The Project Gutenberg eBook of Fanny Lambert, by Henry De Vere Stacpoole.

"You may take away the things, Belinda," said Mr Leavesley, lighting his pipe and taking his seat at the easel. "Nobody called this morning, I suppose?"

"Only the Capting, sir," replied Belinda, piling the tray. "He called at seven to borry your umbrella."

"No, sir, Mr Verneede's got it; you lent it to him the night before last, and he hasn't brought it back."

"Ah, so I did," said Mr Leavesley, squeezing Naples yellow from an utterly exhausted[Pg 2] looking tube. "So I did, so I did; that's the fifteenth umbrella or so that Verneede has annexed of mine: what does he do with them, do you think, Belinda?"

"I'm sure I don't know, sir," replied the maid-of-all-work, looking round the studio as if in search of inspiration, "unless he spouts them."

"That will do, Belinda," said the owner of the lost umbrellas, turning to his work, and the servant-maid departed.

It was a large, pleasant studio, furnished with very little affectation, and its owner was a slight, pleasant-faced youth, happy-go-lucky looking, with a glitter in his grey eyes suggesting a touch of genius or insanity in their owner.

He was an orphan blessed with a small competency. His income, to use his own formula, consisted of a hundred a year and an uncle. During the first four months or so of the year he spent the hundred pounds, during the rest of the year he squandered his uncle; that is to say he would have squandered him only for the fact that Mr James Hancock, of the firm of Hancock & Hancock, solicitors, was a person most difficult to "negotiate."

Art, however, was looking up. He had sold several pictures lately. The morning mists on the road to success were clearing away, leaving to the view in a prospect distant tremulous and golden the mysterious city of attainment.

Through the open windows came the pulse-like sound of the omnibuses in the King's Road, the sleigh bells of the hansoms, the rattle of the coster's barrow, and voices.

As he painted, the sounds outside brought before him the vision of the King's Road, Chelsea, where flaming June was also at work with her golden brush and palette of violet colours.

He saw in imagination the scarlet pyramids of strawberries in the shops. The blazing barrow of flowers all a-growing and a-blowing, the late-June morning crowd, and through the crowd wending its way the figure of a girl.

In the breast-pocket of his coat (on the heart side) lay a letter he had received by the early morning post. The handwriting[Pg 4] was large and generous and careless, for no man living could tell the "m's" from the "w's," or the "t's" from the "l's." It ran somewhat to this effect:

Occasionally as he painted he touched his coat where the letter lay, as if to make sure of its presence.

Suddenly he ceased working. There was a step on the stairs, a knock at the door. Could it be?——

CHAPTER II A LOST TYPE

"My young friend Leavesley," cried the apparition that had suddenly framed itself in the doorway; "busy as usual—and how is Art?"

"I don't know. Come in and shut the door;[Pg 5] take a seat, take a cigarette—bother this drapery—well, what have you been doing with yourself?"

Mr Verneede took neither a seat nor a cigarette. He took his place behind the painter, and gazed at the work in progress with a critical air.

He was a fantastic-looking old gentleman, dressed in a tightly-buttoned frock coat. A figure suggestive of Count d'Orsay gone to the dogs. Mildewed, washed, and mangled by Fate, and very much faded in the process.

He said nothing for a moment, and then he said, after a long and critical survey of the little genre picture on which our artist was engaged:

"Your work improves, decidedly your work improves, Leavesley—improves, very much so, very much so, very much so."

The artist said nothing, and the irresponsible critic, placing his hat on the floor and tightly clasping the umbrella he carried under his left arm, made a funnel of his hands and gazed through it at the picture.

"Heavens!" cried Mr Verneede. "How could I have been so deceived, it was the light. Of course, of course, of course—a lady with a fan, it's quite obvious now. A lady with a fan—do you find these very small pictures pay, Leavesley?"

"Yes—no—I don't know. Sit down, like a good fellow; that's right—look here."

"You will when you see her—but it's not that. See here, Verneede, I want to explain her to you."

"I mean in this way, she's so jolly and[Pg 7] innocent and altogether good, that upon my word I wish she wasn't coming here alone."

"Oh, rubbish! she's as safe here as if she were with her grandfather—what I mean to say is this, she's so innocent of the world that she does things quite innocently that—that conventional people don't do, don't you know. She has no mother."

"And her father, who is one of the jolliest men in the world, lets her do anything she likes. I wish I had a female of some sort to receive her here, but I haven't," said Mr Leavesley, looking round the studio as if in search of the article in question.

"I know of an eminently respectable female," said Mr Verneede meditatively, "who would fall in with your requirements; unfortunately, she is not available at a short notice; she lives in Hoxton, as a matter of fact."

"That's no use, might as well live in the moon. No matter, you'll do, an excellent substitute like What's-his-name's marmalade."

"May I ask," said Mr Verneede, rather stiffly, as if slightly ruffled by this last remark, "is this young lady, from a worldly point of view, an éligible partie?"

"Don't know, she's a most lovable girl. I met them in Paris, she and her father, and travelled back with them. They have a big house up at Highgate, and an estate somewhere in the country, but, somehow, I fancy their affairs are involved. Mr Lambert always seems to be going to law with people. No matter, I want to get some cakes—cakes and tea are the right sort of things to offer a person—a girl—wine is impossible. What's the time? After two! Wait here for me, I won't be long."

Verneede was one of those bizarre figures, with whose construction Nature seems to have had very little to do. What he had been was a mystery, where he lived was to most people a mystery, and what he lived on was a mystery to every one. Some tiny income he must have had, but no man knew from whence it came. Useless and picturesque as an old fashion-plate, he wandered through life[Pg 9] with an umbrella under his arm, ready to stand at any street corner in the chill east wind or the broiling sun and listen to any tale told by any man, and give useless advice or instruction on any subject.

His criticisms were the despair and delight of artists, according to their liability to be soothed or maddened by the absolutely inane.

For the rest, he was quite harmless, his chiefest vice, after a taste for beer, a passion for borrowing umbrellas and never returning them.

Mr Verneede seated, immersed in his own weird thoughts and contemplations, came suddenly to consciousness again with a start.

A dark-haired girl of that lost type which recalls La Cruche Cassée and the Love-in-April conceptions of Fragonard, exquisitely pretty and exquisitely dressed, was in the studio. He had not heard her knock, or perceived her enter. Had she descended through the ceiling or risen from the floor? was it a real girl, or was it June materialised in a gown of corn-flower blue, and with wild field poppies in her breast?

"You were asleep, I think," said the girl. "I'm so sorry to have disturbed you, but I[Pg 10] want to see Mr Leavesley; this is his studio, I think."

"Oh, certainly, yes, this is his studio, I believe. Pray take a seat. Ah, yes—dear me, what a strange coincidence——"

"And these are his pictures?" said the girl, looking round her in an interested way. She had placed a tiny parcel and an impossible parasol on the table, and was drawing off a suede glove leisurely, as she glanced around her.

"These are his pictures," answered the old gentleman, "works of art—very much so, the highest art inspired by the truest genius."

Miss Lambert—for the June-like apparition was Miss Lambert—followed with her little face the sweep of the old gentleman's arm as he pointed out the highest art inspired by the truest genius. Rough studies, canvases turned face to the wall, and one or two small finished pictures.

Then, realising that he had found an innocent victim, he began to expatiate on art and on the pictures around them, and she to listen, innocence attending to ignorance.

"He is very clever, isn't he?" put in Miss Lambert, during a pause in the exordium.

"A genius, my dear young lady, a genius," said Mr Verneede, looking at her over his shoulder as he replaced on a high bracket a little picture he had reached down to show her.

"One of the few living artists who can paint light. I may say that he paints light with a delicacy and an elegance all his own. Fiat Lux"—the shelf came down with a crash and a cloud of dust—"as the poet says—pray don't move, I will restore the débris—as the poet says. Now the gem of my young friend Leavesley's collection, in my mind, is the John the Baptist."

He went to a huge canvas which stood with its face to the wall, seized it with arms outstretched, and turned it towards the girl.

It was a picture of a semi-nude female after Reubens that the blundering old gentleman had seized upon.

"Observe the sunlight on the beard," came the voice of the showman from behind the canvas, "the devotion in the eyes, the—ooch!!"

A pillow caught from the couch by Frank Leavesley who had just entered, and dexterously thrown, had flattened canvas and showman beneath a cloud of dust.

CHAPTER III A COUNCIL OF THREE

"Now, let's all be happy," said Miss Lambert; they had finished tea and Belinda was removing the things, "for I must be going in a minute, and I have such a lot of things to say—oh dear me, that reminds me," her under-lip fell slightly.

"I mean I ought to be perfectly miserable," said Miss Lambert with a charming smile, "but somehow I'm not. Do you know, I never am what I ought to be. When I ought to be happy I'm miserable, and when I ought to be miserable I'm happy. Father says I was addled at birth, and that I ought to have been put out of doors on a red-hot shovel as they used to do long ago in Ireland with the omadlunns, or was it the changelings—no matter. I wanted to talk to you about father—no, please don't go," to Verneede, who had[Pg 13] made a little movement as if to say "Am I de trop?" "You are both so clever I'm sure you will be able to give me good advice. He's worrying so."

"Ah!" said Mr Verneede, with the air of a physician at a consultation. He was in his element, he saw a prospect of unburthening himself of some of his superfluous advice.

"It's this Action," resumed Fanny, as if she were speaking of a tumour or carbuncle, "that makes him so bad; I'm getting quite frightened about him."

"It's about the right-of-way—I mean the right of fishing in a stream down in Buckinghamshire. They've spent ever so much money over it, it's worrying father to death, but he won't give it up. I thought perhaps if you spoke to him you might have some influence with him."

"I'd be delighted to do anything," said Leavesley. "What is this man Bevan like?"

"I hate him!" said Fanny, her eyes flashing, "and I wish he and his old fish stream were—boiled."

"That would certainly solve the difficulty," said Leavesley, scratching the side of his hand meditatively.

"And his beastly old solicitor too," continued the girl, tenderly lifting a lady-bird, that had somehow got into the studio and on to her knee, on the point of her finger. "Isn't he beautiful?"

"Most," assented Leavesley, gazing with an artist's delight at the white tapering finger on which the painted and polished insect was balancing preparatory to flight.

"Oh, that doesn't matter. I've often wished him boiled. It's awfully funny, though, that he should be this man Bevan's solicitor—very."

"I have an idea," said Verneede, leaning forward in his chair and pressing the points of his fingers together.

"Well, my dear young lady, if my advice were asked I would first of all say 'dam the stream.'"

"Father's always damning it," replied Miss Lambert with a laugh, "but it doesn't seem to do much good."

"My other suggestion," said Verneede, taken aback at the supposed beaver-like attributes of Mr Lambert, "is this, go in your own person to the friend of my friend Leavesley. I mean the uncle of my friend. Go to Mr Hancock, go to him frankly, fearlessly, tell him the tale[Pg 16] you have told us; tell it to him with your own lips, in your own manner, with your own charm; say to him 'You are killing my father—cease.' Speak to him in your own way, smile at him——"

"That's not a bad idea," said Miss Lambert, turning to Leavesley, who was seated mouth open, aghast at this lunatic proposition.

"Say to him 'Cease!'" continued Verneede, speaking in an inspired voice. "Say to him——"

"Oh, shut up!" cried Leavesley, shaken out of politeness. "Do you know what you're talking about? Hancock is Bevan's solicitor."

"But it's against all the rules of everything. I'm not sure that it wouldn't be considered tampering with—um—Justice."

"It's not a question of justice, it's a question of common-sense," said Miss Lambert.

"Exactly," said Verneede, "common-sense; if this Mr—er—the uncle of my friend Leavesley, is endowed with common-sense and a sense of justice—yes, justice and a feeling for beauty——"

"Oh, do stop!" said Leavesley, the prosaic vision of James Hancock rising before him.

When certain chemicals are brought into juxtaposition certain results result. So it is with brains. Mr Leavesley for a moment sat contemplating the crazy plan propounded by Mr Verneede. Then he broke into a laugh. His imagination pictured the interview between Miss Lambert and his uncle.

"Well, go ahead," he said. "Perhaps you're right; I don't know much about the law, but, anyhow, it's not a hanging matter. When are you going?"

"It's like going to the dentist; I always take father with me to the dentist's as far as the door, for fear I'd run away. Once I'm in I don't care a bit; it's the going in is the dreadful part."

"I know," said Leavesley, reaching for his hat. "It's like facing the music, the overture is the worst part."

"I don't think you'd call it music," said Miss Lambert, "if you heard me at the dentist's when he's working that drill thing—ugh! Come."

The prospect of having Miss Lambert all alone to himself in a cab made the heart of Mr Leavesley palpitate, mixed emotions filled his soul. Blue funk was the basis of these emotions. He was going to propose, so he told himself, immediately, the instant they were in the cab and the horse had started. That was all very well as a statement made to himself: it did not conceal the fact that Miss Lambert was a terribly difficult girl to propose to. One of those jolly girls who treat one as a brother are generally the most difficult to deal with when one approaches them as a lover. But Miss Lambert, besides the fact of her[Pg 19] jollity and her treatment of Mr Leavesley as a brother, had a personality all her own. She seemed to him a combination of the practical and the unpractical in about equal proportions, one could never tell how she would take things.

They walked down the King's Road looking for a cab, Miss Lambert and Verneede engaged in vivacious conversation, Leavesley silent, engaged in troubled attempts to think.

"Fanny, I love you—no, I can't say that, it's too bald and brutal. Miss Lambert, I have long wanted to—oh, rubbish! How would it do to take her hand—I daren't—bother!—does she care a button about me? Perhaps it would be better to put it off till the next time—I'm not going to funk it—may I call you Fanny?—or Fanny—may I call you Fanny? or Miss Lambert may I call you Fanny? How would it be to write? No, I'll do it."

They stopped, Mr Verneede had hailed a cab, and Leavesley came out of his reverie to find a four-wheeler drawing up at the pavement.

"To drive in," replied Fanny, whilst Verneede opened the door. "Get in, I'm in a horrible fright."

"No, no," said Miss Lambert, getting into the vehicle, "I hate hansoms, I was thrown out of one once. Besides, this is more respectable. Do get in quick, and tell the man to drive fast; I want to get the agony over."

"Corner of Southampton Row," cried Leavesley to the driver. He got in, Verneede shut the door and stood on the pavement, bowing and smiling in an antiquated way as they drove off.

It was a four-wheeler with pretensions in the form of maroon velveteen cushions and rubber tyres, a would-be imitation brougham, but the old growler blood came out in its voice, every window rattled. Driving in it, one could hear oneself speak, but conversation with a companion to be intelligible had to be conducted in a mild shout.

"I don't in the least know what I'm going to say to him," cried Miss Lambert, leaning[Pg 21] forward towards her companion—he was seated opposite to her on the front seat. "I'm so nervous, I can't think."

"No, no, I'm going. Don't let's talk of it, let's talk of something pleasant." She opened her purse, turned its meagre contents into her lap, and examined some bills that were stuffed into a side compartment.

"Then I've lost a shilling," pouted Miss Lambert, counting her money, replacing it, and closing the purse with a snap. "No matter, let's think of something pleasant. Isn't old Mr Verneede sweet?"

"Fanny," said Leavesley, ignoring the saccharine possibilities of Mr Verneede—"may I call you Fanny?"

"Yes, quite. What I was going to say," weakly and suddenly, "Fanny, let's go somewhere some day, and have a really good time."

"I'd love to," said Miss Lambert. "I haven't been up the river for ages; let's have a picnic."

"Any day—at least some day. Some day next week—only father is going away next week, and a picnic would be nothing without him."

"That would be fun," said the girl; "we can make tea—oh, don't let us talk of picnics, I feel miserable. Will he eat me, do you think?"

"Not he—unless he has the gout, he's perfectly savage when he has the gout—I say?"

"Oh, because I've been fighting with him lately. I quarrel with him once in three months or so. If he thought you and I were friends, it might put his back up."

"I'll wait for you at the corner till you come out," said Leavesley, "and tell me, Fanny."

"Rather, if I'm alive. I feel like the young lady of Niger—wasn't it?—who went for a ride on a tiger, just before she saddled it——"

The cab rattled and rumbled them at last into Oxford Street. At the corner of Southampton Row it stopped. They got out, and Leavesley paid and dismissed the driver.

"That's the house down there," said he, "No. —. I'll wait for you here; don't be long."

She tripped off, and Leavesley watched her flitting by the grim, business-like houses. She turned for a second, glanced back, and then No. — engulfed her.

Leavesley waited, trying to picture to himself[Pg 24] the interview that was in progress. Trying to fancy what Miss Lambert was saying to Mr James Hancock, and what Mr James Hancock was saying to Miss Lambert.

Surely no one in London could have suggested such a proceeding except Verneede, a proceeding so hopelessly insane from a business point of view.

To call on your adversary's solicitor, and tell him to cease because he was worrying your father to death!

Besides, Lambert was the man who ought to cease, because it was Lambert who was the plaintiff.

Mr Leavesley burst into a laugh that caused a passing old lady to hurry on her way.

It was nearly closing time at the office. Twenty minutes passed. Could James Hancock really have devoured Fanny in a fit of gout and irritation?

He saw Bridgewater, the old chief clerk, come out and make off down Southampton Row with a bag in his hand.

Three-quarters of an hour had gone, and Leavesley had taken his watch out for the twentieth time, when from the doorway of No. — Fanny appeared, a glimmer of blue like a butterfly just broken from its chrysalis.

Leavesley made two steps towards her, then he paused. Immediately after Fanny came James Hancock, umbrella in hand, and hat on the back of his head.

Fanny glanced in Leavesley's direction, and then she and her companion walked away down Southampton Row, Hancock walking with his long stride; Fanny trotting beside him, neither, apparently, speaking one to the other.

He could tell from his uncle's manner of walking, and from the way he wore his hat, that he was either irritated or perplexed. He walked hurriedly, and, viewed from behind, he had the appearance of a physician who was going to an urgent case.

Much marvelling, the artist followed. He saw Hancock hail a passing four-wheeler, and open the door. Fanny got in, her companion gave some directions to the driver,[Pg 26] got in after the girl, closed the door, and the cab drove off.

"Now, what on earth can this mean?" asked Mr Leavesley, taking off his hat and drawing his hand across his brow.

Disgust at being robbed of Fanny struggled in his mind with a feeling of pure, unadulterated wonder.

CHAPTER IV HANCOCK & HANCOCK

Frank Leavesley's uncle, Mr James Hancock of Gordon Square and Southampton Row, Solicitor, was, in the year of this story, still unmarried.

The firm of Hancock & Hancock had thrived in Bloomsbury for upwards of a hundred years. By a judicious exercise of the art of dropping bad clients and picking up good, and retaining the good when picked up, it had built for itself a business second to none in the soliciting world of the Metropolis.

To be a successful solicitor is not so easy[Pg 27] a matter as you may suppose. Take your own case, for instance, and imagine how many men you would trust with the fact that your wife is in a madhouse and not on a visit to her aunt; with the reason why your son requires cutting off with a shilling; why you have to pay so much a month to So-and-so—and so on. How many men would you trust with your title-deeds, and bonds, and scrip, even as you would trust yourself?

The art of inspiring confidence combined with the less facile arts of straight dealing and right living, had placed the Hancocks in the first rank of their profession, and kept them there for over a hundred years.

James, the last of the race, was in personal appearance typical of his forebears. Rather tall, thin, with a high colour suggestive of port wine, and a fidgety manner, you would never have guessed him at first sight to be one of the keenest business men in London, the depository of awful secrets, and the instigator and successful leader of legal forlorn hopes.

His dress was genteel, verging on the shabby, a hideous brown horse-hair watch guard crossed his waistcoat, and he habitually[Pg 28] carried an umbrella that would have damned the reputation of any struggling professional man.

His sister kept house for him in Gordon Square. She was just one year his senior. An acid woman, early-Victorian in her tendencies and get-up, Patience Hancock, to use the cook's expression, had been "born with the key of the coal cellar in her pocket." She certainly carried the key of the wine cellar there, and the keys of the plate pantry, larder, jam depository, and Tantalus case. Everything lock-upable in the Gordon Square establishment was locked up, and every month or so she received a "warning" from one of the domestics under her charge.

The art of setting by the ears and treading on corns came to her by nature, it was her misfortune, not her fault, for despite her acidity she had a heart, atrophied from disuse, perhaps, but still a heart.

She treated her brother as though she were twenty years his senior, and she had prevented him from marrying by subtle arts of her own, exercised unconsciously, perhaps, but none the less potently. His affair with Miss Wilkinson, eldest daughter of Alderman[Pg 29] Wilkinson, an affair which occurred twenty years ago, had been withered, or blasted, if you like the expression better, by Patience Hancock. She had caused no bitter feelings towards herself in the breast of either of the parties concerned in this old-time love affair, but all the same she had parted them.

Two other attempts on the part of James Hancock to mate and have done with the business failed for no especial reason, and of late years, from all external signs, he appeared to have come to the determination to have done with the business without mating.

Patience had almost dismissed the subject from her mind; secure in the conviction that her brother's heart had jellified and set, she had almost given up espionage, and had settled down before the prospect of a comfortable old age with lots of people to bully and a free hand in the management of her brother and his affairs.

Bridgewater, Hancock's confidential clerk, a man of seventy adorned with the simplicity of a child of ten, had hitherto been her confidant.

Bridgewater, seduced with a glass of port wine and a biscuit, had helped materially in[Pg 30] the blasting of the Wilkinson affair twenty years before. He had played the part of spy several times, unconsciously, or partly so, and to-day he was just the same old blunderer, ready to fall into any trap set for him by an acute woman.

He adored Patience Hancock for no perceptible earthly reason except that he had known her in short frocks, and besides this weak-minded adoration he regarded her as part and parcel of the business, and regarded her commands as equivalent to the commands of her brother.

Of late years his interviews with Patience had been few, she had no need for him; and as he sat over his bachelor's fire at nights rubbing his shins and thinking and dreaming, sometimes across his recollective faculty would stray the old past, the confidences, the port, and the face of Patience Hancock all in a pleasant jumble.

He felt that of late years, somehow, his power to please had in some mysterious manner waned, and, failing a more valid reason, he put it down to that change in things and people which is the saddest accompaniment of age.

CHAPTER V OMENS

One day this late June, or one morning, rather, Miss Hancock's dreams of the future and her part in it became again troubled.

James Hancock, to use a simile taken from the garden, showed signs of sprouting. A new hat had come home the night before from the hatter's, and he had bought a new necktie himself. Hitherto he had paid for his neckties and Patience had bought them, sombre neckties suitable to a lawyer and a celibate. This thing from Amery and Loders, a thing of lilac silk suitable enough for a man of twenty, caused Patience to stare when it appeared at breakfast one morning round the neck of her brother.

But she said nothing, she poured out the tea and watched her brother opening his letters and reading his newspaper, and munching his toast. She listened to his remarks on the price of consols and the fall in Russian bonds, and his grumbles because the "bacon was fried to a cinder," just as she had watched and[Pg 32] listened for the last thirty years. Then, when he had finished and departed, she rose and went downstairs to bully the cook and terrorise the maids, which accomplished, she retired to her own room to dress preparatory to going out.

The house in Gordon Square had the solidity of structure and the gloom peculiar to the higher class houses in Bloomsbury. The great drawing-room had a chandelier that lived in a bag, and sofas and chairs arrayed in brown holland overalls; there were things in woolwork that Amelia Sedley might have worked, and abominations of art, deposited by the early Victorian age, struggled for pride of place with Georgian artistic attempts. The dining-room was furnished with solid mahogany, and everything in and about the place seemed solid and constructed with a view to eternity and the everlasting depression of man.

A week's sojourn in this house explained much of a certain epoch in English History to the mind of the sojourner; at the termination of the visit one began to understand dimly the humours of Gillray and the fidelity to truth of that atmosphere of gloom pervading the pictures of Hogarth. One understood[Pg 33] why, in that epoch, men drank deep, why women swooned and improved swooning into a fine art, why Society was generally beastly and brutal, and why great lords sat up all night soaking themselves with brandy and waiting to see the hangman turn off a couple of poor wretches in the dawn; also, why men hanged themselves without waiting for the hangman, alleging for reason "the spleen."

Miss Hancock, having arranged herself to her own satisfaction, took her parasol from the stand in the hall, and departed on business bent.

She held three books in her hand—the butcher's, the baker's, and the greengrocer's. She felt in a cheerful mood, as her programme included and commenced with an attack on the butcher—Casus Belli—an overcharge made on the last leg of mutton but one. Having defeated the butcher, and tackled the other unfortunates and paid them, she paused near Mudie's Library as if in thought. Then she made direct for Southampton Row and the office of her brother, where, as she entered the outer office, Bridgewater was emerging from the sanctum of his master, holding clutched to his breast an armful of books and papers.

Bridgewater would have delighted the heart of John Leech. He had a red and almost perfectly round face; his spectacles were round, his body was round, his eyes were round, and the expression of his countenance, if I may be allowed the figure, was round. It was also slightly mazed; he seemed forever lost in a mild astonishment, the slightest thing out of the common, heightened this expression of chronic astonishment into one of acute amazement. A rat in the office, a fall in the funds, a clerk giving notice to leave, any of these little incidents was sufficient to wreathe the countenance of Mr Bridgewater with an expression that would not have been out of place had he been gazing upon the ruins of Pompeii, or the eruption of Mont Pelée. He had scanty white hair and enormous feet, and was, despite his bemazed look, a very acute old gentleman in business hours. The inside of his head was stuffed with facts like a Whitaker's almanac, and people turned to him for reference as they would turn to "Pratt's Law of Highways" or "Archbold's Lunacy."

Bridgewater seeing Miss Hancock enter, released somewhat his tight hold on the books[Pg 35] and papers, and they all slithered pell mell on to the floor. She nodded to him, and, stepping over the papers, tapped with the handle of her parasol at the door of the inner office. Mr Hancock was disengaged, and she went in, closing the door behind her carefully as though fearful of some secret escaping.

She had no secret to communicate, however, and no business to transact, she only wanted a loan of Bridgewater for an hour to consult him about the lease of a house at Peckham. (Miss Hancock had money in her own right.) Having obtained the loan and stropped her brother's temper to a fine edge, so that he was sharp with the clerks and irritable with the clients till luncheon time, Miss Hancock took herself off, saying to the head clerk as she passed out, "I want you to come round to luncheon, Bridgewater, to consult you about a lease; my brother says he can spare you. Come at half-past one sharp; Good-day."

"Well to be sure!" said Bridgewater scratching his encyclopædic head, and gazing in the direction of the doorway through which the lady had vanished.

CHAPTER VI LAMBERT V. BEVAN

Now the germinal spot of this veracious history consists in the fact that numbered amongst Mr James Hancock's most prized clients was a young gentleman of the name of Bevan; the gentleman, in short, whom Miss Fanny Lambert described as "frightfully rich and a beast."

Mr Charles Maximilian Bevan, to give him his full title, inhabited a set of chambers in the "Albany," midway between the Piccadilly end and the end opening upon Vigo Street.

He was a young man of about twenty-three years of age, of a not unpleasing but rather heavy appearance, absolutely unconscious of the humour that lay in himself or in the world around him, and possessed of a fine, furious, old-fashioned temper; a temper that would burst out over an ill-cooked beef steak or a missing stud, and which vented itself chiefly upon his valet Strutt. In most of us the port of our ancestors runs to gout; in Mr Bevan it ran to temper.

He was a bachelor. Hamilton Cox, the author of "The Pillar of Salt," once said that the Almighty had appointed Charles Bevan to be a bachelor, and that he had taken up his appointment. To his friends it seemed so, and it seemed a pity, for he was an orphan and very wealthy, and had no unpleasant vices. He possessed Highshot Towers and five thousand acres of land in the richest part of Buckinghamshire, a moor in Scotland which he let each autumn to a man from Chicago, and a house in Mayfair which he also let.

Mr Bevan was not exactly a miser, but he was careful; no cabman ever received more from him than his legal fare; he studied the city news in the Times each morning, and Strutt was kept informed as to the price of Consols by the state of his master's temper, also as to the dividends declared by the Great Northern, South Eastern, London North Western Railways, and the Glasgow Gas Works, in all of which concerns Mr Bevan was a heavy holder.

In his life he had rarely been known to give a penny to a beggar man, yet each year he gave a good many pounds to the Charity Organisation Society, and the Hospitals,[Pg 38] feeling sure that money invested in these institutions would not be misspent, and might even, perhaps, bear some shadowy dividend in the life to come.

He had a horror of cardsharpers, poets, foreigners, inferior artists, and badly dressed people in general—every one, in fact, beyond the pale of what he was pleased to call "Respectability"—but beyond all these and above all these, he had a horror of spendthrifts.

The Bevans had always been like that; there had been drinking Bevans, and fighting Bevans, and foolish Bevans of various descriptions, even open-handed Bevans, but there had never been a thoroughpaced squandering Bevan. Very different was it with the Lamberts, whose estate lay contiguous to that of Bevan, down in Bucks. How the Lamberts had held together as a family for four hundred years, certain; through the spacious times of Elizabeth, the questionable time of Charles, the winter of the Commonwealth; how the ship of Lambert passed entire between the Scylla of the Cocoa tree and the charybdis of Crockfords; how it weathered the roaring forties, are question[Pg 39] constituting a problem indissoluble, even when we take into account the known capacity of the Lamberts for trimming, swashbuckling and good fellowship generally. A problem, however, upon which the present story will, perhaps, cast some light.

How jolly Jack Lambert played with Gerald Fiennes till he lost his house, his horses, his carriages, and his deaf and dumb negro servant. How with a burst of laughter he staked his wife and won back his negro, staked both, and retrieved his horses and his carriages, and at five o'clock of a bright May morning rose from the table having eternally broken and ruined Fiennes, was a story current in the days when William, the first of the Bevans, was a sober cloth merchant in Wych Street, and Charles, the first of the Stuarts, held his pleasant Court at Windsor—Carpe Diem, it was the motto of jolly Jack Lambert. Festina Lente said William of the cloth-yard.

The houses of Bevan and Lambert had never agreed, brilliancy and dulness rarely do, they had intermarried, however, with the result that the present George Lambert and the present Charles Bevan were cousins of a sort, cousins that had never spoken one to[Pg 40] the other, and, moreover, at the present moment, were engaged, as we know, in active litigation as to the rights of fishing in an all but fishless stream some twelve feet broad, which separated the estates and the kinsmen.

Some twelve months previously it appears Strutt being sent down to Highshot Towers to superintend some alterations, had found in the gun-room a fishing-rod, and yielding to his cockney instincts, had fished, catching by some miracle a dilapidated looking jack.

He had promptly been set upon and beaten by a person whom Lambert called his keeper, and who, according to Strutt, swam the stream like an otter, hit him in the eye, broke the rod, and vanished with the jack.

So began the memorable action of Bevan v. Lambert, which, having been won in the Queen's Bench by Charles Bevan, was now at the date of our story, waiting its turn to appear before the Lords Justices of Appeal. It was stated, such was the animus with which this lawsuit was conducted, that George Lambert was cutting down timber to defray the costs of the lawyers, a fallacious statement, for the estate of Lambert was mortgaged beyond the hope of redemption.

CHAPTER VII THE BEVAN TEMPER

On a fine morning, two days after Miss Lambert's visit to Mr Hancock, Mr Bevan entered his sitting-room in the "Albany" dressed for going out. He wore a tea rose in his buttonhole, and Strutt, who followed his master, bore in his hands a glossy silk hat far more carefully than if it had been a baby.

A most comfortably furnished and tastefully upholstered room was this in which Charles Bevan smoked his one cigar and drank his one whisky and seltzer before retiring to bed each night; everything spoke of an orderly and well-regulated mind; of books there were few in bindings sedate as their subject matter, and they had the air of prisoners rarely released from the narrow cases that contained them. On the walls hung a series of Gillray's engravings depicting "the flagitious absurdities of the French during their occupation of Egypt." On the table reposed the Field, the Times, and the Spectator (uncut).

"But what the deuce can he want?" said[Pg 42] Charles, who was holding an open letter in his hand. It was a letter from the family lawyer asking his attendance in Southampton Row at his earliest convenience.

"Maybe," said Strutt, blowing away a speck of dust that had dared to settle on the hat, "Maybe, sir, it's about the lawsuit."

Bevan put the letter in his pocket, took his hat and stick from the faithful Strutt and departed.

In the deserted smoking-room of "Brooks'" he sat down to write some letters, and here followeth the correspondence of a modern Chesterfield.

The author of this modern Englishman's love letter, having stamped and deposited his correspondence in the club letter-box, entered the hansom which had been called for him, and proceeded to his solicitor, James Hancock, of the firm of Hancock & Hancock, Southampton Row.

When Bevan was shown in, Mr Hancock was seated at his desk table, writing a letter with a quill pen. He tossed his spectacles up on his forehead and held out his hand.

"I am sorry to have put you to the inconvenience of calling," said he, crossing his legs, and playing with a paper knife, "but the fact is, I have received a communication from the other side, who seem anxious to bring this affair to a conclusion."

"The fact is," continued the elder gentleman[Pg 45] slapping his knee with the flat of the paper knife as he spoke, "the fact is, Mr George Lambert is in very great financial straits, and if the truth were known, I verily believe the truth would be that he is quite insolvent."

"But he will go on fighting the case, unless we can come to terms, even though he has to borrow money for the purpose, for he is a very litigious man this Mr George Lambert, a very litigious man!"

"Still," said the old lawyer, "I thought it better to lay before you the suggestion that has come from the other side, and which is simply this——" He paused, drew a tortoiseshell snuff-box from his pocket, and took a furious pinch of snuff. "Which is simply this, that each party pay their own costs, and that the fishing rights be shared equally. We beat them in the Queen's Bench, but when the matter comes before the Court of Appeal, who knows but——"

"Pay what?" cried Charles Bevan. "Pay my own costs after having fought so long, and nearly beaten this pirate, this poacher![Pg 46] Show me the letter containing this proposal, this infamous suggestion."

"Dear me, dear me, my dear sir, pray do not take the matter so crookedly," cried the man of law lowering his spectacles and beginning to mend a quill pen in an irritable manner. "There is nothing infamous in this proposal, and indeed it reached me not through the mediumship of a letter, but of a young lady. Mr George Lambert's daughter called upon me in person, a most—er—charming young lady. She gave me to understand from her conversation—her most artless conversation—that her unfortunate father is on the brink, the verge, I may say the verge of ruin. But he himself does not see it, pig-headed man that he is. In fact she, the young lady herself, does not seem to see it. Dear me, dear me, their condition makes me shudder."

"Two days ago," blurted out the old lawyer splitting the quill and nearly cutting his finger with the penknife.

"Why was I not informed sooner of this disgraceful proposition," demanded Bevan.

"Well, tell George Lambert, I will fight as long as I have teeth to fight with, and if I lose the action I'll break him anyhow," foamed Charles who was now in the old-fashioned port-wine temper, which was an heirloom in the Bevan family. "I'll buy up his mortgages and foreclose, tell his wretched daughter——"

"Mr Bevan," suddenly interposed the lawyer, "Miss Fanny Lambert is a most charming lady for whom I have a deep respect—I may say a very deep respect—the suggestion came from her informally. I doubt indeed if Mr George Lambert would listen to any proposals for an amicable settlement, he declares you have treated him, to use his expression—er—not as one gentleman should treat another."

"At present he resides I believe, at his town house 'The Laurels,' Highgate——. Why! Mr Bevan——"

"He said I was not a gentleman, did he? and you listened to him, I suppose, and agreed with him, and you—no matter, I'll be my own solicitor, I'll go and see him, and tell him he[Pg 48] ought to be ashamed of tampering with my business people through the medium of his daughter. Yes, we'll see—'The Laurels' Highgate."

But Mr Bevan was gone, strutting out like an enraged turkey-cock through the outer office.

"I am afraid I have but made matters worse, I am afraid I have but made matters worse," moaned the peace-loving Mr Hancock, rubbing his shrivelled hands together in an agony of discomfiture, whilst Charles Bevan hailed a cab outside, determined to have it out man to man with this cousin who had dared to say that a Bevan had behaved in a dishonourable manner.

CHAPTER VIII AT "THE LAURELS"

Up in Highgate an hour later you might have seen a hansom driving about, pausing here and there to ask of policemen, pedestrians, and others for "The Laurels."

"There's a' many Laurels," said the milkman, who was also the first director, and so after awhile Mr Bevan found to his cost.

But at last they found, with the aid of a local directory, the right one, a spacious house built of red brick seen through an avenue of lime trees all abuzz with bees.

There was no sign of life in the little gate lodge, and the entrance gate was pushed back; the orderly eye of Charles Bevan noticed that it was half off its hinges; also, that the weeds in the avenue were rampant.

A laburnum had pushed its way through the limes, and a peony, as large almost as a cabbage, had laid its head on the avenue-way, presenting a walk-over-me-I-don't-care appearance, quite in accordance with the general aspect of things.

The hansom drew up at the door and the traveller from Southampton Row flung away his cigar end, alighted, and ran up the three steps leading to the porch. He rang the bell, and then stood wondering at the luxuriance of the wisteria that overspread the porch, and contemplating the hind hocks of the cab-horse which had been fired.

What he was about to do or say when he[Pg 50] found himself in the presence of his enemy was not very clear to the mind of Mr Bevan. What did occur to him was that George Lambert would have the advantage over him in the interview, seeing that he would be in his own house—on his own dunghill, so to speak.

He might have got into the hansom and returned to town, but that would have been an admission to himself that he had committed a fault, and to admit themselves in fault, even to themselves, was never a way with the Bevans.

Presently shuffling footsteps sounded from behind the door which opened some two inches, disclosing a pale, blue eye, part of a nose, and an uncertain coloured fringe.

"Dear me," murmured Charles, whose curiosity was now greatly aroused by the neglected aspect of the place and the mysterious personage hidden by the door. He felt a great desire to penetrate further into the affairs of his enemy and see what was to be seen.

The person behind the door undid the chain, satisfied evidently by Bevan's voice and appearance that he was not a dun or a robber. The door opened disclosing a servant maid, very young and very dirty.

This ash-cat took the piece of pasteboard, and made a pretence of reading it, invited Charles to enter, and then closing the door, and barring it this time as if to keep him in, should he try to escape, led the way across a rather empty hall to a library.

Here she invited him to sit down upon a chair, having first dusted it with her apron, and declaring that she would send Miss Fanny to him in "a minit," vanished, and left him to his meditations.

"Most extraordinary place," said Charles, glancing round at the books in their cases. "Most extraordinary place I ever entered."

As he looked about him, he heard the youthful servant's voice raised now to its highest pitch, and calling "Miss Fanny, Miss[Pg 52] Fanny, Miss F-a-a-anny" and dying away as if in back passages.

The library was evidently much inhabited by the Lamberts; it was pleasantly perfumed with tobacco, and in the grate lay the expiring embers of a morning fire. The Lamberts were evidently not of the order of people who extinguish their fires on the first of May. There were whips and fishing-rods, and a gun or two here and there, and books everywhere about, besides those on the shelves. The morning paper lay spread open on the floor, where it had been cast by the last reader, and on the floor lay other things, which in most houses are to be found on tables, envelopes crumpled up, letters, and other trifles.

On a little table by the window grew an orange-tree in a flower-pot, bearing oranges as large as marrow-fat peas; through the half-open window came wasps in and out, the perfume of mignonette and the murmur of distant bees.

Outside lay the ruins of a garden bathed in the golden light of summer, the light that

Beyond lay a paddock in whose centre lay the wraith of a tennis lawn; the net hung shrivelled between the tottering poles, and close to the net he saw the forlorn figure of a girl playing what seemed a fantastic game of tennis all alone.

She would hit the ball into the air and strike it back when it fell; if it went over the net she would jump after it.

Now appeared the slattern maid, card between finger and thumb, picking her way like a cat along the tangled garden path in the direction of the girl.

Mr Bevan turned away from the window and looked at the books lining the wall, his eye travelling from Humboldt's works to the tooled back of Milton—he was trying to recollect who Schopenhauer was—when of a sudden the door opened and an amazingly pretty girl of the old-fashioned school of beauty entered the room. She was dark, and she came into the room laughing, yet with a half-frightened air as if fearful of being caught missing from some old canvas.

"You won't tell," said she as they shook hands like intimate acquaintances. "If father knew I had asked Mr Hancock, you know[Pg 54] what, he'd kill me; I really believe he would." She put down her tennis racquet on the table, her hat she had left outside, and evidently in a hurry, to judge by the delightful disorder of her hair.

Mr Bevan, who was trying to stiffen his lip and appear very formal, had taken his seat on a low chair which made him feel dwarfed and ridiculous. He had also, unfortunately, left his hat on the table some yards away, and so had nothing with which to occupy his hands; he was, therefore, entirely at the mercy of Miss Lambert, who had taken an armchair near by, and was now chattering to him with the familiarity, almost, of a sister.

"It seems so fortunate, you know," said she suddenly, discarding a discussion about the weather. "It seems so fortunate that idea of mine of speaking to Mr Hancock. I hate fighting with people, but father loves it; he'd fight with himself, I think, if he could find no one else, and still, if you knew him, he's the sweetest-tempered person in the world, he is, he would do anything for anybody, he would lay his life down for a friend. But you will know him now, now that that terrible affair about the fish stream is settled."

Mr Bevan swallowed rapidly and cast frantic glances at his hat. Had Miss Lambert been of the ordinary type of girl he might possibly have intimated that the fish stream business was not so settled as she supposed, but with this sweet-tongued and friendly beauty, it was impossible. He felt deeply exasperated at the false position in which he found himself, and was endeavouring to prepare some reply of a non-committal character when, of a sudden, his eye caught a direful sight, which for a moment made him forget both fish stream and false position—the little boot of Miss Lambert peeping from beneath her skirt was old and broken.

"I would not deny him anything, goodness knows," continued Fanny Lambert, as if she were talking of a child. "But this action costs such a lot, and there are so many people he could fight cheaply with if he wants to," she broke into an enchanting little laugh. "I think, really, it's the expense that makes him think so much of it; he has a horror of cheap things."

"Cheap things are never much good," conceded Mr Bevan, upon whose mind a dreadful sort of imbecility had now fallen, his will[Pg 56] cried out frantically to his intellect for help, and received none. Here had he come to demand explanations, to put his foot down—alas! what is the will of man beside the beauty of a woman?

"That's what father says," said Fanny. "But as for me, I love them, that is to say bargains, you know."

The door burst open and a sort of poodle walked in, he was not exactly Russian and not exactly French, he had points of an Irish water-spaniel. Bevan gazed at him and marvelled.

Having inspected the pattern of the visitor's trousers, and seeming therewith content Boy-Boy—such was his name—flung himself on the floor and into sleep beside his mistress.

"He sleeps all day," said Fanny, "and I wish he wouldn't, for he spends the whole night barking and rushing after the cats in the garden. Isn't he just like a door mat, and doesn't he snore?"

"I got him for three and sixpence and an old pair of boots from one of those travelling men who grind scissors and things," said Miss Lambert, looking lovingly at her bargain. "He[Pg 57] was half starved and so thin. He ate a whole leg of mutton the first day we had him."

"That was very unwise," said Mr Bevan, who always shone on the topic of dogs or horses; "you should never give dogs much meat."

"He took it," said Fanny. "It was so clever of him, he hid it in the garden and buried the bone—who is that at the door, is that you, Susannah?"

"Luncheon is ready, Miss," said the voice of Susannah, who spoke in a muted tone as if she were announcing some unsavoury fact of which she was half ashamed.

"I really—I have an engagement—that is a cab waiting." Then addressing his remarks to the eyes of Miss Lambert, "I shall be delighted if such a visitation does not bore you."

Mr Bevan followed his hostess across the hall to the breakfast-room; as he followed he heard with a shudder Susannah attempting to hang his hat on the high hall rack, and the hat falling off and being pursued about the floor.

Luncheon was laid in a free-handed and large-hearted manner. Three whitings on a dish of Sheffield plate formed the piece de résistance, there was jam which appeared frankly in a pot pictured with plums, but in the centre of the table stood a vase of Venetian glass filled with roses.

As they took their seats Susannah, who had apparently been seized with an inspiration, appeared conveying a bottle of Böllinger in one hand, and a bottle of Gold-water in the other.

"I brought them from the cellar, Miss," said the maid with a side glance at Charles—she was a good-natured-looking girl when not defending the hall door, but her under jaw seemed like the avenue gate, half off its hinges, and her intellect to be always oozing away through her half-open mouth. "They were the best I could find."

"That's right, Susannah," said her mistress; "try if you can get one of those little bottles of port, the ones with red seals on them and cobwebs; and close the door."

Mr Bevan opened the champagne and helped himself, Miss Lambert announcing the fact that she was a teetotaler.

"There is a man in the kitchen," said she, after an apology for the general disorder of things, and for the whiting which were but indifferently cooked. "James, you know, and when he is in the kitchen whilst meals are being prepared Susannah loses her head and often spoils things. Father generally sends him out to dig in the garden whilst she is cooking. I didn't send him to-day because he won't take orders from me, only from father. He says a man cannot serve two masters; he is always making proverbs and things, his father was a stationer and he has written poetry. He might have been anything only for his wife, he told me so the other night. It does seem such a pity."

"He's in the law," said Miss Lambert cautiously, then after a moment's hesitation, "I don't see why I shouldn't tell you, you are our cousin. Father had a debt and——"

"I never cried so much as when he came," said Fanny, stroking the head of Boy-Boy, who was resting beside her; "it seemed so terrible. I never knew what a comfort he would turn out; he fetches the coals for Susannah and pumps the water. It sounds strange to say it, but I don't know what we should do without him now."

"Oh, you poor child," thought Charles, "how much you must have suffered at the hands of that pig-headed fool of a father of yours—to think of a good estate coming to this!"

"I wanted to go to Paris, and father said I should, but he would have to think first about the money. Then he went into the library, and took me on his knee, and smoked a pipe.[Pg 61] He always gets money when he sits and has what he calls a 'good think' and smokes a pipe. So he got the money and we went to Paris. We had a lovely time!"

"And then," said Bevan with an expression on his face as if he were listening to a fairy tale which he had to believe, "I suppose Mr Isaacs applied for his money?"

"He sent most impertinent letters," said Fanny, "and I told father not to mind them, then James came."

Mr Bevan went on with his luncheon, all his anger against his cousin, George Lambert, had vanished. Anger is impossible to a sane mind when the object of that anger turns out to be a lunatic.

He went on with his luncheon; though the whiting were indifferently cooked, the champagne was excellent, and his hostess exquisite. It was hard to tell which was more attractive, her face or her voice, for the voice of Miss Lambert was one of those fatal voices that we hear perhaps twice in a lifetime, and never forget, perfectly modulated golden, soothing—maddening.

CHAPTER IX "WHAT TALES ARE THESE?"

"Now tell me," said Mr Bevan, they were walking in the garden after luncheon, "tell me, Cousin Fanny"—Miss Lambert, had vanished with the Böllinger—"don't you think your father is a little bit—er—extravagant?"

"He may be a bit extravagant," murmured Fanny, plucking a huge daisy and putting it in her belt. "But then—he is such a dear, and I know he tries to economise all he can, he sold the carriage and horse only a month ago, and just look at the garden! he wont go to the expense of a gardener but does it all himself; it would be disgraceful only it's so lovely, with all the things running wild; see, here is one of his garden gloves."

"Mr Isaacs' man, they have dug up a lot of ground over there and planted asparagus.[Pg 63] James was a gardener once, but as I have told you, he had misfortunes and had to take to the law. He is awfully poor, and his wife is ill; they live in a little street near Artesian Road, and father has been to see her; he came with me, and we brought her some wine; I carried it in a basket. See, is not that a beautiful rose?" she smiled at the rose, and Charles could not but admire her beauty.

"And then," resumed Fanny, the smile fading as the wind turned the rose's face away, "father is so unfortunate, all the people he lends money to won't pay him back, and stocks and shares and things go up and down, and always the wrong way, so he says, and he gets into such a rage with the house because he can't mortgage it—it was left in trust for me—and we can't let it, so we have to live in it."

"Good gracious goodness!" gobbled Charles, taking the cigar from his mouth. "What nonsense are you talking, Cousin Fanny? Ghost! there are no such things as ghosts."

"Do you really mean to try to make me[Pg 64] believe——" cried Charles, then he foundered, tied up in his own vile English.

"We did let it once, a year ago, to a Major Sawyer," said Fanny, and she smiled down the garden path at some presumably pleasant vision. "It was in May; we let it to him for three months and went down to Ramsgate to economise. Major Sawyer moved in on a Friday; I remember that, for the next day was Saturday, and I shall never forget that Saturday.

"We were sitting at breakfast, when a telegram was brought, it was from the Major, and it was from the South Kensington Hotel; it said, as well as I can remember, 'Call without a moment's delay.'"

"Of course we thought 'The Laurels' were burnt down, and you can fancy the fright we were in, for it's not insured—at least the furniture isn't."

"No; father says houses never catch fire if they are not insured, and he wouldn't trust himself not to set it on fire if it was insured, so it's not insured."

"Let us sit down on this seat. Well, of[Pg 65] course we thought we were ruined, and father was perfectly wild to get up to town and know the worst, he can't stand suspense. He wanted to take a special train, and there was a terrible scene at the station; you know we have Irish blood in us: his mother was Irish, and Fanny Lambert, my great-grandmother, the one that hung herself, was an Irishwoman. There was a terrible scene at the station, because they wouldn't take father's cheque for the extra twenty-five pounds for the special train. 'I tell you I'm ruined,' said father, but the station-master, a horrible little man with whiskers, said he couldn't help that. Oh! the world is horribly cold and cruel," said Fanny, drawing closer to her companion, "when one is in a strange place, where one doesn't know people. Once father gets to know people he can do anything with them, for every one loves him. The wife of the hotel-keeper where we stayed in Paris wept when we had to go away without our luggage."

"You see we only took half of the money we got from Mr Isaacs to Paris; we locked half of it up in the bureau in the library for fear we would spend it, then when the [Pg 66]fortnight was up we hadn't enough for the bill. Father wanted to leave Boy-Boy, but they said they'd sooner keep the luggage. They were very nice over it, the hotel-keeper and his wife, but people are horrid when they don't know one.

"Well, we came by a later train, and found Major Sawyer waiting for us at the South Kensington Hotel. He was such a funny old man with fiery eyes and white hair that stood up. We did not see Mrs Sawyer, so we supposed she had been burnt in the fire; but we scarcely had time to think, for the Major began to abuse father for having let him such a house.

"I was awfully frightened, and father listened to the abuse quite meekly, you see he thought Mrs Sawyer was burnt. Then it came out that there had been no fire, and I saw father lift up his head, and put his chin out, and I stopped my ears and shut my eyes."

"Didn't he! Mrs Sawyer told me afterwards that the Major had never been spoken to so before since he left school, and that it had done him a world of good—poor old thing!"

"Why, the ghost, to be sure. The first night he was in the house he went poking about looking for burglars, and saw it or heard it, I forget which; they say he did not stop running till he reached the police station, and that's nearly a mile away, and he wouldn't come back but took a cab to the hotel in his pyjamas. But the funny thing is, that ever since the day father abused him, he has been our best friend; he's helped us in money matters lots of times, and he always sends us hares and things when he goes shooting. The ghost always brings us luck when she can—always."

"Tell me about her," said Charles, lighting a new cigar and leaning back luxuriously on the seat.

The seat was under a chestnut tree,[Pg 68] before them lay a little wilderness, sunflowers unburst from the bud, stocks, and clove pinks.

In its centre stood a moss-grown sun-dial bearing this old dial inscription in Latin, "The hours pass and are numbered." From this wilderness of a garden came the drone of bees, a dreamy sound that seemed to refute the motto upon the dial.

"She lived," said Fanny, "a hundred, or maybe two hundred, years ago; anyhow it was in the time of the Regency—and I wish to goodness I had lived then."

"I have read about it in the library, there are a lot of old books about it, and one of them is in handwriting, not in print. You know in those times the Lamberts lived here at 'The Laurels,' just as we do, that's what makes the house so old; and the Prince Regent used to drive up here in a carriage and pair of coal-black horses. He was in love with Mrs Lambert, and she was in love with him. I don't wonder at her."

"Well, you ought to wonder at her," said Charles in a hectoring voice, blowing a cloud of smoke at a bumble-bee that had alighted on Fanny's dress, and was rubbing its hands together as if in satisfaction at the prosperous times and the plenty of flowers.

"Don't blow smoke at the poor thing. Isn't he fat!—there, he is gone. Why ought I to wonder at her?"

"Why not? he was awfully good to them. Do you know George, Fanny's husband, must have been very like father; he was like him in face, for we have a miniature of him, but he was like him in other ways, too. He would sit up at Crockfords—what was Crockfords?"

"He would sit up at Crockfords playing cards all night, and he killed a man once by hitting him over the head with a poker; the jury said the man died of apoplexy, but he[Pg 70] kept the man's wife and children always afterwards, and that is just what father would have done."

"I know," said Charles, "at least I can imagine him; but, all the same, I don't think you know what marriage is."

"It's a blessed state," said Fanny, breaking into a joyous laugh; "at least I read so in some old book."

"Were we? Oh yes, I remember. Well, they loved each other so much that the old book said it was a matter of common rumour, whatever that means. One night at Crockfords Mr Bevan—he was an ancestor of yours—flew into a frightful temper over some nonsense—a misdeal at cards I think it was—and called George Lambert a name, an awfully funny name; what was this it was? let me think——"

"Look here——" said Charles, then suddenly he became dumb, whilst the breeze wandered with a rustling sound through the desolate garden, bearing with it from some distant street the voice of a man crying "Herrings," as if to remind them that Highgate was no longer the Highgate of the Regency.

"The Prince was in the room, and every one said he turned pale; some people said he cried out, 'My God, what an occurrence!' and some people said he cried out, 'Gentlemen, gentlemen!' And the old Marquis of Bath dropped his snuff-box, though what that has to do with the story I don't know.

"At all events, the Prince left immediately, for he had an appointment to meet Fanny, and have supper with her. He must have[Pg 72] said something nasty to her, for instead of having supper with him, she took a carriage and drove home here. She seemed greatly distressed; the servants said she spent the night walking up and down the blue corridor crying out, 'O that I ever loved such a man!' and 'Who would have thought men were so cruel!' Then, when her husband came back from fighting a duel with Mr Bevan, she was gone. All her jewels were gone too; she must have hidden them somewhere, for they were never found again.

"They found her hanging in a clothes closet quite dead; she had hung herself with her garters—she must have had a very small neck, I'm sure I couldn't hang myself with mine—and now she haunts the corridor beckoning to people to follow her."

"No, but I am sure I have heard her at nights sometimes, when the wind is high. Father O'Mahony wanted to lay her, but I told father not to let him, she's said to be so lucky."

"I am nothing," said Fanny, proclaiming her simple creed with all the simplicity of childhood, and a smile that surely was reflected on the Recording Angel's face as he jotted down her reply.

"Does your father know of this state of your mind?" asked Charles in a horrified voice.

"Yes, and he is always trying to convert me to 'the faith,' as he calls it. We have long arguments, and I always beat him. When he can find nothing more to say, he always scratches his dear old head and says, 'Anyhow you're baptised, and that's one comfort,' then we talk of other things, but he did convert me once."

"I was in a hurry to try on a frock," said this valuable convert to the Church; "at least the dressmaker was waiting, so I gave in, but only for once."

"What do you believe in, then?" asked Charles, glancing fearfully at the female atheist by his side, who had taken her garden hat from her head and was swinging it by the ribbon.

"I believe in being good, and I believe in father, and I believe one ought always to make every one as happy as possible and be kind to animals. I believe people who ill-treat animals go to hell—at least, I hope they do."

"I didn't. I'd sooner die than be an atheist. One came here to dinner once; he had a red beard, and smoked shag in the drawing-room. Ugh! such a man!"

"I used to, when I was a child. I was always told He would strike me dead if I told a lie, and then I found that He didn't. It was like the man who lived in the oven. I was always told that the Black Man who lived in the oven would run away with me if I stole[Pg 75] the jam; and one day I stole the jam, and opened the oven door and looked in. I was in a terrible fright, but there wasn't any man there."

"I was referring," said Charles stiffly, "to such thoughts in the mind of one so young as you are."

"Oh, I'm as old as the hills," cried Fanny in the voice of a blasé woman of the world, making a grab at a passing moth and then flinging her hat after it, "as old as the—mercy! what's that?"

"Miss Fanny!" cried the voice of Susannah, who was lowing like a cow through garden and shrubbery in search of her missing mistress, "Miss Fah-ny, Miss——"

CHAPTER X ASPARAGUS AND CATS

Charles Bevan followed his cousin to the house. His orderly mind could never have imagined of its own volition a ménage like that of the Lamberts. He revolted at it, yet felt strangely fascinated. It was like watching people dancing on a tight rope half cut in two, sailors feasting and merry-making on a sinking wreck, children plucking flowers on the crumbling edge of a cliff.

Tea was laid in state in the drawing-room, a lovely old room with tapestried walls, and windows that opened upon the garden; or at least that part of it which had been robbed of its roses and converted into a kitchen-garden during one of George Lambert's economical fits.

It was like a badly-ploughed field, and Charles' eye travelled slowly over its ridges and hollows.

"Have you a potato bed?" he asked, his[Pg 77] mind subconsciously estimating the size of the Lamberts' Highgate estate on the basis that their potato crop was in proportion to their asparagus.

"Oh, we buy our potatoes and cabbages and things," said Fanny; "they are cheap."

"Oh, surely not so long as that?" said the girl, taking her seat at the tea-table. "Why, oak trees would grow quicker than that; besides, James said we would have splendid asparagus next spring, and he was a professed gardener before his misfortunes overtook him. Do you take sugar?"

"Yes, please," said Charles, wearily dropping into a low chair and wondering vaguely at the angelic beauty of the girl's face.

"His wife, poor thing, took to drink," said she, with so much commiseration in her tone that she might have been a disciple of the new criminology, "and that broke his heart and took all his energy away."

"Why not? He is a most devoted creature;[Pg 78] and he is going to give up the business he is in and stay on when father pays Mr Isaacs. I hope we will never part with James."

Susannah, in honour of the guest, had produced the best tea service, a priceless set of old Sèvres. The tray was painted with Cupidons blowing trumpets as if in honour of the victory of Susannah over mischance, in that she had conveyed them upstairs by some miracle unsmashed.

There was half a cake by Buszard; the tea, had it been paid for, would have cost five shillings a pound, but the milk was sky blue.

As Fanny was cutting up the cake in liberal slices as if for a children's party, two frightful-looking cats walked into the room with all the air of bandits. One was jet black and one was brindled; both looked starved, and each wore its tail with a pump-handle curve after the fashion of a lion's when marauding.

Fanny regarded them lovingly, and poured out a saucerful of the blue milk which she placed on the floor.

"Well, if you ask me," said Charles Bevan, as if he were giving his opinion on some object[Pg 79] of vértu, "I'd say they were more like—the other things."

"I know they are not pretty," said Fanny regretfully, "but they are faithful. They always come to tea just as if they were invited."

"Boy-Boy?—Oh, he only barks at things at night when they can't see him; he would run from a mouse, he's such a dear old coward. Aren't they thirsty?"

"And Susannah spends all her time turning them out—all, of course, except the black ones."

"Because they are lucky; did you not know that? It's frightfully unlucky to turn a black cat out."

"Susannah has stuffed it up with old stockings and things till she's weary; they butt it in with their heads."

"Father has talked of that, but I have always changed the conversation, and then he forgets."

She inverted the milk jug to show the cats that there was no milk left, and the intelligent creatures comprehending left the room, the black leading the way.

"No matter," said Charles magnanimously. "The poor beggars wanted it more than I. I never drink more than one cup of tea; it makes me nervous."

From somewhere in the distance came the sound of Susannah singing and cleaning a window, a song like a fetish song interrupted by the sound of the window being closed to see if it was clean enough, and flung up again with a jerk, that spoke of dissatisfaction. These sounds of a sudden ceased.

They were succeeded by the murmur of voices, a footstep, then a tap at the door, followed by the voice of Susannah requesting her mistress to step outside for a moment.

"I know what that always means," murmured the girl in a resigned voice, as she rose from the table and left the room.

"These people want protecting," he said[Pg 82] to himself frowning at the asparagus bed. "Irresponsibility when it passes a certain point becomes absolute lunacy. Fanny and her father ought to be in a lunatic asylum with their ghosts, and cats, and rubbish, only I don't believe any lunatic asylum would take them in; they would infect the other patients and make them worse. Good Heavens! it makes me shudder. They must be on the verge of the workhouse, making asparagus beds, and drinking champagne, and flying off to Paris, and feeding every filthy stray cat with food they must want for themselves. Poor devils—I mean damned fools. Anyhow, I must be going." The recollection of a certain lady named Pamela Pursehouse arose coldly in his mind now that Miss Lambert was absent from the room, and the little "still voice," whatever a still voice may be, said something about duty.

He determined to flee from temptation directly his hostess returned, but he reckoned without Fate.

"What do you think Susannah has told[Pg 83] me?" She spoke in a low voice as if death were in the house.

"How disgraceful! I will go down and turn him out." Then he remembered that he could not very well turn him out considering that he was in possession.

"For goodness sake don't even hint that to him, or he may go," cried Fanny in alarm, "for, when he gets like this, he always talks of leaving at once, because his calling is a disgrace to him, and if he went, Susannah would follow him."

"But, my dear girl," cried Charles, "how dare that wretched Susannah—ahem—why, he's a married man, you told me so; surely she knows that."

"I never met such people before!" said Charles, addressing a jade dragon on the[Pg 84] mantelpiece—"I mean," he said, putting his hands in his trousers' pockets and addressing his boots, "such a person as Susannah."

"Her mother ran away with her father," murmured Fanny in extenuation, "so I suppose it is in the blood. But I wish we could do something with James. If he would even go to bed, but he sits by the kitchen fire crying, and that sets Susannah off. She will be ill for days after this. He said it was a cigar some one gave him that reminded him of his better days——"

"——and he went to try and drown the recollection of them. It is so stupid of him, he knows how drink flies to his head; you would never imagine if you could see him now that he has only had two glasses of beer."

"But, Cousin Charles," said Fanny, plucking at his coat, "be sure and speak gently."

James, a long ill-weedy looking man, was seated before the kitchen fire on a chair[Pg 85] without a back; Susannah, on hearing their footsteps, darted into the scullery.

"Now, James, now, James," said Charles Bevan, speaking in a paternal voice, "what is the meaning of all this? How did you get yourself into this condition?"

James turned his head and regarded Charles. He made a vain endeavour to speak and rise from his chair at one and the same time, then he collapsed and his tears returned anew.

At the sound, Susannah in the scullery threw her apron over her head and joined in, whilst Fanny looked out of the window and sniffled.

"I never saw such a lot of people!" cried Charles in desperation. "James, James, be a man."

"How can he," said Fanny, controlling her voice, "when he is in this terrible state? Cousin Charles, don't you think you could induce him to go to bed?"

PART II

CHAPTER I A REVELATION

"When will your father come back?" asked Charles as he returned to the kitchen, having deposited the man of law on his bed and shaken his fist in his face as a token of what he would get if he rose from it.

"Then I must wait till he returns, or till this person recovers himself. I cannot possibly leave you alone in the house with a tipsy man."

"Oh yes, do stay till father returns. I want you to meet him so much," said Fanny, all her grief vanishing in smiles.

"I am almost glad," said Fanny, as she tripped up the kitchen stairs before her[Pg 87] cousin, "I am almost glad James took it into his head to get tipsy, you'd have gone away if he hadn't, without seeing father; it seems almost like Providence. Mercy! it's six o'clock."

She glanced at the great old hall clock ticking away the moments, even as it had done when George the Third was king, and Charles took his watch out to verify the time, but he did not catch the old clock tripping.

"Now we must think about supper," said Fanny, in a busy voice. "You must be dying of hunger. What do you like best?"

"Oh, we always call dinner 'luncheon,' and have it in the middle of the day; it saves trouble, and it is less worry." Then, after a moment's pause: "I wish we had a lobster, but I don't think there is one. I know there is a beefsteak."

"Now, where can that beefsteak have gone to?" murmured the girl, whilst Charles called to mind the criminal countenances of the two faithful cats, and the business-like manner in which they had left the room.

"Don't mind me," said Charles. "Anything will do for me; I am used—I mean——"

"I am not going to have father come back and find you starved to death; he'd kill me. I'm going out marketing; will you come?"

"Yes, smoke everywhere, every one does," and she rushed upstairs for her hat. A[Pg 89] moment later she returned, hat on head, and bearing in her hand a little basket adorned with blue ribbons: a pound of tea would have freighted it.

"How on earth is she going to get the dinner into that?" thought her companion, as he unbarred the hall door and followed her down the steps.

Then they found themselves walking down the weed-grown avenue, the birds twittering overhead in the light of the warm June evening.

That he should be going "a-marketing" in Highgate accompanied by a pretty girl with a basket did not, strangely enough, impress Charles Bevan as being an out-of-the-way occurrence.

He felt as if he had known the Lamberts for years—a good many years. He no longer contemplated the joyous tragedy of their life wholly as a spectator; he had become suddenly and without volition one of the actors, a subordinate actor—a thinking part, one might call it.

The fearful fascination exercised by these people seemed, strange to say, never so potent as when exercised upon hard-headed people,[Pg 90] as Major Sawyer and many another could have told.

"I love marketing," said Fanny, as they trudged along, "at least buying things."

She opened it and peeped in at the three and sixpence it contained, and then shut it with a snap as if fearful of their escaping.

"What do you like next best to marketing?" asked Charles in the sedate voice of a heavy father speaking to his favourite child.

"Oh, you know—strange parcels when they come, or when father brings them, one never knows what may be in them—chocolate creams or what. I wonder what father will bring me back this time?"

"Yes, unless he finds it difficult getting the money. If he does, he won't be home till morning." She spoke as an Indian squaw might speak, whose father or husband has[Pg 91] gone a-hunting, whilst Charles marvelled vaguely.

"Oh, he will get it all right, people are so good to him. Poor, dear Mr Hancock——"

She spoke in a secretive voice which greatly inflamed her companion's curiosity.

"Yes," said Fanny. "I don't think it matters now that you are friends with us, and we're all the same family. Father's dividends had not come in, and he lent us the money to pay the bills."

"The butcher's bill, and Stokes the baker's bill, and the milk bill, and some others."

"Hancock lent you the money to pay your bills?" cried Charles, feeling like a person in a dream.

"But he never told me he was a friend of your father's; besides, he is my solicitor."

"Tell me all about it, and how you came to know him so intimately, and how he paid your bills," commanded Mr Bevan.

There was, just here on the road, a seat dropped incontinently by the County Council; they sat upon it whilst she told her tale.

"It was the other day. Father had not slept all night thinking of the action. He came into my bedroom at two in the morning to tell me that if he lost it before the House of Lords, he would take it before the Queen in Council. He had been sitting up reading 'Every Man his Own Lawyer.' Well, next morning a lot of people came asking for their money, the butcher and all those, and we hadn't any.

"Father said it was all your fault, and he wished he had never seen the fish stream. I was so frightened by the way he was bothering himself about everything—for, as a rule, you know he is the most easy-tempered man in the world as long as he has got his pipe. Well, a friend advised me to go privately to your lawyer and try to stop the action. So I went to Mr Hancock.

"At first he seemed very stiff, and glared at me through his spectacles; but, after a while,[Pg 93] as I told him all about ourselves, he stopped shuffling his feet, and listened with his hand to his ear as if he were deaf, and he took a smelling bottle out of a drawer of his desk and snuffed at it, and said, 'Dear me, how very extraordinary!' Then he called me his 'Poor child!' and asked me had I had any luncheon. I said 'Yes,' though I hadn't—I wasn't hungry. Well, we talked and talked, and at last he said he would come back with me home, for that our affairs were in a dreadful condition and we didn't seem to know it. He said he would come as a friend and try to forget that he was a lawyer.

"Well, he came here with me. Father was upstairs in his bedroom, and I poked my head in and told him your lawyer wanted to see him in the drawing-room.

"I didn't tell him it was I who had fetched him, for I knew he would simply go mad if he thought I had been meddling with the action; besides, Mr Hancock said I had better not, as he simply called as a friend.

"Down came father and went into the drawing-room. I was in an awful fright, too frightened even to listen at the door. I made Susannah listen after a while, and she said[Pg 94] they were talking about roses—I felt so relieved.

"I sent Susannah in with wine, and Mr Hancock stayed to supper. After supper they had cigars and punch, and I played to them on the piano, and father sang Irish songs, and Mr Hancock told us awfully funny stories all about the law, and said he was a bachelor and envied father because he had a daughter like me.

"Then he talked about our affairs, and said he would require more punch before he could understand them; so he had more punch, and father showed him the housekeeping books, and he looked over them reading them upside down and every way. Then he wrote out a cheque to pay the books, with one eye shut, whilst father wrote out bills, you know, to pay the cheque, and then he kissed me and said good-bye to father and went away crying."

"But," cried Charles, utterly astounded at this artless revelation of another man's folly, "old Hancock never made a joke in his life—at least to me—and he's an awful old skinflint and never lent any man a penny, so they say."

"He made lots of jokes that night, anyhow,"[Pg 95] said Fanny, "and lent father over twenty pounds, too; and only yesterday a great bunch of hothouse flowers came from Covent Garden with his card for me."

"He is not an old fool, he's a dear old man, and I love him. Come on, or the shops will be closed."

"You seem to love everything," said Mr Bevan in a rather stiff tone, as they meandered along near now to the street where shops were.

"No one just now. I never hate people for long, it is too much trouble. I used to hate you before I knew you. I thought you were a man with a black beard; you see I hadn't seen you."

"And as every one you don't hate, you—— I say, what a splendid evening this is! it is just like Italy. I mean, it reminds me of Italy."

"And here are the shops at last," said[Pg 96] Fanny, as if the shops had been travelling to them and had only just arrived.

She bought a packet of envelopes for fourpence. Charles turned away to look at some of the gaudily-bound Kebles, Byrons, and Scotts so dear to the middle-class heart, and before he could turn again she had bought a little prayer-book with a cross on it for a shilling. The shopman was besetting her with a new invention in birthday cards when Charles broke the spell by touching her elbow with the head of his walking stick.

"Don't you think," said he when they were safely in the street, "it is a mistake buying prayer-books, these shop-keepers are such awful swindlers?"

"I bought it for Susannah," explained Fanny. "It's a little present for her after the way James has gone on. Look at this dear monkey."

A barrel organ of the old type was playing by the pavement, making a sound as if an old man gone idiotic were humming a tune to himself. A villainous-looking monkey on[Pg 97] the organ-top, held out his hand when it saw Fanny approaching. It knew the world evidently, or at least physiognomy, which is almost the same thing.

"He takes it just like a man," she cried, as the creature grabbed one of her pennies and then nearly broke its chain trying to get at her to tear the rose from her hat. "Look, it knows the people who are fond of it; it is just like a child."

"I must run in here for a moment, it's only about a corset I ordered; I won't be three minutes."

He waited ten, thinking how strange it was that this girl saw something attractive in nearly everything—strange cats, monkeys, and even old Hancock.

At the end of twenty minutes' walking up and down, he approached the milliner's window and peeped into the shop.

Fanny was conversing with a tall woman, whose frizzled black hair lent her somehow the appearance of a Frenchwoman.

The Highgate Frenchwoman was dangling something gaudy and flimsy before Fanny's[Pg 98] eyes, and the girl had her purse in her hand.

"No, it's not ready yet; but I've got the most beautiful—Oh my goodness me!—how stupid I am!"

"I have only three halfpence left, and I have forgotten the eggs and things for supper."

"Give me your purse, and let me look into it," he said, taking the little purse and turning away a moment. Then he handed it back to her; she opened it and peeped in, and there lay a sovereign.

"It's just what father does," she said, looking up in the lamp-light with a smile that somehow made Mr Bevan's eyes feel misty. "What makes you so like him in everything you do?" And somehow these words seemed to the correct Mr Bevan the sweetest he had ever heard.

Then they marketed after the fashion of youth when it finds itself the possessor of a whole sovereign. Fanny laying out the money as the fancy took her, and with the lavishness so conspicuously absent in the dealings of your mere millionaire.

The dining-room of "The Laurels" was a huge apartment furnished in the age of heavy dinners, when a knowledge of comparative anatomy and the wrist of a butcher were necessary ingredients in the composition of a successful host.

Here Susannah, to drown her sorrows in labour and give honour to the guest, had laid the supper things on a lavish scale. The Venetian vase, before-mentioned, stood filled with roses in the centre of the table, and places were laid for six—all sorts of places. Some of the unexpected guests were presumably to sup entirely off fish, to judge by the knives and forks set out for them, and some were evidently to be denied the luxury of soup. That there was neither soup nor fish mattered little to Susannah.

The cellar, to judge by the sideboard, had[Pg 100] been seized with a spirit of emulation begotten of the display made by the plate pantry, and had sent three representatives from each bin. The sideboard also contained the jam-pot, the bread tray, and butter on a plate: commestables that had the abject air of poor relations admitted on sufferance, and come to look on.

The girl's hat was tilted slightly sideways, her raven hair was in revolt, and her cheeks flushed with happiness and the excitement of marketing.

Susannah followed them. She wore a wonderful white apron adorned with frills and blue ribbons, a birthday present from her mistress, only brought out on state occasions.

"Three candles only!" said the mistress of the house, glancing at the table and the three candles burning on it. "That's not enough; fetch a couple more, and, Susannah, bring the sardine opener."

"Why don't you light the gas?" asked her cousin, putting his parcels down and glancing at the great chandelier swinging overhead.

"I would, only father has had a fight with the gas company and they've cut it off. Now let's open the parcels; put the candles nearer."

Mr Bevan's parcels contained a box of sardines, a paysandu ox tongue, and a basket of peaches; Fanny's, the before-mentioned prayer-book, envelopes, and in the tissue-paper parcel a light shawl or fichu of fleecy silk dyed blue.

She cast her hat off, and throwing the fichu round her neck, hopped upon a chair, candle in hand, and glanced at herself in a great mirror on the opposite wall.

"It makes me look beautiful!" she cried. "And I have half a mind to keep it for myself."

"She is ill, you know, and I am going to see her again to-morrow. I hate going to see sick people, but father says whenever we see a lame dog we should put our shoulders to the wheel and help him over the stile, and she's a lame dog, if ever there was one. That's right, Susannah, put the candles here, and give me the can opener; I love opening[Pg 102] tins, and there is a little prayer-book I got for you when I was out."

"Thank you, miss," said Susannah in a muffled voice, putting the little prayer-book under her apron with one hand, and snuffing a candle with the finger and thumb of the other. "Can I get you anything more, miss?"

"He's asleep now, miss," answered the maid, closing her mouth for once in her life by some miracle of Love, and catching in her breath through her nose.

"That will do, Susannah," hastily said her mistress, who knew this symptom of old, and what it foreboded; "I'll ring if I want you. Bring up the punch things at ten, just as you always bring them."

Susannah left the room making stifled sounds, and Fanny, with Mrs Regan's fichu about her neck, attacked the sardine tin with the opener.

"No, no; you open the champagne, and put the peaches on a plate, and I'll open the tins. Bring over the bread and butter and jam. I wish we had some ice for the champagne, but the fishmonger—forgot to send it. Bother this knife!"

She laboured away, with her cheeks flushed; a lock of black hair hanging loose lent her a distracted air, and made her so lovely in the eyes of Charles that he put the bread platter down on top of the butter plate, so that the butter pat clung to the bottom of the bread platter, and they had to scrape it off, one holding the platter, one scraping with the knife, and both hands touching.

"We have had that bread plate ever since I can remember," she said, as they seated themselves to the feast, "and I wouldn't have anything happen to it for earths, not that the butter will do it any harm. Isn't the text on it nice?"

"'Want not,'" he read. He looked in vain for the "Waste not," but that part of the maxim was hidden by the carved representation of a full ear of corn.

"No thanks, I only drink water, wine flies to my head; I am like James. I am going to have a peach—have one."

"Thank you, I am eating sardines. You remind me of the old gentleman—he was[Pg 104] short-sighted—who offered me a pinch of snuff once when I was eating a sole."

Fanny, with her teeth set in the peach, gave a little shriek of laughter, but Mr Bevan was perfectly grave. Still, for perhaps the first time in his life, he felt his possibilities as a humorist, and determined to exploit them.

"Talking about ghosts"—ghosts and mothers-in-law, to the medium intellect, are always fair game,—"talking about ghosts," said he, "you said, I think, Cousin Fanny——"

"Call me Fanny," said that lady, who, having eaten her peach, was now helping herself to sardines. "I hate that word 'cousin,' it sounds so stiff. What about ghosts?"

"About ghosts," he answered slowly, his new-found sense of humour suddenly becoming lost. "Oh yes, you said, Fanny, that a ghost was haunting this house."

"Yes, Fanny Lambert. I told you she hid her jewels before she hung herself. When people see her she is always beckoning them to follow her. We found James insensible one night on the landing upstairs; he told us next morning he had seen her, and she had beckoned him to follow her, and after that he remembered nothing more."

"Oh!" cried Fanny; "why did we never think of that before? Of course that is the reason—and they are worth two hundred thousand pounds. We must have the panels in the corridor taken down. I'll make father do it to-morrow. Two hundred thousand pounds: what is that a year?"

"Fancy father with ten thousand a year!" Mr Bevan shuddered. "We can have a steam yacht, and everything we want. I feel as if I were going mad," said Miss Lambert, with the air of a person who had often been mad before and knew the symptoms.

The door opened and Susannah appeared with the punch things. "Susannah, guess what's happened—never mind, you'll know soon. Have you got the lemon and the sugar? That is right."

And Miss Lambert, forgetting for a[Pg 106] moment fortune, turned her attention to the manufacturing of punch.

Susannah withdrew, casting her eyes over Fanny and Charles as she went, and seeming to draw her under-lip after her.

When the door was shut, Miss Lambert looked into the punch bowl to see if it was clean, and, having turned a huge spider out of it, went to the sideboard.

"Everything is good in punch. Father learned how to make it in Moscow, when he was dining with the Hussars there. After dinner a huge bowl was brought in, and everything went in—champagne, whisky, brandy, all the fruit from the dessert; then they set it on fire, and drank it, burning."

"I'm blest if this is milk punch," said Mr Bevan, as he looked fearfully into the bowl; "but go on."

"I am going as quick as I can," she replied. Then the whisky went in, and half a tumblerfull of curaçoa also, the lemon cut in slices and the peaches that remained.

"I haven't anything more to throw in," said Fanny, casting her eye over the sardines and the ox tongue. "We ought to have grapes and things; no matter, stir it up and set it on fire, and see what it tastes like."

"But, my dear child," said the horrified Charles, as he stirred the seething mixture with the old silver ladle into whose belly a guinea had been beaten. "You surely don't expect me to drink this fearful stuff? I thought you were making it for fun."

She plucked a rose from the vase and strewed the petals on the surface of the liquid to help the taste, whilst Mr Bevan ladled some into a glass.

"It's not bad, 'pon my word it's not bad; the curaçoa seems to blend all the other flavours together, but it's fearfully strong."

"Then we'll take it into the library, it's more comfortable there. You carry the bowl, and I will bring the candles."

"What are these?" asked Mr Bevan, as he removed some papers from the library table to make room for the punch bowl.

"Yes," she said, glancing over his shoulder. "I remember now; those are the things I am[Pg 109] to get a silk dress out of when they go to twenty. Father is mad over them; he says nothing will stop them when they begin to move, whatever that means."

"Well, they have moved with a vengeance, for only yesterday I heard they had gone into liquidation."

"All the good luck seems coming together," said Fanny with a happy sigh, as Charles went to the window and looked out at the moon, rising in a cloudless sky over the forsaken garden and ruined tennis ground. "Not that it matters much if we get those jewels whether the old mines go up or down; still, no matter how rich one becomes, more money is always useful."

"Yes, I suppose it is," said he, looking with a troubled but sentimental face at the moon. "Tell me, Fanny, do you know much about the Stock Exchange?"

"I know that Brighton A's are called Doras—no, Berthas—no, I think it's Doras—and Mexican Railways are going to Par, and the Kneedeep Mines are going to a hundred and fifty, and father has a thousand of them he[Pg 110] got for sixpence a share, and he gave me fifty for myself, but I'm not to sell them till they go to a hundred. Aren't stockbrokers nice-looking, and always so well dressed? I saw hundreds of them one day father left me for a moment in Angel Court whilst he ran in to see his broker—Oh yes! and the bears are going to catch it at the next settlement."

"No," said Fanny, "but they're going to catch it whatever they are, for I heard father say so—Oh, what a moon! I am sure the fairies must be out to-night."

"Of course I believe in them; not here in Highgate, perhaps, for there are too many people, but in woods and places."

"But there are no such things, it has been proved over and over again; no one believes in them nowadays."

"Did you never see the mushrooms growing in rings? Well, how could they grow like that if they were not planted, and who'd be bothered planting umbrella mushrooms in rings but the fairies?"

"Blowing out the lights; it's so much nicer sitting in the moonlight. Fill your glass and sit down beside me."

"Extraordinary child," thought Mr Bevan, doing as he was bid, whilst she opened the window wide to "let the moon in."

Other things came too, a night moth and a perfume of decaying leaves, the souls of last year's sun-flowers and hollyhocks were abroad to-night; the distant paddock seemed full of cats, to judge by the sounds that came from it, and bats were flickering in the air. The voice of Boy-Boy, metallic and rhythmical as the sound of a trip hammer, came from a distant corner of the garden where he had treed a cat.

"Quick," said Fanny, drawing in her head and pulling her companion by the arm, "and you'll be in time to see our tortoise."

"Still, if you'd been a moment sooner the moonlight would have been on him; he was shining a moment ago like silver. Do you know what a tortoise is? it's a sign of age. You and I will be some day like that tortoise, without any teeth, wheezing and coughing and grubbing along; and may-be we will look back and think of this night when we were young—Oh, dear me, I wish I were dead!"

"When two people grow old together," began Mr Bevan in whose brain the punch was at work, "they do not notice the—that is to say, age really does not matter. Besides, a woman is only as old as she feels—I mean as she looks."

The fumes of the punch of a sudden took on themselves a form as of the pale phantom of Pamela Pursehouse, and the phantom cried, "Begone, flee from temptation whilst you may."

Before him the concrete form of Miss Lambert sitting in the corner of the window-seat and bathed in moonlight, said to him, "Hug me."

A few minutes later, feeling clouds beneath his feet and all sorts of new sensations around his heart, he was walking down the weed-grown avenue, Boy-Boy at his heels barking and snarling, satisfied no doubt by some preternatural instinct that do what he might he would not be kicked.

Ere he had reached the middle of the avenue he heard a voice calling, "Cousin Charley!"

CHAPTER II THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE

It was the morning after the day on which Mr Bevan had called at "The Laurels." Leavesley was in bed, and reading the above, which had come by the early post, and which Belinda had thrust under his door, together with a circular and a bill for colours.

"Hurrah!" cried Mr Leavesley, and then "Great Heavens!" He jumped out of bed, and rummaged wildly in his pockets. He found seven and sixpence in silver, and a penny and a halfpenny in coppers, a stump of pencil, a tramway ticket with a hole punched in it, and a Woodbine cigarette packet containing one cigarette. He placed the money on the wash-hand-stand, then he sat for a moment on the side of his bed disconsolate.

The most beautiful day that ever dawned, the most beautiful girl in the world, a chance[Pg 115] of taking her up the river, and seven and six to do it on!

He curled his toes about. Yesterday, in a fit of righteousness, he had paid a tailor two pounds ten on account. He contemplated this great mistake gloomily. Wild ideas of calling on Mark Moses & Sonenshine and asking for the two pounds ten back crossed his mind, to be instantly dispelled.

The only two men in London who could possibly help him with a loan were, to use a Boyle-Rochism, in Paris. Mrs Tugwell, his landlady, was at Margate, and he was in the middle of his tri-monthly squabble with his uncle. He called up the ghost of his aunt Patience Hancock, and communed with her just for the sake of self-torture, and the contemplation of the hopeless.

"Yessir, and here's another letter as hes just come," she poked a square envelope under the door. Leavesley seized it with a palpitating heart; it was unstamped, and had evidently been left in by hand.

"This is the God from the Machine," he[Pg 116] thought. "There's money in it, I know. It always happens like this when things are at their worst."

We all have these instincts at times: the contents of an unopened letter or parcel seem endowed with a voice; who has not guessed the fateful news in a telegram before he has broken open the envelope, even as Leavesley guessed the contents of the letter in his hand?

He tore it open and took out a sheet of paper and a pawnbroker's duplicate. The letter ran:—

Leavesley groaned and laughed, and groaned again. Then he got into his bath and splashed; as he splashed his spirits rose amazingly.

The Captain's letter had electrified the Bohemian part of his nature; instead of depressing him it had done the reverse. Here was another poor devil worse off than himself. Leavesley had six pair of trousers.

The Captain, in parenthesis let me say, has no part in this story. He wasn't a captain, he was a relic of the South African War, a gentleman with a taste for drink, amusing, harmless, and amiable. I only introduce him on account of the telepathic interest of his letter, or rather of the way in which Leavesley divined its contents.

"Seven and sixpence—I mean seven and sevenpence halfpenny, is not a bit of use," said the painter to himself when he had finished breakfast, "so here goes."

He put three and sevenpence in an envelope with the pathetic duplicate, addressed it to Captain Waring, rang for Belinda; and when that much-harried maid-of-all-work appeared,[Pg 118] told her to take it as soon as she could to Captain Waring, down the road over the bacon shop, also to call at Mr Verneede's and ask him to come round at twelve.

Then he reached down a finished picture, wrapped it in brown paper, put the parcel under his arm and started off.

He took a complication of omnibuses, and arrived in Wardour Street about half-past nine.

"Mr Fernandez is gone to the country on pizzines," said the Jew-boy slave of the picture dealer, who came from the interior of the gloomy shop like a dirty gnome, called forth by the ring of the door bell.

"Oh, dash Mr Fernandez! Is there no one here I can show the thing to? He knows me."

"This is a nice sort of thing," said Leavesley to himself as he stood in Wardour Street perspiring. "There's nothing for it now but a frontal attack on uncle."

He made for Southampton Row, reaching the office at ten o'clock, about five minutes after James Hancock.

Hancock was dealing with his morning correspondence. A most unbendable old gentleman he looked as he sat at his table before a pile of letters, backed by the numerous tin boxes Leavesley knew so well. Boxes marked "The Gleeson Estate," "Sir H. Tempest, Bart," etc. Boxes that spoke of wealth and business in mocking tones to the unfortunate artist, who felt very much as the grasshopper must have felt in the presence of the industrious ant. Despite this he noticed that his uncle was more sprucely dressed than usual, and that he had on a lilac satin tie.

Hancock looked at his nephew over his spectacles, then through his spectacles, then he pushed his spectacles up on his forehead.

"I just looked in," said Leavesley, in a light-hearted way, "as I was going by, to see how you were."

"Sit down," said Hancock. "Um—I wasn't aware that there was anything the matter with me."

"Oh, bother the gout!" said the old gentleman, who hated to be reminded of his infirmity. "It isn't gout—Garrod says it's Rheumatoid Arthritis."

"I always told you," said the lawyer, ignoring the last statement in a most irritating way, and speaking as if Leavesley were made of glass and all his affairs were arranged inside[Pg 121] him for view like damaged goods in a shop window—"I always told you painting doesn't pay. If you had come into the office you might have got on well; but there you are, you've made your bed, and on it you must lie," then in a voice three shades gloomier, "on it you must lie."

Leavesley glanced at the office clock, it pointed to quarter past ten, and Fanny was due at one.

"I had a little business to talk to you about," he said. "Look here, will you give me a commission?"

"Well, look here," said Leavesley, with the cynicism of despair, "let me paint Bridgewater, let me paint the office, whitewash the ceilings, only give me a show."

"I would not mind the money I have spent on you," said Hancock, ignoring all this, "the[Pg 122] bills I have paid, if, to use your own expression, there was any show for it; but, as far as I can see, you are like a man in a quagmire, the only advance you are making, the only advance visible to mortal eye, is that you are getting deeper into debt;" then two tones lower, "deeper into debt."

"Well, see here, lend me a fiver," cried Leavesley, now grown desperate and impudent.

James Hancock put his fingers into the upper pocket of his waistcoat, and Leavesley's heart made a spring for his throat.

But Mr Hancock did not produce a five-pound note. He produced a small piece of chamois leather with which he polished his glasses, which he had taken off, in a reflective manner.

"I'm awfully hard up for the moment, and I have pressing need of it. I don't want you to give me the money, I'll pay it back."

"You come to me as one would come to a milch cow, as one would come to a bank in which he had a large deposit."

He put his hand in his breast-pocket and took out a note-case that seemed simply bursting with bank-notes.

"Now if I accommodate you with a five-pound note I must know, at least, what the pressing need is you speak of."

"I want to take a girl up the river, for one thing," answered his nephew, who could no more tell him a lie about the matter, than he could steal a note from that plethoric note-case.

James Hancock replaced the case in his pocket and made a motion with his hands as if to say "that ends everything."

"I'd have paid you it back. No matter. I'm going to write a book, and make money out of it. I'll call it the 'Art of Being an Uncle.'"

Hancock made a motion with his hands that said, "Go away, I want to read my letters."

"Now, look here," said Leavesley, with his hand on the door handle, and inspired with another accession of impudence, "if you'd take ten pounds and put it in your pocket, and come with me and her, and have a jolly good day on the river, wouldn't it be better than sitting in this stuffy old office making money that is no use to any one—you can only live once."

"I'm going. Tell me, if I went round to aunt would she accommodate me, do you think?"

"Accommodate you to make a fool of yourself with a girl? I hope not, I sincerely hope not."

Leavesley went out, and shut the door. Then he suddenly turned, opened the door and looked in.

The old gentleman grew suddenly so crimson that his nephew shut the door and bolted. He little guessed how àpropos that question was.

CHAPTER III TRIBULATIONS OF AN AUNT

He had scarcely gone a hundred yards down Southampton Row, when he heard his name called.

Leavesley took the envelope presented to him, and Bridgewater bolted back to the office like a fat old rabbit, returning to its burrow.

"Well, of all the meannesses!" said the dutiful nephew, pocketing the coin. "Still, it's decent of the old boy after my cheeking him like that. I have now one pound four. I'll go now and cheek aunt."

Miss Hancock was in; she had a handkerchief tied round her head, a duster in her hand; she had just given the cook warning and was in a debatable temper. She was[Pg 126] also in a dusting mood. She had plenty of servants, yet the inspiration came on her at times to tie a handkerchief round her head and dust.

"Well?" she said, as she led the way into the dining-room, and continued an attack she was making on the sideboard with her duster.

Leavesley had scarcely the slightest hope of financial assistance from this quarter. Patience had given him half-a-crown for a birthday present once when he was a little boy, and then worried it back from him and popped it into a missionary box for the Wallibooboo Islanders.

Patience sniffed, and went on with her dusting. Then suddenly she stopped, and, duster in hand, addressed him.

"Are you never going to do anything for a living? Have you no idea of the responsibilities of life? What are you going to do?"

"You won't scrape it up here," said his aunt, continuing her dusting; then, for she was as inquisitive as a mongoose: "And what part of the country do you propose to take a holiday in?"

Miss Hancock was sweeping with her duster round a glass arrangement made to hold flowers, in the convulsion incident on this statement she upset the thing and smashed it, much to Leavesley's delight.

"Go away," said Miss Hancock, who was on her knees collecting the fragments of glass; "I want to see nothing more of you.[Pg 128] If you are lost to respectability you might retain at least common decency."

"I don't know that I've said anything indecent, or that there is anything indecent in going for a day on the river with a girl. Well, I'm going——" A luminous idea suddenly struck him. He knew the old maid's mind, and the terror she had of the bare idea of her brother marrying; he remembered the spruce appearance of his uncle that morning and the lavender satin necktie. "I say——"

He left the room hurriedly and shut the door, before she could call him back he was out of the house.

His random remark had hit the target plumb in the centre of the bull's-eye, and could he have known the agitation and irritation in the mind of his aunt he would have written off as paid his debt against the Wallibooboo Islanders.

The river was impossible now, and the whole thing had shrunk to luncheon at the studio and a visit to Madame Tussaud's or the Tower.

He reached the studio before twelve, and there he found waiting for him Mr Verneede and the Captain.

The Captain was in his trousers; he had come to show them as a proof of good faith and incidentally to get a glass of whisky. Leavesley gave him the whisky and sent him off, then he turned to Verneede.

"The whole thing has bust up. Miss Lambert is coming at one to go up the river and I have no money. Stoney broke; isn't it the deuce?"

"But surely, my dear Leavesley—one pound four—why, it is quite a little sum of money."

"Why not go there and spend a day amidst the trees, the greenery, the blue sky, the——"

"There are hamlets in the forest, where tea may be obtained in cottages at a reasonable cost——"

"We can just do it, I think," said Leavesley, who had been making distracted calculations on paper. He darted to the bell and rang it.

"Belinda," he said, when the slave of the bell made answer, "there's a lady coming here to luncheon, have you anything in the house?"

Belinda, with a far-away look in her eyes, made a mental survey of the larder, twiddling the door-handle to assist thought.

"There's a pie, sir, and sassiges, and a cold mutton chop. There's half a chicken——"

"That'll do, and get a salad. I'll run out and get some flowers and a bottle of claret."

CHAPTER IV THE DAISY CHAIN

They were seated in a dusty glade near a road, near Woodford, and they had lost Verneede.

The loss did not seem to affect them. Fanny had picked some daisies and was making a chain of them. Leavesley was making and smoking cigarettes.

"But what I can't make out," said Leavesley—"This fellow Bevan, you said he was a beast, and now you seem quite gone on him."

"Oh, I don't see why he shouldn't, only it must have been a visitation. I should think your father was rather bored."

"He's very nice-looking; at least he's rather fat—you know the sort of man I mean."

"Your uncle is awfully rich too, isn't he?" asked Miss Lambert after a moment's silence.

Leavesley squirmed with pleasure: that was one for Bevan. He instinctively hated Bevan. He, little knowing the mind of Miss Lambert, thought this indecision of choice between his uncle and another man an exquisitely veiled method of describing the other man's undesirability.

"Marry uncle," he said with a laugh. "And[Pg 133] then we can all live together in Gordon Square, uncle, and you, and I, and aunt, and old Verneede. The house would hold the lot of us."

"Of course," said Leavesley, thinking she spoke in fun, "and a few more—the Captain: you don't know the Captain; he's a treasure, and would make the menagerie quite complete."

She had finished her daisy-chain, and with a charming and child-like movement she suddenly leaned forward and threw it round his neck.

"Oh, Fanny," he cried, taking both her little hands in his, "what's the good of talking nonsense? I love you, and you'll never marry any one but me."

Fanny began to cry just like a little child, and he crept up to her and put his arm round her waist.

"Don't—don't—don't!" sobbed the girl, nestling closer to him at each "don't."

Leavesley heaved a deep sigh of content, squeezed her closer and rocked her slightly. She allowed herself to be nursed like this for a few heavenly moments; then she broke away from him, pushed him away.

"I mustn't, I mustn't—don't!—do leave me alone—go away." She increased the distance between them. Tears were on her long black lashes—lashes tipped with brown—and her eyes were like passion flowers after rain—to use a simile that has never been used before.

Leavesley had got on his hands and knees to crawl closer towards her, and the intense seriousness of his face, coupled with the attitude of his body, quite dispelled Miss Lambert's inclination to weep.

"Don't!" she cried, laughing in a helpless sort of way. "Do sit down, you look so funny like that."

He collapsed, and they sat opposite to each other like two tailors, whilst Fanny dried her eyes and finished up her few remaining sobs.

A brake full of trippers passed on the road near by, yelling that romantic and delightful song

"They're happy," said Fanny, listening with a rapt expression as though she were listening to the music of the heavenly choir. "I wish I was them."

"Fanny," said her lover, ignoring this comprehensive wish, "why can't you care for me?"

Leavesley gazed at the mercenary beauty[Pg 136] before him. Had he miscalculated her? was she after all like other girls, a daughter of the horse leech?

"I'd marry you to-morrow," resumed she, "if you hadn't a penny—only for father."

Leavesley sighed, then he broke out: "But it's dreadful, he never would ask you to make such a sacrifice——"

"He! why, he doesn't care a button. He believes in people marrying whoever they like. He'd like me to marry you. He said only the other day you'd make a good husband because you didn't gamble or drink, and you had no taste for going to law."

Leavesley's face brightened, he got on his hands and knees again preparatory to drawing nearer.

"But if you love me," said the lover, collapsing again into the sitting posture.

"Not enough to marry you. I could if I let myself go, but I've just stopped myself in time. I can't ever marry you."

"Won't it! I'll never marry a man who won't help father, and he wants help. Oh! if you only knew our affairs," said Miss Lambert, picking a daisy and looking at it, and apparently addressing it, "the hair would stand up on the top of your head."

"Bad isn't the word," replied Miss Lambert, plucking the petals from the daisy one by one. "He loves me—he loves me not—he loves me—he loves me not—he loves me."

"But, see here, listen to me: are you really serious in what you have just said?"

"If the Roorkes Drift Mines would only go up to two hundred," said the girl, plucking another daisy, "I'd marry you; father has a whole trunkful of them. He got them at sixpence each, and if they went to two hundred they'd be worth half a million of money."

"Is there any chance, do you think?" asked Leavesley brightening. He knew something of stock exchange jargon. The Captain was great on stock exchange matters, when he was not occupied in pawning his clothes and sending wild messages to his friends for assistance.

"I think so," said Fanny. "Mr Bevan said they were going into Liqui——something."

Leavesley sighed. An old grey horse cropping the grass near by came and looked[Pg 139] gloomily at the humans, snorted, and resumed his meal.

"What's the time?" asked Miss Lambert, putting on her gloves. Leavesley looked at his watch.

"Gracious! let's go; it will take us hours to get home." She rose to her feet and shook her dress.

"I wonder where old Mr Verneede can be?" said the girl, looking round as though to find him lurking amidst the foliage. "It's awful if we've lost him."

"We have his ticket, too," said Leavesley. "He's very likely gone back to the station; if we don't find him there I'll leave his ticket with the station-master."

He rose up, and the daisy-chain round his neck fell all to pieces in ruin to the ground.

They found Mr Verneede waiting for them at the station, smelling of beer, and conversing with the station-master on the weather and the crops.

At Liverpool Street, having seen Miss Lambert into an omnibus (she refused to be seen home, knowing full well the distance from Highgate to Chelsea), Leavesley, filled[Pg 140] with a great depression of spirits, went with Verneede and sat in pubs, and smoked clay pipes, and drank beer.

This sorry pastime occupied them till 12.30, when they took leave of each other in the King's Road, Leavesley miserable, and Verneede maudlin.

"She sent me her love," said Mr Verneede, clinging to his companion's hand, and working it like a pump handle. "Bless you—bless you, my boy—don't take any more—Go—bless you."

When Leavesley looked back he saw Mr Verneede apparently trying to go home arm-in-arm with a lamp-post.

PART III

CHAPTER I AN ASSIGNATION

So, it would seem from the artless confession of Miss Lambert, that Patience Hancock had only too much reason for her fears: the lilac silk necktie had not been bought for the edification of Bridgewater and the junior clerks.

That the correct James Hancock had fuddled himself with punch, told droll stories, and lent Mr Lambert twenty pounds, were facts so utterly at variance with the known character of that gentleman as to be unbelievable by the people who knew him well.

Not by people well acquainted with human nature, or the fact that a grain of good-fellowship in the human heart exhibits extraordinary and radium-like activity under certain [Pg 142]conditions: the conditions induced by punch and beauty and good-fellowship in others, for instance.

One morning, after the day upon which he had refused to assist Frank Leavesley to "make a fool of himself with a girl," James Hancock arrived at his office at the usual time, in the usual manner, and, nodding to Bridgewater as he had nodded to him every morning for the last thirty years, passed into the inner office and closed the door.

The closing of the door was a new departure; it had generally been left ajar as an indication that Bridgewater might come in whenever he chose, to receive instructions and to consult upon the morning letters.

The expression on Bridgewater's face when he heard the closing of the door was so extraordinarily funny, that one of the younger clerks, who caught a glimpse of it, hastily stuffed his handkerchief into his mouth and choked silently behind the lid of his desk.

James Hancock was seated at his desk. On it lay an envelope addressed in a lady's handwriting; he covered the envelope with a piece of blotting paper as Bridgewater entered.

"Oh, bother Purvis! Tell him to call to-morrow, his affair will wait; tell him the deed is not drawn and to come again to-morrow."

"If he won't," said Mr Hancock with some acerbity, "tell him to go to the devil. I don't want his business especially—let him find some one else. Now see here, about these letters."

He went into the morning letters, dictating[Pg 144] replies to the more important ones and leaving the rest to the discretion of his clerk.

"And, Bridgewater," said Mr Hancock, as the senior clerk turned to depart, "I am expecting a lady to call here at half-past ten or quarter to eleven: show her in, it's Miss Lambert."

"You have had no word from Mr Charles Bevan, sir, since he called the other day?"

"Not a word. He is a very hot-headed young man; he inherits the Bevan temper, the Bevan temper," reiterated James Hancock in a reflective tone, tapping his snuff-box and taking a leisurely pinch. "I remember his father John Bevan at Ipswich, during the election, threatening to horsewhip my father; then when he found he was in the wrong, or rather that his own rascally solicitor was in the wrong, he apologised very handsomely and came to us. The family affairs have been in our hands ever since, as you know, and, though I say it myself, they could not have been in better."

"May I ask, Mr James, how affairs are with the Lamberts?—a sweetly pretty young lady is Miss Lambert, and so nice spoken."

"The Lamberts' affairs seem very much involved; but you know, Bridgewater, I have[Pg 145] nothing to do with their affairs. I called to see Mr Lambert purely as a friend. It would be very unprofessional to call otherwise. D——n it!" suddenly broke out old Hancock, as if some one had pricked him with a pin, "a man is not always a business man. I'm getting on in life. I have money enough and to spare. I've done pretty much as I liked all my life, and I'll do so to the end; yes, and I'd break all the laws of professional etiquette one after the other to-morrow if I chose."

Bridgewater's amazed face was the only amazed part of his anatomy; he was used to these occasional petulant outbursts, and he looked on them with equanimity.

Hancock had been threatening to retire from business for the last ten years, to retire from business and buy a country place and breed horses. No one knew so well as Bridgewater the impossibility of this and the extent to which his master was bound up in his business—the business was his life.

He retired, mumbling something that sounded like an assent, and going to his desk put the letters in order.

Mr Hancock, left to himself, took a letter from his breast-pocket. It was addressed in a large careless hand to

"I'll be hanged if it's simpler," grumbled James Hancock, as he returned the letter to his pocket. "Why in the name of all that's sacred couldn't she have let me call?—the clerks will talk so. No matter, let them—I don't care."

Mr Hancock might have thought that Spring herself stood before him in the open doorway, such a pleasing and perfect vision did Miss Lambert make. She was attired in a chip hat, and a dress of something light in texture and lilac in colour, and, from the vivacity of her manner and the general sprightliness of[Pg 147] her appearance, seemed bent upon a day of pleasure.

"I'm so awfully sorry to be so soon," said Miss Lambert. "It's only twenty minutes past ten; the clocks have all gone wrong at home. James broke out again yesterday; he went out and took far, far too much; isn't it dreadful? I don't know what we are to do with him, and he wound up the clocks last night, and I believe he has broken them all, at least they won't go. Father has gone away again; he is down in Sussex paying a visit to a Miss Pursehouse, we met her in Paris. She asked me to come too, but I had to refuse because my dressmaker—I mean, Susannah couldn't be left by herself, she smashes things so. She fell on the kitchen stairs this morning, bringing the breakfast things up—are you busy? and are you sure I'm not bothering you or interfering with clients and things? I arrived here really at ten minutes past ten, and walked up and down outside till people began to stare at me, so I came in."

"Not a bit busy," said Mr Hancock; "delighted you've come so early. Is that chair comfortable?"

"No, no; this is a delightful chair. Who is that nice old man who showed me in?"

"Bridgewater, my chief clerk. Yes, he is a very good sort of man Bridgewater; he's been with us now a number of years."

"I like him, because he always smiles at me and looks so friendly and so funny. He's the kind of man one feels one would like to knit something for; a—muffler or mittens. I will, next Christmas, if he wouldn't be offended."

"Offended! Good heavens, no, he'd be delighted—perfectly delighted, I'm sure, perfectly. Come in!"

"A telegram, sir," spoke Bridgewater's voice. He always "sir'd" his master in the presence of strangers.

"Excuse me," said Mr Hancock, putting on his glasses and opening the telegram. He read it carefully, frowned, then smiled, and handed it to Fanny.

"I relinquish fishing-rights. Make the best terms with Lambert you can.—Bevan."

"Isn't it nice of him?" she said without evincing any surprise; "he told me he would when he called."

"Why, he called—didn't I tell you?—oh no, I forgot—he called, and he was awfully nice. Quite the nicest man I've met for a long time. He stayed to luncheon and tea and supper."

"I would rather this had not happened," said Mr Hancock in a slightly pained voice. "Mr Bevan is a gentleman for whom I have great respect, but considering the absence of your father, the absence of a host—er—er—conventionalities, um——"

"Oh, he didn't seem to mind," said Fanny; "he knew father was away, and took us just as we were. He's awfully rich, I suppose, but he was just as pleasant as if he were poor—came marketing and carried the basket; and, I declare to goodness, if I had known we had such a jolly cousin before, I'd have gone and hunted him up myself in the—'Albany,' isn't it?"

"Mr Bevan lives in the 'Albany,'" said the lawyer. "It is a bachelors' residence, and scarcely a place—scarcely a place for a—er—lady to call—no, scarcely a place for a lady to call. However, what's done is done, and we must make the best of it."

"If I had only thought," said Fanny, who had not been listening to the humming and hawing of Mr Hancock, "I'd have asked him to come with us to-day. Gracious! it's just eleven. Shall we go?"

CHAPTER II THE EMOTIONS OF MR BRIDGEWATER

Mr Bridgewater's emotions, when he saw his principal following the pretty Miss Lambert, were mixed.

He saw through the whole thing at once: she had come by appointment, and they were going somewhere together.

Now, on the day when he had called to[Pg 151] lunch with Patience Hancock, and look over the lease of the Peckham House, the Peckham House had not been once mentioned; the whole conversation, conducted chiefly by Miss Hancock, concerned the welfare of her brother. She hinted at certain news, supposed to have been received by her, that a designing woman had her eye on her treasure; she implored her listener to let her know if he saw any indication of the truth of these reports. "For you know, Bridgewater," said she, indicating that the decanter was at his side, and that he might help himself to his third glass of port, "there is no fool like an old fool," to which axiom Bridgewater giggled assent.

He promised to keep a "sharp look-out," and inform her of what he saw from time to time. And it did not require a very sharp look-out to see what he saw this morning.

As we have indicated, his emotions were mixed. Fanny's face, her "sweetly pretty face," appealed to him; that she had fascinated Mr James, he felt sure; that he ought instantly to inform Miss Hancock he felt certain; that he had a lot of important letters to write and business to transact with Mr Purvis and Mr[Pg 152] Isaacs were facts. Between these facts and these fancies the old man sat scratching his head with the stump of his pen, staring at the letters before him, and pretending to be busy. Born in the age of valentines and sentiment, he had carried along with him through life a "feeling" for the other sex; to be frank, the feeling was compounded mainly of shyness, but not altogether. I doubt if there lives a man in whose life's history there exists not a woman in some form or other, either living and active in the present, or dead and a memory—a leaf in amber.

In old Bridgewater's brain there lived, keeping company with other futilities of youth, a girl. The winters and the springs of forty-five years had left her just the same, red-cheeked and buxom, commonplace, pretty, with an undecided mouth, and a crinoline. As he sat cogitating, this old mental daguerreotype took on fresh colours. He saw the sunlight on a certain street in Hoxton, and heard the tinkle of a piano, long gone to limbo, playing a tune that memory had in some mysterious way bound up with the perfume of wall-flowers.

He remembered a Christmas card that pulled[Pg 153] out like a concertina: a shocking production of art which gave a vista of a garden in filigree paper leading to a house.

A feeling of tenderness possessed him. Why should he move in a matter that did not concern him? He determined to remain neutral, and, with the object of dismissing the matter from his mind, turned to his letters.

But this kindly, though inferior being was dominated by a strong and active intelligence, and that intelligence existed in the brain of a woman.

Whilst he made notes and dictated to a clerk, this alien intelligence was voicing its commands in the sub-conscious portions of his brain. He began to hesitate in his dictation and to shuffle his feet, to pause and to dictate nonsense. Then rising and taking his hat, he asked Mr Wolf, his second in command, to take charge, as he had business which would keep him away for half an hour—and made for the door. In Southampton Row he walked twenty yards, retraced his steps, paused, blew his nose in a huge bandana handkerchief, and then, travelling as if driven by clockwork well wound up, he made for Gordon Square.

The servant said that Miss Hancock was[Pg 154] dressing to go out, and invited him into the cave-like dining-room. She then closed the door and left him to the tender mercies of the place.

Decision was not the most noteworthy characteristic of Mr Bridgewater, nor tact. He stood, consulting the clock on the mantelpiece, yet, had you asked him, he could not have told you the time. Having come into the place of his own volition he was now endeavouring to get up volition enough to enable him to leave.

"Well, Bridgewater?" said a voice. The old man turned. Miss Hancock, dressed for going out, stood before him.

"Why, I declare, Miss Patience!" said Bridgewater, as if the woman before him was the very last person on earth he expected to see.

"You have found me just in time, for I was going out. I am in a hurry, so I won't ask you to sit down. Can I do anything for you?"

"I am afraid—I am afraid, Miss Patience, there is—well—not to put too fine a point upon it—a lady."

"You've said that before—what lady, and what about her?" The recollection of Leavesley's words shot up in her brain.

"Dear me, dear me! I wish I hadn't spoken now. I'm sure it's nothing wrong. I think, very possibly, I have been mistaken."

"John Bridgewater," said Miss Hancock, "you have known me from my childhood, you know I hate shuffling, come to the point—there is a lady—well, I have known it all along, so you need not be afraid to speak. Just tell me all you know. You are very well aware that no one cares for Mr James as much as I do. You are very well aware that some men need protecting. You know very well there is no better-hearted man in the world than my brother."

"And you know very well that he is just the man to fall a victim to a designing woman. Think for a moment. What would[Pg 156] a woman see in a man of his age, except his money."

"Very true; though I'm sure, Miss Patience, no man would make a better husband for a woman than Mr James."

"Oh, don't talk nonsense! When a man arrives at his age, he is too old to be made into a husband, but he is not too old to be made into a fool. Now tell me all you know about this affair. First of all, what is the—person's name?"

"The person I suspect, Miss Patience, though indeed my suspicions may be wrong, is a Miss Lambert."

"Miss Fanny Lambert called some time ago on Mr James. She called in distress about the action. Mr James interviewed her,[Pg 157] and discovered that her father was in a very bad way, financially speaking. He took pity on them——"

"——and called at Highgate to see Mr Lambert. He became very friendly with Mr Lambert. Then Miss Fanny Lambert called again."

"I repeat," said Miss Hancock, speaking as an examiner might speak to a candidate, "I repeat, what did she call for? You surely must have some inkling."

"He hasn't come back; he has gone for the day—told me to take charge of the office."

"You mean they went out together like that and you did not follow them to see where they went?"

"How could you—yes, that's just it. How could you, when you had such a chance, let it slip through your fingers?"

"The office—why, you have left the office to come round here. If you could leave it to come here, surely you could have left it for a more important purpose. Well, you may take this from me: soon there will be no office to leave. It's quite possible that if Mr James makes a fool of himself, he'll leave business and do what he's always threatening to do—go in for farming. When a man once begins making a fool of himself, he goes on doing so, the appetite comes with eating. Well, you had better go back to the[Pg 159] office and remember this for your own sake, for my sake, for Mr James' sake, keep your eyes open. If you get another chance, follow them."

Bridgewater left the house walking in a very depressed manner. In Oxford Street he entered a bar and had a glass of sherry and a biscuit. As he left the bar, who should he see but James Hancock—James Hancock, and Fanny side by side. They were looking in at a shop window.

CHAPTER III AN OLD MAN'S OUTING

On leaving the office, the happy thought had occurred to Fanny of telegraphing at once to her father apprising him of Charles Bevan's decision. Accordingly they sought the nearest telegraph office, where Miss Lambert indited the following despatch:—

"Oh yes," replied Fanny, suddenly remembering that her connection with the matter ought to be kept dark. "Put Hancock."

Then they sought Oxford Street, where Fanny remembered that she had some shopping to do.

"I won't be a minute," she said, pausing before a draper's. "Will you come in, or wait outside?"

It was an unfortunate shop for a man to wait before: there was nothing in the windows but lingerie; the shop on the left of it was a bonnet shop, and the establishment on the right was a bar.

So he had to wait, standing on the kerbstone, in full view of mankind. In two minutes three men passed who knew him, and in the middle of the fourth minute old Sir Henry Tempest, one of his best clients, who was driving by in a hansom, stopped, got out and button-holed him.

"Just the man I want to see, what a piece of luck! I was going to your office. See here,[Pg 161] that d——d scamp of a Sawyer has sent me in a bill for sixteen pounds—sixteen pounds for those repairs I spoke to you about. Why! I'd have got 'em done for six if he had left them to me. But jump into the cab, and come and have luncheon, and we can talk things over."

"I can't," said Mr Hancock, "I am waiting for a lady—my sister, she has just gone into that shop. I'll tell you, I will see you, any time you like, to-morrow."

"Well, I suppose that must do. But sixteen pounds!—people seem to think I am made of money. I tell you what, Hancock, the great art in getting through life is to make yourself out a poor man—go about in an old coat and hat; you are just as comfortable, and you are not pestered by every beggar and beast that wants money."

"Decidedly, decidedly—I think you are right," said his listener, standing now on one foot, now on the other.

"Once you get the reputation of being rich you are ruined—what's the matter with you?"

"Well, don't mind what he says; try my remedy. Gout, my dear sir, is incurable with drugs, I've tried 'em. You try hot air baths and vegetarianism; it cured me. I don't say a strictly vegetarian diet, but just as little meat as you can take. I get it myself. Hancock, we're not so young as we were, and the wine and women of our youth revisit us; yes, the wine and women——"

The cabman who drove Sir Henry Tempest that day from Oxford Street to the Raleigh Club has not yet solved the problem as to "what the old gent, was laughing about."

"I'm awfully sorry to have kept you such a time," said Fanny, as they wandered away, "but those shopmen are so stupid. Who was that nice-looking old gentleman you were talking to?"

"That was Sir Henry Tempest; but he never struck me as being especially nice-looking. He is not a bad man in his way—but a bore; yes, very decidedly a bore."

"Come here," said Fanny, from whose facile mind the charms of Sir Henry Tempest had[Pg 163] vanished—"Come here, and I will buy you something." She turned to a jeweller's shop.

"Oh, I don't mean really to buy you something, I only mean make belief—window-shopping, you know. I often go out by myself and buy heaps of things like that, watches and carriages, and all sorts of things. I enjoy it just as much as if I were buying them really; more, I think, for I don't get tired of them. Do you know that when I want a thing and get it I don't want it any more? I often get married like that."

"Window-shopping. I see sometimes such a nice-looking man in the street or the park, then I marry him and he's ever so nice; but if I married him really I'm sure I'd hate him, or at least be tired of him in a day or two. Now, see here! I will buy you—let me see—let me see—that!" She pointed suddenly to an atrocious carbuncle scarf-pin. "That, and that watch with the long hand that goes hopping round. You can have the whole window," said Fanny, suddenly becoming[Pg 164] lavishly generous. "But the scarf-pin would suit you, and the watch would be useful for—for—well, it looks like a business man's watch."

"Of course, if you like. But you're not old, you're quite young; at least you're just as jolly as if you were. But come, or we will be late for the Zoo."

"Wait," said Mr Hancock; "there is lots of time for the Zoo. Now look at the window and buy yourself a present."

"I'll buy that," said Miss Lambert promptly, pointing to a little watch crusted with brilliants.

Mr Hancock noted the watch and the name and number of the shop, and they passed on.

Mr Hancock found that progress with such a companion in Oxford Street was a slow affair. The extraordinary fascination exercised by the shops upon his charge astonished him; everything seemed to interest her, even churns. The normal state of her brain seemed only comparable to that of a person's who is recovering from an illness.

"Now," said Mr Hancock, pausing and resting on his umbrella, "I am rather perplexed."

"Luncheon. If we take a cab to the Zoo now, we will have to lunch there or in the neighbourhood. I do not know whether they provide luncheons at the Zoo or whether there is even a refreshment room there."

"You can buy buns," said Fanny; "at least, I have a dim recollection of buns when I was there last. We bought them for the bears; but whether they were meant for people to eat, or only made on purpose for the animals, I don't know."

"Just so. I think we had better defer our visit till after luncheon; but, meanwhile, what shall we do? It is now ten minutes past twelve; we cannot possibly lunch till one. Shall we explore the Museum?"

"Oh! not the Museum," said Fanny; "it always takes my appetite away. I suppose it's the mummies. I'll tell you what, we will go and have ices in that café over there."

They crossed to the Vienna Café, and seated themselves at a little marble table.

"Father and I come here often," said Fanny, "when we are in this part of the town; we[Pg 166] know every one here." She bowed and smiled to the lady who sits in the little glass counting house, who smiled and bowed in return. "That was Hermann—the man who went for our ices; and that's Fritz, the waiter, over there, with the bald head." She caught Fritz's eye, who smiled and bowed. "I don't see Henri—I suppose he's married; he told us he was going to get married the last time we were here, to a girl who keeps the accounts in a café in Soho, somewhere, and I promised him to send them a wedding present. He was such a nice man, like a Count in disguise; you know the sort of looking man I mean. What shall I send him?"

James Hancock ran over all the wedding presents he could remember in his mind; he thought of clocks, candlesticks, silver-plated mustard pots.

She rose and approached the lady at the counting-house; a brisk conversation ensued, the lady speaking much with her hands and eyes, which she raised alternately to heaven.

Fanny came back looking sorrowful. "He's[Pg 167] gone," she said; "I never could have thought it!"

"Yes, but he went with the spoons and forks and things, and there was no girl at Soho."

"Never trust those plausible gentlemen who look like Italian Counts," said James Hancock, not entirely displeased with the melodramatic news.

"Whom is one to trust?" asked Fanny, with the air of a woman whose life's illusion is shattered.

James Hancock couldn't quite say. "Trust me," rose to his lips, but the sentiment was not uttered, partly because it would have been too previous, and partly because Hermann had just placed before him an enormous ice-cream.

"It's too hot—ah, um—I mean it's too cold," said Mr Hancock, waking from a moment's reverie. "That is to say, I scarcely ever eat ices." The fact that a sweet vanilla ice was simply food and drink to the gout was a dietetic truism he did not care to utter.

"If," said Fanny, with the air of a mother[Pg 168] speaking to her child, "if you don't eat your ice I will never take you shopping with me again. Please eat it, I feel so greedy eating alone."

"I hope I'll never grow old," sighed Miss Lambert, as Hermann approached them with a huge dish of fantastic-looking cakes—cakes crusted with sugar and chocolate, Moscow Gâteaux simply sodden with rum, and Merangues filled with cream rich as Devonshire could make it.

"We must all grow old," said Hancock, staring with ghastly eyes at these atrocities. "But why do you specially fear age? Age has its beauties, it must come to us all."

"I don't want to grow old," said his companion, "because then I would not care for sweets any more. Father says the older he grows the less he cares for sweets, and that every one loses their sweet tooth at fifty. I hope I'll never lose mine; if I do I'll—get a false one."

Mr Hancock leisurely helped himself to one of the largest and sweetest-looking of the specimens of "Italian confectionery" before[Pg 169] him; Fanny helped herself to its twin, and there was silence for a moment.

It is strange that whilst a man may admit his age to a woman he cares for, by word of mouth, he will do much before he admits it by his actions.

CHAPTER IV A MEETING

Of all places in the world the Zoo is, perhaps, the most uninspiring to your diffident lover, but Mr Hancock was fond of zoology. It was a mild sort of hobby which he cultivated in his few leisure moments, and he was not displeased to air his knowledge before his pretty friend, and to show her that he had a taste for things other than forensic. Accordingly in the Bird House he began to show off. This was a mistake. If you have a hobby, conceal it till after marriage. The man with a hobby, once he lets himself loose upon his pet subject or occupation, always bores. He is like a man in drink, he does not know the extent of his own stupidity;[Pg 170] lost in his own paradise he is unconscious of the trouble and weariness he is inflicting on the unfortunates who happen to be his companions—unlike a man in drink, he is rarely amusing.

There were birds with legs without end, and birds apparently with no legs at all, nutcracker-billed birds, birds without tails, and things that seemed simply tails without birds.

Before a long-tailed bird that bore a dim resemblance to himself, Mr Hancock paused and began to instruct his companion. When he had bored her sufficiently they passed to the great Ape House, and from there to the Monkey House.

They had paused to consider the Dog-faced Ape, when Fanny, whose eyes were wandering about the place, gave a little start and plucked her companion by the sleeve. "Look," she said, "there's old Mr Bridgewater!"

"Why! God bless my soul, so it is!" cried Hancock. "What the—what the—what the——"

CHAPTER V THE ADVENTURES OF BRIDGEWATER

The appearance of shame and conscious guilt that suffused the face and person of Bridgewater caused the wild idea to rush through his employer's mind that the old man had, vulgarly speaking, "scooped the till" and was attempting evasion.

Defaulters bound for America or France do not, however, as a rule, take the Monkey House at the Zoo en route, and the practical mind of James Hancock rejected the idea at once, and gripped the truth of the matter. Bridgewater had been following him for the purpose of spying upon him.

When, emerging from the bar, he had perceived his quarry he had followed them at a safe distance. When they went into the Vienna Café he waited; it seemed to him that he waited three hours: it was, in fact, an hour and a quarter. For, having finished her ice[Pg 172] and its accompaniments, Fanny had declared that she was quite ready for luncheon, and had proposed that they should proceed to the meal at once without seeking a new café.

When they came out, Bridgewater took up the pursuit. They got into a hansom: he got into another, and ordered the driver to pursue the first vehicle at a safe distance. He did this from instinct, not as a result of having read Gaboriau, or the "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes."

The long wait, the upset of all his usual ways, and the fact that he had not lunched, coupled with his dread of a hansom—hitherto when he had moved on wheels it had always been on those of a four-wheeler or omnibus—conspired to reduce him mentally to the condition of an over-driven sheep.

They left the part of the town he knew, and passed through streets he knew not of, streets upon streets, and still the first vehicle pursued its way with undiminished speed. He felt now a dim certainty that his employer was going to be married, and now he tried to occupy his scattered wits in attempting to compute what this frightful cab journey would cost.

He alighted a hundred yards from the gates. At the turnstile he paid his shilling and went in, but Fanny and her companion had vanished as completely as if the polar bear had swallowed them up.

He wandered away through the gardens aimlessly, but keeping a sharp look-out. He had never been to the Zoo before, but guessed it was the Zoo because of the animals. The whole adventure had the complexion of a nightmare, a complexion not brightened by the melancholy appearance of the eagles and vultures and the distant roaring and lowing of unknown beasts.

He saw an elephant advancing towards him swinging its trunk like a pendulum; to avoid it he took a path that led to the Fish House. His one desire now was to get out of the gardens and get home. He recognised now that he had made a serious mistake in entering the gardens at all. To have returned at once to Miss Hancock with the information that her brother had simply taken Miss Lambert to the Zoo would have been[Pg 174] the proper and sensible course to have pursued.

Now at any moment he might find himself confronted with the two people he dreaded to meet. What should he say suppose he met them? What could he say? The anguish of this thought drove him from the Fish House, where he had taken temporary refuge. He took a path which ended in an elephant; it was the same elephant he had seen before, but he did not know it. A side path, which he pursued hastily, brought him to the polar bear. Here he asked his way to the nearest gate of a young man and maiden who were gazing at the bear. The young man promptly pointed out a path; he took it, and found himself at the Monkey House.

He took off his hat and mopped his head with his bandana handkerchief. Looking round in bewilderment after this refreshing operation he saw something approaching far worse than an elephant; it was Mr Hancock, and with Mr Hancock, Fanny, making directly for him.

He did not hesitate a moment in doing the worst thing possible; as an animal enters a trap, he entered the Monkey House. He[Pg 175] would have shut and bolted the door behind him had such a proceeding been feasible.

Bridgewater had a horror of monkeys; he had always considered the common organ-grinder's monkey to be the representative of all its kind, and the last production of nature in frightfulness; but here were monkeys of every shape, size, and colour, a symphony of monkeys, each "note" more horrible than the last.

If you have ever studied monkeys and their ways you will know that they have their likes and dislikes just like men. That some people "appeal" to them at first sight, and some people do not. Bridgewater did not. When he saw Fanny entering at the door he retreated to the furthest limits of the place and pretended to be engaged in contemplation of a peculiarly sinister-looking ape, upon which, to judge from its appearance, a schoolboy had been at work with a brushful of blue paint.

The azure and sinister one endured the human's gaze for a few mutterful moments, and then bursting into loud yells flew at the bars and attempted to tear them from their sockets; the mandrills shrieked and chattered,[Pg 176] the lemur added his note, and Bridgewater beat a retreat.

CHAPTER VI A CONFESSION

Mr Hancock, asking Fanny to wait for him for a short time, took Bridgewater by the arm and led him outside.

"Now, Bridgewater, what is the meaning of this? Why have you left the office? Why have you followed me? What earthly reason had you for doing such a thing? Speak out, man—are you dumb?"

"I declare to God, Mr James," said the unhappy Bridgewater, "I had no reason——"

"Drinking!" cried Bridgewater, with what your melodramatist would call a hollow laugh. "Drinking!—oh yes—drinking? No! No!—don't mind me, Mr James. Drinking! One blessed glass of sherry, and not a bite[Pg 177] have I had—waiting two hours and more—following you in a cab—three shillings the fare was—nearly torn in pieces by an ape—following you and hiding in all sorts of places, and then told I've been drinking. Do I look as if I had been drinking, Mr James? Am I given to drinking, Mr James? Have you known me for forty years, Mr James, and have you ever seen me do such a thing? Answer me that, Mr James——"

"Hush, hush!—don't talk so loud," said Hancock, rather alarmed at the old man's hysterical manner. "No, you are the last person to do such a thing, but tell me, all the same, why you followed me."

Bridgewater was dumb. Hungry, thirsty, frightened at being caught spying, startled by elephants and addled by apes as he was, still his manhood revolted at the idea of betraying Patience and sheltering himself at her expense. All the same, he attempted very feminine tactics in endeavouring to evade a direct reply.

"Drinking! I have been in the office, man and boy, this fifty years and more come next Michaelmas; it's fifty-one years, fifty-one years next Michaelmas Day, every day at my place[Pg 178] but Sundays and holidays, year in, year out——"

"Bridgewater," repeated Mr Hancock, "will you answer me the question I just asked you? Why did you follow me to-day?"

"Oh Lord," said Bridgewater, "I wish I had never seen this day! Follow you, Mr James? do you think I followed you for pleasure? Why, the office—God bless my soul! it makes my hair stand on end—no one there but Wolf to take charge, and I have been away hours and hours. It's three o'clock now, and here am I miles and miles away; and I ought to have called at the law courts at 3.20, and there's those bills to file. It seems all like a horrible nightmare, that it does; it seems——"

"I don't want to know what it seems. You have left your duty and come away—for what purpose?"

"Ah well!" said Hancock, speaking not in the least angrily, "I see there is a secret of some sort. I regret that a man in whom I have always placed implicit trust should keep from me a secret that concerns me; evidently—no matter, I am not curious. Yes, it is three o'clock; it might be as well for you to return[Pg 179] and look after things, though it is too late for the law courts now."

This tone and manner completely floored Bridgewater. The fountains of his great deep were broken up, and if Patience Hancock could have seen the damage done to his confidential reservoir, she would have shuddered.

"I'll tell you the truth, Mr James. It's not my fault—she put me to the work. I'll tell you the truth. I've been following you and spying upon you, but it was for your own good, she said——"

"But," roared Hancock, whose face had been slowly crimsoning, or purpling rather, since the mention of his sister's name, "how[Pg 180] the blazes did she know I was going anywhere?"

"When I saw you going out of the office with Miss Lambert I ran round and told her."

"When you saw me going out of the office with Miss Lambert you ran round and told her!" said Hancock, spacing each word and speaking with such a change from fire to ice that his listener shivered. "Oh, this is too good! I pay you a large salary to spy upon me and to run round and tell my sister my doings. Am I mad, or am I dreaming? And what—what—WHAT led you, sir, to leave the office and run round and tell my sister?"

"For God's sake, Mr James, don't talk so loud!" said Bridgewater; "the people are turning round to look at us. I didn't leave the office of my own accord; it was Miss Patience, who said to me, she said, 'Bridgewater, I trust you for your master's sake to let me know if you see him with a lady, for,' she said, 'there is a woman who has designs on him.'"

"Those were her words. So when I saw[Pg 181] you going out with Miss Lambert I ran round and told her."

Mr Hancock had fallen from fury into a thoughtful mood: one of the sharpest brains in London was engaged in unravelling the meaning to get at the inner-meaning of all this.

"My sister came round to the office some time ago asking me to spare you for an hour as she wished for your advice about a lease. That, of course, was all humbug: she wanted you for the purpose of talking about me?"

"Now see here, Bridgewater, cast your memory back. Is this the first time in your life that my sister has invited you to my house in Gordon Square to discuss my welfare?"

Bridgewater assumed the cast of countenance he always assumed when engaged in reckoning.

"That's enough," said Hancock, "don't count. Now tell me, when did she first begin to take you into her confidence—twenty years ago?"

"And twenty years ago it was the same tale: 'Protect my brother from a designing woman.'"

"Why, it was, and that's the truth," said Bridgewater, as if the fact had just been discovered by him.

"And you did your best, told her all about me and my movements, as far as you knew them, and mixed and muddled, and made an ass of yourself and a fool of me——"

"Hold your tongue!—a fool of me. Do you know, John Bridgewater, that you have been aiding and abetting in a conspiracy—a conspiracy unpunishable by law, but still a conspiracy—hold your tongue!—you are innocent of everything but of being a fool; indeed, I ought not to call any man a fool, for I have been a fool myself, and I ought to have seen that the one end and aim of my sister's life was to secure her position as[Pg 183] my keeper, and her tenure of my house. You have shown me at one flash a worm that has crawled through my past, cankering and corroding all it touched. Money, money, money—that is my sister's creed. I am not young, Bridgewater, and it seems to me that if instead of living all these years side by side with this money-grub, I had lived side by side with a wife, my lot would have been a better one. I might have had children, grown-up sons now, daughters—things that make an interest for us in our old age. Between me and all that has come my sister. That woman has a very strong will. I see many things in the past now, ay, twenty years ago, that I can explain. Bridgewater, you have done me a great injury, but you did it for the best, and I forgive you. Half the people in this world are pawns and chess-pieces, moved about by the men and women of intellect who form the other half. If you had possessed eyes to see, you might have seen that the really designing woman against whom I should have been protected, was the woman with whom you leagued yourself—my sister."

The expression on Bridgewater's face was so wonderfully funny that Hancock would have[Pg 184] laughed had he not been in such a serious mood.

"However, what's done is done, and there is no use in crying over spilt milk. You have at least done me a service by your stupidity in following me to-day, for you have shown me the light. Miss Lambert pleases me, and if I choose to make her mistress of my house, instead of my sister, mistress of my house she will be. We will return now to—where I left Miss Lambert, and we will all go home to Gordon Square and have dinner with my sister."

"Nonsense! you need not fear my sister. She is no longer mistress of my house; next week she shall pack bag and baggage. Come."

He turned towards the Monkey House, and Bridgewater followed him, so mazed in his intellect that it would be hard to tell whether monkeys, men, Fanny Lambert, Patience Hancock, or elephants, were uppermost in his brain.

CHAPTER VII IN GORDON SQUARE

It was James Hancock's rule that a dinner should be served every night at Gordon Square, to which he could invite any one, even a city alderman.

On this especial day a dinner, even better than usual, was in prospect. Miss Hancock had a large circle of acquaintances of her own; she belonged to several anti-societies. As before hinted, she was not destitute of a certain kindness of heart, and the counterfoils of her cheque book disclosed not inconsiderable sums subscribed to the Society for the Total Abolition of Vivisection and Kindred Bodies.

To-day she expected to dinner a person, a gentleman of the female persuasion—that is to say, a sort of man. Mr Bulders, the person in question, a member of the Anti-Tobacco League, was a crank of the crankiest description. He wrote letters to the paper on every conceivable subject, and in this way had obtained a dim and unholy sort of[Pg 186] notoriety. Fox hunting was his especial detestation, and his grand hobby was cremation. "Why Fear the Flames?" by Emanuel Bulders, a pamphlet of fifteen pages, privately printed, reposed in Miss Hancock's private bookcase. But Mr Bulders has no place in this story; he is dead and—cremated, let us hope. I shadow him forth as the reason why Miss Hancock was sitting this evening by the drawing-room fireplace, dressed in the dress she assumed when she expected visitors, and engaged in crochet-work.

The clock pointed to half-past six, Bulders was due—over-due, like the Spanish galleon that was destined never to come into port. She had said in her note, "Come early, I wish to talk over the last report of the —— Society, and my brother has little sympathy with such subjects."

Suddenly her trained ear distinguished the sound of her brother's latchkey in the door below. Some women are strangely like dogs in so far as regards the senses of hearing and smell.

Patience Hancock, as she sat by the drawing-room fireplace, could tell that her brother had not entered the house alone. She made out[Pg 187] his voice, and then the voice of Bridgewater. She supposed that James had brought his clerk home to dinner to talk business matters over, as he sometimes did; and she was relapsing from the attitude of strained attention when a sound struck her, hit her, and caused her to drop her crochet-work and rise to her feet.

Almost instantly upon the laughter the door opened, and it seemed to Miss Hancock that a dozen people entered the room.

"This is my sister Patience—Patience, Miss Lambert. We've all come back to dinner. Sit down, Bridgewater. By the way, Patience, there's a letter for you; I took it from the postman at the hall door." He handed the letter; it was from Mr Bulders, excusing himself for not coming to dine, and alleging for reason a sore throat.

Patience extended a frigid hand to Miss Lambert, who just touched it; all the girl's light-heartedness and vivacity had vanished for the moment, Patience Hancock acted upon her like a draught of cold air.

"I think you have heard me mention Miss Lambert's name, Patience. We have been to[Pg 188] the Zoo, the whole three of us. Immensely amusing place the Zoo—makes one feel quite a boy again. Hey, Bridgewater!"

"I hope you enjoyed it," said Miss Hancock in a perfunctory tone, glancing at Fanny, who was seated in a huge rocking-chair, the only really comfortable chair in the room, and then at Bridgewater, who had taken his seat on the ottoman.

"Pretty well, thanks," said Fanny, speaking in a languid tone. She had assumed very much the air of a fine lady all of a sudden: she was not going to be patronised by a solicitor's daughter, and she had divined in Patience Hancock an enemy. "The Zoo is very much like the world: there is much to laugh at and much to endure. Taken as a whole, it is not an unmixed blessing."

James Hancock opened his mouth at these sage utterances, and then shut it again and turned away to smile. Bridgewater had the bad manners to scratch his head. Miss Hancock said, "Indeed?"

"I think the world is exactly what we choose to make it," said Patience Hancock, quoting Bulders.

"You think that?" said Fanny, suddenly forgetting her fine lady languors. "Well, I wish some one would show me how to make the world just as I'd choose to make it. Oh, it would be such a world—no poor people, and no rain, and no misery, and no debts."

"You mean no debtors," said Patience, seizing her opportunity. "It is the debtors that make debts, just as it is the drunken people who make drunkenness."

"Yes, I suppose it is," said Fanny, suddenly abandoning her argumentative tone for one of reverie. "It's the people in the world that make it so horrid and so nice."

"That's exactly it," said Hancock, who was standing on the hearthrug listening to these banalities of thought, and contemplating Bridgewater. "Miss Lambert is a true philosopher. It is the people who make the world what it is; could we banish the meddlers and spies and traitors"—he looked fixedly at his sister—"the world would not be an unpleasant place to live in."

"I hate spies," said Fanny, totally unconscious of the delicate ground she was stepping upon—"people who poke about into other people's business, and open letters, and that sort of[Pg 190] thing." Miss Hancock flushed scarlet, and her brother noted the fact. "James opens letters, I caught him."

"He's our butler," said Fanny, looking imploringly at Mr Hancock as if to say "Don't tell."

Miss Hancock rose. "May I show you to my room? you would like to remove your hat."

The dinner was not a success, intellectually speaking. James Hancock's temper half broke down over the soles, the sauce was not to his liking; the sweet cakes, ices, and other horrors he had consumed during the day had induced a mild attack of dyspepsia. His nose was red, and he knew it; and, worst of all, faint twinges of gout made themselves felt. His right great toe was saying to him, "Wait till you see what you'll have to-morrow." Then Boffins, the old butler, tripped on the cat, broke a dish, and James Hancock's temper flew out.

I have described James Hancock badly, if you have not perceived that he was a man with a temper. The evil demons in the Merangues and ices, the irritation caused by Bridgewater's confession, the provoking [Pg 191]calmness of his sister, the uric acid in his blood, and the smash of the broken dish, all combined of a sudden and were too much for him.

"Damn that cat!" he cried. "Cats, cats, cats! How often have I told you"—to his sister—"that I will not have my house filled with those sneaking, prowling beasts? Chase her out; where is she?"

"I won't have cats in my house," said Mr James, proceeding with his dinner and feeling rather ashamed of his outburst. "Dear Lord, Patience, what do you call this thing?"

"The cook," said Patience, "calls it, I believe, a vol-au-vent. What is wrong with it?"

"What is right with it, you mean. Don't touch it, Miss Lambert, unless you wish to have a nightmare."

"I think it's delicious," said Fanny, "and I don't mind nightmares. They're rather fun—when they are over, and you wake up and find yourself safe in bed."

"Well, you'll have some fun to-night," grunted James. "The person who cooked[Pg 192] this atrocity ought to be made sleep with the person who eats it."

"Boffins, fill Miss Lambert's glass—let's change the subject. This champagne is abominably iced—give me some Burgundy."

"Surely you remember the gout—the frightful attack you had last time after Burgundy."

"Gout? I suppose you mean Arthritic Rheumatism? But perhaps you are right, and Dr Garrod was wrong—let us call it gout. Fill up the glass, Boffins. Bridgewater, try some Burgundy, and see if it affects your gout. Boffins, that cat's in the room, I hear it purring. I hear it, I tell you, sir! where is the beast?"

The beast, as if in answer, poked its head from under the table-cloth—it was in Miss Lambert's lap.

"Your father has known my brother some time?" said Miss Hancock, when the ladies found themselves alone in the drawing-room after dinner.

"Oh yes, some time now," said Fanny. "They met over some law business. Father had a dispute with Mr Bevan of Highshot Towers, the place adjoining ours, you know, down in Buckinghamshire, and Mr Hancock was very kind—he arbitrated."

"Is that so? I'm sure I don't know, I never trouble myself about law business or money matters. I leave all that to father."

They talked on various matters, and before Miss Lambert had been packed into a specially chartered four-wheeler and driven home with Bridgewater on the box beside the driver as chaperone, Miss Hancock had come to form ideas about Miss Lambert such as she had never formed about any other young lady. Ideas the tenor of which you will perceive later on.

PART IV

CHAPTER I "THE ROOST"

Mr Bevan, since his visit to Highgate, dreamed often at nights of monstrous asparagus beds, and his friends and acquaintances noticed that he seemed distrait.

The fact was the mind of this orderly and precise individual had received a shock; his world of thought had tilted somewhat, owing to a slight shifting of the poles, and regions hitherto in darkness were touched with sun.

Go where he would a voice pursued him, turn where he would, a face. Wild impulses to jump into a cab and drive to "The Laurels," Highgate, as swiftly as cab could take him were subdued and conquered. Perhaps it would be happier for some of us if we used less reason in steering our way through life. Impulsive people are often sneered at, yet,[Pg 195] I dare say that an impulse acted upon will as often make a man's life as mar it.

Mr Bevan was not an impulsive man. It was not for some days after his visit to "The Laurels" that he carried out his determination to stop the action once for all. He did not return to "The Laurels." He was engaged and a man of honour, and as such he determined to fly from temptation. Accordingly one bright morning he despatched a wire intimating his arrival by the 3.50 at Ditchingham, having sent which he flung himself into a hansom and drove to Charing Cross, followed by another hansom containing Strutt, two portmanteaux, a hunting kit-bag and a bundle of fishing-rods. An extraordinary accident happened to the train he travelled by; it arrived at Paddock Wood only three minutes late, making up for this deficiency, however, by crawling into Ditchingham at 4.10.

On the Ditchingham platform stood two girls. One tall, pale, and decidedly good-looking despite the pince-nez she wore; the other short and rather stout, and rather pretty.

The tall girl was Miss Pursehouse; the short was Lulu Morgan, Miss Pursehouse's companion, an American.

Pamela Pursehouse at this stage of her career was verging on thirty, the only daughter of the late John Pursehouse of Birmingham, and an orphan. She was exceedingly rich.

Some months ago she had met Bevan on board Sir Charles Napier's yacht; they had spent a fortnight cruising about the Balearic Islands and the Riff coast of Morocco, had been sea-sick together, and bored together, and finally had, one moonlight night, become engaged. It was a cold-blooded affair despite the moonlight, and they harboured no illusions one of the other, and no doubts.

Pamela had a mind of her own. She had attended classes at Mason's College and had quite a knowledge of Natural History; she also had an interest in the ways of the working classes, and had written a paper to prove that, with economy, a man, his wife and five children, could live on an income of eleven shillings a week, and put by sixpence for a rainy day; to disprove which she was eternally helping the cottagers round about with doles of tea on a liberal scale, coal in the winter, and wine in sickness. When the rainy day came she supplied the sixpence, which ought to have been in the savings bank, for she was a girl[Pg 197] who found her heart when she forgot her head.

At Marseilles Lady Napier, Pamela, Lulu, and Charles Bevan had left the yacht and travelled together to Paris; there, after a couple of days, he had departed for London to look after his affairs. Pamela had remained in Paris, where, through Lady Napier, she had the entrée of the best society, and had met many people, including the Lamberts. She had indeed only returned to England a short time ago.

Outside the station stood a governess cart and the omnibus of the hotel. Into the governess cart bundled the lovers and Lulu, into the omnibus Strutt and the luggage. Pamela took the reins and the hog-maned pony started.

"Hot, isn't it?" said Charles, tilting his hat over his eyes, and envying Strutt in the cool shelter of the omnibus.

"Think so?" said Pamela. "It's July, you know. Why do men dress always in summer in such heavy clothes? Seems to me women are much more sensible in the matter of dress. Now if you were dressed as I am, instead of in that Harris tweed, you wouldn't feel the heat at all."

Charles tried to imagine himself in a chip hat and lilac cotton gown, and failed.

"You must have been fried in that train," said Lulu, staring at him with a pair of large blue eyes, eyes that never seemed to shut.

Rookhurst stands on a hill; it is a village composed of gentlemen's houses. Country "seats" radiate from it to a distance of some three miles. Three acres and a house constitute a "seat."

The conservatism of the old Japanese aristocracy pales when considered beside the conservatism of Rookhurst. In this microcosm there are as many circles as in the Inferno of Dante, and the circles are nearly as painful to contemplate.

When Pamela Pursehouse rented "The Roost" and took up residence there she came unknown and untrumpeted. The parson and several curious old ladies called upon her, but the seat-holders held aloof, she was not received. Mrs D'Arcy-Jones—Rookhurst is full of people with double-barrelled names, those double-barrelled names in which the[Pg 199] second barrel is of inferior metal—Mrs D'Arcy-Jones discovered that Pamela's father was of Birmingham. Mrs D'Arcy-Johnson found out that he was in trade, and Mrs D'Arcy Somebody-else that her mother's maiden name was Jenkins. There was much turning up of noses when poor Pamela's name was mentioned, till one fine day when all the turned-up noses were suddenly turned down by the arrival at "The Roost" of the Duchess of Aviedale, her footman, her maid, her dog, and her companion. Then there was a rush. People flung decency to the winds in their haste to know the tradesman's daughter and incidentally get a lick at the Duchess's boots. But to all callers Pamela was not at home; she had even the rudeness not to return their visits.

The snobs, beaten back, retired, feeling very much like damaged goods, and Pamela was left in peace. Her aunt, Miss Jenkins, a sweet-faced and perfectly inane old lady, lived with her and kept house, and Pamela, protected by her wing, had all sorts of extraordinary people to visit her. Sandyman, M.P., the Labour representative, came down for a week-end once, and smoked shag tobacco[Pg 200] in the dining-room and wandered about the village on Sunday in a Keir-Hardy cap; he also attended the tin chapel, had a quart of beer at the village pub, and did other disgraceful things which were all duly reported and set down to Pamela's account in the D'Arcy-Jones-Johnson notebook.

Pamela liked men, that is to say, men who were original and interesting; yet she had engaged herself to the most unoriginal man in England: a fact for which there is no accounting, save on the hypothesis that she was a woman.

The governess cart having climbed a long, long hill, the hog-maned pony took to himself wings, and presently, in a cloud of dust, halted.

"The Roost," though a fairly large house, did not boast a carriage-drive. A gate in a high hedge led to a path through a rose-garden which was worth all the carriage-drives in existence.

"We have several people staying with us, did I tell you?" said Pamela as she led the way. "Hamilton-Cox, the man who wrote the 'Pillar of Salt,' and Wilson—Professor Wilson of Oxford, and—but come on, and I'll introduce you."

They entered a pleasant hall. The perfume of cigars and the sound of a man's laughter came from a half-open door on the right. Pamela made for it, and as Charles Bevan followed he heard a rich Irish voice. "My friend Stacey, of Castle Stacey, raised one four foot broad across the face; such a sunflower was never seen by mortal man, I measured it with my own hands—four foot——"

Bevan suddenly found himself before a man, an immense, good-looking, priestly-faced man, in his shirt-sleeves, a cigar in his mouth, and a billiard cue in his hand.

"Why, sure to goodness it's not my cousin, Charles Bevan of the 'Albany'!" cried the big man, effusively clasping the hand of Charles and gazing at him with the astonished and joyous expression of a man who meets a dear and long-lost brother.

"But, sure to goodness," said the big man, dropping Charles' hand and scratching his head with a puzzled air, then he turned on his heel: "Where's my coat?" He found his[Pg 202] coat and took from it a pocket-book, from the pocket-book a telegram and a sheet of paper, whilst Pamela turned to Professor Wilson and the novelist.

"I got that from your lawyer, Mr Bevan," said he, "some days ago." Charles read:

"Yes," said Charles rather stiffly, "I stopped the action, but Hancock seems to have—been drinking."

"And there's the reply I was going to send, only I forgot it," said George Lambert, handing the copy of a telegram to Charles.

"Tell Bevan I relinquish all fishing rights. Wish to be friends.—George Lambert."

"It is very generous of you," said Charles, really touched. "But I can't have it, we'll divide the rights."

"Come into the garden, my boy," said George, who had now resumed his coat, linking his arm in that of Charles and leading him out through the open French window, into the rose-scented garden, "and let's talk things over. It's the pity of the world we weren't always friends. Damn the fish stream and all the fish in it! I wish they'd been boiled before[Pg 203] they were spawned. What's the good of fighting? Isn't life too short for fighting and divisions? Sure, there's a rose as big as a red cabbage, but you should see the roses at my house in Highgate—and where did you meet Miss Pursehouse?"

"We met her in Paris, Fanny—that's my daughter—and me met her in Paris. Fanny doesn't care for her much, and wouldn't come with me; but there's never a woman in the world that really cares for another woman, unless the other woman is as ugly as sin and a hundred. There's a melon house for you, but you should see my melon houses in Highgate, the one's I am going to have built by Arthur Lawrence of Cockspur Street; he's made a speciality of glass, but he charges cruel. It's the passion of my life, a garden."

He leaned over the gate leading to the kitchen-garden, and whistled an old Irish hunting song softly to himself as he contemplated the cabbages and peas. Charles lit a cigar. He was a fine figure of a man, this Lambert; one of those large natures in[Pg 204] a large frame that dwarf other individualities when brought in contact with them. Hamilton Cox would pass in a crowd, and Professor Wilson was not unimpressive, but beside George Lambert, Hamilton-Cox looked a shrimp, and the Oxford professor somewhat shrivelled.

"It's the passion of my life," reiterated Fanny Lambert's father, addressing the cabbages, the marrow fat peas, Charles Bevan, and the distant woods of Sussex. "And if I'd stuck to it and left horses alone, a richer man I'd have been this day."

"I say," said Charles, who had been plunged in meditation, "why did Hancock telegraph to you, I wonder? It wasn't exactly solicitors' etiquette; the proper course, I think, would have been to communicate with your lawyers, Messrs Sykes and Fagan."

"Faith," he said, "I suppose he did communicate with them, and they answered that they weren't my lawyers any more. I've fought with them, and that's a fact; and now that we're friends, you and me, I've an idea of transferring my business to Hancock.[Pg 205] I've one or two little suits pending; and I'm not sure but one of them won't be with Fagan for the names I called him in his own office before his own clerks. 'I'll have you indicted for slander,' he says. 'Slander!' said I, 'slander, you old clothes-bag, have me up for slander, and I'll beat the dust out of your miserable reputation in any court in the kingdom, ye old wandering-Jew-come-to-roost,' and with that I left the office, and never will I set my foot in it again."

"Never again. He's a red Jew—always beware of red Jews; black Jews are bad, but red Jews are the devil—bad luck to them! If I'd left Jews alone, a richer man I'd have been this day. Who's that ringing a bell? Oh, it's the afternoon tea-bell: let's go in and talk to the old professor and Miss Pursehouse."

They did not go in, for the Professor and Miss Pursehouse, Lulu Morgan, and the author of the "Pillar of Salt" were having tea on the lawn. There were few places pleasanter than the lawn of "The Roost," especially on this golden and peaceful summer's evening, through which the warm south wind[Pg 206] brought the cawing of rooks from distant elm trees.

"Have you two finished your business?" asked Pamela, addressing Charles; "if so, sit down and tell me all the news. I got your note. So sorry you were bored by old Mr—Blundell—was it?—at the club. Mr Blundell is a rose-bore, it seems," turning to Hamilton Cox; "he is mad on roses."

"Blundell! what an excellent name for a bore!" said the "Pillar of Salt" man dreamily, closing his eyes. "I can see him, stout and red-faced and——"

"Matter of fact, old Blundell isn't stout," cut in Charles, to whom Hamilton-Cox did not appeal. "He's thin and white."

"Ah! I had connected him with the idea of red roses. Why is it that in thinking of roses one always figures them red?"

"Well," put in Pamela, "when you escaped from Mr Blundell what did you do with yourself that day—smoked, I suppose, and went to Tattersal's?"

"Yes," said Charles Bevan, feeling that he was humorous in his reply, and feeling rather a sneak, too. "Luncheon was part of the business."

The remembrance of the fried whiting rose before him, backed by a vision of Susannah holding in one hand a bottle of Böllinger, and in the other a bottle of Gold-water.

CHAPTER II MISS MORGAN

It is so easy not to do some things. Bevan, had he acted correctly, ought to have informed Mr Lambert of his visit to Highgate and all that therein lay, yet he did not. There was nothing to hide, yet, as Sir Boyle-Roche might have said, he hid it.

During tea several things occupied his mind very much. The vision of Fanny Lambert was constantly before him, so was the person of her father. He could not but acknowledge that Lambert was a most attractive personage—attractive to men, to[Pg 208] women, to children, to dogs, cats—anything that could see and feel, in fact. Everything seemed to brighten in his presence. Hamilton-Cox's dictum that if Lambert could be bottled he would make the most excellent Burgundy, was not far wrong.

Bevan, as he sipped his tea, watched the genial Lambert, and could not but notice that he paid very marked attention to Pamela, and even more marked attention to old Miss Jenkins, her aunt.

This did not altogether please him, neither did the fact that Pamela seemed to enjoy the attentions of this man, who was her diametrical opposite.

To the profound philosopher who indites these lines it seems that between men and women in the mass there is very little difference. They act pretty much the same, except, perhaps, in the presence of mice. Bevan did very much what a woman would have done in his position: seeing his true love flirting with some one else, he flirted with some one else. Lulu Morgan was nearest to him, so he used her.

"I've been in England a twelvemonth," answered Miss Morgan, in reply to a query,[Pg 209] "and I feel beginning to get crusted. They say the old carp in the pond in Versailles get moss-grown after they've been there a hundred and fifty years or so, and I feel like that. When I say I've been in England a twelvemonth, I mean Europe. I've been in England three months, and the rest abroad. Pamela picked me up in Paris, you'd just gone back home; Lady Scott introduced me to her. I was looking out for a job. I came over originally with the Vandervades, then Sadie Vandervade got married; I was her companion, and I lost the job. Of course I could have stayed on with old man Vandervade and his wife, but I wanted a job. I'm like a squirrel, put me in a cage with nothing to do, and I'd die. I must have a mill to turn, so I froze on to Pamela's offer. I write her letters, and do her accounts, and interview her tradespeople. I guess she's getting fat for want of work since I've been her companion. Yes, I like England, and I like this place; if the people could be scraped out of it clean, it would be considerably nicer. I went to church last Sunday to have a good long considerate look at them; they all arrived in carriages—every one here who has a shay of any description turns it out to[Pg 210] go to church in on Sunday. Well, I went to have a good long look at them, and such a collection of stuffed images and plug-uglies I never beheld. I'm vicious about them p'rhaps, for they treated Pamela so mean, holding off from her when she first came, and then rushing down her throat when they found she knew a duchess. They'd boil themselves for a duchess. Say—you know the Lamberts? Isn't Fanny sweet?"

Mr Bevan started in his chair, but Miss Morgan did not notice, engrossed as she was with her own conversation.

"We met them in Paris; and I don't know which is sweeter, Fanny or her father. She was to have come down here with him, but she didn't. My, but she is pretty. And don't the men run after her! there were three men in Paris raving about her; she'd only known them two days, and they were near proposing to her. Don't wonder at it, I'd propose to her myself, if I was a man. But she's a little flirt all the same, and I told her so."

"Excuse me," said Bevan, "but I scarcely think you are justified—that is—from what I have heard of Miss Lambert, I would scarcely suspect her of being a—flirt."

"Wouldn't you? Men never suspect a woman of being a flirt till they're flirted with and done for. Fanny's the worst description of flirt—oh, I've told her so to her face—for she doesn't mean it; she just leads men on with her sweetness, and doesn't see they're breaking their hearts for her. She's a regular trap bated with sugar. How did you escape, Mr Bevan? You're the only man, I guess, who ever did."

"I haven't the pleasure—er—of Miss Lambert's acquaintance," said Charles, rather stiffly.

"Well, you're safe, for you are engaged; only for that I'd say 'Don't have the pleasure of her acquaintance.' What I like about her is that she makes all the other women so furious; she sucks the men away from them like a whirlpool. It's a pity she's so rich, for it's simply gilt thrown away——"

"No—but she gives one the impression; they have country houses like mushrooms all over the place, and she dresses simply just as she pleases; only really rich people can afford to[Pg 212] do that. She went to the opera in Paris with us in an old horror of a gown that made her look quite charming. No one notices what she has on; and if she went to heaven in a coffee-coat they'd let her in, for she'd still be Fanny Lambert."

"Tell me," said Mr Bevan very gravely, "you said she was a flirt—did you really mean that?"

"Why, how interested you are! She is, but not a bad sort of flirt. She's one of those people all heart—she loves everything and everybody—up to a certain point."

"Can't say," said Miss Morgan, shaking her head sagely; "but when she does, she'll go the whole hog. The man she'll love she'll love for ever and ever, and die on his grave, and that sort of thing, you know."

"I was referring to your description of her. Girls of her impulsive nature—er—generally[Pg 213] do—I mean they are generally warm-hearted and that sort of thing."

"There's one man I think she has a fancy for," said Miss Morgan, staring into space with her wide-open blue eyes, "but he's poor as a rat—an awfully nice fellow, a painter; Mr Lambert fished him up somewhere in a café. He and Fanny and I and a friend of his went and had dinner at a little café near the Boul' Miche. Then we got lost—that is to say, I and Heidenheimer lost sight of Fanny and her friend; and Fanny told me afterwards she'd had no end of a good time finding her way home; so'd I. 'Twas awfully improper, of course, but no one knew, and it was in Paris."

"I may be old-fashioned, of course," said Mr Bevan stiffly, "but I think people can't be too careful, you know—um—how long was Miss Lambert lost with Mr——"

"Leavesley—that's his name. Oh! she didn't turn up at the hotel till after eight."

"Oh yes, but he wasn't uneasy; he said she was like a bad penny, sure to turn up all right."

"What on earth!—why, there was no harm. Leavesley is the best of good fellows, he looked after her like a grandmother; he worships the very ground she walks on, and I'd pity the man who would as much as look twice at Fanny if he was with her."

"Well, Mr Leavesley may be all right in his way, but I should not care to see a sister of mine worshipped by one of these sort of people. Organ-grinders and out-of-elbow artists may be delightful company amidst their own set, but I confess I am not accustomed to them——"

"That's just your insular prejudice—seems to me I've heard that expression before, but it will do—Leavesley isn't an organ-grinder. I can't stand loafers myself, and if a man can't keep up with the procession, he'd better hang himself; but Leavesley isn't a loafer, and he'll be at the top of the procession yet, leading the elephant. Oh, he paints divinely!"

"Don't know—very likely; these artistic people can do things other people can't. We all went to see the Lamberts off at the Nord, and had champagne at the buffet; and poor old Fragonard—he was another worshipper, an artist you know—turned up with a huge big bouquet of violets for Fanny; we asked him where he'd got them, and he said he'd stolen them. They don't care a fig for poverty, artists; make a joke of it you know. Yes, I daresay he writes to Fanny. Heidenheimer writes to me every week—says he's dying in love with me, and sends poems, screechingly funny poems, all about nightingales and arrows and hearts. He's an artist too, and I'd marry him, I believe I would, only we're both as poor as Lazarus."

"Yes, but he's a genius, but genius doesn't pay—that's to say at first—afterwards—afterwards it's different. Trading rats for diamonds in famine time isn't in it with a genius when he gets on the make."

Mr Bevan gazed reflectively at the tips of his shoes. He quite recognised that these long-haired and out-at-elbowed anomalies[Pg 216] y'clept geniuses had the trick, at times, of making money. A dim sort of wrath against the whole species possessed him. To a clean, correct, and level-headed gentleman possessed of broad acres and a huge rent-roll, it is unpleasant to think that a slovenly, shiftless happy-go-lucky tatterdemallion may be a clean, correct and level-headed gentleman's, superior both in brains, fascination, and even in wealth. We can fancy the correct one subscribing sympathy, if not money, to a society for the extinction of genius, were not such a body entirely superfluous in the present condition of human affairs.

"It may be," said Mr Bevan at last, "that those people are very pleasant and all that, and useful in the world and so on, but I confess I like to associate with people who cut their hair, and, not to put too fine a point on it, wash——"

"Oh, Leavesley washes," said Miss Morgan, "he's as clean as a new pin. And as for cutting his hair, my!—that's what spoils him in my opinion; why, it's cut to the bone almost, like a convict's. All artists cut their hair now; it's only Polish piano-players and violinists wear their hair long."

"Whether they cut their hair 'to the bone' or wear it long is a matter of indifference," said Mr Bevan. "They're all a lot of bounders, and I'd be sorry to see a sister of mine married amongst them—very sorry."

Miss Morgan said nothing, the warmth of Mr Bevan on the subject of Leavesley struck her as being somewhat strange; though she said nothing, like the parrot, she thought the more, and began to consider Mr Bevan more attentively and to "turn him over in her mind." Now the fortunate or unfortunate person whom Miss Morgan distinguished by turning them over in her mind, generally gave up their secrets in the process unconsciously, subconsciously, or sometimes even consciously. Those wide-open blue eyes that seemed always gazing into futurity and distance saw many happenings of the present invisible to most folk.

Professor Wilson and Hamilton-Cox had wandered away through the garden discussing Oxford and modern thought. Miss Pursehouse, Lambert, and old Miss Jenkins were talking and laughing, and seemingly quite happy and content. Said Miss Morgan, looking round:

"Every one's busy, like the children in the Sunday-school story, and we've no one to play with; shall we go for a walk in the village, and I'll show you the church and the pump and the other antiques?"

"Then com'long," said Miss Morgan, "Pamela, I'm taking Mr Bevan to show him the village and the creatures that there abound. If we're not back by six, send a search-party."

Rookhurst is, perhaps, one of the prettiest and most quaint of English villages, and the proudest. If communities receive attention from the Recording Angel, amidst Rookhurst's sins written in that tremendous book will be found this entry, "It calls itself a town."

"Isn't the village sweet and sleepy?" said Miss Morgan, as she tripped along beside her companion; "it always reminds me of the dormouse in 'Alice in Wonderland'—always asleep except at tea-time, when it wakes up—and talks gossip. That's the chemist's shop with the two little red bottles in the window, isn't it cunning? The old man chemist doesn't keep any poisons, for he's half blind and's[Pg 219] afraid of mixing the strychnine with the Epsom salts. His wife does the poisoning; she libels every one indifferently, and she gave out that Pamela was a lunatic and I was her keeper. She was the butcher's daughter, and she married the chemist man for his money ten years ago, hoping he'd die right off, which he didn't. He was seventy with paralysis agitans and a squint, and the squint's got worse every year, and the paralysis agitans has got better—serve her right. That's the butcher's with the one leg of mutton hanging up, and the little pot with a rose-tree in it. He drinks, and beats his wife, and hunts snakes down the road when he has the jumps—but he sells very good mutton, and he's civil. Here comes a queen, look!"

A carriage drawn by a pair of chestnut horses approached and passed them, revealing a fat and bulbous-faced lady lolling on the cushions, and seen through a haze of dust.

"No? She's the Queen of Snobs; looks as if she'd come out of a joke-book, doesn't she? and her name is—I forget. She lives[Pg 220] in a big house a mile away. That's a 'pub.' There are seven 'pubs' in this village, and this is a model village—at least, they call it so; what an immodel village in England must be, I don't know. There's a tailor lives in that little house; he preaches in the tin chapel at the cross-roads. I heard him last Sunday."

"No, I'm Church. I heard him as I was passing by—couldn't help it, he shouts so's you can hear him at 'The Roost' when the wind's blowing that way—You religious?"

"Neither'm I. That's the doctor's; he's Church and his wife's Chapel. She has a sister in a lunatic asylum, and her aunt was sister of the hair-cutter's first wife, so people despise her and fling it in her teeth. We can raise some snobs in the States, but they're button mushrooms to the toadstools you raise in England. Pamela is awfully good to the doctor's wife just because the other people are nasty to her. Pamela is grit all through. The parson lives there—a long, thin man, looks as if he'd been mangled, and they'd forgot to hang him out to dry. How are[Pg 221] you, Mrs Jones? and how are the rheumatics?" Miss Morgan had paused to address an old lady who stood at the door of a cottage leaning on a stick.

"That's Mrs Jones; she has more enquiries after her health than any woman in England. Can you tell why?"

"Well, she has a sort of rheumatics that the least damp affects, and so she's the best barometer in this part of the country. She's eighty, and has been used to weather observation so long, she can tell what's coming—hail, or snow, or rain to a T. That old man leaning on the gate, he's Francis, the village lunatic, he's just ninety; fine days he crawls down to Ditchingham cross-roads to wait for the soldiers coming back from the Crimea. I call that pathetic, but they only laugh at it here. He must have waited for them when he was a boy and seen them marching along, and now he goes and waits for them—makes me feel s'if I could cry. Here's a shilling for you, Francis; Miss Pamela is knitting you some socks—good-day—poor old thing! Let's see now, those cottages are all work-people's, and there's nothing beyond,[Pg 222] only the road, and it's dusty, and I vote to go back. Why, there's that old scamp of a Francis making a bee-line for the 'Hand in Hand'; n'mind, I won't have to wear his head in the morning."

Miss Morgan chatted all the way back uninterruptedly, disclosing a more than comprehensive knowledge of all the affairs of the village in which she had lived some ten days or less.

"Nothing; only I might have called and seen Mrs Harmer. She has such a pretty daughter, and I'd have liked you to have seen her, for she's the image of Fanny Lambert." She stared full at Mr Bevan as she said this, and there was a something in her tone and a something in her manner, and a something in her glance that made Charles Bevan lose control of his facial capillaries and blush.

"Fanny's cooked him," thought the lady of the blue eyes as she retired to dress for dinner. "But what in the nation did he mean by saying he did not know her?"

"What the deuce made her say that in such a way?" asked Mr Bevan of himself as he assumed the clothes laid out for him by the careful Strutt.

CHAPTER III A CURE FOR BLINDNESS

"The British thoroughbred is not played out by any means. Look at the success of imported blood all over the world. Look at Phantom, the grandsire of Voltaire, and Bay Middleton——" Mr Bevan paused. He was addressing George Lambert, and suddenly found that he was addressing the entire dinner-table in one of those hiatuses of conversation in which every tongue is suddenly held.

"Yes," said Hamilton-Cox, continuing some desultory remarks on literature, in general, into which this eruption of stud book had broken; "but you see the old French ballads are for the most part by the greatest of all poets, Time. Beside those the greatest modern poems seem gaudy and Burlington Arcady,[Pg 224] if I may use the expression. An old folk-song that has been handed from generation to generation, played on, so to speak, like an old fiddle by all sorts of hands, gains a sweetness and richness never imagined by the simple-minded person who wrote it or invented it.

"My dear lady," sighed Hamilton-Cox, "nobody writes poems nowadays, or if they do they keep the fact a secret. I have a younger brother who writes poetry——"

"Younger brothers are nobodies. I say I have a younger brother, he writes most excellent verse—reams of it. Some years ago he would have been pursued by publishers. Well, only the other day he copied out some of his most cherished productions and approached a London publisher with them. He entered the office at five o'clock, and some few minutes later the people in Piccadilly were asking of each other, 'What's all that row in Vigo Street?' No, a publisher of to-day would as soon see a burglar in his office as a poet."

"I never took much stock in poetry," said[Pg 225] the practical Miss Morgan. "I'm like Mr Bevan."

"I can't stand the stuff," said Charles. "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck, and all that sort of twaddle, makes me ill."

Pamela looked slightly pained. Charles was enjoying his dinner; Burgundy and Moselle had induced a slight flush to suffuse his countenance. If you are engaged and a gourmand never let your fiancée see you eat. A man mad drunk is to the sensitive mind a less revolting picture than a man "enjoying his food."

"Well, he was; and he was reciting I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight. He'd got everything mixed, and had got as far as

when every one laughed, and he sat down—on another man's hat. That's the sort of poetry I like, something to make you laugh. Gracious! what's the good of manufacturing misery and letting it loose in little poems to[Pg 226] buzz round and torment people? isn't there enough misery ready made? Hood's Song of the Shirt always makes me cry."

"Hood," said Professor Wilson, "was a man of another age, a true poet. He could not have written his Song of the Shirt to-day; the decadence——"

"Now, excuse me," said Hamilton-Cox, "we have fought that question of decadence out, you and I. Hood, I admit, could not have written his Song of the Shirt to-day, simply because shirts are manufactured wholesale by machinery, and he would have to begin it. 'Whir—whir—whir,' which would not be poetry. Women slave at coats and waistcoats and other garments nowadays, and you could scarcely write a song of the waistcoat or a song of the pair of—you understand my point. Poetry is very false, the matchbox-maker is as deserving of the poet's attention as the shirt-maker, yet a poem beginning 'Paste, paste, paste' would be received with laughter, not with tears. You say we are decadents because we don't encourage poetry. I say we are not, we are simply more practical—poetry is to all intents and purposes dead——"

"Is it?" said George Lambert. "Is King Lear dead? I was crying over him last night, but it wasn't at his funeral I was crying. Is old Suckling dead? I bought a first edition of him some time ago, and the fact wasn't mentioned or hinted at in the verses. Is Sophocles dead? Old Maloney at Trinity pounded him into my head, and he's there now alive as ever; and if I was blind to-morrow, I'd still have the skies over his plays to look at and the choruses to hear. Ah no, Mr Cox, poetry is not dead, but they don't write it just now. They don't write it, but it's in every one's heart waiting to be tapped, only there's no man with an augur sharp enough and true enough to do the tapping."

"I love it," said Lambert, in a tone that reminded Charles Bevan of Fanny's tone when she declared her predilection for cats.

"I declare it's delightful," said Professor Wilson, "to find a man of the world who knows all about horses, and is a good [Pg 228]billiard-player, and all that, confessing a love for poetry."

"Perhaps Mr Lambert is a poet himself," said Hamilton-Cox, with a suspicion of a sneer, "or has written poetry."

"Poetry! yards of it," answered the accused with a mellow laugh, "when I was young and—wise. The first poem I ever wrote was all about the moon; I wrote it when I was eleven, and sent it to a housemaid. Oh, murder! but the things that we do when we are young."

"She couldn't read; it was in the days before the Board schools and the higher education of women. She couldn't read, she was forty, and ugly as sin; and she boxed my ears and told my mother, and my mother told my father, and he leathered me. He said, 'I'll teach you to write poetry to housemaids.' But somehow," said Mr Lambert, admiring with one eye the ruby-tinted light in his glass of port, "somehow, with all his teaching, I never wrote a poem to a housemaid again."

"Yes, but it was a gain to housemaids; and as housemaids seem the main producers of novels and poems nowadays, begad," said Mr Lambert, "it's, after all, a gain to literature."

"That's one for you, Cox," said Professor Wilson, and Hamilton-Cox laughed, as he could well afford to do, for his lucubrations brought him in a good fifteen hundred a year, and his reputation was growing.

On the lawn, under the starlit night after dinner, Bevan had his fiancée for a moment alone. They sat in creaky basket-work chairs a good yard apart from each other. The moon was rising over the hills and deep, dark woods of Sussex, the air was warm and perfumed: it was an ideal night for love-making.

"When I left you I had some dinner at the Nord," said Mr Bevan, tipping the ash off his cigar. "The worst dinner I've ever had, I think. Upon my word, I think it was the worst dinner I ever had. When I got to Dover I was so tired I turned into the hotel, and came on next morning. What sort of crossing did you have?"

"Oh, very fine," said Pamela, stifling a yawn, and glancing sideways at a group of her guests dimly seen in a corner of the garden, but happy, to judge from the laughter that came from them.

"Yes, it was emptying fast when we left, wasn't a soul left scarcely. Do you know, I have a great mind to run over to Ostend for a few weeks. The Napiers are going there; it's rather fun, I believe."

A great beetle moving through the night across the garden filled the air with its boom. The group in the corner of the garden still were laughing and talking; amidst their voices could be distinguished that of Hamilton-Cox. Mr Cox had not a pleasant voice; it was too highly pitched, and it jarred on the ear of Mr Bevan and on his soul. His soul was in an irritable mood. When we speak of the soul[Pg 231] we refer to an unknown quantity, and when we speak of its condition we refer sometimes, perhaps, to just a touch of liver, or sometimes to an extra glass of champagne.

"I can't make out what induces you to surround yourself with those sort of people," said Mr Bevan, casting his cigar-end away and searching for his cigarette case.

"I am not surrounding myself with Mr Cox; the thing is physically and physiologically impossible. Do talk sense, Charles."

Charles retired into silence, and Miss Pursehouse yawned again, sub-audibly. After a few moments—"Where did you pick up the Lamberts?"

"Has he a daughter? Why, Lulu Morgan, when I asked her what you and she had found to talk about, said Fanny Lambert——"

"It is perfectly immaterial what Miss Morgan said; some of her sayings are[Pg 232] scarcely commendable. I believe she did say something about a Miss Lambert. When I said 'has he a daughter?' I spoke with a meaning."

"What I meant was, that it would have been much better for him to have brought his daughter down here with him."

"Do you mean to insinuate that she is—unable to take care of herself in town?"

"Go on, this is interesting," said Miss Pursehouse, who guessed what was coming.

"According to my old-fashioned ideas it is scarcely the thing for a man, a married man, to pay a visit——"

"You mean it's improper for me to have Mr Lambert staying here as a guest?" "Improper was not the word I used."

"Oh, nonsense! you meant it. Well, I think I am the best judge of my own propriety, and I see nothing improper in the transaction. My aunt is here, Lulu Morgan is here, you are here, Professor Wilson is here, there's a poet coming to-morrow—I suppose that's improper too. I do wish you would be[Pg 233] sensible; besides, Mr Lambert is not a married man, he is a widower."

"Sure, I don't know. I don't go about with a placard with 'I am engaged' written on it on my back. Why do you ask?"

"Well—um—if a stranger had been here at tea to-day he would scarcely have thought that the engaged couple——"

"Go on, this is delightful; it's absolutely bank-holidayish—the engaged couple—go on."

"The behaviour of 'engaged couples' in decent society is, I believe, pretty much the same as our behaviour has been, and I hope will be. How would you have it? Would you like to walk about, I clinging to your arm, and you playing a mouth-organ? Ought we to exchange hats with each other? Shall I call you Choly and put ice down your neck at dinner? Ought we to hire a brake and go on a bean feast? I wish you would instruct me. I hate to appear gauche, and I hate not to do the correct thing."

"Vulgarity is always painful to me," said Mr Bevan, "but senseless vulgarity is doubly so."

"Please come and help us," said Miss Morgan, coming up. "We've got the astronomical telescope, and we can't make head or tail of it."

Miss Pursehouse rose and approached the group surrounding an astronomical telescope that stood on the lawn. It was trained on the moon, and Hamilton-Cox, with a hand over one eye and the other eye at the eyepiece, was making an observation.

"Sometimes I can see stars, and sometimes nothing. I can't see the moon at all."

"Perhaps," said Miss Pursehouse, "if you remove the cap from the telescope you will be able to see better. A very simple thing sometimes cures blindness."

CHAPTER IV TIC-DOULOUREUX

Mr Bevan found no chance for a tête-à-tête with his fiancée again that night, perhaps because he did not seek one; he was not in the humour for love-making. He felt—to use the good old nursery term that applies so often, so very often, to grown-ups—"fractious."

He retired to his bedroom at half-past eleven, and was sitting with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, staring at the wood-fire brightly burning in his grate, when a knock came to the door and Lambert appeared.

Mr Lambert helped himself to a Marcovitch from a box on the table, drew up an easy-chair to the fire and sank into it with a sigh.

"It seems funny," said he in a meditative tone, "that I should be sitting here smoking and yarning with you to-night, and only[Pg 236] yesterday, so to speak, we were fighting like bull-dogs; but we're friends now, and you must come and see me when you're back in town. You live in the 'Albany'? I had rooms there once, years ago—years ago. Lord! what a change has come over London since the days when Evans' was stuffed of a night with all manner of people—the rows and ructions I remember! The things that went on. One night in Evans' I remember an old gentleman coming in and ordering a chop, and no sooner had he put on his spectacles and settled down to it with a smile all over his face, than Bob O'Grady, of the 10th—Black O'Grady—who'd been watching him—he was drunk as a lord—rose up and said, ''Scuse me,' he said, and took the chop by the shank-bone and flung it on the stage. A man could take his whack in those days, and be none the worse for it; but men are different, somehow, now, and they go in for tea and muffins and nerves just as the women used to, when I was twenty; and the women, begad, are the best men now'days. Look at Miss Pursehouse! as charming as a woman and as clever as a man. Look at this house of hers! One would[Pg 237] think a man owned it, everything is so well done: brandies and sodas at your elbows, matches all over the place, and electric bells and a telephone. That's the sort of woman for me—not that I'm not fond of the old-fashioned sort of woman too. Fanny, my daughter—I must introduce you to her—is as old-fashioned as they make 'em. Screeches if she sees a rat, and knows nothing of woman's rights or the higher education of females, and is always ready to turn on the water-works, bless her heart! ready and willing to cry over anything you may put before her that's got the ghost of a cry in it. But, bless you! what's the good of talking about old-fashioned or modern women? From Hecuba down, they're all the same—born to deceive us and make our lives happy."

"My dear fellow, sure, what's happiness but illusion, and what's illusion but deception, and talking about deception, aren't men—the blackguards!—just as bad at deceiving as women?"

"Yes, bad luck to it! I've got a house there I can't get rid of, and, talking of old-fashioned things, it's an old-fashioned house. There aren't any electric bells, and if there were you'd as likely as not ring up the ghost. For there's a ghost there, sure enough; she nearly frightened the gizzard out of my butler James."

He leaned back luxuriously in his chair, blowing cigarette rings at the fire, whilst Charles Bevan mentally recalled the vision of "My butler James."

He could not but admit that Lambert carried his poverty exceedingly well, and with a much better grace than that with which many men carry their wealth. The impression that Fanny Lambert had made upon him was not effaced in any way by the impression made upon him by her father. Lambert was not an impossible man. Wildly extravagant he might be, and reckless to the verge of lunacy, but he was a gentleman; and in saying the word "gentleman," my dear sir or madam I do not refer to birth. There lives many a hideous bounder who yet can fling his[Pg 239] great-great-great-grandfather at your head, and many a noble-minded gentleman, the present or past existence of whose father is demonstrable only by the logic of physiology.

Lambert went off to his room at twelve, and Mr Bevan passed a broken night. He dreamt of lawyers and sunflowers. He dreamt that he saw old Francis, the village lunatic, waiting at the cross-roads; and when he asked him what he was waiting for, Francis replied that he was waiting to see his (Mr Bevan's) marriage procession go by: a dream which was scarcely a hopeful omen, considering the object of the old man's daily vigil as revealed by Lulu Morgan.

He came down to breakfast late. His hostess did not appear, and Miss Morgan announced that her friend was suffering from tic-douloureux.

"'S far as I can make out, it's like having the grippe in one eye. I've physicked her with Bile Beans and Perry Davis, and I've sent for some Antikamnia. If she's not better by luncheon I'll send for the doctor."

She was not down by luncheon. After that meal, Charles, strolling across the hall to the[Pg 240] billiard-room, felt something pluck at his sleeve. It was Miss Morgan.

"I want to speak to you alone for a minute," said she. "Come into the garden; there's no one there."

He followed her, much wondering, and they passed down a shady path till they lost sight of the house.

"We've been sitting up all night, she and I, and we've been discussing things, you 'specially."

"Now, don't you be mad, for Pamela's very fond of you, and I like you, for you're a right good sort; but, see here, Pamela thinks she's made a mistake."

A queer new feeling entered Mr Bevan's mind, peeped round and passed through it, so to speak—a feeling of relief—or more strictly speaking, release.

"The fact is, she doesn't want to marry me; why not say it at once? or, rather, why doesn't she say so to me frankly, instead of deputing another person to do so?"

"There's a letter," said Miss Morgan, producing one from her pocket. "She wrote it and told me to give it to you; it's eight pages long, and all sorts of things in it—she's very fond of you—keep it and read it. But I tell you one line that's in it, she says she will always feel as a sister to you, or be a sister to you, or words to that effect—that's fatal—once a girl says that she's said the last word."

"I don't think she ever cared for me, really," said Mr Bevan—"let us sit down on this seat—no, I don't think she really ever cared for me."

"Because you're too much alike; you are both rich, and both steady and well-balanced, you know, and that sort of thing. Likes ought never to get married. Dear—dear—dear—what a pity——"

"I was only thinking of all the love-making there's wasted in the world. Now I know so[Pg 242] many girls who would suit you to a T. I'll tell you of one, if you like——"

"I was thinking of Fanny Lambert," said Miss Morgan in a dreamy voice. "The girl I told you of yesterday——"

Now, Mr Bevan was the last man in the world—as I daresay you perceive—to discuss his feelings with any one. But Miss Morgan had a patent method of her own for extracting confidences, of making people talk out, as she would have expressed it herself.

"I said to you yesterday that I had never met Miss Lambert: I had reasons connected with some law business for saying so—as a matter of fact, I have met her—once."

"Oh, that's quite enough. If you've met Fanny Lambert once, you have met her for ever. Does she like you?—I don't ask you do you like her, for, of course, you do."

"You mustn't think—women hate men that think, they like them to be sure. If a man was only bold enough he could marry any woman on earth."

"'Tis, and my opinion is worth having. What a woman wants most is some one to make up her mind for her. Go and make Fanny's mind up for her; you and she are just suited."

"Yes, but Pamela told me last night the Lamberts are simply stone-broke. Mr Lambert told her all his affairs, his estates are all encumbered. She says he's just like a child, and wants protecting; so he is, and so's Fanny; they're both a pair of children, and you are just the man to keep Fanny straight, and make her life happy and buy her beautiful clothes and diamonds. Why, she'll be the rage of London, Fanny will, if she's only properly staged—and she's a dear and a good woman, and would make any man happy. My!"

"Thank you for saying all that," said he. "Few women praise another woman. I shall leave here by this evening's train, of course; I[Pg 244] cannot stay here any longer. I will think over what course I will pursue."

"For heaven's sake, don't think, or you'll find her snapped up; I have a prevision that you will. Go and say to Fanny 'marry me.' I do want to see her settled, she's not like me, that can rough it, and she's just the girl to fling herself away on some rubbish."

"I will see," said Mr Bevan. "I frankly confess that Miss Lambert—of course, this is between you and me—that Miss Lambert has made me think a good deal about her, but these things are not done in a moment."

"Aren't they? I tell you love-making is just like making pancakes, if you don't do them quick they're done for. You just remember this, that many a man has proposed to a girl the first time he's met her and been accepted. Women like it, it's so different from the other thing—and, look here, kiss her first and ask her afterwards. Have two or three glasses of champagne—you've just got the steady brain that can stand it—and it will liven you up. I'm an old stager."

"Dear me! I don't believe you've been listening to a word I've been saying. Well, go your own gate, as the old woman said to the cow that would burst through the hedge and tumbled into the chalk-pit and broke its leg. What you going to do with that letter?"

CHAPTER V THE AMBASSADOR

The morning after the excursion to Epping Forest he had written a long letter to Fanny: a business-like letter, explanatory of his prospects in life.

He had exhibited in this year's Academy; he had exhibited in the New gallery—more, he had sold the Academy picture for forty pounds. He had a hundred a year of his own, which, as he sagaciously pointed out, was "something." If Fanny would only wait a year, give him something to hope for, something to live for, something to work for. Three[Pg 246] pages of business-like statements ending with a fourth page of raving declarations of love. The letter of a lunatic, as all love-letters more or less are.

He had posted this and waited for a reply, but none had come. He little knew that his letter and a bill for potatoes were behind a plate on the kitchen dresser at "The Laurels," stuffed there by Susannah in a fit of abstraction, also the outcome of the troubles of love.

On top of this all sorts of minor worries fell upon him. Mark Moses and Sonenshine, stimulated by the two pounds ten paid on account, were bombarding him with requests for more. A colour-man was also active and troublesome, and a bootmaker lived on the stairs.

Belinda, vice-president of the institution during Mrs Tugwell's sojourn at Margate, was "cutting up shines," cooking disgracefully, not cleaning boots, giving "lip" when remonstrated with, and otherwise revelling in her little brief authority. A man who had all but commissioned a portrait of a bull-dog sent word to say that the sittings couldn't take place as the dog was dead.

Then a cat had slipped into his bedroom and kittened on his best suit of clothes; and Fernandez, the picture dealer to whom he had taken the John the Baptist on the top of a four-wheeler, had offered him five pounds ten for it; and, worst of all, driven by necessity, he had not haggled, but had taken the five pounds ten, thus for ever ruining himself with Fernandez, who had been quite prepared to pay fifteen.

The Captain, who had suddenly come in for a windfall of eighty pounds, was going on like a millionaire—haunting the studio half-tipsy, profuse with offers of assistance and drinks, and, to cap all, the weather was torrid. The only consolation was Verneede, who would listen for hours to the praises of Miss Lambert, nodding his head like a Chinese mandarin and smoking Leavesley's cigarettes.

"I don't know what to do," said the unhappy young man, during one of these conferences, "I don't know what to do. It's so unlike her."

"Not I—at least, how can I? If she won't answer that letter there's no use in writing any more."

"Could you not apply to their family physician? I should go to him, frankly——"

"But I don't know who their doctor is—do talk sense. See here! could you call and ask—ask did she get home all right, and that sort of thing?"

"Most certainly, with pleasure, if it would relieve your feelings. Anything—anything I can do, my dear Leavesley, in an emergency like this you can count on me to do."

"Armbruster came in this morning, he's going to America. He's got on to a big firm for book illustrating; he wanted me to go with[Pg 249] him and try my luck—offered to pay the expenses. You might hint, perhaps, if the subject turns up, that you think I am going to America."

"You might go now, for I'm awfully anxious to hear if she is all right. What's the time? Two—yes—if you go now you will get there about four."

Leavesley went to a little jug on the mantel and turned the contents of it into his hand.

Mr Verneede departed, and the painter went on with his painting, feeling very much as Noah must have felt when the dove flew out of the Ark.

Mr Verneede first made straight for his lodgings. He inhabited a top-floor back in Maple Street, a little street leading out of the King's Road.

Here he blacked his boots, put bear's grease on his hair, and assumed a frock-coat a shade more respectable than the one he usually wore. Then, with his coat tightly buttoned, his best hat on his head, and his umbrella under his arm, he made off on his errand revolving in his wonderful mind the forthcoming interview. To assist thought, he turned into the four-ale bar of the "Spotted Dog." Here stood a woman with a baby in her arms, a regular customer, who was explaining domestic troubles to the sympathetic barmaid. Seeing Verneede seated with his ale before him, she included him in her audience. Half an hour later the old gentleman, having given much advice on the rearing of babies and management of husbands, emerged from the "Spotted Dog" slightly flushed and entirely happy.

It seemed so much pleasanter and cooler to enter a public house than an omnibus, that the "King's Arms," where the omnibuses stood, swallowed him easily. Here an anarchistical house-painter, who was destructing the British Empire, included him in his remarks; and it was, somehow, nearly five o'clock before he left the "King's Arms" more flushed and most entirely happy, and took an omnibus for Hammersmith.

At nine o'clock he was wandering about Hammersmith asking people to direct him to "The Hollies" in James' Road; at eleven he was criticising the London County Council in a bar-room somewhere in Shepherd's Bush, but it might have been in Paris or Berlin, Vienna or Madrid, for all he knew or cared.

CHAPTER VI A SURPRISE VISIT

Verneede having departed on his mission, Leavesley resumed his work with a feeling of relief.

He had done something. There is nothing that strains the mind so much as sitting waiting with hands folded, so to speak, doing nothing.

When Noah closed the trap-door of the Ark having let forth the dove, he no doubt followed its flight with his mind's eye—here flitting over wastes of water, here perched on the island he desired.

Even so Leavesley, as he worked, followed the flight of Verneede towards the object of his desires.

Leavesley was one of those unhappy people who meet their pleasures and their troubles half-way. He was an imaginative man, moving in a most unimaginative world, and as a result he was always knocking his nose against the concrete. Needless to say, his forecasts were nearly always wrong. If he opened a letter thinking it contained a bill, it, ten to one, enclosed a theatre ticket or a cheque, and if he expected a cheque, fifty to one he received a bill.

This temperament, however, sometimes has its advantages, for he was sitting now quite contentedly painting and getting on with his[Pg 253] picture, whilst Mr Verneede was sitting quite contentedly in the bar of the "Spotted Dog."

He was also smoking furiously with all the windows shut. To the artistic temperament at times comes moods, when it shuts all the windows, excluding noise and air, lights the foulest old pipe it can find, and, to use a good old public school term, "fugs."

Suddenly he stopped work, half-sprang to his feet, palette in one hand, pipe in the other. A footstep was on the landing, a girl's footstep—it was her!

Since the other night when Fanny had dined with them, Miss Hancock had been much exercised in her mind.

How on earth had Leavesley known of the affair? Had he referred to Fanny when he made that mysterious remark about his uncle and a girl, or was there another girl? She had an axiom that when a man once begins to make a fool of himself he doesn't know where to stop; she had also a strong dash of her nephew's imaginative temperament.[Pg 254] Fanny had troubled her at first; seraglios were now rising in her mental landscape. She had an intuition that her brother had broken the ice as regards the other sex, and a dreadful fear that now he had broken the ice he was going to bathe.

"Whew!" said Miss Hancock, waving her parasol before her to dispel the clouds of smoke.

"For goodness sake, open the window. Open something—achu!—do you live in this atmosphere?"

Leavesley opened wide the windows, tapped the ashes of his pipe out on a sill, and turned to his aunt, who had taken her seat in an uncomfortable manner on a most comfortable armchair.

Miss Hancock made no reply. It was the first time she had been in the studio, the first time she had been in any studio.

She noticed the dust and the litter. The place was, in fact, extraordinarily untidy, for Belinda, engaged just now in the fascination of a policeman, had scarcely time even for[Pg 255] such ordinary household duties as making beds without turning the mattresses, and flinging eggs into frying pans full of hot grease.

As fate would have it, or curiosity rather, Belinda at this moment entered the studio, attired in a sprigged cotton gown four inches shorter in front than behind as if to display to their full a pair of wonderful feet shod in list slippers. Her front hair was bound in Hindes' hair-binders tight down to her head, displaying a protruberant forehead that seemed to have been polished. It was the only thing polished about Belinda, and she made a not altogether pleasing picture as she slunk into the studio to "look for something," but in reality to take stock of the visitor.

She was slinking out again when Miss Hancock, who had been following her every movement, said:

"Stop twiddling that door handle," said Miss Hancock, entirely ignoring Leavesley, "and attend to what I'm saying. If you are paid to keep this room in order you are defrauding your mistress, and girls who defraud their mistresses end in something worse. Go, get a duster."

The feelings of Cruiser, when he first came under the hands of Mr Rarey, may have been comparable to the feelings of Belinda before this servant-tamer.

She recognised a mistress, but she did not give in at once. She stood looking sulkily from Leavesley to his aunt, and from his aunt to Leavesley.

One second more the animal stood in mute rebellion, then it went off and got the duster and the broom.

"Take up that strip of carpet," commanded Mr Leavesley's aunt, when the duster and the broom returned in the hands of the animal. "Whew! Throw it outside the door and beat it in the back garden, if you have such a thing—burn it if you haven't. Give me the duster. Now sweep the floor, whilst I do these shelves; Frank, put those books in a heap. Whew! does no one ever clean this place? Ha! what are you doing sweeping under the couch? Pull out that couch. Mercy!!!"

Under the couch there was a heap of miscellaneous things—empty cigarette tins, an empty beer bottle, an empty whisky bottle, half a pack of cards, a dress tie, a glove, "The Three Musketeers," and an old waistcoat—and dust, mounds of dust.

Miss Hancock looked at this. Like the coster who looked back along the City road to see the way strewn with cabbages, lettuces, and onions which had leaked from his faulty barrow, language was quite inadequate to express her feelings.

"Go, get a dust-pan," she said at last, "and a basket. Be quick about it. Mercy!!!"

By the time the place was in order, Belinda,[Pg 258] to Leavesley's astonishment, had become transformed from a sulky-looking slattern to a semi-respectable-looking servant girl.

"That will do," said Miss Hancock in a magisterial voice, when the last consignment of rubbish had been removed. "Now, you can go."

As the boar sharpens its tusks against a tree preparatory to using them to carve human flesh, so had Miss Hancock sharpened the tusks of her temper upon Belinda.

"No thanks, I don't want any tea," she said, replying to Leavesley's invitation. "I've come to ask you for an explanation."

"About my uncle?" he replied, wrinkling his forehead. He couldn't for the life of him think what she was driving at; he had quite forgotten his Parthian remark about the "girl," the thing had no root in his mind—a bubble made of words that had risen to the surface of his mind, burst, and been forgotten.

Miss Hancock had her own way of dealing[Pg 259] with hypocrites. "Well, we will say no more about your uncle. How about Miss Lambert?"

Leavesley made a little spring from his chair, as if some one had stuck a pin into him, and changed colour violently.

"I know all about it," said Miss Hancock grimly. She was so very clever that she had got hold of the wrong end of the stick entirely, as very clever people sometimes do. If she had come to him frankly she would have found out that he was Fanny's lover, and not James Hancock's confidant and go-between, as she now felt sure he was.

Unhappy Leavesley! his love affair with Fanny seemed destined to be mulled by every one who had a hand in it.

"It's dreadful," said Miss Hancock, apparently addressing a tobacco jar that stood on the table, "it's dreadful to watch a man consciously and deliberately making a fool[Pg 260] of himself—to sit by and watch it, and not be able to move a hand."

Of course he thought she referred to himself, but he was so accustomed to hear his aunt calling people fools that her remarks did not ruffle him.

"But what I can't understand is this," he said. "Who told you about Fanny—I mean Miss Lambert?"

"The world has altered since I was a girl, that's all." Then with deep sarcasm—"Does your uncle know that you call her Fanny?"

Miss Hancock stared at him stonily, then she spoke. "Are you in love with her too?" she asked.

"Of course I am; every one who meets her must love her. I believe old Verneede is in love with her. Love with her! I'd lay my life down for her, but it's hopeless—hopeless——"

For a minute he thought his aunt must be a little bit mad: this was more than her ordinary contrariness; then he went back to his original question.

"He told me everything—Miss Lambert's visit to the Zoological Gardens, her——"

"You may as well be exact whilst you are about it; it wasn't the Zoological Gardens, it was Epping Forest."

"Frank Leavesley, a lie is bad enough, but a silly lie is much worse. Miss Lambert herself told me it was the Zoological Gardens; perhaps she has been to Epping Forest as[Pg 262] well; perhaps next it will be a visit to Paris. I wash my hands of the affair."

"No matter what I have seen. I have seen enough to make me open my eyes—and shut them again."

Leavesley was now fuming about the studio. What on earth had possessed Bridgewater? How on earth had he found out about the affair, and how had he come to twist Epping Forest into the Zoological Gardens?

"——and shut them again," resumed Miss Hancock. "However, it is none of my business, but if there is such a thing as honour you ought, in my humble opinion, to go to your uncle and tell him the state of your feelings towards Miss Lambert."

"I'll go," said Leavesley—"go to the office to-day; and if uncle chooses to keep that antiquated liar of a Bridgewater in his service any longer after what I tell him, it will be his own look-out."

"I know," said Leavesley. "Now, I must go out; I have some business. Are you sure you won't have some tea?"

CHAPTER VII THE UNEXPLAINED

It was just as well she refused the tea, for there was no one to make it. She had hypnotised Belinda, and Belinda coming out of the hypnotic state was having hysterical convulsions in the kitchen, assisted by the charwoman.

"Belinda," cried Leavesley down the kitchen stairs, he had rung his bell vainly, "are you there?"

"Oh, well, if a Mr Verneede calls, will you ask him to wait for me? I'll be back soon."

He left the house and proceeded as fast[Pg 264] as omnibuses could take him to Southampton Row.

Bridgewater was out, but Mr Wolf, the second in command, ushered him into Hancock's room.

"Well," said Hancock, who was writing a letter—"Oh, it's you. Sit down, sit down for a minute."

He went on with his letter, and Leavesley took his seat and sat in a simmering state listening to the squeaking of the quill pen, and framing in his mind indictments against Bridgewater.

If he had been in a state of mind to absorb details he might have noticed that his uncle was looking younger and brighter. But the youthfulness or brightness of Mr Hancock were indifferent to him absorbed as he was with his own thoughts.

"Well," said Hancock, finishing his letter with a flourish and leaning back in his chair.

"Aunt came to see me to-day," said Leavesley, "and I came on here at once. It's most disgraceful."

"Bridgewater. You've got a man in your[Pg 265] office who is not to be trusted, a mischief-making old——"

"Dear me, what's all this? A man in the office not to be trusted? To whom do you refer?"

"Doing! He has been sneaking round to my aunt telling tales about a lady; that's what he has been doing."

"Yes, and I have given Bridgewater a right good dressing down—meddling old stupid!"

"It's not his fault," continued Hancock. "It's your aunt's fault; she put him on to spy. However, it's rather a delicate subject, and we won't pursue it, but"—suddenly and in a friendly tone—"I take it very kindly of you to come round and tell me this."

"I thought I'd better come," said the young man; "besides, the thing put me in such a wax. Of course, if he was egged on by aunt, it's not so much his fault."

"I take it very kindly of you, and we'll say no more about it." He lapsed into meditation, and Leavesley sat filled with a vague feeling of surprise.

Every one seemed a little out of the ordinary to-day. Why on earth did his uncle take this news so very kindly?

"I've been thinking," said Hancock suddenly—then abruptly: "How are you financially, now?"

"Oh, pretty bad. I had to sell a picture of John the Baptist for five pounds the other day; it was worth twenty."

"When your mother married your father," said Hancock, leaning back in his chair, "she flew in the face of her family. He was penniless and a painter."

"I don't want to hear anything against my father," said Leavesley tartly. "Yes, he was penniless and a painter, and she married him, and I'm glad she did. She loved him, that was quite enough."

"If you will excuse me," said Hancock, "I was going to say nothing against your father. I think a love-match—er—um—well, no matter. I am only stating the facts. She flew in the face of her family, and as a result the money that might have been hers, went to your aunt."

"The hundred a year left you by your parents," resumed the lawyer, ignoring this reply, "is, I admit, a pittance. I offered you, however, as the head of the family, and feeling that your mother had not received exactly justice, I offered you the choice of a profession. I offered to take you into this office. You refused, preferring to be a painter. Now, I am not stingy, but I have seen much of the world, and in my experience, the less money a young man has in starting in life, the more likely is he to arrive at the top of the tree. You have, however, now started; I have been making enquiries, and you seem to be working, and I am pleased with you for two things. Firstly, when you came to me the other day for money for a—foolish purpose you didn't lie over the matter and say you[Pg 268] wanted the money for your landlady, as nine out of ten young men would have done. Secondly, for coming to me to-day and apprising me of the unpleasant intelligence, to which we will not again refer. I appreciate loyalty."

Hancock took a five-pound note and a ten-pound note out of the note-case, looked at them both, and then put the ten-pound note back.

"I'm going to lend you five pounds," he said. "It will serve for present expenses, and I expect you to pay me it back before the end of the week." He held out the note.

"You had better keep it," said his nephew, "for there's not the remotest chance of my paying you before the end of the week."

"Take the note," said Hancock testily, "and don't keep me holding it out all day;[Pg 269] you don't know what may happen in the course of a week. Take the note."

"Well, I'll take it if you will have it so; and I'll pay you back some time if I don't this week."

CHAPTER VIII RETURN OF THE AMBASSADOR

He left the office feeling depressed. Spent anger generally leaves depression behind it.

Hancock's admission that his mother had been treated harshly by her family, though a well-known fact to him, did not decrease his gloom. He considered the thousands that ought to have fallen to her share, that had fallen to the share of Patience instead. For a second a wild hatred of the Hancocks and all their ways filled his breast, and he felt an inclination to take the five-pound note from his pocket, roll it into a ball, and fling it into the gutter. Not being a lunatic, he didn't.[Pg 270] He went and dined instead, though it was only a little after five, and having dined he went back to the studio.

Verneede had not yet returned. At ten o'clock Verneede had not yet returned. Midnight struck.

"Can he be staying there the night?" thought Leavesley, who had gone to bed with a novel and a pipe and an ear, so to say, on every footstep ascending the stairs.

People often stayed the night at the Lamberts' drinking punch and playing cards; he had done so himself once.

He woke at seven and dressed, and at eight he was standing before the house of Verneede in Maple Street.

"Hin!" said the landlady, "I should think he was hin; and thankful he ought to be he's not hin the police station."

"Woke us up at two in the mornin' hangin' like a coal sack over the railin's; might a-tumbled into the airy and broke his neck. Disgraceful, I call it!"

"Yus, you can go up—he's in the top floor[Pg 271] back—trouble enough we had to get him there."

Leavesley went up to the top floor back. The unfortunate Verneede was in bed, trying to remember things. He had brought his umbrella home safely, but in the pockets of his clothes, after diligent search in the grey dawn, he had been able to discover only one halfpenny. To make up for this deficiency, his head was swelled up till it felt like a pumpkin.

"Good gracious, Verneede," cried Leavesley, staring at him, "what on earth has happened to you?

"I'm better now," said Mr Verneede, placing the jug, half empty, on the floor, and passing his hand across his brow.

Verneede had no recollection of anything at all save a few more or less unpleasant[Pg 272] incidents. He remembered the "Spotted Dog," the "King's Arms"; he remembered streets; he remembered being turned out of somewhere.

"She said—she hoped you'd have a fine voyage, that the weather would be fine, in short, or words to that effect."

Leavesley sighed again, and Verneede leaned back on his pillow. He did not know in the least whether he had been at Lamberts' or not—he hoped he hadn't.

PART V

CHAPTER I GOUT

Since her visit to Leavesley Miss Hancock felt certain that her system of petty espionage had been discovered: the question remained as to what course her brother would take. He had as yet said nothing.

One fact stood before her very plainly: his infatuation for Miss Lambert. She had examined Fanny very attentively, and despite the fact that she had plotted and planned for years to keep her brother single, had he at that moment entered the room with the news that he was engaged to be married to George Lambert's daughter, she would have received it not altogether as a blow. In her lifelong opposition to his marrying, she had always figured his possible wife as a woman who would oust her, but Fanny was totally unlike all other[Pg 275] girls she had ever met—very different from Miss Wilkinson and the other middle-class young women, with minds of their own, from whom she had fortunately or unfortunately guarded her brother. There were new possibilities about Fanny. She was so soft and so charmingly irresponsible that the idea of hectoring, ordering, directing and generally sitting upon her was equivalent to the idea of a new pleasure in life. To order, to put straight, to admonish were functions as necessary to Miss Hancock's being as excretion or respiration; a careless housemaid to correct, or a shiftless friend to advise, called these functions into play; and the process, however it affected the housemaid or the friend, left Miss Hancock a healthier and happier woman.

The Almighty, who, however we may look at the fact, made the fly to be the intimate companion of the spider, seemed in the construction of Miss Lambert to have had the vital requirements of Miss Hancock decidedly in view.

She had almost begun to form plans as to Fanny's dress allowance, in the event of her marriage—how it should be spent; her hair,[Pg 276] how it should be dressed; and her life, how it should be generally made a conglomeration of petty miseries.

On the night before the day Bevan left for Sussex Mr Hancock and his great toe had a conversation. What his right great toe said to Mr Hancock that night I will report very shortly for the benefit of elderly gentlemen in general; Anacreon has said the thing much better in verse, but verse is out of date. Said the right great toe of Mr Hancock in a monologue punctuated with the stabs of a stiletto:

"How old are you? Sixty-three? (stab), that's what you say, but you know very well you were born sixty-five years and six months ago. Wake up (stab, stab), you must not go to sleep. Sixty-five—five years more and you will be seventy; fifteen years more and you'll be eighty, and you are in love (stab, stab, stab). I'll teach you to eat sweet cakes and ice creams; I'll (stab) teach you to drink Burgundy. And you dared to call me Arthritic Rheumatism the other night, you (stab) dared! Now, go to sleep (stab, stab) ... wake up again, I want to speak to you," etc., etc., etc.

Gout talks to one very like a woman: you cannot reply to it, it simply talks on.

At eight o'clock next morning, when Miss Hancock left her room, Boffins informed her that her brother was ill and wished to see her.

"I'm all right," said James, who was lying in bed with the sheets up to his nose, "I'm all right—for heaven's sake, don't fidget with that window blind—I want my letters brought up; shan't go to the office to-day. You can send round and tell Bridgewater to call, and send for Carter, I've got a touch of this Arthritic Rheumatism (ow!)—do ask that servant to make less row on the stairs. No, don't want any breakfast."

"Well, Hancock," said Dr Carter, when he arrived, "got it again—whew! There's a foot! What have you been eating?"

"An ice-cream, and a cake, and a glass of Burgundy—well, you can commit suicide if you choose, but I can only warn you of this that if you wish to commit suicide in a most unpleasant manner you'll do such a thing again."

"Dash it, Carter—oh, Lord! go gently, don't touch it there! What's the good of being alive? I remember the days when I could drink a whole bottle of port without turning a hair."

"It's not your age so much as your diathesis," said the pitiless Carter. "It's unfortunate for you, but there you are. You might be worse, every man is born with a disease. Yours is gout—you might be worse. Suppose you had aneurism? Now, here's a prescription; get it made up at once. Thank goodness, you can stand colchicum."

"There, you are grumbling. Remember, my dear fellow, that living is a business as well as lawyering. Take life easy, and forget the office for a few days."

"I wasn't thinking of the office—give me that writing-case over there; I must write a letter."

When Bridgewater arrived half an hour later, he found his master laboriously addressing an envelope.

"Take that and post it, Bridgewater." Bridgewater took it and placed it in his pocket without looking at the address upon it, and having reported on the morning letters, and received advice as to dealing with one or two matters, ambled off on his errand.

That evening at five o'clock, when Patience brought him up a cup of tea and the evening newspaper, James, considerably eased by the colchicum and pills of Dr Carter, said: "Put the tea on the table there, and sit down, Patience. I wish to speak to you."

"You mean, James, that you have written a letter of proposal—that you intend, in short, to marry Miss Lambert?"

"Please explain what you mean by 'yes' and 'no'; the expression lacks lucidity, to say the least of it."

"I mean that it would be much better for you to remain as you are; but if you do intend to commit yourself in this way, well—Miss Lambert is at least a lady."

The keen eye of James examined his sister's face as she spoke, and he knew that what she said she meant. Despite all his tall talk to Bridgewater about sending his sister packing her influence upon him was very strong; thirty years of diffidence to her opinion in the minor details of life had not passed without leaving[Pg 281] their effect upon his will; besides he, as a business man, had great admiration for her astuteness and power of dealing with things. Active opposition to his matrimonial plans would not have altered them, but it would have made him unhappy.

"Mind," said Miss Hancock, as she handed the beverage, "I wash my hands of the matter; I think it distinctly unwise, considering your age, considering her age, considering everything."

"It is not my habit to be unkind to any one. You have written, you say, to her to-day; you wrote without consulting me—the step is taken, and you must abide by it. I hope it will be for your happiness, James."

"I wish," he said, putting the cup down on the table beside the bed, "I wish you knew her better."

"I will call upon her," said Miss Hancock,[Pg 282] counting her stitches; "she left her parasol behind her last night, I will take it back to her——"

"No, don't, for goodness sake!" said James, the Lambert ménage rising before him, and also a vague dread that his sister, despite her appearance and words of goodwill—or rather semi-goodwill—might be traitorously disposed at heart. "At least—I don't know—I suppose it would be the right thing to do."

"I am not especially anxious to call," said Miss Hancock, who had quite made up her mind to journey to Highgate on the morrow and spy out the land of the Lamberts for herself. "In fact, the only possible day I could call would be to-morrow before noon. I have a meeting in Sloane Square to attend at five, and on Wednesday I have three engagements, two on Thursday; Friday I have to spend the day with Aunt Catherine at Windsor, where I will remain over Sunday."

"Oh Lord! I thought some one had shot a bullet into my foot. Give me the medicine,[Pg 283] quick, and send round for Carter. I must have some opium, or I won't sleep a wink."

Miss Hancock administered the dose, and retired downstairs, when she sent a message to Dr Carter and ordered the lilac parasol of Miss Lambert to be wrapped in paper. Then she sent a message to the livery stables to order the hired brougham, which she employed several times a week, to be in attendance at 9.30 the following morning, to drive her to Highgate.

But next morning her brother was so bad that she could not leave him. But she called one morning later on.

CHAPTER II THE RESULT

The Lamberts as a rule took things easy in the morning. Breakfast was at any time that was suitable to the convenience and appetite of each individual; the things were generally cleared away by half-past eleven or twelve, a matter of half an hour lost in the forenoon[Pg 284] made little difference in the revolution of their day.

At half-past ten on the morning of Miss Hancock's descent upon her, Fanny was seated at the breakfast-table. It was a glorious day, filled with the warmth of summer, the scent of roses, and the songs of birds. A letter from her father lay beside her on the table; it had arrived by the morning's post, and contained great news—good news, too, yet the goodness of it was not entirely reflected in her face.

The worries of life were weighing on Miss Lambert; James Hancock's unanswered letter was not the least of these. She had laughed on receiving it, then she had cried. She had written three or four letters in answer to it, beginning, "Dear Mr Hancock," "My dear Mr Hancock," "Please do not think me horrid," etc.; but it was no use, each was a distinct refusal, yet each seemed either too cold or too warm. "If I send this," said she, "it will hurt him horribly, and he has been so kind. Oh dear! why will men be so stupid, they are so nice if they'd only not worry one to marry them. If I send this[Pg 285] it will only make him think that I will 'have him in the end,' as Susannah says. I wish I were a man."

Besides love troubles household worries had their place. James had gone very much to pieces morally in the last few days. He had taken diligently to drink, the writing and quoting of poetry, and the pawning of unconsidered trifles; between the bouts, in those fits of remorse, which may be likened to the Fata Morgana of true repentance, he had expended his energy on all sorts of household duties not required of him: winding up clocks to their destruction, smashing china, and scattering coals all over the place in attempts to convey over-full scuttles to wrong rooms and in the face of gravity. The effect upon Susannah of these eccentricities can be best described by the fact that she lived now most of her time with her apron over her head. Housework under these circumstances became a matter of some difficulty.

It wanted some twenty minutes to eleven when the "brougham with celluloid fittings," containing Miss Hancock, drove up the drive and stopped before "The Laurels."

Miss Hancock stepped out and up the steps, noticing to the minutest detail the neglect before and around her.

She gave her own characteristic knock—sharp, decided, and business-like; she would also have given her own characteristic ring, but that the bell failed to respond, the pull produced half a foot of wire but no sound, and the knob, when she dropped it, dangled wearily as if to say, "Now see what you've done! N'matter, I don't care."

She waited a little and knocked again; this time came footsteps and the sound of bars coming down and bolts being unshot, the door opened two inches on the chain, and the same pale blue eye and undecided-coloured fringe that had appeared to Mr Bevan, appeared to the now incensed Miss Hancock.

Just as the rabbit peeping from its burrow sees the stoat and recognises its old ancestral enemy, so Susannah, in Miss Hancock, beheld the Foe of herself and all her tribe.

Susannah banged the door to, not to exclude the newcomer, but simply to release the chain. Then she opened it again wide, as if to let in an elephant.

Susannah had not presented a particularly spruce appearance on the day when Mr Bevan called and we first met her, but this morning she was simply—awful.

A lock of hair like a bight of half-unravelled cable hung down behind her ear, her old print dress was indescribable, and she had, apparently, some one else's slippers on. She had also the weary air of a person who had been watching in a sick room all the night.

Miss Hancock took this figure in with one snapshot glance; also the hall untidied, the floor undusted, the dust-pan and brush laid on the stairs, a trap for the unwary to step on; the grandfather's clock pointing to quarter to six, and many other things which I have not seen or noticed, but which were clear to Miss Hancock, just as nebulæ and stars which, looking in the direction of I cannot see, are clear to the two-foot reflecting telescope of the Yerkes observatory.

Susannah escorted the sniffing visitor into[Pg 288] the library, dusted with her apron the very same chair she had dusted for Mr Bevan, said, "I'll tell Miss Fanny," and left the room, closing the door with a snap that spoke, not volumes, but just simply words.

The night before, after the other members of the household had retired, James had taken it into his head to sit up in the library over the remains of the fire left by Fanny. The room, as a consequence, reeked of stale tobacco, a tumbler stood on the table convenient to the armchair. Needless to say, the tumbler was empty.

Miss Hancock looked around her at the books, at the carpet, at the general litter. She came to the mantelpiece and touched it, looked at the tip of her gloved finger to assay the quantity of dust to the square millimetre, said, "Pah!" and sat down in the armchair. A Pink Un of George Lambert's lay invitingly near her on the table; she picked it up, glanced at the title, read a joke, turned purple, and dropped the raciest of all racing papers just as Fanny, fresh and charming, but somewhat bewildered-looking, entered the room.

Fanny felt sure that this visit of Miss Hancock's had something to do with the letter of her brother's. She was relieved when her visitor, after extending a hand emotionless and chill as the fin of a turtle, said:

"I had some business in Highgate, so I thought I would take the opportunity of returning your parasol, which you left behind you the other night."

"Thanks awfully," said Fanny; "it's awfully good of you to take the trouble. Please excuse the untidiness; we are in a great upset for—the painters are coming in. Won't you come into the breakfast-room? There's a fire there; it's not cold, I know, but I always think a fire is so bright."

She led the way to the breakfast-room, her visitor following, anxious to see as much as she could of the inner working of the Lambert household.

She gave a little start at the sight of the breakfast things not removed, and another start at sight of the provender laid out for one small person. The remains of a round of beef graced one end of the board, and a haddock that, had it been let grow, would[Pg 290] assuredly have ended its life in the form of a whale, the other; there was also jam and other things, including some shortbread on a plate.

"I breakfasted at quarter to eight," said Miss Hancock with a scarcely perceptible emphasis on the "I."

"I know we're awfully late as a rule," said Fanny, as they sat down near the window, in and out of which the wasps were coming, and through which the sun shone, laying a burning square on the carpet, "but I hate early breakfast. When I breakfast at eight I feel a hundred years old by twelve. Did you ever notice how awfully long mornings are?"

"My mornings," said Miss Hancock, laying a scarcely perceptible accent on the "my," "are all too short; an hour lost in the morning is never regained. You cannot expect servants to be active and diligent without you set them the example. We are placed, I think, in a very responsible position with regard to our servants: as we make them so they are."

"Do you think so?" said Fanny, trying to consider what part she possibly could have[Pg 291] had in the construction of James and the helpmeet Susannah.

"I am sure of it. If we are idle or lazy ourselves they imitate us; they are like children, and we should treat them as such. I ring the bell at half-past five every morning for the maids, and I expect them to be down by six."

"Then," said Fanny, laughing, "you don't set them—I mean they set you the example, for they are up before you."

"I spoke figuratively," said Miss Hancock rather stiffly, and eyeing the handmaiden who had just appeared at the door to remove the things.

"Give the fish to the cats, Susannah," said her mistress, "and be sure to take the bones out; one nearly choked," she said, resuming her conversation with her visitor, "the other morning."

"Hum!" said Miss Hancock, unenthusiastic on the subject of choking cats. "Do you always feed your animals on—good food?"

"You are very young, and, of course, it is[Pg 292] no affair of mine, but I think in housekeeping—having first of all regard to waste—one ought to consider how many poor people are starving. I send all my scraps to the St Mark's Refuge Home, an excellent institution."

"I used to give a lot of food away," said Fanny, "but I found it didn't pay, people didn't want it. We had a barrel of beer that no one drank, so I gave a tramp a jugful once, and he made a mark somewhere on the house, and after that twenty or thirty tramps a day called. We couldn't find the mark, so father had to have the whole lower part of the house lime-washed, and the gate pillars. After that he said no more food was to be given away, or beer."

"There are poor and poor. To give beer to a tramp is in my opinion a distinctly wicked act; it is simply feeding the flames of drunkenness, as Mr Bulders says. You have heard of Mr Bulders?"

"I must introduce you. I hope you will like him, he is a great friend of ours. Your Christian name is Fanny, I believe. May I call you Fanny?"

"Yes," said Fanny. "How queer it is,[Pg 293] nobody knows me for—I mean, everybody always asks me that before I have known them for more——"

Miss Hancock said nothing, but sat for a moment in silence gloating over the girl before her. Here was a gold-mine of pure correction—the metaphor is mixed perhaps, but you will understand it. Then she said: "And do you permit it?"

"Yes, but, my dear girl, you are no longer a child. Fathers are indulgent, and sometimes blind to what the world thinks; consider, when you come to marry, when you come to have a husband——"

"Oh, I hope it'll be a long time before I come to that," said Fanny, in a tone of voice as if general service or the workhouse were the topic of discussion.

"I understood my brother to say that he had written to you on a subject touching your welfare and his happiness?"

Fanny flushed all over her face and neck. Only a little child or a very young girl can blush like that—a blush that passes almost as quickly as it comes, and is, perhaps, of all emotional expressions the most natural and charming.

"I did have a letter," she faltered, "and I have tried to answer it, am going to answer it—I am so sorry——"

"I don't see the necessity of being sorry," said the elder lady. "One does not answer a letter of that description flippantly and by the next post; my brother will quite understand and appreciate the cause of delay."

"Oh, but it's not the delay I'm sorry for, it's the—it's the having to say that—I can't say what he wants me to say."

Miss Hancock raised her eyebrows. Miss Lambert's English was enough to raise a grammarian from the grave, but it was not at the English that Miss Hancock evinced surprise.

James Hancock was not as old to his sister as he appeared to the rest of the world, though she knew his age to a day and had quoted it as an argument against his marriage; she did not appreciate the fact that he looked every day of his age, and even perhaps a few days over.

It is a pathetic and sometimes beautiful—and sometimes ugly—fact that we are blind to much in the people we live with and grow up with. Joan sees Darby very much as she saw him thirty years ago, and to Miss Hancock her younger brother was her younger brother; and her younger brother, to a woman, is never old. Besides being in the "prime of life," James was clever; besides being clever, he was rich, very rich. What more could a girl want?

"Oh, it's not that sort of liking. I mean I'd like to like him, I do like him, but not in the way he wants."

"It is no affair of mine," said Miss Hancock,[Pg 296] "not in the least, but I would urge you not to be too hasty in your reply. Think over it, weigh the matter judicially before you decide upon what, after all, is the most important decision a young girl is ever called upon to make."

"I hate myself," broke out Fanny, who had been listening with bent head, and finger tracing the pattern on the cloth of the table beside her. "I hate myself. People are always doing me kindnesses and I am always acting like a beast, so it seems to me, but how can I help it?" lifting her head suddenly with a bright smile. "If I were to marry them all, I'd have about fifty husbands, now—more!—so what am I to do?"

Miss Hancock sniffed; she had never been in the same position herself, so could give no advice from experience. The question rather irritated her, and a smart lecture rose to her lips on the impropriety and immodesty of girls allowing people of the other sex to "care for them," etc., etc., but the lecture did not pass her lips.

Since entering the house of the Lamberts the demon of Order had swelled Jinnee-like[Pg 297] in her breast, and the seven devils of spring cleaning, each of whose right hands is a cake of soap, and whose left hands are scrubbing-brushes, arose and ramped. The whole place and the people therein, from the bell-pull to the cats'-breakfast-destined haddock, from Susannah to her mistress, exercised a fascination upon Miss Hancock beyond the power of words to describe. She had measured Susannah from her sand-coloured hair to her slipshod feet, gauged her capacity for work and her moral ineptitude, and had already dismissed her, in her mind; as for the rest of the business, the ordering of Fanny and of her father, whom she divined, the setting of the house to rights and the righting of all the Lamberts' affairs, mundane and extra-mundane—this, she felt, would be a work, which accomplished, she could say, "I have not lived in vain." All this might be lost by a lecture misplaced.

"Of course you will please yourself," she said. "I would only say do nothing rashly; and in whatever way you decide, I hope you will always be our friend. You are very young to have the cares of a house and the ordering of servants thrust upon you, and[Pg 298] any assistance or advice I can give you, I should be very glad to give."

"I would be very glad to call some day and have a good long chat with you; my experience in housekeeping might be of assistance."

"I should be delighted," gasped Fanny, who felt like a bird in the net of the fowler, and whose soul was filled with one wild longing—the longing to escape.

"Monday—no, not Monday, I have an engagement. Tuesday—I am not sure about Tuesday. Suppose—suppose I write?"

"I am disengaged all next week; any day you please to appoint I shall be glad to come. What a large garden you have!"

"Oh, I scarcely ever wear a hat in the garden. If you come this way we can go out through the side door."

They wandered around the garden, Miss Hancock making notes in her own mind. As they passed the kitchen window, a face[Pg 299] gazed out, a beery, leery face, behind which could be seen the pale phantom of Susannah. The face was gazing at Miss Hancock with an expression of amused and critical impudence that caused that lady to pause and snort.

"Yes," said Fanny in an agony, "it must have been the plumber; he came this morning to mend the stove. Oh, here is your carriage waiting; so glad you called. Yes, I'll write."

CHAPTER III THE RESULT—(continued)

Miss Lambert ran back to the house. She made a bee-line for the library, sat down at the writing-table, seized a pen and a sheet of paper, and began writing as if inspired. This is what she wrote, in part:

Now we have seen that Miss Hancock had endeavoured as far as in her lay to help along her brother's interests with Miss Lambert. Yet on the receipt of the above letter the conviction entered the mind of James Hancock, never to be evicted, that his sister had, vulgarly speaking, "dished" the affair, and, moreover, that she had done so wittingly and of malice prepense.

CHAPTER IV "JOURNEY'S END"

For some days past, ever since Verneede's fiasco in fact, Leavesley had been very much down in the mouth.

There is a tide in the affairs of man that when it reaches its lowest ebb usually takes a turn. The tide had been out with Leavesley for some time, and acres of desolate mud spoke nothing of the rolling breakers that were coming in.

The first roller had arrived by the first post on this very morning. It was a letter from his uncle.

"Two thousand pounds!" yelled Leavesley, "Belinda!" (he had heard her foot on the stairs).

"I've been left two thousand pounds." Belinda passed on her avocations; she thought it was another of Mr Leavesley's jokes.

He ate a tremendous breakfast without knowing what he was eating, and in the middle of it the second roller came in.

He felt certain it was from Hancock revoking his legacy. It was from Miss Lambert.

"Fanny!" cried Leavesley, as he stood before her in the drawing-room of "The Laurels" (she had just entered the room, having returned from posting her letter).

"Yes; he was going to have left me it in his will, but he's given me it instead."

"How good of him!" said Fanny. She was about to say something else, but she stopped.

He did not for a moment grasp the importance of this piece of intelligence. Then it broke on him. Now that Fanny's father was provided for, she would be free to marry any one she liked.

"I was nearly heart-broken," mumbled Leavesley into Fanny's hair—they were seated on the couch—"when you didn't reply."

"The letter was on the kitchen dresser all[Pg 304] the time," replied Fanny in a happy and dreamy voice, "behind a plate."

"And then when old Verneede called, and you seemed so indifferent—at least, he said you did."

"He said he did, and he saw you, and told you I was going to Australia, and you didn't care."

"He must have been dreaming then," said Leavesley, who began to see how matters stood as regards the veracity of Verneede. "No matter, I don't care now. Hold me tighter, Fanny."

"But," said Leavesley after an interval of sweet silence, "what I can't make out is how Bridgewater found out about you and me."

"Yes; he told my aunt all about us, and our going to Epping Forest: only the old fool said we went to the Zoo."

Fanny was silent. Then she said in a perplexed voice: "I want to tell you something. I did go to the Zoo."

"Oh, that accounts for it; he's mixed me and uncle up together—he must be going mad. Every one seems a little mad lately, uncle especially—taking you to the Zoo, and giving me two thousand, and—and—no matter, kiss me again."

"Now," said Fanny, suddenly jumping up, "I must see after the house. Father wired this morning that he was bringing Miss[Pg 306] Pursehouse here to-day to see the place, and I must get it tidy. Who's there?"

"Miss Fanny," said Susannah, opening the door an inch. Miss Lambert left the room hurriedly and closed the door. There was something in Susannah's voice that told her "something had happened."

"Oh, my goodness!" murmured Fanny with a frown; visions of Mr Hancock in all the positions of love-making rose before her. "Why didn't you say I was out?"

Fanny went downstairs and into the library, and there before her stood Mr Bevan on the hearthrug.

"I am so glad—when did you come? Guess who I thought it was? I thought it was Mr Hancock."

"Hancock?" said Charles, who had held her outstretched hand just a moment longer than was absolutely necessary. "Oh, that affair is all over. I stopped the action—by the way, I believe old Hancock's cracked; sent your father a most extraordinary wire, saying I was—what was it he said?—a duck, I think."

"That he's engaged to be married to Miss Pursehouse. I had the letter this morning—oh, of course he couldn't have told you, for he only proposed yesterday afternoon. He wrote in an awful hurry, just a line to say he's 'engaged and done for.' Isn't he funny? There was another man after her, and father says he has 'cut him out.' Do tell me all about them; did you see the other man? and what did you think of father—isn't he a dear?"

"Yes," said Mr Bevan abstractedly. He was flabbergasted with the news and irritated, although he was not in love, and never had been in love, with Miss Pursehouse, still, it was distinctly unpleasant to think that he had been "cut out."

"I thought he seemed fond of her in Paris," continued Fanny, "but one never can tell. I'm glad he got the telegram all right. It[Pg 308] was I that sent it. I was going to the Zoo with Mr Hancock——"

"I was going to the Zoo with Mr Hancock. Oh, I have such a lot to tell you, but promise me first you'll never tell."

"Yes, but you've promised never to tell. Every one seems to have been proposing to me in the last three months, and I wish they'd stop—I wish they'd stop," said Miss Lambert, half-talking to herself and half to Bevan, half-laughing and half-crying all at the same time; "it's got on my nerves. James will be the next—it's like the influenza, it seems in the air——"

"I came to-day," said Mr Bevan with awful and preternatural gravity, "to speak to[Pg 309] you, Fanny—to tell you that ever since I saw you first, I have thought of nobody else——"

"Oh, stop," said Fanny, "stop, stop—oh, this is too bad! I never thought you would do it. I thought I had one f-f-friend."

"Dry your eyes, and tell me this; am I so very dreadful? Don't you think if you tried you could care for me? I know I'm not clever and all that—look up." He took her hand, and she let him hold it.

"If I h—hadn't met him, I believe I—I—I'd have married you—if you'd asked me."

"We're both so poor," said Fanny, "that you needn't envy us, dear Cousin Charles; all we've got in the world is our love for each other."

"Miss Morgan, that American girl, told me something about him." Mr Bevan stood silent[Pg 310] for a moment, and then went on: "Look here, Fanny, just think this matter over and tell me your mind. I'll put my case before you. You like me, I think?"

"Well, I am not so very old, and I am rich; between one thing and another I have about eight thousand a year. We might be very happy together—don't interrupt me, I am just stating my case—money means a lot in this world; it's not everything, I admit—there are some men richer than I, that I would be sorry to see any girl married to. Well, on the other hand, there is this other man; he may be awfully jolly, and all that sort of thing, but he's poor—very poor, from what I can gather. Before you kick me over, think of the future—think well."

"Do you know," said Fanny, "that if you had come yesterday, and had asked me to marry you, I believe I would have said 'yes,' and then we would have been always miserable. I would have married you for your money; not for myself, but to help father. But you see now that he is going to be married to Miss Pursehouse she'll take care of him."

"He is not married to her yet," said Charles,[Pg 311] thinking of Lulu Morgan's words, and cursing himself for having let days slip by, for he could have called yesterday, or the day before, but for indecision—that most fatal of all elements in human affairs.

"No, but he will marry her, for when father makes up his mind to do a thing he always does it."

"So then," he said, "you have made up your mind irrevocably not to have anything to do with me?"

"I must, I must—Oh dear, I wish I were dead. I will always be your friend—I will always be a sister to you."

"Don't—don't say anything more about it, please. You can't help yourself—it's fate."

"No—let us talk of other things. How are you getting on, has that man been giving any more trouble?"

"James—oh, he's been dreadful. His wife has run away from their lodgings; and now he says she was not his wife at all, and Susannah is breaking her heart, for she can't bring him to the point. When she suggests marriage he does all his things up in a bundle and says he's going to Australia. I'll get[Pg 312] father to turn him out when he comes back."

"Let me," said Charles, who felt an imperative desire to kick some one—himself, if possible—that being out of the question—James.

"No," said Fanny, as he rose and took his hat preparatory to departing, "for she'd follow him, and I'd be left alone. Who is this?"

"Then quick," said Fanny, not knowing the truth of the matter, but guessing that Charles as a rejected lover had his feelings, and preferred not to meet her father.

She led him across the hall and down some steps, then pushed him into a passage, which, being pursued, led to the kitchen, whence through the scullery flight might be effected by the back entry of "The Laurels."

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PART I
CHAP.		PAGE
I.	MR LEAVESLEY	1
II.	A LOST TYPE	4
III.	A COUNCIL OF THREE	12
IV.	HANCOCK & HANCOCK	26
V.	OMENS	31
VI.	LAMBERT v. BEVAN	36
VII.	THE BEVAN TEMPER	41
VIII.	AT "THE LAURELS"	48
IX.	"WHAT TALES ARE THESE?"	62
X.	ASPARAGUS AND CATS	76

PART II
I.	A REVELATION	86
II.	THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE	113
III.	TRIBULATIONS OF AN AUNT	125
IV.	THE DAISY CHAIN	131

PART III
I.	AN ASSIGNATION	141
II.	THE EMOTIONS OF MR BRIDGEWATER	150
III.	AN OLD MAN'S OUTING	159
IV.	A MEETING	169
V.	THE ADVENTURES OF BRIDGEWATER	171
VI.	A CONFESSION	176
VII.	IN GORDON SQUARE	185

PART IV
I.	"THE ROOST"	194
II.	MISS MORGAN	207
III.	A CURE FOR BLINDNESS	223
IV.	TIC-DOULOUREUX	235
V.	THE AMBASSADOR	245
VI.	A SURPRISE VISIT	251
VII.	THE UNEXPLAINED	263
VIII.	RETURN OF THE AMBASSADOR	269

PART V
I.	GOUT	274
II.	THE RESULT	283
III.	THE RESULT (continued)	299
IV.	"JOURNEY'S END"	301

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Fanny Lambert: A Novel

FANNY LAMBERT

CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER I MR LEAVESLEY