remorse, and bowed down in her agony. Nor did Fede seek to detain him. She knew these things are best faced in solitude. She took her future mother-in-law’s hand in hers, and, without one word, stroked and smoothed it tenderly. As for the Colonel, having delivered his bolt, he thought it best to beat a strategic retreat for the moment. A little later, when tide served, he could arrange at leisure for his increased allowance, or, its only alternative, his return to Milworth.
For twenty minutes or more Hubert lay on his bed, tossed this way and that in a whirlwind of emotion. Yet the full shame and awe of the revelation broke over him but gradually. Not for several minutes did it dawn upon his soul that as he was in blood and bone this man’s son, he was also the inheritor of his transmitted tendencies. The mere disgrace of calling such a creature his father was more than enough in itself for the first few dark moments; to inherit his taints, his vices, his diseases was more than he could take in without long reflection. And he had dreamt an hour ago of marrying Fede — he, that loathsome thing’s son! It was past all thinking. He had but one consolation in this hour of gloom — that the truth had come out in time to save him from such ineffable sacrilege.
At the end of twenty minutes he could stand it no longer. Active natures need the outlet of activity at moments of profound and devouring emotion. Some inner spur goads them on to movement; they must walk it off, walk it off, walk it off forever. Hubert rose from his bed and broke out into the open air. He must move, move, move, up the sides of the mountain.
He stole out by the back way, under the trellis of dead roses, to avoid meeting either his mother or Fede. Then he turned along the track which led to the Rothenspitze. He had ascended it yesterday by the easiest path, on the opposite side, with the aid of a guide. To-day he would ascend alone by the abrupter face that turned towards the village. Good Alpine climbers held the mountain unapproachable by the slope; but what of that? It mattered little now whether he lived or died. If he fell and broke his neck, so much the better. That would be the easiest way out of an intolerable situation. In any case he must climb, he must climb, he must climb. Anything to get rid of this gnawing energy.
He set himself to work to scale it fiercely. As he rose on the first slopes, between grassy terraces, he could see his uncle and the Marchese walking along the dusty white road below, and entering the telegraph office. A hateful thrill ran through him. He knew what they were doing. They had settled preliminaries, and the Marchese was telegraphing the news to Florence. News of the marriage that could never take place! Marriage? Was he fit to marry the vilest creature in the streets? He, the drunkard’s son, how could he ever have dr
eamed of that spotless Fede?
He could see her even now on the lawn of the hotel, by his mother’s side, holding her hand and smoothing it with daughterlike devotion.
His mother! If he were his mother’s son alone — as he had been till that day — how different it would all have been! He had known and loved and respected his mother from childhood upward. He had been proud to be her son, to feel he inherited her pure and unselfish moral nature. And now, this man! this unspeakable interloper! How could she ever have married him! How could she ever have consented to bring a child into the world who should share in such a creature’s loathsome characteristics?
“If the man has a son,” he had said only twelve hours before to the concierge, “that son is doomed to insanity before thirty.”
Insanity! Was that all? Vice, crime, drunkenness, brutality, paralysis. He might, perhaps, avoid by stern self-repression the drinking instinct itself, which wrought the curse; but how could he avoid the physical and mental taints, the hereditary tendencies of Colonel Egremont’s moral or immoral nature? To some men the plea of heredity is a convenient excuse. Hubert saw far too deep into Nature for that fallacy. It was the opposite idea which troubled him most. “I am what I hate. I am, potentially, all that in my father revolts and disgusts me.”
He climbed on and on with restless energy, up straight walls of rock, where his foot hardly found a hold in slight cracks and crannies. He caught at sprigs of bushes growing out of tiny clefts, and helped himself up by their slender twigs, in the wild hope that they might give way and let him dash himself to pieces against the rocks at the bottom. But they held, by a miracle. He never thought of how he climbed: his mind was seething now with so many fierce and conflicting ideas. He could not possibly have scaled that rearing wall of rock, alone and unaided, if he had attacked it consciously; but the unconscious clambering instinct of the boy and the monkey came out in him now that he was blind to danger. He climbed and climbed, scarcely knowing what he did. He could hardly have pointed out his own track again to any other athlete; and if he could have pointed it out, nobody would have believed him.
