by Ouida
“Yes, Wilfrid,” says Lady Southwold;— “who are the Brown family?”
“To whom you are always at home,” adds his uncle.
“And Annie who sends button-holes with love,” adds Marlow.
Bertram replies with icy brevity, “A perfectly respectable young woman.”
“And the respectable one’s address?” asks Marlow. “Where is ‘our place’? I am seized with an irresistible longing to eat mustard and cress. I never did eat it, but still—”
Bertram eyes him very disagreeably. “The Browns are persons I esteem. I should not give their address to persons for whom I have no esteem.”
“My dear Wilfrid!” cries his aunt. “How altruism does sour the temper!”
“Temper! I hope I have too much philosophy to allow my temper to be ruffled by the clumsy horse-jokes of my acquaintances.”
“But why are you always at home to these Browns?” Bertram hesitates.
“Are they acolytes? studies? pensioners?” asks his aunt.
“Is — the respectable one pretty?” murmurs Marlow. “The respectable ones so uncommonly rarely are!”
He takes the violets off the cloisonné plate.
“A buttonhole to be worn at Hoxton Theatre? It is an emblem of the immorality of finance: for its commercial value must be at least four farthings. If my Waterbury offend the eye of eternal justice this penny bunch must outrage it no less.”
“It is quite natural, I think,” says Cicely Seymour, rather impatiently, “that Mr. Bertram should have many friends in those classes which he considers so superior to his own.”
“I do not say any class is superior to any other,” interrupts Bertram. “I say that all are equal.”
There is now a great buzz of voices everywhere in the rooms; people are so very glad to have the muzzle off after an hour’s silence; he cannot doubt, as that murmur and trill of conversation run all round him, that he has bored them all excruciatingly.
“They have no minds!” he thinks, bitterly. “We sell a bare score of copies a month of the Age to Come, and the Dustcart, with its beastly ribaldry and social scandals, sells sixty-five thousand!”
“Do you mean to say, Wilfrid,” asks his aunt, eating a caviare sandwich, “that anybody would pay taxes if they were not obliged?”
“Do not people, urged by conscience, send arrears, unasked, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer?”
“Well, they do certainly now and then. But they must be very oddly constituted people.”
“Is conscience an eccentricity?”
His aunt does not argue, she only shakes her head.
“I can’t believe anybody would pay taxes if they weren’t obliged.”
“But they do. There are these instances in the papers. If moral feeling in the public were acute and universal, as it ought to be, every public duty would be fulfilled with promptitude and without pressure.” The old duke nods very expressively.
“Your aunt’s right,” he mumbles. “Conscience-money can only come from cranks!”
“Come and dine with us, Wilfrid,” says his aunt; “we never see you now. I assure you a good dinner changes the colour of political opinions in a wonderful degree. I am dreadfully afraid that you have been living on boiled soles and carrot fritters.”
Bertram smiles slightly.
“The carrot fritters; not the soles. I am a vegetarian.”
“But we are justified in being carnivorous,” says Southwold, very eagerly. “Individualism justifies us.”
Marlow repeats with emphasis: “We are justified in being carnivorous. Individualism justifies us.”
“Certainly,” says Bertram, with uncivil sarcasm. “The crocodile has a right to its appetites, and the cur to its vomit. Solomon said so.”
“Am I the crocodile or the cur?” asks Southwold.
“Do you keep Critchett on carrot fritters?” asks Marlow, “and what does he have to drink? Hot water? Hot water is, I believe, the beverege which nowadays accompanies high thinking.”
“And how do you reconcile your conscience and your creeds to keeping a Critchett at all?” repeats Lady Jane.
Bertram replies with distant chillness and proud humility: “The leaven of long habit is hard to get rid of; I entirely agree with you that I am in the wrong. To have a servant at all is an offence to humanity; it is an impertinence to the brotherhood of our common mortality.”
“Don’t be afraid,” says Southwold, grimly, “our brothers and sisters in the servants’ halls pay us out for the outrage; they take away our characters, read our correspondence, and pocket twenty per cent, on all our bills.”
“Can you blame them? They are the product of a corrupt society. No one can blame them, whatever they are or do. The dunghill cannot bring forth the rose. Your service has debased them. The fault of their debasement lies with you.”
“But Critchett cannot be debased. He must, living in so rarefied a moral atmosphere, be elevated above all mortal weaknesses.”
Bertram replies stiffly: “I can assure you I have much more respect for Critchett than for any member of a St. James’ Street club.”
“And yet you give him carrot fritters!” cried Lady Southwold.
Bertram replies with great irritation: “He eats whatever he pleases, turtle and turbot for aught I know. I should never presume to impose upon him either my menu or my tenets, my beliefs or my principles.”
“You do wisely if you wish to keep him!” says his aunt. “I hope you will keep him. He is your only link with civilised life.”
Bertram smiles. “My dear aunt, when I was in the South Pacific I landed at a small island where civilisation was considered to consist in a pierced nose and a swollen belly. I do not want to be offensive, but the estimate which my age takes of its own civilisation is not very much more sensible.”
“I think it would have been better, Wilfrid, to study psychology under these savages than to publish the Age to Come! You could not have injured them, but here—”
“How illiberal you are, dear Lady Southwold,” says Cicely Seymour. “You want a course of Montaigne.”
“What’s that, Miss Seymour?” asks Marlow. “A rival to Mariani wine?”
“Yes, a French wine; very old and quite unequalled!”
Even Bertram laughs. Marlow is irritated. He does not see what he has said which is so absurd, or why his friends are laughing.
“Why do you always take that prig’s part?” he mutters, sullenly, aside to Cicely Seymour.
“I do not take any one’s part,” replies the young lady; “but I detest injustice and illiberality.”
At this moment the old duke rises with Bertram’s help, is assisted by him to find his hat and stick, and takes his departure, assuring his godson that he had been much entertained.
Following the duke’s example every one takes their leave, assuring their instructor that they have derived much entertainment and information from his disquisition. Cicely Seymour says simply and very gently:— “Thanks, Mr. Bertram. You have made me your debtor for many noble thoughts.”
When they have left him Bertram walks up and down his rooms dissatisfied with himself.
“What a coward!” he thinks, with the moral self flagellation of an over-sensitive and over-sincere person. “Why could I not tell them the truth? Why did I limit myself to saying that she was a perfectly respectable young woman? If I cannot face the simple enunciation of the intention, how shall I ever bring myself to the endurance of publishing the fact when it is accomplished? Am I, after all, the slave of opinion, like anybody else? Am I afraid of a set of fools who are capering on their primrose path, seeing nothing of the abyss to which it leads? If I have not the courage of my views and faiths, wherein am I superior to their philistinism? I do what I choose; what I see to be wise and right and just; I desire to give an example which shall show how utterly I despise the fictitious barriers of caste and custom, and yet I have not courage enough to say to a few people who are drinking tea in my rooms, ‘My good folk
s, I am going to marry a young woman called Annie Brown.’ Why could I not say it? Why was I such a miserable poltroon?”
He throws himself into a deep chair and lights a cigarette.
“What would my aunt have done? What would that grinning; cad Marlow have said? What would Cicely Seymour have thought? Perhaps she would have approved. She has more sympathy, more insight than the others — and what a charming profile! And those deep blue eyes under those long thick lashes; they are eves which have mind in them as well as youth and smiles and innocence; they are eyes which will be still beautiful when she is seventy and her hair is white under a lace mob-cap or a black satin hood. What colour are Annie’s eyes? They are round and small, of no particular colour, I think; a reddish grey. Dear good little girl, it was not for her beauty that I selected her.”
Critchett opens the door at that moment, and breaks in on his reflections.
“Mr. Fanshawe, sir.”
A gentleman of no definite age, with a shrewd countenance and a significant smile, crosses the room with outstretched hand.
“My dear Wilfrid, they tell me you are in a wax about the exceptions I took to your article. I am extremely sorry to touch any single line of yours, but B.P. must be considered, you know. You are miles too advanced for this inviolate isle; she is still shuddering at the fright which Guy Fawkes gave her.”
Bertram replies stiffly:— “I have certainly no affinity to Guy Fawkes, who was a religious person and a strict monarchist. As for the essay, pray do not trouble yourself; I shall publish it in the Age to Come.”
“Oh, that’s a pity; that will be practically putting it into the waste-paper basket; excuse me saying so, but you know the circulation of the Age to Come is at present — is — well — limited.”
“We certainly do not chronicle scandals of the hunting-field, and devote columns to prophesying the shape of next year’s bonnets, as the Torch does!”
“That shows you don’t understand your public, or don’t want to secure one. Extreme opinions, my dear boy, can only be got down the throats of the world in a weekly journal by being adroitly sandwiched between the caviare of calumny and the butter of fashion. People hate to be made to think, my dear boy. The Age to Come gives ’em nothing but thinking; and damned tough thinking too. You write with uncommon power, but you are too wholesale, too subversive; you scare people so awfully that they stop their ears to your truths. That is not the way to secure a hearing.”
“I am consistent.”
“Oh, Lord! Never be consistent. There’s nothing so unpopular in life.”
“I despise popularity.”
“You despise bread and butter. I believe you lose twenty pound a month by your Age to Coyne?”
“To speak more correctly,” replies Bertram, bitterly, “it gets me into debt to that amount!”
“Heaven and earth! Why don’t you drop it?”
“It is a matter of principle.”
“Principle which will land you in Queer Street. Now, my dear Wilfrid, no man thinks more things bosh than I do, or takes more pleasure in saying so, but I combine pleasure with business; I say my say in such a way that it brings me in eighty per cent.” Bertram looks at him derisively.
“I have always known that your intellect was only equalled by your venality!”
Fanshawe laughs good-humouredly.
“That is neat. That is soothing. It is not difficult to understand that you are not considered a clubbable man! However, as you credit me with intellect, I don’t mind your denying me morality. But seriously, my dear friend, you are much too violent, too uncompromising for success in journalism. Who tries to prove too much fails to prove anything, and when you bend your bow too violently it snaps and speeds no arrow. I confess that I (who am as revolutionary as most people and always disposed to agree with you) do frequently get up from the perusal of one of your articles with the unwilling conviction that it is best to let the old order of things alone. Now, that is certainly not the condition of mind which you wish to produce in your readers.
Bertram is silent. After a pause he says:
“What do you advocate, then? A cautious trimming?”
“Trimming was the name which the eighteenth-century politician gave to what we now call opportunism. All sagacious men are not opportunists, but all sagacious men endeavour to create supporters, not antagonists. Now, all violent assertion raises opposition, for human nature is cantankerous and contradictory.”
Critchett enters and hands a card on a salver. “If you please, sir, the gentleman’s waiting below; says he sent you a letter two days ago; gentleman’s head of the firm of Folliott and Hake, sir.”
Bertram looks vaguely about the room. “There are a good many letters unopened. I wonder which it is?”
Fanshawe catches up a pile of letters from a writing-table and sorts them: “Here’s one with ‘Folliott and Hake’ on the seal; how unpractical you are, dear boy!”
Bertram takes the letter and looks at it without curiosity. “It is sure to be something unpleasant. I never heard of Folliott and Hake.”
Fanshawe laughs. “I have; many a time. They have been solicitors in more than one libel case, of which the Torch was defendant. Come, open the letter. See what it says.” Bertram opens and reads it: “Only that they have a matter of great importance to communicate to me. I really have no idea what it can be. People think so many things important which are of infinitesimal insignificance.”
“You will best correct your ignorance by allowing Mr. Folliott to enter and explain himself.”
“I am so opposed to all lawyers on principle.”
“So am I, as I am opposed to small-pox, or bicycle riders, or yellow fogs; but they are not to be avoided in this life, and it is neither polite or politic to keep these highly respectable solicitors waiting like sweeps. Critchett, beg Mr. Folliott to enter. I will leave you, Bertram.”
“No, no; for goodness’ sake stay. I may want some advice.”
“You not unfrequently do. But you never follow it when given. Pray be civil.”
A few moments later Mr. Folliott enters; a bland, white-haired, portly old gentleman, a little ruffled at having been left so long at the foot of the stairs.
“I beg your pardon, Mr. — Mr. — Folliott,” says Bertram, looking at the letter. “I had, in fact, not opened this note of yours. It is a bad habit I have of leaving letters unread.”
“It was Sheridan’s, sir,” says the lawyer, pointedly. “It did not bring him good fortune.” He catches sight of Fanshawe, and his amiable countenance assumes the startled and displeased expression of a cat’s face, when the cat suddenly perceives a bull terrier.
“I naturally awaited you, Mr. Bertram, or a communication from you, all the day,” he says, in an affronted tone. “Hearing nothing I thought it best to come myself. You are perhaps unaware that the Prince of Viana is dead.”
“I never heard of the individual,” says Bertram. “Who was he?”
“He was your first cousin. You may know him better as the son of Mr. Horace Errington.”
“Oh! The son of my mother’s brother? We never knew him. There was a family feud.”
“But you will remember to have heard that his father made great wealth in the Abruzzi through copper mines, was nationalised, and was ennobled by Victor Emmanuel. The family feud was chiefly on account of his connection with commerce and his change of country.”
“Precisely.”
“I regret to inform you that your cousin is dead, at thirty-three years of age, killed by a wild boar when hunting in the Pontine marshes; he has left you, Mr. Bertram, his sole and exclusive heir.”
Bertram stares at him.
“What! you must be joking, Mr. Folliott!”
The old gentleman takes off his gold spectacles and puts them on again in extreme irritation.
“I am not in the habit of joking, sir, either in business or outside it. We were solicitors to his father and to himself. We drew up this will five years ago. You are inheritor
of an immense fortune, Mr. Bertram.”
Bertram stands staring at him, then turns to Fanshawe. “Do you hear? Is it true? Surely, no one could insult me so greatly, even in jest?”
“I really do not understand,” says the lawyer, bewildered. “What insult can there be? I am speaking, sir, in most sober earnest.”
“Shall I fan you, Wilfrid? or send for some sal volatile?” says Fanshawe, derisively. “Don’t be an ass,” he adds in a whisper. “This sensible old fellow will think it his duty to shut you up in a private madhouse, if you talk like that. Pull yourself together, and answer him sensibly.”
Mr. Folliott surveys the speaker as a timid person may look at a lion riding on a velocipede in a circus-ring.
“If Mr. Bertram would place me in communication with his solicitor matters would be facilitated,” he murmurs. —
“I have no solicitors,” replies Bertram. “If you will pardon what may seem an offensive opinion, I regard all men of law as poisonous parasites growing on the rotten trunk of a society which has the axe of retribution laid at its roots.”
Mr. Folliott is too astonished to be offended: “I fail to follow you, sir, but I have no doubt you mean something very profound. Your cousin did not, I imagine, read your articles in the reviews, but I have read one or two of them. However, notwithstanding your extraordinary opinions, you are a man of birth and breeding, and must, in a measure, be a man of the world, sir. You must know that you must allow me to fulfil my office. This will has to be proved and probate taken out.”
“Where is the necessity?”
“Be so good as not to play with me. You must accept the inheritance or decline it. In event of your refusal, of your formal and final refusal, the whole of this property is to go to the testator’s old college at Oxford — Magdalen College.”
“Ah! that is a consolation.”
“Why so, sir?”
“Because, although I have no sympathy with the modern movements at Oxford, and consider that she has fallen away from her original high mission, yet she is, and always will be, a seat of learning; and the Humanities will never wholly be banished from her halls.”