Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “But I don’t understand,” Paul Ravenel stammered. “You were cashiered both of you, you and my father?”

  “Both of us.”

  “Yet I saw you coming from a dinner at the Guildhall, with your medals upon your breast. You are here in your own home, wearing your rank! How can that be, sir?”

  Colonel Vanderfelt replied with a curious accent of apology to his young guest.

  “I was lucky. I had served in India longer than your father. I had been more interested; and dialects came to me easily. More than once I had spent my leave living in the Bazaars, and as far north as Leh. Therefore it wasn’t so difficult for me. I disappeared. I’m a dark man naturally. I grew a beard. I joined a battalion of irregular levies. I served for three years in it on the frontier.”

  “Did no one guess who you were?”

  “I think one or two suspected and — winked. They were busy years you see. A good deal was going on all this time and men who knew anything about soldiering were valuable. Of course they were pretty rough, hard years for any one with delicate tastes, but there was so much to be perhaps regained,” and Colonel Vanderfelt pulled himself up quickly. “Well, after three years I was wounded rather badly. As you see I limp to this day. It looked then as if the game was up altogether and I was going out. So I sent a message in my own name to an officer on the border whom I had known. The Governor of Quetta came up himself to see me in hospital and the end of it was that my sentence was annulled. There, my boy, that’s the whole story.”

  Colonel Vanderfelt rose from his chair and limping over to the window looked out upon that quiet garden, which he had lost, and after such unlovely years won back again. They were years of which he could never think even now without a shiver of disgust and a cold fear lest by some impossibility they should come again. None indeed had ever known the full measure of their abasement and squalor and degradation. Even with the great prize continually held in view, they had been hardly endurable. The chance of winning it had been the chance of a raft to a man drowning in the Pacific. The voice of Paul Ravenel who was still seated at the table broke in upon him.

  “And that’s the whole story, sir?”

  “Yes, Paul.”

  Paul shook his head.

  “The whole story, sir, except that what you did — my father didn’t. Therefore he lived and died an outcast,” and the young man’s voice died away in a whisper.

  Colonel Vanderfelt turned back to him and laid his hand upon Paul’s shoulder and shook it in a gentle sympathy.

  “There’s another question I would like to have answered,” said Paul. He was very pale, but his voice was firm again.

  “Yes?”

  “The disgrace, I suppose, killed my mother?”

  “I have no right to say that.”

  “The truth, sir, please!” and the appeal came so clearly from a man in the extremity of torture, that Colonel Vanderfelt could not but answer it.

  “It did. She was in India when this shameful business happened. She came home and died.”

  In a few moments Paul began to laugh. The laughter was pitched in a low key and horrible to hear; and there was such a flame of agony burning in the boy’s eyes and so dreadful a grin upon his white face that Colonel Vanderfelt feared for his reason.

  “Steady, Paul, steady!” he said gently.

  “I was thinking of the fine myth by which I explained everything to the honour of the family,” Paul cried in a bitter voice. “Our seclusion, the antagonism between my father and me, the change of name — it was all due to a morbid grief at the loss of a wife too deeply loved. That’s what I believed, sir,” he said wildly, but Colonel Vanderfelt had already learned of these delusions from Mr. Ferguson. “And shame’s the explanation. Disgrace is the explanation. He killed my mother with it and now the son too must hide!”

  “No,” said Colonel Vanderfelt with decision. “There’s a good way out of this tangle for you, a way by which you may still reach all you have set your heart on — your career, your name and an honoured place amongst your own people.”

  Paul lifted incredulous eyes to the other man’s face.

  “Yes,” insisted the older man. “You don’t believe me. You young fellows see only the worst and the best, and if the best doesn’t tumble into your hands, you are sure at once that there’s nothing for you but the worst. Just listen to me!”

  Paul took hold upon himself. He was ashamed already of his outburst.

  “You are very kind, sir,” he said, and some appreciation of the goodwill which the older man had shown to him, in baring his own wounds, and drawing out into the light again old humiliations and guilt long since atoned, pierced even through the youth’s sharp consciousness of his own miseries. He rose up from his chair. He was in command of his emotions now, his voice was steady.

  “I have been thinking too much of myself and the distress into which this revelation has plunged me,” he said, “and too little of your great consideration and kindness. What you have told me, you cannot have said without pain and a good deal of reluctance. I am very grateful. Indeed I wonder why you ever received me here at all.”

  “You would have found out the truth without my help.”

  “That’s what I mean,” said Paul. “I should have found it out through an enquiry agent, and the news would have been ten times more hideous coming in that way rather than broken gently here. Whilst on the other hand you would have spared yourself.”

  “That’s all right,” Colonel Vanderfelt answered uncomfortably, and to himself he added: “Yes, old Ferguson wrote the truth. That boy’s clean and a gentleman.” He pressed Paul down into his chair again.

  “Come! Take a glass of this old brandy first — it’s not so bad — and then we’ll talk your prospects over like the men of the world we both are — eh? Neither making light of serious things nor exaggerating them until we make endeavour useless.”

  He fetched to the table a couple of big goblets mounted on thin stems within which delicate spirals had been blown, and poured a liqueur of his best brandy into each.

  “I have an idea, Paul. It has been growing all the time we have been talking together. Let’s see if it means anything to you.”

  He held his goblet to his nose and smelt the brandy. “Pretty good, this! Try it, Paul. There’s not a cough nor a splutter in it. Well, now,” he went on when Paul had taken his advice, “in the first place, you are eighteen.”

  “Yes,” said Paul.

  “And a man of means?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “You have property in Casablanca, in Morocco?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Paul, wondering whither all these questions were to lead.

  “And you lived there for some years?”

  “Yes. Before I went to school in France and my father built his house in Aguilas.”

  “You know Arabic, then?”

  “The Moorish dialect, yes.”

  “And by nationality you are French?”

  “Yes,” answered Paul reluctantly.

  “Good,” said the Colonel, warming to his theme. “Now listen to me. The French must move in Morocco, as we moved in India, as we moved in Egypt. It isn’t a question of policies or persons. It’s the question of the destiny of a great nation. The instinct of life and self-preservation in a great nation which sooner or later breaks all policies and persons that stand in the way. There’ll be the timid ones who’ll say no! And there’ll be the intriguers who’ll treat the question as a pawn to be moved in their own interest. But in the end they won’t matter.” Colonel Vanderfelt had a complete and not very knowledgeable contempt for politics and politicians like most of his calling until they have joined the ranks of the politicians themselves.

  “Morocco can’t remain as it is — a vast country with a miserable population, misgoverned if governed at all, with a virgin soil the richest in the world, and within a few miles of Europe. Somebody’s got to go in and sort it up. And that some one’s got to be France, for she can’t affor
d a possible enemy on her Algerian frontier. Yes, but there’ll be trouble before she succeeds in her destiny, trouble and — opportunity.” The Colonel paused to let that word sink into Paul’s mind. “Why not be one of those who’ll seize it? They are great soldiers, the French. Join them, since that’s your way of life. Go through the schools, get your commission in France and then strive heart and soul to get service in the country whose language you know, the country of opportunity. Then, in God’s good time, if you still so wish it, come back here, resume your own name, rejoin your own race!”

  Paul Ravenel, from his solitary dreaming life and his age, was inclined to be impressed by thoughts of sacrifice and expiation and atonement. He was therefore already half persuaded by Colonel Vanderfelt’s advice. It would be exile, as he had come to think, but it would also be a cleansing of his name, an expiation of his father’s crime. And after all, when he looked at the man who gave him this advice, and remembered what he had endured with a hope so much more infinitesimal, the course proposed to him seemed fortunate and light.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I should like to think over your idea.”

  Colonel Vanderfelt was pleased that there had been no flighty hysterical acceptance, no assumption that the goal was as good as reached.

  “Yes, take your time!”

  Colonel Vanderfelt rose and, removing the shades, blew out the candles upon the dining-table.

  “I don’t know what you would like to do?” he said, turning to the lad. “You will follow your own wish, of course. And if you would rather go straight now to your room, why, we shall all understand.”

  “Thank you, but I should prefer to join the ladies with you.”

  Colonel Vanderfelt smiled very pleasantly. The anticipation of Paul’s visit had caused him a sleepless night or two and not a little pain. How much should he tell? The question had been troubling him, so that he had more than once sat down to write to Mr. Ferguson that he would not receive the boy at all. He was very glad now that he had, and that he had kept nothing back.

  “Come, then,” he said.

  In the drawing room Phyllis Vanderfelt sang to that little company some songs of old Herrick in a small, very sweet, clear voice. Paul sat near the long, open window. The music, the homely friendliness within the room, and the quiet garden over which slept so restful a peace were all new to him and wrought upon him till he felt the tears rising to his eyes. Phyllis’ hands were taken from the keys and lay idle in her lap. In the high trees of the Park upon the far side of the road the owls were calling and the cuckoo still repeated his two notes from the tree beyond the field. Paul rose suddenly to his feet.

  “That throaty old cuckoo means to make a night of it,” he said with a laugh which was meant to hide the break in his voice and did not succeed. He stepped over the threshold and was out of sight.

  “Let him be!” said Colonel Vanderfelt. And a little later, when Phyllis had taken herself off to bed: “I liked him very much. The right temper — that’s the phrase old Ferguson used. He’ll do well, Milly — you’ll see. We shall see him home here one day carrying his sheaves,” and as his wife remained silent he looked at her anxiously. “Don’t you agree with me?”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Vanderfelt answered slowly. “I hope so with all my heart. But — didn’t you notice his looks and a sort of grace he has?”

  “Well?” asked the Colonel.

  “Well, we have left out one consideration altogether. What part are women going to play in his life? A large one. Tom, I have been watching Phyllis to-night. A day or so more, and we should have an aching heart in this house.”

  “Yes, I see,” returned Colonel Vanderfelt. “Women do upset things, don’t they?”

  “Or get upset,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt. “And sometimes both.”

  CHAPTER IV

  Betwixt and Between

  PAUL RAVENEL LEFT Colonel Vanderfelt’s house of King’s Corner on the next morning in time to catch an early train to London. His friends gathered in the drive to wave him a good-bye as he drove away.

  “You’ll write to us, won’t you?” said Mrs. Vanderfelt.

  “And there’s a room here whenever you have an evening to spare,” added the Colonel.

  Paul had quite captured the hearts of the small household and they were hardly less concerned for his future and his success than they would have been had he been their own son.

  Paul had given no hint at the breakfast table of his plans, if indeed he had yet formed any, nor did his friends press him with any question. But they waited anxiously for letters and in time one came with the postmark of St. Germain. Paul had passed into St. Cyr. Others followed with lively enough accounts of his surroundings and companions. Here and there the name of a friend was mentioned, Gerard de Montignac, Paul’s senior by a year, for instance, who cropped up more often than any one else.

  They heard later that he had passed out with honours and was now a sub-lieutenant in the 174th Regiment, stationed at Marseilles; then a couple of years later, just at the time when Phyllis was married, that he had been seconded to the 2nd Tirailleurs and was on active service amongst the Beni-Snassen in Algeria. He escaped from that campaign without any hurt and wrote a little account of it to his friends at King’s Corner, with some shrewd pictures of his commanders and brother officers. But the same reticence overspread the pages. Mrs. Vanderfelt was at a loss to recapture out of them a picture of the lad who had stayed one night with them and borne so gallantly the destruction of his boyish illusions. The letters, to her thinking, might have been written by an automaton with a brain.

  A few months afterwards Colonel Vanderfelt slammed down his newspaper on the breakfast table.

  “That’s where Paul ought to be. I told him! You can’t blame me! I told him!”

  The long-expected trouble in Morocco was coming to a head. The extravagance and incapacity of the Sultan Abd-el-Aziz; the concession of the Customs to the French; the jealousies of powerful kaids; and the queer admixture of contempt and fear with which the tribes watched the encroachments of Europeans; all these elements were setting the country on fire. Already there were rumours of disorder in the wealthy coast town of Casablanca.

  “That’s where Paul ought to be,” cried Colonel Vanderfelt angrily. But his anger was appeased in a couple of days. For he received a letter from Paul with the postmark of Oran, written on shipboard. He and his battalion were on their way to Casablanca.

  They arrived after the bombardment and massacres, and served under General D’Amade throughout the campaigns of the Chaiouïa. Paul was wounded in the thigh during the attack upon Settat but was able to rejoin his battalion in a month. He was now a senior Lieutenant and his captain being killed in the fight at McKoun, he commanded his company until the district was finally pacified by the victory over the great kaid and Marabout, Bou Nuallah. Paul had done well; he was given the medaille and at the age of twenty-six was sure that his temporary rank would be confirmed. He wrote warmly of those days to his friends. There was a note of confidence and elation which Mrs. Vanderfelt had not remarked before, and the letter ended with a short but earnest expression of gratitude to his friends for the help they had given him eight years before.

  For the next two years, then, the household at King’s Corner read only of the routine of a great camp, described with a lively spirit and an interest in the little trifles of his profession, which was a clear proof to them all that Paul had seen straight and clearly when he had declared: “There’s no other profession for me.” Thereafter came news which thrilled his audience.

  “I am transferred to the General Staff,” Paul wrote, “and am leaving here on special service. You must not expect to hear from me for a long while.”

  Neither Colonel Vanderfelt nor his wife had quite realised how they had counted on Paul’s letters, or what a fresh, lively interest they brought into their quiet lives, until this warning reached them.

  “Of course we can’t expect to hear,” said Colonel Vanderfelt irr
itably, “Paul’s probably on very important service. Very often a postmark’s enough to give a clue. But you women don’t understand these things.”

  Phyllis, the married daughter, and Mrs. Vanderfelt were the women to whom this rebuke was addressed, and neither of them had said a word to provoke it.

  “No doubt, dear,” Mrs. Vanderfelt replied meekly, with a private smile for the daughter. “We shall hear in due time.”

  But the weeks ran into months, the months into a year, and still no letter came. At one moment they wondered whether new associations had not obliterated from Paul’s mind his former aspirations: at another, whether he still lived. Colonel Vanderfelt ran across Mr. Ferguson towards the end of the year outside his club in Piccadilly and made enquiries.

  “Did you ever hear of that boy, Paul Ravenel, again?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes, he’s a rich man now and I have acted for him,” returned Mr. Ferguson. “Since the French occupation, land in and around Casablanca has gone up to fifty times its former value. Ravenel has realised some of it. I have bought the freehold of his father’s house close to you and let it for seven years and invested a comfortable sum for him in British securities. So I gather that he means to come back in a little while.”

  Colonel Vanderfelt was relieved upon one score, but it was only to have his anxiety increased upon the other.