by Grant Allen
The Lord of the Manor, when he came to hear the whole pitiful story, would have nothing to do with the wretched doubloons; the curse of blood was upon them, he said, and worse than that; so the Treasury, which has no sentiments and no conscience, came in at the end for what little there was of John Cann’s unholy treasure.
VIII
In the County Pauper Lunatic Asylum for Devon there was one quiet impassive patient, who was always pointed out to horror-loving visitors, because he had once been a gentleman, and had a strange romance hanging to him still, even in that dreary refuge of the destitute insane. The lady whom he had loved and robbed — all for her own good — had followed him down from London to Devonshire; and she and her aunt kept a small school, after some struggling fashion, in the town close by, where many kind-hearted squires of the neighbourhood sent their little girls, while they were still very little, for the sake of charity, and for pity of the sad, sad story. One day a week there was a whole holiday — Wednesday it was — for that was visiting-day at the County Asylum; and then Ethel Sutherland, dressed in deep mourning, walked round with her aunt to the gloomy gateway at ten o’clock, and sat as long as she was allowed with the faded image of Cecil Mitford, holding his listless hand clasped hard in her pale white fingers, and looking with sad, eager anxious eyes for any gleam of passing recognition in his. Alas! the gleam never came (perhaps it was better so); Cecil Mitford looked always straight before him at the blank whitewashed walls, and saw nothing, heard nothing, thought of nothing, from week’s end to week’s end.
Ethel had forgiven him all; what will not a loving woman forgive? Nay, more, had found excuses and palliations for him which quite glossed over his crime and his folly. He must have been losing his reason long before he ever went to Jamaica, she said; for in his right mind he would never have tried to deceive her or himself in the way he had done. Did he not fancy he was sent out by the Colonial Office, when he had really gone without leave or mission? And did he not persuade her to give up her money to him for investment, and after all never invest it? What greater proofs of insanity could you have than those? And then that dreadful fever at Spanish Town, and the shock of losing his kind entertainer, worn out with nursing him, had quite completed the downfall of his reason. So Ethel Sutherland, in her pure beautiful woman’s soul, went on believing, as steadfastly as ever, in the faith and the goodness of that Cecil Mitford that had never been. His ideal had faded out before the first touch of disillusioning fact; hers persisted still, in spite of all the rudest assaults that the plainest facts could make upon it. Thank Heaven for that wonderful idealising power of a good woman, which enables her to walk unsullied through this sordid world, unknowing and unseeing.
At last one night, one terrible windy night in December, Ethel Sutherland was wakened from her sleep in the quiet little schoolhouse by a fearful glare falling fiercely upon her bedroom window. She jumped up hastily and rushed to the little casement to look out towards the place whence the glare came. One thought alone rose instinctively in her white little mind — Could it be at Cecil’s Asylum? Oh, horror, yes; the whole building was in flames, and if Cecil were taken — even poor mad imbecile Cecil — what, what on earth would then be left her?
Huddling on a few things hastily, anyhow, Ethel rushed out wildly into the street, and ran with incredible speed where all the crowd of the town was running together, towards the blazing Asylum. The mob knew her at once, and recognised her sad claim; they made a little lane down the surging mass for her to pass through, till she stood beside the very firemen at the base of the gateway. It was an awful sight — poor mad wretches raving and imploring at the windows, while the firemen plied their hose and brought their escapes to bear as best they were able on one menaced tier after another. But Ethel saw or heard nothing, save in one third-floor window of the right wing, where Cecil Mitford stood, no longer speechless and imbecile, but calling loudly for help, and flinging his eager arms wildly about him. The shock had brought him back his reason, for the moment at least: oh, thank God, thank God, he saw her, he saw her!
With a sudden wild cry Ethel burst from the firemen who tried to hold her back, leaped into the burning building and tore up the blazing stairs, blinded and scorched, but by some miracle not quite suffocated, till she reached the stone landing on the third story. Turning along the well-known corridor, now filled with black wreaths of stifling smoke, she reached at last Cecil’s ward, and flung herself madly, wildly into his circling arms. For a moment they both forgot the awful death that girt them round on every side, and Cecil, rising one second superior to himself, cried only, ‘Ethel, Ethel, Ethel, I love you; forgive me!’ Ethel pressed his hand in hers gently, and answered in an agony of joy, ‘There is nothing to forgive, Cecil; I can die happy now, now that I have once more heard you say you love me, you love me.’
Hand in hand they turned back towards the blazing staircase, and reached the window at the end where the firemen were now bringing their escape-ladder to bear on the third story. The men below beckoned them to come near and climb out on to the ladder, but just at that moment something behind seemed incomprehensibly to fascinate and delay Cecil, so that he would not move a step nearer, though Ethel led him on with all her might. She looked back to see what could be the reason, and beheld the floor behind them rent by the flames, and a great gap spreading downward to the treasurer’s room. On the tiled floor a few dozen pence and shillings and other coins lay, white with heat, among the glowing rubbish; and the whole mass, glittering like gold in the fierce glare, seemed some fiery cave filled to the brim with fabulous wealth. Cecil’s eye was riveted upon the yawning gap, and the corners of his mouth twitched horribly as he gazed with intense interest upon the red cinders and white-hot coin beneath him. Instinctively Ethel felt at once that all was lost, and that the old mania was once more upon him. Clasping her arm tight round his waist, while the firemen below shouted to her to leave him and come down as she valued her life, she made one desperate effort to drag him by main force to the head of the ladder. But Cecil, strong man that he was, threw her weak little arm impetuously away, as he might have thrown a two-year-old baby’s, and cried to her in a voice trembling with excitement, ‘See, see, Ethel, at last, at last; there it is, there it is in good earnest. John Cann’s Treasure!’
Ethel seized his arm imploringly once more. ‘This way, darling,’ she cried, in a voice choked by sobs and half stifled with the smoke. ‘This way to the ladder.’
But Cecil broke from her fiercely, with a wild light in his big blue eyes, and shouting aloud, ‘The treasure, the treasure!’ leaped with awful energy into the very centre of the seething fiery abyss. Ethel fell, fainting with terror and choked by the flames, on to the burning floor of the third story. The firemen, watching from below, declared next day that that crazy madman must have died stifled before he touched the heap of white-hot ruins in the central shell, and the poor lady was insensible or dead with asphyxia full ten minutes before the flames swept past the spot where her lifeless body was lying immovable.
XI
IVAN GREET’S MASTERPIECE
I
’Twas at supper at Charlie Powell’s; every one there admitted Charlie was in splendid form. His audacity broke the record. He romanced away with even more than his usual brilliant recklessness. Truth and fiction blended well in his animated account of his day’s adventures. He had lunched that morning with the newly-appointed editor of a high-class journal for the home circle — circulation exceeding half a million, — and had returned all agog with the glorious prospect of untold wealth opening fresh before him. So he discounted his success by inviting a dozen friends to champagne and lobster-salad at his rooms in St. James’s, and held forth to them, after his wont, in a rambling monologue.
‘When I got to the house,’ he said airily, poising a champagne-glass halfway up in his hand, ‘with the modest expectation of a chop and a pint of porter in the domestic ring — imagine my surprise at finding myself forthwith standing before the gates o
f an Oriental palace — small, undeniably small, a bijou in its way, but still, without doubt, a veritable palace. I touched the electric bell. Hi, presto! at my touch the door flew open as if by magic, and disclosed — a Circassian slave, in a becoming costume à la Liberty in Regent Street, and smiling like the advertisement of a patent dentifrice! I gasped out — —’
‘But how did ye know she was a Circassian?’ Paddy O’Connor inquired, interrupting him brusquely. (His name was really Francis Xavier O’Connor, but they called him ‘Paddy’ for short, just to mark his Celtic origin.)
Charlie Powell smiled a contemptuously condescending smile. He was then on the boom, as chief literary lion. ‘How do I know ye’re an Oirishman, Paddy?’ he answered, hardly heeding the interruption. ‘By her accent, my dear boy; her pure, unadulterated Circassian accent! “Is Mr. Morrison at home?” I gasped out to the Vision of Beauty. The Vision of Beauty smiled and nodded — her English being chiefly confined to smiles, with a Circassian flavour; and led me on by degrees into the great man’s presence. I mounted a stair, with a stained-glass window all yellows and browns, very fine and Burne-Jonesey; I passed through a drawing-room in the Stamboul style — couches, rugs, and draperies; and after various corridors — Byzantine, Persian, Moorish — I reached at last a sort of arcaded alcove at the further end, where two men lay reclining on an Eastern divan — one, a fez on his head, pulling hard at a chibouque; the other, bare-headed, burbling smoke through a hookah. The bare-headed one rose: “Mr. Powell,” says he, waving his hand to present me, “My friend, Macpherson Pasha!” I bowed, and looked unconcerned. I wanted them to think I’d lived all my life hobnobbing with Pashas. Well, we talked for a while about the weather and the crops, and the murder at Mile End, and the state of Islam; when, presently, of a sudden, Morrison claps his hands — so — and another Circassian slave, still more beautiful, enters.
‘“Lunch, houri,” says Morrison.
‘“The effendi is served,” says the Circassian.
‘And down we went to the dining-room. Bombay black-wood, every inch of it, inlaid with ivory. Venetian glass on the table; solid silver on the sideboard. Only us three, if you please, to lunch; but everything as spick and span as if the Prince was of the company. The three Circassian slaves, in Liberty caps, stood behind our chairs — one goddess apiece — and looked after us royally. Chops and porter, indeed! It was a banquet for a poet; Ivan Greet should have been there; he’d have mugged up an ode about it. Clear turtle and Chablis — the very best brand; then smelts and sweetbreads; next lamb and mint sauce; ortolans on toast; ice-pudding; fresh strawberries. A guinea each, strawberries, I give you my word, just now at Covent Garden. Oh, mamma! what a lunch, boys! The Hebes poured champagne from a golden flagon; that is to say, at any rate’ — for Paddy’s eye was upon him— ‘the neck of the bottle was wrapped in gilt tinfoil. And all the time Morrison talked — great guns, how he talked! I never heard anything in my life to equal it. The man’s been everywhere, from Peru to Siberia. The man’s been everything, from a cowboy to a communard. My hair stood on end with half the things he said to me; and I haven’t got hair so easily raised as some people’s. Was I prepared to sell my soul for Saxon gold at the magnificent rate of five guineas a column? Was I prepared to jump out of my skin! I choked with delight. Hadn’t I sold it all along to the enemies of Wales for a miserable pittance of thirty shillings? What did he want me to do? Why, contribute third leaders — you know the kind of thing — tootles on the penny-trumpet about irrelevant items of non-political news — the wit and humour of the fair, best domestic style, informed throughout with wide general culture. An allusion to Aristophanes; a passing hint at Rabelais; what Lucian would have said to his friends on this theme; how the row at the School Board would have affected Sam Johnson.
‘“But you must remember, Mr. Powell,” says Morrison, with an unctuous smile, “the greater part of our readers are — well, not to put it too fine — country squires and conservative Dissenters. Your articles mustn’t hurt their feelings or prejudices. Go warily, warily! You must stick to the general policy of the paper, and be tenderly respectful to John Wesley’s memory.”
‘“Sir,” said I, smacking his hand, “for five guineas a column I’d be tenderly respectful to King Ahab himself, if you cared to insist upon it. You may count on my writing whatever rubbish you desire for the nursery mind.” And I passed from his dining-room into the enchanted alcove.
‘But before I left, my dear Ivan, I’d heard such things as I never heard before, and been promised such pay as seemed to me this morning beyond the dreams of avarice. And oh, what a character! “When I was a slave at Khartoum,” the man said; or “When I was a schoolmaster in Texas”; “When I lived as a student up five floors at Heidelberg”; or “When I ran away with Félix Pyat from the Versaillais”; till I began to think ’twas the Wandering Jew himself come to life again in Knightsbridge. At last, after coffee and cigarettes on a Cairo tray — with reminiscences of Paraguay — I emerged on the street, and saw erect before my eyes a great round Colosseum. I seemed somehow to recognise it. “This is not Bagdad, then,” I said to myself, rubbing my eyes very hard — for I thought I must have been wafted some centuries off, on an enchanted carpet. Then I looked once more. Yes, sure enough, it was the Albert Hall. And there was the Memorial with its golden image. I rubbed my eyes a second time, and hailed a hansom — for there were hansoms about, and policemen, and babies. “Thank Heaven!” I cried aloud; “after all, this is London!”’
II
‘It’s a most regrettable incident!’ Ivan Greet said solemnly.
The rest turned and looked. Ivan Greet was their poet. He was tall and thin, with strange, wistful eyes, somewhat furtive in tone, and a keen, sharp face, and lank, long hair that fell loose on his shoulders. It was a point with this hair to be always abnormally damp and moist, with a sort of unnatural and impalpable moisture. The little coterie, of authors and artists to which Ivan belonged regarded him indeed with no small respect, as a great man manqué. Nature, they knew, had designed him for an immortal bard; circumstances had turned him into an occasional journalist. But to them, he represented Art for Art’s sake. So when Ivan said solemnly, ‘It’s a most regrettable incident,’ every eye in the room turned and stared at him in concert.
‘Why so, me dear fellow?’ Paddy O’Connor asked, open-eyed. ‘I call it magnificent!’
But Ivan Greet answered warmly, ‘Because it’ll take him still further away than ever from his work in life, which you and I know is science and philosophy.’
‘And yer own grand epic?’ Paddy suggested, with a smart smile, pouncing down like a hawk upon him.
Ivan Greet coloured — positively coloured— ‘blushed visibly to the naked eye,’ as Paddy observed afterwards, in recounting the incident to his familiar friend at the United Bohemians. But he stood his ground like a man and a poet for all that. ‘My own epic isn’t written yet — probably never will be written,’ he answered, after a pause, with quiet firmness. ‘I give up to the Daily Telephone what was meant for mankind: I acknowledge it freely. Still, I’m sorry when I see any other good man — and most of all Charlie Powell — compelled to lose his own soul the same way I myself have done.’ He paused and looked round. ‘Boys,’ he said, addressing the table, ‘in these days, if any man has anything out of the common to say, he must be rich and his own master, or he won’t be allowed to say it. If he’s poor, he has first to earn his living; and to earn his living he’s compelled to do work he doesn’t want to do — work that stifles the things which burn and struggle for utterance within him. The editor is the man who rules the situation; and what the editor asks is good paying matter. Good paying matter Charlie can give him, of course: Charlie can give him, thank Heaven, whatever he asks for. But this hack-work will draw him further and further afield from the work in life for which God made him — the philosophical reconstitution of the world and the universe for the twentieth century. And that’s why I say — and I say it again — a most
regrettable incident!’
Charlie Powell set down his glass of champagne untasted. Ivan Greet was regarded by his narrow little circle of journalistic associates as something of a prophet; and his words, solemnly uttered, sobered Charlie for a while — recalled him with a bound to his better personality. ‘Ivan’s right,’ he said slowly, nodding his head once or twice. ‘He’s right, as usual. We’re all of us wasting on weekly middles the talents God gave us for a higher purpose. We know it, every man Jack of us. But Heaven help us, I say, Ivan: for how can we help ourselves? We live by bread. We must eat bread first, or how can we write epics or philosophies afterwards? This age demands of us the sacrifice of our individualities. It will be better some day, perhaps, when Bellamy and William Morris have remodelled the world: life will be simpler, and bare living easier. For the present I resign myself to inevitable fate. I’ll write middles for Morrison, and eat and drink; and I’ll wait for my philosophy till I’m rich and bald, and have leisure to write it in my own hired house in Fitzjohn’s Avenue.’
Ivan Greet gazed across at him with a serious look in those furtive eyes. ‘That’s all very well for you!’ he cried half angrily, in a sudden flaring forth of long-suppressed emotion. ‘Philosophy can wait till a man’s rich and bald; it gains by waiting; it’s the better for maturity. But poetry! — ah, there, I hate to talk about it! Who can begin to set about his divine work when he’s turned sixty and worn out by forty years of uncongenial leaders? The thing’s preposterous. A poet must write when he’s young and passionate, or not at all. He may go on writing in age, of course, as his blood grows cool, if he’s kept up the habit, like Wordsworth and Tennyson: he may even let it lie by or rust for a time, like Milton or Goethe, and resume it later, if he throws himself meanwhile, heart and soul, into some other occupation that carries him away with it resistlessly for the moment; but spend half his life in degrading his style and debasing his genius by working for hire at the beck and call of an editor — lose his birthright like that, and then turn at last with the bald head you speak about to pour forth at sixty his frigid lyrics — I tell you, Charlie, the thing’s impossible! The poet must work, the poet must acquire his habits of thought and style and expression in the volcanic period; if he waits till he’s crusted over and encysted with age, he may hammer out rhetoric, he may string fresh rhymes, but he’ll never, never give us one line of real poetry.’
