A Man of Means Page 8

  “After all you have done for us, Senor Bleke, we shall seem to you ungrateful bounders, but what is it? Yes? No? I shouldn’t wonder, perhaps. The whole fact is that there has been political crisis in Paranoya. Upset. Apple-cart. Yes? You follow? No? The Ministry have been—what do you say?—put through it. Expelled. Broken up. No more ministry. New ministry wanted. To conciliate royalist party, that is the cry. So deputation of leading persons, mighty good chaps, prominent merchants and that sort of bounder, call upon us. They offer me to be President. See? No? Yes? That’s right. I am ambitious blighter, Senor Bleke. What about it, no? I accept. I am new President of Paranoya. So no need for your kind assistance. Royalist revolution up the spout. No more royalist revolution.”

  The wave of relief which swept over Roland ebbed sufficiently after an interval to enable him to think of some one but himself. He was not fond of Maraquita, but he had a tender heart, and this, he felt, would kill the poor girl.

  “But Maraquita–-?”

  “That’s all right, splendid old chap. No need to worry about Maraquita, stout old boy. Where the husband goes, so does the wife go. As you say, whither thou goes will I follow. No?”

  “But I don’t understand. Maraquita is not your wife?”

  “Why, certainly, good old heart. What else?”

  “Have you been married to her all the time?”

  “Why, certainly, good, dear boy.”

  The room swam before Roland’s eyes. There was no room in his mind for meditations on the perfidy of woman. He groped forward and found Bombito’s hand.

  “By Jove,” he said thickly, as he wrung it again and again, “I knew you were a good sort the first time I saw you. Have a drink or something. Have a cigar or something. Have something, anyway, and sit down and tell me all about it.”

  THE EPISODE OF THE HIRED PAST

  Final Story of the Series [First published in Pictorial Review, October 1916]

  “What do you mean—you can’t marry him after all? After all what? Why can’t you marry him? You are perfectly childish.”

  Lord Evenwood’s gentle voice, which had in its time lulled the House of Peers to slumber more often than any voice ever heard in the Gilded Chamber, had in it a note of unwonted, but quite justifiable, irritation. If there was one thing more than another that Lord Evenwood disliked, it was any interference with arrangements already made.

  “The man,” he continued, “is not unsightly. The man is not conspicuously vulgar. The man does not eat peas with his knife. The man pronounces his aitches with meticulous care and accuracy. The man, moreover, is worth rather more than a quarter of a million pounds. I repeat, you are childish!”

  “Yes, I know he’s a very decent little chap, Father,” said Lady Eva. “It’s not that at all.”

  “I should be gratified, then, to hear what, in your opinion, it is.”

  “Well, do you think I could be happy with him?”

  Lady Kimbuck gave tongue. She was Lord Evenwood’s sister. She spent a very happy widowhood interfering in the affairs of the various branches of her family.

  “We’re not asking you to be happy. You have such odd ideas of happiness. Your idea of happiness is to be married to your cousin Gerry, whose only visible means of support, so far as I can gather, is the four hundred a year which he draws as a member for a constituency which has every intention of throwing him out at the next election.”

  Lady Eva blushed. Lady Kimbuck’s faculty for nosing out the secrets of her family had made her justly disliked from the Hebrides to Southern Cornwall.

  “Young O’Rion is not to be thought of,” said Lord Evenwood firmly. “Not for an instant. Apart from anything else, his politics are all wrong. Moreover, you are engaged to this Mr. Bleke. It is a sacred responsibility not lightly to be evaded. You can not pledge your word one day to enter upon the most solemn contract known to—ah—the civilized world, and break it the next. It is not fair to the man. It is not fair to me. You know that all I live for is to see you comfortably settled. If I could myself do anything for you, the matter would be different. But these abominable land-taxes and Blowick—especially Blowick—no, no, it’s out of the question. You will be very sorry if you do anything foolish. I can assure you that Roland Blekes are not to be found—ah—on every bush. Men are extremely shy of marrying nowadays.”

  “Especially,” said Lady Kimbuck, “into a family like ours. What with Blowick’s scandal, and that shocking business of your grandfather and the circus-woman, to say nothing of your poor father’s trouble in ‘85–-“

  “Thank you, Sophia,” interrupted Lord Evenwood, hurriedly. “It is unnecessary to go into all that now. Suffice it that there are adequate reasons, apart from all moral obligations, why Eva should not break her word to Mr. Bleke.”

  Lady Kimbuck’s encyclopedic grip of the family annals was a source of the utmost discomfort to her relatives. It was known that more than one firm of publishers had made her tempting offers for her reminiscences, and the family looked on like nervous spectators at a battle while Cupidity fought its ceaseless fight with Laziness; for the Evenwood family had at various times and in various ways stimulated the circulation of the evening papers. Most of them were living down something, and it was Lady Kimbuck’s habit, when thwarted in her lightest whim, to retire to her boudoir and announce that she was not to be disturbed as she was at last making a start on her book. Abject surrender followed on the instant.

  At this point in the discussion she folded up her crochet-work, and rose.

  “It is absolutely necessary for you, my dear, to make a good match, or you will all be ruined. I, of course, can always support my declining years with literary work, but–-“

  Lady Eva groaned. Against this last argument there was no appeal.

  Lady Kimbuck patted her affectionately on the shoulder.

  “There, run along now,” she said. “I daresay you’ve got a headache or something that made you say a lot of foolish things you didn’t mean. Go down to the drawing-room. I expect Mr. Bleke is waiting there to say goodnight to you. I am sure he must be getting quite impatient.”

  Down in the drawing-room, Roland Bleke was hoping against hope that Lady Eva’s prolonged absence might be due to the fact that she had gone to bed with a headache, and that he might escape the nightly interview which he so dreaded.

  Reviewing his career, as he sat there, Roland came to the conclusion that women had the knack of affecting him with a form of temporary insanity. They temporarily changed his whole nature. They made him feel for a brief while that he was a dashing young man capable of the highest flights of love. It was only later that the reaction came and he realized that he was nothing of the sort.

  At heart he was afraid of women, and in the entire list of the women of whom he had been afraid, he could not find one who had terrified him so much as Lady Eva Blyton.

  Other women—notably Maraquita, now happily helping to direct the destinies of Paranoya—had frightened him by their individuality. Lady Eva frightened him both by her individuality and the atmosphere of aristocratic exclusiveness which she conveyed. He had no idea whatever of what was the proper procedure for a man engaged to the daughter of an earl. Daughters of earls had been to him till now mere names in the society columns of the morning paper. The very rules of the game were beyond him. He felt like a confirmed Association footballer suddenly called upon to play in an International Rugby match.

  All along, from the very moment when—to his unbounded astonishment—she had accepted him, he had known that he was making a mistake; but he never realized it with such painful clearness as he did this evening. He was filled with a sort of blind terror. He cursed the fate which had taken him to the Charity-Bazaar at which he had first come under the notice of Lady Kimbuck. The fatuous snobbishness which had made him leap at her invitation to spend a few days at Evenwood Towers he regretted; but for that he blamed himself less. Further acquaintance with Lady Kimbuck had convinced him that if she had wanted him, she would have
got him somehow, whether he had accepted or refused.

  What he really blamed himself for was his mad proposal. There had been no need for it. True, Lady Eva had created a riot of burning emotions in his breast from the moment they met; but he should have had the sense to realize that she was not the right mate for him, even tho he might have a quarter of a million tucked away in gilt-edged securities. Their lives could not possibly mix. He was a commonplace young man with a fondness for the pleasures of the people. He liked cheap papers, picture-palaces, and Association football. Merely to think of Association football in connection with her was enough to make the folly of his conduct clear. He ought to have been content to worship her from afar as some inaccessible goddess.

  A light step outside the door made his heart stop beating.

  “I’ve just looked in to say good night, Mr.—er—Roland,” she said, holding out her hand. “Do excuse me. I’ve got such a headache.”

  “Oh, yes, rather; I’m awfully sorry.”

  If there was one person in the world Roland despised and hated at that moment, it was himself.

  “Are you going out with the guns to-morrow?” asked Lady Eva languidly.

  “Oh, yes, rather! I mean, no. I’m afraid I don’t shoot.”

  The back of his neck began to glow. He had no illusions about himself. He was the biggest ass in Christendom.

  “Perhaps you’d like to play a round of golf, then?”

  “Oh, yes, rather! I mean, no.” There it was again, that awful phrase. He was certain he had not intended to utter it. She must be thinking him a perfect lunatic. “I don’t play golf.”

  They stood looking at each other for a moment. It seemed to Roland that her gaze was partly contemptuous, partly pitying. He longed to tell her that, tho she had happened to pick on his weak points in the realm of sport, there were things he could do. An insane desire came upon him to babble about his school football team. Should he ask her to feel his quite respectable biceps? No.

  “Never mind,” she said, kindly. “I daresay we shall think of something to amuse you.”

  She held out her hand again. He took it in his for the briefest possible instant, painfully conscious the while that his own hand was clammy from the emotion through which he had been passing.

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Thank Heaven, she was gone. That let him out for another twelve hours at least.

  A quarter of an hour later found Roland still sitting, where she had left him, his head in his hands. The groan of an overwrought soul escaped him.

  “I can’t do it!”

  He sprang to his feet.

  “I won’t do it.”

  A smooth voice from behind him spoke.

  “I think you are quite right, sir—if I may make the remark.”

  Roland had hardly ever been so startled in his life. In the first place, he was not aware of having uttered his thoughts aloud; in the second, he had imagined that he was alone in the room. And so, a moment before, he had been.

  But the owner of the voice possessed, among other qualities, the cat-like faculty of entering a room perfectly noiselessly—a fact which had won for him, in the course of a long career in the service of the best families, the flattering position of star witness in a number of England’s raciest divorce-cases.

  Mr. Teal, the butler—for it was no less a celebrity who had broken in on Roland’s reverie—was a long, thin man of a somewhat priestly cast of countenance. He lacked that air of reproving hauteur which many butlers possess, and it was for this reason that Roland had felt drawn to him during the black days of his stay at Evenwood Towers. Teal had been uncommonly nice to him on the whole. He had seemed to Roland, stricken by interviews with his host and Lady Kimbuck, the only human thing in the place.

  He liked Teal. On the other hand, Teal was certainly taking a liberty. He could, if he so pleased, tell Teal to go to the deuce. Technically, he had the right to freeze Teal with a look.

  He did neither of these things. He was feeling very lonely and very forlorn in a strange and depressing world, and Teal’s voice and manner were soothing.

  “Hearing you speak, and seeing nobody else in the room,” went on the butler, “I thought for a moment that you were addressing me.”

  This was not true, and Roland knew it was not true. Instinct told him that Teal knew that he knew it was not true; but he did not press the point.

  “What do you mean—you think I am quite right?” he said. “You don’t know what I was thinking about.”

  Teal smiled indulgently.

  “On the contrary, sir. A child could have guessed it. You have just come to the decision—in my opinion a thoroughly sensible one—that your engagement to her ladyship can not be allowed to go on. You are quite right, sir. It won’t do.”

  Personal magnetism covers a multitude of sins. Roland was perfectly well aware that he ought not to be standing here chatting over his and Lady Eva’s intimate affairs with a butler; but such was Teal’s magnetism that he was quite unable to do the right thing and tell him to mind his own business. “Teal, you forget yourself!” would have covered the situation. Roland, however, was physically incapable of saying “Teal, you forget yourself!” The bird knows all the time that he ought not to stand talking to the snake, but he is incapable of ending the conversation. Roland was conscious of a momentary wish that he was the sort of man who could tell butlers that they forgot themselves. But then that sort of man would never be in this sort of trouble. The “Teal, you forget yourself” type of man would be a first-class shot, a plus golfer, and would certainly consider himself extremely lucky to be engaged to Lady Eva.

  “The question is,” went on Mr. Teal, “how are we to break it off?”

  Roland felt that, as he had sinned against all the decencies in allowing the butler to discuss his affairs with him, he might just as well go the whole hog and allow the discussion to run its course. And it was an undeniable relief to talk about the infernal thing to some one.

  He nodded gloomily, and committed himself. Teal resumed his remarks with the gusto of a fellow-conspirator.

  “It’s not an easy thing to do gracefully, sir, believe me, it isn’t. And it’s got to be done gracefully, or not at all. You can’t go to her ladyship and say ‘It’s all off, and so am I,’ and catch the next train for London. The rupture must be of her ladyship’s making. If some fact, some disgraceful information concerning you were to come to her ladyship’s ears, that would be a simple way out of the difficulty.”

  He eyed Roland meditatively.

  “If, for instance, you had ever been in jail, sir?”

  “Well, I haven’t.”

  “No offense intended, sir, I’m sure. I merely remembered that you had made a great deal of money very quickly. My experience of gentlemen who have made a great deal of money very quickly is that they have generally done their bit of time. But, of course, if you–-. Let me think. Do you drink, sir?”

  “No.”

  Mr. Teal sighed. Roland could not help feeling that he was disappointing the old man a good deal.

  “You do not, I suppose, chance to have a past?” asked Mr. Teal, not very hopefully. “I use the word in its technical sense. A deserted wife? Some poor creature you have treated shamefully?”

  At the risk of sinking still further in the butler’s esteem, Roland was compelled to answer in the negative.

  “I was afraid not,” said Mr. Teal, shaking his head. “Thinking it all over yesterday, I said to myself, ‘I’m afraid he wouldn’t have one.’ You don’t look like the sort of gentleman who had done much with his time.”

  “Thinking it over?”

  “Not on your account, sir,” explained Mr. Teal. “On the family’s. I disapproved of this match from the first. A man who has served a family as long as I have had the honor of serving his lordship’s, comes to entertain a high regard for the family prestige. And, with no offense to yourself, sir, this would not have done.”

  “Wel
l, it looks as if it would have to do,” said Roland, gloomily. “I can’t see any way out of it.”

  “I can, sir. My niece at Aldershot.”

  Mr. Teal wagged his head at him with a kind of priestly archness.

  “You can not have forgotten my niece at Aldershot?”

  Roland stared at him dumbly. It was like a line out of a melodrama. He feared, first for his own, then for the butler’s sanity. The latter was smiling gently, as one who sees light in a difficult situation.

  “I’ve never been at Aldershot in my life.”

  “For our purposes you have, sir. But I’m afraid I am puzzling you. Let me explain. I’ve got a niece over at Aldershot who isn’t much good. She’s not very particular. I am sure she would do it for a consideration.”

  “Do what?”

  “Be your ‘Past,’ sir. I don’t mind telling you that as a ‘Past’ she’s had some experience; looks the part, too. She’s a barmaid, and you would guess it the first time you saw her. Dyed yellow hair, sir,” he went on with enthusiasm, “done all frizzy. Just the sort of young person that a young gentleman like yourself would have had a ‘past’ with. You couldn’t find a better if you tried for a twelvemonth.”

  “But, I say–-!”

  “I suppose a hundred wouldn’t hurt you?”

  “Well, no, I suppose not, but–-“

  “Then put the whole thing in my hands, sir. I’ll ask leave off to-morrow and pop over and see her. I’ll arrange for her to come here the day after to see you. Leave it all to me. To-night you must write the letters.”

  “Letters?”

  “Naturally, there would be letters, sir. It is an inseparable feature of these cases.”

  “Do you mean that I have got to write to her? But I shouldn’t know what to say. I’ve never seen her.”

  “That will be quite all right, sir, if you place yourself in my hands. I will come to your room after everybody’s gone to bed, and help you write those letters. You have some note-paper with your own address on it? Then it will all be perfectly simple.”

  When, some hours later, he read over the ten or twelve exceedingly passionate epistles which, with the butler’s assistance, he had succeeded in writing to Miss Maud Chilvers, Roland came to the conclusion that there must have been a time when Mr. Teal was a good deal less respectable than he appeared to be at present. Byronic was the only adjective applicable to his collaborator’s style of amatory composition. In every letter there were passages against which Roland had felt compelled to make a modest protest.