“This is a private room,” Jack said sternly, anticipating his father’s outburst. “You do not seem to be aware of it, my friend.”
“A private room, is it?” the visitor replied, closing one eye with much enjoyment. “A private room, and what then?”
“This much, that you are requested to leave it.”
“Ho, ho!” the man replied; “so you would put me out of my daughter’s room, would you — out of my own daughter’s room? I daresay that you would like to do it.” Then, with a sudden change to ferocity, he added, “You are bragging above your cards, young man, you are! Dry up, do you hear? Dry up.”
And Jack did dry up, falling back against the table with a white face. The Archdeacon, even in his own misery — misery which far exceeded his presentiments — saw and marvelled at his son’s collapse. That Jack, keen, practical, hard-headed, should be so completely overwhelmed by collision with this creature, so plainly scared by his insinuations, infected the Archdeacon with a kind of terror. Yet, struggling against the feeling, he forced himself to say, “You are Mr. Kent, I presume?”
“I am, sir; yours to command,” swaggered the wretch.
“Then I may tell you that your daughter,” the Archdeacon continued, resuming something of his natural self-possession, “was left in my charge by your wife, and that I am here in consequence of that arrangement.”
“Gammon!” Mr. Kent replied, distinctly, putting his tongue in his cheek. “Gammon! Do you think that that story will go down with me? Do you think it will go down with any one?”
“It is the truth.”
“All right; but look here, when did you see my wife? On her death-bed. And before that — not for twenty years. Well, what do you make of it now? Why,” he exclaimed, with admiration in his tone, “you have the impudence of the old one himself! Fie on you, sir! Ain’t you ashamed of hanging about stage doors, and following actresses home at your age? But I know you. And your friends shall know you, Archdeacon Yale, of the Athenæum Club. You will hear more of this!”
“You are an insolent fellow!” the clergyman cried. But the perspiration stood in great beads upon his brow, and his quivering lips betrayed the agony of his soul as he writhed under the man’s coarse insinuations. The awkwardness, the improbability of the tale he would have to tell in his defence flashed across his mind while the other spoke. He saw how cogently the silence he had maintained about the matter would tell against him. He pictured the nudge of one friend, the wink of another, and his own crimsoning cheeks. His son’s unwonted silence, too, touched him home. Yet he tried to bear himself as an innocent man; he struggled to give back look for look. “You are a madman and a scoundrel, besides being drunk!” he said stoutly. “If it were not so, or — or I were as young as my son here — —”
“I do not see him,” the man answered curtly.
“Jack!” the Archdeacon cried, purple with indignation. “Jack! if you have a voice, speak to him, sir!”
“It won’t do,” Mr. Kent replied, shaking his head. “Call him Charley, and I might believe you.”
“Charley?” repeated the Archdeacon mechanically.
“Ay, Charley — Charley Williams. Oh I know him, too,” with vulgar triumph. “I have not been hanging about this house for two days for nothing. He has been here heaps of times! What you two are doing together beats me, I confess. But I am certain of this, that I have caught you both — killed two birds with one stone.”
It was the Archdeacon’s turn to fall back, aghast. The light that shone upon him with those words so blinded him that every spark of his anger paled and dwindled before it. His son, Charles Williams? He sought in that son’s eyes some gleam of denial. But Jack’s eyes avoided his; Jack’s downcast air seemed only too strongly to confirm the charge. The shock was a severe one, taking from him all thought of himself. The why and wherefore of his presence there could never again be questioned. A real sorrow, a real trouble, gave him courage. “Jack!” he said, “we had better go from here. Come with me. For you, sir,” he continued, turning to the actor, “your suspicions are natural to you. Nothing I can say will remove them. So be it. They affect me not one whit. It is enough for me that I came here in all honour, and with an honourable purpose.”
“Indeed,” replied Mr. Kent mockingly. “Indeed? And your son, Mr. Charles Jack Williams Yale, Archdeacon? No doubt you will answer for him, as he has not got a word to say for himself? He, too, came with an honourable purpose, I suppose? Oh yes, of course; we are all honourable men!”
For an instant the Archdeacon quailed. He saw the pitfall dug before him. He knew all that his answer would imply of disappointed hopes and a vain ambition. He recognised all that might be made of it by his listeners, friend or foe, and he blenched. But the cynical eye and sneering lip of the wretch recalled him to himself. Nay, he seemed to rise above himself, as he replied more sternly, “Yes, sir; I will answer for my son, as for myself! I will answer for him that he came here in all honour.”
The man sneered still. But he knew better things if he did not ensue them, and he stood aside with secret respect and let the two go unmolested.
“Sir,” Jack said, when they had walked halfway down the street in silence, which his father showed no sign of breaking, “you are thinking more ill of me than I deserve.”
“You gave a false name,” the Archdeacon snarled.
“Not in a sense — not wilfully, I mean. I wrote a play some time ago, and, as is usual for professional men, I submitted it under a nom de plume. I was known as Charles Williams at the theatre, and I had no more idea of doing wrong when I was introduced to Grissel in that name than I have now.”
“I hope not,” the Archdeacon said grimly. He was not a man to go back from an engagement. “I trust not,” he added with a bitterness. “You may break your word to the girl if you please, but I will not break mine to the mother. So help me Heaven!”
“Sir,” Jack said, his utterance a little husky, “God bless you! She is a good girl, and some day she will honour you as I do.”
They parted without more words. The Archdeacon, hardly master of his thoughts, walked on until he reached the corner of Oxford Street. There he paused, and seeing girls pass, young, graceful, soft-eyed, leaning back in carriages with parcels round them, ay, and thinking that Jack might have chosen out of all these, while he had chosen in Sidmouth Street — Sidmouth Street, Gray’s Inn Road — he could not stifle a groan. He plunged recklessly across and found himself presently in St. James’ Square, and round and round this he walked, fighting the battle with himself. His poor wife, that was the burden of his cry. His poor wife, and the shock it would be to her, and the downfall of hopes! He knew that she a woman would recoil from such a daughter-in-law far more than he did, who had known Grissel’s mother, and knew that actresses may be good and true women. It would be dreadful for her, with her old-world notions; the Archdeacon knew it. But he valued one thing above even the peace of his home, and that was his honour. It was not in sarcasm we called him a good man. To break his word to the dead woman who had trusted him; to leave this girl, whom it behooved him to protect, in the hands of her wretched father, and so to leave her with her faith in goodness shattered — this he could not do.
But he was tempted to think hard things of Jack, to think that Jack, who had never given him the heartache before, had better not have been born than bring this trouble on them. It went no farther than temptation; and he was marvellously thankful next morning that he had not framed the thought in words; for, as he entered the breakfast-room, looking a year older than he had looked, chipping his egg yesterday, the hall-porter put a telegram into his hands. “Come at once — Jack,” were the words that first made themselves intelligible to him; and then, a few seconds later, the address “St. Thomas’s Hospital.”
How swiftly does a great misfortune, a great loss, a great pain, expel a less! I have known a man lose his wife and go heavily for a month, and then losing a thousand pounds become as oblivious of her as if she had nev
er been born. But the Archdeacon was not such a man, and rattling towards Westminster in a cab he felt not only that a thousand pounds would be a small price to pay for his son’s safety, but that, if Providence should take him at his thought, he might have worse news for his wife than those tidings which had almost aged him in a night.
His son, however, met him at the great gates, whole and sound, but with a grave face. “You are too late, sir,” he said quietly. But he flushed a little at the grasp of his father’s hand, and a little more when the Archdeacon told him to pay the cabman a double fare. “I have brought you here for nothing. He died a quarter of an hour ago, sinking very rapidly after I sent to you.”
“Who? Who died?” the Archdeacon asked, pressing one hand heavily on the other’s shoulder, as they walked back towards the bridge.
“Mr. Kent.”
The elder man said nothing for a while — aloud at least. But presently he asked Jack to tell him about it.
“There is little to tell. After we left him he went out. Going home late last night, and not I fear sober, he was run down by a road-car. When they brought him to the hospital he was hopelessly injured, but quite sensible. They fetched his daughter, and then he asked for me — as your son. He did not know my address, but the assistant-surgeon happened to be a friend of mine, and did, and he sent a cab for me.”
And really that seemed all. “It is very, very sudden; but — Heaven forgive me! — I cannot regret his death,” the clergyman said. “It is impossible.”
They had reached the corner of the bridge. “There is something else I should tell you,” Jack said nervously. “When he had sent for me he had a lawyer brought, and made his will.”
“His will!” the Archdeacon repeated, somewhat startled. “Had he anything to leave?” He asked the question, rather in pity for so wretched a creature as the man seemed to him, than out of curiosity.
“If we may believe him,” Jack said slowly, “and I think he was telling the truth, he was worth thirty thousand pounds.”
“Impossible!” the Archdeacon cried.
“I do not know,” replied Jack. “But we shall learn. He said he had made it in oil, and had come home a poor man to see how his wife and child would receive him. I do not think he was all bad,” Jack continued thoughtfully. “There must have been a streak of romance in him.”
“I fear,” the Archdeacon muttered very sensibly, “that it is all romance!”
But it was not all romance; there is oil in the States yet, and Mr. Kent, of whom since he is dead we all speak with respect, by hook or crook had got his share. The thirty thousand pounds were discovered pleasantly fructifying in Argentine railways, and proved as many reasons why Mrs. Yale, when Jack’s fate became known to her, should smile again. The Archdeacon put it neatly: To marry an actress is a grave offence because a common one, and one easily committed; but to marry an actress with thirty thousand pounds! Such ladies are not blackberries, not do they grow on every bush.
“Mr. and Mrs. John Yale have not yet established themselves at the Hall. They live at Henley, and their house is the summer resort of all kinds of people, among whom the Archdeacon is a very butterfly. An idea prevails — though a few of us are in the secret — that Mrs. Jack comes, in common with so many pretty women, of an old Irish family; and the other day I overheard an amusing scrap of conversation at her table. ‘Mrs. Yale,’ some one said, ‘do you know that you remind me, I if may say it without offence, of Miss Kittie Latouche, the actress?’”
“Indeed?” the lady replied with a charming blush. “But do you know that you are on dangerous ground? My husband was in love with that lady before he knew me. And I believe that he regrets her now.”
“Tit for tat!” cried Jack. “Let us all tell tales. If my wife was not in love with one Mr. Charles Williams a month — only a month — before she married me, I will eat her.”
“Oh, Jack!” the lady exclaimed, covered with confusion. But this story would not be believed in Studbury, where Mrs. John passes for being a little shy, a little timid, and not a little prudish.
BAB
CHAPTER I
HER STORY
“Clare,” I said, “I wish that we had brought some better clothes, if it were only one frock. You look the oddest figure.”
And she did. She was lying head to head with me on the thick moss which clothed one part of the river bank above Breistolen near the Sogne Fiord. We were staying at Breistolen, but there was no moss there, nor in all the Sogne district, I often thought, so deep and soft, and of so dazzling an orange and white and crimson as that particular patch. It lay quite high upon the hills, and there were gigantic grey boulders peeping through the moss here and there, very fit to break your legs if you were careless. Little more than a mile above us was the watershed, where our river, putting away with reluctance a first thought of going down the farther slope towards Bysberg, parted from its twin brother — who was thither bound with scores upon scores of puny green-backed fishlets — and instead, came down our side gliding and swishing and swirling faster and faster, and deeper and wider, and full, too, of red-speckled yellow trout all half-a-pound apiece, and very good to eat.
But they were not so sweet or toothsome to our girlish tastes as the tawny-orange cloud-berries which Clare and I were eating as we lay. So busy was she with the luscious pile we had gathered that I had to wait for an answer. And then, “Speak for yourself,” she said. “I’m sure you look like a short-coated baby. He is somewhere up the river, too.” Munch, munch, munch!
“Who is, you greedy little chit?”
“Oh, you know,” she answered. “Don’t you wish you had your grey plush here, Bab?”
I flung a look of calm disdain at her; but whether it was the berry juice which stained our faces that took from its effect, or the free mountain air which father says saps the foundations of despotism, that made her callous, at any rate she only laughed scornfully and got up and went down the stream with her rod, leaving me to finish the cloud-berries, and stare lazily up at the snow patches on the hillside — which somehow put me in mind of the grey plush — and follow or not as I liked.
Clare has a wicked story of how I gave in to father, and came to start without anything but those rough clothes. She says he said — and Jack Buchanan has told me that lawyers put no faith in anything that he says she says, or she says he says, which proves how little truth there is in this — that if Bab took none but her oldest clothes, and fished all day and had no one to run her errands — he meant Jack and the others — she might possibly grow an inch in Norway. As if I wanted to grow an inch! An inch indeed! I am five feet one and a half high, and father, who puts me an inch shorter, is the worst measurer in the world. As for Miss Clare, she would give all her inches for my eyes. So there!
After Clare left it began to be dull and chilly. When I had pictured to myself how nice it would be to dress for dinner again, and chosen the frock I would wear upon the first evening, I grew tired of the snow patches, and started up stream, stumbling and falling into holes, and clambering over rocks, and only careful to save my rod and my face. It was no occasion for the grey plush, but I had made up my mind to reach a pool which lay, I knew, a little above me. I had filched a yellow-bodied fly from Clare’s hat with a view to that particular place.
Our river — pleased to be so young, I suppose — did the oddest things hereabouts. It was not a great churning stream of snow water foaming and milky, such as we had seen in some parts, streams which affected to be always in flood, and had the look of forcing the rocks asunder and clearing their paths even while you watched them with your fingers in your ears. Our river was none of these; still it was swifter than English rivers are wont to be, and in parts deeper, and transparent as glass. In one place it would sweep over a ledge and fall wreathed in spray into a spreading lake of black, rock-bound water. Then it would narrow again until, where you could almost jump across, it darted smooth and unbroken down a polished shoot with a swoop like a swallow’s. Out of this
it would hurry afresh to brawl along a gravelly bed, skipping jauntily over first one and then another ridge of stones that had silted up weir-wise and made as if they would bar the channel. Under the lee of these there were lovely pools.
To be able to throw into mine, I had to walk out along the ridge on which the water was shallow, yet deep enough to cover my boots. But I was well rewarded. The “forellin” — the Norse name for trout, and as pretty as their girls’ wavy fair hair — were rising so merrily that I hooked and landed one in five minutes, the fly falling from its mouth as it touched the stones. I hate taking out hooks. I used at one time to leave the fly in the fish’s mouth to be removed by father at the weighing house; until Clare pricked her tongue at dinner with an almost new, red tackle, and was so mean as to keep it, though I remembered what I had done with it, and was certain it was mine — which was nothing less than dishonest of her.
I had just got back to my place and made a fine cast, when there came — not the leap, and splash, and tug which announced the half-pounder — but a deep, rich gurgle as the fly was gently sucked under, and then a quiet, growing strain upon the line which began to move away down the pool in a way that made the winch spin again and filled me with mysterious pleasure. I was not conscious of striking or of anything but that I had hooked a really good fish; and I clutched the rod with both hands and set my feet as tightly as I could upon the slippery gravel. The line moved up and down, and this way and that, now steadily and as with a purpose, and then again with an eccentric rush that made the top of the rod spring and bend so that I looked for it to snap each moment. My hands began to grow numb, and the landing-net, hitherto an ornament, fell out of my waist-belt and went I knew not whither. I suppose I must have stepped unwittingly into deeper water, for I felt that my skirts were afloat, and altogether things were going dreadfully against me, when the presence of a reinforcement was announced by a cheery shout from the far side of the river.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 824
