Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “Why should you trouble?” said Harry Rames.

  “It makes a little difference to me,” said Cynthia. “Perhaps more than a little.”

  For old Daventry’s last words weighed upon her. He had bidden her in troubles and difficulties to seek advice from Isaac Benoliel. He had thought much of his wisdom. She had herself accepted it as a thing beyond question, and a timely help. Now, she began to ask herself, was his wisdom, if it was born of the East and tempered by the instincts of his race, fit for service in her generation and for her people? She pondered the question during the next two days, and leaned more and more to Sir James Burrell’s way of thinking from a trivial reason; the inside of Culver agreed so completely with its exterior. Its flamboyancy set the eyes aching. Its wall papers were indigestibly rich with colored flowers, and never was there a blue so vividly blue as the blue of his velvet curtains and triple-pile carpets. It is true that there were treasures of art in Culver, glowing pictures of the early Flemish school, with their crowds of figures, each one a finished miniature, and behind the crowds the clear sky and translucent air; there were marvels of jade, and glorious little statues of silver and marble, but their delicate beauty was spoilt and lost in the riot of gorgeousness which framed them.

  One homely place alone there was in that building. The great hall, all colonnades and galleries, occupied the centre of the house. But on each side of the wide chimney, where of an evening, even in the summer, a fire usually burned, a great screen was drawn; and these screens enclosed a space before the fire set about with comfortable chairs, a sofa or two, and little mahogany tables, and made of it a place of comfort. In this space on the Sunday night Cynthia came to grips with Isaac Benoliel, and understood at last his life, and something of his philosophy.

  It was eleven o’clock, or a little later. The ladies were retiring for the night. Cynthia herself had her foot upon the lowest step of the stair, and was thinking that after all she was to be spared an argument, when Mr. Benoliel came from the corridor of the smoking-room where he had left the men.

  “Will you give me a few minutes, Cynthia?” he asked, and she turned at once and walked to the fire. She stood with a foot upon the rail of the hearth and a hand upon the mantel-shelf, quiet but mutinous. Mr. Benoliel followed her and sat down in a straight-backed arm-chair, facing the fire, and a little way behind her.

  “You have not yet announced your engagement, Cynthia?” he began.

  “No.”

  “Yet Whitsuntide is very close. Perhaps you have thought better of it?”

  “No.”

  Mr. Benoliel looked at her as she stood, aggressively showing him her back, and smiled at her, with some amusement, a great deal of affection, and a little pity.

  “Of course,” he said, “I have not much right to interfere, and yet I should like you to hear, Cynthia, what I have to say. Otherwise I shall fail your father.”

  Cynthia turned about at once, and her manner toward him changed with her movement. The appeal of his voice and words had its effect upon her, and not that alone. Mr. Benoliel was so neat and supple, he sat with so upright a figure in his chair, his hair was so black and sleek and thick that she was seldom really conscious of his age. But at times, as now, when by chance she looked straight into his eyes and noticed their fatigue and their patience, and how the light had quite gone out of them, it came upon her almost as a shock that this was an old, old man; and because she was surprised she exaggerated his age, and gave to him in return for his pity the cruel pity of youth. She was in the mood almost to admit his right to interfere. But her gift of silence and the weariness which had become instinctive checked her. She moved forward to him with a gracious deference — that was all — and said, standing in front of him:

  “I am glad of course to hear anything you have to say, Mr. Benoliel. You disapprove of my marriage.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you wanted me married.”

  “To the right person.”

  “Lord Helmsdale,” said Cynthia, with a little pout of disdain.

  “Youth should marry youth,” returned Mr. Benoliel.

  He looked the girl over from head to foot. She stood in front of him in her delicate frock of soft white satin and lace, long-limbed and slender, with the gloss of youth upon the heavy curls of her fair hair, and the rose of youth on her cheeks, and the sheen of youth upon her white and pretty shoulders. She was the color of a flower, and had the freshness of a flower upon a morning of dew. From the tip of her slim satin slipper to the ribbon in her hair, she was dressed with a daintiness which set her beauty proudly off. To Mr. Benoliel she was radiant and wonderful with youth.

  “Yes,” he repeated, “youth should marry youth, Cynthia, especially when it is such rare youth as yours.”

  Cynthia was pleased. She knew a compliment when she heard it.

  “You have shifted your ground, Mr. Benoliel,” she said, smiling down at him.

  “No,” he answered.

  “It was social position, which you wanted me to marry in Lord Helmsdale.”

  “That, too. Yes. I don’t make light of it. I am old enough not to blow a trumpet round the walls of Jericho in these days,” he said. “But I did not tell you all my thought. I am an old man, and there are certain things I am shy of talking about. I am like you in that, Cynthia, eh? We neither of us wear our hearts upon our sleeves or are fond of talking sentiment. But I am compelled to to-night. I think the most beautiful thing in the world is a couple of young lovers facing all the unknown future, hand in hand, high of hope and courage, and serious with the uplifting seriousness of love. Now you are not in love, Cynthia, and he’s not young. So, from my point of view, on both sides this marriage falls short of the marriage which should be.”

  “Captain Rames is not old,” replied Cynthia. She omitted all reference to the point in which she herself failed according to Benoliel’s standard. Isaac Benoliel noticed her admission, and, though he made no comment, he became still more determined to prevent the marriage if by any means he could. He had drawn his bow at a venture. With that touch of charlatanism which made him delight in posing as omniscient, he had stated as a fact what he only suspected. But she would have denied the suggestion, and indignantly, had it been false. He was sure now that she did not care for Harry Rames as a young woman should care for the man she is to marry. Moreover there had been a note of involuntary regret in Cynthia’s voice as she had answered him. It seemed that she too agreed with him as to what should have been, and grieved that it was not to be.

  “No,” he conceded, “Captain Rames is not old. But neither is he young. He is forty, or thereabouts. He has lived by eighteen years longer than you have. And so — I will tell you the truth, Cynthia” — and he leaned forward with his hands upon his knees and his eyes shrewdly watching her face— “and so I am afraid. Yes, I look forward into your future, and I am afraid.”

  He saw Cynthia wince. So often had she spoken just such words to herself. Ever since she had crouched by the door in the dark room at the estancia, fear had walked at her heels with its shadow thrown upon the road beyond her feet. Was it to lie in front of her all her life? Here was her chosen adviser thinking her thoughts. She was not to be comforted by Sir James Burrell’s reasonings. Mr. Benoliel might be altogether compact of the Orient. None the less his words knocked shrewdly at her heart. She sank down at the end of a sofa close at Mr. Benoliel’s side, her face all troubled and discouraged.

  “But I accepted Harry so that I might be safe,” she cried tremulously, “so that I might no longer be afraid,” and then sat with her cheeks afire, conscious that she had betrayed herself.

  “I mean—” she corrected herself hastily.

  “Just what you said, Cynthia,” rejoined Mr. Benoliel. Once more he had shot his arrow at a venture and reached the mark. He had now for the first time the key to her. Much was explained to him. But he spoke as though the explanation had long been known to him.

  “Yes, ever since I have known you, y
ou have lived in fear, Cynthia,” he said.

  Cynthia did not again deny the truth. She found a better argument in the recollection of old Mr. Daventry’s death-bed.

  “But there was no reason for the fear,” she cried. “It was groundless. I tortured myself for nothing. It was all due to a foolish mistake.” She hesitated, choosing her words so that they might carry some sort of conviction and yet reveal nothing. “The mistake arose because — people — were silent — and they were silent because they wished to spare, and thought that knowledge would hurt. It was the silence which hurt.”

  “This time,” said Mr. Benoliel, “silence shall not do harm. Nor shall a thought to spare. I will be frank with you as to why I am afraid, if you will listen to me. I shall have to tell you a little about myself. I shall not spare myself.”

  He spoke with reluctance. For he was reticent about himself. Cynthia realized suddenly how very little she knew of him, though she probably knew him more intimately than any one else, except the separated wife in Eaton Square. He had kept his secrets better than she had kept hers. Now he was going to reveal himself, and certainly to open old wounds for her sake.

  “Thank you,” she said gently. “I shall know of what you are afraid, of something perhaps which I may now be able to avert. But I ought to tell you at once, that nothing which you say can change me.”

  CHAPTER XXI

  MR. BENOLIEL’S WARNING

  MR. BENOLIEL, HOWEVER, persisted.

  “I daren’t be silent, Cynthia. There are just three great crises — some would say three great catastrophes — birth, marriage, and death. The first and the last happen. They are outside our control. But about the middle one we do ourselves have a word to say; we can direct it. And it’s the most important of them all. For it means the beginning of life for others, and the making or undoing of our own. Therefore you can’t afford to trust to luck, Cynthia.”

  “I am not trusting to luck at all,” said Cynthia confidently.

  “Aren’t you?” asked Mr. Benoliel. “You are proposing to marry a man, nineteen years of whose life — whose man’s life — if you understand me, you have had no share in, no influence upon, and have now no real knowledge of. I am not suggesting that the conventional other woman is somewhere in the background, waiting to appear at the marriage ceremony with a baby in her arms,” he continued with a smile. “But during those nineteen years how many things must have happened to him, trials and miseries and elations, to modify and mould his character? And since you are ignorant of the things which happened to him, how can you know the man?”

  “Yet I think I do know him,” said Cynthia, and her confidence increased. She could meet Mr. Benoliel on this battle-ground. “And without laying claim of any particular insight. For he has always been careful that I should know him. From the very first day of our acquaintanceship he has spoken and acted quite deliberately in order that I might have no illusions about him. He has wanted me to know him just as clearly as he knows himself.”

  Mr. Benoliel shrugged his shoulders.

  “Does he know himself?” he asked.

  “Better than most men,” said Cynthia. “He has set out to use himself as a machine and he has studied the machine unceasingly, its limits and its capacities, so that he might use it to its fullest power.” She recalled Harry Rames’s foresight, the careful laying of his plans, the queer modesty which underlay his ambition to excel. She turned triumphantly to Mr. Benoliel. “Oh, yes, he knows himself a good deal better than youth can know itself.”

  “Ah!” said Mr. Benoliel, raising a warning finger. “I was waiting for that. I admit that youth doesn’t know itself. But then it’s not so important that it should. There’s not, after all, as yet, so very much to know. But take it this way. Suppose that you and Captain Rames were both young and of an age! Suppose that he had the nineteen years which separate you in front of him instead of behind him!”

  “Well?” said Cynthia.

  “Why, then, when he reached forty, you, the wife, would know him better than he would know himself. A wife always does, if she lives in sympathy with her husband. I am presuming that. You would know him a good deal better than he knows himself now. The solitary nineteen years, of which now I dread the consequences, you would have shared. That’s the point. And you wouldn’t be running the danger you are running now.”

  “What danger?” asked Cynthia impatiently. “Of what are you afraid?”

  “I am afraid of the latent things,” Mr. Benoliel answered. “I am afraid of the seeds which may have been sown in him during these nineteen years, and of which the plant has not yet shown. I am afraid of latent desires, fancies, ambitions, latent cravings of which he is not yet aware, and which may some day come to life with overwhelming strength. Haven’t you seen men suddenly change for no apparent reason to the ordinary observer, drop from all their established habits, begin again upon another plane? I have, and that’s the change I am afraid of now. For it’s one you would be powerless to avert, since you would not even suspect it until it had actually begun.”

  He turned toward Cynthia, and with a smile upon his face summed up his argument.

  “Make no mistake, Cynthia. I am not making light of Captain Rames. In a way my fears are an actual tribute to the man. But I am afraid that out of a life so busy, and so keen as his has been, so fraught with incidents, so varied, something may suddenly seize him and catch him back and hold him; some craving, some ambition in which you will have no share, and which will separate you forever.”

  He spoke with so much earnestness that Cynthia was impressed against her will. She was sure that he was speaking with knowledge of a kindred case. Certain words he had dropped made her certain that the kindred case was his own.

  “But supposing that such a change came,” she said with hesitation, “must it separate?”

  “No,” said Mr. Benoliel gently, “not if both bring to the marriage love. Then I don’t think it need.” He glanced at her swiftly, and said with a sudden sharp note in his voice: “But what if the marriage be only a bargain, Cynthia? What then?” and the blood rushed into the girl’s face as he looked at her.

  “I’ll tell you,” he cried. His voice rose and a kind of sombre passion rang in it. “One party doesn’t keep the bargain, or keeps it half-heartedly, as an irksome thing, and day by day the separation grows more complete, until you are living with your enemy or living quite alone.”

  His voice dropped again to a whisper on the last words. He finished and sat lost wistfully in his own recollections, and forgetful of Cynthia at his side. After a little while his lips moved, and, as an old man will, he spoke a word or two to himself. Cynthia’s ears caught the words.

  “It was my fault, and it couldn’t be helped,” he said, and so again fell into a long silence, with his eyes upon the coals of the fire. At length Cynthia touched him gently upon the sleeve.

  “I should like — the instance,” she said timidly.

  Isaac Benoliel roused himself with a start.

  “Yes. I mean to give it you.”

  “But I have no right to it,” Cynthia insisted. “You must remember that.”

  Benoliel shook his head and smiled.

  “You are a young girl starting out on life. You have every right to it, Cynthia.”

  “I mean that it cannot change me,” she said. “I would like to hear it — yes. But it is only that I may understand and be ready. And if you think that reason insufficient, don’t tell me. I shall thank you, all the same, for offering to tell me.”

  “You mustn’t take the warning literally,” he said. “I am of the East, you know. So is my story”; and a sudden relief swept over Cynthia. He was not of her people, his stand-point would not be hers, his warning might not apply to her. She thought of Sir James Burrell’s words. Discouragement sat more lightly upon her than it had done during the last hour. There were certain curious phases in Mr. Benoliel’s life which were not understood — sudden disappearances, for instance, during which no one me
t him to bring back to London the place of his abode. He was recognized as a man apart. Yes, he was of the Orient, and he might have no message for her ears.

  “It was my race which caught me back,” Benoliel began, and Cynthia’s courage increased. But his story was only just begun.

  CHAPTER XXII

  AND AN INSTANCE TO ENFORCE IT

  “YOU KNEW, I suppose, that I was married?”

  “Yes,” said Cynthia.

  “And that my wife lives?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Benoliel nodded and shifted in his chair.

  “You have also very possibly heard a good many speculations about my origin?”

  “A good many,” said Cynthia.

  “Well, here’s the truth. I am a Barbary Jew. I come out of Morocco, the one country where you’ll find the East to-day. Already in Tangier, the city given over to the foreigner, you will come across some traces of it. But ride for a few hours out of Tangier, straight to the south, pay your dues and cross the Red Hill, and you’ll have both feet planted in the East, and may breathe in some of its enchantment. Go forward for another day or so, and you may pass perhaps some tall Arab, striding through the crowd outside El Ksar, carrying a stick stretched across his shoulder-blades. He’ll speak to no one, stop for nothing, and all will make way for him. That’s the Imperial Courier, on his way to the coast from Fez. He’ll not sleep upon the way, and he’ll take no food lest he should sleep. He’ll be in Tangier three days after he has left Fez. He’s the penny post. Ride on still further, cross the Sebou, travel over a vast plain by a track beaten by the feet of men and animals, yet strangely enough a track which never runs straight, though the plain is bare, but winds and turns, and winds again over the face of the country.” Mr. Benoliel’s eyes were fixed upon the fire; he spoke, lingering upon his words. He had grown forgetful of the purpose which drove him to reveal himself. Another and a strange aspect of him was presented suddenly to Cynthia. The dilettante and the exquisite had vanished. He spoke with a kind of yearning in his voice. His thoughts had drifted out through the doorway of his abominable villa. He was walking in the starshine over the wide empty plain of the Sebou, steeped in the enchantment of which he had spoken. Dimly she foresaw whither he was leading her.