a true mother the whole world is full of wicked men and women busied
in laying snares for the destruction of her child; she never deems it
possible that her child may be himself the tempter of others.

Hero did not doubt that the Duchess spoke perfect truth. What woman
likes to think that another woman’s influence is otherwise than hurtful
to a man in whom she is interested?

“I am sure of it,” Miss Vanbrugh said with conviction. “But perhaps
what has happened”--they both shrank from the word “bankruptcy”--“may
be the best thing in the end, if it compels him to leave her.”

The Duchess shook her head despondently.

“I hardly know what will happen yet. I hinted that his brother might
come to his help if he would give up his present life, and he refused.
Do you know what I am actually afraid of? I believe that woman is
scheming to make him marry her!”

Hero Vanbrugh was as much shocked by this suggestion as the Duchess
could have desired. Her training had not been severely Puritanical,
but an instinct older than copybooks and Sunday schools taught her
to look on Molly Finucane as her natural enemy. Such women as Molly
were traitors to their sex; they were the blacklegs of the feminine
trades-union. The wage which the others had worked from time immemorial
to establish--honour, a home, the half of all a man’s possessions, and
the chief place in his life--all this the free-lance had foregone, to
snatch the miserable gains of adventure.

The announcement that lunch was on the table did not interrupt the
conversation. But it added another interlocutor in the person of the
Duke of Trent.

The new Minister had passed a busy morning at the Home Office. His
first care had been to send for his solicitor, to consult him about
Lord Alistair’s affairs. The lawyer told him that, though the nominal
amount of his brother’s indebtedness was not less than fifty thousand
pounds, the creditors would probably be willing to accept one-half to
cancel the proceedings. Twenty-five thousand was a large sum to a man
circumstanced as the Duke was; nevertheless, he had made up his mind
that it should be forthcoming, and he had instructed the solicitor to
open the negotiations on his behalf.

The most important item of official business had been a call from the
Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who reported a fresh
piece of hooligan violence from the neighbourhood of Bermondsey. A
policeman was again the victim, and the Force were beginning to show a
dangerous temper, and to demand permission to carry revolvers for their
own protection.

The Home Secretary privately sympathized with this demand, but he
foresaw that such a departure would be the signal for a storm of
protest in the workmen’s papers and in the House of Commons. The
particular quarter of London where the latest outrage had occurred was
represented in the House by a sturdy demagogue who was not likely to
sit with his mouth closed while his constituents were threatened with
what he had already described in advance as martial law. The very gangs
which were now defying the police were believed to have done effective
work during the last election, and on one memorable occasion their
popular representative had led them to an armed encounter with the
forces of law and order in the heart of the capital.

These considerations had to be weighed by the Home Secretary. A Cabinet
Minister in these days holds the position of a buffer between the
permanent heads of his department, who really govern the Raj, and
the assembly elected by the populace to supervise them. The first
duty of the Minister, no doubt, was to support his staff, but it was
also imperative to take no step that might endanger the popularity of
his party in the constituencies. In this dilemma the Duke of Trent
had reserved his decision till he should have had an opportunity of
consulting Major Berwick, the trusted chief of the electoral machine.

A smile of pleasure betrayed his gratification at the entrance of Miss
Vanbrugh, who greeted him with the ease of old friendship. He told his
mother briefly of the steps he had already taken on Alistair’s behalf.

The Duchess gave him a grateful look.

“Thank you, dear; I knew you would do what you could. I was just
talking to Hero about the poor boy. The one thing we have to try for
now is to make this trouble a means of rescuing him from his present
life.”

“I ought to make that condition, of course,” the elder brother observed
doubtingly; “but from what you told me last night he would only refuse
it if I were to.”

“It is very difficult,” the Duchess admitted. “I am afraid you are
right. Perhaps if you say nothing about conditions, and simply let him
know that you are helping him generously, he will feel ashamed not to
make a return.”

The Duke of Trent had his own opinion as to his brother’s sense of
shame, but he did not care to express it before Miss Vanbrugh.

“What I want most,” the Duchess proceeded, “is to induce him to come
here again. I dread the consequence of his always being with that
woman. If I could get hold of him sometimes, and bring him into contact
with women of a different kind, I feel sure that the contrast between
them and the woman he is living with would soon disgust him with her.”

Even if the Duchess had not stolen a glance at Hero Vanbrugh as she
spoke, her drift could hardly have been misunderstood by the girl. The
Duke failed to see the personal application of his mother’s remark.

“If you could find some decent woman who would overlook the past, and
get him to marry her, she might be able to keep him straight,” he said
bluntly. “On the other hand, she might not.”

“I feel sure that he might be saved by the right woman,” the Duchess
said earnestly. “I am convinced that the poor boy is secretly sick of
the life he has been leading, and only his pride keeps him from giving
it up. A noble, pure-minded girl, who really cared for him, would be
able to do anything she liked with Alistair.”

This time the allusion was too plain to be mistaken. The Home Secretary
intercepted the blush on Hero’s face, and his eyes were opened. A look
of dissatisfaction replaced his indifferent air, as he replied with
some bitterness:

“I am not so sure of it. Many a good woman has sacrificed her life
before now in the effort to reclaim a man who was unworthy of her, and
the sacrifice has been in vain.”

In saying this he was thinking of the history of his own father and
mother, of which he had learned more than his mother suspected. He had
sometimes felt surprised, as well as mortified, that he should have
had such a parent as Lord Alexander. Never having seen his father since
early childhood, and being free from any tendency to romantic idealism,
the Duke was able to judge the dead man quite impartially, and to think
of him as if he had been some remote ancestor, whose virtues and vices
were merely matter of curiosity for his descendants.

“I wonder my mother’s own experience has not taught her the folly of
thinking that a worthless man can be redeemed by a good wife,” he
reflected impatiently. “Alistair takes after his father; no doubt
that is why she has always loved him better than me. Her whole soul
is absorbed in trying to save him from the consequences of his own
follies, and I am merely a pawn in the game. Now she wants to enlist
Hero Vanbrugh in the same task, as if a girl like that were fit for
nothing better than to be the keeper of a drunken prodigal.”

The Duchess observed the frown on her eldest son’s brow with wondering
dismay. It did not occur to her that he could be moved by any other
feeling than fraternal jealousy. Old-fashioned in her ideas on this
subject, as on most others, she had never contemplated it as possible
that the Duke of Trent and Colonsay could marry out of his own
class. And the class in which, with perfectly unconscious pride, she
placed her young friend was that middle one which appeared to have
been created to supply doctors and lawyers and men of business for
the service of the aristocracy. In her eyes the girl’s father, Sir
Bernard Vanbrugh, was simply a successful medical man. The scientific
achievements which had made him a European personage, greater than any
Secretary of State, were outside her ken.

If she had come to entertain the project of marrying Hero Vanbrugh to
her prodigal son as a last means of averting the terrible catastrophe
of Molly Finucane, she did so honestly, considering that she offered a
privilege to Hero, corresponding with the greatness of the interest at
stake. It was in the perfect simplicity of this conviction that she had
so candidly revealed her design. In the same spirit she had been ready
to take Alistair’s brother into her confidence without any apprehension
that she might be applying the spur of rivalry to a slumbering
admiration.

She was familiar with the Duke’s expressed views on matrimony, which
she respected, although they struck a little cold on her own more
emotional nature. She knew that he had made up his mind from an early
age to two things--that he was one of the best matches in Great
Britain, and that marriage was the most important card he had to play
in the game of life. It had long been understood between them that
Trent was in no hurry; that what he required in a wife was a great
fortune, accompanied by those social graces which count for so much
in politics; and that when he found a possessor of both these gifts
who pleased him she would become his Duchess. The mother lived in the
mild expectation of hearing some day that her young sultan had thrown
the handkerchief to a fitting aspirant, whom it would be her part to
welcome with what tenderness was permitted, and in whose favour she
would cheerfully resign her place in Colonsay House.

Thus it lay altogether outside her calculations that her eldest
son could take any interest in Hero Vanbrugh warmer than a passing
friendship. The prudent young statesman was the last person in the
world whom anyone acquainted with him would have believed capable of a
romantic passion. And the last person in the world to believe it would
have been the young Minister himself.

A man who has lived to the age of thirty without ever losing his head
in the company of a woman naturally regards himself as love-proof, and
perhaps insensibly relaxes his self-defence. But Hero Vanbrugh enjoyed
one great advantage over almost every unmarried girl whom Trent had
ever met, inasmuch as she had not come before him as a candidate for
the orange-blossoms.

If he had met her in one of those crowded ballrooms where her sisters
are paraded nightly in the London season for the allurement of
intending purchasers, Trent would have carefully guarded himself from
giving her a second thought. He had met her for the first time at his
own table, lunching in outdoor costume with his mother, who introduced
her as a helper in her charitable work. The Duke, presuming that
Miss Vanbrugh came from some humble clerical circle, unbent from his
ordinary reserve in the desire to put her at her ease. He was rewarded
for this kindly effort by the discovery that she was beautiful and
charming.

It was not until afterwards that he learned from his mother, who
rallied him playfully on his fascination, that he had been entertaining
the daughter of the great Vanbrugh. It was chance, therefore--one
of those chances that every now and then take over the control of
our lives and change them for us--that had caused Trent to meet Hero
Vanbrugh on this easy footing instead of in the cankered atmosphere
of fashion. But the ice, once broken, could not be re-formed, and the
relations between Hero and her host at Colonsay House had developed
into intimacy.

Up to this time the Duke’s mental attitude had been that of a man who
views a tempting object in a shop-window, and stands hesitating, purse
in hand, wishful to buy, but unable to make up his mind to give the
price. Now he suddenly became aware that another possible purchaser was
coming up, and that if he wanted to make sure of the bargain, he must
lose no more time.

An embarrassing silence was broken by Hero, who undertook to divert the
thoughts of the Home Secretary by asking:

“What do they think in the Home Office of the Legitimist Guild?”

CHAPTER VII

THE DECADENTS

IT was some time after dinner when the Duke of Trent, faithful to his
promise to their mother, drove up to the gate of Alistair’s house in
Chelsea.

On the way James considered what line it would be best for him to take.
He reckoned on finding the prodigal in a despondent mood, perhaps half
estranged from the temptress already, under the stress of poverty and
disgrace. If so, it should prove an easy task to appeal to him by the
picture of the welcome awaiting him in Colonsay House. Alistair could
not but be touched by his brother’s generosity--and James meant to be
generous. He meant to say--to say a little condescendingly, perhaps,
but kindly: “I take your debts on myself. Your name is cleared. Your
mother and I only ask you not to forget that you have a home to come to
when you like.”

By the time he had reached the house the Duke had half persuaded
himself that he should be able to bring the repentant one away with him
that very night.

The house was surrounded on all sides by a high brick wall, pierced at
the entrance by a tall narrow gateway, the gate of Georgian ironwork.
Ordering his coachman to wait, the Minister strode up a covered pathway
that led to the door of the house, and knocked.

As he did so he was aware that the lower part of the house was
brilliantly lit up. He caught a murmur of voices coming through the
windows of a room which overlooked the front garden, and even heard
what sounded like applause.

Before he could frame any explanation to himself of these sights and
sounds the door was opened by a smart lad in a rather untidy page’s
livery, who stared at the visitor with the vulgar impertinence of a
servant who does not respect his employers.

At the same instant a loud burst of laughter came from the interior of
the building.

“Is Lord Alistair at home?” the Duke demanded sharply, incensed by this
reception.

“He’s engaged,” said the boy glibly, giving the Duke a cautious look.
“What name, please?”

“The Duke of Trent. I am his lordship’s brother,” returned the Home
Secretary, frowning.

“Oh, that’s all right, my lord--I mean Your Grace,” the page responded,
with an air of relief. “Come in, please.”

And, scarcely giving the visitor time to remove his hat, he threw
open the door of the room from whence the sounds had proceeded, and
announced him.

The new-comer took two steps through the doorway, and stopped
astounded.

He had arrived on the scene of a festivity. Around a dining-table,
crowded with a confusion of dessert-dishes, champagne-bottles,
coffee-cups, cigar-boxes, and spirit-stands, with the ashes of
innumerable cigars and cigarettes soaking in the spilt wine and coffee
on the tablecloth, were seated some seven or eight men, most of them
young, all wearing evening dress, and seeming to be in the highest
spirits. At the head of the table, facing the Duke as he came in, the
woman he had come to snatch his brother away from lolled back in her
chair, puffing a cigarette, her hands monstrously encumbered with
coloured stones, and her powdered bosom resplendent with five or six
chains of jewellery. At the foot of the table, beside the door by which
James had just entered, the brother he had come to pardon and to redeem
turned languidly in his seat, and, rising with studied nonchalance,
removed a cigar from his lips to say:

“That you, Trent? So good of you to join us.” And, turning to the
company again, he added the careless introduction: “My brother.”

His second glance round the room had warned the angry Duke that,
however he might be disposed to treat Molly Finucane, her guests were
not men whom he had any right to object to meet. Too well-bred to make
a scene under the circumstances, he choked down his indignation, and,
after a haughty bow, which neither included nor excluded the lady of
the house, he accepted the chair which someone offered him. It was with
a sense of satisfaction not unmingled with surprise that the Secretary
of State discovered on sitting down that his neighbour was a personal
acquaintance, the great Mendes, head of the South American Bank, and a
financier with whom Cabinet Ministers were obliged to reckon.

Lord Alistair vouchsafed a light word of explanation.

“Been having a little feed to celebrate my smash,” he said, waving
his hand over the dirty table. “These are my friends. You see before
you the members of the Dishonourable Brotherhood of Decadents, an
association for the spread of corruption among the upper classes.
Dishonourable Brother St. John, I call upon you for a speech.”

“What on earth is all this?” the Duke demanded in a whisper of his
neighbour.

The millionaire shrugged his shoulders, as though he were slightly
ashamed of his company.

“I suppose they intend it for humour,” he answered in the same key.
“It’s one of your brother’s ideas. He’s always starting something
of the kind. It used to be a Chinese Guild, and they all dressed as
mandarins and wore pigtails. Last year it was an anti-Semite show,
and Stuart had the cheek to ask me to join it.” The Jew’s smile as
he said this was a trifle threatening. “They parody everything. That
Frenchman opposite, Des Louvres”--he nodded towards a man with a thin,
wicked-looking face and small dark beard and moustache--“he is at the
bottom of it, I believe. They may know something about him in your
Office.”

The Home Secretary was staggered. Possessed of too little imagination
to see anything in the proceedings but a rather scandalous jest of
the kind that undergraduates indulge in at places like Cambridge and
Oxford, he felt that the mere fact of the jest being carried out by
grown men made it doubly unbecoming. And he felt personally aggrieved
that these men should be making merry over an event which had cast a
shadow on the house of which he was the head. He recalled his mother’s
grief, Prince Herbert’s gracious interest, the money sacrifice which he
himself was preparing to make; and his heart swelled with inward wrath
and shame.

He could not help wondering privately what Mendes was doing in such
company. The keen, remorseless man of business who had executed a
masterpiece of legal robbery, and thereby made himself one of the new
world powers which were taking the place of Kings and Cabinets, seemed
strangely out of place among that crew of mockers. The Brazilian sat
for the most part silent, his lips set in an ironical smile. But from
time to time his glance wandered in the direction of Molly Finucane,
who moved restively in, her chair whenever she caught Mendes’s black
eyes fixed on hers.

The rest of the revellers were all excited in different degrees by the
wine they had been drinking, and their remarks and interruptions formed
a sort of ground-bass to the speech which Alistair had called for. Mr.
Gerald St. John, whom the “Court Guide,” more tender of his dignity
than he seemed to be himself, described as “Honourable,” was a man of
about the same age as Stuart, though his bald forehead gave him the
appearance of being older. He had some little reputation as an amateur
in music and painting; he had composed songs which were occasionally
sung, and painted pictures which the New Gallery did not disdain.

Addressing his friends as “Dishonourable Brethren,” he hailed them as
the missionaries of a new gospel. Theirs was the task to purge society
of Puritanism and propriety. They were to set the example of becoming
artists in Beautiful Sin. It was impossible for Trent to tell how far
he was serious. His speech mingled echoes of the cant of a certain
class of literary and artistic critics with what appeared to be broad
farce.

But two passages in the address made an impression on the Minister, by
their curious connection with his recent interests. The first was a
surprising compliment to the Church of Rome; the second was a panegyric
in a much broader vein of the hooligans.

Of the Roman Church the speaker said that it was the only form of
Christianity which deserved their toleration and respect. He regarded
it as the true Church of the Decadence, and as such he called upon the
Brotherhood to support it. He was not himself a Catholic; he was a
polytheist. But he considered that, next to polytheism, the Church of
Rome afforded the best rallying-point for all that was beautiful and
corrupt in the art and life of the age.

This extraordinary eulogy was received with vociferous applause,
especially by the French Count, whose air was that of a man enjoying
a personal triumph. Molly Finucane, who had not been to Mass or
Confession for many years, but who had not quite shaken off her early
impressions, tried to disguise her nervousness by hammering the table
with her wineglass till it broke--an accident which she was half
disposed to interpret as the work of an offended Power.

The Duke of Trent, who entertained a vague respect for the Roman Church
as a venerable institution whose influence was generally exerted on
the side of the Conservative party, hardly knew what to think of this
equivocal homage to its merits. The Honourable Gerald St. John passed
on to the question of hooliganism, not without a shy glance in the
direction of the Home Secretary, which showed how much the jest was
enhanced by the presence of hooliganism’s official adversary.

The hooligans, he declared, were crusaders fighting for the same
cause as that Dishonourable Brotherhood. They were martyrs of the new
individualism. Their so-called outrages constituted a protest--the
only form of protest which dull and hidebound statesmen could
understand--against the iron yoke of Socialist civilization, under
which they were all groaning. He regarded the hooligans as saviours. It
was significant that so far the man whom they had selected for attack
was that embodiment of everything vulgar and virtuous, the suburban
ratepayer. When they had exterminated the ratepayer, he hoped they
would go on to the millionaire. He had always regretted that their
fellow-workers, the Anarchists, should show so much antipathy to Kings.
It was an unreasonable prejudice. Kings were picturesque survivals in
the midst of the hideous monotony of modern life. Kings were rarely
respectable, and were not seldom steeped in crime; and this applied
particularly to those romantic claimants--he, the speaker, preferred
the dear old name “Pretender”--whom their Dishonourable Brother on the
left was seeking to restore.

This allusion was accepted by Des Louvres with eager manifestations of
approval. Once more the Secretary of State felt an obscure uneasiness
as he compared these mocking utterances with the recent experience
of his own department, and he began to ask himself if he was indeed
listening to the first whispers of a coming storm.

Hero Vanbrugh’s question about the Legitimist Guild had not fallen on
deaf ears. He had had the curiosity to ask his permanent staff if they
knew anything of the Legitimists, and he found they knew very little.
There is nothing Government Departments dislike so much as information,
except the trouble of acting on it. No one in the Home Office could say
exactly who the Legitimists were, or how they had come into existence
as a guild. Their very number was unknown, but it was believed to be
insignificant. They were wholly without influence or following, and
would never have been heard of but for the fact that the newspapers
regarded their proceedings as a good joke. Every sensible person put
them down as a clique of vain and foolish young men who made themselves
supremely ridiculous by trying to revive a cause which had been dead
for a hundred and fifty years.

Such was the official view. Sixty or seventy years before a similar
view had been taken of the action of a little clique of Oxford men who
were setting themselves to undo the work of the Protestant Reformation.
That little clique had undertaken to break up a settlement which had
taken root for two hundred and fifty years, and had survived twelve
reigns and six rebellions. In the course of a single reign they had
come within sight of their goal. They had driven the word “Protestant”
out of polite conversation, and made it a synonym for everything base,
ignorant and malicious. They had made it dangerous for a Protestant to
object publicly to Catholic practices which were still forbidden by the
letter of the law. They had sent an informal embassy to the Vatican to
negotiate the re-entry of England into the Roman obedience; and they
had delivered the first open attack on the legislative bars which still
hindered that consummation.

Fresh from the assurances of the Home Office, it was a shock to the
Minister to find himself for the second time that day confronted with
this ridiculous but offensive movement. It was true that Mr. St. John’s
remarks bordered on satire, but the serious-minded are apt to resent
satire at the expense of what they fear, as much as at the expense of
what they revere; the only notes they wish to hear are the snap of
cavil and the rumble of denunciation.

If the Duke of Trent had consulted his own inclination he would have
risen and protested against this trifling with treason. But, like most
men who are deprived of the sense of humour, James Stuart was keenly
sensitive to ridicule, and he dared not expose himself to the merciless
wit of this crew of profligates. He bitterly repented the false step he
had taken in sitting down amongst them, but he sought in vain for any
means of extrication.

Meanwhile the orator concluded with a felicitous reference to the
occasion of the feast.

One Dishonourable Brother--in fact, the founder of their Order, he
said--had shown that it was possible to emulate, if not to surpass,
the exploits of the humble hooligan. By his magnificent defiance of
the day before he had struck dismay into the mercenary ranks of their
hereditary foes--he need not say he meant the trading class, whose
shameful supremacy had made England unfit to live in. Their gallant
host had plundered the hostile camp of a sum which represented one of
the greatest triumphs ever achieved over the Philistine. He called
upon him, in their name, not to pay this _canaille_ a farthing in the
pound. And he called upon them to drink confusion to the respectable
classes, coupled with the name of their Arch Decadent!

Everyone rose to his feet to drink the toast, with the exception of the
bankrupt himself, and his brother, who tried to conceal his disgust
under an air of amused tolerance.

Alistair Stuart was conscious of his brother’s real feeling, and
resented it all the more because he was half ashamed of his own part in
the buffoonery. His tone became louder and more insolent as he gulped
down glass after glass of spirits, and called upon one or other of his
guests to keep up the entertainment.

Nobody dared call upon the Secretary of State. They all knew enough to
feel that he was a stranger in the camp, if not a spy, and only the
emphasized indifference of Stuart to his brother’s presence gave them
courage to go on. The presence of this representative of all that they
professed to loathe and despise, looking on with chill disapproval,
dashed their spirits unexpectedly, and even to their own ears their
customary jests took on a hollow sound.

Presently it came to the turn of a youth seated opposite to the Duke.
He was of a pale and sickly countenance, the whiteness of his face
being accentuated by the black locks which he allowed to grow down to
his neck. His tie was a black sash with flowing ends like that worn by
French Art students in the quarter of Batignolles. He did not appear
to be much more than twenty, and answered to the name of Egerton Vane.

“Who is he?” Trent asked his neighbour.

“The lunatic with the scarf round his neck? That’s a minor poet.
I don’t suppose you have ever come across his works. He publishes
two volumes every year, at his own expense, of course, with about
twenty poems in each. No one ever reads them, except the provincial
reviewers. He has got an album filled with cuttings from papers like
the _Pembrokeshire News_ and the _Berwick-on-Tweed Gazette_. ‘A volume
of verse from the graceful pen of Mr. Egerton Vane’--that’s the kind
of incense he feeds on. Once he got a puff in a paper called the
_Librarian_, and carried it about with him for months. He said to me
with tears in his eyes: ‘This is recognition!’”

Everyone in the room seemed to have some literary or artistic vocation,
except Mendes himself. The motive which brought the South American
there remained unguessed by Trent, but it was clear that he extracted
some amusement from his strange associates.

“That other young fool over there is his brother, Wickham Vane,” the
millionaire continued, indicating a boy of eighteen or thereabouts, at
the other end of the table.

“Does he write poetry, too?”

“No, he doesn’t do anything so material as write. He thinks beautifully
about old tapestry.”

Wickham Vane might have been pursuing his peculiar vocation at that
moment from his absorbed expression. But he roused himself from his
abstraction to pay the homage of attention to his elder brother.

Egerton Vane held a large sheet of paper in his hand, but before
reading from it he prepared his hearers’ minds by a short allocution.

“The poem I am about to read you strikes an entirely new note in
literature, the note of the unreal. It is a ‘Sonnet to a Drawer in a
Japanese Cabinet.’ I have come to the conclusion that all the poets
who have preceded me have been mistaken in thinking that Nature was
poetical. The artificial only is poetical, because only Art can be
artistic. Nature is incapable of symbolism, and the symbol alone is
truly beautiful. All the glorious sins which reveal themselves crudely
and grossly in mere human beings are latent in exquisite suggestion in
the divinely precious works of Art. Even the handicrafts of the East
are steeped in the splendid sensuality of its peoples. In this poem
I have attempted to do justice to the subtle and elusive vice which
clings like the aroma of putrefying rose-leaves to the workmanship of a
Japanese cabinet in my possession.”

The poet proceeded to read:

  SONNET

  TO A DRAWER IN A JAPANESE CABINET

  What shadow of dead secrets, lemon-eyed,
    Lurks in thy black recesses, frightful drawer,
    Crowned with the Pagan scent of delicate gore
  Fresh from the veins of some green suicide?

  Behold thy lacquered sins are glorified
    In frantic fowls that round thy handle soar,
    Mad with obscure desires, like those that tore
  Unclean blue Mænads by the Phrygian tide!

  And horrors like vermilion rats awake
    And crawl about thee, crooning in my ears
  Dim, vampire songs of shrivelled souls that ache

  With the strange lust for torture-baths of pain;
  Sick with the thirst of poison drunk in vain,
    And bleeding with the clammy blood of tears.

The new note thus successfully struck in literature was applauded with
a vehemence that concealed some jealousy on the part of the other poets
present. Only Molly Finucane, who was beginning to feel herself left
out in the cold, asked the author impertinently what his work meant.

“Nothing!” was the rapt reply. “All Art is quite meaningless.”

The Duke of Trent turned to Mendes.

“And is that absurd and disgusting rubbish the sort of thing which
passes for poetry to-day?”

“Not to-day, perhaps, but it will pass for it to-morrow. If Egerton
Vane goes on long enough, I have no doubt he will found a school. But I
have noticed that most young fellows who begin like that end by going
into a monastery.”

The Duke began to see a new usefulness in the institutions which he had
been brought up to regard with aversion.

The Brazilian, who knew the weak spot in most of his fellow-men,
maliciously threw an apple of discord among the company by asking
Egerton Vane across the table what he thought of the poems of Rowley
Drummer.

The quarrel which instantly arose and raged over the merits of this
distinguished writer showed that envy of a rival’s renown may be a
stronger passion than hatred of the middle classes.

The chief apologist for the poet was a man who had recently achieved
a scandalous success with a novel in which he dealt faithfully with
the vices of all his most intimate friends. The terror inspired by
this performance had made him for the moment the most courted man in
London society, and persons like the brothers Vane followed him about
everywhere in the hope of finding themselves pilloried to fame in Basil
Dyke’s next libel.

Dyke, who found his antipathy to the _bourgeoisie_ sensibly diminished
by every cheque which reached him from his publisher, and who was
already meditating desertion from the decadent ranks in favour of
marriage with an heiress, put forward a claim on behalf of his client
which it did not seem easy to refute.

“He has made vice popular in the person of the British soldier,” he
urged. “He has stamped with brazen hoofs upon the Gordons and the
Havelocks and the prayer-meeting heroes of the Victorian Age, and has
called upon the drudging taxpayer to bow down and worship a swearing,
drinking blackguard. His patriotism is nauseous in itself, I grant,
but then he has made it patriotic to break the Ten Commandments. He has
identified Imperialism with immorality.”

“And therefore, I suppose, you would say with Art?” retorted Egerton
Vane, with ill-concealed annoyance. “All Art is immoral, but it does
not follow that all immorality is artistic.”

“Vulgarity is never artistic,” added the thinker about old tapestry,
coming to his brother’s support. “Rowley Drummer has no sense of the
unreal. He sees life in all its blinding vulgarity, and therefore the
better he paints it, the worse is the result.”

Dyke saw that he had gone too far. It is always bad manners to praise
one poet in the hearing of another. He tried to qualify his praise.

“I do not defend him as an artist,” he explained, “but as a demagogue.
I say that the coarse passion called patriotism, in his hands, has been
turned to a good purpose. After he has taught the public to acclaim the
hooligans of the barrack-room, they cannot very well flog the hooligans
of the street.”

To the Minister, fresh from his legislative essay, this remark sounded
like a challenge. Once more a doubt invaded his mind as to whether all
that he was listening to was sheer ribaldry, or whether there were not
underlying it some serious purpose, or at least some serious tendency,
of which Cabinet Ministers one day might have to take heed.

Molly Finucane had been feeling bored for some time, and, what was
worse, feeling that her exclusion from the conversation reflected on
her position as the lady of the house. She seized this opportunity to
assert her prerogative.

“Who talks of flogging the hooligans?” she asked, with a good deal of
scorn. “They’ll have to catch ’em first.”

She stopped short, warned by the uneasy looks of the rest that she had
committed herself in some way. Molly did not read the papers, and so
was ignorant of the recent proceedings of the House of Lords. But she
was aware that Lord Alistair’s brother was identified in some way with
the Government, and therefore with the cause of law and order, and she
guessed that her expressions might contain some element of offence.

There had been a time when Molly would have enjoyed nothing so much as
shocking a Cabinet Minister by telling him across her own table that
her brother was a corner-boy. But for the past year a great change
had come over her disposition, as great as that which transforms the
roystering medical student into the serious family practitioner. It had
not needed the letter from Lord Alistair’s mother to put before her
the idea of becoming Lord Alistair’s wife, nor to teach her the way in
which his friends would take such an alliance. To become Lady Alistair
without at the same time obtaining the social honours which other Lady
Alistairs enjoyed would do little to satisfy that yearning for other
women’s respect which is the torment appointed for such as Molly
Finucane. And there was enough good in Molly to make her anxious for
Alistair’s sake not to be a permanent blight on his career. It was for
his sake as much as for her own that she had been striving painfully
for the last twelve months to acquire the habitudes of a lady.

The unexpected arrival of the Duke of Trent had caused her a thrill of
pleasurable excitement. To make a good impression on the head of the
family, she felt, would bring her half-way to the goal. Now, at the
thought that she had been so near to disgracing herself, she could have
bitten her tongue.

Molly’s preoccupations were not shared by Alistair, who took it for
granted that his brother had come to reproach him, and resented what
seemed to him an impertinent intrusion. By this time he had drunk too
much to care what he said or did, and the desire was strong upon him to
wreak his bitter feelings on the head of his favoured elder.

Staggering to his feet, and casting a disdainful look at the silent and
annoyed Duke, he burst out:

“I am a hooligan. I’ve been trying to disguise it ever since I was a
boy, but I’m not going to try any more. I hate your law and order; I
hate your respectability; I hate your civilization. Our forefathers
were thieves and murderers, and I envy them. They lived a jolly life
among the heather and the hills, and they were gentlemen. They didn’t
cringe to cobblers and butchers for votes, and go to church on Sundays
to please their grocer. They swore and drank and diced as much as
they liked, and never asked what the Dissenters thought of them. I
am sick of the strait-waistcoat; I am sick of swallow-tail coats and
prayer-books. Why should I torture myself in the effort to lead your
unnatural life? I protest against it all. Life is one long persecution
of men like me, by men like you. Why can’t you leave me alone, as I
leave you alone? I don’t force you to drink and gamble, and lead what
you are pleased to call an immoral life. Why do you try to force me to
lead a moral one?”

He paused for a moment, and then, as if the overflow of his wrath had
sobered him, went on in a more serious vein:

“What is your ideal? Show me the man you honour, and I will show you
the value of your morality. The hero of to-day is the successful cheat,
the tradesman who has made a million by selling rotten food to the
poor or to your own soldiers in South Africa; the bandit of the Stock
Exchange; the monopolist who has broken the hearts and ruined the lives
of a hundred struggling rivals, and who three hundred years ago would
have been hanged as an engrosser. That is the man to whom you kneel,
for whom all the doors of all the churches are thrown open, in whose
name I am ordered to reform my ways.”

The speaker seemed to feel the need of pointing his denunciation with a
personal application.

“I am your victim. I am the man whose life is ground out beneath the
Juggernaut wheels of what you call your social system. Why? Because
I cannot become hard and selfish and stupid like your model. It is
monotony that you want; it is originality that you hate. Go to the
tombs of your martyrs--most of them are buried in Westminster Abbey
or St. Paul’s--Goldsmith the bankrupt, Nelson the adulterer, Pitt
the drunkard, Shakespeare the debauchee. Those are the men whom you
are trying to exterminate, and you have nearly succeeded. I--I had
something here, perhaps”--he smote his forehead with his hand--“and
I might have done something if I had ever had the chance. But you
have killed me. All the bright instincts, all the golden wings that
fluttered in the dawn, all the magic whispers, all the reveries and
dreams--they are dead and still and silent now. Your work is done.”

A slight shiver went round the room and touched even the Cabinet
Minister, who had been more than once on the point of rising and taking
his departure.

Suddenly Alistair Stuart broke into a loud laugh.

“Thank you, my Dishonourable friends--thank you for your support
to-night. You see before you a bankrupt, but a merry one. You will hear
of me again before long. I think of taking a house on the south side of
the river, and turning hooligan. I invite you to become members of my
band. I hope to give some trouble to the authorities. We are fortunate
in having one of them here to-night. I invite you to drink his health,
gentlemen--my brother, the Home Secretary, author of a Bill to punish
the hooligans by flogging. In your name I defy him, and drink damnation
to his Bill!”

The thickness of his speech and the increasing wildness of his
behaviour relieved Lord Alistair’s hearers from the necessity of
treating this as anything but the utterance of an intoxicated man. But
it was clearly necessary to put an end to the scene.

Mendes and the Duke of Trent rose together, but the financier was the
first to speak.

“Gentlemen, it is time we were going. Stuart, sit down! You don’t know
what you are doing!”

He thrust Lord Alistair down into a chair and held him there, while the
others made their hasty farewells and streamed out into the hall.

“I am obliged to you, Mendes,” said the Duke. “Do you think,” he added
in a whisper, “you could get that girl out of the way?”

“It’s her house, I believe, but I’ll try to send her to bed,” was the
answer.

The Brazilian went up to Molly, who sat looking rather frightened at
her end of the table. He said a few words in a low voice which appeared
to produce the right effect. Molly Finucane glanced timidly at the
Duke, and then came towards him with an evident desire to propitiate.

“I’ll leave him with you, if you like,” she said, “but you won’t find
it much good talking to him to-night, I expect. You’d better come again
in the morning, if it’s any business.”

Trent confined himself to bowing silently, and Mendes accompanied Miss
Finucane out of the room, leaving the brothers together.

Alistair had remained still, with his head resting in his hands, as
though exhausted by his passion. Hearing the door close, he looked up
sullenly.

“Well, what do you want with me?” he asked.

Faithful to his resolve to be gracious, in spite of the provocations he
had received, the Duke made a mild answer.

“I want you to come home, Alistair.”

“This is home.”

“My house is your home,” said James, not unkindly; and, with a tact of
which he was not always capable, he added: “Our mother’s house is the
home of both of us.”

Alistair reddened.

“How is she?” he muttered.

“She is very anxious and unhappy about you. I have promised her to save
you, if you will let me.”

This time the elder brother’s words were not so well chosen. It always
grated on Alistair to be reminded that he was dependent on James.

“I can’t leave my friends,” he said stubbornly.

Trent thought of the company he had just seen depart, and his
indignation got the better of him.

“Friends!” he repeated. “Friends who have landed you in the Bankruptcy
Court!”

“Well, you didn’t keep me out of it!”

Trent made a strong effort to keep his temper.

“I have seen my solicitor to-day with the object of preventing the
adjudication. Alistair, I will do it, if you will only pull yourself
together, and make it possible for your mother and me to help you. I
will pay your debts once more, though I can ill afford it, and start
you again with a clean sheet, if you will only take advantage of it.
Come! I have got the brougham waiting outside. Why shouldn’t you get up
now, and let me take you straight away with me?”

He tried to speak cheerfully and confidently. But there was no
encouragement in the bleared eyes that looked up at him.

“What! and leave Molly after she’s stuck to me all this time? D’you
think I’m a cad, Trent?”

“You called yourself a hooligan just now.”

Trent regretted the retort the moment it had passed his lips. But it
was too late. Alistair started up angrily.

“And, damn it! I’ll _be_ a hooligan before I will sell the little woman
for a few miserable thousands, like that! Go to the devil, you and your
clean sheet! I’m sorry for the old mater, if she feels it, but I can’t
stand your patronage, and I won’t have your moralizing; so you can just
leave me alone.”

“I will leave you alone!” exclaimed his brother. “God forgive me, I
sometimes wonder what I have done to deserve being cursed with such a
brother as you!”

He turned and strode out of the room, leaving Alistair to sway and sink
down with his head upon the table among the ashes and wine-stains of
the extinguished revel.

CHAPTER VIII

A LEGITIMIST DEMONSTRATION

THE carriage which brought the Duchess of Trent and Miss Vanbrugh to
the Legitimist bazaar set them down at the door of a mean-looking,
brick-built schoolroom, over the door of which was a niche containing
the statue of a woman holding a babe in her arms.

This woman was intended for a Jewish peasant, wife of the carpenter
Joseph of Nazareth. This babe was her Divine Son, the second person of
the Christian Triad.

The woman wore an emblem of glory in the form of a crown on her
head. The babe’s head was undecorated. The group was copied without
alteration from the ancient pagan idols of the Great Mother and her
Child, worshipped for countless ages in the Mediterranean zone.

Beneath the niche four letters were cut. They were the four initials,
A.M.D.G., of the Latin words, _Ad majorem Dei gloriam_--“To the greater
glory of God.”

It was the motto of the famous Society of Jesus, set up over a building
in which the children of Protestant Churchmen were being educated.
Only the Jesuit motto was not set out in full; it was merely hinted at
by those cryptic letters. This was a touch that Ignatius Loyola would
have admired.

Neither of the two ladies observed the unobtrusive initials, nor,
if they had done so, would they have understood their significance.
But they could scarcely avoid seeing the idol in its niche; and
just as they were stepping out of the carriage a bright little lad,
attractively robed in a white gown with a red vest above, evidently a
singing-boy from the church hard by, passed through the doorway, bowing
reverently to the sacred image as he went up the steps.

The Duchess of Trent was amazed. Her works of charity had never brought
her into this part of the parish, and she had always kept herself from
contact with the religious activities of St. Jermyn’s.

“If that is not Popery, I should like to know what is?” she exclaimed
bluntly to her young friend. “Did you see that boy bowing to the Virgin
Mary? I have no doubt they are taught to pray to her as well.”

This surmise was perfectly just. Such slight control as the episcopate,
or at least the lay judges of the Privy Council, exercised over the
services in St. Jermyn’s Church, appeared to cease altogether on the
threshold of the school. Within that building Dr. Coles was supreme,
and taught what religion he pleased. If it had suited him to set up
an image of Siva for the adoration of his scholars, or to inculcate
the most degrading beliefs of primitive savagery, no one would have
interfered with his discretion. Thus, while the Vicar maintained
some of the forms of Anglican worship in the parish church, in the
schoolroom he had long laid them aside. The catechism taught to the
boys was one prepared by a clerical secret society, and was carefully
contrived to fill the learner’s mind with hatred for the Protestant
heresy, and to turn it in the direction of Catholic Unity.

A special liturgy, compiled by the same hands, was also provided
for the use of the scholars. In it the Mother of God figured as the
principal, though not the sole, object of worship, the Apostle Peter
taking the second place. Among the prayers, precedence was given to
one for the Patriarch of the West--“Thy servant Leo, that he may be
inspired rightly to define and zealously to defend the faith once
delivered to Thy saints.” After this came petitions on behalf of a
personage discreetly referred to as “the lawful Sovereign of these
realms,” the souls of the dead “now awaiting Thy judgment,” and the
reunion, “under one visible Head on earth,” of all branches of the Holy
Catholic Church. Dr. Coles himself was responsible for a supplementary
prayer in which “our blessed patron, Saint Jermyn,” was complimented on
his influence with the Mother of God, due to the continence of his life
on earth, and implored to use that influence on behalf of the area for
which he was, as it were, the spiritual County Councillor.

It was a document breathing the spirit of the Dark Ages, when God
figured in men’s minds as a sort of Byzantine Emperor, surrounded by a
court of heavenly chamberlains and eunuchs, each dispensing favours to
his own train of followers, and none incapable of being bribed.

Miss Vanbrugh, regarding the symbolical sculpture with the indifference
born of ignorance, smiled at her friend’s indignation.

“Let us go in,” she said; “I don’t think it’s so bad inside.”

The whitewashed walls of the room in which they found themselves
offered a curious medley of science and religion, evidencing a painful
struggle in the mind of Dr. Coles between proselytizing zeal and a
desire to earn the grants of an heretical Government. A large crucifix
over the teacher’s desk was flanked by a geological map of Great
Britain, and a glass case containing silk in various stages from the
cocoon to the finished skein. The Ten Commandments on one wall were
faced by the two hemispheres on the other; and an illuminated calendar
of Holy Days was half concealed by a chart depicting screws, wedges,
levers, and other mechanical appliances. The cloven, or at least the
clerical, hoof peeped out in a series of cartoons illustrative of
English history, the scenes chosen being all in one category--the
landing of Augustine, the martyrdom of Edmund, Thomas à Becket defying
Henry II., and Langton, with a formidable crozier, extorting Magna
Charta from King John apparently by the threat of physical violence,
while the barons respectfully looked on.

On this particular occasion the eye was quickly distracted from these
mural decorations by the exhibition beneath. The room, which was
large enough to contain one or two hundred people, was lined round
three sides by stalls loaded with that extraordinary description of
articles which are manufactured specially for sale at bazaars, and in
which the greatest possible uselessness is combined with the greatest
possible fragility. Children’s frocks, which no child could wear for
an hour without damaging them, embroidered tobacco-pouches sufficient
to dismay the most stout-hearted smoker, weird contrivances of paper
and cheap ribbon described as toilet-tidies, ridiculous pin-cushions,
and impossible patchwork quilts formed the staple of the display. In
one corner a lottery was being conducted by the Rev. Aloysius Grimes,
happy in that immunity from the law which newspaper editors cannot
obtain; and pretty little choristers, in their sacred vestments, were
passing to and fro among the ladies doing a roaring trade in the sale
of tickets. But the great attraction of the afternoon was the theatre,
which had been organized in an adjoining classroom, and in which it was
announced that a Miracle Play would be produced at four o’clock, under
the direction of Egerton Vane, Esq.

As soon as Mr. Grimes caught sight of the Duchess of Trent and her
companion, he handed over the care of the lottery to a young lady
assistant, and hastened forward to greet them. He was just shaking
hands, when a stir in the doorway announced the arrival of Dr. Coles.

In appearance the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s contrasted very favourably
with his curate. It was easy to see that he was a man of education and
refinement, and his white hairs gave him a certain dignity. His face
was that of a sensualist, but the benevolent smile, which had become
almost stereotyped on his lips, produced an impression of cordiality
and goodness of heart. The Doctor’s career had not been quite
untroubled by the voice of scandal. But any bygone slips on the part of
a saintly man had been forgotten or forgiven. The reverent murmur which
welcomed his appearance among his flock was a striking testimony to the
influence he had secured over those among whom he worked.

The Rev. Aloysius, breaking away from the two ladies in the middle of a
sentence, without apology, was the first to cast himself on both knees
before his employer, and respectfully kiss a large ring on the Vicar’s
extended forefinger.

“What in the name of goodness does that mean?” the astonished Duchess
asked of Hero.

She spoke loudly enough to be heard by several persons in the throng,
who turned and cast rebuking glances at her. Directly afterwards she
saw a number of well-dressed women advance one after the other and
salute the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s with the same ceremonial as that
observed by Mr. Grimes.

“Are they all mad, or what is it?” the Duchess whispered. “I have
never seen such a thing before in my life, except when I was abroad,
in Roman Catholic society. But even they don’t kneel to their priests,
only to a Bishop.”

Hero blushed guiltily. She was better informed than the Duchess,
but she was not sure that her knowledge might not damage her in her
friend’s eyes.

“Perhaps these people regard Dr. Coles as a Bishop,” she suggested
timidly. “Have you never heard it whispered that he had been secretly
consecrated by--an Armenian Bishop, I think?”

The Duchess stared at her in honest bewilderment.

“How could that be? I don’t understand. Why should an English clergyman
go to Armenia to be consecrated?”

Hero saw that she must make her revelation complete.

“I understand the object was to renew the Apostolical Succession in the
Church of England.”

“It has never been broken,” said the Duchess, with decision. She had
been told so as a girl, and had never given the subject a second
thought. To her devout mind, too candid to be taken in logical
snares, the presence or absence of one or two or three Bishops at
the consecration of another could not seem a matter of real concern.
To attribute to such details the awful consequences they possess for
Catholic minds would have seemed to her to attribute the technical
instincts of a small attorney to the Maker of the sun and stars.

“The Pope of Rome refuses to recognize Anglican Orders, you know,”
Hero explained gently. “The application was made to him the other day
by Lord Bargreave on behalf of a third of the clergy, and he told them
that the English Church had no Bishops, no priests, and no Sacraments.”

The Duchess flushed to the roots of her hair.

“When I was a girl,” she said sternly, “the Church of England would
have refused to recognize the Pope of Rome. I was brought up to believe
that the Roman communion was a half-pagan, half-political body, which
had corrupted the Gospel with idolatry and superstition, and forfeited
its right to be called a Christian Church.”

It was Hero’s turn to be astonished as she listened to the language
of an extinct generation. Brought up in the age which had witnessed
the triumph of the Ritualist propaganda, it was news to her that the
national Church had ever occupied any attitude but one of envious
imitation or suppliant apology towards that of Rome. And yet Hero
Vanbrugh was a girl who had read a good deal, travelled much, and used
her own powers of observation and reasoning. She had seen the ignorant
priesthoods of Spain and Italy, and their brutish flocks, the most
degraded element in the European population. The sight of the Rev.
Aloysius Grimes cringing to Mike Finigan had roused her indignation.
And yet the spectacle of a great society of Grimeses cringing to
Mike Finigan’s master, in the name of Elizabeth’s and Cromwell’s
countrymen, had scarcely moved her to a passing sigh.

“Times have changed,” she murmured to the Duchess.

And times had. Even the Duchess realized dimly that it had become
unsafe to utter aloud her sentiments of loyalty to the English Church
or to the English Throne in a Church of England schoolroom, while it
had ceased to be unsafe for Dr. Coles to parade openly his treason
to both. His episcopal character was no secret in the theological
colleges from which a steady stream of young men like the Rev. Aloysius
turned their steps to the obscure Lambeth Vicarage in search of those
supernatural powers which they deemed the neighbouring Archbishop had
no power to bestow. In this way the whole Church was being gradually
leavened, so that the time was at hand when some portion of the
mysterious virtue brought from Armenia would have found its way into
all the channels of ordination, and obstinate Evangelicals would be
receiving Armenian Orders unknown to themselves, and would be working
the great Transubstantiation miracle in which they personally did not
believe.

For the sake of achieving this object Dr. Coles had put on one side the
prospect of promotion in the English Church. With abilities sufficient
to have raised him perhaps to the House of Lords, he had deliberately
accepted the part of priest of an obscure parish, content if his
underground revolution was allowed to proceed without interference.
His motives were mixed, perhaps, but great revolutions are the result
of mixed motives, and never of wholly small and base ones. The Vicar of
St. Jermyn’s was blinded to the degrading character of his methods by
the loftiness of his aims. He took the guilt of fraud and perjury on
his conscience, and he did so contentedly, looking forward to the time
when the Church he served would re-enter the Catholic unity, and the
Body of Christ be made whole.

As soon as he had finished receiving the homage of his peculiar
adherents, the old priest went up to the Duchess of Trent, for whom
he had a warm regard. In spite of the theological gulf that sundered
them, she commanded his sympathy far more than the vain and hysterical
women who grovelled in his confessional, and her simple and unselfish
piety displayed in those good works which all religions enjoin had
won his gratitude and respect. Had he been able to make a convert
of the Duchess he would have felt it as great a triumph as when the
State-appointed Bishop of Linchester, laying aside his jewelled crozier
and mitre, came and knelt in the humble study of St. Jermyn’s Vicarage
to receive them again at the hands of the “Bishop of Lambeth.”

On her side the Duchess was not blind to the merits of Dr. Coles,
his indefatigable zeal, unworldliness, and kindly temper. They met
as friends meet, seated in different trains, and going in opposite
directions, who exchange a brief word of greeting before they pass out
of each other’s sight.

The Duchess had never referred to the religious aberrations of the
Doctor, but she thought she might safely challenge him on the subject
of loyalty to the Throne.

“I had no idea that you sympathized with the Legitimists,” she observed.

The Vicar smiled indulgently.

“This bazaar, I suppose you mean? It is more Father Grimes’s doing than
mine. I hold entirely aloof from politics.”

“But you have lent your schoolroom.”

Dr. Coles frowned.

“My schoolroom, as you call it, is a public building,” he said, with
a touch of anger. “I find I am expected to lend it for the purposes
of political meetings, even to the party which almost openly aims at
Disestablishment. I sometimes wonder I don’t receive an application to
lend it for an infidel lecture.”

The Duchess was impressed. Dr. Coles had struck the one note which
brought them into perfect accord, in his reference to infidelity.

In the view of the Duchess this was the one thing worse than Popery.
Her religious scale was made up of five degrees. At the very bottom
came Infidelity, in which term she was disposed to include the
Unitarian denomination and those divines of her own Church whose Hebrew
studies had led them to take different views as to the authorship of
the Old Testament books from those at one time prevalent. The second
head, Popery, covered practically the whole Christian Church during the
ages between the death of Paul and the conversion of Martin Luther, and
two-thirds of existing Christendom. The third division, under the word
Idolatry, embraced the religions of the rest of mankind, including the
stern monotheists of Islam. The Jews formed a class apart; the Duchess
was too good a Conservative to blame that ancient race severely for
their stubbornness in resisting even a Divine reform; she regarded them
as a species of embryo Christians, whose development had been arrested
in the caterpillar stage. Her fifth division, Protestantism, applied to
the sects dating from the Lutheran revolt, and to stray heretics of the
past, such as the Socialist Lollards and the freethinking Albigeois,
who possessed the merit of having been persecuted by Rome. Among these,
of course, she distinguished between the converted Christian and the
much larger class of sinners for whom she wished to take for granted a
death-bed repentance.

It was not an unimportant matter that the Duchess of Trent should
have held these views. Money is always important, and the Duchess was
one of a very large moneyed class who were always ready to open their
purses on behalf of their favourite propaganda. The infidel and the
sinner were supposed to be reached by the ordinary machinery of the
Church, and the Papist and the Jew had been wellnigh abandoned as
hopeless, though a few Englishmen of the lower class still prowled
through countries like Spain and Portugal, distributing Protestant
tracts and increasing the dislike felt for their nation. But the great
field for missionary effort, of course, was that section of mankind
labelled idolaters or heathen. In the spirit of the hymn which singles
out the inoffensive Buddhists of Ceylon to brand them with the epithet
vile, the good Duchess firmly believed that to thrust, not merely
the theology, but the morals, social customs, marriage institutions,
language, manners, and even clothing of her own age and country upon
all the peoples of the earth was a Divine injunction to be neglected at
her peril.

This generous zeal had long been encouraged by the statesmen of the
Raj, who saw its possessions widened without the expense of arms. The
British Empire resembles no other that has ever existed in having come
into existence unconsciously. England has sent forth her outlaws on
the shores of distant continents, and they have come back soldiers for
her. Her merchants have gone forth seeking merchandise, and realms
Alexander sighed for have fallen like ripe fruit into their hands. Her
missionaries have Anglicized where they should have Christianized;
the bigoted worshippers of Allah and Vishnu imitate the language of
Macaulay, and every new church in Africa gives a new cotton-mill to
Lancashire.

Dr. Coles had a more personal argument in store for the Duchess of
Trent.

“Surely you cannot be very bigoted against the Legitimists,” he urged.
“I thought that all the old Scotch families were Jacobites at heart.
And Lord Alistair Stuart is a member of the Guild.”

“I have heard my mistress, the Queen, say: ‘I am the greatest Jacobite
of them all,’” the Duchess responded. “But I don’t think she ever
expected to hear of real Jacobites in the twentieth century. I don’t
take your friends very seriously, Dr. Coles, and I dare say my son
doesn’t either.”

Before the discussion could be carried further Alistair himself came
into view. His mother watched him anxiously, half afraid of seeing him
accord the same homage to Dr. Coles as the others. But whether because
he was wanting in reverence for Armenia, or because he was ashamed to
show greater respect to a man than to his own mother, Stuart contented
himself with shaking hands with the priest, after he had previously
greeted his parent.

He was surprised at first to see her at such a function. But the
diplomacy of the Duchess was very transparent. She at once turned to
Hero, and pronounced the formula which entitles two people in English
society to know of each other’s existence.

It was the first time Alistair had seen Miss Vanbrugh, but not the
first time he had heard her name. The eyes of society are very keen
where a man like the Duke of Trent and Colonsay is concerned, and its
whispering-gallery is very wide. Although the Duke himself had never
given any significance to his intercourse with Hero, the correct
significance had already been given to it by others, and the rumour
had reached Lord Alistair. For him the girl who stood before him was
the girl who was on the point of becoming his brother’s betrothed.

He raised his eyes to her face, and when he saw that picture of calm,
sweet maidenhood, with all the bloom of youth and purity upon it, and
those eyes radiant with high and happy thoughts, and when he recalled
that other face he had just quitted, with the paint peeling off under
the haggard eyes, and the cracked lips set in a querulous scowl because
he had not dared to bring her into the company of reputable women, and
when he compared his own lot, cast with that unhappy creature, with
the life that lay before his brother, blest in so dear a wife, then
his heart failed him, and he had to turn away his eyes to hide the
unexpected smart.

On her part Hero was not much less moved. She saw standing before her
the figure around which her imagination had already woven its romance,
and he was handsomer than the hero of her romance. The gracefully-knit
form, with its statuesque neck and curling dark hair, breathed the
very spirit of the lays of Oisin. The swish of the heather was still
in his elastic tread, the sunlight of the rain-washed Hebrides was in
his glance. She seemed to see him in his kilt and plaid, the eagle’s
feather nodding in his bonnet, and the claymore by his side, a young
chieftain of the glens, starting at daybreak from his bed among the
fern, and setting forth perhaps to woo a maiden like herself with
the immemorial charms of song and dance. In the strait garb of the
decorous capital he seemed to her like a shorn Samson, and she thought
of violets fading in a city garret, and skylarks caged in a dark cellar
beating their wings in want of light and air.

She, also, drew her comparison, and the cold and perfect courtier of
Colonsay House suffered by it. For the first time she felt in its full
strength that instinct of self-sacrifice which lies at the core of
every noble nature. The task which Stuart’s mother had offered to her,
and in which she had only taken a sentimental interest, now became a
fascination. The longing to save this glorious soul, fallen among weeds
and briars, to lift it up and wipe away its stains, and set it on its
true path again, overcame her like the touch of love; the touch of
love overcame her like the longing to save, and her hand trembled in
Alistair Stuart’s.

The two Vanes sidled up, anxious to be recognized by their chief.

“So glad you have turned up, Stuart,” bleated the elder. “It’s quite a
demonstration, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Wickham echoed, “it is a blow. I think we are striking a blow.”

He meant at the hated middle classes. It was the only kind of a blow he
was ever likely to strike against that or any other enemy.

Stuart heard them with impatience. Somehow the presence of Hero made
the two brothers look tawdry and ridiculous with their decadent cant,
their untidy hair, and their silly, outlandish neckties. He answered
with irony:

“No doubt the middle classes will be frightened when they hear of this
bazaar. But you must see that it gets into the papers, otherwise the
effect will be lost. Are there any reporters here?”

The brothers looked around a little nervously.

“I hope so,” said Egerton, whose vanity was slightly greater than his
cowardice.

“It might vulgarize the thing,” suggested Wickham whose cowardice was
slightly greater than his vanity.

Stuart understood their fears, and played on them by way of distraction
from his secret emotion.

“I expect the place is crammed with detectives,” he observed. “I
fancied I saw one or two suspicious-looking fellows with notebooks as I
came in.”

Hero grasped the situation, and smiled.

“No; do you think so?” exclaimed the elder Vane in a tone of
exultation, tempered by alarm. “But surely there is nothing they can
take hold of--nothing illegal, I mean--in a bazaar?”

“They may shadow us after this, though,” muttered the junior, in whom
alarm had got the better of exultation.

“They may treat the bazaar as evidence of a conspiracy,” Stuart
suggested cheerfully. “But here comes St. Maur; you had better ask him.”

He turned, and led Hero away through the crowd, to escape from the
person he had indicated, leaving the brothers in a state of cruel
apprehension.

But Mr. St. Maur was not to be shaken off so easily. This gentleman,
who had spelt his name “Maher” in his native city of “Dahblin”
(as he was accustomed to pronounce it), was the son of a decent
butter-merchant, who had put him to the Bar. Coming over to the Temple,
in accordance with old custom to keep his terms, the ambitious youth
was surprised and charmed to find that his membership of the Roman
Church, which had stood somewhat in his light in the society of the
Irish capital, was here a fashionable distinction. To drink the Roman
Pontiff’s health before that of the British Sovereign appeared to be in
some mysterious way a passport to Court favour, and a Roman missionary
had just been given precedence over the heads of the English Church.
The policy of the Primrose League had been adapted to the purposes of
proselytism, and a club had been founded in the West End in which the
middle-class aspirant could enjoy the privilege of lunching in the
same room as a Roman Cabinet Minister and receiving the _Times_ fresh
from the hands of a Roman Duke. Unfortunately the Duke and the Cabinet
Minister failed to play their parts with sufficient zeal, or else there
were not enough of them to go around, and St. Bridget’s Club gradually
sunk from depth to depth till not merely Protestants, but Jews,
profaned its portals, and it became a refuge for all the suspicious
characters whom other clubs refused.

Young Maher was not long in deciding to forsake the Irish Bar for the
English, and a slight alteration in the spelling of his name enabled
him to pose as an offshoot of one of the greatest families in Britain.
The difficulty of an accent which clove obstinately to his tongue was
met by a well-constructed legend of an Irish branch of the family in
question, supposed to have settled in the Emerald Isle about the time
of Strongbow. On the strength of this genealogy, which would have done
credit to the Heralds’ College in its best remunerated moments, Mr. St.
Maur was in the habit of referring to a nobleman of lofty rank as “the
head of our house,” thereby causing intolerable anguish to his friends,
the Vanes, who were only nephews of a baronet. Unfortunately they were
prevented from questioning the genuineness of St. Maur’s pedigree,
inasmuch as they had laid every stress upon it in introducing him to
their acquaintance. But they had an uneasy sense that the Irishman was
an impostor who had beaten them by mere bluff.

On his part the barrister having, as he conceived, surpassed the Vanes,
was seeking for loftier heights to scale. As soon as he met Lord
Alistair Stuart in the brothers’ flat he promptly marked him out for
attack. Undaunted by Stuart’s evident dislike for him, the Irishman
persistently forced himself on his notice. With this object he had
thrown himself heart and soul into the Legitimist cause, as he would
have thrown himself into the Independent Labour Party the day after if
the leaders of that movement had been members of the peerage.

Having come to the bazaar chiefly in order to push his acquaintance
with Lord Alistair, Mr. St. Maur was not the man to be balked of his
prey.

“Grand success, this, isn’t it, Stuart?” he bawled out from afar, as he
hustled his way through the throng.

Much as Stuart disliked his follower, he failed to give him credit
for the naked singleness of his aims. Had he fully understood the
Irishman’s character, he would have got rid of him before this by the
easy expedient of introducing him to his brother. Once anchored to the
coat-tails of a Duke, St. Maur would have left a mere younger brother
severely alone. As it was, Lord Alistair saw no way of repelling the
intruder except by a harshness which was not in his nature.

Mr. St. Maur shook hands effusively, and then, finding he was not going
to be introduced to Lord Alistair’s companion, began enlarging on the
prospects of the movement.

“I consider this affair will launch us as a serious party,” he
declared. “The public will begin to reckon with us. It will soon be
time to think of a Parliamentary candidature. What do you say, Stuart?”

Alistair shrugged his shoulders.

“I should think you would get about ten votes in any constituency in
England.”

“Ah, but what about Scotland? There is a feeling up there that might be
appealed to. If a man like yourself, now, a member of an old Highland
family, were to stand in your own part of the country, don’t you think
the clansmen would rally round you?”

“You forget that I should have my brother’s influence dead against me.
He is a member of the Government.”

“He would have to disavow you officially, of course. But privately, you
know? Don’t you think the Duke might be brought to show some sympathy
for the movement?”

“He would simply laugh at it, I expect,” said Stuart.

“The Duke of Gloucester does not laugh at it,” returned the other.

Alistair’s face darkened at the name, and he cast down his eyes.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

St. Maur swelled with importance.

“I happen to have private information that he watches the proceedings
of the Guild with the closest attention. He has everything that appears
in the press about us sent him by a press-cutting agency.”

“I wish I had known that before,” said Alistair. And, turning to Hero,
he explained: “I have let them have an autograph letter of the Prince’s
to sell at one of the stalls.”

The absurdity of this did not strike Hero so much as its ingratitude.

“A letter from the Prince to you, do you mean?” she asked, with an
accent of reproach.

“Yes; I used to know him very well when we were boys. I came across it
the other day among some old papers. But I shouldn’t like him to hear
that I had let it be sold.”

A purpose had swiftly formed in Hero’s mind.

“Whereabouts is the stall?” she inquired.

“Over here.”

Turning his back on Mr. St. Maur with unwonted rudeness, he conducted
Hero to a stall presided over by a pretty, overdressed little woman,
who had been persuaded by Mr. Grimes in the confessional that she would
thus atone for certain errors to which pretty, overdressed little women
are prone. Prince Herbert’s autograph had been entrusted to her for
sale, and by good luck it had not been disposed of when the two came up.

“What is the price of this letter?” Miss Vanbrugh asked quickly.

“One guinea,” the stallkeeper simpered. “It is from His Royal Highness
the Duke of Gloucester to Lord Alistair Stuart,” she added in ignorance
of who stood before her.

“Let me buy it, and give it to you!” cried Alistair, guessing Hero’s
design.

She took up the letter. It was a short schoolboy’s note, and contained
a misspelt word.

  “DEAR ALISTAIR:

  “I cannot meet you to-morrow, as the Crown Prince of Austria is
  coming, but I will go out fishing on Saturday if you like. Come over
  here at ten o’clock--mind, be punctual.

                                         “Yours affectionately,
                                                               “HERBERT.

  “P.S.--Sorry to break my promise, but they made me. Mind, bring your
  fishing-rod.”

Hero handed the letter to her companion.

“I would rather you let me buy it, and give it back to you,” she said.

She handed the money to the lady of the stall, who was looking
considerably astonished.

Alistair understood the delicate rebuke. His glance took in the
contents of the friendly, boyish note afresh, and he felt ashamed that
he had parted with it.

“I am very grateful to you, Miss Vanbrugh, believe me,” he said
earnestly, as he slipped the letter into his pocket. “I ought not to
have let it go into strange hands. But I hope I needn’t count you as a
stranger. You are often at Colonsay House, aren’t you?”

“I have never met you there,” said Hero pointedly.

And Alistair was silent.

The Miracle Play was a great success, though not, perhaps, in the way
anticipated by Dr. Coles.

The Vicar had understood that the text of the Ober-Ammergau
performance was to furnish the basis of a version only slightly
modified by Mr. Egerton Vane. But Mr. Vane, being deeply imbued with
the spirit of Maeterlinck, had allowed his adaptation to become
tinctured to an unforeseen extent by the vein of symbolism peculiar to
the work of the Belgian master. The orthodox Christian interpretation
being repugnant to his feelings as a Pagan, he had, moreover, boldly
replaced it by something more congenial to his own sympathies.

The result was somewhat as though a conscientious Buddhist should
rewrite “Paradise Lost,” endeavouring to make it illustrate the
doctrine of metempsychosis.

In the opening scene Mary was introduced as the Spirit of Form,
receiving the Annunciation from the Angel Gabriel as the representative
of Creative Genius. The dialogue, which was fortunately unintelligible
to nine-tenths of the audience, turned on the sterility of the Jewish
nation in the department of the plastic arts. Mary was informed
that her Son would remove the prohibition contained in the Second
Commandment, thereby opening the way for the Christian school of
statuary and painting.

The whole of the sacred narrative was dealt with from the same
standpoint. The Wise Men were presented as the exponents of the three
arts of Poetry, Music, and Painting, whose respective merits were
discussed at some length. The dispute of the child Christ in the Temple
was made to turn on Keats’s famous identification of Truth with
Beauty. Satan, in the scene of the Temptation, appeared as the genius
of Utilitarianism and the middle classes, urging the Christ to abandon
the principle of Art for Art’s sake. Towards the end of the drama
Byron’s jest about Barabbas was almost literally incorporated, Barabbas
being designed as a type of commercial success in literature--a Jewish
Tennyson or Ruskin.

Every allusion to the Jews as a people was barbed with the bitterest
malignity. The Semitic spirit was branded, with some historical
confusion, as that of Philistinism _par excellence_; and Isaiah and
other prophets were ingeniously represented as having fallen martyrs to
their literary excellence rather than to their reforming energy.

The allegory was so vague and the dialogue so obscure that most of
those present entirely failed to grasp the enormity of the author’s
transgression. But it was otherwise with Dr. Coles. The Armenian
proselyte was a learned and thorough-going medievalist, and he had
taken it for granted that medieval traditions would be strictly adhered
to. He had left the work of superintending the rehearsals to his
curate, never deeming that Mr. Grimes was capable of betraying the
trust. Nor was he, had he been sufficiently intelligent to perceive
that he was being made a cat’s-paw by his pagan librettist. The actors
in the piece, being the choir-boys, were even less capable of judging
of the drift of the performance.

The deeply mortified Vicar restrained his wrath till the moment when
the High-Priest Caiaphas came upon the scene in the thinly-disguised
character of the proprietor of a morning paper with an enormous
circulation, when it became impossible to mistake the dramatist’s
intentions. Rising from his seat in the front row of the audience, Dr.
Coles gave a peremptory order for the curtain to be let down, and the
thoroughly mystified spectators seized the opportunity to escape.

CHAPTER IX

MOLLY FINUCANE AT HOME

AS he turned away from St. Jermyn’s schoolroom, after putting his
mother and Miss Vanbrugh into their carriage, Lord Alistair Stuart made
a curious discovery. Thrusting his hands into his pocket in the act of
nodding to a cabdriver, he found that he had no money.

The brother of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay had often known what it
was to want a thousand pounds, but he had never been without sovereigns
in his pocket, and it took him some moments to realize that this state
of things was not accidental, but natural in his new circumstances.

Much to his own surprise, he felt the first cold touch of poverty
distinctly exhilarating, like a bather’s first plunge into the sea. It
was not hardship so far; it was merely adventure. He apologized to the
disappointed cabman, and set off to walk to Chelsea, with that sense of
superiority to fortune which Aristippus may have felt when he bade his
tired slave throw away the bag of gold.

Voluntary suffering has always exercised a powerful charm over a
certain order of mankind. The starvation, the confinement, and the
self-torture of the Hindu fakir and the Catholic saint have not been
practised solely with a business-like view to reward in a future life;
they have satisfied a need--morbid, perhaps, but real, since it is
found among races that have scarcely risen to the conception of another
world. It is as if diseased human nature instinctively sought its own
remedy, as the suffering animal seeks out the herb possessed of healing
powers.

As Alistair Stuart took his way through the mean streets of Lambeth
and Vauxhall, with their narrow dirty pavements, their scanty shops
at the street-corners and their taverns in which the only touches of
brightness and prosperity seemed concentrated, he felt the temptation
growing strong upon him.

“After all, it would not be so bad to live this life,” he said
to himself. “One might be very cosy in one of these small old
houses, tucked up against some great dead wall, with unknown things
taking place on the other side of it, or buried beneath some huge
railway arch, with trains thundering overhead all night to unknown
destinations. I seem to be an outlaw; why shouldn’t I live among
outlaws? I could loaf about in flannel shirts and dressing-gowns all
day long, and Molly would fetch me my beer from the public-house. I
should smoke long clay pipes, and write an epic poem, like the ‘City of
Dreadful Night.’”

But the recollection of Thomson and his poem turned the current of his
thoughts into a darker channel.

“How many men of genius has London brained with her paving-stones!” he
reflected bitterly. “The poet asks for nothing but liberty to sing, and
the world will not give it to him. ‘Give me money’s worth for my bread
and raiment and shelter’ is her harsh demand; and she drags the poet
from his fountain in the wilderness to sweep the dust of the bazaar.”

His fellow-feeling for the poor drunken schoolmaster rested on
sentiment. In Alistair the seed of genius, delicate from the first,
had been choked, not by the pressure of physical needs, but by a
profound moral discouragement. During the years in which genius begins
to recognize itself, to try its wings, and point its first shy flight
towards the empyrean, he had found himself living the life of a
criminal on a ticket-of-leave. He had been kept in a state of spiritual
starvation, deprived of the food for which his nature pined, and choked
with the dry bread of Calvinism. The budding tendrils of his mind had
shrivelled, vainly searching for the air of sympathy and the warm sun
of praise. He had been made to feel afraid of his own intelligence,
his dreams and guesses after truth and beauty were imputed to him as
iniquity; and if he ever sought to give them expression, he wrote as
Crusoe might have written on his desert isle--for the ears of savages.

His genius had emerged from this ordeal maimed for life. If he sang
now, it was not as the birds sang, rejoicing in their Maker’s gift to
them, but stealthily, as prisoners sing in dungeons, apprehensive of
the passing warder’s tread. Even the desire for fame was now a broken
spring. He had tasted too deeply of the bitter cup of disapproval to
hope to cleanse his mouth with the honey of applause. He felt vaguely
that he had been sent into the world to teach his fellow-men to rejoice
with him in all its beauty and its wonder, and that they had struck
him brutally across the lips, and bidden him become dull and timid and
mean-hearted, like themselves.

A whole generation in England had endured an experience more or less
like Alistair’s, and the literature of the age still breathes a
suppressed bitterness against the cruelties of Evangelicalism. The
persecution was all the more oppressive because it was not sanctioned
by any public authority, nor embodied in any law. It was carried on
privately, around every hearth, and in every hour of family life,
poisoning the springs of truthfulness and self-respect, and breaking
the hearts of the young. It was the memory of such wrongs that had made
easy the triumph of the Catholic reaction; the Protestant tyranny had
fallen, as other tyrannies fall, more by its own abuses than by the
strength of its assailants. The fires of Smithfield were forgotten,
and the little pagan group who surrounded Alistair Stuart patronized
the Roman Church as their most powerful ally against the Nonconformist
conscience.

But Alistair was beginning to look deeper. The play he had just
witnessed, in spite of its absurdities, had embodied certain sentiments
of his own. “There is no cure,” he reflected as he walked along. “There
is no help for men like me; the crowd will always persecute us. They
have set up the image of the Crucified One that they might crucify
others in his name. The memory of Otway did not save Chatterton; the
sufferings of Chatterton did not redeem Poe. Their flattery of the
dead is only a deeper insult to the living. They kneel at the tomb of
Shakespeare, and if Shakespeare rose again they would cast him into
Reading Gaol.”

It was Alistair Stuart’s misfortune to be only a half-hearted sinner.
The world likes its men to be thorough-going. Confronted with a mixed
individuality it is disconcerted and annoyed, like a reviewer called
upon to judge a poem by a prose-writer, or a serious volume from a
humorist’s pen. Alistair’s natural instincts had been cowed by his
boyish experience. Without sharing the convictions of the righteous,
he lacked the courage to despise them utterly. He would have had them
pardon him, though he could not repent.

His embittered mood lasted till he came in sight of the river below
Battersea Park. The sunlight sparkling on the water, and the fresh
breeze blowing over the trees of the park, refreshed him for the
moment, and his thoughts turned to Hero Vanbrugh.

A sigh rose to his lips.

“If I had only met her a year ago!”

The rebuke which Hero had administered so delicately in the matter of
the royal autograph had moved him to the heart. It had been an appeal
to his self-respect, a proof that she credited him with honourable
instincts like her own, and at this crisis in his life the compliment
was like the touch of balm upon a sore. With such a hand as Hero’s
to restrain him, that plunge into the social underworld which he
was contemplating lost its fascination. How was it that in all the
years they had known him neither his mother nor his brother had ever
been able to strike the chord which this girl’s finger had touched
unerringly at their first meeting?

In searching for the answer to this riddle, he recollected whither his
steps were bound. The figure of Molly Finucane rose before him like a
faded portrait over which a breath of discoloration had passed, leaving
it tarnished and dingy, and he shivered slightly, and unconsciously
relaxed the quickness of his pace.

His heart sank within him as he ascended the familiar path, and let
himself in with his latchkey. Missing the expected figure of the page,
he hung up his hat himself, and passed into the drawing-room.

“Where’s Tom?” he inquired, not without some foreboding of the reply he
should receive.

Molly was lying on the sofa in a low-necked dress, pulling a cigarette,
and trying to amuse herself with an illustrated ladies’ paper, which
did not amuse her at all--it was much too severe in its decorum. She
sat up yawning at Stuart’s entrance, and frowned as he put his question.

“I had to get rid of him for insolence,” she replied, with still
smouldering wrath. “I told him my shoes hadn’t been cleaned this
morning, and the young brat contradicted me to my face, and said he
couldn’t do them any better. The lazy little wretch hadn’t touched
them. I asked him if he knew who he was talking to, and he became
insolent. So I just ordered him to pack up and leave the house.”

Stuart listened without much interest to this story, the counterpart
of which he had often heard before. Somehow Molly’s servants were
perpetually incurring dismissal for similar behaviour. It was rare for
her to keep them more than a couple of months, and it was not uncommon
for them to be sent away the day after they arrived; and always for the
same cause--disrespect to the mistress of the house.

“I can’t think what’s the matter with the servants nowadays,” Molly
complained. She was not the only mistress to whom it had never occurred
that there could be, by any possibility, a servants’ side to the great
question. “I had a Scotchwoman here to-day, applying for the cook’s
place”--the cook had been under notice to leave for some time--“and she
was most impertinent.”

Molly stopped rather unexpectedly, as though she had been going to give
particulars of the impertinence, but had suddenly thought better of it.
The Scotchwoman, in fact, had presumed so far as to inquire into the
character of the relationship between the lady of the house and the
Lord Alistair Stuart who was indicated as its master, and had withdrawn
her candidature for the situation on learning that the tie was merely
one of friendship. Being told rather fiercely by Miss Finucane that
this was not her business, the offender had replied uncompromisingly:
“Excuse me, miss, I don’t set up to blame you, but I have my character
to think of, and if it was known that I had taken a place in a house
that wasn’t respectable, I might not be able to suit myself elsewhere.”

It was no doubt the irritation caused by this plain speaking which had
vented itself on the unlucky page. Alistair shrugged his shoulders as
though in sympathy, but inwardly the question suggested itself whether
Miss Vanbrugh ever had to encounter insolence on the part of servants.
He did not think it likely.

He had to go upstairs to dress for dinner, this being a point about
which Miss Finucane was very particular. If ever a man ventured to
present himself at her dinner-table in morning dress she was apt to
take it as a carefully studied reflection on her character. Her own
time hung so heavily on her hands that she spent half her day over
her wardrobe. She breakfasted in a fur-lined dressing-gown, put on a
walking-dress during the morning, lunched in a third costume, wore an
æsthetic tea-gown in the afternoon, made a grand toilet for dinner,
and exchanged it for a loose night-robe in which she drank whisky
and water before going to bed. In all these changes of costume jewels
played a great part. Diamonds and sapphires meant to Molly much what
a table well covered with briefs means to a barrister, or the strips
of ribbon on his breast to a soldier; they were the tangible tokens of
success.

When Stuart came downstairs there was no sign of dinner. He sat down
and tried to talk to Molly about the bazaar, but she listened sulkily,
offended because he had not ventured to take her with him.

“There were lots of women there, I suppose?” she asked, in a grumbling
voice.

“Yes, a good many. Women belonging to the Church, most of them, I
expect.”

“Was there anyone you knew?”

She fixed a shrewdly questioning glance on him, and noted the momentary
hesitation that preceded his reply.

“No, no one.”

Molly gave a scornful smile.

“That’s a lie, Alistair. Was your mother there?”

“I prefer not to talk about my mother,” returned Alistair, who dreaded
Molly’s coarse tongue.

“Do you think I didn’t know why you wouldn’t take me?” Molly retorted.
“Who else was there?”

“No one I had ever met before.”

Molly pounced on the concealed admission.

“Your mother introduced you to someone. Who was it?”

Stuart rose to his feet, beginning to get angry.

“The only woman I spoke to the whole afternoon was a young lady who, I
believe, is going to marry my brother.”

“What’s her name?”

“I decline to tell you.” He walked over to the bell and rang it
impatiently. “What the deuce are they keeping dinner for?”

Molly sat silent, watching him with all the cunning of a narrow
intelligence concentrated on one point. No one in the world was more
ignorant than Molly Finucane was of the things that are written about
in books, but the keenest counsel who ever sifted the evidence of
a lying witness could not have matched the sureness with which she
detected anything in Alistair’s mind that threatened her supremacy over
him. Her instinct now warned her that some danger had arisen for her,
and her fear, overpowering her jealousy for the moment, made her hold
her tongue.

No notice was taken of Lord Alistair’s ring, but after another ten
minutes or so an untidy parlour-maid put her head into the room and
announced that dinner was ready.

The dinner was badly cooked, and not appetising, and the parlour-maid
had neglected to warm the claret. Molly called for champagne.

“There’s none left, ma’am,” the maid retorted, speaking in that hostile
tone which her servants generally assumed towards Miss Finucane.

“Yes, there is, unless you’ve drunk it in the kitchen.”

An altercation between mistress and maid followed, high words being
used on both sides. Stuart went on with his dinner in silent disgust,
trying not to listen. He had sat through similar scenes often enough
before, but they had not made the same impression on him. It was as
though his whole nature had been set throbbing like a bell with a
certain note, with which his surroundings were all out of tune.

The dinner was not only badly cooked, but it quickly appeared that
there was not enough of it. On seeing a few slices of ham set before
her in the place of a joint, the mistress of the house lost her temper.

“Go and tell the cook to make an omelette,” she ordered angrily. “It’s
disgraceful that we can’t have enough to eat.”

The parlour-maid departed. A minute or two afterwards the door was
flung open violently, and the cook advanced into the middle of the
dining-room.

“You can’t have an omelette. I’ve no eggs, and the fire’s gone out,”
she remarked loudly and aggressively.

“What do you mean, cook?” said Molly, evidently rather alarmed.

The cook saw her mistress quailing, and raised her voice.

“I mean that I’ve cooked as much as I mean to, and I’m not going to do
any more. I’m tired of it.”

“This is disgraceful!” exclaimed her mistress, appealing to Stuart.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, to come in and talk like that,
simply because I asked for an omelette.”

“Well, you can’t have it, then,” the cook returned, with a ring of
triumph.

“Very well; that’s enough. Go downstairs!” commanded Molly.

The cook tossed her head, and marched out of the room, slamming the
door behind her.

“Do you owe the woman any wages?” Stuart asked, as soon as she was
gone. He knew by experience that it was useless to interfere in these
periodical scenes between Molly and her household.

“Not a farthing,” Molly protested. “And I’ve always treated her kindly,
too. I can’t think what makes her presume like that.”

The cook went down fuming and snorting into the kitchen, and gave the
explanation to her sympathizing sisters.

“I’ll teach her to send haughty messages out to me, and me a
respectable woman whose father had a farm, and six men under him; and
her out of the gutter, and no better than a street-walker, if you come
to that, though she do ride in her carriage, and wear as many jewels as
a Martinet.”

“You mean a Marchioness, don’t you, Eleanor?” inquired the housemaid,
who had moved in higher spheres.

“I mean a lady, that’s what I mean,” said the cook, with grim emphasis.
“Consequently I don’t mean Miss Finucane, as she calls herself, though
her real name’s Finigan, and she’s low Irish down to her boot-soles.”
She took a long breath, and concluded: “And so I’d have told her to
her face if his lordship hadn’t been there; but he’s a gentleman, when
all’s said and done, and I’m sorry for him.”

The cook spoke for her sex. Most women were sorry for Lord Alistair
Stuart.

When Molly saw Alistair rise from the table immediately after the
cook’s stormy exit, her face fell.

“You’re not going out again?” she protested.

“I’ve got to,” was the answer.

“Take me with you, then,” Molly demanded.

“Can’t. I’m going to see Des Louvres.”

“You’re always going there. What do you want to see him for?”

“It’s on business to do with the Legitimists.”

“Bother the Legitimists!” Molly was not a politician. Beyond the vague
notion that all these pretenders of whom she heard so much enjoyed
the secret patronage of the Pope, and must therefore be in some way
inimical to that Protestantism which it had been her first lesson as
a child to abjure and abhor, she was completely indifferent to their
cause.

“I won’t have you go,” she continued. “You’ve been out all day, and
left me alone with those wretched servants. I want you to take me to
the theatre.”

“I’ve no money,” said Stuart impatiently.

“Can’t you borrow some?”

“Who from?”

A name rose to Molly’s lips, but she hesitated to pronounce it. She
looked at Stuart, and as their eyes met each knew what the other was
thinking of.

“No,” he declared hastily. “I’m sorry, Molly, but I must go. I
promised. There’s to be somebody there that I must meet.”

“Who?”

“Well, it’s a sort of secret. You won’t talk about it?”

“Who have I got to talk to?”

The retort struck painfully on Alistair. That compassion for Molly
which lay at the root of his refusal to leave her was stirred by the
reminder of the poor little woman’s loneliness. She had no friends,
she could have no friends in their present circumstances, and she had
no interests in life apart from him. He felt that he was ill-treating
her by this second absence in one day, and his voice softened as he
explained:

“It’s Don Juan. Des Louvres told me he doesn’t want it to be known that
he’s in England.”

The name was not familiar to Molly.

“Who is he?” she asked, more with the object of detaining Stuart than
from any real curiosity on the subject.

Don Juan, in fact, only ranked as an heir-apparent in the Legitimist
almanac, his father being still alive. He represented one of those
families of decrepit and priest-ridden despots which were everywhere
driven from the thrones of the Mediterranean by the great Liberal
flood of the nineteenth century. Now the flood was beginning to abate,
the wrongs of the past were fading from men’s minds, and the figures of
these discrowned Princes stood forth once more, surrounded by the halo
of romantic misfortune.

But all this did not concern Molly in the least. Don Juan’s only
importance for her was as a new acquaintance for Stuart. She took a
jealous interest in all Alistair’s friends, not as individuals, but as
influences over him which might or might not tend to detach him from
herself.

“Why are you going to meet him?” she asked, hardly waiting for the
answer to her first question.

Alistair gave a half-ashamed smile.

“Well, he is going to give me a decoration, I believe--the Order of the
Holy Sepulchre.”

Molly looked impressed. She was sensitive about Alistair’s social
position, which she was conscious of having compromised, and this
decoration, coming on the morrow of his bankruptcy, seemed a welcome
rehabilitation.

“Then he really is a Prince?” she asked, with floating recollections
of police-court cases in which adventurers had obtained money by
pretending to titles not really theirs.

Stuart laughed good-naturedly.

“Yes, he’s a Prince right enough; at least, he’s as good as the Comte
de Rouen.”

Molly had heard of the Comte de Rouen, whose party had just given
proof of its vitality in a neighbouring country in one of the most
extraordinary episodes recorded in history. A conflict, extending over
years, and threatening at one time to assume the character of a civil
war, had taken place between the heads of the army, on the one hand,
and the civil Government on the other, over the body of an obscure
Jewish officer. If the guilt or innocence of the victim of this famous
persecution had not yet been placed beyond the reach of doubt, at least
it was made clear that his enemies had steeped themselves in perjury,
forgery, and every kind of subornation and conspiracy. It became
equally evident that the motive of their action was rather religious
than political; a chasm was revealed running through the nation, and
sharply dividing the clerical persecutors from the anti-clerical
defenders of the accused man. The army chiefs appeared as the tools of
the priesthood, which was seen in full cry on the trail of a Semitic
victim. The contagion spread to other countries, and prelates of the
Roman Church in England proclaimed their sympathy with the crusade. A
shock ran through Europe and America. It was as if the mask of saintly
meekness under persecution worn so closely by the Roman Church for
a century had been suddenly lifted for a moment, and modern men had
obtained a glimpse of the Fury’s visage underneath, with its writhing
snakes and its teeth gnashing for blood, the visage which they had
almost come to think of as a fable of Protestant historians.

The name of the Comte de Rouen silenced Molly, and Alistair was
allowed to depart without further objection.

As soon as he had left the house she went upstairs, took out his
mother’s letter, and read it through again for the fourth or fifth
time, with her lips tightly pinched and her forehead wrinkled in the
effort to devise some reply calculated at once to teach the Duchess
manners, and yet to neutralize her opposition.

This was what she wrote:

  “DEAR MADAM:

  “Don’t worry about Alistair. You are about as likely to see me marry
  him as you are to see”--she named a sacred personage--“riding down
  Piccadilly on a bicycle.

                                                   “Yours truly,
                                                        “MARY FINUCANE.”

CHAPTER X

A SCIENTIFIC OPINION

THE Duke of Trent and Colonsay sat at his great office table in his
room at the Home Office thinking.

The table was piled high with official papers. The permanent staff
of a Government Department are quick to detect the weakness of each
new chief put over their heads by the changing tide of parliamentary
warfare. The weakness of the new Home Secretary was for details and
statistics. A return of a hundred foolscap pages showing exactly how
many pounds of beef and how many pounds of rice are consumed in the
prisons of the country every year, or how many miles a policeman tramps
over in the same period in the course of his beat, afforded a real
satisfaction to his intellect. His staff catered for this taste as if
they had been the conductors of a popular magazine. They kept their new
chief busy and contented, and he let them alone.

But it was not about his important functions in the State that the
Minister was thinking at this moment, but about a more personal concern.

His discovery of his mother’s project had left him for some time in a
state of indecision, due partly to the fact that his desire was not
so much to marry Hero Vanbrugh as to prevent his brother from marrying
her. The appearance of a rival on the scene is generally sufficient to
decide a hesitating wooer, but then the Duke had not been exactly a
wooer, and this was another cause of embarrassment. Suddenly to begin
paying the attentions of a lover to a girl whom he had been accustomed
to treat familiarly as his mother’s friend seemed to a man of the
Duke’s stiff habit of mind an awkward, and possibly a ridiculous,
proceeding.

On the other hand, he saw that his mother was actively pushing her
design, and he could not shut his eyes to the fact that Alistair was a
rival to be feared.

It is difficult at all times for a man with a strong sense of his own
dignity to make love, and for a man animated by the calm and temperate
regard of the Duke of Trent to try to make love according to the
accepted English convention struck even his imagination as dangerously
foolish.

He condemned in his own mind the national custom which requires the man
to do his own love-making.

“Now, in France,” he reflected, “there would be no trouble about the
matter. I should tell my mother to send for Sir Bernard Vanbrugh, and
they would settle it between them.”

Sir Bernard’s name suggested an alternative which recommended itself
the more the longer he considered it. He would carry his proposal to
Hero’s father, and leave it to him to break the ice with Hero herself.

His acquaintance with the great scientist and physician was of the
slightest, but he could hardly distrust the reception such a son-in-law
as himself was likely to receive, and he might count on the father’s
influence with his daughter to overcome any possible hesitation on her
part.

Desirous to give every possible distinction to his overture, the Home
Secretary drew towards him a sheet of the official notepaper, and
wrote a few lines requesting the physician to name an hour at which he
would receive him on a private matter. The note folded and sealed, he
handed it to his private secretary, with injunctions to send it by a
messenger, and bring back the reply.

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s answer, which arrived within half an hour, was
even more formal than the Duke’s request, simply stating that the
physician would be at liberty that day at five o’clock.

The Duke ordered his carriage, and alighted at Sir Bernard’s door in
Stratford Place punctually at the hour named. Rather to his surprise,
but even more to his relief, he was taken, not into the drawing-room,
but into the physician’s consulting-room, and offered the patient’s
chair.

The man whose grey powerful eyes, under their square wall of forehead,
were turned on him with something of the penetrative power of a
searchlight, across a fragile-looking desk in some decorative wood,
was a man with a remarkable history.

There are some men of whom their friends are accustomed to say that
they should like them better if they were not so clever. Vanbrugh had
started in life with this handicap. He was an intellectual monster,
a brain-giant whose understanding was to the understandings of those
about him what the magnesium light is to a tallow candle.

Those into whose company he was thrown suffered somewhat as they
would have done in a strong light. Moreover, they were conscious that
Vanbrugh silently looked through them and over them, and they resented
the process in proportion to their conceit of themselves.

Thus it happened that the ablest man of his time was the most unpopular.

The unpopularity was the most marked among the members of his own
profession. To Vanbrugh the usages and traditions of his class were
so much rubbish. He saw in the etiquette of medicine nothing but the
precautions of dunces to protect their incapacity from discovery. He
was unable to make allowance for that infirmity of the human mind which
clings to custom through sheer terror of the unknown. Where he ought to
have imputed cowardice he imputed fraud.

He was a revolutionist by sheer force of insight. His mind covered at
a single bound the slow progress of years, and he was too impatient
to wait for the laggards to catch him up. The stupid are in a great
majority at all times, and in all situations, but some men, not less
great than Vanbrugh, have possessed the art of coaxing them, and
leading them on. It was just this art that Vanbrugh lacked. Unconscious
of his own brutality, he trampled on folly and dullness with feet of
iron, and the dull and foolish turned and rent him.

Up to the age of forty Bernard Vanbrugh’s life had been one long record
of disaster.

As a student he had been deeply unpopular, even with his professors,
who saw that they had in him a critic rather than a pupil. While
still walking the hospitals, the young man had ventured to argue
with the great lights of the profession whom he was there to watch
reverently and believe implicitly. He had had the audacity to suggest
to a celebrated gynecologist the use of ice at a critical stage of a
well-known operation; and though the specialist found himself obliged
to act on the advice, and subsequently enhanced his reputation by
adopting the treatment in his private practice, he never forgave the
young man’s presumption.

The medical authorities treated Vanbrugh with strict justice, up to the
point at which justice ceased to be obligatory; that is to say, they
awarded him as examiners every prize for which he chose to enter, but
they refused him a house-surgeoncy. When the astonished and mortified
young man tried to learn the reason for this refusal, he was met by
polite excuses and the recommendation that he should start in practice
as a consultant.

One old professor told him the truth.

“Our honorary staff will not have you,” he said bluntly. “Not because
they haven’t confidence in you, but because they think you haven’t
confidence in them.”

With a bitter smile Vanbrugh acknowledged the justice of the excuse.

He made up his mind that he must accept a house-surgeoncy in the
provinces. But when he came to apply for the usual testimonials from
those who had superintended his education, he received documents so
frigidly worded as to show clearly that they were given as a matter
of obligation merely, and not with any good will. The local doctors
in whose hands the appointments lay discerned the actual disapproval
beneath the formal recommendation. Vanbrugh, the most distinguished
student of his year, or for many years, was not even invited to present
himself for a personal interview when he applied for a post of two
hundred a year in a small country town.

He abandoned this useless attempt without much regret. He knew well
enough that London contained his destiny, and that he had been guilty
of treason to his own powers in seeking to escape it.

His enemies had advised him to become a consultant--that is to say, to
take rooms in an expensive street in the West End, and wait for other
doctors to send him patients as to a superior. Vanbrugh took this
advice, and for fifteen years no patient ever crossed his threshold.

A consultant depends absolutely on the support of his own profession,
and in his own profession Vanbrugh was hated as few men are hated.
There were men who, if they had heard of a patient intending to consult
him, would have walked across London to prevent it.

Vanbrugh was a poor man. The whole of the funds remaining from his
scholarships, together with the remittances doled out grudgingly by his
family, were set aside to pay the rent of the rooms in Brook Street.
His brass-plate, once affixed to the doorpost there, became his flag,
which he would not strike while life remained. In the meantime he had
to live.

After endless trials in all directions, Bernard Vanbrugh succeeded in
getting employment on the staff of one of those bureaus which undertake
to supply information on any subject. Vanbrugh’s was the medical
department, and he was paid at the rate of half a crown an hour. The
work had mostly to be done at the British Museum, and his weekly
earnings averaged about two pounds.

This, then, was the situation. The most brilliant follower of medicine
in Europe, perhaps the keenest intellect of his time, was compelled to
spend the best years of his life among broken-down journalists, and
stranded governesses, and all the sad jetsam of the educated class,
doing drudge’s work for the wages of a drudge. The celebrated Huxley
had a narrow escape from the same fate. How many other Huxleys and
Vanbrughs are to-day dreeing the same weird, while the millions of
philanthropy roll about the gutters, and the billions of endowments
pass into the pockets of the dunce?

Vanbrugh divided his scanty earnings into two equal portions. Fifty
pounds a year paid for his food and clothes and the rare holidays
conceded to health, with the other fifty he bought books and scientific
instruments.

The subject he had chosen to investigate was the cells of the brain.

At the age of forty he completed his work on the brain, and the
fifteen years’ penal servitude to which he had been sentenced by human
stupidity and spite approached its term.

He carried the manuscript to an important publisher, and solicited a
personal interview.

Strange to say, the publisher granted it. Vanbrugh’s name was well
known to him. Some hints of his researches had leaked out from time to
time, and the hospitals were already trembling. The meteoric career of
the student had not been forgotten. Every now and then his brethren
spoke of Vanbrugh as of a man from whom the world was certain to hear
sooner or later. While he was toiling in the dust he was already
reluctantly recognized as the coming man.

Vanbrugh placed his book in the publisher’s hands with something of
his old arrogance, which half a lifetime of hardship had not been able
to crush.

“This is a book which will, directly it appears, supersede every other
book on the brain. But if your reader sees my name on the title-page,
he will tell you it is rubbish. I ask you to submit it to him without
allowing him to know whom it is by, and then he may tell you the truth.”

The publisher smiled. He glanced from his caller’s proud, harsh
countenance to his shabby clothes and patched boots, and thought he
could understand. “The man is a crank,” he said to himself. “His
troubles have unhinged him.”

Nevertheless, he gave the required promise. He even went beyond his
word. Lest his English reader should suspect the authorship of the book
and be prejudiced in consequence, he took the trouble to forward the
manuscript to Vienna, to a renowned specialist in that capital, saying
that his usual advisers differed as to the merit of the work, and
requesting an impartial opinion. This was the first stroke of fortune
in Vanbrugh’s favour.

In less than a month the publisher was astonished by receiving back
the manuscript with a letter in which the Viennese authority repeated
Vanbrugh’s very words.

“I cannot understand what you tell me about your advisers,” the
Austrian wrote. “This is one of the greatest works I have ever had the
good fortune to read. It will supersede every existing work on the
brain. The author has done you a high honour in offering this book to
your house.”

The great publisher winced. It so happened that he had in the
press a voluminous book on this very subject by a baronet and
physician-in-ordinary to the Court, a book on whose preparation he had
already spent a considerable sum. It was clear that one of these two
books must kill the other. In either case he must be at a loss. On the
other hand, if he were to refuse Vanbrugh’s work, it might be taken by
the great rival house which divided the trade with his.

In this uncertainty he decided to submit the manuscript to his reader
in the ordinary way. Scarcely had he sent it off when he received a
second call from Vanbrugh.

The Austrian specialist, not dreaming that his opinion could be
disregarded, and filled with enthusiasm for Vanbrugh’s achievement, had
addressed a letter to him, congratulating him in the warmest terms. The
letter did not elate Vanbrugh in the least, but it brought him round to
the publisher to find out what was being done with his book.

He came, taking it for granted that its acceptance was now out of
doubt. The publisher, compelled to give a definite answer, made up his
mind on the spot, and proposed terms which Vanbrugh accepted.

Two days later his reader returned the manuscript with a brief note,
dismissing it as the work of a charlatan. Vanbrugh had beaten this man
in one of the hospital examinations.

When the book came out, the medical reviewers were staggered. They
dared not attack, and they would not praise it; it was therefore
allowed to fall dead from the press. The distinguished baronet, whose
book had been thrown over by the publisher, was furious. He threatened
to have Vanbrugh’s name taken off the register as a quack.

The publisher was wringing his hands, when suddenly an offer arrived
from Leipzig for the German rights of the book, an offer larger in
amount than what he had paid Vanbrugh for the copyright. Similar offers
came tumbling in from Paris, from Rome, and from St. Petersburg. Rival
editions appeared in New York and Chicago, the publishers of which,
more honest than their legislators, sent considerable sums to the
author. The scientific press on both sides of the Atlantic rang with
the name of Bernard Vanbrugh, and the popular journals followed suit.

As Vanbrugh had foretold, his book superseded every existing treatise
on the brain.

The first part of the work was a careful and exhaustive monograph
on the brain-cells, their morphology and physiology. Vanbrugh had
applied every available tool of scientific investigation in his
experiments--chemical agents, electric discharges, the microscope, and
the photograph. The reaction under the different rays of the spectrum
had been tested separately and in combination, and results of the
highest interest obtained. But the epoch-making character of the book
was given to it by the second part.

Here Vanbrugh had boldly essayed the feat of building a bridge between
physiology and what is called psychology. He had explored what are
known as mental phenomena in the light of his physical analysis. Into
this dim and distrusted region of knowledge Vanbrugh had projected the
searchlight of his merciless intellect, and had made it scientific
ground.

Even the lay reader could follow him here, and understand most of his
conclusions. Vanbrugh disdained the hieroglyphic vocabulary of the new
priesthood of science, and forced the words of daily life into the
service. In this part of the book occurred his famous comparison of the
brain to a biograph, with the process of thought carried on by a series
of films, succeeding each other with inconceivable rapidity, but yet
with a gap of pure annihilation after each.

“Science is measured knowledge,” was the keynote of his triumphant
peroration.

“Science is measured knowledge, and the only measures we can apply are
physical ones, and we can only apply them to physical phenomena. Slowly
but surely, as we succeed in identifying these processes called mental
with the processes of the brain-cells, we shall be enabled to reduce
them to a plan, to evolve order out of confusion, and to regulate human
passion and intelligence as we regulate the secretions of the stomach
and the circulation of the blood, the alternation of the harvests, and
the courses of the tides.”

Such thorough-going materialism shocked and terrified not a few
readers, but the day was gone by for any objection to be raised on that
score in scientific circles. Before the book had been out a year it was
the recognized authority on the subject with which it dealt in every
civilized country, and the London colleges were obliged to give it a
place upon their shelves.

Honours and distinctions flowed in upon the author from abroad.
Vienna was the first to offer him the honorary membership of her
first learned society, and other capitals hastened to do the same. A
great foreign ruler, who considered it a part of his own greatness to
befriend greatness in others, sent his most coveted Order to the poor
English doctor, of whom his Ambassador in London had never so much as
heard till he was directed to call upon him with the decoration. Not
content with that, the Emperor wrote privately to the English Court,
remonstrating with it warmly on its neglect of so illustrious a subject.

The English Court took the hint, and Sir Bernard Vanbrugh figured in
the next list of birthday honours. Then at last the sullen opposition
of the profession gave way. His brethren realized that they were
compromising their own reputation in the eyes of the world, and on the
next vacancy Vanbrugh was offered, and he accepted, the Presidency of
his College.

He was now sixty years of age; his appointment-book was filled up for
weeks in advance, and his only child was an heiress.

The Duke of Trent, with all the prestige of his rank and office,
yielded to the same involuntary fear that Vanbrugh always inspired, and
sat down like a schoolboy in the master’s presence.

“I don’t think we have met very often,” he began, “but I dare say you
know that Miss Vanbrugh is a great friend of my mother’s.”

At the mention of his daughter the scientist moved slightly, and his
expression became less severe.

“I have had many opportunities of seeing her at Colonsay House,” the
Minister pursued, his tone unconsciously betraying his intimate sense
of a favour about to be conferred, “and, so far as I am able to judge,
she is disposed to like me. I will come to the point at once, and say
that the object of my visit is to ask you to give her to me. I don’t
suppose it is necessary for me to say anything to you on the subject of
my own feelings. I show them sufficiently by my proposal. I am not a
sentimental schoolboy, but you may believe me when I say that, should
your daughter honour me by becoming my wife, I shall do the utmost in
my power to make her happy.”

Sir Bernard listened without any further sign of emotion to this
speech, the formality of which did the wooer less harm in his eyes than
it might have done in Hero’s.

“What does Hero say?” was his sole observation in reply.

“I have not spoken to her yet. In fact, I have never given her any
reason to expect this proposal. We have been friends, and nothing more,
so far. I confess I have felt some difficulty about approaching her. I
have had no experience in love-making, and it occurred to me that you
might be willing to sound Miss Vanbrugh on my behalf.”

The physician made no objection to this suggestion. He remained
thinking for some little time, and then answered deliberately:

“You have done me an honour, of which I am entirely sensible, in asking
for my daughter’s hand. As your wife her position would be a very proud
one, and perhaps most fathers in my place would accept your offer
without a moment’s hesitation. But Hero is my only child, and I am a
man who has always held strong views on the question of marriage. I
trust you will not think me wanting in appreciation of your high claims
to consideration if I put exactly the same questions to you which I
have always intended to put to any man who came to me in the character
of a future son-in-law.”

The Secretary of State was a little surprised by this reception of his
offer, but on the whole he was pleased by it. He told himself that few
candidates for matrimony would be better able to withstand a father’s
scrutiny than he.

“I shall be very pleased to answer any questions you wish to put to me.
You are most fully entitled to know everything I can tell, and I have
nothing to conceal.”

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh nodded. Opening a drawer in his desk, he took out
a large printed form and spread it out in front of him.

“I had better begin, perhaps,” the suitor suggested, “by giving you the
names of my solicitor and banker. They will give you every information
with regard to my financial circumstances.”

The physician shook his head slightly.

“I do not doubt that your means are ample, and my daughter will not be
a portionless girl. I am the medical adviser to a number of insurance
companies, and this paper contains the questions it is my duty to put
to a person who desires to insure his life. In my view, I ought not to
have to say, marriage is an infinitely more important step than the
granting of a policy. Are you willing for me to examine you with the
same care as if you were asking my employers to insure you for a few
thousand pounds?”

The Duke opened his eyes. Not even Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s
reputation for originality--eccentricity it is called in Government
departments--had prepared him for such a proposition. But any momentary
irritation was quickly swallowed up in the comforting reflection: What
sort of reception would this man give to Alistair!

“I am at your disposal, Sir Bernard!”

The physician began his methodical examination exactly as if he were
dealing with an ordinary patient. He weighed the Cabinet Minister, he
measured him, he took his pulse and temperature, and sounded his heart
and lungs. As test after test was applied the examiner did not conceal
his interest and satisfaction, and at the close of the ordeal his
manner became almost enthusiastic.

“I can congratulate you,” he reported, “on being an almost perfect
life--I may say, a remarkable life. Do you know that you are as nearly
as possible a normal man?”

The twelfth subject of the Queen looked ever so slightly disconcerted
by the compliment.

“You don’t understand, I see,” said Vanbrugh. “I must explain to you
that scientific anthropologists have arrived at certain standards of
bodily proportion, of the energy of the vital functions, and so on,
which they have fixed as constituting the norm of humanity--that is
to say, the perfect balance which ought to be found in every member
of the species. The normal man is therefore a scientific abstraction:
he is the imaginary type with which actual individuals are to be
compared, and to which they should as far as possible conform. Now
I find that you fulfil to an extraordinary degree every requirement
which anthropological science has laid down for the species. You are,
therefore, a normal man--the first I have ever been fortunate enough to
come across.”

The Duke of Trent tried to persuade himself that this was a flattering
report, though in his ear the word “normal” sounded disagreeably like
commonplace.

“At all events, you are satisfied?” he asked.

“I am more than satisfied so far. Now as to your family history----”

For the first time a misgiving stole into the Duke’s mind, as he
remembered Lord Alexander Stuart’s career. Surely this scientific
inquisitor was not going to visit the sins of the father on the son, as
his words foreboded?

“Is your father living?”

“No; I have the title,” the Duke reminded him.

“True. At what age did he die?”

“As far as I can recollect, at about thirty-eight or forty. I could
easily ascertain.”

“That may not be necessary. What did he die of?”

The Duke’s cheeks burned. But he saw the folly of temporizing with a
man like Vanbrugh. The story of Lord Alexander was perfectly well known
in London.

“Of _delirium tremens_, I am afraid.”

Sir Bernard’s eyebrows lifted, and he shot a painful glance at the
unfortunate son.

“Your mother,” he hastened to say, “I know is alive. What is her state
of health?”

The Duke was glad to be able to reply altogether satisfactorily. He was
beginning to breathe again when the scientist put the fatal question:

“Have you any brothers or sisters?”

“One brother.” As the admission escaped him all his old bitterness
against his junior returned with ten-fold force.

“Living?”

“Yes, he is living.”

“Surely I have heard something about him lately?” Sir Bernard said
reflectively. “What is he called?”

“Lord Alistair Stuart.”

The words might have been red-hot coals on the Duke’s lips and not have
given him a greater wrench to utter.

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh laid down his paper and leant back in his chair.