Masterman and Son

Masterman and Son

by

W. J. DAWSON

Author of "A Prophet in Babylon," etc.

NEW YORK —— CHICAGO —— TORONTO

Fleming H. Revell Company

LONDON AND EDINBURGH

Copyright, 1909, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue
Toronto: 25 Richmond St., W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

CONTENTS

PART ONE

ARCHIBOLD MASTERMAN

CHAPTER
I.	THE MASTER-BUILDER
II.	A DISCUSSION
III.	THE BIG STRONG BEAST
IV.	MRS. BUNDY
V.	THE MAGIC NIGHT
VI.	YOUNG LOVE
VII.	ENTER SCALES
VIII.	THE ACCUSATION
IX.	THE CONTEST
X.	THE FAREWELL

PART TWO

THE AMERICAN MADONNA

XI.	NEW YORK
XII.	MR. WILBUR MEREDITH LEGION
XIII.	ADVENTURES OF AN INCOMPETENT
XIV.	HE FINDS A FRIEND
XV.	THE MILLIONAIRE
XVI.	KOOTENAY
XVII.	THE NEW LIFE

PART THREE

FATHER AND SON

XVIII.	THE AMALGAMATED BRICK CO.
XIX.	THE FEAR
XX.	THE RETURN
XXI.	THE VERDICT
XXII.	MRS. BUNDY PHILOSOPHISES
XXIII.	THE LAST HOME
XXIV.	THE NEW WORLD

PART ONE

ARCHIBOLD MASTERMAN

I

THE MASTER-BUILDER

Archibold Masterman, tall, heavily-built, muscular, and on the wrong side of fifty, was universally esteemed an excellent specimen of that dubious product of modern commerce, the self-made man. At twenty he was a day-labourer, at thirty a jobbing builder, at forty a contractor in a large way of business. At that point may be dated the beginning of his social efflorescence. It was then that he began to wear broadcloth on week-days, and insisted on a fresh shirt every other day. Hitherto careless of his appearance, he now took a quiet pride in clothes, and discovered the uses of the manicure. A little later he discovered that a man's position in society is judged by the kind of house he lives in, and that it is social wisdom to pay a high rent for a small house in a discreetly "good" locality, rather than a low rent for a much better house in a deteriorated suburb. That was the year in which he purchased Eagle House, a pompous, old-fashioned residence standing in its own grounds in Highbourne Gardens.

Highbourne Gardens was one of those London suburbs which contrive to preserve a faint aroma of gentility for many years after the real gentlefolk have left it. It had many old houses of the plain and specious order, inhabited a century ago by great London merchants. In the floors of these houses might be found vast beams of some foreign wood, hard enough to turn the keenest chisel; in the gardens at their backs were copper beeches, mulberry trees, and an occasional cedar of Lebanon. Modern London, with its vast invasion of mean streets, stopped respectfully before the proud exclusiveness of Highbourne Gardens. It was one of the last localities to have roads which were marked "Private," guarded by locked gates, and to employ watchmen in faded liveries, who dwelt in tiny sentry-boxes and at stated hours collected the letters of the residents.

It was precisely the kind of neighbourhood for such a man as Archibold Masterman to make his first social experiment, and he was quick to recognise its advantages. Eagle House, Highbourne Gardens, was a thoroughly respectable address; if it did not convey the impression of social distinction, it clearly did imply solid competence, which was a good deal better. Jones, the well-known city tailor, lived there, and drove a pair of horses which any lord might envy; there were half a dozen brokers who kept as good tables as any man in London; and there was Loker, the famous manufacturer of soaps, whose rhymed advertisements met the eye in every railway-carriage. According to the views of Archibold Masterman, in his present stage of social enlightenment, these illustrious persons composed a real aristocracy of solid merit.

Above all, there was in Highbourne Gardens a church, at which most of these prosperous persons were regular attendants, and Archibold Masterman was shrewd enough to see that such a church was admirably adapted to the plan of social advancement which he had in view. It was not an Episcopal church, it was true; but that scarcely mattered in a neighbourhood which was by long tradition Non-conformist. It was enough for him that it contained the people he wished most to know, and his first act on settling at Eagle House was to rent the most expensive pew in the church which then chanced to be at liberty. The day when he took possession of this pew was a red-letter day in his life. He was conscious that he was well-dressed, and that he and his family were favourably remarked. Loker, the soap manufacturer, took the collection in his aisle, and when Masterman put a new five-pound note upon the plate, he knew that he had created a sensation. When he left the church, Loker shook his hand with great cordiality, and from that hour his position was assured.

All this was, of course, many years ago. Since then he had played his cards so well that he had become almost the best-known man in the locality. He was certainly esteemed the wealthiest. He was a deacon in the church, vice Loker deceased, and he now trod the aisles with the collection plate, and kept a jealous eye upon its contents. Among the church folk his record for generosity stood high. Among the younger men the story of his life had become a stimulating tradition. There were two versions of this tradition. In the young men's societies, and at their annual club dinner, he was accustomed to tell a touching story of how he once did a piece of humble work which no one else would touch, and found his fidelity rewarded by sudden promotion, which gave him his first real chance in life. This story never failed to arouse loud cheers, and when irate parents found their boys unwilling to black their own shoes or weed the garden, they would cry, "Remember Masterman." Among a few old cronies in the building trade, in convivial moments, this tradition took a different form. To them he boasted that he bought his first plot of land by issuing a cheque when he had nothing in the bank, only borrowing the money just in time to prevent discovery.

"It was a prison or a fortune," he was accustomed to remark. "And I took the risk. I took the risk, and see what I am to-day." Whereat his old cronies, particularly Grimes, a small builder in Tottenham, who were all more or less under financial obligations to him, would applaud him even more vigorously than the church young men.

The whole character of the man may be discerned in the incident. That he should have risked a prison to make a fortune was nothing to be ashamed of; although he had sense enough to know that it was not the kind of story which would be received with acclamation by the church young men. Therefore to them he gave a milder version, suited to their innocence. But in his heart he was proud of his own daring, still prouder of his triumph. His blood thrilled pleasurably whenever he recalled that perilous and nearly fatal morning—his sudden decision to buy the land whose speculative value none but he could recognise, the bold bluff he practised on the sellers, the false cheque which he knew put the handcuffs oh his wrists, the mad, breathless rush across London to secure the money at any rate of interest from any kind of lender. And then the ecstatic moment when, just ten minutes before the bank closed, he had paid in the five thousand pounds which saved his credit. In the end he had made twenty thousand pounds out of that land, and from that moment he dated his prosperity. He had taken risks, and that was to him the equivalent of heroism. Life was full of risks, and the man who dared nothing was a coward. It was the simple philosophy of the buccaneer, the pirate, the adventurer. Had he lived a hundred years earlier and been bred to the sea, he would have gloried in the black flag, and would have competed with Captain Kidd for terrifying fame. The very joy of living lay in taking risks.

He had been taking risks ever since, although time and prosperity had taught him caution and a more sober craft. Sometimes, and especially since he had become a resident in Highbourne Gardens, he had resolved to content himself with the kind of business which avoided speculative perils, but the old instinct always proved too strong for him. Show him an opportunity that offered the chance of great and sudden profit, and he could no more help putting all he had in jeopardy to secure it than can the old gambler refuse one more cast of the dice. But under the chastenings of his new respectability he had become more and more secretive in these dubious transactions. His own family never once suspected them. All that they knew was that there were recurring periods when he went about the house in grim silence, and sat up half the night in the little room which he called his office. At such times his face seemed to harden; new lines appeared about the eyes and the firm mouth; but it always remained impassive and inscrutable. Some day the cloud would lift suddenly; the grim toiler in the midnight office came forth, jovial, loud-voiced, ten years younger; and there was a period of joyous extravagance, a new pair of horses in the stable, a conservatory added to the drawing-room, a large subscription to the church funds, and the genial stir and tumult of dinner and lawn-tennis parties. After a time the cloud rolled back again, but his friends were alike ignorant of the causes that produced or the triumphs which dissolved it.

So Masterman lived his life, and it was part of the man that the church had come to occupy a considerable place in it. He felt that he owed it gratitude, for had it not done much to forward his social ambitions? He no longer moved in it humbly, as a man sedulous of notice; he had long since become its undisputed king. The day was past when he was grateful for the hand-shake of a Loker: it was his turn now to confer the favours which he once had sought. It represented an essential feature in his triumph. When the time came that he sought public honours, which he meant to do, the church would prove a valuable factor in his ambitions. He would then get back all that he had given it, in willing service. It pleased him to think that the church itself would turn out a good investment when that time came.

Not that he was destitute of all sense of religion; in his own way he valued it, though not upon the grounds that were common with ordinary pious folk. He thought it a good thing that men should have definite views of truth, especially when their views encouraged them in the belief that they would become in another world persons of as much importance as they had been in this. As he understood the matter, it was necessary for a man to have certain right beliefs in order that he might become secure of the reversion of eternal happiness; and if that were true, a man would be a fool who did not accept these beliefs. Hence he was severely orthodox, and insisted on orthodoxy in his family. He liked a good sermon, he liked good music, and it was part of his pride that the Highbourne Gardens Church had both in all excellence unapproachable by any of the lesser churches in the neighbourhood. This was the limit of his apprehension as regards the church. He recognised in it one of the great proprieties of life, a kind of etiquette toward God which no moral human creature would refuse.

That he was moral, in the ordinary meaning of the word, there could be no doubt. Long ago, when he was a mere day-labourer, he had indulged in a week's drunkenness, and had learned once for all the lesson that success in life is not compatible with insobriety. He had been discharged from his employment, and had spent a miserable month in hunting work with a damaged character. From that hour he was a water-drinker. Life, having taught him this lesson, proceeded to teach him a second, that the man who means to succeed must not meddle with the coarser passions. He had come near to an entanglement with an evil woman, and had issued from it with a fixed conviction that the pleasures of passion were never worth the price men paid for them. Here the original hardness of his nature served him, and this was soon reinforced by the temper of ambition. Cool, shrewd, alert, he became too much enamoured of success to stop for wayside pleasures; he knew the more recondite joy of climbing over the shoulders of disabled men to seize the prize which they had forfeited. In a word, it paid him to be moral, and his temperament jumped with his self-interest.

But of morality in its higher forms of ethical ideals he knew nothing. Deacon of a church as he was, he was still a pirate, a buccaneer, a highwayman of commerce, thirsting for illicit adventure. There was a grim humour in the situation of which he himself caught brief glimpses. Like the bandit who makes a gift to the Virgin from his spoils, and holds himself henceforth reconciled to heaven, so Masterman paid his tithe to God, in the comfortable faith that no one had the right to examine too closely the means by which it was obtained.

"A hypocrite," the shallow reader will exclaim, but no word would be farther from the truth, for the real and only hypocrite is he who, having light to see the highest things, deliberately uses them to serve his lower instincts. Masterman did nothing of the kind. He simply had no higher light. Not even a jury with a damaging verdict, or a judge with a scathing allocution, could have convinced him that it was a wrong time to write a bogus cheque in an emergency, when twenty thousand pounds hung upon the chance of his deceit being undiscovered. He would have done it again to-morrow, done it proudly, with a kind of fearless, misguided heroism. Life was like that, he would have said; you took your chances. And what he would have said and done at thirty-five, he would have said and done at fifty. There was a hard, unmalleable quality in the man that turned the edge of all those fine ethics which the preachers uttered. It was their duty to utter them, no doubt; it was what they were paid to do; but what did they know of life? What did John Clark, the minister of Highbourne Gardens Church, comfortably paid, and living in a good house, know of life as Masterman had found it? He was like a child playing in the shallows; he had never known deadly contest with tides, and waves, and tempests. So Masterman listened to him with a kindly irony, and went upon his way totally unmoved by any delicate displays of pulpit rhetoric.

Yet of late things had somewhat altered; he was conscious that there was a changed atmosphere in the world. John Clark was preaching a different kind of sermon, a bolder, plainer sermon, full of pungent references to public evils and daily conduct. That would not have mattered much, for Masterman was perfectly aware that he was John Clark's master whenever he might choose to assert the rights of the purse. But a much more pertinent and painful problem was gradually rising in Masterman's own household. He had but two children, Helen and Arthur, and upon the boy all his hopes were set. He had sent him to Oxford, where he had done tolerably well; from the University he had returned with a fund of new ideas which were to his father strange and detestable. And among them was a vague socialism, which displayed itself in vehement attacks on the common processes by which wealth was acquired. There came a day when Masterman was aware, for the first time, that he was face to face with a separate personality in his son, which had its own springs of action and claimed its own liberty of thought. And as the boy uttered his youthful diatribes, the father began to wonder how much he knew about his own life, how far those diatribes might be directed obliquely against himself.

He listened in silence, with a difficult good-humour. He never attempted to retort. When he did speak, he meant to speak once for all, but he would choose his time. He often wondered what he should say; whether he would tell the boy with a brutal frankness all about his methods of business, or leave him to discover a little at a time, when he entered the office, as in due time Masterman meant that he should. But whatever he said or did, he would act with finality when the time came. There were means of bringing Arthur to heel as well as John Clark.

The present trouble was that Arthur seemed greatly to approve John Clark's teaching. He quoted it, amplified it, and insisted on its rightness. And yet in all this the father knew quite well that his son could intend no disloyalty to him. The boy's frank gray eyes had no deceit in them. But they also flashed an unmistakable challenge on the world. The father could not but admire the boy. He was no fool, he often told himself with a bitter smile. Perhaps these new opinions of his were, after all, mere froth; it might be wise to let him talk himself out. Surely he must come to see life from the commonsense point of view, which of course was Masterman's. So the father eagerly debated, and once more the light burned late in the little office, and as the days passed, his mouth grew grim and the lines deepened on his face. Here was a problem much more difficult than buying land without money, and it was not solved by mere daring.

So matters stood when John Clark preached his notorious sermon on jerry-building, in which he accused without mercy the men who ran up rotten buildings for the poor as thieves and assassins.

Archibold Masterman heard the sermon, and left the church with a frowning face. For the rest of the Sabbath he shut himself up in his office, and a heavy silence dwelt in Eagle House.

II

A DISCUSSION

It was in Masterman's office that the informal meeting of some of the leading church officials took place next day. The meeting had been preceded by what was known as "a high tea," for the customary evening dinner was dispensed with when deacons were the guests. This was done out of deference to the inferior position of some of the younger deacons, who had not yet attained the social dignity of late dinners.

Masterman, however, took care that this substitutionary meal did credit to his own social superiority. Where the younger deacons were accustomed to provide for the entertainment of their brethren plates of exiguous ham, manifestly bought at the cookshop, insufficient salads frugally overlaid with sliced eggs, and a sparse variety of home-made cake and pastry, Masterman spread a groaning table with a cold sirloin of beef, a pair of fowls, and an entire ham, to say nothing of thick cream and expensive fruits. Masterman's coffee, too, was of a richness quite unapproachable by the inferior decoctions of Beverley and Luke, whose wives dealt at local shops, and were not above using a certain detestable invention known as coffee essence. Luke and Beverley also used gas fires in their dining- and drawing-rooms, to save labour, which was necessary when but one maid was kept; whereas Masterman had a coal fire even in the hall, and burned logs of wood in his living-rooms. Upon Masterman's table there was also real silver of undeniable price, and a vast silver urn; whereas Beverley and Luke could pretend to nothing better than electro imitations, which were not even silver-plated. So that it was clear that though Masterman gave high teas, they were scarcely distinguishable from evening dinners; and if he was a deacon, he was by no means a common deacon.

Arthur Masterman had long ago come to regard those diaconal high teas with a kind of sombre merriment. It amused him to remark his father's difficult adjustment to a form of meal to which he was not used; his conflict between condescension and hospitality; his manifest, and not quite successful, effort to modify his blunt, domineering outspokenness to the sensitive susceptibilities of his guests. He was aware also, with a sort of pride, how big his father seemed beside these men. He loomed above them like some vast cathedral front over huddled houses. They were city dwellers all, and had never been anything else. They had the precise, neat manners of men accustomed to formal ways of life. Their talk rarely went beyond the gossip of church affairs, or the recapitulation of something in the morning's paper. But no one could look at Archibold Masterman without a sense of something primitive and massive in the man. The heavy frame, the great breadth of shoulder, the clean-shaven face with its firm lines, the eyes, clear, watchful, dominating, with a certain almost vulpine intensity and hardness—all these declared a man at all times unusual, but most unusual in contrast with these men, who bore in every feature the evidence of how cities by mere attrition grind men down into conventional similarities. That the boy should fear his father was natural, for Archibold Masterman was a man whose will was law; that he should not wholly understand him was also natural, for a vast world of experience lay between them: but his pride in him was a genuine and steadfast feeling, all the more remarkable because the father was uneducated, and the son had drunk deep of the waters of Oxford scholarship.

With the sister, Helen, the case was very different. Arthur had inherited from his father the gift of self-poise. He knew how to look at things with a single eye, to meditate on them in silence, and to take up an attitude of his own toward them. Helen's whole nature was of lighter calibre. She was a girl easily influenced by chance acquaintance, more ready to enjoy life than to examine its underlying elements, in all things more comformable to conventions. When she came home from an expensive finishing-school, she brought with her less her own character than a character imposed upon her by her teachers. She took her place in life with an instant alacrity of adaptation; formed a dozen light-hearted friendships, became popular for her vivacity and gaiety, and in her heart thought her father dull. She had none of the sense of his essential bigness that Arthur had. She had no curiosity about him: he was simply an element in the convenient furniture of her own life. She sometimes wished him a little more polished, resented his brusque manners, misunderstood his heavy silence, and was inclined to be ironical about his social ambitions. Yet these same social ambitions were the chief common bond between them. Through them she saw her road to a life that would gratify her vanity. Somewhere, in the dim future, she discerned a golden world, which she hoped to enter when her father's force of character had broken down the barriers of social caste. What her father's character really was, or by what means he meant to reach that desirable golden world, she did not ask. As long as the result was reached, she had no curiosity about the process.

The last person in the family group to be remarked is the mother. She sat at the end of the long table, dispensing tea and coffee with an air of weary assiduity. In her youth she had had some claim to beauty, and there still clung to her a kind of tired elegance. Her hair, once blond, had become almost white, and lay in rippled fullness over a forehead much lined. Her face was without colour, the eyebrows dark and beautifully curved, the eyes gray and clear, with a certain startled expression, as if life had presented to her little else than a series of unforeseen surprises. She was a very silent woman; silence was her dominating quality, but it was enigmatic silence. Persons of effusive and flamboyant manners found her silence scarcely distinguishable from scorn; people of vivacious temperament called it stolidity; the general impression among her acquaintance was that it was significant of a nature at once cold and colourless. They were all wrong, however. And those were yet further from the truth who confused her silence with placidity. There were times when a sudden flash of fire in the gray, watchful eyes witnessed to an inner heat. If she spoke little, it was not because she felt little—it was rather because she realised the total ineffectiveness of language to express her thought. Helen had characteristically never tried to understand her mother. But as Arthur had grown older, and especially since his return from Oxford, he had often found himself speculating on the real nature of his mother's character. He saw her, an apparent automaton, content to fill an automatic place in life, making no claims for herself, offering no opposition to the claims of others, apparently desirous of squeezing herself into a position of neglected insignificance; but he was acute enough to know that all this self-effacement was artificial. What were her real relations with his father? Was she a woman simply overborne by his superior weight? How much of her silence sprang from fear of his heavy-handed judgments? But no sooner did such thoughts visit him than the boy recoiled from them with a sense of their indelicacy. Not to speculate at times upon the relations of his parents was impossible in one who was just at that stage of observation when the entire area of life is an object of intense curiosity; but to cherish or pursue such thoughts was too much like violating a privacy which both nature and custom had declared sacred. Yet of one thing he was sure: his mother's native force of character was not inferior to his father's, and her silence rested on a deep-lying intensity of temperament, not on apathy.

The meal pursued its common course of dullness. Luke retailed some petty gossip about a family named Vickars, who had recently joined the church; and Beverley contrived to get upon his usual topic of fiscal reform, producing as his own opinions the substance of a leading article which had appeared in the morning paper. No one took any notice of Beverley, but Luke's topic of conversation proved more interesting, especially to the only other deacon present, a middle-aged, slightly gray man, with quick, crafty eyes, called Scales. Scales kept the record of the seat-holders, and felt that Beverley was intruding on his own peculiar domain when he described the Hilary Vickars, the new family which had joined the congregation.

"I know them very well," he remarked. "They have only taken two sittings, and they are not the sort of people who will add much strength to the church. They live in a small house in Lonsdale Road—one of your houses, sir," he added, turning to Masterman.

"A very good class of people live in Lonsdale Road, I believe," said Masterman drily.

"Oh yes, of course—I know that; and in the changing conditions of the neighbourhood a street of houses like Lonsdale Road is a great benefit to the locality. But this Hilary Vickars only rents a part of a house, I am informed, and that is what I meant when I said he wouldn't add much strength to the church."

"Hilary Vickars," said Arthur. "Why, isn't he a writer? I think I saw his name mentioned the other day as the author of a novel which appeared this spring."

"Very likely," said Scales. "Now I think of it, some one told me he wrote for the papers. I wonder now if he couldn't give the church a write-up in The Weekly Journal some day?"

"In that case he might prove a greater accession to the church than you imagine," said Beverley, who was always glad to score a point against Scales, whose assumption of authority he disliked.

Scales made no reply. He really had no information about Hilary Vickars, beyond the fact that he had taken a sitting in the church. As he never read a book of any kind, nor a literary journal, he was quite ignorant of Hilary Vickar's pretensions as a writer. But since Beverley appeared to think Vickars an acquisition of some value, he was eager to prove the contrary. He remembered opportunely that it was immediately after John Clark's sermon on jerry-building that Vickars had applied for sittings, and immediately said so, with a crafty glance at Masterman.

"Of course I don't know what other people think," he added, "but I consider that sermon an outrage."

Arthur flushed.

"Do you really?" he asked. "It seems to me that to say that is to beg the whole question. The real, and therefore the only, question is, Was it true?"

Masterman turned his heavy, frowning gaze on Arthur.

"We won't discuss that here," he said. "If you are ready, gentlemen, we will adjourn to my office."

The men rose and left the room, Masterman leading the way. When the office door closed, Masterman at once began to speak.

"I don't propose to beat about the bush," he said; "it isn't my way. You all know just why we are here, and what the subject of discussion is. It's Clark."

The others remained silent.

"Have you nothing to say?" he asked, with a sombre glance at Scales.

"We would all prefer to hear you first," said Scales. "Have you any course to propose?"

"Yes, I have," said Masterman, in a formidable voice. "I've had about enough of Clark. I know he's a good preacher and all that, but he's greatly changed. For weeks past he has been attacking people from the pulpit. That's not the kind of thing we pay him for, and it must stop. Unless it stops, either he or I must leave the church, and it's for you to choose."

Thus bluntly adjured, the fountains of discussion were at once open. Masterman lit a cigar, and sat before the big writing-table, smoking stolidly. He had shot his bolt, and was pretty sure of its effect. He had the great advantage of having meditated on his course with sober boldness. He knew very well that he could do without the church better than it could do without him. He did not wish to leave it, but he had now reached a point in his career when he was relatively indifferent to its advantages. It would not hurt him much if he did join the rival Episcopal church in the neighbourhood, which had recently become quite popular under a new incumbent of mellifluous voice and no particular convictions. It might even help him socially—conceivably it might. But that was a course which he did not mean to take except under extreme pressure. It would certainly have the aspect of defeat, and to be defeated by John Clark was intolerable.

As he saw the matter, the issue was absolutely clear. Clark could no longer hold his own if he should oppose him. A church can always get a minister, but a minister could not always get a church. If Clark should recognise the weakness of his position, and amend his ways—well, he was not vindictive, and he would accept any reasonable compromise. No, he was neither vindictive nor unreasonable, but he meant to have his way, and the only question in debate was by what means he should secure it.

To Beverley's cautious platitudes and Luke's halting remonstrances he scarcely listened, but when at last Scales began to speak, he was all attention. He knew better than to place Scales in the category with Luke and Beverley. Although his social position was not much superior to theirs, yet he had by suavity and some real ability insinuated himself into a place of some authority in the counsels of the church. People listened to him. He always spoke with gravity, and with a certain air of deprecation, as of one who admitted his humility, but was quietly aware of his importance. And he usually knew exactly what to say to influence opinion, for he had a habit of collecting privately the opinions of other people before he announced his own. Nothing sounds so like wisdom in debate as for a speaker to give back in clear form the half-articulated opinions of his audience, and in this art Scales was an adept. Therefore Masterman listened to him eagerly, when he began in his usually non-committal voice to array reasons and suggest a course.

Open opposition would not do, he remarked. That would in all probability stiffen Clark in his views, and rally round him those who agreed with him. But it was a known fact that Clark was about to pay a long-projected visit to the Holy Land. Let them give him a cordial send-off—they might even give him a cheque toward his expenses. Then, when he was gone, would be the time to call a special meeting to inquire into the condition of the church. At such a meeting people would speak freely, as they would not if Clark were present. Of course no one could prophesy exactly what might happen, but it would not be surprising if a good deal of opposition developed both to the minister and his views.

"Which means in plain words?" interrupted Masterman.

"That possibly he may not come back," said Scales quietly.

"I will be no party to getting rid of the minister," said Beverley.

"Certainly not," said Scales. "But it is possible—I only say it is possible, you know—that he may resign."

"Under compulsion, you mean?"

"Not at all. Simply in recognition of inevitable facts."

Masterman's grim mouth relaxed in a broad smile. His eye rested on Scales with a glance of ironic admiration. What a pity such a man was after all only a superior clerk, with no opportunity to display his diplomatic gifts except upon the narrow stage of church affairs. Yet he was conscious too of a curious element of repulsion which mingled with his admiration of the clerk's astuteness. His mind, which half an hour before had been filled with hot enmity against the minister, now recoiled swiftly and inclined to his defence, when he saw the kind of weapons which Scales meant to use against him. He was a man both by nature and by habit not delicate in his use of means to attain an end; he could be both cruel and unscrupulous upon occasion; but he had no taste for deliberate perfidy, he had no capacity for meanness, and he contemplated the narrow-shouldered, suave-tongued clerk with a rising disgust.

"I don't like your plan," he broke forth loudly. "That Holy Land scheme of yours, getting rid of Clark and then attacking him, it's mean, it's too much like tying a rope across a road to trip up a man in the dark whom you dare not tackle openly."

"It's only a suggestion, sir," said Scales deferentially.

"It had better remain a suggestion, then."

He turned his back on Scales, and began to arrange the papers on his desk. It was the signal that the conference was over. Luke and Beverley soon left, but Scales remained.

"I don't think you quite appreciate your own position in this affair," Scales remarked.

"My position? What do you know of my position?"

"More than I cared to say before the others. I would like to ask you a question."

"Ask away," Masterman retorted grimly.

"Well then, do you know the real reason why Clark preached that sermon?"

"Oh, I suppose it was the expression of the new-fangled socialism he professes."

"In part, yes. But there was a personal element, too. Do you recollect a church you built at Orchard Green about ten years ago?"

Masterman's face darkened, for he knew very well what was coming. He had received more than one letter lately from the trustees of Orchard Green Church, who complained that the west wall of the edifice was sinking, owing to imperfect foundations. It would have to be rebuilt, and they naturally traced their disaster to his bad workmanship. Hitherto he had taken no notice of these letters. The people who wrote them were not persons of any influence. They had no legal claim upon him. Of course his work had been properly certified by the architect at the time of its completion, and in any case the lapse of ten years made him immune from all responsibility. Nevertheless, it was not an affair that he cared to have generally known, and he was startled at Scales' reference to the Orchard Green Church.

"Well," Scales continued, "it seems Clark has friends at Orchard Green. When he went to see them a little time ago, they told him that the walls of the church were sinking. They had uncovered a part of the foundations to discover the cause, and had found instead of sound concrete a rotten mixture of oyster-shells and road-gravel. Of course they told him that you were the builder, and he came back raging. Then he preached his sermon."

"And you disapproved his sermon?"

"Certainly—certainly," Scales replied in an eager voice.

"Even though his facts were right?"

"Ah! I couldn't agree to that, sir. And I'm sure you wouldn't admit it."

Masterman threw away his cigar, lit another, and stood regarding Scales with a sardonic eye. Somehow the craft of the clerk did not appear to him the admirable quality that it had seemed half an hour earlier. To rob upon a large scale was one thing; to cheat the mind into false conclusions was quite another. The first he had done, and would do again; but by a strange paradox this robber in action remained honest in thought, and could not bring himself to say the thing he did not mean. He felt again that spasm of aversion to Scales, and with his aversion there was mixed a strong curiosity to know just how far the clerk's supple conscience would serve him, and what was the part he wished to play.

He wheeled suddenly upon Scales, and broke into a harsh laugh.

"Is that all you have to say?" he asked.

"Yes, that is all."

"Well, now listen to me. The facts about the Orchard Green Church are all right. I admit them. They wanted everything as cheap as could be; they wanted me cheap; so I gave them cheap work just to balance matters. Don't think that's an apology, for it isn't. As for Clark, I don't object to his saying anything he likes about the business, but I do object to his saying it from a pulpit. He wants to injure me, and so he can't complain if I get back at him. But there's two ways of fighting a man—one's face to face, and the other's by hitting him behind. I'm going to fight honest. And do you know, Scales, much as I dislike Clark, I really think I like him better than I like you, after all."

"I fail to understand——" Scales began.

"Oh no, you don't; you're much too clever for that. But if you do really want a little light, I'd have you remember this—that Archibold Masterman was never frightened yet by threats, and when he fights he fights fair."

III

THE BIG STRONG BEAST

The next morning Masterman wrote a letter to the overjoyed trustees of the Orchard Green Church, offering to make good without cost all defects of workmanship in the building which might be justly charged to him. He was careful to explain that while they had no legal claim on him, he regarded this work as a debt of honour.

He had just finished the letter when Arthur came into the office. Arthur's manner was constrained and almost timid. Masterman, on the contrary, was in his most jovial mood. He had just performed an act which was not only good in itself, but wise and politic; for, of course, he knew that his action toward the Orchard Green trustees would become public, and would be quoted to his credit.

"Well," he began, "getting a bit tired of doing nothing? Not that I grudge you your liberty, you know. I promised you a year to look around, before you settle to your life-work, and I shall stick to my bargain. But I confess it will be a glad day for me when I write 'Masterman & Son' over my doors."

"I'm very far from doing nothing, sir," he answered. "Oxford is one world, and London quite another. I am learning every day a lot of things Oxford never taught me."

"Of course you are. London's a big world, and the things it has to teach are the things that count. Not that Oxford isn't worth while too. It gives a man a start in life nothing else can give. That's why I sent you there, you know."

"Yes, I know, father, and I am grateful to you."

"Nothing to be grateful for, my boy. I owed it to you." His face softened with a musing look very unusual with him. "I got no kind of start myself, you know," he continued. "At fifteen I was working in a brickfield. When I went home at night, my father used to beat me. I don't think I ever hated any one as I hated my father. One day I struck back, and ran away from home. Queer thing—I was always sorry for that blow. I used to lie awake at nights for weeks after, wondering if I really hurt the old man. From that day to this I never saw him any more. But I'm still sorry for that blow. Sons shouldn't hit their parents, anyway. I ought to have let him go on beating me; he'd got the habit, and I could have stood it all right. Well, well, it's such a long time ago that I can hardly believe it ever happened."

He stopped suddenly, with a lift of the shoulders, as if he shook off the burden of that squalid past. But the rude words had left the son inexpressibly touched. A swift picture passed before his mind of a gaunt boy toiling over heavy tasks, ill-paid, cruelly used, wandering out into the world lonely and unguided, and a strong passion of pity and of wonder shook his heart. Above all, those artless words, "Sons shouldn't hit their fathers, anyway," fell upon him with the weight of a reproach. Had he not already condemned his father in his thoughts? He had known very well to whom Clark alluded in his sermon, and yet he had approved. He had entered the office that morning with the fixed intent of endorsing Clark's tacit accusation of his father. And now he found himself suddenly disarmed. That old sense of something big about his father came back to him with redoubled force. To start like that, shovelling clay in a brickyard for twelve hours a day, and to become what he was—oh! it needed a big man to do that, an Esau who was scarcely to be judged by the standards of smooth-skinned, home-staying Jacobs.

"I didn't know you had suffered all that, father. You never told me that before."

"There's a sight of things I've suffered that I wouldn't like you to know. But they were all in the day's work, and I don't complain. And that's one thing I want to say to you, and I may as well say it now. You've got a start I never had, and you won't suffer what I suffered, but I want you to know that the world's a pretty hard place to live in anyway. You can't go through it without being badly hurt somewhere. You've got to take what you want, or you won't get it. Talking isn't going to mend things: life's a big strong beast, and it isn't words but a bit and bridle and a whip a man needs who is going to succeed. Now you're at the talking stage, and I don't complain. You admire talkers like Clark, and you think they are doing no end of good, don't you? Well, you'll learn better presently. You'll find that the world goes on much the same as it ever did, in spite of the talkers. I want you to digest that fact just as soon as you can, and then you'll be ready to step down into the thick of life where I am, and help me do the things I want to do."

"But, father, is what Clark said concerning you true?"

"Do you want to discuss it with me?"

"No; I have no right to ask that."

"Yes, you have. I want you to join in the business when you're ready, and you've a right to know what kind of business it is, and, if you like to put it so, what kind of person your partner is."

"He is my father, and I love him. That is enough," said Arthur proudly.

"No, it isn't enough. I had a father, and I didn't love him. But as to this business of Clark's. He found out something against me, and instead of coming to me about it, he preached a sermon on it, and for that I don't forgive him. Well, what was it he found out? No more than this—that ten years ago I had to do a cheap job, and I did it cheaply. My work has held together ten years, which is about all that could be expected at the price. Now I'll tell you what I've done. I've agreed to do the work over again for nothing. There's the letter which I've just written. You had better read it."

Arthur took the letter, and read it slowly. His father had risen from his desk, and stood watching him narrowly. Perhaps until that moment he had never quite realised how much his heart was set on having his son in the business with him. And he wanted above all things to win the son's approval. Perhaps there was some underlying thought of this kind in his mind when he wrote the letter. Not that he meant to alter all the methods of his business to suit his son. Once in the business, Arthur would learn what these were by imperceptible degrees, and would grow accustomed to them. But just now the father's heart was wholly set upon concession and conciliation. He remembered, with a rush of tenderness, how he had long ago taught the boy to swim. He could still see the slight, childish form shivering on the rock above the swimming-pool. He had begun with threats, but had soon found them useless. Then he had used persuasion and cajolery, until at last the boy had slipt into the pool, and in a week was swimming with the best of them. Well, it was like that now. If he could but cajole him into the deep stream of life, that was enough; when the deep water heaved beneath his feet, he would have to do what the others did in pure self-defence.

"Well?" he said at last.

Arthur laid down the letter and turned a shining face upon his father.

"It is a noble letter, father. Forgive me that I misjudged you."

"That's all right, then."

"You have taught me a lesson. I shall not forget it."

"Oh! don't take it too seriously, my boy. It is only a small affair, after all."

But each knew that it was not a small affair. In that moment these two opposite natures were nearer together than they had ever been before, and, although neither knew it, nearer than they would ever be again.

Arthur left his father with a strong sense of exaltation. The cloud of misgiving concerning his father's methods of business had miraculously dissolved. In the quick rebound of feeling he was inclined to judge himself intolerant and unjust, and his father's image glowed before his mind, endued with heroic virtues. He shuddered when he thought of his father's youth, with its dreadful disabilities; he kindled with admiring ardour when the thought of his father's triumph over a weight of circumstance which would have crushed a weaker man. If some of the mire of the pit yet clung to him, if in many things he was crude, violent, narrow, it was not surprising; the marvel was that his faults were not more numerous and more unpardonable. As Arthur went to his room, he caught a vision of himself in the mirror of his wardrobe—a slight figure admirably clothed, a face fresh and unlined, with white forehead and close curling hair, the picture of youth delicately nurtured, upon whom the winds of life had not blown roughly—and he was filled with compunction at the contrast afforded by that other picture of a poor drudging boy toiling in a brickfield and beaten by a drunken parent. In spite of all his superficial superiorities, he seemed a creature of small significance beside this Titanic father of his.

It was an exquisite spring morning, one of those mornings when London draws her first fresh, unimpeded breath after the long, choking fogs of winter. The lawn lay green beneath the window, presided over by a busy thrush, who flirted his wings in the strong sunlight, and stopped at intervals to address a long mellow note of rapture to the blue sky; the japonica had hung the garden wall with crimson blossoms; the poplars took the light upon their slender spires, till each burned with yellow flame. Nature, unconquered by the gross antipathy of man, was invading the brick Babylon, flinging brocades of light upon the beaten ways, and filling them with the music of the pipes of Pan. Arthur could not resist the call.

He felt a need of solitude. He had many thoughts that cried aloud for readjustment. He stepped out in the blither air, and took his way to Hampstead Heath. Soon the narrow streets were left behind, the long hill rose above him, and his feet trod the furze-clad slopes, little altered since the day when Roman legions camped upon their crests, and eighteenth-century highwaymen concealed themselves among their hollows. He walked far and fast, meditating much on life. It seemed a wonderful thing to be alive, where so many generations of men had fought and perished, to be for a little time sole possessor of a world that had cast off such myriads of tenants; and there came to him, with an almost painful wonder, the sense of the richness of his opportunity. He would make his own life something worthy. It was true, as his father had said, that he started at a point of vantage not given to every one. By so much that he started higher, he must soar higher, go farther. But in the midst of all his exultant thoughts there intruded his father's terse picture of life as a big strong beast only to be mastered by bit and whip and bridle. And at that thought the tide of exaltation began to leave him. He walked more slowly, became listless, was conscious of weariness. It no longer seemed an easy and a rapturous thing to live; life rose before him as a menace.

In the early afternoon he came to the Spaniards' Inn, and entered it. Coming from the brilliant air into the dim room of the inn, he did not at first recognise a man already seated there, finishing a frugal meal of bread and cheese and ale. The man was tall, with somewhat stooping shoulders; his face was long and bearded, his forehead high, with thin dark hair, his eyes dark and penetrating. He wore a flannel shirt with a silk tie of some indeterminate colour akin to dull crimson. He held a book in one hand, and read as he ate.

As Arthur entered the room he looked up.

"You don't know me, I suppose," he said genially. "But I know you by sight at least. My name is Hilary Vickars."

So this was Hilary Vickars, of whom he had heard Scales speaking at the deacon's tea. Now that he looked at him more closely he recognised him at once. Among the crowd of ordinary faces in the church, that face had stood out with a singular distinctness. It was a face at once grave and composed, sad and humorous; the face of a man who had striven much and suffered much, but had retained through all a certain vivacity, which was distinct from gaiety while including it. And all these qualities seemed to rest upon a deeper quality of composure, so that the final impression was of a man who through suffering had won his way to some secret knowledge which gave him an air of gentle authority.

"I have often wished to know you," said Arthur.

"And I you."

"Why should you wish to know me?"

"Oh! a fancy of mine. It is my business to study people. And you do not look like the run of folk in Highbourne Gardens. Most of the folk in Highbourne Gardens are dear, good, comfortable folk, but stodgy. They are as alike as peas. I could tell you their exact method of life, even to what they have for breakfast. They are products of manufacture, all turned out just alike to the last hair, and all doing just the same things every day, without the least variation. That is what stodginess means."

"And I am not stodgy?" Arthur laughed.

"No; you are fluid. You have not hardened into shape yet. You are a problem."

Arthur looked at the dark, ironic face, and felt a sudden friendliness for the man. It was a long time since he had conversed with a man of ideas; he had scarcely done so since he had left Oxford. The church young men he had found distasteful to him. They were good young men for the most part, much enamoured of respectability, laboriously virtuous, cherishing many mild scruples about the use of the world and inclined to judge it by standards quite foreign to their real tastes; but they had no mental horizons. They were also inclined to be a little shy of him, as a rich man's son with a superior education; a little envious, too, and not at home in his presence, so that intercourse with them had not been easy. But here was a man who spoke another kind of language; it was that language of ideas which at once asserts kinship, among those to whom it is intelligible.

Arthur drew his chair to the table, and soon found himself absorbed in conversation. Hilary Vickars talked slowly, with hesitating pauses—a trick which lent emphasis to what he said. It was as though he fumbled for the right word, and then flashed it out like a sudden torch. Arthur noticed, too, that he occasionally did not pronounce a word in the way common among educated men. The variation was slight; it could scarcely have been called erroneous; but it suggested some deficiency of early training. Perhaps the boy's face betrayed his surprise too ingenuously, for after one of these variations Vickars said abruptly:

"I envy you. It was my dream to go to Oxford. I didn't dream true in that case."

"Perhaps you have done just as well without Oxford," said Arthur generously.

"No, I have never cherished that—delusion. Deprivations in middle life don't matter; but deprivations in early life can never be made up." He paused a moment, and then added. "I was a gardener before I became an author."

Arthur looked his surprise, whereat Vickars laughed.

"Oh! I assure you," he said, "even gardeners have their dreams. Mine, as I said, was Oxford, for I spent my youth within sight of her spires, within sound of her bells. I believed I could become a scholar; indeed, I still believe my old belief not quite foolish. I spent all my money on grammars and dictionaries which I did not know were obsolete, got to know the classics in a crude fashion, and went on imagining that some day I might enter the University. Of course it was all an absurd dream; you do not need to be told that. My first real discovery in life was that learning is the privilege of wealth. That led me to some other discoveries of the same nature, the sum of which was that the great mass of mankind are born disinherited, and that I was one of them. It hurt me dreadfully at the time, but in the long run it was the making of me. It set me studying life as it is, not as it once was in ancient times. And the more I studied it, the more I came to admire common men and women, until at last I was glad that I belonged to them. It is a great thing to know just to whom you belong; no man does any kind of good work till he knows that."

"But you are not a common man," Arthur interrupted. "You are a writer."

"Oh! I have some aptitudes that are not common, no doubt; I am immodest enough to think that. But if I am a writer, I write of common people. It is common life that interests me, the virtues, vices, trials, heroisms, debasements, and nobilities of plain people. But I did not mean to talk about myself, and you must forgive me."

"There is nothing to forgive. What you say deeply interests me. My father said a thing to-day about life which has been in my thoughts a good deal, and you make me recall it. By the way, do you know my father?"

"Yes, I know him."

He spoke the words with a certain caustic accent which did not pass unnoticed.

"You mean you do not like him," Arthur replied with a flash of anger.

"No, I don't say that. I know him merely as a type. But what did he say?"

"He said life was a hard business, in which one was sure to be hurt; that it was a big strong beast which could only be subdued by whip and bridle."

"An excellent definition. Life is strong and cruel and hard. Men who really live soon discover that."

"Have you found it so?"

"Yes. And I've seen the big strong beast tread thousands down—the people who haven't got the whip and bridle."

He spoke the words with remarkable intensity. They were flashed from him rather than spoken. Then, as if ashamed of his display of feeling, he rose from the table, and said in a matter-of-fact tone, "The evening is coming on. I must be going."

They went out of the inn together. The long gray road with its groups of trees and dim houses lay before them; and, as the darkness deepened, the distant lights of London flung a yellow conflagration on the sky. "That's where the big strong beast lies," said Vickars. "You can hear his mighty hooves at work." And, as he spoke, from that great caldron of life, that lay packed and mist-swathed to the eastward of the road, there did come up a sound as of waves upon a groaning beach, a sound of crashing and rending, mingled with the dull thud of wheels and the demoniac shriek of engine and of factory whistles.

But he did not recur to the theme. The talk became trivial, commonplace; once only did it touch a theme of interest, when Vickars recalled how Coleridge and Keats and Haydon and Leigh Hunt had trodden that same road, each with his own separate vision of what life meant, and what man was meant to do in it.

It was nearly dark when they reached the neighbourhood of Highbourne Gardens. Presently Vickars stopped before a small house, one of many, in a long gravelled street. The houses were all alike; each had its strip of garden, its bow-window, its door with glass panels, its aspect of decent mediocrity. There was still enough light to see that though the houses were comparatively new, a kind of premature decay had overtaken them. The iron garden-gates sagged upon their hinges, and the bricks appeared to be joined with sand, which errand-boys had picked out in deep grooves while waiting in the porch for orders. The dilapidation of age may be respectable and even romantic, but in this dilapidation of newness there was something inexpressibly depressing.

"This is where I live," said Vickars.

"I don't think I was ever in this street before," said Arthur. "It must have been built while I was at Oxford."

"It was," said Vickars. "Your father built it."

They said good-night and parted.

IV

MRS. BUNDY

A few days after Arthur's memorable conversation with his father, Archibold Masterman entered on one of his recurring fits of gloom. He went about the house silently, ate and drank in silence, took little notice of any member of his family, and sat alone in his office till long past midnight. The causes of his silence were, as usual, inscrutable. Sometimes he looked on Arthur with a long, brooding, wistful gaze, as if he would like to confide in him, but the confidence never came. Possibly if he had followed up his recent burst of tenderness with complete confidence, the boy might have been won. But in Masterman's nature there was a curious element of perversity, which often prevailed over the dictates of reason and even of self-interest. It was this element of perversity that lay at the root of much that seemed complex in his character, exhibiting itself sometimes in gusty tenderness, sometimes in unscrupulous hardness, so that to the casual observer he appeared a man of formidable moods, none of whose actions could be predicated from any precedent experience.

Once, when Arthur said timidly, "Can I be of any help to you in the office, sir?" he replied curtly, "None whatever. I'll tell you when I want you," and the boy said no more. His sister had gone away to spend some weeks with a friend, his mother was as silent as his father, and he was left more completely to himself than he had ever been.

It was little wonder that he turned eagerly from that gloomy house to the society of such friends as were available. Among these was Hilary Vickars, for whom he had conceived a strong liking. He walked with him occasionally in the afternoons, but as yet Arthur had not visited the house. Another friend, whose house was always open to him, and had been since he was a boy, was a certain Mrs. Bundy, a motherly, cheerful, eccentric Scotchwoman. She was a person of extraordinary slovenliness and good-humour, indefatigably kind, generous, and light-hearted, who had been so used to carrying burdens herself that she cheerfully shouldered other people's burdens as a kind of right. Every one knew where Mrs. Bundy lived; lonely Scotch youths who had come to London to push their fortunes found in her an ardent sympathiser; and should one come to her sick with the shame of some sudden defeat of virtue, he never failed to find in her a shrewd and optimistic friend. Over such youths she exercised a directorship as complete as that of a Jesuit Father; she inspected with a jealous eye their morals and their underwear; mended for them, dosed them when they had colds, fed them with anything that came to hand, took charge of their money, made them small loans, and addressed them with apostolic fervour upon the perils and the pitfalls of London life.

"Poor laddies!" she would say, "they need mothering," and her ample breast swelled with pity at the picture of their loneliness in shabby London lodgings, where they did unequal battle with rapacious land-ladies. Not that she herself was childless; she was the proud mother of two of the most odious children in the locality, who spent their whole time in making life intolerable to their neighbours. But to her, of course, they were merely riotous young angels, whose mischief was the proof of hearty spirits, and whose worst faults reposed upon a solid base of good intentions.

Life for these youngsters was merely a joke and an adventure, and, to tell the truth, Mrs. Bundy's view of life was not unlike theirs. Her whole existence had been fugitive and precarious, for her husband was a speculator who had followed for thirty years the will-o'-the-wisp of sudden fortune. He was a solemn little man, with large, dreamlike eyes, whose immense power of industry had been almost uniformly turned in wrong directions. At the whisper of gold, silver, lead, coal, nitrates, oil, land-booms, he was ready at a moment's notice to wander off into the most inaccessible places of the earth, from which he returned sometimes penniless, and sometimes with a profusion of spoil which he soon contrived to lose again. Most women would have tired of these fruitless quests, but Mrs. Bundy's faith in her husband never faltered, and all the strange caprices of his fortune did not disconcert her. When her adventurer returned with bags of gold, she at once rose to the occasion, moved into a larger house, rode in her carriage for a few weeks, and thoroughly enjoyed the sunshine while it lasted. When the luck failed, she went back contentedly to the cheapest house she could find, used up her fine gowns in household service, and waited hopefully for the return of Bundy. He always came back, though more than once he had been away a whole year; and his return was sometimes dramatic—as, for instance, when he appeared at midnight, and flung a diamond necklace round her throat, while she hid in her pocket a county-court summons for a year's milk bills which she could not pay.

"Come in wi' you, my bonny lad," was the usual greeting to Arthur, and she would lead him into the kitchen with the air of a duchess introducing him to a salon; for it should be said that at this time the Bundy star was in eclipse. And then she would sit down and tell him wondrous tales of people she had known, much too grotesque and tragic for any reasonable world, with stories still more grotesque of the wanderings of Bundy in Brazil and South Africa, and the narrow escapes he had had of being a multimillionaire. Just now, it appeared, he was engaged on some mysterious business in Canada, where a handful of dollars judiciously expended might purchase an estate as large as England. And she would tell these stories with such a vivid art, and with such good faith and humour, that Arthur would roar with laughter, which perhaps was what she wished him to do, for he often came to her with a clouded brow.

"It's small good staying in England these days, if you want to prosper," she would remark. "What wi' all the ships upon the sea and all the new lands that lie beyond, it's a shame for a youth to sit at home. You don't get any fun out of life that way."

Arthur might have retorted that there did not seem to be much fun in a kind of life that left Mrs. Bundy sole tenant of a ruinous old house in Lion Row, whose rent she could scarcely pay, while Bundy wandered in Brazil or Canada, but Mrs. Bundy was so unaffectedly enamoured of her lot that he never said it. On the contrary, there was sown in his mind a little germ of adventure which was to ripen later on, and he got exhilarating glimpses of the romance and bigness of life.

She examined his hand one night, for she affected a knowledge of palmistry, and ended by saying, "You'll have your adventures before long"; and in spite of his entire scepticism, a pleasurable thrill shot through his veins at the prophecy.

"You've got a hand like Bundy's," she remarked; whereat he laughed, and said rather rudely that he had no wish to resemble Bundy.

"Bundy's had his bad times," she retorted, "but he's had his good times too. But if you asked him, I don't think he'd regret anything, and he'd live the same life again if he had the choice. And so would I, for that matter."

And then she swept across the kitchen in her soiled silk dress with the air of pride and dignity that would have become a palace, and Arthur was left reflecting on the happy courage of her temperament as something to be greatly envied.

He learned much from Mrs. Bundy in those weeks, and above all he learned to love her. She was, in spite of all her eccentricities, so motherly, and such a fountain of inexhaustible sympathy, that he got into the way of confiding to her many of his private thoughts.

One night he spoke to her about his father, and of his father's plans for him.

"He wants me to enter the business," he said.

"And why not, laddie?"

"Frankly, I don't like it."

"That's neither here nor there. You've got to live, and as long as a business is honest, one business is as good as another."

"But is it honest?"

He had not meant to ask the question. It came from him unawares. It was a long-silent, long-concealed thought, suddenly become audible.

"What is dishonest in it?"

"I can't quite tell. But I do know that my father buys land for speculative building, and puts up houses that are built of the rottenest material, and sells them to ignorant people."

"Aye, laddie, your father's like the man in the parable, 'an austere man, gathering where he has not strawed.' But he's a strong man, is your father. There's few stronger men than Archibold Masterman.

"Strong, but is he good? I mean, is his way of life right?"

"I canna' tell about that, laddie. But if I was you, I think I wouldn't ask that question about my father. There's a lot of goodness in men, and my conviction is that most men are about as good as they know how to be. There's many people wouldn't call Bundy good, because he's what they call a speculator, and has to live with wild men, and doesn't go to church when he's home; but I know he's got a heart of gold. He never cheated any man knowingly. He's lost himself much more than men have lost by him. And he'd always give away his last penny to the poor."

"Ah, but that's not the point. I know my father is good in that way. Why, only the other day he rebuilt a church entirely at his own expense for people who had no legal claim at all on him. But it's his business, it's the method of it. And I must find an answer, for I must join him in the business or refuse it."

"Well, if you feel like that, refuse it, laddie. Not that I'll say you're wise, nor even right. Fathers have some claims on their sons after all, and these claims ought to come before your own tastes. Only if you know you couldn't draw together with your father, and would only make him and yourself unhappy trying to, then the best thing is to say so at once."

"I suppose you are right," he said in a lugubrious voice. And then he added, "There's another trouble, too. How am I to get my living?"

"You'll find that out fast enough when you become acquainted with hunger," she said with a laugh.

"But if I don't go into my father's business, God only knows what I can do. I don't seem to be fitted for anything in particular."

"I wouldn't worry about that, either," she replied. "There's very few men do the things they think they're fitted for; but they find out how to do other things that are just as important. There's Bundy, now; you'll never guess what he thought himself fitted for when I married him."

"Well, what?"

"A clergyman."

Arthur laughed profanely. The thought of the nefarious Bundy, whose life had been spent in the promotion of companies of a singular collapsibility, as a clergyman was too ridiculous.

"Ah! you may laugh, but let me tell you he'd have made a first-rate parson if he'd gone to college, and started fair."

She spoke with heat, which immediately passed into laughter, as she caught a glimpse of the whimsicality of the thing.

"Ye canna' say Bundy has not a fine flow of language when he chooses, and he can look as solemn as a bishop, and I'm sure he would have had a fine bedside manner," she continued. "But my belief is that a man who can do one thing well can do any other thing just as well."

"That's a consoling faith, at any rate."

"It isn't a faith, it's a fact. It's just a question of ability. The worst of you London-bred lads is that you all want a place made for you, and you don't see that the strong man makes a place for himself."

Arthur did not quite like that, and he liked it the less because he knew that it was true. For was not he London bred? Had not his path been made easy for him? And how could that happen without some emasculation of nature? To grow up in streets, carefully paved and graded, punctually lit at night; to live in houses where a hundred conveniences sprang up to meet the idle hand, to be guarded from offence, provided for without exertion—ah, how different that life from the primitive life of man, familiar with rain and tempest, with a hundred rude and moving accidents, always poised upon the edge of peril, and existing instant by instant by an indomitable exercise of will and strength! For the first time he caught a vital glimpse of the primeval life of man, and recognised its self-sufficing dignity. For the first time he realised that the essence of all true living lay in daring. It was a truth which neither London nor Oxford had imparted to him. He had not even learned it through his own father, whom he knew conventionally rather than really. Strangely enough, it came to him now through the talk of Mrs. Bundy, wise with a wisdom which vicissitude alone could teach, and through the somewhat sorry epic of her husband's hazardous adventures.

"The strong man makes a place for himself"—it was sound doctrine and indubitable fact as well; but was he one of the strong? The question hung upon the confines of his mind, a whispered interrogation, which disturbed and sometimes tortured him. Youth is always a little ludicrous, often pathetically ludicrous, and in nothing so much as in its capacity for taking itself seriously. Life seems such an immensely solemn business at one-and-twenty. Later on we discover that the decisions on which we supposed angels waited are of scant interest to any one but ourselves, and that the world goes on much the same whatever we do or say.

Yet youth is right, even in its crude vanity and egoism, for the history of the world would be poor reading if it recorded nothing better than the commonsense and commonplace performances of middle-age. Mrs. Bundy, from her fifty years' coign of vantage, saw life as Arthur could not see it; above all, she saw its width, which was a great vision to attain.

"No man really enjoys life," she said to him one day, "unless he starts poor."

"How do you make that out?"

"Because the poor are the only people capable of adventures," she replied. "As long as a man is poor, anything may happen to him; but after he becomes rich, nothing happens."

"But you would like to be rich, wouldn't you?"

"Not rich enough to want for nothing," she replied.

As usual she fell back upon her own experience for wisdom, and drew a shrewd and humorous sketch of one of her episodic emergences into wealth.

"Bundy was really rich that time," she remarked. "He'd struck oil in Texas, and had only to sit still and let the oil work for him. It was good fun at first. We took a big house at Kensington, and Bundy spent his time getting cheated over horses, and I spent mine being cheated over sham Sheraton furniture, and when we tired of that we bought pictures, until at last the house was so full of things we couldn't get another stick into it. 'What shall we do now?' says Bundy. 'Let us try being fashionable,' says I." [She uttered the word "fash-ee-on-abell," with an indescribable drawling accent of contempt.] "So we tried that, too, and drove in the Park, and gave dinner-parties, and Bundy had to wear dress-clothes, though he never could make out how to tie his white tie, and made more fuss than enough of it. We got plenty of folk to eat our dinners, but a duller lot I never met. The men all wanted to talk oil, and the women couldn't talk of anything but dress, and men and women alike hung round Bundy, and let him know as plainly as they dared that all they came for was to see if they could get any oil-shares out of him. After a time we grew tired of being fashionable, and Bundy says, 'I think we'll have a yacht.' So we bought a yacht, though neither of us liked the sea, and we made out a summer that way. And all the while the oil was pouring out of those wells in Texas, and the money was pouring in, and we saw no end to it. Then Bundy tried being a philanthropist, and that was really interesting while it lasted. There wasn't a crank in London—nor, one would suppose, in Europe, from the look of his mail-bag—that didn't find him out. They sat upon his doorstep to catch him coming out, and hunted him down the street, and all the men he'd ever known anywhere claimed him as an old friend, so that the poor man lived the life of a partridge on the mountains, as the saying is. He grew quite old-looking, and lost his sleep, and after a time he didn't even read what the papers said about him, which is a pretty bad sign in a man."

"Poor Mr. Bundy!" said Arthur, in mock commiseration.

"Ah! you may well say it, laddie, and poor Mrs. Bundy, too, for I'd never been so miserable in my life. You see, it was the dullness of the thing that made us miserable. When you can get everything you want, you don't want anything after a time."

"And how did it end?"

"Well, one morning I lay a-bed late, for there was nothing particular to get up for, and I could hear Bundy in his dressing-room, opening and shutting drawers, as though he couldn't make up his mind what clothes he wanted to wear. There came a knock on the outer door, and I heard a crumpling of paper, and then he whistled.

"'What is it?' I called out.

"He didn't answer, but I heard him rampaging round. So I jumped out of bed, and ran into the dressing-room, and there stood Bundy laughing to himself, and upon my word he looked happier than I had seen him for twelve months or more.

"'What is it?' I says again.

"And then he looked at me mighty solemn and queer, and says, 'Can ye bear it?'

"'Bear what?' says I.

"'Oh! nothing much,' says he, 'only we're bust. The oil's given out.'

"'Then we're poor?' says I.

"'Poor we are,' says he—'poor as Job. For, you see, I've been spending everything as it came, thinking that that oil would last for ever, and now we're bust.'

"'Hallelujah!' says I. 'That's the best news I've heard a long time.'

"He looked at me a minute, kind of doubtful, and then he burst out laughing, and says, 'I rather think I feel that way myself.'

"'I knew you would,' says I. And then I put my arms round him, and we danced round the room, and I give you my word that was the happiest hour I ever spent in that big house at Kensington. You see, we'd both been dying of dullness, though neither of us liked to say it. We'd got where there weren't any adventures; and that's why life didn't seem worth living."

She looked at Arthur with humorous eyes, in which also there was the gleam of motherly affection and solicitude.

"You're dreadfully afraid of being poor, aren't you, my dear?" she concluded. "London makes men feel like that. And it's because men get afraid of life that they take the first comfortable groove that offers, and then all the fun is over for them. Well, don't you be like that. If I was you, I'd live my life, and let the question of getting a living shift for itself. And remember what I say, for it's true—the only people who really enjoy life are the poor, because they're the only people who have lots to look forward to."

V

THE MAGIC NIGHT

Coming home one night along the Lonsdale Road, Arthur found Hilary Vickars standing at his garden gate, taking the air. It was June, that most exquisite of all months in London, when the perfume of summer finds its way into the narrowest streets, and the imprisoned people thrill with a new sense of freedom and deliverance. In the soft twilight even Lonsdale Road was touched with the idyllic; its impudence of newness was concealed under a faint wash of mauve, and its tiny gardens were fresh with the scent of mown grass.

Hilary Vickars himself seemed softened with the hour; when he spoke to Arthur there was a new kindness in his voice. Perhaps he could not have explained his mood; few of us can explain these sudden softenings that come to us, sometimes through the influence of external things, sometimes from the welling up in us of founts of tenderness which we had thought for ever sealed. A gust of wind among the trees, a bird's song in the dusk, a girl's voice at her piano, in its first fresh, unrestrained sweetness—who of us cannot recall how things as slight as these have had a strange power to provoke some crisis of emotion, which perhaps has coloured all our after-life? Hilary Vickars had been listening that night to his daughter as she sang. She had sung a song her mother had been fond of, and in the mind of the widowed man all the past had leapt into agonised distinctness. And from that he had passed to the perception of the daughter's likeness to her mother, and to the pathos of her youth. Her voice yet lingered in the air, as he stole out of the room, and stood bareheaded at the garden gate. And then he saw Arthur coming up the road, and as his eye rested on the slim, graceful figure he again realised this infinite pathos of youth.

"He wants help, and I ought to help him," was his instant thought.

Hitherto a kind of pride had imposed a barrier of reserve between himself and Arthur. He had seen him as a rich man's son, the member of a class for which he had only scorn and anger. But now he saw him simply as a youth launching his frail bark upon the perilous sea of life, and he loved him. So Nature wrought within him, using his softened mood for her own ends, and with Nature came Destiny, casting the first threads of her inscrutable design upon the loom of life.

He held his hand with a lingering pressure, and then said, as if obeying a resolve imposed upon his own will rather than suggested by it, "Won't you come in?"

He led the way into the house, and Arthur followed with a glad alacrity.

The narrow hall-way opened upon a room at the back of the house, which served both as living-room and library. The only light in the room came from two candles on the piano brackets. Between them sat a young girl, her fingers still upon the keys, her face, rayed with the nimbus of the candlelight, turned upward with a charming air of expectation and surprise.

She was not beautiful, judged by the canons of exacting art; yet there was no artist who could have been indifferent to her, for she possessed an element of charm much more rare than beauty. The hair, dark and abundant, was very simply dressed above a low white forehead; the face was beautifully moulded, and expressed a delicate fatigue; the mouth, too large for beauty, was mobile and eager; the eyes were a stag's eyes, brown and full and limpid. It was in these that her charm was concentrated. They held depth beyond depth, eyes into which the gaze sank, fathomless as water in a well.

She rose as her father and his guest entered the room.

"My daughter, Elizabeth," he said.

She bowed, and turned toward Arthur the regard of her unfathomable eyes. Arthur stood transfixed. For a long moment his gaze clung to hers, and a new, strange, pleasurable heat thrilled his blood. A subtle, undecipherable telegraphy was in that clinging gaze. It was as though soul challenged soul; the citadel of sentience in each awoke to sudden life, and quivered at the shock of contact, with an emotion half alarm and half delight. Then the veil fell between them, and the soul of each receded into secrecy.

It was a relief to each when Vickars lit the gas, and began to speak in accents of conventional courtesy.

"This is my work-room," he said.

And indeed the room told its own tale. Bookshelves, closely packed, covered each wall; the books lay in heaps upon the floor; and in their midst stood a wide table piled with manuscripts, proofs, and notebooks. There was not a single picture in the room, not an ornament of any kind. Near the window stood a typewriter and a small table, and on the other side of the window the piano.

"I suppose there are few rooms in London that know more about brain-toil than this room—that is, if rooms can receive impressions, as I sometimes think they can," he continued. "Certainly none in Lonsdale Road," he added with a smile. "Ah! that reminds me of a story. When I first came to live here, there was the greatest curiosity to know what I did for a living. Lonsdale Road could not account for any man who did not go to the city every day, and therefore refused to accept his credentials of respectability. I never knew how far this aversion went till one day our little servant told us with tears that she must leave us. It took a long time to draw from her her reason. You would never guess it. At last she said, 'Mother say she thinks you are a burglar.' And then I found that our neighbours had actually woven this ingenious romance about us, and I am not sure that they have discarded it even yet."

He spoke lightly, and yet with an accent of resentment and of hurt pride. To Arthur the story was a revelation of the social loneliness of Vickars's life. But he was thinking less of the father than the daughter. Once more his eyes sought that fair face, and he was surprised to find no laughter in it; it was evident the story had pained her.

"Elizabeth does not like that story," said her father, noticing her silence.

"No, father, I do not. It makes me hate the world to think it treats you unjustly."

"Oh! the world's very well, little girl," he replied. "One doesn't expect justice from it. One should be content if the world merely allows him to live."

"Yet you are always fighting for justice. You know you are, father."

"Ah! justice for other people—that's a different thing. But the condition of such a fight as that is to be indifferent to the question of justice to one's self. That is a very small matter indeed."

"That is how he always talks," she answered, with a charming friendliness of appeal to Arthur. "He never thinks about himself."

"There, there! we're getting very serious, little girl," Vickars replied. "Suppose we change the subject. We don't often have a guest. Don't you think a little supper and some music afterwards might fit the occasion?"

"How forgetful of me!" she said. She rose and left the room.

"You mustn't take my fine sentiments too seriously, so I give you due warning," he remarked. "Men who write books get into the way of talking their own books. You'll find, as you come to know me better, that there's a good deal of—of the artificial in me. The only merit I have above other men is that I am conscious of it."

"I have read your last book," said Arthur, "and I found nothing artificial in it. I thought it a great book."

"Have you? Well, I'm glad." His pale face was illumined for an instant by the boy's ingenuous praise. "No, Arthur," he added, "it's not great. It is merely true. And I think I can say this with real sincerity—I care much more for its truth than for its greatness."

"Are they not the same?" said Arthur.

"Not for this generation. This is the age of 'best sellers,' and the book that is called great is usually the book that has least to say about the truth of life."

"I was not thinking of contemporary opinion."

"Contemporary opinion is the only court of appeal we have. A book must justify itself to the generation in which it is written, or be sure of it no other generation will know anything about it. Yet I do sometimes think that truth must make itself heard. I cherish the belief, in spite of history and experience."

He spoke with an accent of infinite dejection. Arthur could find no words of reply. If, an hour before, he had been asked what kind of life came nearest his ideal, perhaps he would have replied, "The literary life," and he would have instanced Vickars. Now, as he looked at the writer's tired face, it was as though the naked realities of such a life lay before him, stripped of all delusive trappings. To drain one's life-blood into books that no one read, to prophesy to deaf ears and undiscerning eyes, ah! surely there must be a better way of life than this; and on the instant he knew what that way was. That warmth which still pierced his veins spoke to him more clearly than any voice. To love—that was life. To live the lyric life of love—that was better than to write of it. And straightway there came to him a vision of wide plains and deep forests, dotted with the homes of men, beneath whose roofs lip met lip in faithful kisses, and heart beat to heart through long nights of sleep, and all the primeval life of man went on in birth and death, as it had done since the gates of Eden closed. Ah! infinite desirable delight of love, strong, and natural, and enduring, on which the great seal of God had always rested! In that moment he ceased to be a boy; his manhood rushed upon him; he blushed, and in his heart a voice cried, "Elizabeth!"

She re-entered the room at that moment, carrying a supper-tray, and Arthur could not but observe the supple poise and grace of her young figure. She moved easily, with a soft gliding motion; she was dressed wholly in white, and conveyed an impression of a creature inimitably virginal. The face had not lost its look of delicate fatigue, but it was clear that this fatigue was of the mind rather than the body, and owed itself to no physical defect. Both he and Vickars rose together to clear a place upon the littered writing-table for the supper-tray, and in performing this act his hand touched hers. It was but a feather's touch, but it thrilled him, and his very flesh seemed to dissolve in a fire of rapture. Again he sought her eyes, but now they were averted. The moment passed like a chord of music that left the air vibrating. It seemed to him that all the world must know what had happened.

Then the current of his life ran back into its normal channels, and he found himself talking with excited eagerness. The meal was as simple as a meal could be, but for him it had ambrosial flavours. She sat quite silent, listening, apparently unaware that he talked for her alone. Vickars caught the gaiety of his good spirits, and talked as eagerly as he. The conversation soon found its accustomed grooves—books, and London, and the interminable comedy and tragedy of man. Presently Vickars happened to mention a young poet who had lately died, and Arthur asked if he had known him.

"Yes, he came here once. It was in his last days, when he had finally discovered that the world had rejected him. But he never knew why he was rejected."

"Why was he rejected?"

"Because he could only sing of the past. He had no vision of the modern world. He despised it, and his contempt blinded him to its real significance.

"I do not think that is quite just, father," said Elizabeth.

"Ah! I forgot to say," said Vickars, with an admiring glance at his daughter, "that Elizabeth is a much better critic than I. She is a better critic because she is a kinder."

"No, it's not that, father. My criticism, such as it is, is only feeling, and I felt that poor Lawson was just finding his way to the right method when he died. Don't you remember those lines on London in his last sonnet?—

O Calvaries of the poor, dim hills of pain,
    Whose utmost anguish is not nail or thorn,
    The beaten blood-smeared brow, the soft flesh torn,
But this, that ye are crucified in vain.

The man who wrote those lines surely saw the modern world, and realised its significance."

She recited the lines slowly, in a low fluty voice which would have imparted dignity and music to much worse lines. Arthur listened entranced. Surely there was magic in this summer's night, a magic of the soul as well as of the flesh. His hand had touched hers, but now her mind revealed itself, and thrilled his with a subtler contact. In one swift glimpse he understood her exquisite sensitiveness, her pitifulness and tenderness, her strength and goodness; it was as though the Madonna's halo rested for an instant on that fair brow, and awed him into worship. He drew a long breath, and now, when his eyes sought hers, her gaze was not averted. She accepted the challenge of his eyes with complete sincerity, and with a frankness which was the last effect of complete innocence and modesty.

The voice of Vickars broke the spell.

"Yes, you are right," he said; "you usually are." And then, turning to Arthur with a whimsical smile, "Do you know Elizabeth writes my books for me?"

"Typewrites, he means. That is all, I assure you," she said.

"And corrects my blunders, which are many."

"Only the spelling. Father never could spell, and when he is in difficulties he makes a hieroglyphic with his pen, and leaves me to decipher it."

"I am afraid the critics find it hieroglyphic too," said Vickars, with a return to his dejected manner. "I sometimes wish we had Grub Street back again, with all its tribe of famished hacks; they at least would understand a book that deals with poverty. But who are the critics to-day? They are gentlemen with settled incomes who write in comfortable armchairs, and know as little about real life as the tadpole knows of the ocean. The result is they simply cannot understand the things I write about. They persuade themselves that such things don't exist. What can one say of them but the accusation which is as old as time—'having eyes they see not, and ears they hear not, and hearts they do not understand'?"

"They will surely understand one day," said Arthur.

"Ah! one day—but when? When the common people have forced them to see and understand. For there is my real hope, after all—the common people. They know what they want, and don't go to the critics for their opinions. A venomous review may do much to injure a young author; but if he goes on writing undismayed, the time comes when reviews, whether bad or good, don't affect him. If he can justify himself to the common people, he is certain to triumph in the long run. But there, we are getting too serious again. Let us forget books, and have some music. One can find solace for any kind of disappointment in music. It is the only art that makes a universal appeal."

Elizabeth rose and went to the piano, stooping as she went to kiss her father's brow.