As he dismounted at the side door he caught a fleeting glimpse of a gaunt, elderly woman peering at him from behind the curtain of an upper window. Evidently this was his aunt by adoption.

Over the ample midday meal that stood in readiness for him Stoner was able to review the possibilities of his extraordinary situation. The real Tom, after four years of absence, might suddenly turn up at the farm, or a letter might come from him at any moment. Again, in the character of heir to the farm, the false Tom might be called on to sign documents, which would be an embarrassing predicament. Or a relative might arrive who would not imitate the aunt’s attitude of aloofness. All these things would mean ignominious exposure. On the other hand, the alternatives was the open sky and the muddy lanes that led down to the sea. The farm offered him, at any rate, a temporary refuge from destitution; farming was one of the many things he had “tried,” and he would be able to do a certain amount of work in return for the hospitality to which he was so little entitled.

“Will you have cold pork for your supper,” asked the hard-faced maid, as she cleared the table, “or will you have it hotted up?”

“Hot, with onions,” said Stoner. It was the only time in his life that he had made a rapid decision. And as he gave the order he knew that he meant to stay.

Stoner kept rigidly to those portions of the house which seemed to have been allotted to him by a tacit treaty of delimitation. When he took part in the farm-work it was as one who worked under orders and never initiated them. Old George, the roan cob, and Bowker’s pup were his sole companions in a world that was otherwise frostily silent and hostile. Of the mistress of the farm he saw nothing. Once, when he knew she had gone forth to church, he made a furtive visit to the farm parlour in an endeavour to glean some fragmentary knowledge of the young man whose place he had usurped, and whose ill-repute he had fastened on himself. There were many photographs hung on the walls, or stuck in prim frames, but the likeness he sought for was not among them. At last, in an album thrust out of sight, he came across what he wanted. There was a whole series, labelled “Tom,” a podgy child of three, in a fantastic frock, an awkward boy of about twelve, holding a cricket bat as though he loathed it, a rather good-looking youth of eighteen with very smooth, evenly parted hair, and, finally, a young man with a somewhat surly dare-devil expression. At this last portrait Stoner looked with particular interest; the likeness to himself was unmistakable.

From the lips of old George, who was garrulous enough on most subjects, he tried again and again to learn something of the nature of the offence which shut him off as a creature to be shunned and hated by his fellow-men.

“What do the folk around here say about me?” he asked one day as they were walking home from an outlying field.

The old man shook his head.

“They be bitter agen you, mortal bitter. Ay, ’tis a sad business, a sad business.”

And never could he be got to say anything more enlightening.

On a clear frosty evening, a few days before the festival of Christmas, Stoner stood in a corner of the orchard which commanded a wide view of the countryside. Here and there he could see the twinkling dots of lamp or candle glow which told of human homes where the goodwill and jollity of the season held their sway. Behind him lay the grim, silent farm-house, where no one ever laughed, where even a quarrel would have seemed cheerful. As he turned to look at the long grey front of the gloom-shadowed building, a door opened and old George came hurriedly forth. Stoner heard his adopted name called in a tone of strained anxiety. Instantly he knew that something untoward had happened, and with a quick revulsion of outlook his sanctuary became in his eyes a place of peace and contentment, from which he dreaded to be driven.

“Master Tom,” said the old man in a hoarse whisper, “you must slip away quiet from here for a few days. Michael Ley is back in the village, an’ he swears to shoot you if he can come across you. He’ll do it, too, there’s murder in the look of him. Get away under cover of night, ’tis only for a week or so, he won’t be here longer.”

“But where am I to go?” stammered Stoner, who had caught the infection of the old man’s obvious terror.

“Go right away along the coast to Punchford and keep hid there. When Michael’s safe gone I’ll ride the roan over to the Green Dragon at Punchford; when you see the cob stabled at the Green Dragon ’tis a sign you may come back agen.”

“But—” began Stoner hesitatingly.

“’Tis all right for money,” said the other; “the old Missus agrees you’d best do as I say, and she’s given me this.”

The old man produced three sovereigns and some odd silver.

Stoner felt more of a cheat than ever as he stole away that night from the back gate of the farm with the old woman’s money in his pocket. Old George and Bowker’s pup stood watching him a silent farewell from the yard. He could scarcely fancy that he would ever come back, and he felt a throb of compunction for those two humble friends who would wait wistfully for his return. Some day perhaps the real Tom would come back, and there would be wild wonderment among those simple farm folks as to the identity of the shadowy guest they had harboured under their roof. For his own fate he felt no immediate anxiety; three pounds goes but little way in the world when there is nothing behind it, but to a man who has counted his exchequer in pennies it seems a good starting-point. Fortune had done him a whimsically kind turn when last he trod these lanes as a hopeless adventurer, and there might yet be a chance of his finding some work and making a fresh start; as he got further from the farm his spirits rose higher. There was a sense of relief in regaining once more his lost identity and ceasing to be the uneasy ghost of another. He scarcely bothered to speculate about the implacable enemy who had dropped from nowhere into his life; since that life was now behind him one unreal item the more made little difference. For the first time for many months he began to hum a careless light-hearted refrain. Then there stepped out from the shadow of an overhanging oak tree a man with a gun. There was no need to wonder who he might be; the moonlight falling on his white set face revealed a glare of human hate such as Stoner in the ups and downs of his wanderings had never seen before. He sprang aside in a wild effort to break through the hedge that bordered the lane, but the tough branches held him fast. The hounds of Fate had waited for him in those narrow lanes, and this time they were not to be denied.

THE RECESSIONAL

CLOVIS sat in the hottest zone but two of a Turkish bath, alternately inert in statuesque contemplation and rapidly manœuvring a fountain-pen over the pages of a note-book.

“Don’t interrupt me with your childish prattle,” he observed to Bertie van Tahn, who had slung himself languidly into a neighbouring chair and looked conversationally inclined; “I’m writing deathless verse.”

Bertie looked interested.

“I say, what a boon you would be to portrait painters if you really got to be notorious as a poetry writer. If they couldn’t get your likeness hung in the Academy as ‘Clovis Sangrail, Esq., at work on his latest poem,’ they could slip you in as a Study of the Nude or Orpheus descending into Jermyn Street. They always complain that modern dress handicaps them, whereas a towel and a fountain-pen—”

“It was Mrs. Packletide’s suggestion that I should write this thing,” said Clovis, ignoring the bypaths to fame that Bertie van Tahn was pointing out to him. “You see, Loona Bimberton had a Coronation Ode accepted by the New Infancy, a paper that has been started with the idea of making the New Age seem elder and hidebound. ‘So clever of you, dear Loona,’ the Packletide remarked when she had read it; ‘of course, any one could write a Coronation Ode, but no one else would have thought of doing it.’ Loona protested that these things were extremely difficult to do, and gave us to understand that they were more or less the province of a gifted few. Now the Packletide has been rather decent to me in many ways, a sort of financial ambulance, you know, that carries you off the field when you’re hard hit, which is a frequent occurrence with me, and I’ve no use whatever for Loona Bimberton, so I chipped in and said I could turn out that sort of stuff by the square yard if I gave my mind to it. Loona said I couldn’t, and we got bets on, and between you and me I think the money’s fairly safe. Of course, one of the conditions of the wager is that the thing has to be published in something or other, local newspapers barred; but Mrs. Packletide has endeared herself by many little acts of thoughtfulness to the editor of the Smoky Chimney, so if I can hammer out anything at all approaching the level of the usual Ode output we ought to be all right. So far I’m getting along so comfortably that I begin to be afraid that I must be one of the gifted few.”

“It’s rather late in the day for a Coronation Ode, isn’t it?” said Bertie.

“Of course,” said Clovis; “this is going to be a Durbar Recessional, the sort of thing that you can keep by you for all time if you want to.”

“Now I understand your choice of a place to write it in,” said Bertie van Tahn, with the air of one who has suddenly unravelled a hitherto obscure problem; “you want to get the local temperature.”

“I came here to get freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient,” said Clovis, “but it seems I asked too much of fate.”

Bertie van Tahn prepared to use his towel as a weapon of precision, but reflecting that he had a good deal of unprotected coast-line himself, and that Clovis was equipped with a fountain-pen as well as a towel, he relapsed pacifically into the depths of his chair.

“May one hear extracts from the immortal work?” he asked. “I promise that nothing that I hear now shall prejudice me against borrowing a copy of the Smoky Chimney at the right moment.”

“It’s rather like casting pearls into a trough,” remarked Clovis pleasantly, “but I don’t mind reading you bits of it. It begins with a general dispersal of the Durbar participants:

“‘Back to their homes in Himalayan heights

The stale pale elephants of Cutch Behar

Roll like great galleons on a tideless sea—’”

“I don’t believe Cutch Behar is anywhere near the Himalayan region,” interrupted Bertie. “You ought to have an atlas on hand when you do this sort of thing; and why stale and pale?”

“After the late hours and the excitement, of course,” said Clovis; “and I said their homes were in the Himalayas. You can have Himalayan elephants in Cutch Behar, I suppose, just as you have Irish-bred horses running at Ascot.”

“You said they were going back to the Himalayas,” objected Bertie.

“Well, they would naturally be sent home to recuperate. It’s the usual thing out there to turn elephants loose in the hills, just as we put horses out to grass in this country.”

Clovis could at least flatter himself that he had infused some of the reckless splendour of the East into his mendacity.

“Is it all going to be in blank verse?” asked the critic.

“Of course not; ‘Durbar’ comes at the end of the fourth line.”

“That seems so cowardly; however, it explains why you pitched on Cutch Behar.”

“There is more connection between geographical place-names and poetical inspiration than is generally recognized; one of the chief reasons why there are so few really great poems about Russia in our language is that you can’t possibly get a rhyme to names like Smolensk and Tobolsk and Minsk.”

Clovis spoke with the authority of one who has tried.

“Of course, you could rhyme Omsk with Tomsk,” he continued; “in fact, they seem to be there for that purpose, but the public wouldn’t stand that sort of thing indefinitely.”

“The public will stand a good deal,” said Bertie malevolently, “and so small a proportion of it knows Russian that you could always have an explanatory footnote asserting that the last three letters in Smolensk are not pronounced. It’s quite as believable as your statement about putting elephants out to grass in the Himalayan range.”

“I’ve got rather a nice bit,” resumed Clovis with unruffled serenity, “giving an evening scene on the outskirts of a jungle village:

“‘Where the coiled cobra in the gloaming gloats,

And prowling panthers stalk the wary goats.’”

“There is practically no gloaming in tropical countries,” said Bertie indulgently; “but I like the masterly reticence with which you treat the cobra’s motive for gloating. The unknown is proverbially the uncanny. I can picture nervous readers of the Smoky Chimney keeping the light turned on in their bedrooms all night out of sheer sickening uncertainty as to what the cobra might have been gloating about.”

“Cobras gloat naturally,” said Clovis, “just as wolves are always ravening from mere force of habit, even after they’ve hopelessly overeaten themselves. I’ve got a fine bit of colour painting later on,” he added, “where I describe the dawn coming up over the Brahma-putra river:

“‘The amber dawn-drenched East with sun-shafts kissed,

Stained sanguine apricot and amethyst,

O’er the washed emerald of the mango groves

Hangs in a mist of opalescent mauves,

While painted parrot-flights impinge the haze

With scarlet, chalcedon and chrysoprase.’”

“I’ve never seen the dawn come up over the Brahma-putra river,” said Bertie, “so I can’t say if it’s a good description of the event, but it sounds more like an account of an extensive jewel robbery. Anyhow, the parrots give a good useful touch of local colour. I suppose you’ve introduced some tigers into the scenery? An Indian landscape would have rather a bare, unfinished look without a tiger or two in the middle distance.”

“I’ve got a hen-tiger somewhere in the poem,” said Clovis, hunting through his notes. “Here she is:

“‘The tawny tigress ’mid the tangled teak

Drags to her purring cubs’ enraptured ears

The harsh death-rattle in the pea-fowl’s beak,

A jungle lullaby of blood and tears.’”

Bertie van Tahn rose hurriedly from his recumbent position and made for the glass door leading into the next compartment.

“I think your idea of home life in the jungle is perfectly horrid,” he said. “The cobra was sinister enough, but the improvised rattle in the tiger-nursery is the limit. If you’re going to make me turn hot and cold all over I may as well go into the steam room at once.”

“Just listen to this line,” said Clovis; “it would make the reputation of any ordinary poet:

“‘and overhead

The pendulum-patient Punkah, parent of stillborn breeze.’”

“Most of your readers will think ‘punkah’ is a kind of iced drink or half-time at polo,” said Bertie, and disappeared into the steam.

 

The Smoky Chimney duly published the “Recessional,” but it proved to be its swan song, for the paper never attained to another issue.

Loona Bimberton gave up her intention of attending the Durbar and went into a nursing-home on the Sussex Downs. Nervous breakdown after a particularly strenuous season was the usually accepted explanation, but there are three or four people who know that she never really recovered from the dawn breaking over the Brahma-putra river.

A MATTER OF SENTIMENT

IT was the eve of the great race, and scarcely a member of Lady Susan’s house-party had as yet a single bet on. It was one of those unsatisfactory years when one horse held a commanding market position, not by reason of any general belief in its crushing superiority, but because it was extremely difficult to pitch on any other candidate to whom to pin one’s faith. Peradventure II was the favourite, not in the sense of being a popular fancy, but by virtue of a lack of confidence in any one of his rather undistinguished rivals. The brains of club-land were much exercised in seeking out possible merit where none was very obvious to the naked intelligence, and the house-party at Lady Susan’s was possessed by the same uncertainty and irresolution that infected wider circles.

“It is just the time for bringing off a good coup,” said Bertie van Tahn.

“Undoubtedly. But with what?” demanded Clovis for the twentieth time.

The women of the party were just as keenly interested in the matter, and just as helplessly perplexed; even the mother of Clovis, who usually got good racing information from her dressmaker, confessed herself fancy free on this occasion. Colonel Drake, who was professor of military history at a minor cramming establishment, was the only person who had a definite selection for the event, but as his choice varied every three hours he was worse than useless as an inspired guide. The crowning difficulty of the problem was that it could only be fitfully and furtively discussed. Lady Susan disapproved of racing. She disapproved of many things; some people went as far as to say that she disapproved of most things. Disapproval was to her what neuralgia and fancy needlework are to many other women. She disapproved of early morning tea and auction bridge, of ski-ing and the two-step, of the Russian ballet and the Chelsea Arts Club ball, of the French policy in Morocco and the British policy everywhere. It was not that she was particularly strict or narrow in her views of life, but she had been the eldest sister of a large family of self-indulgent children, and her particular form of indulgence had consisted in openly disapproving of the foibles of the others. Unfortunately the hobby had grown up with her. As she was rich, influential, and very, very kind, most people were content to count their early tea as well lost on her behalf. Still, the necessity for hurriedly dropping the discussion of an enthralling topic, and suppressing all mention of it during her presence on the scene, was an affliction at a moment like the present, when time was slipping away and indecision was the prevailing note.

After a lunch-time of rather strangled and uneasy conversation, Clovis managed to get most of the party together at the further end of the kitchen gardens, on the pretext of admiring the Himalayan pheasants. He had made an important discovery. Motkin, the butler, who (as Clovis expressed it) had grown prematurely grey in Lady Susan’s service, added to his other excellent qualities an intelligent interest in matters connected with the Turf. On the subject of the forthcoming race he was not illuminating, except in so far that he shared the prevailing unwillingness to see a winner in Peradventure II. But where he outshone all the members of the house-party was in the fact that he had a second cousin who was head stable-lad at a neighbouring racing establishment, and usually gifted with much inside information as to private form and possibilities. Only the fact of her ladyship having taken it into her head to invite a house-party for the last week of May had prevented Mr. Motkin from paying a visit of consultation to his relative with respect to the big race; there was still time to cycle over if he could get leave of absence for the afternoon on some specious excuse.

“Let’s jolly well hope he does,” said Bertie van Tahn; “under the circumstances a second cousin is almost as useful as second sight.”

“That stable ought to know something, if knowledge is to be found anywhere,” said Mrs. Packletide hopefully.

“I expect you’ll find he’ll echo my fancy for Motorboat,” said Colonel Drake.

At this moment the subject had to be hastily dropped. Lady Susan bore down upon them, leaning on the arm of Clovis’s mother, to whom she was confiding the fact that she disapproved of the craze for Pekingese spaniels. It was the third thing she had found time to disapprove of since lunch, without counting her silent and permanent disapproval of the way Clovis’s mother did her hair.

“We have been admiring the Himalayan pheasants,” said Mrs. Packletide suavely.

“They went off to a bird-show at Nottingham early this morning,” said Lady Susan, with the air of one who disapproves of hasty and ill-considered lying.

“Their house, I mean; such perfect roosting arrangements, and all so clean,” resumed Mrs. Packletide, with an increased glow of enthusiasm. The odious Bertie van Tahn was murmuring audible prayers for Mrs. Packletide’s ultimate estrangement from the paths of falsehood.

“I hope you don’t mind dinner being a quarter of an hour late tonight,” said Lady Susan; “Motkin has had an urgent summons to go and see a sick relative this afternoon. He wanted to bicycle there, but I am sending him in the motor.”

“How very kind of you! Of course we don’t mind dinner being put off.” The assurances came with unanimous and hearty sincerity.

At the dinner-table that night an undercurrent of furtive curiosity directed itself towards Motkin’s impassive countenance. One or two of the guests almost expected to find a slip of paper concealed in their napkins, bearing the name of the second cousin’s selection. They had not long to wait. As the butler went round with the murmured question, “Sherry?” he added in an even lower tone the cryptic words, “Better not.” Mrs. Packletide gave a start of alarm, and refused the sherry; there seemed some sinister suggestion in the butler’s warning, as though her hostess had suddenly become addicted to the Borgia habit. A moment later the explanation flashed on her that “Better Not” was the name of one of the runners in the big race. Clovis was already pencilling it on his cuff, and Colonel Drake, in his turn, was signalling to every one in hoarse whispers and dumb-show the fact that he had all along fancied “B.N.”

Early next morning a sheaf of telegrams went Townward, representing the market commands of the house-party and servants’ hall.

It was a wet afternoon, and most of Lady Susan’s guests hung about the hall, waiting apparently for the appearance of tea, though it was scarcely yet due. The advent of a telegram quickened every one into a flutter of expectancy; the page who brought the telegram to Clovis waited with unusual alertness to know if there might be an answer.

Clovis read the message and gave an exclamation of annoyance.

“No bad news, I hope,” said Lady Susan. Every one else knew that the news was not good.

“It’s only the result of the Derby,” he blurted out; “Sadowa won; an utter outsider.”

“Sadowa!” exclaimed Lady Susan; “you don’t say so! How remarkable! It’s the first time I’ve ever backed a horse; in fact I disapprove of horse-racing, but just for once in a way I put money on this horse, and it’s gone and won.”

“May I ask,” said Mrs. Packletide, amid the general silence, “why you put your money on this particular horse? None of the sporting prophets mentioned it as having an outside chance.”

“Well,” said Lady Susan, “you may laugh at me, but it was the name that attracted me. You see, I was always mixed up with the Franco-German war; I was married on the day that the war was declared, and my eldest child was born the day that peace was signed, so anything connected with the war has always interested me. And when I saw there was a horse running in the Derby called after one of the battles in the Franco-German war, I said I must put some money on it, for once in a way, though I disapprove of racing. And it’s actually won.”

There was a general groan. No one groaned more deeply than the professor of military history.

THE SECRET SIN OF SEPTIMUS BROPE

“WHO and what is Mr. Brope?” demanded the aunt of Clovis suddenly.

Mrs. Riversedge, who had been snipping off the heads of defunct roses, and thinking of nothing in particular, sprang hurriedly to mental attention. She was one of those old-fashioned hostesses who consider that one ought to know something about one’s guests, and that the something ought to be to their credit.

“I believe he comes from Leighton Buzzard,” she observed by way of preliminary explanation.

“In these days of rapid and convenient travel,” said Clovis, who was dispersing a colony of green-fly with visitations of cigarette smoke, “to come from Leighton Buzzard does not necessarily denote any great strength of character. It might only mean mere restlessness. Now if he had left it under a cloud, or as a protest against the incurable and heartless frivolity of its inhabitants, that would tell us something about the man and his mission in life.”

“What does he do?” pursued Mrs. Troyle magisterially.

“He edits the Cathedral Monthly,” said her hostess, “and he’s enormously learned about memorial brasses and transepts and the influence of Byzantine worship on modern liturgy, and all those sort of things. Perhaps he is just a little bit heavy and immersed in one range of subjects, but it takes all sorts to make a good house-party, you know. You don’t find him too dull, do you?”

“Dulness I could overlook,” said the aunt of Clovis: “what I cannot forgive is his making love to my maid.”

“My dear Mrs. Troyle,” gasped the hostess, “what an extraordinary idea! I assure you Mr. Brope would not dream of doing such a thing.”

“His dreams are a matter of indifference to me; for all I care his slumbers may be one long indiscretion of unsuitable erotic advances, in which the entire servants’ hall may be involved. But in his waking hours he shall not make love to my maid. It’s no use arguing about it, I’m firm on the point.”

“But you must be mistaken,” persisted Mrs. Riversedge; “Mr. Brope would be the last person to do such a thing.”

“He is the first person to do such a thing, as far as my information goes, and if I have any voice in the matter he certainly shall be the last. Of course, I am not referring to respectably-intentioned lovers.”

“I simply cannot think that a man who writes so charmingly and informingly about transepts and Byzantine influences would behave in such an unprincipled manner,” said Mrs. Riversedge; “what evidence have you that he’s doing anything of the sort? I don’t want to doubt your word, of course, but we mustn’t be too ready to condemn him unheard, must we?”

“Whether we condemn him or not, he has certainly not been unheard. He has the room next to my dressing-room, and on two occasions, when I dare say he thought I was absent, I have plainly heard him announcing through the wall, ‘I love you, Florrie.’ Those partition walls upstairs are very thin; one can almost hear a watch ticking in the next room.”

“Is your maid called Florence?”

“Her name is Florinda.”

“What an extraordinary name to give a maid!”

“I did not give it to her; she arrived in my service already christened.”

“What I mean is,” said Mrs. Riversedge, “that when I get maids with unsuitable names I call them Jane; they soon get used to it.”

“An excellent plan,” said the aunt of Clovis coldly; “unfortunately I have got used to being called Jane myself. It happens to be my name.”

She cut short Mrs. Riversedge’s flood of apologies by abruptly remarking:

“The question is not whether I’m to call my maid Florinda, but whether Mr. Brope is to be permitted to call her Florrie. I am strongly of opinion that he shall not.”

“He may have been repeating the words of some song,” said Mrs. Riversedge hopefully; “there are lots of those sorts of silly refrains with girls’ names,” she continued, turning to Clovis as a possible authority on the subject. “‘You mustn’t call me Mary—’”

“I shouldn’t think of doing so,” Clovis assured her; “in the first place, I’ve always understood that your name was Henrietta; and then I hardly know you well enough to take such a liberty.”

“I mean there’s a song with that refrain,” hurriedly explained Mrs. Riversedge, “and there’s ‘Rhoda, Rhoda kept a pagoda,’ and ‘Maisie is a daisy,’ and heaps of others. Certainly it doesn’t sound like Mr. Brope to be singing such songs, but I think we ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“I had already done so,” said Mrs. Troyle, “until further evidence came my way.”

She shut her lips with the resolute finality of one who enjoys the blessed certainty of being implored to open them again.

“Further evidence!” exclaimed her hostess; “do tell me!”

“As I was coming upstairs after breakfast Mr. Brope was just passing my room. In the most natural way in the world a piece of paper dropped out of a packet that he held in his hand and fluttered to the ground just at my door. I was going to call out to him ‘You’ve dropped something,’ and then for some reason I held back and didn’t show myself till he was safely in his room. You see it occurred to me that I was very seldom in my room just at that hour, and that Florinda was almost always there tidying up things about that time. So I picked up that innocent-looking piece of paper.”

Mrs. Troyle paused again, with the self-applauding air of one who has detected an asp lurking in an apple-charlotte.

Mrs. Riversedge snipped vigorously at the nearest rose bush, incidentally decapitating a Viscountess Folkestone that was just coming into bloom.

“What was on the paper?” she asked.

“Just the words in pencil, ‘I love you, Florrie,’ and then underneath, crossed out with a faint line, but perfectly plain to read, ‘Meet me in the garden by the yew.’”

“There is a yew tree at the bottom of the garden,” admitted Mrs. Riversedge.

“At any rate he appears to be truthful,” commented Clovis.

“To think that a scandal of this sort should be going on under my roof!” said Mrs. Riversedge indignantly.

“I wonder why it is that scandal seems so much worse under a roof,” observed Clovis; “I’ve always regarded it as a proof of the superior delicacy of the cat tribe that it conducts most of its scandals above the slates.”

“Now I come to think of it,” resumed Mrs. Riversedge, “there are things about Mr. Brope that I’ve never been able to account for. His income, for instance: he only gets two hundred a year as editor of the Cathedral Monthly, and I know that his people are quite poor, and he hasn’t any private means. Yet he manages to afford a flat somewhere in Westminster, and he goes abroad to Bruges and those sorts of places every year, and always dresses well, and gives quite nice luncheon-parties in the season. You can’t do all that on two hundred a year, can you?”

“Does he write for any other papers?” queried Mrs. Troyle.

“No, you see he specializes so entirely on liturgy and ecclesiastical architecture that his field is rather restricted. He once tried the Sporting and Dramatic with an article on church edifices in famous fox-hunting centres, but it wasn’t considered of sufficient general interest to be accepted. No, I don’t see how he can support himself in his present style merely by what he writes.”

“Perhaps he sells spurious transepts to American enthusiasts,” suggested Clovis.

“How could you sell a transept?” said Mrs. Riversedge; “such a thing would be impossible.”

“Whatever he may do to eke out his income,” interrupted Mrs. Troyle, “he is certainly not going to fill in his leisure moments by making love to my maid.”

“Of course not,” agreed her hostess; “that must be put a stop to at once. But I don’t quite know what we ought to do.”

“You might put a barbed wire entanglement round the yew tree as a precautionary measure,” said Clovis.

“I don’t think that the disagreeable situation that has arisen is improved by flippancy,” said Mrs. Riversedge; “a good maid is a treasure—”

“I am sure I don’t know what I should do without Florinda,” admitted Mrs. Troyle; “she understands my hair. I’ve long ago given up trying to do anything with it myself. I regard one’s hair as I regard husbands: as long as one is seen together in public one’s private divergences don’t matter. Surely that was the luncheon gong.”

Septimus Brope and Clovis had the smoking-room to themselves after lunch. The former seemed restless and preoccupied, the latter quietly observant.

“What is a lorry?” asked Septimus suddenly; “I don’t mean the thing on wheels, of course I know what that is, but isn’t there a bird with a name like that, the larger form of a lorikeet?”

“I fancy it’s a lory, with one ‘r,’” said Clovis lazily, “in which case it’s no good to you.”

Septimus Brope stared in some astonishment.

“How do you mean, no good to me?” he asked, with more than a trace of uneasiness in his voice.

“Won’t rhyme with Florrie,” explained Clovis briefly.

Septimus sat upright in his chair, with unmistakable alarm on his face.

“How did you find out? I mean how did you know I was trying to get a rhyme to Florrie?” he asked sharply.

“I didn’t know,” said Clovis, “I only guessed. When you wanted to turn the prosaic lorry of commerce into a feathered poem flitting through the verdure of a tropical forest, I knew you must be working up a sonnet, and Florrie was the only female name that suggested itself as rhyming with lorry.”

Septimus still looked uneasy.

“I believe you know more,” he said.

Clovis laughed quietly, but said nothing.

“How much do you know?” Septimus asked desperately,

“The yew tree in the garden,” said Clovis.

“There! I felt certain I’d dropped it somewhere. But you must have guessed something before. Look here, you have surprised my secret. You won’t give me away, will you? It is nothing to be ashamed of, but it wouldn’t do for the editor of the Cathedral Monthly to go in openly for that sort of thing, would it?”

“Well, I suppose not,” admitted Clovis.

“You see,” continued Septimus, “I get quite a decent lot of money out of it. I could never live in the style I do on what I get as editor of the Cathedral Monthly.”

Clovis was even more startled than Septimus had been earlier in the conversation, but he was better skilled in repressing surprise.

“Do you mean to say you get money out of—Florrie?” he asked.

“Not out of Florrie, as yet,” said Septimus; “in fact, I don’t mind saying that I’m having a good deal of trouble over Florrie. But there are a lot of others.”

Clovis’s cigarette went out.

“This is very interesting,” he said slowly. And then, with Septimus Brope’s next words, illumination dawned on him.

“There are heaps of others; for instance:

“‘Cora with the lips of coral,

You and I will never quarrel.’

That was one of my earliest successes, and it still brings me in royalties. And then there is—‘Esmeralda, when I first beheld her,’ and ‘Fair Teresa, how I love to please her,’ both of those have been fairly popular. And there is one rather dreadful one,” continued Septimus, flushing deep carmine, “which has brought me in more money than any of the others:

“‘Lively little Lucie

With her naughty nez retrousee’.

Of course, I loathe the whole lot of them; in fact, I’m rapidly becoming something of a woman-hater under their influence, but I can’t afford to disregard the financial aspect of the matter. And at the same time you can understand that my position as an authority on ecclesiastical architecture and liturgical subjects would be weakened, if not altogether ruined, if it once got about that I was the author of ‘Cora with the lips of coral’ and all the rest of them.”

Clovis had recovered sufficiently to ask in a sympathetic, if rather unsteady, voice what was the special trouble with “Florrie.”

“I can’t get her into lyric shape, try as I will,” said Septimus mournfully. “You see, one has to work in a lot of sentimental, sugary compliment with a catchy rhyme, and a certain amount of personal biography or prophecy. They’ve all of them got to have a long string of past successes recorded about them, or else you’ve got to foretell blissful things about them and yourself in the future. For instance, there is:

“‘Dainty little girlie Mavis,

She is such a rara avis.

All the money I can save is

All to be for Mavis mine.’

It goes to a sickening namby-pamby waltz tune, and for months nothing else was sung and hummed in Blackpool and other popular centres.”

This time Clovis’s self-control broke down badly.

“Please excuse me,” he gurgled, “but I can’t help it when I remember the awful solemnity of that article of yours that you so kindly read us last night, on the Coptic Church in its relation to early Christian worship.”

Septimus groaned.

“You see how it would be,” he said; “as soon as people knew me to be the author of that miserable sentimental twaddle, all respect for the serious labours of my life would be gone. I dare say I know more about memorial brasses than any one living, in fact I hope one day to publish a monograph on the subject, but I should be pointed out everywhere as the man whose ditties were in the mouths of nigger minstrels along the entire coast-line of our Island home. Can you wonder that I positively hate Florrie all the time that I’m trying to grind out sugar-coated rhapsodies about her?”

“Why not give free play to your emotions, and be brutally abusive? An uncomplimentary refrain would have an instant success as a novelty if you were sufficiently outspoken.”

“I’ve never thought of that,” said Septimus, “and I’m afraid I couldn’t break away from the habit of fulsome adulation and suddenly change my style.”

“You needn’t change your style in the least,” said Clovis; “merely reverse the sentiment and keep to the inane phraseology of the thing. If you’ll do the body of the song I’ll knock off the refrain, which is the thing that principally matters, I believe. I shall charge half-shares in the royalties, and throw in my silence as to your guilty secret. In the eyes of the world you shall still be the man who has devoted his life to the study of transepts and Byzantine ritual; only sometimes, in the long winter evenings, when the wind howls drearily down the chimney and the rain beats against the windows, I shall think of you as the author of ‘Cora with the lips of coral.’ Of course, if in sheer gratitude at my silence you like to take me for a much-needed holiday to the Adriatic or somewhere equally interesting, paying all expenses, I shouldn’t dream of refusing.”

Later in the afternoon Clovis found his aunt and Mrs. Riversedge indulging in gentle exercise in the Jacobean garden.

“I’ve spoken to Mr. Brope about F.,” he announced.

“How splendid of you! What did he say?” came in a quick chorus from the two ladies.

“He was quite frank and straightforward with me when he saw that I knew his secret,” said Clovis, “and it seems that his intentions were quite serious, if slightly unsuitable. I tried to show him the impracticability of the course that he was following. He said he wanted to be understood, and he seemed to think that Florinda would excel in that requirement, but I pointed out that there were probably dozens of delicately nurtured, pure-hearted young English girls who would be capable of understanding him, while Florinda was the only person in the world who understood my aunt’s hair. That rather weighed with him, for he’s not really a selfish animal, if you take him in the right way, and when I appealed to the memory of his happy childish days, spent amid the daisied fields of Leighton Buzzard (I suppose daisies do grow there), he was obviously affected. Anyhow, he gave me his word that he would put Florinda absolutely out of his mind, and he has agreed to go for a short trip abroad as the best distraction for his thoughts. I am going with him as far as Ragusa. If my aunt should wish to give me a really nice scarf-pin (to be chosen by myself), as a small recognition of the very considerable service I had done her, I shouldn’t dream of refusing. I’m not one of those who think that because one is abroad one can go about dressed anyhow.”

A few weeks later in Blackpool and places where they sing, the following refrain held undisputed sway:

“How you bore me, Florrie,

With those eyes of vacant blue;

You’ll be very sorry, Florrie,

If I marry you.

Though I’m easy-goin’, Florrie,

This I swear is true,

I’ll throw you down a quarry, Florrie,

If I marry you.”

“MINISTERS OF GRACE”

ALTHOUGH he was scarcely yet out of his teens, the Duke of Scaw was already marked out as a personality widely differing from others of his caste and period. Not in externals; therein he conformed correctly to type. His hair was faintly reminiscent of Houbigant, and at the other end of him his shoes exhaled the right soupçon of harness-room; his socks compelled one’s attention without losing one’s respect; and his attitude in repose had just that suggestion of Whistler’s mother, so becoming in the really young. It was within that the trouble lay, if trouble it could be accounted, which marked him apart from his fellows. The Duke was religious. Not in any of the ordinary senses of the word; he took small heed of High Church or Evangelical standpoints, he stood outside of all the movements and missions and cults and crusades of the day, uncaring and uninterested. Yet in a mystical-practical way of his own, which had served him unscathed and unshaken through the fickle years of boyhood, he was intensely and intensively religious. His family were naturally, though unobtrusively, distressed about it. “I am so afraid it may affect his bridge,” said his mother.

The Duke sat in a pennyworth of chair in St. James’s Park, listening to the pessimisms of Belturbet, who reviewed the existing political situation from the gloomiest of standpoints.

“Where I think you political spade-workers are so silly,” said the Duke, “is in the misdirection of your efforts. You spend thousands of pounds of money, and Heaven knows how much dynamic force of brain power and personal energy, in trying to elect or displace this or that man, whereas you could gain your ends so much more simply by making use of the men as you find them. If they don’t suit your purpose as they are, transform them into something more satisfactory.”

“Do you refer to hypnotic suggestion?” asked Belturbet, with the air of one who is being trifled with.

“Nothing of the sort. Do you understand what I mean by the verb to koepenick? That is to say, to replace an authority by a spurious imitation that would carry just as much weight for the moment as the displaced original; the advantage, of course, being that the koepenick replica would do what you wanted, whereas the original does what seems best in its own eyes.”

“I suppose every public man has a double, if not two or three,” said Belturbet; “but it would be a pretty hard task to koepenick a whole bunch of them and keep the originals out of the way.”

“There have been instances in European history of highly successful koepenickery,” said the Duke dreamily.

“Oh, of course, there have been False Dimitris and Perkin Warbecks, who imposed on the world for a time,” assented Belturbet, “but they personated people who were dead or safely out of the way. That was a comparatively simple matter. It would be far easier to pass oneself off as dead Hannibal than as living Haldane, for instance.”

“I was thinking,” said the Duke, “of the most famous case of all, the angel who koepenicked King Robert of Sicily with such brilliant results. Just imagine what an advantage it would be to have angels deputizing, to use a horrible but convenient word, for Quinston and Lord Hugo Sizzle, for example. How much smoother the Parliamentary machine would work than at present!”

“Now you’re talking nonsense,” said Belturbet; “angels don’t exist nowadays, at least, not in that way, so what is the use of dragging them into a serious discussion? It’s merely silly.”

“If you talk to me like that I shall just do it,” said the Duke.

“Do what?” asked Belturbet. There were times when his young friend’s uncanny remarks rather frightened him.

“I shall summon angelic forces to take over some of the more troublesome personalities of our public life, and I shall send the ousted originals into temporary retirement in suitable animal organisms. It’s not every one who would have the knowledge or the power necessary to bring such a thing off—”

“Oh, stop that inane rubbish,” said Belturbet angrily; “it’s getting wearisome. Here’s Quinston coming,” he added, as there approached along the almost deserted path the well-known figure of a young Cabinet Minister, whose personality evoked a curious mixture of public interest and unpopularity.

“Hurry along, my dear man,” said the young Duke to the Minister, who had given him a condescending nod; “your time is running short,” he continued in a provocative strain; “the whole inept crowd of you will shortly be swept away into the world’s waste-paper basket.”

“You poor little strawberry-leafed nonentity,” said the Minister, checking himself for a moment in his stride and rolling out his words spasmodically; “who is going to sweep us away, I should like to know? The voting masses are on our side, and all the ability and administrative talent is on our side too. No power of earth or Heaven is going to move us from our place till we choose to quit it. No power of earth or—”

Belturbet saw, with bulging eyes, a sudden void where a moment earlier had been a Cabinet Minister; a void emphasized rather than relieved by the presence of a puffed-out bewildered-looking sparrow, which hopped about for a moment in a dazed fasion and then fell to a violent cheeping and scolding.

“If we could understand sparrow-language,” said the Duke serenely, “I fancy we should hear something infinitely worse than ‘strawberry-leafed nonentity.’”

“But good Heavens, Eugène,” said Belturbet hoarsely, “what has become of—Why, there he is! How on earth did he get there?” And he pointed with a shaking finger towards a semblance of the vanished Minister, which approached once more along the unfrequented path.

The Duke laughed.

“It is Quinston to all outward appearance,” he said composedly, “but I fancy you will find, on closer investigation, that it is an angel under-study of the real article.”

The Angel-Quinston greeted them with a friendly smile.

“How beastly happy you two look sitting there!” he said wistfully.

“I don’t suppose you’d care to change places with poor little us,” replied the Duke chaffingly.

“How about poor little me?” said the Angel modestly. “I’ve got to run about behind the wheels of popularity, like a spotted dog behind a carriage, getting all the dust and trying to look as if I was an important part of the machine. I must seem a perfect fool to you onlookers sometimes.”

“I think you are a perfect angel,” said the Duke.

The Angel-that-had-been-Quinston smiled and passed on his way, pursued across the breadth of the Horse Guards Parade by a tiresome little sparrow that cheeped incessantly and furiously at him.

“That’s only the beginning,” said the Duke complacently; “I’ve made it operative with all of them, irrespective of parties.”

Belturbet made no coherent reply; he was engaged in feeling his pulse. The Duke fixed his attention with some interest on a black swan that was swimming with haughty, stiff-necked aloofness amid the crowd of lesser water-fowl that dotted the ornamental water. For all its pride of bearing, something was evidently ruffling and enraging it; in its way it seemed as angry and amazed as the sparrow had been.

At the same moment a human figure came along the pathway. Belturbet looked up apprehensively.

“Kedzon,” he whispered briefly.

“An Angel-Kedzon, if I am not mistaken,” said the Duke. “Look, he is talking affably to a human being. That settles it.”

A shabbily dressed lounger had accosted the man who had been Viceroy in the splendid East, and who still reflected in his mien some of the cold dignity of the Himalayan snow-peaks.

“Could you tell me, sir, if them white birds is storks or halbatrosses? I had an argyment—”

The cold dignity thawed at once into genial friendliness.

“Those are pelicans, my dear sir. Are you interested in birds? If you would join me in a bun and a glass of milk at the stall yonder, I could tell you some interesting things about Indian birds. Right oh! Now the hill-mynah, for instance—”

The two men disappeared in the direction of the bun stall, chatting volubly as they went, and shadowed from the other side of the railed enclosure by a black swan, whose temper seemed to have reached the limit of inarticulate rage.

Belturbet gazed in an open-mouthed wonder after the retreating couple, then transferred his attention to the infuriated swan, and finally turned with a look of scared comprehension at his young friend lolling unconcernedly in his chair. There was no longer any room to doubt what was happening. The “silly talk” had been translated into terrifying action.

“I think a prairie oyster on the top of a stiffish brandy-and-soda might save my reason,” said Belturbet weakly, as he limped towards his club.

It was late in the day before he could steady his nerves sufficiently to glance at the evening papers. The Parliamentary report proved significant reading, and confirmed the fears that he had been trying to shake off. Mr. Ap Dave, the Chancellor, whose lively controversial style endeared him to his supporters and embittered him, politically speaking, to his opponents, had risen in his place to make an unprovoked apology for having alluded in a recent speech to certain protesting taxpayers as “skulkers.” He had realized on reflection that they were in all probability perfectly honest in their inability to understand certain legal technicalities of the new finance laws. The House had scarcely recovered from this sensation when Lord Hugo Sizzle caused a further flutter of astonishment by going out of his way to indulge in an outspoken appreciation of the fairness, loyalty, and straightforwardness not only of the Chancellor, but of all the members of the Cabinet. A wit had gravely suggested moving the adjournment of the House in view of the unexpected circumstances that had arisen.

Belturbet anxiously skimmed over a further item of news printed immediately below the Parliamentary report: “Wild cat found in an exhausted condition in Palace Yard.”

“Now I wonder which of them—” he mused, and then an appalling idea came to him. “Supposing he’s put them both into the same beast!” He hurriedly ordered another prairie oyster.

Belturbet was known in his club as a strictly moderate drinker; his consumption of alcoholic stimulants that day gave rise to considerable comment.

The events of the next few days were piquantly bewildering to the world at large; to Belturbet, who knew dimly what was happening, the situation was fraught with recurring alarms. The old saying that in politics it’s the unexpected that always happens received a justification that it had hitherto somewhat lacked, and the epidemic of startling personal changes of front was not wholly confined to the realm of actual politics. The eminent chocolate magnate, Sadbury, whose antipathy to the Turf and everything connected with it was a matter of general knowledge, had evidently been replaced by an Angel-Sadbury, who proceeded to electrify the public by blossoming forth as an owner of race-horses, giving as a reason his matured conviction that the sport was, after all, one which gave healthy open-air recreation to large numbers of people drawn from all classes of the community, and incidentally stimulated the important industry of horse-breeding. His colours, chocolate and cream hoops spangled with pink stars, promised to become as popular as any on the Turf. At the same time, in order to give effect to his condemnation of the evils resulting from the spread of the gambling habit among wage-earning classes, who lived for the most part from hand to mouth, he suppressed all betting news and tipsters’ forecasts in the popular evening paper that was under his control. His action received instant recognition and support from the Angel-proprietor of the Evening Views, the principal rival evening halfpenny paper, who forthwith issued an ukase decreeing a similar ban on betting news, and in a short while the regular evening Press was purged of all mention of starting prices and probable winners. A considerable drop in the circulation of all these papers was the immediate result, accompanied, of course, by a falling-off in advertisement value, while a crop of special betting broadsheets sprang up to supply the newly created want. Under their influence the betting habit became if anything rather more widely diffused than before. The Duke had possibly overlooked the futility of koepenicking the leaders of the nation with excellently intentioned angel under-studies, while leaving the mass of the people in its original condition.

Further sensation and dislocation was caused in the Press world by the sudden and dramatic rapprochement which took place between the Angel-Editor of the Scrutator and the Angel-Editor of the Anglian Review, who not only ceased to criticize and disparage the tone and tendencies of each other’s publication, but agreed to exchange editorships for alternating periods. Here again public support was not on the side of the angels; constant readers of the Scrutator complained bitterly of the strong meat which was thrust upon them at fitful intervals in place of the almost vegetarian diet to which they had become confidently accustomed; even those who were not mentally averse to strong meat as a separate course were pardonably annoyed at being supplied with it in the pages of the Scrutator. To be suddenly confronted with a pungent herring salad when one had attuned oneself to tea and toast, or to discover a richly truffled segment of pâté de foie dissembled in a bowl of bread and milk, would be an experience that might upset the equanimity of the most placidly disposed mortal. An equally vehement outcry arose from the regular subscribers of the Anglian Review, who protested against being served from time to time with literary fare which no young person of sixteen could possibly want to devour in secret. To take infinite precautions, they complained, against the juvenile perusal of such eminently innocuous literature was like reading the Riot Act on an uninhabited island. Both reviews suffered a serious falling-off in circulation and influence. Peace hath its devastations as well as war.

The wives of noted public men formed another element of discomfiture which the young Duke had almost entirely left out of his calculations. It is sufficiently embarrassing to keep abreast of the possible wobblings and veerings-round of a human husband, who, from the strength or weakness of his personal character, may leap over or slip through the barriers which divide the parties; for this reason a merciful politician usually marries late in life, when he has definitely made up his mind on which side he wishes his wife to be socially valuable. But these trials were as nothing compared to the bewilderment caused by the Angel-husbands who seemed in some cases to have revolutionized their outlook on life in the interval between breakfast and dinner, without premonition or preparation of any kind, and apparently without realizing the least need for subsequent explanation. The temporary peace which brooded over the Parliamentary situation was by no means reproduced in the home circles of the leading statesmen and politicians. It had been frequently and extensively remarked of Mrs. Exe that she would try the patience of an angel; now the tables were reversed, and she unwittingly had an opportunity for discovering that the capacity for exasperating behaviour was not all on one side.

And then, with the introduction of the Navy Estimates, Parliamentary peace suddenly dissolved. It was the old quarrel between Ministers and the Opposition as to the adequacy or the reverse of the Government’s naval programme. The Angel-Quinston and the Angel-Hugo-Sizzle contrived to keep the debates free from personalities and pinpricks, but an enormous sensation was created when the elegant lackadaisical Halfan Halfour threatened to bring up fifty thousand stalwarts to wreck the House if the Estimates were not forthwith revised on a Two-Power basis. It was a memorable scene when he rose in his place, in response to the scandalized shouts of his opponents, and thundered forth, “Gentlemen, I glory in the name of Apache.”

Belturbet, who had made several fruitless attempts to ring up his young friend since the fateful morning in St. James’s Park, ran him to earth one afternoon at his club, smooth and spruce and unruffled as ever.

“Tell me, what on earth have you turned Cocksley Coxon into?” Belturbet asked anxiously, mentioning the name of one of the pillars of unorthodoxy in the Anglican Church. “I don’t fancy he believes in angels, and if he finds an angel preaching orthodox sermons from his pulpit while he’s been turned into a fox-terrier, he’ll develop rabies in less than no time.”

“I rather think it was a fox-terrier,” said the Duke lazily.

Belturbet groaned heavily, and sank into a chair.

“Look here, Eugène,” he whispered hoarsely, having first looked well round to see that no one was within hearing range, “you’ve got to stop it. Consols are jumping up and down like bronchos, and that speech of Halfour’s in the House last night has simply startled everybody out of their wits. And then on the top if it, Thistlebery—”

“What has he been saying?” asked the Duke quickly.

“Nothing. That’s just what’s so disturbing. Every one thought it was simply inevitable that he should come out with a great epoch-making speech at this juncture, and I’ve just seen on the tape that he has refused to address any meetings at present, giving as a reason his opinion that something more than mere speech-making was wanted.”

The young Duke said nothing, but his eyes shone with quiet exultation.

“It’s so unlike Thistlebery,” continued Belturbet; “at least,” he said suspiciously, “it’s unlike the real Thistlebery—”

“The real Thistlebery is flying about somewhere as a vocally industrious lapwing,” said the Duke calmly; “I expect great things of the Angel-Thistlebery,” he added.

At this moment there was a magnetic stampede of members towards the lobby, where the tape-machines were ticking out some news of more than ordinary import.

“Coup d’état in the North. Thistlebery seizes Edinburgh Castle. Threatens civil war unless Government expands naval programme.”

In the babel which ensued Belturbet lost sight of his young friend. For the best part of the afternoon he searched one likely haunt after another, spurred on by the sensational posters which the evening papers were displaying broadcast over the West End. “General Baden-Baden mobilizes Boy-Scouts. Another coup d’état feared. Is Windsor Castle safe?” This was one of the earlier posters, and was followed by one of even more sinister purport: “Will the Test-match have to be postponed?” It was this disquietening question which brought home the real seriousness of the situation to the London public, and made people wonder whether one might not pay too high a price for the advantages of party government. Belturbet, questing round in the hope of finding the originator of the trouble, with a vague idea of being able to induce him to restore matters to their normal human footing, came across an elderly club acquaintance who dabbled extensively in some of the more sensitive market securities. He was pale with indignation, and his pallor deepened as a breathless newsboy dashed past with a poster inscribed: “Premier’s constituency harried by moss-troopers. Halfour sends encouraging telegram to rioters. Letchworth Garden City threatens reprisals. Foreigners taking refuge in Embassies and National Liberal Club.”

“This is devils’ work!” he said angrily.

Belturbet knew otherwise.

At the bottom of St. James’s Street a newspaper motor-cart, which had just come rapidly along Pall Mall, was surrounded by a knot of eagerly talking people, and for the first time that afternoon Belturbet heard expressions of relief and congratulation.

It displayed a placard with the welcome announcement: “Crisis ended. Government gives way. Important expansion of naval programme.”

There seemed to be no immediate necessity for pursuing the quest of the errant Duke, and Belturbet turned to make his way homeward through St. James’s Park. His mind, attuned to the alarums and excursions of the afternoon, became dimly aware that some excitement of a detached nature was going on around him. In spite of the political ferment which reigned in the streets, quite a large crowd had gathered to watch the unfolding of a tragedy that had taken place on the shore of the ornamental water. A large black swan, which had recently shown signs of a savage and dangerous disposition, had suddenly attacked a young gentleman who was walking by the water’s edge, dragged him down under the surface, and drowned him before any one could come to his assistance. At the moment when Belturbet arrived on the spot several park-keepers were engaged in lifting the corpse into a punt. Belturbet stooped to pick up a hat that lay near the scene of the struggle. It was a smart soft felt hat, faintly reminiscent of Houbigant.

More than a month elapsed before Belturbet had sufficiently recovered from his attack of nervous prostration to take an interest once more in what was going on in the world of politics. The Parliamentary Session was still in full swing, and a General Election was looming in the near future. He called for a batch of morning papers and skimmed rapidly through the speeches of the Chancellor, Quinston, and other Ministerial leaders, as well as those of the principal Opposition champions, and then sank back in his chair with a sigh of relief. Evidently the spell had ceased to act after the tragedy which had overtaken its invoker. There was no trace of angel anywhere.

THE REMOULDING OF GROBY LINGTON

“A man is known by the company he keeps.”

IN the morning-room of his sister-in-law’s house Groby Lington fidgeted away the passing minutes with the demure restlessness of advanced middle age. About a quarter of an hour would have to elapse before it would be time to say his good-byes and make his way across the village green to the station, with a selected escort of nephews and nieces. He was a good-natured, kindly dispositioned man, and in theory he was delighted to pay periodical visits to the wife and children of his dead brother William; in practice, he infinitely preferred the comfort and seclusion of his own house and garden, and the companionship of his books and his parrot to these rather meaningless and tiresome incursions into a family circle with which he had little in common. It was not so much the spur of his own conscience that drove him to make the occasional short journey by rail to visit his relatives, as an obedient concession to the more insistent but vicarious conscience of his brother, Colonel John, who was apt to accuse him of neglecting poor old William’s family. Groby usually forgot or ignored the existence of his neighbour kinsfolk until such time as he was threatened with a visit from the Colonel, when he would put matters straight by a hurried pilgrimage across the few miles of intervening country to renew his acquaintance with the young people and assume a kindly if rather forced interest in the well-being of his sister-in-law. On this occasion he had cut matters so fine between the timing of his exculpatory visit and the coming of Colonel John, that he would scarcely be home before the latter was due to arrive. Anyhow, Groby had got it over, and six or seven months might decently elapse before he need again sacrifice his comforts and inclinations on the altar of family sociability. He was inclined to be distinctly cheerful as he hopped about the room, picking up first one object, then another, and subjecting each to a brief bird-like scrutiny.

Presently his cheerful listlessness changed sharply to an attitude of vexed attention. In a scrap-book of drawings and caricatures belonging to one of his nephews he had come across an unkindly clever sketch of himself and his parrot, solemnly confronting each other in postures of ridiculous gravity and repose, and bearing a likeness to one another that the artist had done his utmost to accentuate. After the first flush of annoyance had passed away, Groby laughed good-naturedly and admitted to himself the cleverness of the drawing. Then the feeling of resentment repossessed him, resentment not against the caricaturist who had embodied the idea in pen and ink, but against the possible truth that the idea represented. Was it really the case that people grew in time to resemble the animals they kept as pets, and had he unconsciously become more and more like the comically solemn bird that was his constant companion? Groby was unusually silent as he walked to the train with his escort of chattering nephews and nieces, and during the short railway journey his mind was more and more possessed with an introspective conviction that he had gradually settled down into a sort of parrot-like existence. What, after all, did his daily routine amount to but a sedate meandering and pecking and perching, in his garden, among his fruit trees, in his wicker chair on the lawn, or by the fireside in his library? And what was the sum total of his conversation with chance-encountered neighbours? “Quite a spring day, isn’t it?” “It looks as though we should have some rain.” “Glad to see you about again; you must take care of yourself.” “How the young folk shoot up, don’t they?” Strings of stupid, inevitable perfunctory remarks came to his mind, remarks that were certainly not the mental exchange of human intelligences, but mere empty parrot-talk. One might really just as well salute one’s acquaintances with “Pretty Polly. Puss, puss, miaow!” Groby began to fume against the picture of himself as a foolish feathered fowl which his nephew’s sketch had first suggested, and which his own accusing imagination was filling in with such unflattering detail.

“I’ll give the beastly bird away,” he said resentfully; though he knew at the same time that he would do no such thing. It would look so absurd after all the years that he had kept the parrot and made much of it suddenly to try and find it a new home.

“Has my brother arrived?” he asked of the stable-boy, who had come with the pony-carriage to meet him.

“Yessir, came down by the two-fifteen. Your parrot’s dead.” The boy made the latter announcement with the relish which his class finds in proclaiming a catastrophe.

“My parrot dead?” said Groby. “What caused its death?”

“The ipe,” said the boy briefly.

“The ipe?” queried Groby. “Whatever’s that?”

“The ipe what the Colonel brought down with him,” came the rather alarming answer.

“Do you mean to say my brother is ill?” asked Groby. “Is it something infectious?”

“Th’ Colonel’s so well as ever he was,” said the boy; and as no further explanation was forthcoming Groby had to possess himself in mystified patience till he reached home. His brother was waiting for him at the hall door.

“Have you heard about the parrot?” he asked at once. “’Pon my soul I’m awfully sorry. The moment he saw the monkey I’d brought down as a surprise for you he squawked out, ‘Rats to you, sir!’ and the blessed monkey made one spring at him, got him by the neck and whirled him round like a rattle. He was as dead as mutton by the time I’d got him out of the little beggar’s paws. Always been such a friendly little beast, the monkey has, should never have thought he’d got it in him to see red like that. Can’t tell you how sorry I feel about it, and now of course you’ll hate the sight of the monkey.”

“Not at all,” said Groby sincerely. A few hours earlier the tragic end which had befallen his parrot would have presented itself to him as a calamity; now it arrived almost as a polite attention on the part of the Fates.

“The bird was getting old, you know,” he went on, in explanation of his obvious lack of decent regret at the loss of his pet. “I was really beginning to wonder if it was an unmixed kindness to let him go on living till he succumbed to old age. What a charming little monkey!” he added, when he was introduced to the culprit.

The new-comer was a small, long-tailed monkey from the Western Hemisphere, with a gentle, half-shy, half-trusting manner that instantly captured Groby’s confidence; a student of simian character might have seen in the fitful red light in its eyes some indication of the underlying temper which the parrot had so rashly put to the test with such dramatic consequences for itself. The servants, who had come to regard the defunct bird as a regular member of the household, and one who gave really very little trouble, were scandalized to find his bloodthirsty aggressor installed in his place as an honoured domestic pet.

“A nasty heathen ipe what don’t never say nothing sensible and cheerful, same as pore Polly did,” was the unfavourable verdict of the kitchen quarters.

 

One Sunday morning, some twelve or fourteen months after the visit of Colonel John and the parrot-tragedy, Miss Wepley sat decorously in her pew in the parish church, immediately in front of that occupied by Groby Lington. She was, comparatively speaking, a new-comer in the neighbourhood, and was not personally acquainted with her fellow-worshipper in the seat behind, but for the past two years the Sunday morning service had brought them regularly within each other’s sphere of consciousness. Without having paid particular attention to the subject, she could probably have given a correct rendering of the way in which he pronounced certain words occurring in the responses, while he was well aware of the trivial fact that, in addition to her prayer book and handkerchief, a small paper packet of throat lozenges always reposed on the seat beside her. Miss Wepley rarely had recourse to her lozenges, but in case she should be taken with a fit of coughing she wished to have the emergency duly provided for. On this particular Sunday the lozenges occasioned an unusual diversion in the even tenor of her devotions, far more disturbing to her personally than a prolonged attack of coughing would have been. As she rose to take part in the singing of the first hymn, she fancied that she saw the hand of her neighbour, who was alone in the pew behind her, make a furtive downward grab at the packet lying on the seat; on turning sharply round she found that the packet had certainly disappeared, but Mr. Lington was to all outward seeming serenely intent on his hymn-book. No amount of interrogatory glaring on the part of the despoiled lady could bring the least shade of conscious guilt to his face.

“Worse was to follow,” as she remarked afterwards to a scandalized audience of friends and acquaintances. “I had scarcely knelt in prayer when a lozenge, one of my lozenges, came whizzing into the pew, just under my nose. I turned round and stared, but Mr. Lington had his eyes closed and his lips moving as though engaged in prayer. The moment I resumed my devotions another lozenge came rattling in, and then another. I took no notice for a while, and then turned round suddenly just as the dreadful man was about to flip another one at me. He hastily pretended to be turning over the leaves of his book, but I was not to be taken in that time. He saw that he had been discovered and no more lozenges came. Of course I have changed my pew.”

“No gentleman would have acted in such a disgraceful manner,” said one of her listeners; “and yet Mr. Lington used to be so respected by everybody. He seems to have behaved like a little ill-bred schoolboy.”

“He behaved like a monkey,” said Miss Wepley.

Her unfavourable verdict was echoed in other quarters about the same time. Groby Lington had never been a hero in the eyes of his personal retainers, but he had shared the approval accorded to his defunct parrot as a cheerful, well-dispositioned body, who gave no particular trouble. Of late months, however, this character would hardly have been endorsed by the members of his domestic establishment. The stolid stable-boy, who had first announced to him the tragic end of his feathered pet, was one of the first to give voice to the murmurs of disapproval which became rampant and general in the servants’ quarters, and he had fairly substantial grounds for his disaffection. In a burst of hot summer weather he had obtained permission to bathe in a modest-sized pond in the orchard, and thither one afternoon Groby had bent his steps, attracted by loud imprecations of anger mingled with the shriller chattering of monkey-language. He beheld his plump diminutive servitor, clad only in a waistcoat and a pair of socks, storming ineffectually at the monkey which was seated on a low branch of an apple tree, abstractedly fingering the remainder of the boy’s outfit, which he had removed just out of his reach.

“The ipe’s been an’ took my clothes,” whined the boy, with the passion of his kind for explaining the obvious. His incomplete toilet effect rather embarrassed him, but he hailed the arrival of Groby with relief, as promising moral and material support in his efforts to get back his raided garments. The monkey had ceased its defiant jabbering, and doubtless with a little coaxing from its master it would hand back the plunder.

“If I lift you up,” suggested Groby, “you will just be able to reach the clothes.”

The boy agreed, and Groby clutched him firmly by the waistcoat, which was about all there was to catch hold of, and lifted him clear of the ground. Then, with a deft swing he sent him crashing into a clump of tall nettles, which closed receptively round him. The victim had not been brought up in a school which teaches one to repress one’s emotions—if a fox had attempted to gnaw at his vitals he would have flown to complain to the nearest hunt committee rather than have affected an attitude of stoical indifference. On this occasion the volume of sound which he produced under the stimulus of pain and rage and astonishment was generous and sustained, but above his bellowings he could distinctly hear the triumphant chattering of his enemy in the tree, and a peal of shrill laughter from Groby.

When the boy had finished an improvised St. Vitus caracole, which would have brought him fame on the boards of the Coliseum, and which indeed met with ready appreciation and applause from the retreating figure of Groby Lington, he found that the monkey had also discreetly retired, while his clothes were scattered on the grass at the foot of the tree.

“They’m two ipes, that’s what they be,” he muttered angrily, and if his judgment was severe, at least he spoke under the sting of considerable provocation.

It was a week or two later that the parlour-maid gave notice, having been terrified almost to tears by an outbreak of sudden temper on the part of the master anent some under done cutlets. “’E gnashed ’is teeth at me, ’e did reely,” she informed a sympathetic kitchen audience.

“I’d like to see ’im talk like that to me, I would,” said the cook defiantly, but her cooking from that moment showed a marked improvement.

It was seldom that Groby Lington so far detached himself from his accustomed habits as to go and form one of a house-party, and he was not a little piqued that Mrs. Glenduff should have stowed him away in the musty old Georgian wing of the house, in the next room, moreover, to Leonard Spabbink, the eminent pianist.

“He plays Liszt like an angel,” had been the hostess’s enthusiastic testimonial.

“He may play him like a trout for all I care,” had been Groby’s mental comment, “but I wouldn’t mind betting that he snores. He’s just the sort and shape that would. And if I hear him snoring through those ridiculous thin-panelled walls, there’ll be trouble.”

He did, and there was.

Groby stood it for about two and a quarter minutes, and then made his way through the corridor into Spabbink’s room. Under Groby’s vigorous measures the musician’s flabby, redundant figure sat up in bewildered semi-consciousness like an ice-cream that has been taught to beg. Groby prodded him into complete wakefulness, and then the pettish self-satisfied pianist fairly lost his temper and slapped his domineering visitant on the hand. In another moment Spabbink was being nearly stifled and very effectually gagged by a pillow-case tightly bound round his head, while his plump pyjama’d limbs were hauled out of bed and smacked, pinched, kicked, and bumped in a catch-as-catch-can progress across the floor, towards the flat shallow bath in whose utterly inadequate depths Groby perseveringly strove to drown him. For a few moments the room was almost in darkness: Groby’s candle had overturned in an early stage of the scuffle, and its flicker scarcely reached to the spot where splashings, smacks, muffled cries, and splutterings, and a chatter of ape-like rage told of the struggle that was being waged round the shores of the bath. A few instants later the one-sided combat was brightly lit up by the flare of blazing curtains and rapidly kindling panelling.

When the hastily aroused members of the house-party stampeded out on to the lawn, the Georgian wing was well alight and belching forth masses of smoke, but some moments elapsed before Groby appeared with the half-drowned pianist in his arms, having just bethought him of the superior drowning facilities offered by the pond at the bottom of the lawn. The cool night air sobered his rage, and when he found that he was innocently acclaimed as the heroic rescuer of poor Leonard Spabbink, and loudly commended for his presence of mind in tying a wet cloth round his head to protect him from smoke suffocation, he accepted the situation, and subsequently gave a graphic account of his finding the musician asleep with an overturned candle by his side and the conflagration well started. Spabbink gave his version some days later, when he had partially recovered from the shock of his midnight castigation and immersion, but the gentle pitying smiles and evasive comments with which his story was greeted warned him that the public ear was not at his disposal. He refused, however, to attend the ceremonial presentation of the Royal Humane Society’s life-saving medal.

It was about this time that Groby’s pet monkey fell a victim to the disease which attacks so many of its kind when brought under the influence of a northern climate. Its master appeared to be profoundly affected by its loss, and never quite recovered the level of spirits that he had recently attained. In company with the tortoise, which Colonel John presented to him on his last visit, he potters about his lawn and kitchen garden, with none of his erstwhile sprightliness; and his nephews and nieces are fairly well justified in alluding to him as “Old Uncle Groby.”