# The Truth about Vignolles/The Profiteer

Chapters: II — III — IV — V — VI — VII — VIII — IX — X — XI — XII — XIII

### THE PROFITEER

I
TO see old Vignolles vivid and all alert, safe in a big arm-chair again, reposing in my rooms, eloquent and nervous, or thoughtful and sitting at his ease! That was to me one of those rare delights that go with friendship—the slow and cautious friendship of the middle years. One does not make friends easily after one has climbed the hill. I suppose one is critical, or difficult—call it what you like. But Vignolles I had tested, I had known so thoroughly; and every time he had given the right answer. He played so openly; I could take him or leave him; this is what he was like, or that. He didn't care whether I approved of him or disapproved. He was always himself; and I liked that self most utterly, with never a reservation. I dare say, if you come to analysis, it was because Vignolles did the things that I could do only in dreams, imaginatively. He actually did them. While I; when it came to action—I funked them I suppose. I could see them and the way of them; I would have loved to follow; but there were always prudence and the risks. These held me back. But Vignolles had never funked anything.
He had always gone on. If a dream, a course of action, came to him, he followed it, no matter where it led. He did not count the cost. It was the right thing to do and he did it. The right thing for him to do, I should have said. For me it would have been most definitely the wrong thing. I could not have seen it out; or my nerve would have given way.... But here he was, tall, spare, and dark, in spite of the gray hair. I dare say this peculiar effect of darkness came from his eyes—singularly dark eyes—you couldn't help but notice them. They were the eyes of a young man, though he was well, very well, into the fifties. And of course he was burnt and browned by those tropic suns of his and you never felt that his clothes mattered very much or that he took the least pains with them.
He had come back to England a week before, from somewhere close to the Equator. Out East it was; and he had returned there after he had left the army. It was a plantation, or maybe two plantations, where he grew tea and rubber. I don't know much about that kind of enterprise, though I've bought shares and seen them go up and down like mercury in a glass, and made money and lost it and drawn dividends. But Vignolles had gone straight out to the fountain-head and had come back with a fortune. He was a war profiteer, he declared, of the very worst kind. He'd taken our money and hadn't done a day's work to deserve it. I wonder whether I can tell his story somehow near the way he told it.
"You remember," he said, "I had more or less got settled when the war found us out—upset things, so it seemed. But, as a matter of fact, I've come through, and it's made rather a rich man of me. I can't help it; but there it is. I thought I was going to be ruined and all the rest of it. I'd counted on that; but, of course, one doesn't hesitate. You don't know my people? There were quite a good few of us; but I've only a sister left now. She's married and pretty well done for; used to be rather a good sort. I'd been what they call a 'rolling stone' for years and years; simply couldn't help it. What's the use of living if you don't live and see things and know the sort of place you're inhabiting and its diversities? I'd been rather a rolling stone and a thorn in the flesh. You see, my people were in commerce; and I was absolutely uncommercial and even unprofessional; they'd have stood something respectable, like doctoring or law. I wanted to see the world and men and cities; and so I roamed and roamed and roamed till I was long past forty, instead of making provision for my old age; instead of devoting myself to a wife and family. That's the proper thing to do if you're a Vignolles. So my father looked at it, and my grandfather, and aunts and uncles. But they'd done all that, and, nineteen-thirteen or so, they were all gone and they'd left me a few thousands—couldn't help themselves, it seemed; couldn't take it away with them.
"My sister got a good bit, and the stock-broker she's married to, and the children are coming in for their lot; but I got some as well. You see, I'd never done anything very disgraceful, except roll and be a thorn. I put the money into tea and rubber; went in with a fellow called Sutherland. He knew all about it. He was a Scotchman, not very well off, but deuced honest. It's a jolly life. You ride about on a pony and watch other people work—nice bronze savages—they enjoy it if you treat 'em well. It's their life; they've never known any other. You watch the things grow; you haven't a care in the world; and you're very happy. At least I was; and so was Sutherland. He had diabetes, poor chap; but if he ate the right kind of food and drank the right kind of drink, he was not much the worse for it; fact is, it tended to make him the steady, God-fearing kind of chap he was and is.
"We were just on the edge of making a good living and putting money by when the war came and busted up everything. At least, so I felt, and so did most of us. I raced home and joined up; you remember, that's how we found one another? Rather a middle-aged couple!" And Vignolles paused here and chuckled over the pair of us, and the figure we had cut in uniform; a brace of grizzled subalterns, saluting majors half our age and trying hard to take 'em seriously; and I dare say they were doing the same by us.
He resumed:
"Everybody who could stand upright or sit a horse came trooping home. But there was that poor old blighter Sutherland! He had diabetes and they wouldn't look at him. You had to take an oath that you were free from 'organic disease'—that's what they called it—before they'd let you sail, and there was a doctor who knew all about him. So Sutherland had to stay behind and look after the tea and the rubber. He'd had five years of it before I turned up again. He was Scotch and honest and shrewd and devilish hard-working; and though I hadn't done a stroke or a hand's turn in those five years, I was his partner and he'd made a rich man of me. Simply couldn't help it. The prices went up and up and up, whether you wanted 'em to or not. The world was in a conspiracy to make the two of us rich. That's what it seemed like. I know a dozen men who've been treated just the same, and scores of others who've been broke and done in, and more still who are being caught now it's all over. War's curious. Even my gifted brother-in-law isn't quite the same success that he used to be.... But I've sold out to Sutherland," my friend concluded. "You see, money's not much use to a man out there. Here—here in England, I've a fancy one might do some good with it."
And this, more or less, is the way in which my friend Vignolles became a profiteer, and put away a roving life and returned to the country of his fathers; where he lived very plainly in a second-rate hotel, and no doubt pondered ways and means of doing "some good with it."
II
There was the house, to begin with. Vignolles had bought it. You couldn't well avoid buying a house if you wished to live in one just then. It was not right in London and it was not right in the country; it was exactly on the dividing line where the one begins and the other ends. Vignolles would drive you up to town in an hour with his car; or you could leave the house on foot and go across the fields, through woods, orchards, and plantations till you arrived at what he called his "view." It looked out over half a county: a landscape-painter might describe its strange variety and the marvelous great sky that overspread it and made you feel that here was English air. After London one could fill one's lungs here, and fill one's eyes, and empty one's heart of all our dismal struggles and inward-turning thought. One looked out from here and found one's wings again. Maybe we two old buffers but shared an illusion or were blinded by the beauty of that scene. Still, there it was, and it did one's eyes good to look out on it. And next we would tramp back to the house, which was rapidly filling with Vignolles's purchases; for here he had resolved to make his home. There was a cottage next to the front gate where lived the gardener. He had belonged to the house and seemed to go with it; and, incidentally, he and his now watched out that no one stole the furniture, and the bed and table linen, and the china, and the silver, and the carpets, books, and pictures, and all the other truck that Vignolles was accumulating.
He was doing it entirely by himself and most methodically. He still kept to his second-rate hotel; and there he would brood for a week upon each room. He had a plan of the place, complete; passages, stairways, rooms, landings, lobbies, and what not. He took them one by one, saw them in his mind's eye, and dealt with them like a decorator or an artist; and when he had done with his mental image and set it down on paper, he went out and about in London and ordered and chose the things. He created a dozen interiors. He had the measurements and shape of every place. "But it's all empty," he said, smiling; "the joke'll begin when I find people to live in it."
Even the kitchen of that house must be original, he had insisted. And it was. The pots and pans and things all lived in cupboards with glass doors; tables and chairs were chosen like the rest; and the place had color and character. And, lastly, he scattered baths about that house, and the servants' quarters were much like other people's.
"My sister goes round with me at times," he explained, "and tells me how mad I am. But this is only a beginning. When I'm done—" He didn't finish, but kept us on the edge of anticipations. When he had "done," I inferred, his sister would regard him as a public danger.
The house, at last, was "done"; but that was only, as he had so rightly said, "a beginning." The next step was an effort constructed with his usual care in the seclusion afforded by that very second-rate hotel. In my rooms one evening he produced it. Just a slip of paper; and on it I read:
       Housekeeper required for gentleman's place near London. War widow with one or two children would he given preference. Replies to Captain V. C/o Smith, Hammett and Smith, Solicitors, 14, London Wall, E.C.
It was the first time I had known Vignolles to claim the rank wherewith he had passed out of the army.
"I'm shoving this advertisement into half a dozen papers. It's the least I can do for 'em; and I'm rather fond of kids," he explained "and it'll mean a home for some good lady."
"It's certainly an idea," I said; '"But why not advertise straight out for a wife and family and be done with it?"
"Oh, I'm only after the kids. I could give 'em a chance, couldn't I? And I've rather missed that side of life; never had time for it or even the money, until to-day."
I found the advertisement on the front page of my "Morning Post" the following Friday; I picked up "The Times" at the club on the Saturday and there it was; and I found it again on the Sunday in "The Observer," No wonder that I lost my friend for over a week! I pictured him, snowed under, engaged with women-folk and correspondence. It is not exactly a joke or a matter for laughter. But, still, I chuckled. I couldn't have faced it—those widows and those kids. No, I positively couldn't!
III
But Vignolles had faced it, and was facing it, and would go on facing it. He dropped in on the ninth day and said: "I think I've got 'em. There's a Mrs. Tyrrell—three kids—one grown up and fending for herself, a boy of ten, and a girl of twelve. I get the two small ones if everything goes well. We're making each other's acquaintance to begin with."
"And the mother?" I asked; for I wasn't quite so deuced paternal and was more interested in her than in the rest.
"The mother's all right. Her husband was a gunner Regular, and she appreciates the situation. She's had five years of it with her in-laws; I don't suppose it quite agrees with her. Of course she didn't say anything; but one guesses. I'm taking the two kids to the Zoo to-morrow, and next day we 'll have the car and all run down to see my view."
He told me about all sorts of other kids, and how he had dealt with them, with their mothers, and with everything.
"It's pretty simple," he said; "I go by the letters. When there's a woman behind 'em I keep them; when they're just a lot of words, I chuck 'em away. There were only twenty good ones out of close on two hundred. The ladies were written to, and when I'd seen them I asked to see the kids. I judged them by the way they took that side of the question. Twelve fell out on that—seemed to fancy it might be them that I was after and that the kids didn't so much matter. It's a pathetic world"; and Vignolles, half smiling, half serious, lit a fresh cigarette.
I recall some of his "kids" and a few of his widows; for he had entertained me an entire evening with the story of them; and, no doubt, I had prompted and encouraged this recital, which was all life's business to him at that particular period and phase.
There was one little girl he had rejected owing to her incredible appetite for mutton. It sounds incredible, but he was as positive as he was disgusted. "The mother was all right," he had said, "seemed a very capable woman otherwise; but an only child, spoilt, and restless, and greedy as a little pig—I couldn't stand that. She'd already called me 'uncle,' and sprawled in the best chair without being asked, and suggested that I should buy her a doll and a scooter; it'll be hats and jeweler's truck ten years from now, and she'll exploit the whole race of us if she's pretty enough, and give us icy kisses for our trouble. I had the two of them to lunch, and that precious child demanded three helpings of mutton—just sat and yelped for them till she got 'em. No, she wasn't hungry, but just a little pig; and she looked it too—a very fat child. The father may have been a hero, but if he'd lived, perhaps he'd have overeaten himself and died of apoplexy. There's a king in history who did that—one of the early ones—stuffed himself with lampreys, whatever they are. I think the lady must have noticed that I didn't like her bairn."
Another of his widows had two daughters, delightful, grown-up girls; and the mother was so charming that you wondered whether nature had made her so or whether it was an art she had acquired. Vignolles lingered over this trio with a certain reluctance as though it had cost him an effort to part with them; as indeed, it had.
"I invited the lot to dinner; a very good dinner, too," he said. "'There's no fool like an old fool'—it's a quotation from Solomon or some other wise old josser. I kept that sage remark in front of me the whole blissful evening. There was the charming mother, a dangerous creature; though I suspect nothing much to look at in the morning; cross, I imagine, but brightening all day and toward nightfall positively radiant. There was the engaged girl, who had driven a car in France and was going to marry one of her officers when they could afford it. She wore her hair short, had the freshest, healthiest complexion, and was just like a nice boy. She probably thought me rather an old ass. The other girl was beautiful; just that and nothing more; as though it were her job and she took it very seriously. Well, it's as good a job as most jobs, and a darned sight better than some of 'em. I'm rather sensitive to beauty. At my age I ought to know better; but, somehow, I never shall. And she knew that I knew how beautiful she was and thrilled to it as one thrills to music made on a violin. I loved the very sight of her; but though I may be old and a bit of a fool, I'm not quite fool enough to live in a house with things like that. A Moslem pasha might manage it; but it's not done in England by elderly gentlemen unless they're eager for trouble. I ought to get a medal for resisting that trio; many a one has been given for less. One is flesh and blood sometimes, after all," he added wistfully.
I must omit the others—there were several more—and return to the Mrs. Tyrrell whom he had mentioned in the first instance with her boy of ten and her girl of twelve, and a second girl who was grown up and out in the world. These seemed to suit his case better than any of the rest, and he seemed to suit theirs very perfectly and fully.
"I like her," he had commented, reverting to Mrs. Tyrrell. "She's very straightforward and natural. She sees quite plainly what I'm after, and she's not thinking of herself at all. One could make a very good friend of her. She's keen on giving those two kids a chance. Her eighteen-year old girl, the one that's independent, just went off and found herself a job. Hadn't got to be driven—full of pluck and a good head on her—saw that her mother wasn't having exactly a rosy time of it, though she isn't the sort that complains. The two of them are something like sisters, and there's rather a dash of the protective attitude about that girl. She's somebody's secretary. I call her the secretary-bird. There's one at the Zoo, where I'm taking the kids to-morrow. They're quite unspoilt and think me wonderful. Poor little devils! They'll get a hell of a shock some day, when they know the truth!"
But for all his passing off the matter so lightly, he could not avoid a burst of confidence where it came to "those two kids." Some people might call it balked paternal instinct; but it was, rather, a fine light that he threw over the three of them, dropping all his disguises at last and speaking as he felt about it; about himself and Mrs. Tyrrell's little boy and girl.
"You see, their mother had never tried for a job before," he had run on; "and she was a bit timid about it; but for their sakes—I guess it is for their sakes a deuced sight more than for her own. She wrote from the house where she was living with her in-laws, and I told her to come up and see me—I've a sitting-room now in that hotel you so despise. Well, she turned up all right and she understood me. She was a trifle shy at first, but when she found herself and we really got to talking and she discovered I wasn't so very terrible, she became more easy, and I felt that if the kids were all right, she'd do. I asked her about them next, and she confessed that they were waiting downstairs for her in the hall. You see, she hadn't quite fancied the job of asking and being interviewed by a man from Lord knows where, and she'd wanted something to keep up her pluck, and so she'd brought them along as a kind of bodyguard, or for company. I don't think she put it quite that way, but one feels these things. It gave her more confidence. And I said, 'Let's send for them; or I'll go down, myself.'
"I went down and found them waiting, very good, on a settee; the girl a bit motherly, being two years the older; the boy, a chubby little chap in an Eton suit—thoroughbreds both. They weren't a bit afraid of me, bless them! They looked up when I spoke and read me and trusted me, and when they do that it's difficult to resist. I only had to put out a hand, and they came, quite simply, quite naturally, as though we had known each other all our lives.
"'You're Captain Vignolles,' they said
"'How did you know?' I laughed.
"'We knew,' they both answered, 'Mummy told us about it and read us your letter.'
"It didn't seem strange to then; nothing seemed strange to them. If we'd only had bread and cheese for lunch, they wouldn't have minded; and when we drove down to the house and I told them that if they liked they could live there, they didn't seem to feel it was strange or wonderful or unpleasant or anything, but just said, 'Yes.' For the world is a queer place to children and they never quite know what's going to happen next. But whatever happens is very interesting, as long as it doesn't hurt too much; as long as it doesn't over-pain their body or their soul. We've agreed to do half a dozen things together," he ended, "and if we don't bore each other too much, the Tyrrells are going down to live in that old house."
IV
There had been something contradictory in Vignolles's account of his relations with those two children. In one breath they thought him "wonderful," and yet were quite unstirred by the material comforts and other benefits his friendship offered or seemed to promise. I asked him about this, for I couldn't well follow it.
"My dear old chump," he responded, "don't you see that it's me, Vignolles, they think wonderful, and that the house and home and all the rest of it are only a house and home. The things money, sordid cash, can buy don't interest them; but to have me as a friend, me to romp with and to chatter to, they seem to like that and it's very new and unexpected. Most of the others were after my money. I had it and they wanted it, and I don't suppose they thought much further. Yes, even the children seemed to share that taint, had drawn it from whatever home or atmosphere they came from. But these two are free from it and we can just be friends; and, of course I'm wonderful, because I'm a grown-up and because I'm ready to talk to them quite seriously and listen very seriously to all they have to say. And then they seem to think I've done things, seen the world and had adventures. They make discoveries about me every day. Cant help it. We go to the Zoo and they find out that I've seen eagles, not in cages but flying in the air and sitting on nests; and that I've seen elephants and camels in their own countries, and sailed down rivers full of hippoes and crocodiles. And Kit's found out that I once killed a man—I wasn't aware of it till he told me. You see, the other fellow was just a Chink who tried to do me in. I did him in, instead. It had never occurred to me that I'd done anything very out of the way till Kit blazed up about it and Eden opened her eyes. No, those two don't care a button about money and the house, but they do love grabbing hold of me and making me confess. I rather let myself go with them," he added, with a curious shy tenderness; and one could read the love he'd missed and the gratitude he felt at picking up these crumbs—or, it might be, a banquet—late in middle age.
The two children and he invaded my rooms one afternoon with paper bags of cakes and baker's stuff, and announced that they had come for tea, Vignolles acting as spokesman. That was my own introduction to this new alliance. My rooms are in the Temple, and between them they discovered that I was a Knight Templar and something of a successor to the rascals who had fought in the Crusades and who occurred in "Ivanhoe," a book those kids were full of. But all the same they unpacked their cakes and scones, and laid the table and boiled a kettle of water on the gas-stove, and had a regular picnic with me as their sole guest. It was an eventful afternoon for all of us.
I caught the three of them together again one chilly afternoon as I was crossing London Bridge. Everybody else was busy and hurried and absorbed; but these three stood quite openly upon the bridge and got in people's way and looked at the gulls and shipping and wharves and water, like travelers lingering over the sights and wonders of a foreign land.
I knew the spot for one of Vignolles's favorite haunts when he had felt lonely and restless; when the call from ocean after ocean had come to him, asking why he had turned deserter. From here one could watch the ships and their broad highway running out to the salt seas and leading to every corner and crevice of that fabulous world wherein for thirty years he had adventured. To-day he was talking it over with these children, and they were as wide awake and as mystery-lured as he. I could understand then how to them our friend was "wonderful." He had been out there and come back; he had known shipwreck—they had made him own up to it—and seen savage men and cannibals, and sharks and whales and fish that flew in air.
Once or twice he came in to me dead beat, tired out with answering questions, with making himself quite small again, with seeing the world through their fresh, happy eyes. But in the main he could hold his own, and enjoyed himself so thoroughly, reliving his past with them, re-finding old scenes, old faces, old sorrows, old temptations; relieved of trouble, of grossness, of disillusionment, of all the struggles he had known and overcome, the fears, the hauntings. Rosily and through mists he now could see these things, and, if he was to hold his two companions, that was the right way. Soon enough they would touch a fuller knowledge! And, meanwhile, they had made a hero of him. He admitted it; and, "Well, somebody has to make a hero of you," he added, laughing; "or else life's not much fun; now, is it?"
And while all this was going on in London, Mrs. Tyrrell, duly appointed and given a free hand, was occupied with getting servants and making ready for their move into the house.
V
I have never known exactly what were the business arrangements that brought Mrs. Tyrrell and the two children out of Richmond, where they had shared a home with the elder Tyrrells, down to the house that Vignolles had bought and furnished on the country's edge. I dare say she had a salary, and there was, of course, her pension, and as for the rest of it, I have no doubt that Vignolles footed the bills.
Kit now went to a new school, the best in the district, and wore as the mark of it a sky-blue cap with a yellow cross. Eden whose real name was Evelyn, but who somehow had slipped into this more appropriate designation, had become one of an establishment the pupils of which wore black straw hats with an embroidered device in brown on the front of a dark-blue ribbon. They rode to school on bicycles, with a satchel slung from their shoulder, and the boy was engrossed in football and Eden was great on hockey. I often had week-ends with them and grew to know Mrs. Tyrrell; and Berta, the girl who was out in the world and somebody's secretary; and there were the two in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Tyrrell senior, we will call them, though perhaps I ought more properly to speak of "The Honorable," for they had that courtesy title, or handle, or whatever it is, being the younger children of persons of distinction long defunct.
Three generations, therefore, of that family were sometimes together under the one roof, and to me it was ever an interesting study to watch them; for I felt it was almost like watching history and the processes of evolution out of hand. Mrs. Tyrrell, it was true, was only a daughter-in-law and not a daughter; but, still, she might have been. She was entirely of the Tyrrell class and their tradition. Rather a helpless class and tradition it occurred to me, conscious of a new world marching on.
And in addition to his new-found friends, I met Mrs. Carey-Holt, the sister of whom Vignolles had occasionally spoken; and there was her husband, the stock-broker; and young Francis Carey-Holt, and Miss Jane Carey-Holt, their offspring. Vignolles did not seem exactly enamored of his niece and nephew.
"The boy's too much like a young lady for my taste," he said, discussing them; "had everything done for him—never seems to have put his nose outside of London—been to all the cinemas and dances all the latest dances, but after that you come to a blank wall. It's a pity he didn't get roped in for the war. He'd have traveled, at any rate, and probably been kicked a little."
As for his niece, according to Vignolles, she was quite definitely out to get a husband. That was her purpose in life, and she wasn't very particular whom she got so long as he had the right income and was moderately presentable. "The little devil makes no bones about it!" he exclaimed, smiling. "She's honesty at least, though I tell her she might as well mark herself up for sale openly as do it that way. Comes to the same thing. And she answers: 'Uncle, you're a back number'; and she shakes her head over me and says, 'No wonder you never got on; you never would have done if it hadn't been for this old war.' I rather like her in a curious way," he added. "She's got more stuff in her than the boy and she bullies her father."
Carey-Holt, the stock-broker, I never knew with any intimacy, and it never seemed to me that there was anything to know. I believe he had persuaded himself that he had fallen in love with his wife before he married her; he went to the City every morning and was engrossed in the ups and downs of his stocks and shares; and he was, I suppose, of some use as a kind of instigator and lubricant. But outside of this he did as everybody else did of his rather narrow acquaintanceship; wore the same clothes, played the same golf, ate the same dinners and sat down to the same rubbers of "auction," and drank and smoked much as his friends. And for doing all this he seemed to get paid a very comfortable income. I often wondered why; but I don't think he ever troubled, except to feel that it wasn't large enough and never would be. And yet, he wasn't conceited. He was rather a heavy simple kind of fellow, with no particular pretensions; but he certainly had an appetite for money, and nothing but money, that knew no bounds.
This, more or less, was the family circle or environment which now beset Vignolles, home from all his wanderings and seemingly at rest and settled down for good within the borders of his native land. He had, of course, his other interests; for he had joined numerous societies, the Officers' Association, Comrades of the Great War, and similar institutions, where he felt that he and his money might be of use. I never saw his name put forward or stuck out in the newspapers; I think he avoided that as he would a plague. But in his way he was deep enough in these things, attending committees and shelling out and talking little, though making rather a strong point of common sense. One way and another, I heard a good deal about all these affairs. He would discuss them with me, and of course, as an old "comrade" myself, I took some interest as well. He seemed, however, now to have made his life and settled down to it; what with the children, his home and a variety of valuable things outside of it. It might all go on smoothly; or on the other hand, it might be only a new beginning, leading to some adventure more turgid and more marked than any that had gone before.
VI
I do not know precisely why all those people came to me. I dare say it was because I stood outside their troubles and was not particularly involved in them; but first one came and then another, till I knew exactly what everybody felt and thought and conjectured about everybody else. And of course I listened, but I don't believe that I ever took sides. It seemed to do them good to have it out with somebody, and I being handy and not belonging to any special camp, they all of them had it out with me. This is what modern civilization comes to, I suppose; crowds of people living elbow to elbow, and the more they see of one another, the more they dislike each other and pick each other to pieces. The women are the worst offenders, having leisure and, therefore, plenty of time to brood. Well, I've no doubt they have their grievances. There was Mrs. Carey-Holt, for instance, Vignolles's only sister. She had a good deal to say for herself, and I admit that I listened very politely to all she had to say.
As a close friend of their brother and their uncle, Mrs. Carey-Holt and all the Carey-Holts had accepted me. I had been asked to dine; I had played "auction"; I had met various gracious members of their "set." I believe that I could have reëstablished myself socially in this new circle, had I felt so disposed, and that Carey-Holt voted me "a good fellow." They lived in a big sprawling house in a good suburb, where the young Carey-Holts took some kind of festive lead, being full of parties and theaters and dances and other interesting matters which filled the house with other young people and led to a deal of discursive talk. Mrs. Carey-Holt seemed to like it, and her husband's chief function was to pay up. I can't say that I took any of these people very seriously, till my hostess fairly cornered me one Saturday afternoon. I owed her a call, I remember, and she had said that she was always at home on Saturday afternoons.
Everybody else was out, apparently, and we had her own little boudoir to ourselves; for, "You see, I am treating you quite as an old friend," she said, waving me to a chair; and then I inquired after the others and was told that they were at their Badminton club and that Mr. Carey-Holt was playing golf.
She felt her way, so to speak, before she came to her main point that afternoon, and when she reached the right moment, "Don't you think Fred is making rather a fool of himself over those Tyrrells?" she asked genially, as though her brother were some kind of naughty child, who must be protected and remonstrated with, and as though, perhaps, she intended the latter job for me in case of need.
"In what way?" I responded, all innocence and seeking information.
"In every way," said she.
"I like Mrs. Tyrrell," I put in blandly.
"But would a woman with any self-respect place herself in that position?"
"It's a perfectly innocent position, I assure you," I began—
"Yes, we know all about that; but—is it done?" she asked abruptly.
"Since the war," I ventured, "a good many things are done that wouldn't have been done before the war."
"But he might have got some decent woman even a lady, a single woman; there are lots of them about."
"She'd have fallen in love with him—a sentimental spinster—they're the very dickens!" I protested, laughing.
Mrs. Carey-Holt laughed too; yet, for all that, she stuck quite grimly to her point.
"But Mrs. Tyrrell, with those two children, is far more dangerous," she resumed; "and there's a girl of eighteen, and the grandparents as well—Fred seems to have adopted the whole family."
"Well, why not?" I asked, lightly. "They're in a way comrades of his, and they've been hit pretty hard; and what's a pension nowadays, with everything costing double? And the old Tyrrells have only a fixed income that won't stretch. It's rather lucky they fell in with Fred Vignolles."
I had put it fairly bluntly toward the end. I didn't see that she had much to complain of, with that big house of hers and plenty of servants and her own money and Carey-Holt's to pay the bills.
"But if Fred had wanted to do something with his money," she persisted "there're his own niece and nephew aren't there? I don't believe in going outside one's own family," she added, "and no more do you."
So that was her point? She was jealous of the Tyrrells, and she wanted Vignolles's money to go to her own brood and not to be frittered away outside.
It was a situation, I suppose, one might have foreseen; yet, for all that, I really couldn't help blurting out the truth and letting her have it straight. "When Fred was hard up," I said, "he must have saved you a lot of trouble."
She laughed at that. She was really pretty decent over it, and she never seemed to bear me any grudge for my candor.
"Of course you're fond of him," she said, "and like him to have his own way in things; and then you're a selfish old bachelor. But when one's married, one does think of one's own children; it's only natural, isn't it?"
She turned the subject after that; but she had made it pretty clear to me that Vignolles and his peculiar schemes hardly met with her approval, and that, indeed, Mrs. Tyrrell, and especially the two Tyrrell children, she regarded as obstacles that stood unfairly and unexpectedly in the way of her own far more deserving girl and boy.
And that, I imagined, was the view taken by all the Carey-Holt family; by young Francis and by Miss Jane, and by the stock-broker himself, no less emphatically. But as it was a matter that, to my unbiased mind, concerned my friend and my friend only, I felt that it was certainly not within my province to interfere.
VII
I have already said that I liked Mrs. Tyrrell, whose friends called her "Angela," a name, by the way, that admirably suited her, as I ventured to think when I first caught it. There was, quite unaffectedly, something angelic about that charming lady, whose age I guessed a year or two under forty and whose face and figure were still very much that of a young woman. And she was capable, too, and firm where needed. She ran the house successfully, was clever with the servants, and was not at all obtrusive or inclined to act the "boss," In her place many a good woman might have yielded.
Vignolles, though probably quite unaware and just his natural self was equally tactful. He looked on, so to speak rather than played the master in that house and its "appurtenances." He had his own den, his own quarters, his own everything. When at home he would most often invite himself to luncheon with the children and their mother; but at breakfast and at dinner he was alone, unless they had people down from London—the older Tyrrells, Berta Tyrrell, the Carey-Holts, or myself, for instance. Outside this small circle he usually entertained at one or another of his clubs. All this suited Mrs. Tyrrell, and to Vignolles it gave something that, not without reason, he might regard as hard-won anchorage.
My week-ends were very frequently spent amid these surroundings. I liked that Georgian house, so close to London and yet so distant, with its bright gardens and shrubberies, its green meadows and its avenue of trees. It was not a very big place as places go; but, it had a completeness, a variety, which showed that the people who had lived here and were now dispersed had loved it and spent a few of their generations upon its making.
Mrs. Tyrrell loved it too, and she said so quite openly.
"It's often hard to believe in all our luck," she remarked to me one Sunday morning as we strolled out of doors. "It's more like a thing one dreams of than a thing that has happened."
"But Vignolles is like that—exactly like that," I answered, smiling. "Haven't you noticed he always does the things that other people do only in fancy?"
8he and I were intimate enough by then to talk with a certain freedom of our host.
"You've known Mr. Vignolles longer than I have," she replied; "and, of course, I only know this one thing."
"There are lots of others," I said. "He seems to have lived mainly to be the exception that proves the rule; you've heard of it?"
"I have—only too often!" she laughed; and then, "Mrs. Carey-Holt, that sister of his, doesn't like me," she added. "She doesn't like any of us; I suppose it's natural."
"She'll get over it. She does pretty well as she pleases, herself, so why shouldn't Vignolles?"
"The children are happy here; that's the main thing," she resumed. "I had often wondered, before this, what was to become of them. You see, we were so very hard up—everybody decent is hard up, nowadays; or almost everybody." She laughed again as she corrected herself; and, "Of course, I've no wish to be personal," she added, discreetly; and, "What a charming woman," I thought; 'What a very charming woman!"
But all I said aloud was, "Vignolles made his money only by a fluke"; and then I went on to tell her something of his past life and how the miracle of his present affluence had come about.
"It's strange, isn't it?" she said, when I had ended; "and it might have turned out just the other way!"
"He's keen on doing what he calls 'some good with it.' That's rather fine of him." And next, "I believe old Vignolles could live on bread and cheese and a cheap cigarette; he hasn't much use for money, himself," I added; and it seemed to me that I had grown a trifle lyrical and rather enthusiastic about our friend.
"He's been most good to the children," she answered, smiling, and I think a little amused at me. "And even to Berta," she continued; "takes her out and buys her hats and frocks till she gets quite annoyed with him. I often wonder what Arthur would say if he could come back and see us."
She was speaking of the soldier who had been her husband, the father of the three that Vignolles was concerned with; for even the independent Berta, I now learnt, was not outside the urgency he felt to give.
"He'd be rather relieved, I should fancy—if I'm any judge," I ventured.
"Yes, I dare say," she answered, dubiously; "but perhaps he'd feel it wasn't quite—"
"Quite what?"
"Well, quite the thing for a Tyrrell. And, of course, Mr. Vignolles, though he's an angel and all that, he isn't quite—no, I shouldn't have said that, should I?" And she looked at me so frankly with her clear blue eyes; and I could only smile and think how pretty she was, standing there with the sunlight filling her hair and making it more golden than ever, and her pure complexion, and her beautiful, round figure. And it flashed upon me as I watched her, that the Arthur who had been her husband had never awakened this woman, had never loved her as she might have been loved, and that that was why she was so like a child to-day, in spite of her own three children and her forty years, or whatever it was. And of all this she was quite unconscious; of her own power as of her own weakness. I admit that, at the moment, I felt a stress to sail in myself and try what I could make of her. It might have been a passing insurgency or even a passing mood; for one doesn't often do these things—now, does one? And just then the children rushed out on us; they had been to the village church with Vignolles, and were come back all zeal and mischief, like two colts liberated and free to kick up their heels. And he, good chap, was happy—as happy as I had ever known him; and looking it, too, as his eyes rested on that delightful place, all green and sunlit, and the two children, and Mrs. Tyrrell and me, standing there, both rather happy as well.
It was a scene, a thing, that he had created, much as an artist creates—a something out of a nothing. And just like that he must have felt; that he had made it and all its implicit happiness; and this, no doubt was why, in his own face, I caught a gleam of a something that was deeper than satisfaction. With his money he had been able to give the five of us this very perfect moment. Yes, it was, indeed, a matter to feel deeply and to be more than glad about; just as a painter glows after he has made a beautiful thing, or a writer who has finished a new story.
VIII
So far I have dealt with only the two generations, with the children, five years of whose short lives had been passed amid the realities and deprivations of the war; impressionable years, when the mind yields readily to the heroic and sees a champion in every poor devil who has adventured, with what reluctances and hesitations heaven alone can say. And there was my own generation that included the elder Carey-Holts and Mrs. Tyrrell and Vignolles. With us the war had been, among other things, as a bridge, a satanic interlude: we had known something of life before its coming, and now we were back, ennobled by it or scarred by it, or whatever it may have done to us. The Carey-Holts, for instance, had firmly made up their minds that there had never been a war. They had, in fact, refused to tolerate it any longer. They divided life, I had quickly discovered, into components, pleasant and unpleasant. The pleasant ones they courted; the others they cut dead. "You do not exist," they seemed to say; and for them, indeed, nothing did exist but what their hearts desired. It was certainly an admirable philosophy, though to freer spirits, like Vignolles and myself, it made conversation or any general survey of the world at times rather difficult, and, in moments of impatience we were both of us inclined to regard the older Carey-Holts as a couple of bores.
"It's that generation—our generation," Vignolles had once exclaimed, "that made the war! I belong to it, and yet I hate it; no wonder I couldn't get on with it! By Jove, we were rotten and we're still rotten! If the young 'uns don't kick us out, or hold us down and muzzle us, we'll start some devilment again. We've neither heart, nor imagination, nor pluck, nor common honesty. I see it on half the committees I'm working with and whose motto is compromise and delay, till somebody gets up and reminds them that hunger and cold are real and that men and women aren't just figures in a blue-book or a bundle of statistics. That's why I love those kids I've got hold of. They haven't learnt to funk things—not yet, at least—and, by George, they never shall if I can help it!"
He had his own ideas about their education. It was difficult, he admitted. "I don't want them to belong to one class. I want them to be English first and foremost. The class doesn't much matter as long as they care for the country and the land out of which they grew." He enlarged on this topic: "I don't believe that, ultimately, there's anything worth learning but history, for if you know the past you're at home in the present, and you 'ye some chance of guessing right when you look ahead. The gentlemen who govern us seem constantly to be taken by surprise. Carey-Holt would do well at that job."
But I digress; indeed, I digress most shamefully; for it is not these two generations—that of the children and my own—with which just now I am most pressingly concerned. There was an older generation still, the third on our list; that of the two in-laws, the Honorable John and the Honorable Amelia, from whose Richmond place of residence Mrs. Tyrrell and the children had been so unexpectedly transplanted.
Me, for some curious reason, these two had accepted with very effortless and genuine cordiality. I have occasionally wondered about it, and have concluded that this condescension may be explained by the fact that my mother's cousin, Mary Branston, had married the Earl of Tadcaster. That must be it, for on more than one occasion they alluded to this relationship; and, indeed, it seemed to "place" me and tell them exactly who I was—in their eyes, at least. Vignolles, poor chap, could provide them with nothing so solid. I saw that that worried them and made a complete mess of his other qualities. To me they were very gracious; with Vignolles they maintained an unmistakable reserve.
I called on these old people several times. I had met them frequently at the new house, and it was only decent; and—may I be forgiven for saying it!—with all their pride and their condescension and their reservations, they were about the most futile pair of personages I have ever known. Nor were they particularly backward about letting me into the peculiar and fatuous phases of a history which to them no doubt was completely normal and acceptable. For seventy years and over they had lived upon this planet, and it seemed to me that in all that time neither the one nor the other had done a fair day's work; nor had it ever occurred to either one of them that anything so absurd could be demanded. They had not, of course, claimed this immunity; they had merely taken it for granted.
I have often wondered what would have become of this old couple had not Vignolles appeared at exactly the right moment; for the war, playing upon their inelastic revenues, had left them very badly in the lurch. And, moreover, the Honorable John, grasping at a chance remark dropped by Mr. Carey-Holt, had tried his luck upon the Stock Exchange and discovered that neither Mr. Carey-Holt nor his chance remarks were to be taken as infallible. Vignolles had helped them out of this affair, and at the same time had suggested to his brother-in-law that the old gentleman had better be discouraged in future; and, indeed, he had gone deep enough into the disordered finances of the two elder Tyrrells as to place these on a footing of some security. To them it appeared that he had sold out and re-invested, very profitably and very wisely; to me it appeared that he had exchanged their depreciated bonds for some of his own more lucrative securities.
I have a very clear recollection of a visit I paid to them about this period and of the tea they offered me in their little drawing-room. It was very good tea, and, in fact, so excellent that I remarked upon its quality and flavor.
They appreciated the compliment, and the Honorable John observed that one could trust Mrs. Tyrrell to get the "best of everything"; and next that dear old lady herself looked out on me, and with a certain child-like candor that was very winning, remarked quite simply: "To think that our boy's widow and our grandchildren should be dependent on this Mr. Vignolles!"
It was an embarrassing turn and I had no immediate reply; nor could I feel any anger with one so old and so very helpless.
"If one only knew anything about him," she ran on, "that would make all the difference. Of course we've met his sister and the brother-in-law who cheated John. Now, that wasn't very creditable."
"Well, it turned out all right, as it happened," the old gentleman interrupted her.
"Not through any fault of his," she rapped out, quite sharply. "And of course Mr. Vignolles has been kind and taken a lot of trouble; but all these new people—it is difficult to get used to them." And then the thought that had all along possessed her came suddenly to the surface, as she added, "If he'd been a gentleman, he'd have proposed to Angela instead of making this other arrangement."
"That would have been impossible," exclaimed the Honorable John, bridling.
Berta, the girl who was somebody's secretary, shared with me the honor of this interview. She resided with her grandparents, but otherwise was very independent, and, I believe, paid her way. She smiled across at me now, as much as to say, "They do talk, don't they?"
I attempted my little diversions and tried to interest them in some other subject, half a dozen other subjects, more or less; but Vignolles, and his social obscurity, and his not belonging to a recognizable class or circle—these were the points that mattered on this particular afternoon, and they returned to them again and yet again. They rankled, evidently.
"Now, if he were an American. One doesn't mind it so much with them, does one? And I suppose they are somebody in their own country." It was the Honorable Amelia who had crossed the Atlantic and arrived at this decision on the other side.
"In any case," I said at last, "if people work, they can't very well pick and choose whom they'll work for."
"No, I suppose not," admitted the Honorable John. "But there must be a few of us left; and perhaps Angela needn't have been so hasty."
It was no use arguing with them. I realized that, and how they had been brought up to regard people of a certain class as one thing and people of all other classes as another. Nor had Vignolles ever done anything considerable in politics or in law, or in any of those recognizable channels by which the commoner sort may enter upon a higher meeting-ground. He was most deplorably defenseless; and even the Carey-Holts, I next imagined, must in their heart of hearts regard him as some one who only by accident had escaped the category of the disreputable.
"He's very modest, certainly," the old lady had conceded, "and most people of that sort are rather loud."
"As long as he treats Angela with respect," the Honorable John had answered, "we must allow her to accept the situation."
"And the children?" I ventured, I dare say a trifle maliciously. "They seem to find him perfect."
"Oh, children are children," remarked the Honorable Amelia; and then she laughed and explained it by adding: "When I was a little girl, I'm afraid my best friends were the servants. I was always in the stables, or playing about in the housekeeper's rooms"; and the Honorable John laughed, too.
"I know we had a groom called Richards," said he, "and when I was a boy, he and I used to slink off and go racing. Not that for a moment I wish to compare Mr. Vignolles with poor old Richards," he corrected himself.
And then again I caught the eye of their grandchild, the independent Berta. She rose with me when I left and insisted on seeing me to the door and told the old gentleman that he mustn't trouble. And when we two were alone in the little hall, "I could throw things at them," she cried, passionately; "only I know they can't help it! And Mother's nearly as bad; but she's not too old to grow out of it I don't know what you must think of us! I often think that it's a good job all we Tyrrells and people like us are pretty well done for. I wouldn't marry one of them—" She had stopped short, rather flushed and as though surprised at herself; and she looked at me through her mother's eyes and with much the same softness creeping into her face and making it more charming than I could ever have suspected.
"He'll be a lucky chap, whoever he is," I said, taking her hand and tapping her lightly on the shoulder—I was old enough to allow myself that liberty. "A deuced lucky chap, Berta! I mean it—of course I mean it. And there's no harm done by what your grandfather and grandmother have said about old Fred. He can stand it. He's stood a good deal in his time, I should say; and a little more or less—"
"Can't hurt?" She had finished it for me.
And after that we shook hands, and I raised my hat to her and found the way downhill to Richmond Station.
"I don't know what you must think of us"
IX
It was all very curious; it was even a little disgusting and calculated to shake one's faith in what is called "human nature"; for there was not one of these people, who, in some way or another, did not stand in Vignolles's debt, and not one of them had a good word to say for him. I except, of course, those three delightful children, who, so far, were unspoiled and had not reached the age of criticism—no, not even the full-grown Berta! I had been pleased and astonished at her outbreak on that afternoon, as she was usually quiet and not especially demonstrative. She took most things in, I had discovered, but did not give very much away; and probably that was why she had made a success of her work as somebody's secretary.
I could understand the Carey-Holts. Young and old, they were greedy, and, being of the same blood with him, quite inevitably they must look upon Vignolles as their natural prey. I could even understand the older Tyrrells, whose pride and whose prejudices were these years very much on edge and to whom my friend most appear as a final portent of disorder. To them he must have come as the proverbial last straw; for even a Jew money-lender will do no more than produce his bond and ready cash and you are spared the horrors of his table. This the Honorable John had understood and could still understand. Not that poor old Fred bore any remote resemblance to such fowl, but most certainly he had put the older Tyrrells under obligations. And somebody had to put them under obligations, one felt sure, and, whoever it was, they would have hated it. But that young Mrs. Tyrrell should question Fred—she who was under no very special obligation—I did feel that that was rather strong; but, perhaps, as Berta had argued, she might get over it.
Yet not at all, for there came a day when she turned to me and I had to hear her rendering, or shall we describe it as her protest? It was during one of my week-ends with them and very much under the same circumstances as those that had occurred before. Fred had taken the children out for a long scramble through the fields, and Mrs. Tyrrell and I had remained behind. The gardens were indeed lovely at this season, when all the flowering shrubs blossomed in procession, seizing on that month before June passes quite away and carries off the year's first bounteous wonders.
Angela Tyrrell and I had stayed behind, and, to tell the cold philandering truth, it always did me good to look at her and pass an hour or two in her society. She was so absurdly pretty now that she was free from care, and young—indeed, I often thought that with each month she seemed to grow a year younger.
I told her so that morning, and added, "If you go on like that we'll have to send you to school again like Kit and Eden, or perhaps we'll find you a place as somebody's secretary."
"Oh, it's these fashions!" she laughed. "The way we dress to-day—it makes us all look our best—and sometimes our worst."
And yet she was not so noticeably displayed as were most of her tantalizing species at that particular epoch of jumpers and short skirts.
"Fashions?" I had answered. "No, it's not that. You're happy; you're absolutely happy. I don't believe you've a care in the world, of any consequence."
She knit her brow at this, and looked at me very steadily.
"How little you know!" she said; "though I suppose I'm foolish. Most women in my position would give a great deal to exchange with me. I'm aware of that. But I've had a home of my own, haven't I?"
On this enigmatic question there followed a silence. It was delicate ground and I had no wish to intrude upon it.
"But it does hurt a little, being in another person's house," she next resumed; "not that Mr. Vignolles isn't always considerate—too considerate. He doesn't know much about women, though, does he?"
At that I was forced to smile; for a keener judge of a difficult sex in all its breeds and races, white, yellow, and brown, I had rarely met.
"Well, our class," she corrected herself; "perhaps he does know 'women'; but there's a difference, isn't there?"
"I suppose there is; I've often wondered. You see, I've never been married to anybody, and it's only then one knows for certain." And next I took the bull by the horns; it was about time that somebody spoke up for him: "All you people—I know what I'm talking about—rather look down on dear old Fred, don't you?"
She hesitated, somewhat taken by surprise, for this was hardly the kind of diversion she had expected. But I didn't stop for her, and running on: "Your father-in-law and mother-in-law are pretty frank about it, and the Carey-Holts give themselves away whenever they get going, and you, when you're caught unawares; there's only me and the children. And, by Jove, if he isn't the best of the whole lot of us!"
She waited a little longer before she found a reply, and then she came out with it pat and very briefly. "He's different from anything I've been used to," she answered; and there, seemingly, was the end to it.
But I wasn't done. Far from it!
"You think—you think that he's not what you call—I'll use the hateful word—a gentleman? That he's not what people like you and your parents call a gentleman?"
She reflected for a moment, and then, "I suppose it is that," she conceded.
"But the children don't find him so, and they're better judges than you and I; and the future belongs to them, in any case. Has it ever occurred to you,' I asked more quietly, "that we of our generation will be edged out—are practically done for?"
"Are we?" she said. "I don't feel particularly 'done for'"; and it was difficult to resist her charming smile and the humor that lurked about her voice and soft blue eyes as she said it.
But I was serious.
"You've bumped into a man—a big man," I said, "who has had the courage not to be what you call a 'gentleman.'"
She didn't quite follow me, and I could see the effort; so, "What I mean is exactly this," I continued. "Fred's taken his own line and hasn't followed other people's. And when all of you say he's not quite right, that's what you mean; for it's nothing else. You're never quite sure what he's going to do or say; that's it, now isn't it? And all you people'd like to tyrannize and make him the same as everybody else and say and do what you like. If he'd been that kind, and soft and common—well, there would have been no garden and no house for us here; and you—you can guess what I might say but I won't say."
"The children and I would still be at Richmond?" She faced that courageously. And next, "Go on—do go on," she said; "I rather like it"
I went on:
"After all, there must be a few people who don't cringe and lie, and who say straight out what they think, and who aren't afraid of loving and who aren't afraid of hating; and who don't care whether they're rich or poor, and don't expect to be kept in the one case and aren't fat parasites in the other. After all, Fred's giving the world some value for its money. Dashed good value, I should say!"
My eyes were resting straight on her; and there they stayed, taking in the full-blown beauty of her. For these last moments she seemed to have expanded and warmed and completed herself, as though she were a flower; as though she had opened and filled like a rose kissed wide by the sun. And then she moved toward me, one step closer, and in her low, sweet voice, "I see—I see," she said. "It had never occurred to me. A woman looks in, perhaps, too much, instead of looking out. And I'm forgetting all about the Sunday dinner, am I not?" she ended. "You'll amuse yourself for a little while?"
She was gone, leaving me alone on the big lawn by the greenhouses; and I was feeling rather the better for having said my say; and if I took the path through the wood, I'd be sure to run into Fred Vignolles and the children, and if I didn't it wouldn't much matter.
But I did and walked a mile with them, and they made him blow smoke-rings on the way and leap the ditch instead of crossing by the plank; and at table—we were just the five of us—there was the usual scramble as to who should sit next to Uncle Fred. It was Kit's turn, it seemed, but, being a lady and therefore less law-abiding, Eden had jumped his claim and was installed..... Yes, it was quite clear. Those children owned him now; he was their property; and they called him Uncle Fred, because, if he called them Kit and Eden and took other liberties, surely they had the right to call him Fred. And the "Uncle" was, firstly, a concession to his years and maturity; secondly, to his rank in our vanished armies, still cherished by these children; and thirdly, to euphony and to convenience. They had argued it out between the three of them, and, after a hot debate, had arrived at this decision.
X
I do not know that Vignolles would have been especially interested in all these discussions or that he would have cared very much whether these people approved of him or whether they didn't; and so secure seemed his serenity that it more than once occurred to me how no one would have been more astonished than just he, had he discovered that his doings and his shortcomings were being dissected with so great a heat and from so many different points of view and angles. He gave no sign of any inklings or least suspicion of the truth; he was invariably the same, and, just now, deeply committed and engaged with his many tasks and duties. He did get impatient once or twice, expressing himself with his usual vigor; but that was quite outside anything connected with his private affairs or his domestic circumstances.
The newspapers had discovered him, it seemed, and had agreed that he was what they called "a personality." He was keen on the disabled soldier, the workless, and every other kind of soldier, and he had said some characteristically downright things about the government departments concerned, about some of the trades unions and also about certain of our big employers. He had said them in committee and at semi-private meetings; yet, somehow, they had got into those confounded newspapers! And he didn't mind that so much, but what he did mind was that, instead of dwelling on the matters he had at heart and which were of real consequence, the most of these wretched journals had merely exploited him; had seized with a strange tenacity on Fred Vignolles, and let the rest go hang. He didn't at all like it.
"But you can't help that," I explained one day, as we were strolling arm in arm down St. James's Street after one of these very committee meetings; for I was in it too a little, though hardly very much in the limelight, where circumstance, leisure, and a very clear sense of duty had placed my friend.
"You've been out of England too long; and just now, I'm afraid, England's all politics and newspapers," I had pursued. "Especially newspapers. Modern civilization's mostly getting things into them or keeping things out—keeping 'em out, I fancy—and we've got to swallow it."
"But why all this nonsense about me?" he answered. "I don't want anything."
"That alone must make you something of a novelty; and they're after new things, aren't they? That's why they are called newspapers."
I was enjoying my own little joke, when suddenly he too started to chuckle. But not at me, nor at anything I had left said or unsaid. For presently he came out with it:
"You know those two old Tyrrells," he began, "the Honorable John and the Honorable Amelia, who fancy themselves so enormously and think that they're the products of a separate act of creation—well, they're enormously impressed by it, and so's my sister and Carey-Holt, and they can't hide it."
We had reached the club where we were lunching, and, seated at our corner table, he reverted to this topic.
"You see, people like me, when we get into those confounded newspapers, begin to count. Bather ridiculous, ain't it?"
"It's a ridiculous world," I assured him. "Why, even this place"—and I looked round at its pillars and its marbles and its waiters and waitresses with brass buttons and a kind of uniform—"even this place—if you belong to it, you're supposed to be a Conservative. Are you one?"
"Blest if I know!" said Vignolles. "It was handy, and there was a fellow who offered to put me up. They give you a very good lunch, and it's fairly reasonable—cheaper than those damned restaurants, where they stick you and look quite hurt if you don't go strong on the wine list." And next he wandered back to the older Tyrrells; for it appeared that the Honorable John had been having another little flutter and had been caught short—it was some kind of oils—and hadn't the ready cash to meet the difference.
"If the old fellow will gamble," I said curtly, "he must stand the racket."
"Must he?" smiled Vignolles. "I think I'll let the old lady and Berta give him a good wigging, and then, perhaps, I'll sail in and lend him the hundred or two he's asked for. Poor old chap, he's been brought up to regard backing horses, cards, and the Stock Exchange as Britain's leading industries!"
He dwelt for a moment longer with the Honorable John, and likewise with the Honorable Amelia.
"That old couple," he pursued, "I know they think me mud, as the dirt under their feet; they've said as much to you, haven't they?"
"They didn't put it quite so picturesquely; but it was something of the kind."
"And the Carey-Holts," he ran on, "my sister and all that lot, can't get over my haying a bit of money. I suppose they're a trifle disappointed? Blurted it out to you, I'll bet. You've a knack of worming out these confidences." And he laughed aloud at me. "Aren't I an instance?" he asked. "I'm telling you all I know and a little you didn't want me to know. They're all divided among themselves and all united in thinking me the limit."
I let him go on; for I couldn't deny it; though I had never suspected him of seeing so far into them and showing neither displeasure nor disgust at what I, certainly, should have resented.
"And young Mrs. Tyrrell," he added now, "she's a trifle critical? But Kit and Eden and I don't care for anybody, and I bet Berta's on our side. It's all very natural, though, isn't it?"
It didn't seem so very natural to me, and I began to say as much. But he interrupted me.
"Those poor old Tyrrells!" he exclaimed. "Don't you see that they've never had a chance? That they've been most shamefully neglected; just like the poor devils you meet down in Lambeth or any other slum, only they're at the top end instead of at the bottom? Never learnt anything at school, never been anywhere, never done anything, never been kicked into doing anything! Oh, they're all right. If they'd only had a fair chance, they might have been something rather splendid. Too late, now, isn't it? No good producing people of that kind unless you give them money and lots of responsibility; and they've never had either. They've been cheated; and so they've had to dig themselves in behind their prejudices, just like the anarchists and communists and socialists and all those other fellows one hears so much about and who are at the other end of it. If old John had come of a less exalted stock, perhaps he'd have been one of that lot, and out to skin people openly; on paper, or with his mouth, or somehow safe. Though I believe the old chap would have had the pluck and breeding to come out fair and square instead of skulking."
We had reached the club smoking-room by now and, apparently he was enjoying these dissertations; for, seated in comfort, he came next to the Carey-Holts, his sister and his brother-in-law; and he had no illusions about them, either.
"They're my own tribe, I suppose, and the tribe I've escaped," was how he read them. "Perhaps I'd have finished up like that myself if I'd been a good little boy and honored my parents. Now I've got some money, they feel they've a right to it. But don't they feel that they've a right to all the money in the world—if they can get hold of it? That's their view of life, or their religion. It's the sort of thing you rather come to in London, in Paris, in New York—in all the big cities. You've got to get money there, or go under. And so you begin to make a god of money; and, gradually, it displaces the old gods whom one would like to see kept alive. 'Old-fashioned,' Carey-Holt would say. But you can't quite help it when you've known great skies of stars, and watched the sun come up or drop below the ranges, or when you've played your life against the wonder of the sea. Or, perhaps, you've kicked up a few coins in the drifting sands of the desert and found the carving on a broken column; and you know that a thousand cities have risen and disappeared and their Carey-Holts with them. But the stars haven't changed, and the sun hasn't changed, and the hearts of kids like Kit and Eden. Poor old Carey-Holt!—he can't help it."
And next there was Angela Tyrrell; and I wondered whether, with his curious insight, that nothing escaped, that revealed everything, he had found a clue to her.
He had, seemingly; for now he produced a letter from an inside pocket; and, "Look at this," he said, handing it over.
I unfolded the thing. It was written on the one page and dated from the house on the country's edge, and at the foot I read, "Angela Tyrrell." And next I attacked the note itself which ran:
       Dear Mr. Vignolles:
       There are certain personal and private reasons why our present arrangement must come to an end. I need not enter into them, for it is sufficient to state that they exist. Of course I am not going to leave you in the lurch, but as soon as you have found a successor, I should be glad to hear of it, so that I can make my plans accordingly. You may rest assured that I will never forget your kindness and consideration, and that the children, could they express themselves, would be in full agreement with
Yours most sincerely, Anqela Tyrrell.
I whistled when I had read this. I folded it and returned it.
"Rather a blow, isn't it?" I asked; and then, on a moment's reflection, "So charming a woman—of course, one might expect it."
"I did expect it," he answered, unconcerned.
"Marrying again?" I said.
"Sure," he replied; and next, dismissing the matter: "She's had a little difficulty in swallowing me, as well? You seem to be in everybody's confidence," and he smiled with his curious eyes, the youth and the expressive vitality of which were always to me so striking.
He did not wait for my answer; indeed, any answer to that would have been rather beyond me. She had had a little difficulty in swallowing him; but who was I to report as to whether she had or as to whether she hadn't?
Vignolles interrupted these reflections with a question, or was it a reminiscence? I confess that the point of it escaped me at the time.
"You remember," he asked suddenly, "the little dun mare I used to ride, the one I had at Kantara?"
I remembered it perfectly.
"The other fellows had given it up. It wouldn't pass this and it wouldn't pass that and it shied at its own shadow; it had nerves and it was afraid—so everybody told me. Well, when I'd had it a month or two, I could make it pass anything. I don't think I did more than talk to it and stroke its nose. Angela Tyrrell's a trifle like that little mare," he ended, thoughtfully; "more than a trifle."
XI
It was altogether inexplicable, and, in a way, painful. Vignolles would lose those two delightful kids that he was so set upon, and they would lose Vignolles; and I doubted whether this new man—I was already picturing him, and rather jealously—would prove anything but a poor substitute for my big-hearted friend; as to whose unconcern—he had acted it very cleverly—was it not merely a cloak under which he hid the hurt he had sustained? A deep wound, I felt it must be, for all his acting and all his cleverness; and my imagination raced, and I saw the house—that warm nest he had made for them—standing cheerless, standing emptied, and him doing his best to get over it. And I saw, too, the Carey-Holts, all four of them, rubbing their hands together and plucking up courage; and the two old Tyrrells hovering round and questioning and getting the right answer—the man was one of the well-groomed, one of the self-satisfied, one of their own dull sort. And then I saw Kit and Eden having to part with their Uncle Fred, and setting up no end of a howl at the cruel prospect. I think I must have spent a very miserable evening. And next day there was Berta, whom I had invited to dinner and a theater; for I felt that, apart from her always invigorating company, it was up to me to give her some change in the round of being somebody's secretary.
"What do you think of it?" I had asked her, as she helped herself to a cigarette and dropped a pill of that wretched saccharine into her coffee; "of your mother's leaving us, and all that? But, of course, I'm a trifle jealous—bound to be!"
Berta looked at me and looked at me; so I went into the crude details.
"Mother's chucked her job?" she exclaimed. "It's the first I've heard of it."
"Of course—so charming a woman—it's very natural."
"Natural fiddlesticks!" Berta had interrupted. "What are you talking about?" She was a very direct young person, like all these samples of the new generation that now are tramping on our slower-moving heels.
Well, I'll come out with it," said I.
"Do," said Berta.
"I suppose your mother's going to marry again—and so does Fred."
Berta laughed. She rolled in her chair like a silly schoolboy and roared at us; for I include old Fred, whom I had merely quoted.
"You suppose that, do you?" she asked, shaking some of the hair that she wore short and rather in a mop, out of her eyes, and looking across at me with an expression which plainly conveyed that she thought me something not very far removed from an infant.
"I'll run down and see Mother," she said next; and then smiling out at me, very frankly and with that big-brotherly air she so often produced: "Mother's gone potty on old Fred," she added, "and the joke is that she doesn't know it!"
It was irreverent—it was most deucedly irreverent—but, with this younger and this newer generation, one was growing used to that.
"What evidence?" I asked, aiming at severity, and making, I believe, rather a hash of it. "What evidence have you?" I repeated.
"Oh, one just knows. Either one does or else one doesn't."
"I suppose even you make mistakes, sometimes," I replied to this; "though you will be nineteen next birthday and you pay for your own frocks."
She disregarded this superiority, and, rising from her chair, "All right; I thought I'd tell you; and what about that old play?" she ended.
We reached it just in time to see the curtain rise and some guests being announced in a bright green drawing-room. And then they talked and talked and talked away instead of getting on with the business. Berta seemed to enjoy it all, though I confess I didn't.
XII
The mystery was none the clearer when, on the next day, I received a brief yet jubilant message from Fred Vignolles, in which he announced that Angela and he were getting married. "And you're to be best man and a witness and all that," he said. "It'll be very quiet; we're fixing it up with the parson here and it's not getting into those confounded newspapers. Angela's got some shopping to do and I've got a committee. We'll look you up in a day or two and tell you all about it."
Of course I was impatient, but really I hadn't so very long to wait before they sent a wire, and, in the afternoon, came up themselves—Fred rather hurried and late for some engagement in the City.
"You'll give Angela tea and let her rest a little," he said, after I had done with my congratulations and he had explained that he had to be off again at once. "I'll be back as soon as they let me," he ended, "and you'll take care of her. I can find my way out; don't trouble"; and he was gone. And there was Angela, lovely, quite radiant, and following him to the doorway with her eyes.
"I'll be back as soon as they let me," he ended, "and you'll take care of her"
I rang for tea and my man served it; and when he was done, "What's all this?" I asked. "I'm dying—I'm simply dying to hear."
She smiled her soft, mysterious smile, so full of secret happiness; but even that didn't take me very much farther.
"When you've done smiling," I said, "and looking beautiful—yes, you do look beautiful."
She liked that, too, and glowed to it.
"You're unendurably pretty—"
"Am I?" And then, "I feel it," she said quite simply; and turning to me lazily and with her usual frankness, "You dear man," she added, "it's very much your fault."
I shook my head at this, for it wasn't very clear.
"Why mine?" I asked.
"hen I was a little fool—that seems ages ago now—when I behaved and talked like a little fool, didn't you always stick up for Fred?"
"Oh, that!" I answered. "Anybody would have done that!"
"Nobody else did—nobody grown up—and you made me see him at last, as he is, and not as I wanted him to be. He's bigger—ever so much bigger—than the man I wanted him to be. He's bigger than any of us; and yet we all had the impertinence to sneer and to criticize. I don't think I'd have discovered that if you hadn't scolded so. You did scold; and I deserved it; of course, if I hadn't deserved it, you wouldn't have scolded."
She had paused here; and now I nodded, for I was beginning to understand—a little with Berta's help, too, as I remembered how Berta had sized her mother up as being undecided, on the fence, so to speak: she might come down on our side, the right side, or she might choose for the other, for the tradition of the older Tyrrells. She had, however, come over to us—come to us now quite definitely. She was young enough for that; she had a sufficient force and vitality.
"I'm glad," I almost shouted, as I realized what I have endeavored to express; lamely, I fancy, but it must do.
Yet all this didn't take us very much farther; and next I found myself asking, "Why did you write that letter—that letter giving Fred notice, throwing up your job?"
"I don't know; 1 couldn't help it. As long as I didn't think much about him—rather despised him—for I did despise him—I never questioned. I could have stayed on forever like that," she now explained. "But when I left off being a little snob and a little cad and saw him as he was and saw what a little beast I was—then I had to go. I couldn't stay; I simply had to go."
She was done; and though I offered no comment, I thought the more.
"And Fred?" I asked at last.
"Oh, he looked up at me—I had come in to his study and he was sitting at the writing-desk. I had come in to see him about the housekeeping—about the checks and things. He was busy when I came in, and he'd had my letter giving notice, and he hadn't said anything, and it hadn't made a bit of difference. My letter was on the desk. He held it up to me, and 'I ought to have answered this, I suppose,' he said, quite cold and businesslike."
She was enjoying it all, and she paused before she went on again:
"I didn't quite know what to say, for I had grown a little afraid of him; and he was looking up at me; and then his eyes softened, and next he just took me—simply took me—just as if I'd been Kit or Eden, just as if I'd been a child. And then I first knew what love was; I'd never known till then. I'm telling you this—I don't know why I'm telling you this—but one has to tell somebody. And I don't know that I could talk about it to Fred—not now, when one is living it. Oh, if you talk about things you feel and do together, it's not right, is it? Because there aren't words, really. Of course it's foolish of me to go on like this—an old woman with three big children!—isn't it? But till now, I didn't know. I was just a girl before; and Arthur loved me and I let him love me—that was all. Perhaps it's cruel and wrong of me to say it. But when one's a girl, one doesn't know, does one?"
It seemed to me, as I listened to her then—as I had never listened to her before and as I have never listened to her since—that it did her good to say these things. So much of what she had said was new to her—so very much! And there was I—old and spent and gray, and rather like a father confessor, or some fat priest. I made the comparison aloud. At any rate, it might change her mood or bring a laugh.
It did both.
"Yes, you would have made a very good priest," she answered, smiling and her old untroubled self again. "You ought to have been a Catholic, and then they'd have made you a bishop."
"If you say so," I replied; "still, I'm of some use as I am."
I remember that I was rather glad when Fred came back and took her away from me; for, after all, it hurt a little—it hurt a good deal more than a little.
"You're spending the week-end with us," they said before they left. "It'll be the last—till we come back."
They went after that, and I saw them downstairs to the car that was waiting in the dusk of a November evening; and going back to my rooms, I stirred the fire and looked out of the window at the naked trees. It was solitary up here—lonely—dashed lonely!
XIII
I remember that next week-end with a peculiar fullness; for everything and everybody seemed changed down to the very servants, who had all grown sentimental and were wallowing—positively wallowing—in this sudden outbreak of romance. It moved them, this story with its "happy ending" all complete; and I could understand them and forgive them; for was it not one of their most cherished legends come to life? had not our most popular writers built their fortunes on this identical complication? Those servant-girls loved it; and they were not far wrong.
And the two older Tyrrells, the Honorable John and the Honorable Amelia, who had been here as watch-dogs ever since they had heard the news? They had safeguarded the proprieties; to-day they were full of an importance; they were Mr. and Mrs. Grundy. The world had found a use for them at last. And they had put by their objections; stood neither aloof nor coldly critical. Bather the reverse.
"She's making a good match—a rare good match," the Honorable John confided to me; "and you know, after all, he isn't a bad fellow. A very good fellow, when you really know him,."
The Honorable Amelia agreed with this estimate, apparently; for she nodded wisely, and, "It's such an excellent thing for the children," she added to her husband's summary. "Mr. Vignolles is not very young; but Angela's not far from forty. Yes, I think it's a very good match, considering."
Besides the two old Tyrrells, on the Sunday we had a visit from the head of their house, the earl and his countess, hitherto invisible and mysterious figures who had somehow only been held over our unworthy heads. They had materialized at last, quite a youngish couple, who had driven up from somewhere, left their cards, and stayed to tea. The Honorable John was full of it; took, indeed, some little time to get over it; though his nephew or his great-nephew—I forget the exact relationship—appeared to be a very modest fellow, and, if anything, somewhat afraid of us. Nor he nor his lady seemed to have any great illusions about their superiority to common-folk. They had the title, and it was a luxury that cost no end to keep up and involved all manner of duties, and one couldn't in any way get out of it Such might have been their view of the thing. They implied as much, strolling through the grounds and admiring the completeness of the little place. I think they envied Fred his simpler state.
Nor must I omit the Carey-Holts, who had motored down with their congratulations; and I will say this much for them, now the decision had been declared, they took their defeat like sportsmen. "You've won," Mrs. Carey-Holt might have said to Angela; "and there's an end to it." But of course she never said anything of the kind; yet, for all that, she and the stock-broker and the two young people were uncommonly decent, the girl sizing up the situation as it affected the whole of them, when, getting me apart, "It isn't as though Uncle Fred were marrying a nobody," she said; "and, of course, he has a perfect right to do as he pleases."
Through all these people and through all this coming and going, I have still a vision of Kit and Eden, both hugely excited and full of the infection that was in the air; passing from group to group, being called to and petted, and every now and again wondering and bewildered by these grown-ups and the fuss that they were making.
And, lastly, there was Fred, looking out on us all, unchanged, and rather impassive, as though, something like the children, he too were wondering why all these people should press round in a matter that, primarily, concerned but Angela Tyrrell and himself.
After supper the house quieted down a little, and presently Angela and the old people went their way and only Fred and I were left of that whole host. Before turning in for the night we went up to his den. It was peaceful there and comfortable, and one had no fear of being disturbed.
We smoked our cigars and sat in two big chairs with the firelight playing between us; and my thoughts went back to the day when, returned from his wanderings, he had told me how the war had unexpectedly given him a fortune, and of his desire "to do some good with it." And next I dwelt on that quaint advertisement he had put into the newspapers, and his war-widows and their children, and how he had lit on Angela Tyrrell. A year had passed since then, a year and over; and Angela Tyrrell had been living here a good many months.
I recalled the whole affair to him, went over its outstanding phases. "To think that it should end like this!" I said.
"It might have ended worse, mightn't it?" he asked, smiling that curious, semi-detached and wholly philosophic smile of his that was so baffling to the common egoist.
I nodded. And then, "You took your time over it," I pursued; "you spotted the children pretty quick, but it took you rather a long time to discover a very charming woman, didn't it?"
"Five minutes," he answered; "five minutes."
"You old rascal!" I gasped, sitting bolt upright in my chair. "You old rascal! Do you mean to say that all along you've been deceiving us—that it wasn't the children?"
"Well, of course," and next he added, "I wanted the children; but they grow up and go away from you—and then?"
"Do you mean to say that you plotted the whole thing out, and that all the time—"
"I mean to say that I met exactly the right woman and gave myself the chance of winning her."
"By Gad, you are a wonder!—you always were a wonder!" was the only answer I could find to this.
"Not always—by Jove not!" he corrected me. "But I have met a woman before to-day, if that's what you mean."
"I never doubted it; but to take us all in!" I seemed, at the moment, unable to get over that part of the business.
He explained matters further; and perhaps he owed me this last confidence; or, like Angela Tyrrell, he felt a human need to "tell somebody."
"I might have been deceiving myself, as well as you," he had pursued; "and, in any case, Kit and Eden were all right; but when I got that letter giving me notice—I showed it to you—then I knew."
"Knew what?"
"That if I asked Angela to stay here, she would stay."
"You mean it told you—it told you she was fond of you?"
"If you like to put it that way."
Angela herself had already put it very much stronger; but I couldn't well tell him so, could I?
"But how did you know?" I asked. "How did you know?"
"You dear old idiot, wasn't I waiting for it! Didn't I know that if she cared, she couldn't very well stay on—as a housekeeper?"
He was right; and again Angela herself was my authority.
"So you waited for that, did you?"
"Look here, me lad, it had to happen in one of three ways, hadn't it?"
He expected me to follow this; but I didn't.
"I see. I had better explain," he now continued. "I might have proposed then and there, after five minutes, mightn't I? But that would have been ridiculous, so we'll count it out. That leaves two."
I followed so far.
"Or, secondly, I could have waited for a few months, and then I could have proposed romantically, as we used to do when we were young and foolish. Angela might have accepted me or she might not. She probably wouldn't have; but assuming she had, she'd have argued this way about it: 'Poor old thing, I'd better take pity on him.' And 'poor old thing,' I'd have been to her for the rest of my days. So many wives are like that and so many husbands. You may have noticed it?"
I had noticed that.
They marry some poor devil to put him out of his pain and they're sorry for him ever afterward. I can't say that I wanted to be pitied. Never have done, never will do. But there was one other way. I was sure enough of myself—"
"You mean to say you left it to her to do the rest; and that's what that letter of hers comes to?"
"It's no good marrying a woman unless she cares for you," he parried, "is it? And I've wanted that; wanted that most damnably for Lord knows how many years!"