E Phillips Oppenheim

by The Wicked Marquis

  Borden nodded. He relaxed his speed a little and glanced towards his companion.

  "You know what our friend said in that Russian manuscript I lent you," he reminded her: "'The primitive laws are for the primitive world.'"

  "But what do we learn, Jim?" she asked him tremulously. "What is its value? Is it sophistry or knowledge? I lived in that little cottage once. I have smiled at the memory of those days so often. I did homely tasks and dreamed of books and learning. To me it seems, although my fingers are bleeding, that I have climbed. And to him—and he looked just like something out of the Bible, Jim—I am nothing more—"

  "Don't," he interrupted. "He is of his world and you of yours. You can't work out the sum you are trying to solve, there isn't any common denominator."

  "I don't know," she answered, a little pitifully. "There was a single second, as I saw him sitting there with his Bible on his knee and remembered that he was a clean, well-living, honest man, when my heart began to shake. I remembered that he was my father. It seems to me that it is all wrong that there should be any difference between us. I suddenly felt that a brain really didn't count for anything, after all, that all the culture in the world wasn't so beautiful as a single right feeling."

  He slackened again the speed of the car. As far as they could see was a great open space of moorland, with flaming bushes of yellow gorse, little clumps of early heather, and, in the distance, a streak of blue from the undergrowth of a long belt of firs. She looked about her for a moment and closed her eyes.

  "There," he said, "is one of the simplest phases of beauty, the world has ever given us—flowers and trees, an open space and a west wind. There isn't any one who can look at these things and be happy who isn't somewhere near the right path, Marcia."

  She leaned back, her eyes fixed dreamily upon the blue distance.

  "Just drive on, please, Jim," she begged.

  CHAPTER XXI

  David ate his three cutlets and, both as regards appetite and in other ways, was a great success at the little luncheon party. Afterwards, they finished the bottle of Marsala under a cedar tree, and whilst the Colonel indulged in reminiscences, Sylvia's eyes rested more than once upon the automobile drawn up before the door. It was quite an adventure in her rather humdrum life, and, after all, there was no reason why a fairy prince shouldn't be an American millionaire and come in a Rolls-Royce.

  "I am sure I hope you'll like Broomleys, Mr. Thain," the Colonel said, as David rose to make his adieux. "I am delighted to leave the place in the hands of such a good tenant. It makes one almost sorry to go away when one realises what one is missing in the shape of neighbours, eh, Sylvia?"

  Sylvia was unaccountably shy, but she raised her eyes to David's for a moment.

  "It is most disappointing," she agreed. "Mr. Thain is such a sympathetic shopper."

  David drove off a little gloomily.

  "Why the devil couldn't I fall in love with a nice girl like that," he muttered to himself, "instead of—"

  He pulled up short, set his heel upon that other vision, and braced himself for the immediate task before him. He drove around the park, drew up outside the cottage, and, descending from the car, approached the low hedge. At the further end of the garden he could hear his uncle's sonorous voice. He was seated in a high-backed chair, the Bible upon his knee, reading to himself slowly and with great distinctness the Ten Commandments. On the ground by his side were the remnants of another chair. As David came up the little path, his uncle concluded his reading and laid down the Bible.

  "Bring out a chair and sit with me, David," he invited.

  David pointed to the ground.

  "Your furniture seems—"

  "Don't jest," his uncle interrupted. "That chair I have broken to pieces with my own hands because of the woman who sat upon it not many hours since."

  David frowned.

  "You mean Marcia?"

  "I mean Marcia—the woman who was my daughter," was the stern reply, "the woman of whose visit you warned me."

  "Come into the house with me," David begged, turning his back upon Mandeleys. "You sit and look at that great drear building and brood overmuch. I want to talk with you."

  Richard Vont rose obediently to his feet and followed his visitor into the little parlour. David looked around him curiously.

  "This place seems to have the flavour of many years ago," he said. "Sometimes I can scarcely realise that I have ever eaten my meals off that oak table. Sometimes it seems like yesterday."

  "Time passes, but time don't count for much," the old man sighed. "Mary Wells will be up from the village soon, and she'll make us a cup of tea. Sit opposite me, lad. Is there any more news?"

  "None!"

  "Them shares, for instance?"

  "There will be no change in them," David replied. "In two months' time he will know it."

  "And he'll have forty thousand pounds to find, eh?—forty thousand pounds which he will never be able to raise!" Richard Vont muttered, his eyes curiously bright. "There isn't an acre of land here that isn't mortgaged over and over again."

  "You'll make him a bankrupt, I suppose," David said thoughtfully.

  "Ay, a bankrupt!" his uncle repeated, lingering over the word with a fierce joy. "But there's something more as'll fall to your lot, David," he went on,—"something more—and the time's none so far off."

  David moved in his chair uneasily.

  "Something more?"

  "Ay, ay!" the old man assented. "You'll find it hard, my boy, but you'll keep your word. You've got that much of the Vonts in your blood. Your word's a bond with you."

  "Tell me," David begged, "about that something more?"

  "The time's not yet," his uncle replied. "You shall know, lad, in good season."

  David was silent for a moment, filled with nameless and displeasing apprehensions. He was brave enough, prepared to meet any ordinary emergency, but somehow or other the vagueness of the task which lay before him seemed appalling. Outside was Mandeleys, a grim and silent remembrance. Inside the cottage everything seemed to speak of changeless times. The pendulum of the tall clock swung drowsily, as it had swung thirty years ago. The pictures on the wall were the same, the china, the furniture, even its arrangement. And the man who sat in his easy-chair was the same, only that his whiskers and hair were white where once they had been black.

  "Uncle," he begged, "let me know the worst now?"

  "You'll know in good time and not before," was the almost fierce reply. "Don't weary me to-night, lad," Vent continued, his voice breaking a little. "The day has been full of trials for me. 'Twas no light matter to have a strange woman here—the strange woman, David, that was once my daughter."

  David frowned a little.

  "Uncle," he said, "I don't wish to pain you, but I am sorry about Marcia."

  "You don't need to be, lad. She isn't sorry for herself. She is puffed up with the vanity of her brain. She came here in fine clothes and with gentle manners, and a new sort of voice. She has made herself—a lady! Poor lass, her day of suffering is to come! Maybe I was hard on her, but I couldn't bear the sight of her, and that's the truth. She talked to me like one filled with wisdom. It was me whom she thought the ignorant one. Put Marcia out of your mind, David. We will talk of other things."

  David leaned forward in his chair. His eyes were bright, his tone eager.

  "Let us have this out, uncle," he begged. "I've been thinking of it—perhaps as much as you lately. They may have been wrong, those two; they may be sinners, but, after all, the world isn't a place for holy people only. The Bible tells you that. For nearly twenty years he has stood by her and cared for her. There has been no meanness, no backing out on his part. He is as much to her to-day as ever he was."

  "Ay," his listener interposed scornfully, "she talked that way. Do you reckon that a man and woman who sinned a score of years ago are any the better because they are going on sinning to-day? Faithfulness to good is part of the Word of God. Faithfulness in sin is of the Devil'
s handing out."

  David shook his head.

  "I am sorry, uncle," he said earnestly, "I have come to look on these things a little differently. Many years ago, in America, I used to wonder what it was that kept you apart from every one else, kept the smile from your lips, made you accept good fortune or ill without any sign of feeling. I was too young to understand then, but I realise everything now. I know how you denied yourself to send me to school and college. I know how you left yourself almost a beggar when you gave me the chance of my life and trusted me with all your savings. These things I shall never forget."

  "One word, lad," Vont interrupted. "It's the truth you say. I trusted you with well-nigh all I had that stood between me and starvation, but I trusted you with it on one condition. Do you mind that condition? We sat outside the little shanty I'd built with my own hands, up in the Adirondacks there, and before us were the mountains and the woods and the silence. We were close to God up there, David. You remember?"

  "I remember."

  "You'd come hot-foot from the city, and you told me your story. I sat and listened, and then I told you mine. I told you of the shame that had driven me from England, and I told you of the thoughts that were simmering in my mind. As we sat there your wrath was as mine, and the oath which I had sworn, you swore, too. I lent you the money over that oath, boy. Look back, if you will. You remember the night? There was a hot wind—cool before it reached us, though—rushing up from the earth, rushing through the pine trees till they shook and bowed around us; and a moon, with the black clouds being driven across it, looking down; and the smell of the pines. You remember?"

  "I remember," David repeated.

  "We stood there hand in hand, and there was no one to hear us except those voices that come from God only knows where, and you swore on your soul that you would help me as soon as the time came to punish the man who had blasted my life. In my way you promised—not yours. There should be no will but mine. For this one thing I was master and you were slave, and you swore."

  "I swore. I am not denying it," David acknowledged. "Haven't I made a start? Haven't I deceived the man at whose table I sat and laid a plot to ruin him? And I have ruined him! Do you want more than this?"

  "Yes!" was the unshaken reply.

  "Then what, in heaven's name, is it?" David demanded. "Out with it, for God's sake! I carry this whole thing about with me, like a weight upon my soul. Granted that you are master and I am slave. Well, I've done much. What is there left?"

  "That you will be told in due season."

  "And meantime," David continued passionately, "I am to live in a sort of prison!"

  "You've no need to find it such," the old man declared doggedly.

  David sprang to his feet. The time had come for his appeal. The words seemed to rush to his lips. He was full of confidence and hope.

  "Uncle," he began, "you must never let a single word that I may say seem to you ungrateful, but I beseech you to listen to me. Life is like a great city in which there are many thoroughfares. It is an immense, insoluble problem which no one can understand. You never open another book except your Bible. You have never willingly exchanged speech with any human being since you left here. In America you shunned all company, you lived in the gloomiest of solitudes. This little corner of the earth is all you know of. Perhaps there is more in life even than that Book can teach you."

  "Marcia talked like this," Richard Vont said quietly. "She spoke of another world, a world for cleverer folk than I. Are you going to try and break my purpose, too?"

  "I would if I could," David declared fervently. "This man is what his ancestors and his education have made him. He has led a simple, ignorant, and yet in some respects a decent life. He is too narrow to understand any one's point of view except his own. When he took Marcia away, she was the village girl and he the great nobleman. To-day Marcia holds his future in her hands. She is the strong woman, and he is the weak man. She has achieved fame and made friends. She has lived a happy life, she is at the present moment perfectly content. Every promise he made her he has kept. Well, why not let it go at that?"

  "So you are another poor child who knows all about this wonderful world of which I am so ignorant," Richard Vont said bitterly. "Yet, my lad, I tell you that there's one great truth that none of you can get over, and that is that sin lives, and there is nothing in this world, save atonement, can wash it out."

  "There's a newer doctrine than that, uncle," David insisted. "You talk with the voice of the black-frocked minister who dangles Hell in front of his congregation. There is something else can clear away sin, and the Book over which you pore, day by day, will teach it you, if you know where to look for it. There's love."

  "Was it love, then, that brought him down through the darkness to dishonour my daughter?" Vont demanded, with blazing eyes.

  "It didn't seem like it, but love must have been there," David answered. "Nothing but love could have kept these two people together all this time, each filling a great place in the other's life. I haven't thought of these things much, uncle, but I tell you frankly, I've read the Bible as well as you, and I don't believe in this black ogre of unforgivable sin. If these two started in wrong fashion, they've purified themselves. I hold that it's your duty now to leave them alone. I say that this vengeance you still hanker after is the eye for an eye and limb for a limb of the Old Testament. There has been a greater light in the world since then."

  "Have you done?" Vont asked, without the slightest change in his tone or expression.

  "I suppose so," David replied wearily. "I wish you'd think over it all, uncle. I know I'm right. I know there is justice in my point of view."

  "I'll not argue with you, lad," his uncle declared. "I'll ask you no'but this one question, and before you answer it just go back in your mind to the night we stood outside my shack, when the wind was blowing up from the valleys. Are you going to stand by your pledged word or are you going to play me false?"

  The great clock ticked drearily on. From outside came the clatter of teacups. David walked to the latticed window and came back again. Richard Vont was seated in his high-backed chair, his hands grasping its sides. His mouth was as hard and tightly drawn as one of his own vermin traps, but his eyes, steadfastly fixed upon his nephew, were filled with an inscrutable pathos. David remembered that passionate outburst of feeling on a far-distant night, when the tears had rolled down this man's cheeks and his voice was choked with sobs. And he remembered—

  "I shall keep my word in every way," he promised solemnly.

  Vont rose slowly to his feet. His knees were trembling. He seemed to be looking into a mist. His hands shook as he laid them on David's shoulders.

  "Thank God!" he muttered. "David, boy, remember. This light talk is like an April shower on the warm earth. Goodness and sin are the same now as a thousand years ago, and they will be the same in a thousand years to come. We may pipe a new tune, but it's only the Devil's children that dance to it—sin must be punished. There's no getting over that! Forgiveness later maybe—but first comes punishment."

  CHAPTER XXII

  A queer atmosphere of depression seemed about this time to have affected the two inhabitants of Number 94 Grosvenor Square. The Marquis had suddenly become aware of an aimlessness in life which not even his new financial hopes enabled him to combat. The night of his weekly dinner at Trewly's he spent in the entertainment of three ancient whist companions, and it was not until they had gone and he was left alone in the silent house that he realised how empty and profitless the evening had been. Day by day, after lunch, he sent out the same message to his chauffeur—five o'clock for the club instead of three o'clock for Battersea, and on each occasion the words seemed to leave his lips with more reluctance. He walked each morning in the Park, as carefully dressed and as upright as ever, but one or two of his acquaintances noticed a certain difference. There was an increased pallor, a listlessness of gait, which seemed to bespeak an absent or a preoccupied mind. He even welcomed the coming,
one morning just as he was starting for his promenade, of Mr. Wadham, Junior. Here at least was diversion.

  Mr. Wadham, Junior, had been rehearsing his interview and his prospective deportment towards the Marquis on the way up, and he started the enterprise to his own entire satisfaction. He entered the library with an exceedingly serious air, and he took great pains to be sure that the door was closed after the retreating butler before he did more than respond to his distinguished client's greeting.

  "Anything fresh, Wadham?" the latter enquired.

  "I have ventured to see your lordship once more," Mr. Wadham began, "with reference to the scrip which we deposited at the bank to meet certain liabilities on your behalf."

  "Well, what about it?" the Marquis asked good-humouredly. "You lawyers know nothing of the Stock Exchange."

  Mr. Wadham assumed an expression of great gravity.

  "Would your lordship," he begged, "for the satisfaction of my firm, the members of which I think you will admit have always been devoted to your lordship's interests, ring up the stockbroking firm of—say—Messrs. Youngs, Fielden and Company, or any other you like, with reference to the value of those shares?"

  "I am, unfortunately," the Marquis replied, "not in a position to do so. The shares were sold me by a personal friend. I am content to believe that if they had not been of their face value, the transaction would not have been suggested to me."

  "That," Mr. Wadham declared seriously, "is not business."

  "It happens to be the only way in which I can look upon the matter," was the cool reply.

  "To proceed a little further," the lawyer continued, "I am here to enquire, solely in your own interests and as a matter of business, whether you have made any definite agreement to pay for these shares? I am under the impression that your lordship mentioned a note of hand."