with the following march london saw once more the duchess of otterbourne carrying her graceful presence to court and salon and theatre, having recovered her beauty and with it her spirits. one of those fortunate incidents of which life is prodigal to its favorites had happened. an old aunt had died and left her a legacy of a few thousands; enough thousands to make a year at least pass smoothly, without too much self-denial.
she was pleased to have a little ready money, indisputably her own, which had come to her in a most respectable manner, and could be squandered just as she chose, without the interference of anybody. millions do not really afford you the smallest satisfaction if somebody stands over you to see how you spend them.
the insolence and the courage of her character brought her back to the scene of her slavery to william massarene. she felt that it was necessary to show her brother that she did not care a straw for his condemnation, and to prove to society in general that her position was unshaken. who could tell how that young woman, who had sent her the counterfoils and the acceptances, might not have talked? besides, she wished to see her children. her affection for them was genuine. it was not profound or unselfish, it was not tender or ideal, but it was a real affection in its way; and, besides, she was proud of them. they were the handsomest little people in england; always well and always strong. against jack she bore a grudge—unreasoningly and unkindly—but still, she wished to have him with her in london. the presence of the little duke and his brothers and sister in her new house would prove to people that her conduct had always been perfectly correct.
“one does miss one’s children so cruelly,” she said to her sister carrie, who answered: “yes, one does; it is like losing one’s dressing-bag.”
she fully expected hurstmanceaux to forbid their coming to her, but he left the matter to the ormes’s decision;[453] he was at faldon, and gave no opinion one way or the other. to her intimate friends she attributed her rupture with him to his extreme severity and unkindness about the otterbourne diamonds and her own financial affairs; and, as she was always a popular person, and he never was, her version was accepted and circulated, and the opinion of the world was indulgent to her.
she took a pretty, furnished house in eaton place, and resumed the life which she had led when cocky, like a ministering angel, had been behind her, to excuse her imprudence and share her extravagance. the blenheims were left down at whiteleaf, but jack and his brothers and sister were brought to town.
boo, wild with delight, raced upstairs to a bedroom on the third floor, and thought that altitude a seventh heaven. jack was dull; he loved the country and hated london, hated it doubly now that he had lost harry, and he felt sure that his mother was the cause of harry’s disappearance. when he saw the life guards ride down through the park to knightsbridge, the sight made him very sad, for there were no kind dark eyes looking at him with a smile in them from under the shining helmet.
his mother, who was not harassed by such regrets, was very pleased to be in london again with a little money at her back. she was very tenacious of her social position, and she knew that it was necessary to be respectable now and then. she attended the first drawing-room; went to the first receptions of some tiresome gros bonnets whom she called old dowdies; and reascended a social throne which for a moment had shaken under her. the chapel royal saw her every sunday, and she began to think of making a pleasant second marriage before katherine massarene (who might spoil one) should return to society.
harrenden house was shut up; its porter alone, stripped of his gorgeous vestments, dwelt behind the gates looking no more like himself than a grub looks like a butterfly. there was a hatchment above the door, large, imposing, majestic; it was there by margaret massarene’s wish beyond the usual time to have it shown. all the great people and the smart people who had dined at that house, and pocketed cotillon presents, and drunk rare wines, and[454] borrowed money and paid it by insolent jokes, now drove past in the sunshine or the fog, in the north wind or the east, had found other dupes and other butts for their needs and their jests, and did not even give a thought to “billy.”
he was gone, and there were always new people coming in from the states or the colonies, or even homemade, who were the natural manure wherewith to nourish starving genealogical trees.
“i say, sourisette, how was it you got nothing under billy’s will?” said her cousin roxhall to her one day as they rode in the park.
“my dear gerald,” she answered with dignity, “i had not sold him an ancestral estate. if i had done so i should not have taken it back as a gift from his daughter as you have done!”
“oh i say,” muttered roxhall. “that’s a nasty one, but it isn’t the fact. i’ve paid back half the purchase price and the other half is on the land, and it’s not you, mousie, who have the right to say such things.”
roxhall’s mind reverted to the sale of vale royal at homburg, when he had never looked too closely into the percentage received by the fair negotiatress of the sale. they were speaking as they rode down rotten row, and at that moment her mare became fidgety and carried her out of earshot. he rode after her.
“you think you can say those things to me,” he said, leaning a little toward her, “because i am a relative, and because i have always been a fool about you; but don’t you put people’s backs up like that, my dear, or you’ll get more than you like some day.”
“my dear gerald,” said mouse between her teeth, “fall back a little, please; i don’t care to be seen riding with a person who has taken alms from miss massarene, even if he is my cousin.”
she was not afraid to be insolent to him; roxhall would be no use any more to her, for he could never sell vale royal twice.
roxhall checked his horse and let her groom pass him. this was the woman for whom he had nearly broken his wife’s heart, and more than nearly ruined himself!
[455]“what a confounded ass i was!” he thought. “she isn’t worth the tan that her mare kicks up; and yet—and yet—oh, lord, if she whistled me i should run to her like a dog, i know i should!”
he was a clever if careless man of the world, and he was sincerely attached to his wife, but he had been as wax in the hands of his cousin mouse, and would be so again, he felt, if she cared to make him so. neither philosophy nor psychology can explain fascination or the power it exercises in the teeth of common sense and to the root of conscience.
she, who believed and disbelieved in a higher power, as most people do according to the favor or the frown which they consider the higher power gives them, was at this moment in the full fervor of belief, as she had money enough to let her do as she liked for a year or two. roxhall could not touch her conscience; hurstmanceaux could not rouse her shame; the sight of the closed gates of harrenden house could not disturb that serenity which she had regained so successfully; but something did occur which momentarily disturbed and almost afflicted her.
jack had been usually kept down at whiteleaf with his brothers; and a remote northamptonshire country house amongst farmsteads, streams, and orchards, is not a centre of news. no word or sign had come to him of his friend, and in his occasional visits to town he had heard nothing of him. though years had passed since harry had bade him good-bye under the elm-tree, and children are usually forgetful, with little minds like sieves, jack did not cease to lament his lost friend. if he had been sure where harry had gone, he would have tried to get on board a ship and work his way out to the same place, like the cabin-boys he read of in story-books. but the south pole was a vague destination; and he once heard some men saying, who had been harry’s friends, that he was now in uganda or rhodesia. it was all so vague that it was impossible to plan any wanderings and voyages on such data.
mammy must know, he thought; but he could not bring himself to ask her. he had a vague but positive sense that harry’s exile and disappearance were due to her; that she[456] had been unkind and had hurt harry in some way or another in some incurable and unmerciful manner.
when jack saw all the london life going on just the same—the life guards prancing, the ladies cycling or riding, the traffic filling up the streets, the carriages flashing toward the park—his young heart ached with a dull painful sense of the heartlessness of things. harry had always been there in that movement and glitter and rush; and now he was no more seen, and no one cared, not even his troop. once he went up to harry’s late colonel, whom he knew by sight, and asked straight out for news of him. the colonel looked surprised, for a long time had elapsed. “my dear boy, i don’t know at all where he is; he’s gone on the make somewhere, i believe. out of sight, out of mind, you know, more shame for us.”
what unkind, indifferent people they all were, thought jack.
but in the middle of june, when he was on his visit to his mother, there was a telegram in a morning paper which disinterred the buried name so dear to him. it said, in the usual niggard brevity, “lord brancepeth said to have been severely wounded fighting in loomalia.”
now harry’s late colonel was startled by that telegram as he sat at luncheon in his club; and as he walked an hour later across the green park he chanced to meet jack and his tutor.
“look here, my boy,” he said, holding out the newspaper. “you asked me once about this friend of yours—”
jack read the two lines through starting tears.
“thanks very much,” he said in a low tone, and took off his hat to the colonel; then he said to mr. lane, “if you please, we will go home.”
“that child’s a good plucked one,” thought the colonel. “it’s hit him hard.”
by that time many people in fashionable london had read the telegram, and were talking of it.
“who is this gentleman about whom you are so unhappy?” asked his tutor, who knew nothing of fashionable society and its rumors and traditions.
jack felt himself color. he could not have exactly analyzed what he felt.
[457]“he’s harry,” he said in a low tone. “he was always very kind to us; kinder than anyone.”
the colonial office was applied to for information, and the minister for the colonies buttonholed in the lobby. the minister was chill and careful; he remarked that lord brancepeth was acting as an amateur, on his own responsibility—entirely on his own responsibility; he could not approve his action; the loomalis were in insurrection; the boers were the allies of england; there were treaties; treaties must be respected, however individuals might suffer; the government could not be responsible for any adventurous gentleman fighting on his own hand.
a similar answer was returned to lord inversay when he, a weary and infirm old man, came up to town, and went to the colonial office and to the premier.
a little later, fuller particulars were telegraphed from the newspaper correspondents at capetown, and then everybody began again to talk of harry at the dinner-tables, and club-houses, and pleasure places in which he had been once such a familiar figure.
the boers had, as usual, made an excuse of an imaginary transgression of boundary, to attack a friendly tribe, of which they were bound to respect the neutrality. they had harried and ravaged the country, carried off herds and flocks, burned villages, and borne off to servitude old men, women and children, with all those excesses of barbarous brutality which invariably characterize the introduction of civilization anywhere. this especial tribe was blameless, willing to be at peace, and contented to live in a simple and natural manner with the harvests of a bountiful soil. but that soil their neighbors wanted; it is the story of every war.
brancepeth had gone as a traveler, only to look on; but he was soon disgusted by the cruelty of the white men, touched by the helplessness of the natives, alienated by the avarice and violence of the former, and moved by the rights and sufferings of the latter. he had gone with no intention of taking a share in the strife; but when he saw the flaming kraals, the ravaged flocks, the fettered women, the starved and hunted old people and young[458] children, the blood of a soldier grew hot in him; the sense of justice uprose in him; the generosity of a manly temper impelled him to take part with the weak, the oppressed, the natural owners of the vast plains, the solemn mountains, the trackless hills, the immense waters. he drew his sword on their side. he led them more than once to victory. if he had had a single troop of the men he had commanded at home, he would have driven the dutchmen back over their own veldt, and forced them to relinquish their prey. but the poor loomalis had been already exhausted, demoralized, hopelessly weakened, when he had first come into their land. they could not second his efforts or comprehend his tactics. had he arrived a month earlier, he might perhaps have saved them. as it was, he could only die with them.
he had fought side by side with their chief, mahembele, hewing down the boers with a sabre when the last shots had been fired from his revolver, and not a single cartridge had been left.
“it is not your cause; go, while you have life,” said the african to him.
“i’ll be damned if i will,” said brancepeth. “right is right, and the right is on your side.”
so he fought like a knight of old, knee-deep in the heap of dead he had slain, and he fell at last as the sun went down, pierced by a score of wounds, and mahembele dropped, shot through the forehead, across his body.
the boers retreated down the hillside—for he had mauled them terribly—and a few of the loomalis ventured to carry off the body of their chief for burial; and as they removed it, they saw that the white leader was not dead quite, and in gratitude they bore him away to a cavern in the rocks, where their women tended him, until months afterwards some english travelers, hearing of his deeds and of his fate, sought him out, and had him carried down the river to their camp, many miles away. thus it became known who he was, and how he had given away his life for these poor and persecuted people.
the story moved his own london world when it was told in the columns of the great daily papers. poor[459] harry! he had lived like a fool, but he had ended his life like a hero.
for ended it surely was; he might rally, he might even live through a few months, a few years, but he had been shot and slashed like a desert animal slaughtered and maimed by a hundred hands; he would never breathe without pain, never move without help, never stand upright again. so the surgeon who was with him telegraphed to his father; and the governor at capetown to the government at home.
and for ten minutes, in guardroom, in clubroom, in drawing-room, his old friends were sorry and spoke of him in a hushed voice. only the colonial office was annoyed, because it had been pledged to protect the loomalis and had broken its word, and failed them in their need; and the fact that one english gentleman had stood by these poor africans to the last disagreeably emphasized by contrast the bad faith and pusillanimity of england as an empire.
the duchess of otterbourne, like the colonial office, was much shocked and displeased. it was odious to have all london talking of harry; it would, she knew, make people remember his relations with herself.
when a woman has ordered a man out of her life she prefers him to efface himself from other people’s lives. harry had effaced himself and gone docily into oblivion, which was quite right, but that now from that nether world he should have sent a clarion blast echoing over the seas, as if he were one of wagner’s heroes, was distinctly irritating. do what she would, too, she could often not sleep for thinking of him with his body hacked to pieces and his blood staining the yellow grass. to be sure she could take chloral, but she was very prudent as regarded health, and she knew that chloral has two faces, one beneficent and the other malevolent, and is not a deity to be too frequently invoked.
meantime he was coming home; every day the vessel drew nearer and nearer, whether it brought him living or brought him dead. it was too dreadfully irritating when she had been relieved from the incubus of william massarene to have this revival of an old scandal.
[460]if his mother had said a word to her eldest son about their old friend, he would have laid his head on her lap and sobbed his heart out, and asked her why she had sent him to africa. but she said not a word. he saw her always going out here, there, and everywhere, beautifully dressed and gay and bright; and jack hated her for her heartlessness and avoided her, which was easy to do, for she seldom asked for him. boo she had frequently with her, and his little brothers were sometimes taken in her carriage; but for jack she scarcely ever inquired. he was left to the care of mr. lane. once she told him to go as a page to a cousin’s wedding, the daughter of mrs. cecil courcy, and jack bluntly refused.
“i won’t be dressed up like a boy in a pantomime,” he said to boo, who brought him the order; and he was steadfast in his refusal, for how could he know that harry might not be already dead?
“you’d get a diamond pin,” said boo.
“what do i want with pins?” replied jack with scorn. “i won’t be made a guy of; i’d sooner be a real page and help to clean the plate.”
“you are such a low boy, jack,” said boo with disdain. “mammy always says so.”
jack’s brows clouded at his mother’s name. was he a low boy? he wondered. he did not think so, but then his tutor had told him that no one has any knowledge of themselves. he liked real things, he liked people who told the truth; he hated being called “your grace”; he loved dogs and horses; he detested fine ladies and all their perfumes and pranks and pastimes; perhaps he was a very low boy indeed.
jack, after the colonel had shown him that telegram, bought up all the newspapers he could (when he was not watched), and read them with difficulty where the words were long, and understood that his friend had been behaving like a knight of old. how his heart ached, and how his blood thrilled! one thing too added greatly to his pain; the news was more than four months old. intelligence traveled slowly from the land of the loomalis, and people did so also. he could not tell at all how his friend was on these especial days when he, himself seated on his own[461] bed to be undisturbed, devoured the chronicles from capetown in one london journal after another. jack had heard enough about wounds from shot and sabre to know that they were often mortal, and that recovery, if it ensued, was terribly tedious and slow, and often too uncertain.
in his ignorance and unhappiness he took a bold step. he wrote to harry’s father, whom he did not know. he composed a letter “all out of his own head.”
“the duke of otterbourne presents his compliments to lord inversay and wishes very much if you would tell him where harry is, and if it is true that he is hurt amongst black men. i am so very very anxious, and i want you please to tell me, and no one knows that the duke of otterbourne is writing to you, so please don’t say, and excuse these blots; please answer soon, and i am your very affectionate jack.”
when he had read it over it seemed to him not altogether right; he was afraid it was ungrammatical, but he could not tell where the mistakes were, and he put it in an envelope and addressed it to the marquis of inversay, looking out the address in the big red book so dear to mrs. massarene, and sealing it with a seal lent him by his friend hannah, bearing the device of two doves and a rose.
the little note would have gone to the heart of harry’s father, and would have certainly been answered, but, as jack’s unlucky star would have it, his mother espied his letter lying on the hall table with her own, and seeing the address in the big childish caligraphy, took it, opened it, and consigned it in atoms to the waste-paper basket.
she was agitated and irritated in an extreme degree by its perusal. what would old inversay think if he got such a note? he would actually think that jack knew! she was beyond measure annoyed and alarmed to see this impudent little fellow daring to act and to write all by himself.
in her own way she was herself worried about harry, although she concealed her worry successfully; it pained her to think of his wounds and his danger; her anxiety[462] did not prevent her from going to theatres and operas, and pastoral plays and dinner-parties, and state concerts and all the rest of it; but still the thought of him hurt her, and no doubt he would come home and be made a pet of by everybody, and be sent for to windsor, and it would all be rather worrying, and malapropos, and perhaps some woman would get hold of him—women are always mad about heroes—and then that woman would make him talk of herself.
she said nothing about his letter to jack, who, after watching with eagerness for the post in vain for a week, sadly decided that lord inversay must have been offended with a stranger for writing to him. he did not say anything about his disappointment to anyone, for jack had already learned that our sorrows only bore other people. but he got all the newspapers he could and searched through them every day. once he saw that lord brancepeth had been brought down from the interior, and had been carried on board a homeward bound steamer at capetown, and although very weak and shattered, it was considered possible the voyage might save him, and that he might rally on reaching his native air.
through all those weeks of uncertainty jack was perpetually punished by mr. lane for inattention, for disobedience, for neglected tasks, for unlearnt lessons, for bad spelling, for saying that two and three made seven, and that caractacus was julius cæsar’s brother. the child’s thoughts were far away on the big green rollers of the ocean on which the vessel which bore his friend homeward was rocking and panting. what sort of weather was it? were the winds kind and the waves gentle? were the hot calms he had read of very trying? did harry suffer when the ship pitched? those were the questions he was always asking himself, and to which he could have no answer; and he began to grow thin and pale and seemed a hopelessly naughty and unteachable little boy to mr. lane, who could beat nothing whatever into his head, and who, being a very conscientious person, wrote to hurstmanceaux that he feared he should be obliged to relinquish his charge.
“don’t encourage the duke in his fancies for africa,[463] mr. lane, or we shall have him africa mad like them all, and running off to cecil rhodes,” his mother said once jestingly to his tutor; and although that gentleman was not used to smart ladies and their way of talking au bout des levres, he understood that the subject of the black continent was disagreeable to her. but the time came when she was forced to think about africa herself.
one day, rather early in the forenoon, when she was alone, they brought in to her the card of lord inversay. she was extremely astonished and somewhat embarrassed. harry’s father had never set foot in her house—she did not even know him to speak to; he had always obstinately avoided both her and her husband; he was poor and unfashionable, a man seldom seen in the smart world, and who lived almost all the year round on his estates on the border.
for the moment she was inclined not to receive him, then curiosity conquered the vague apprehension which moved her. moreover, she recollected with a chill that the newspapers had spoken of harry as returning home; was it possible that he had sent her a message?
inversay entered her presence without ceremony; he was a weary-looking man about sixty, and the expression of his face was cold and greatly troubled; he declined with a gesture her invitation to a seat beside her, and continued standing. she looked at him with the sense of apprehension weighing more heavily upon her.
“to what am i indebted?” she began.
“madam,” said inversay very coldly, though his voice was husky and almost inaudible, “i bring you a request from my son; he has come home to die.”
“to die? harry?”
she grew very pale; there were genuine horror and emotion in the cry, if there was also some personal terror of a baser kind; dying men are so garrulous sometimes!
she was not unprepared for such a statement, but its clear and hard expression, as of an unalterable fact, gave her a great shock.
poor silly harry!
“madam,” said his father, “you may be quite sure that nothing short of the greatest extremity would have[464] brought me to your house. he is dying, i repeat. i doubt if he can live an hour longer; that he can live a day is impossible.”
“how very horrible!” she said nervously; she trembled visibly, she felt that inversay intended to insult her, and she had not courage to resent and reprove it. harry dying! such a possibility had presented itself to her, and she had thoughts, even when she had read in the papers that he was coming home wounded, that perhaps he would be better—safer—dead; but now that the actual tragedy of his end was brought home to her, it seemed to her extremely dreadful.
poor harry!
he was only a year older than herself!
inversay looked at her with loathing and hatred. but for her what a happy and simple life his boy might have led!
“i have a favor from you to ask for in his name,” he said huskily; “nothing less could have made me leave him. but he cannot die in peace if he cannot see your son, the eldest boy; he would like to see all the children.”
she checked the nervous tremor in her limbs and braved herself to combat and composure; she felt all that the stern eyes of the old man said to her while his lips limited themselves to those few harmless words.
“he was always very fond of the children,” she said quite naturally, with marvellous self-possession. “but i don’t think i can send them to see him; it would look so very odd; and a deathbed frightens small boys so much; jack was ill for weeks after seeing his father die.”
this tremendous falsehood glided smoothly off her lips in the purposed introduction of her husband’s name.
inversay moved a step nearer to her, and the scathing scorn of his gaze would have struck to the earth a woman less sure of herself, less safe in the surety of duplicity, less confident in the silence of the dying man who had her reputation in his hands.
“madam,” he said with a bitter scorn and wrath unspoken, “my son may breathe his last whilst you make me dawdle here. let your eldest boy come with me at once—at once—do you hear?”
[465]“lord brancepeth was very fond of all children,” she said again, a little nervously, “but it will seem very odd to people——”
“he loved yours, madam,” said inversay curtly; the three words cut her pride like a sword; seemed to bear down through all her hypocrisies and falsehoods and devices as she had seen the sabres of harry’s troopers cut through a veil of gauze and sever a lemon in two.
“send for your son,” he said with stern passion. “send at once, madam; do you hear me?”
she was awed, and quailed under his fixed gaze. she did not dare to refuse his command, strange as the thing would look. she rang, and to the servant who entered said:
“tell mr. lane to come to me, and to bring his grace.”
a moment or two later the tutor came into the room, and jack also.
“jack, you are to go with this gentleman where he wishes to take you. mr. lane, will you be so good as to accompany the duke and bring him home?”
“where are we going to?” asked jack, as they went downstairs; he did not know who lord inversay was, but he was a little afraid of the strained stern look on the old man’s face; he felt that he was in the presence of some great grief, and his thoughts flew to harry, vaguely hoping and fearing he knew not what.
“you will soon know,” said inversay, whose voice was choked in his throat as he looked at the handsome child with the soft black eyes, so like the eyes of another boy of the same age who, twenty years or so before this day, had run beside him over the sunny lawns of his old home; the old home was mortgaged to its last sod, and the boy had come home in the flower of his manhood to die—ruined by a woman.
they were driven quickly to the door of a well-known hotel; inversay begged the tutor to wait below in the reading-room, and went alone upstairs with jack, who caught his breath and felt his heart quake a little.
a vague terror had seized him; he recalled all the papers had said of the fighting in loomalia.
[466]was it, perhaps——? the child’s warm blood turned cold.
before the closed door of a bedroom inversay paused.
“it is someone you like who is very ill,” he said in a broken voice. “don’t be frightened and don’t cry out, for heaven’s sake.”
he opened the door and motioned to the boy to precede him and enter.
there were two bay windows in the chamber, they were open, and the light shone on to the bed where an emaciated form was lying, a hand wasted and bony lay on the coverlid, a face, which had a ghastly beauty in it, was like marble on the snow of the pillows; some women, his mother and sisters, were kneeling beside the bed.
“harry!” cried the child with a shrill scream, and swift as the wind he sprang across the room and leaped on the bed and covered the cold still face with kisses.
“oh, harry, harry, wake up!” he sobbed. “oh, speak to me, harry. look at me. it’s jack, it’s jack, that’s here!”
his voice found its way to the fading memories of the dying man; harry’s closed eyes opened and smiled at him.
“you dear little beggar!” he murmured. “how you’re grown! i’m glad——”
his strengthless hands tried to clasp the child and draw him closer.
“i’ve left you cuckoopint, jack,” he said faintly. “don’t forget—what i told you—in the park. try and grow like your uncle ronnie. he’ll help you to keep straight.”
his voice was scarce louder than a breath; his feeble heart was straining to force the blood through its vessels, the tired eyelids fell, and closed once more.
they gave him oxygen and he revived slightly, enough to know that jack’s head was lying on the pillow by his own and that jack’s arm was round his throat.
“don’t cry,” he murmured. “kiss the others for me. they never cared as you did.”
there was a long silence, only broken by the passionate sobbing of the child and the subdued weeping of those present.
[467]“keep clear of women, jack,” he said huskily, painfully, as he tried to draw the boy still closer. “tell your mother—no—never mind. thank her for letting you come. where are you, dear? i can’t see you. kiss me again.”
then his mouth opened, gasping, and his last breath passed out into the summer air.
he had died, silent, as a gentleman must.
