by Grant Allen
The landlord was profuse in his protestations and apologies. Such a thing had never happened in his house before. He couldn’t understand it. He would communicate with the police, and do everything in his power to have the purse recovered. Furthermore, if Sir Richard wished to go to London, the landlord (rubbing his hands) had known him so long and so well, it would give him the greatest pleasure on earth to let the bill stand over, and to lend him twenty pounds till the cash was restored and the thief was punished.
“I don’t say there’s any thief, though, mind you,” the jovial voice responded most candidly. “I expect it was all my own stupid carelessness. I’m such an ass of a fellow always for leaving money about; and as likely as not I pulled the thing out with my handkerchief in the billiard-room. I don’t doubt it’ll turn up, sooner or later some day, when you’re cleaning the house up. If it don’t” — the jovial voice sank for a moment to a lower key— “it’s not so much the money itself I mind — that’s only a few hundred pounds, and some circular notes which can’t be negotiated — it’s the letters and papers and private mementos. There were things in that purse” — and the voice still sank lower to an unexpected softness “that I wouldn’t have lost — well, not for a good many thousands.”
Guy’s heart smote him at those words with poignant remorse. He thought of the child’s hair, and blushed crimson with shame. Erect and solemn he strode into the office. “Sir Richard Lavers,” he said slowly, “I want to speak with you alone one moment in the salon.”
“Eh?” Sir Richard said sharply, turning round. “Oh, it’s you. Why, certainly.” And he followed the painter into the room with a somewhat sheepish air, like a detected felon.
Guy shut the door tight. Then he laid down that cursed thing with a shudder on the table. “There’s your purse,” he said curtly, without one word of explanation.
Sir Richard looked at it with distinct pleasure. “You picked it up,” he said, smiling.
“No,” Guy answered, disdaining to tell a lie; “I stole it.”
Sir Richard sat down on a chair, with his hands on his knees, and stared at him curiously for ninety seconds. Then he burst into a loud laugh, and exclaimed, much amused, “Well, anyhow, there’s no reason to pull such a long face about it.”
Guy dropped into a seat opposite him, and told him all his tale, extenuating nothing, in frank self-accusation. Sir Richard listened intent, with a smile on his mouth and a twinkle in his eyes of good-natured acquiescence.
“Then it was you who woke me up,” he said, “when I went to shut the window. Well, you’re a deuced brave chap, that’s all I’ve got to say, to come this morning and tell me the truth about it. Why didn’t you say you picked it up in the passage? I led up to it straight. That’s what beats me utterly!”
“Because it would have been a lie,” Guy answered frankly. “And I’d rather own up than tell you a lie about it.”
Sir Richard opened the purse and turned the things over carefully. “Why, it’s all here right enough,” he said, in a tone of bland surprise. “You haven’t taken anything out of it!”
“No, of course not,” Guy replied, almost smiling, in spite of himself, at the man’s perfect naïveté.
Sir Richard eyed him hard with a curiously amused glance. “But, I say, look here, you know,” he remonstrated quietly; “you are a precious inefficient sort of burglar, aren’t you? You won’t have anything now to pay your bill with on Monday.” For Guy had not concealed from him the plain reason for his onslaught upon the sacred rights of property.
“No, I must do without as best I can,” Guy answered, somewhat glum. For he stood still face to face with that original problem.
Sir Richard stared at him once more with that same curious expression. “Tell me,” he said, after a short pause, “did you look at any of the letters or things in this pocket-book?”
“Not one,” Guy answered honestly, with the ring of truth in his voice. “I saw they were private, and I abstained from touching them. Only,” he added, after a second’s hesitation, “I couldn’t help seeing there was a lock of light hair in a paper in one place. And of that, I felt sure, it would be wicked to deprive you.”
The baronet said nothing. He only gazed at his man fixedly. A suspicion of moisture lurked in his blue eyes. “Well, as long as I’ve got the papers,” he murmured at last, after a long pause, “I don’t mind about the tin. That was really a secondary consideration.”
“And now,” Guy said sturdily, “if you’ll send for the police and tell the landlord, I’ll give myself into custody on the charge of robbery.”
Sir Richard rose and fronted him. For one moment he was serious. “Now, look here, young man,” he said, with an air of paternal wisdom, “don’t you go and be a something-or-other fool. Don’t say one word of this to the landlord or anybody. You are a deuced clever fellow, and you can paint like one o’clock. That’s a precious good thing of yours, that view of the ramshackled old Schloss on the Drachenfels. You’re sure to rise in the end; you’ve the right cut of the jib for it. Now, you take my advice, and keep this thing quiet. If you don’t peach of it, I won’t — word of honour of a gentleman. And if you’ll allow me, I’ll lend you fifty pounds. You can pay me back right enough when you’re elected to the Academy.”
Guy Lethbridge’s face grew red as fire. That the man should forgive him was bad enough in all conscience, but that he should offer him a loan was really dreadful. It’s all very well for a virtuous citizen to relieve the overweening aristocrat of his superfluous wealth with the high hand of confiscation; but to take it as a gift from him — for a gift it would practically mean — and that at the very moment when one had to acknowledge an attempted crime, revolted every sentiment of Guy Lethbridge’s nature.
He drew back with a stammered “No, thank you. It’s very kind of you, but — of course, I couldn’t.” And then there arose between them the most comic episode of expostulation and persuasion that the rooms of the Berliner-Hof had ever yet witnessed. The baronet almost lost his temper over the young man’s obstinacy. It was ridiculous, he urged, for any gentleman not to accept a loan of fifty pounds from a well-disposed person in a moment of emergency. A fellow who could paint like that could never want long; and as for the passing impulse which had led Guy to take charge of the purse for an hour or two — why, the upshot showed it was only a passing impulse; and we all make mistakes in moments of effusion, late at night, after dining. Besides, a man in Guy’s position must be really hard up, and no mistake, before he thinks of relieving other people of their purses. And when a fellow’s hard up, well, hang it all, my dear sir, you can’t blame him for deviating into eccentric action. As for the fifty pounds, if Guy didn’t take it, it’d go upon a horse, no doubt, or a supper at the Gaiety, or something equally foolish. Let him be sensible and pocket it; no harm in a loan; and to be quite frank, Sir Richard said, he thought better of him for owning up to his fault so manfully, than he’d have thought of him if he’d never yielded at all to temptation.
Guy stood firm, however, and refused to the bitter end.
Sir Richard consulted his watch.
“Hullo,” he said, starting, “I can’t stand here squabbling over fifty pounds with you all the morning. I’ve got to catch the 9·25 to Cologne; my things are all packed; I must have my coffee. Now, before I go, for the last time, will you or won’t you accept that little loan from me? Mind, you’re a conscientious kind of chap, and your bill’s due on Monday. You’ve got no right to defraud your landlord when a friend’s prepared to help you tide over this temporary difficulty.”
That was a hard home-thrust. Guy admitted the logic of it. But he stood by his guns still, and shook his head firmly. All sense of sullenness and defiance was gone from him now. The man’s genuine kind-heartedness and sympathy had conquered him. “Sir,” he cried, wringing his new friend’s hand with unaffected warmth, “you’re a brick; and you make me ashamed of myself. But please don’t press it upon me. I couldn’t take it now. Your kindness
has broken me.” And he burst into tears with a sudden impulse as he rushed to the window to hide his emotion.
Sir Richard hummed an air and left the salon abruptly. Guy went up to his own room, locked himself in all alone, and had a bad half-hour of it with his own conscience. He was roused from his reverie at the end of that time by a double knock at the door. It was the German waiter. “Wit’ Sir Richard’s compliments,” he said, handing a letter to Guy. The painter tore the envelope open. It contained — fifty pounds in English bank notes, and accompanying them this surprising letter: —
“Dear Mr. Lethbridge,
“You must accept enclosed few notes as a loan for the present. You see, the fact is, I’m not a baronet at all, but a bookmaker and bank swindler. The letters you didn’t examine in my purse would have put the police on my track; and I therefore regard this trifling little sum as really due to you. You need have no compunction about taking it, for it isn’t mine, and you can’t possibly return it to its proper owner. Take it without a scruple, and settle your bill — you can repay me whenever you next meet me. You’re a long sight a better man than I am, anyhow.
“Yours faithfully,
“Richard Lavers.”
Guy crumpled it up in his hand with an impatient gesture. Take a swindler’s money! Inconceivable! Impossible! He seized his hat in his haste, and rushed down to the office.
“Where’s he gone?” he cried to the landlord.
And the landlord, taking his sense, answered promptly —
“To the station.”
Guy tore down the road, and rushed into the building just as the Cologne train was steaming out from the platform. He ran along its side, disregarding the vehement expostulations of portly, red-banded German officialdom. Soon he spied the dubious baronet alone in a first-class compartment. Crumpling the notes into a pellet, he flung them back at him fiercely.
“How could you?” he cried, all on fire. “More than ever, now, when I know who you are, I can’t touch those notes — I can’t look at your money!”
In another second that jovial face leaned, all smiles, out of the window.
“You confounded fool!” the loud voice burst forth merrily, “you’re the hardest chap to befriend I ever yet came across. Do you think, if what I said in that letter was true, I’d be ass enough to confess it — and in writing too — to a casual acquaintance? Take your tennis-ball back again!” and the pellet hit Guy hard on the cheek at the words. “Settle your bill like a man; and if ever you want to pay me back in return, you can find my address any day in Debrett or Foster.”
By this time even Sir Richard’s stentorian voice was almost past bawling-point. There was nothing left for it now but to pick up the notes and return to the Berliner-Hof. Though whether he should use them or not to pay his bill was a point of casuistry he had still to debate upon.
Next morning’s post, however, brought him a note from Cologne, which placed the whole question in an unexpected light for him: —
“Dear Mr. Lethbridge,
“We’ve both been fools. My ruse was a silly one. How extraordinary the right way out of this little difficulty didn’t at once occur to me! I was awfully taken by your picture of the ramshackled old Schloss; in fact, I thought when I could look up its price in the Academy catalogue I’d probably buy it, if it wasn’t too dear for me. But the heat of the moment put this idea altogether out of my head. Shall we say £200 as the price of the picture? The balance to be paid on delivery in London. Now think no more of the rest, and remain well assured that if ever this little episode gets abroad in the world it will not be through the instrumentality of —
“Yours very sincerely,
“Richard Lavers.”
Sir Richard has settled down now as a respectable county member; and, except when occasionally exhilarated with champagne, is really a most useful pillar of society. He’s very proud of a picture in his dining-room of Sorrento from the Castellammare-road — a companion-piece to that exquisite autumnal view of the ruin on the Drachenfels and the Seven Mountains. Both are from the brush of that rising young Associate, Mr. Guy Lethbridge, whom Sir Richard discovered and introduced to the great world; but the frame of the Sorrento bears a neat little inscription:— “For Sir Richard Lavers, from his ever grateful and affectionate friend, the painter.” The owner has been offered five hundred down for the Drachenfels more than once — and has refused the offer.
THE POT-BOILER.
Ernest Grey was an inspired painter. Therefore he was employed to paint portraits of insipid little girls in black-silk stockings, and to produce uninteresting domestic groups, of which a fat and smiling baby of British respectability formed the central figure.
He didn’t like it, of course. Pegasus never does like being harnessed to the paternal go-cart. But being a philosopher in his way, and having a wife and child to keep, he dragged it none the less, with as good a grace as could reasonably be expected from such celestial mettle. The wife, in fact, formed the familiar model for the British mother in his Academy pictures, while little Joan (with bare legs) sat placidly for the perennial and annual baby. Each year, as observant critics might have noticed, that baby grew steadily a twelvemonth older. But there were no observant critics for Ernest Grey’s pictures: the craft were all too busy inspecting the canvas of made reputations to find time on hand for spying out merit in the struggling work of unknown beginners. It’s an exploded fallacy of the past to suppose that insight and initiative are the true critic’s hallmark. Why go out of your way to see good points in unknown men, when you can earn your three guineas so much more surely and simply by sticking to the good points that everybody recognizes? The way to gain a reputation for critical power nowadays is, to say in charming and pellucid language what everybody regards as the proper thing to say about established favourites. You voice the popular taste in the very best English.
But Ernest Grey had ideals, for all that. How poor a creature the artist must be who doesn’t teem with unrealized and unrealizable ideals! All the while that he painted the insipid little girls in the impeccable stockings, very neatly gartered, he was feeding his soul with a tacit undercurrent of divine fancy. He had another world than this of ours, in which he lived by turns — a strange world of pure art, where all was profound, mysterious, magical, beautiful. Idyls of Celtic fancy floated visible on the air before his mind’s eye. Great palaces reared themselves like exhalations on the waste ground by Bedford Park. Fair white maidens moved slow, with measured tread, across his imagined canvas. What pictures he might paint — if only somebody would pay him for painting them! He revelled in designing these impossible works. His scenery should all lie in the Lost Land of Lyonesse. A spell as of Merlin should brood, half-seen, over his dreamy cloisters. The carved capitals of his pilasters should point to something deeper than mere handicraftsman’s workmanship; his brocades and his fringes should breathe and live; his arabesques and his fretwork, his tracery and his moulding, should be instinct with soul and with indefinite yearning. The light that never was on sea or land should flood his landscape. In the pictures he had never painted, perhaps never would paint, ornament and decoration were lavished in abundance; design ran riot; onyx and lapis lazuli, chrysolite and chalcedony, beryl and jacinth, studded his jewelled bowls and his quaintly-wrought scabbards; but all to enrich and enforce one fair central idea, to add noble attire and noble array to that which was itself already noble and beautiful. No frippery should intrude. All this wealth of detail should be subservient in due place to some glorious thought, some ray of that divine sadness that touches nearest the deep heart of man.
So he said to himself in his day-dreams. But life is not day-dream. Life, alas! is very solid reality. While Ernest Grey nourished his secret soul with such visions of beauty, he employed his deft fingers in painting spindle legs, ever fresh in number, yet ever the same in kind, and unanimously clad in immaculate spun-silk stockings. No hosier was better up in all the varieties of spun silk than that inspired painter. ’Tis the w
ay of the world, you know — our industrial world of supply and demand — to harness its blood-horses to London hansoms.
After all, he was working for Baby Joan and Bertha. (Bertha was the sort of name most specially in vogue when his wife was a girl; it had got to Joan and Joyce by the date of the baby.) They lived together in a very small house at Bedford Park — so small, Bertha said, that when a visitor dropped in they bulged out at the windows.
But Ernest Grey had a friend better off than himself — a man whose future was already assured him — a long-haired proprietor who wrote minor verse which the world was one day to wake up and find famous. He was tall and thin, and loosely knit, and looked as if he’d been run up by contract. His name was Bernard Hume; he claimed indirect descent from the philosopher who demolished everything. Unlike his collateral ancestor, however, Bernard Hume had faith, a great deal of faith — first of all in himself, and after that in every one else who shared the honour of his acquaintance. This was an amiable trait on Bernard’s part, for, as a rule, men who believe in themselves complete their simple creed with that solitary article. With Bernard Hume, on the contrary, egotism took a more expanded and expansive form — it spread itself thin over the entire entourage. He thought there was always a great deal in any one who happened to inspire him with a personal fancy. “I like this man,” he said to himself virtually, “therefore he must be a very superior soul, else how could he have succeeded in attracting the attention of so sound a critic and judge of human nature?”
Of all Bernard Hume’s friends, however, there was not one in whom he believed more profoundly than the inspired painter. “Ernest Grey,” he used to say, “if only he’d retire from the stocking-trade and give free play to his fancy, would bring the sweat, I tell you, into that brow of Burne-Jones’s. (You think the phrase vulgar? Settle the question by all means, then, with Browning, who invented it!) He’s a born idealist, is Grey — a direct descendant of Lippi and Botticelli, pitchforked, by circumstances over which he has no control, into the modern hosiery business. If only he could paint those lovely things he draws so beautifully! Why, he showed me some sketches the other day for unrealized pictures, first studies for dreams of pure form and colour — fair virgins that flit, white-armed, through spacious halls — plaintive, melancholy, passionate, mystical. One of them was superb. An Arthurian uncertainty enveloped the scene. The touch of a wizard had made all things in it suffer a beautiful change. It was life with the halo on — life as the boy in Wordsworth’s “Ode on Immortality” must surely have seen it — life in the glow of a poet’s day-dream. A world of pure phantasy, lighted up from above with glancing colour. A world whose exact date is once upon a time. A world whose precise place is in the left-hand corner of the land of fairy-tales. If only Ernest Grey would paint like that, he might fail for to-day; he might fail for to-morrow; his wife and child might starve and die; he might fall himself exhausted in the gutter — but his place hereafter would be among the immortals.”
