E. Phillips Oppenheim - A Prince of Sinners

E >> E. Phillips Oppenheim >> A Prince of Sinners

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21

The lips broke away at last.

"After all," she murmured, "I think that I shall enjoy myself this
evening. You are looking all sorts of nice things at me."

"My eyes," he answered, "are more daring than my lips."

"And you call yourself a lawyer?"

"Is that a challenge? Well, I was thinking that you looked charming."

"Is that all? I have a looking-glass, you know."

"And I shall miss you--very much."

She suddenly avoided his eyes, but it was for a second only. Yet Brooks
was himself conscious of the significance of that second. He set his
teeth hard.

"The days here," he said, slowly, "have been very pleasant. It has all
been--such a different life for me. A few months ago I knew no one
except a few of the Medchester people, and was working hard to make a
modest living. Sometimes I feel here as though I were a modern Aladdin.
There is a sense of unreality about Lord Arranmore's extraordinary
kindness to me. To-night, more than ever, I cannot help feeling that it
is something like a dream which may pass away at any moment."

She looked at him thoughtfully.

"Lord Arranmore is not an impulsive person," she said. "He must have
had some reason for being so decent to you."

"Yes, as regards the management of his affairs perhaps," Brooks
answered. "But why he should ask me here, and treat me as though I were
his social equal and all that sort of thing--well, you know that is a
puzzle, isn't it?"

"Well, I don't know," she answered. "Lord Arranmore is not exactly the
man to be a slave to, or even to respect, the conventional, and your
being--what you are, naturally makes you a pleasant companion to
him--and his guests. No, I don't think that it is strange."

"You are very flattering," he said, smiling.

"Not in the least," she assured him. "Now-a-days birth seems to be
rather a handicap than otherwise to the making of the right sort of
people. I am sure there are more impossibilities in the peerage than in
the nouveaux riches. I know heaps of people who because their names are
in Debrett seem to think that manners are unnecessary, and that they
have a sort of God-sent title to gentility."

Brooks laughed.

"Why," he said, "you are more than half a Radical."

"It is your influence," she said, demurely.

"It will soon pass away," he sighed. "To-morrow you will be back again
amongst your friends."

She sighed.

"Why do one's friends bore one so much more than other people's?" she
exclaimed.

"When one thinks of it," he remarked, "you must have been very bored
here. Why, for the last fortnight there have been no other visitors in
the house."

"There have been compensations," she said.

"Tell me about them!" he begged.

She laughed up at him.

"If I were to say the occasional visits of Mr. Kingston Brooks, would
you be conceited?"

"It would be like putting my vanity in a hothouse," he answered, "but I
would try and bear it."

"Well, I will say it, then!"

He turned and looked at her with a sudden seriousness. Some
consciousness of the change in his mood seemed to be at once
communicated to her. Her eyes no longer met his. She moved a little on
one side and took up an ornament from an ormolu table.

"I wish that you meant it," he murmured.

"I do!" she whispered, almost under her breath.

Brooks suddenly forgot many things, but Nemesis intervened. There was
the sound of much rustling of silken skirts, and--Lady Caroom's poodle,
followed by herself, came round the angle of the drawing-room.

"My dear Sybil," she exclaimed, "do come and tie Balfour's ribbon for
me. Marie has no idea of making a bow spread itself out, and pink is
so becoming to him. Thanks, dear. Where is our host? I thought that I
was late."

Lord Arranmore entered as she spoke. His evening dress, as usual, was
of the most severely simple type. To-night its sombreness was
impressive. With such a background his pallor seemed almost waxen-like.
He offered his arm to Lady Caroom.

"I was not sure," he said, with a lightness which seemed natural enough,
"whether to-night I might not have to dine alone whilst you poor people
sat and played havoc with the shreds of my reputation. Groves, the
cabinet Johannesburg and the '84 Heidsieck--though I am afraid," he
added, looking down at his companion, "that not all the wine in my
cellar could make this feast of farewells a cheerful one."

"Farewell celebrations of all sorts are such a mistake," Lady Caroom
murmured. "We have been so happy here too."

"You brought the happiness with you," Lord Arranmore said, "and you take
it away with you. Enton will be a very dull place when you are gone.

"Your own stay here is nearly up, is it not?" Lady Caroom asked. "Very
nearly. I expect to go to Paris next week--at latest the week after, in
time at any rate for Bernhardt's new play. So I suppose we shall soon
all be scattered over the face of the earth."

"Except me," Brooks interposed, ruefully. "I shall be the one who will
do the vegetating."

Lady Caroom laughed softly.

"Foolish person! You will be within two hours of London. You none of
you have the slightest idea as to the sort of place we are going to. We
are a day's journey from anywhere. The morning papers are twenty-four
hours late. The men drink port wine, and the women sit round the fire
in the drawing-room after dinner and wait--and wait--and wait. Oh, that
awful waiting. I know it so well. And it isn't much better when the
men do come. They play whist instead of bridge, and a woman in the
billiard-room is a lost soul. Our hostess always hides my cue directly
I arrive, and pretends that it has been lost. By the bye, what a dear
little room this is, Arranmore. We haven't dined here before, have we?"

Lord Arranmore shook his head. He held up his wineglass thoughtfully as
though criticizing the clearness of the amber fluid.

"No!" he said. "I ordered dinner to be served in here because over our
dessert I propose to offer you a novel form of entertainment."

"How wonderful," Sybil said. "Will it be very engrossing? Will it help
us to forget?"

He looked at her with a smile.

"That depends," he said, "how anxious you are to forget."

She looked hastily away. For a moment Brooks met her eyes, and his
heart gave an unusual leap. Lady Caroom watched them both thoughtfully,
and then turned to their host.

"You have excited our curiosity, Arranmore. You surely don't propose to
keep us on tenterhooks all through dinner?"

"It will give a fillip to your appetite."

"My appetite needs no fillip. It is disgraceful to try and make me eat
more than I do already. I am getting hideously stout. I found my maid
in tears to-night because I positively could not get into my most
becoming bodice."

"If you possess a more becoming one than this," Lord Arranmore said,
with a bow, "it is well for our peace of mind that you cannot wear it."

"That is a very pretty subterfuge, but a subterfuge it remains," Lady
Caroom answered. "Now be candid. I love candour. What are you going
to do to amuse us?"

He shook his head.

"Do not spoil my effect. The slightest hint would make everything seem
tame. Brooks, I insist upon it that you try my Johannesburg. It was
given to my grandfather by the Grand Duke of Shleistein. Groves!"

Brooks submitted willingly enough, for the wine was wonderful. Sybil
leaned over so that their heads almost touched.

"Look at our host," she whispered. "What does he remind you of?"

Brooks glanced across the table, brilliant with its burden of old
silver, of cut-glass and hothouse flowers. Lord Arranmore's face,
notwithstanding his ready flow of conversation, seemed unusually still
and white--the skin drawn across the bones, even the lips pallid. The
sombreness of his costume, the glitter in his eyes, the icy coldness of
his lack of coloring, though time after time he set down his wineglass
empty, were curiously impressive. Brooks looked back into her face, his
eyes full of question.

"Mephistopheles," she whispered. "He is absolutely weird to-night. If
he sat and looked at me and we were alone I should shriek."

Lord Arranmore lifted a glass of champagne to the level of his head and
looked thoughtfully around the table.

"Come," he said, "a toast-to ourselves. Singly? Collectively. Lady
Caroom, I drink to the delightful memories with which you have peopled
Enton. Sybil, may you charm society as your mother has done. Brooks,
your very good health. May your entertainment this evening be a welcome
one.

"We will drink to all those things," Lady Caroom declared, "with
enthusiasm. But I am afraid your good wishes for Sybil are beyond any
hope of realization. She is far too honest to flourish in society. She
will probably marry a Bishop or a Cabinet Minister, and become engrossed
in theology or politics. You know how limiting that sort of thing is.
I am in deadly fear that she may become humdrum. A woman who really
studies or knows anything about anything can never be a really
brilliant woman."

"You--"

"Oh, I pass for being intelligent because I parade my ignorance so, just
as Sophie Mills is considered a paragon of morality because she is
always talking about running off with one of the boys in her husband's
regiment. It is a gigantic bluff, you know, but it comes off. Most
bluffs do come off if one is only daring enough."

"You must tell them that up at Redcliffe," Lord Arranmore remarked.

Sybil laughed heartily.

"Redcliffe is the one place where mother is dumb," she declared. "Up
there they look upon her as a stupid but well-meaning person. She is
absolutely afraid to open her mouth."

"They are so absurdly literal," Lady Caroom sighed, helping herself to
an infinitesimal portion of a wonderful savoury. "Don't talk about the
place. I know I shall have an attack of nerves there."

"Mother always gets nerves if she mayn't talk," Sybil murmured.

"You're an undutiful daughter," Lady Caroom declared. "If I do talk I
never say anything, so nobody need listen unless they like. About this
entertainment, Arranmore. Are you going to make the wineglass
disappear and the apples fly about the room a la Maskelyne and Cook? I
hope our share in it consists in sitting down."

Arranmore turned to the butler behind his chair.

"Have coffee and liqueur served here, Groves, and bring some cigarettes.
Then you can send the servants away and leave us alone."

The man bowed.

"Very good, your lordship."

Lord Arranmore looked around at his guests.

"The entertainment," he said, "will incur no greater hardship upon you
than a little patience. I am going to tell you a story."

CHAPTER XX

THE CONFIDENCE OF LORD ARRANMORE

The servants had left the room, and the doors were fast closed. Lord
Arranmore sat a little forward in his high-backed chair, one hand
grasping the arm, the other stretched flat upon the table before him.
By his side, neglected, was a cedar-wood box of his favourite
cigarettes.

"I am going," he said, thoughtfully, "to tell you a story, of whom the
hero is--myself. A poor sort of entertainment perhaps, but then there
is a little tragedy and a little comedy in what I have to tell. And you
three are the three people in the world to whom certain things were
better told."

They bent forward, fascinated by the cold directness of his speech, by
the suggestion of strange things to come. The mask of their late gaiety
had fallen away. Lady Caroom, grave and sad-eyed, was listening with an
anxiety wholly unconcealed. Under the shaded lamplight their faces,
dominated by that cold masterly figure at the head of the table, were
almost Rembrandtesque.

"You have heard a string of incoherent but sufficiently damaging
accusations made against me to-day by a young lady whose very existence,
I may say, was a surprise to me. It suited me then to deny them.
Nevertheless they were in the main true."

The announcement was no shock. Every one of the three curiously enough
had believed the girl.

"I must go a little further back than the time of which she spoke. At
twenty-six years old I was an idle young man of good family, but scant
expectations, supposed to be studying at the Bar, but in reality idling
my time about town. In those days, Lady Caroom, you had some knowledge
of me."

"Up to the time of your disappearance--yes. I remember, Arranmore," she
continued, her manner losing for a moment some of its restraint, and
her eyes and tone suddenly softening, "dancing with you that evening.
We arranged to meet at Ranelagh the next day, and, when the next day
came, you had vanished, gone as completely as though the earth had
swallowed you up. For weeks every one was asking what has become of
him. And then--I suppose you were forgotten."

"This," Lord Arranmore continued, "is the hardest part of my narrative,
the hardest because the most difficult to make you understand. You will
forgive my offering you the bare facts only. I will remind you that I
was young, impressionable, and had views. So to continue!"

The manner of his speech was in its way chillingly impressive. He was
still sitting in exactly the same position, one hand upon the arm of his
high-backed chair, the other upon the table before him. He made use of
no gestures, his face remained as white and emotionless as a carved
image, his tone, though clear and low, was absolutely monotonous. But
there was about him a subtle sense of repression apparent to all of
them.

"On my way home that night my hansom knocked down an old man. He was
not seriously hurt, and I drove him home. On the way he stared at me
curiously. Every now and then he laughed--unpleasantly.

"'I have never seen any one out of your world before,' he said. 'I
dare say you have never spoken to any one out of mine except to toss us
alms. Come and see where I live.'

"He insisted, and I went. I found myself in a lodging-house, now pulled
down and replaced by one of Lord Rowton's tenement houses. I saw a
hundred human beings more or less huddled together promiscuously, and
the face of every one of them was like the face of a rat. The old man
dragged me from room to room, laughing all the time. He showed me
children herded together without distinction of sex or clothing, here
and there he pointed to a face where some apprehension of the light was
fighting a losing battle with the ghouls of disease, of vice, of foul
air, of filth. I was faint and giddy when we had looked over that one
house, but the old man was not satisfied. He dragged me on to the roof
and pointed eastwards. There, as far as the eyes could reach, was a
blackened wilderness of smoke-begrimed dwellings. He looked at me and
grinned. I can see him now. He had only one tooth, a blackened yellow
stump, and every time he opened his mouth to laugh he was nearly choked
with coughing. He leaned out over the palisading and reached with both
his arms eastward. 'There,' he cried, frantically, 'you have seen one.
There are thousands and tens of thousands of houses like this, a million
crawling vermin who were born into the world in your likeness, as you
were born, my fine gentleman. Day by day they wake in their holes, fill
their lungs with foul air, their stomachs with rotten food, break their
backs and their hearts over some hideous task. Every day they drop a
little lower down. Drink alone keeps them alive, stirs their blood now
and then so that they can feel their pulses beat, brings them a blessed
stupor. And see over there the sun, God's sun, rises every morning,
over them and you. Young man! You see those flaming spots of light?
They are gin-palaces. You may thank your God for them, for they alone
keep this horde of rotten humanity from sweeping westwards, breaking up
your fine houses, emptying your wine into the street, tearing the silk
and laces from your beautiful soft-limbed women. Bah! But you have
read. It would be the French Revolution over again. Oh, but you are
wise, you in the West, your statesmen and your philanthropists, that you
build these gin-palaces, and smile, and rub your hands and build more
and spend the money gaily. You build the one dam which can keep back
your retribution. You keep them stupefied, you cheapen the vile liquor
and hold it to their noses. So they drink, and you live. But a day of
light may come.'"

Lord Arranmore ceased speaking, stretched out his hand and helped
himself to wine with unfaltering fingers.

"I have tried," he continued, "to repeat the exact words which the old
man used to me, and I do not find it so difficult as you might imagine,
because at that time they made a great impression upon me. But I
cannot, of course, hope to reproduce to you his terrible earnestness,
the burning passion with which every word seemed to spring from his
lips. Their effect upon me at that time you will be able to judge when
I tell you this--that I never returned to my rooms, that for ten years I
never set foot west of Temple Bar. I first joined a small society in
Whitechapel, then I worked for myself, and finally I became a
police-court missionary at Southwark Police-Court. The history of
those years is the history of a slowly-growing madness. I commenced
by trying to improve whole districts-I ended with the individual."

Brooks' wineglass fell with a little crash upon the tablecloth. The
wine, a long silky stream, flowed away from him unstaunched, unregarded.
His eyes were fixed upon Lord Arranmore. He leaned forward.

"A police-court missionary!" he cried, hoarsely.

Lord Arranmore regarded him for a moment in silence.

"Yes. As you doubtless surmise, I am your father. Afterwards you may
ask me questions."

Brooks sat as one stupefied, and then a sudden warm touch upon his hand
sent the blood coursing once more through his veins. Sybil's fingers
lay for a moment upon his. She smiled kindly at him. Lord Arranmore's
voice once more broke the short silence.

"The individual was my greatest disappointment," he continued. "Young
and old, all were the same. I took them to live with me, I sent them
abroad, I found them situations in this country, I talked with them,
read with them, showed them the simplest means within their reach by
means of which they might take into their lives a certain measure of
beautiful things. Failure would only make me more dogged, more eager.
I would spend months sometimes with one man or boy, and at last I
would assure myself of success. I would find them a situation, see them
perhaps once a week, then less often, and the end was always the same.
They fell back. I had put the poison to sleep, but it was always there.
It was their everlasting heritage, a gift from father to son, bred in
the bone, a part of their blood.

"In those days I married a lady devoted to charitable works. Our
purpose was to work together, but we found it impracticable. There was,
I fear, little sympathy between us. The only bond was our work--and
that was soon to be broken. For there came a time, after ten breathless
years, when I paused to consider."

He raised his glass to his lips and drained it. The wine was powerful,
but it brought no tinge of colour to his cheeks, nor any lustre to his
eyes. He continued in the same firm, expressionless tone.

"There came a night when I found myself thinking, and I knew then that a
new terror was stealing into my life. I made my way up to the roof of
the house where that old man had first taken me, and I leaned once more
over the palisading and looked eastwards. I fancied that I could still
hear the echoes of his frenzied words, and for the first time I heard
the note of mockery ringing clearly through them. There they
stretched--the same blackened wilderness of roofs sheltering the same
horde of drinking, filthy, cursing, parasitical creatures; there flared
the gin-palaces, more of them, more brilliantly lit, more gorgeously
decorated. Ten years of my life, and what had I done? What could any
one do? The truth seemed suddenly written across the sky in letters of
fire. I, a poor human creature, had been fighting with a few other
fanatics against the inviolable, the unconquerable laws of nature. The
hideous mistake of all individual effort was suddenly revealed to me.
'We were like a handful of children striving to dam a mighty torrent
with a few handfuls of clay. Better a thousand times that these people
rotted--and died in their holes, that disease should stalk through their
streets, and all the evil passions born of their misery and filth should
be allowed to blaze forth that the whole world might see, so the laws of
the world might intervene, the great natural laws by which alone these
things could be changed. I looked down at myself, then wasted to the
bone, a stranger to the taste of wine or tobacco, to all the joys of
life, a miserable heart-broken wretch, and I cursed that old man and the
thought of him till my lips were dry and my throat ached. I walked back
to my miserable dwelling with a red fire before my eyes, muttering,
cursing that power which stood behind the universe, and which we call
God, that there should be vomited forth into the world day by day, hour
by hour, this black stream of human wretchedness, an everlasting mockery
to those who would seek for the joy of life.

"They took me to the hospital, and they called my illness brain-fever.
But long before they thought me convalescent I was conscious, lying
awake and plotting my escape. With cunning I managed it. Of my wife
and child I never once thought. Every trace of human affection seemed
withered up in my heart. I took the money subscribed for me with a
hypocrite's smile, and I slunk away from England. I went to Montreal in
Canada, and I deliberately entered upon a life of low pleasures. Pardon
me!"

He bent forward and with a steady hand readjusted the shade of a lamp
which was in danger of burning. Lady Caroom leaned back in her chair
with an indrawn sobbing breath. The action at such a moment seemed
grotesque. His own coolness, whilst with steady fingers he probed away
amongst the wounded places of his life, was in itself gruesome.

"My money," he continued, "was no large sum, but I eked it out with
gambling. The luck was always on my side. It's quite true that I
ruined the father of the young lady who paid me a visit to-day. After a
somewhat chequered career he was settling down in a merchant's office in
Montreal when I met him. His luck at cards was as bad as mine was good.
I won all he had, and more. I believe that he committed suicide. A man
there was kind to me, asked me to his house--I persuaded his wife to run
away with me. These are amongst the slightest of my delinquencies. I
steeped myself in sin. I revelled in it. I seemed to myself in some
way to be showing my defiance for the hidden powers of life which I had
cursed. I played a match with evil by day and by night until I was
glutted. And then I stole away from the city, leaving behind a hideous
reputation and not a single friend. Then a new mood came to me. I
wanted to get to a place where I should see no human beings at all, and
escape in that way from the memories which were still like a clot upon
my brain. So I set my face westwards. I travelled till at last
civilization lay behind. Still I pushed onward. I had stores in
plenty, an Indian servant who chanced to be faithful, and whom I saw
but twice a day. At last I reached Lake Ono. Here between us we built
a hut. I sent my Indian away then, and when he fawned at my feet to
stay I kicked him. This was my third phase of living, and it was true
that some measure of sanity came back to me. Oh, the blessed relief of
seeing the face of neither man nor woman. It was the unpeopled world of
Nature--uncorrupted, fresh, magnificent, alive by day and by night with
everlasting music of Nature. The solitudes of those great forests were
like a wonderful balm. So the fevers were purged out of me, and I
became once more an ordinary human being. I was content, I think, to
die there, for I had plenty to eat and drink, and the animals and birds
who came to me morning and evening kept me from even the thought of
loneliness. The rest is obvious. I lost two cousins in South Africa,
an uncle in the hunting-field. A man in Montreal had recognized me. I
was discovered. But before I returned I killed Brooks, the police-court
missionary. This girl has forced me to bring him to life again."

It was a strange silence which followed. Brooks sat back in his chair,
pale, bewildered, striving to focus this story properly, to attain a
proper comprehension of these new strange things. And behind all there
smouldered the slow burning anger of the child who has looked into the
face of a deserted mother. Lady Caroom was white to the lips, and in
her eyes the horror of that story so pitilessly told seemed still to
linger.

Lord Arranmore spoke again. Still he sat back in his high-backed
chair, and still he spoke in measured, monotonous tones. But this time,
if only their ears had been quick enough to notice it, there lay behind
an emotion, held in check indeed, but every now and then quivering for
expression. He had turned to Lady Caroom.

"Chance," he said, "has brought together here at the moment when the
telling of these things has become a necessity, the two people who have
in a sense some right to hear them, for from each I have much to ask.
Sybil is your daughter, and from her there need be no secrets. So,
Catherine, I ask you again, now that you know everything, are you brave
enough to be my wife?"

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21