The Fortunate Youth

W >> William J. Locke >> The Fortunate Youth

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23

"I will make public later on the reasons for our respective changes
of name. For the present it is enough to state the fact of our
relationship and of our mutual affection and respect. That I thank
you for electing me goes without saying; and I will do everything in
my power to advance the great cause you have enabled me to
represent. I regret I cannot address you in another place to-night,
as I had intended. I must ask you of your kindness to let me go
quietly where my duty and my heart call me to my father's
death-bed."

He bowed and waved a dignified gesture of farewell, and turning into
the hall met the assemblage of long, astounded faces. From outside
came the dull rumbling of the dispersing crowd. The mayor, the first
to break the silence, murmured a platitude.

Paul thanked him gravely. Then he went to Wilson. "Forgive me," said
he, "for all that has been amiss with me to-day. It has been a
strain of a very peculiar kind."

"I can well imagine it," said Wilson.

"You see I'm not an aristocrat, after all," said Paul.

Wilson looked the young man in the face and saw the steel beneath
the dark eyes, and the Proud setting of the lips. With a sudden
impulse he wrung his hand. "I don't care a damn!" said he. "You
are."

Paul said, unsmiling: "I can face the music. That's all." He drew a
note from his pocket. "Will you do me a final service? Go round to
the Conservative Club at once, and tell the meeting what has
happened, and give this to Colonel Winwood."

"With pleasure," said Wilson.

Then Paul shook hands with all his fellow-workers and thanked them
in his courtly way, and, pleading for solitude, went through the
door of the great chamber and, guided by an attendant, reached the
exit in a side street where his car awaited him. A large concourse
of people stood drawn up in line on each side of the street,
marshalled by policemen. A familiar crooked figure limped from the
shadow of the door, holding a hard felt hat, his white poll gleaming
in the shaft of light. "God bless you, sonny," he said in a hoarse
whisper.

Paul took the old man by the arm and drew him across the pavement to
the car. "Get in," said he.

Barney Bill hung back. "No, sonny; no."

"It's not the first time we've driven together. Get in. I want you."

So Barney Bill allowed himself to be thrust into the luxurious car,
and Paul followed. And perhaps for the first time in the history of
great elections the successful candidate drove away from the place
where the poll was declared in dead silence, attended only by the
humblest of his constituents. But every man in the throng bared his
head.

CHAPTER XXI

"HE had the stroke in the night," said Barney Bill suddenly.

Paul turned sharply on him. "Why wasn't I told?"

"Could you have cured him?"

"Of course not."

"Could you have done him any good?"

"I ought to have been told."

"You had enough of worries before you for one day, sonny."

"That was my business," said Paul.

"Jane and I, being as it were responsible parties, took the liberty,
so to speak, of thinking it our business too."

Paul drummed impatiently on his knees.

"Yer ain't angry, are you, sonny?" the old man asked plaintively.

"No--not angry--with you and Jane--certainly not. I know you
acted for the best, out of love for me. But you shouldn't have
deceived me. I thought it was a mere nervous breakdown--the strain
and shock. You never said a word about it, and Jane, when I talked
to her this morning, never gave me to dream there was anything
serious amiss. So I say you two have deceived me."

"But I'm a telling of yer, sonny--"

"Yes, yes, I know. I don't reproach you. But don't you see? I'm sick
of lies. Dead sick. I've been up to my neck in a bog of falsehood
ever since I was a child and I'm making a hell of a struggle to get
on to solid ground. The Truth for me now. By God! nothing but the
Truth!"

Barney Bill, sitting for-ward, hunched up, on the seat of the car,
just as he used to sit on the footboard of his van, twisted his head
round. "I'm not an eddicated person," said he, "although if I hadn't
done a bit of reading in my time I'd have gone dotty all by my lones
in the old 'bus, but I've come to one or two conclusions in my, so
to speak, variegated career, and one is that if you go one in that
'ere mad way for Truth in Parliament, you'll be a bull in a china
shop, and they'll get sticks and dawgs to hustle you out. Sir Robert
Peel, old Gladstone, Dizzy, the whole lot of the old Yuns was up
against it. They had to compromise. It's compromise"--the old man
dwelt lovingly, as usual, on the literary word--"it's compromise
you must have in Parliament."

"I'll see Parliament damned first!" cried Paul, his nerves on edge.

"You'll have to wait a long time, sonny," said Barney Bill, wagging
a sage head. "Parliament takes a lot of damning."

"Anyhow," said Paul, not eager to continue the argument, but
unconsciously caught in the drift of Barney Bill's philosophy, "my
private life isn't politics, and there's not going to be another lie
in my private life as long as I live."

The old man broke a short silence with a dry chuckle. "How it takes
one back!" he said reflectively. "Lor lumme! I can hear yer speaking
now--just in the same tone--the night what yer run away with me.
Yer hadn't a seat to yer breeches then, and now you've a seat in
Parliament." He chuckled again at his joke. "But"--he gripped the
young man's knee in his bony clasp--"you're just the same Paul,
sonny, God bless yer--and you'll come out straight all right. Here
we are."

The car drew up before Silas Finn's house. They entered. Jane,
summoned, came down at once and met them in the dreadful
dining-room, where a simple meal was spread.

"I haven't heard--" she said.

"I'm in."

"I'm glad."

"My father--?" he asked curtly.

She looked at him wide-eyed for a second or two as he stood, his
fur-lined coat with astrachan collar thrown open, his hand holding a
soft felt hat on his hip, his absurdly beautiful head thrown back,
to casual glance the Fortunate Youth of a month or two ago. But to
Jane's jealous eye he was not even the man she had seen that
afternoon. He looked many years older. She confessed afterwards to
surprise at not finding his hair grey at the temples, thus
manifesting her ordered sense of the harmonious. She confessed, too,
that she was frightened--jane who, for any other reason than the
mere saving of her own skin, would have stolidly faced Hyrcanean
tigers--at the stern eyes beneath the contracted brows. He was a
different Paul altogether. And here we have the divergence between
the masculine and the feminine point of view. Jane saw a new avatar;
Barney Bill the ragged urchin of the Bludston brick-fields. She
shifted her glance to the old man. He, standing crookedly, cocked
his head and nodded.

"He knows all about it."

"Yes, yes," said Paul. "How is my father?"

Jane threw out her hands in the Englishwoman's insignificant
gesture. "He's unconscious--has been for hours--the nurse is up
with him--the end may come any moment. I hid it from you till the
last for your own sake. Would you care to go upstairs?"

She moved to the door. Paul threw off his overcoat and, followed by
Barney Bill, accompanied her. On the landing they were met by the
nurse.

"It is all over," she said.

"I will go in for a moment," said Paul. "I should like to be alone."

In a room hung like the rest of the house with gaudy pictures he
stood for a short while looking at the marble face of the
strange-souled, passionate being that had been his father. The lids
had closed for ever over the burning, sorrowful eyes; the mobile
lips were for ever mute. In his close sympathy with the man Paul
knew what had struck him down. It was not the blow of the nameless
enemy, but the stunning realization that he was not, after all, the
irresistible nominee of the Almighty. His great faith had not
suffered; for the rigid face was serene, as though he had accepted
this final chastisement and purification before entrance into the
Eternal Kingdom; but his high pride, the mainspring of his fanatical
life, had been broken and the workings of the physical organism had
been arrested. In those few moments of intense feeling, in the
presence of death, it was given to Paul to tread across the
threshold of the mystery of his birth. Here lay stiff and cold no
base clay such as that of which Polly Kegworthy had been formed. It
had been the tenement of a spirit beautiful and swift. No matter to
what things he himself had been born--he had put that foolishness
behind him--at all events his dream bad come partly true. His
father had been one of the great ones, one of the conquerors, one of
the high princes of men. Multitudes of kings had not been so
parented. Outwardly a successful business man and a fanatical
Dissenter--there were thousands like Silas Finn. But Paul knew his
inner greatness, the terrific struggle of his soul, the warrings
between fierce blood and iron will, the fervent purpose, the lofty
aspirations and the unwavering conduct of his life of charity and
sorrow. He stretched out his hand and with his finger tips lightly
touched the dead man's forehead. "I'm proud to be your son," he
murmured.

Then the nurse came in and Paul went downstairs. Barney Bill waylaid
him in the hall, and led him into the dining-room. "Have a little
food and drink, sonny. You look as if yer need it--especially
drink. 'Ere." He seized a decanter of whisky--since Paul's first
visit, Silas had always kept it in the house for his son's,
comforting--and would have filled the tumbler had not Paul
restrained him. He squirted in the soda. "Drink it down and you'll
feel better."

Paul swallowed a great gulp. "Yes," he agreed. "There are times when
it does help a man."

"Liquor is like a dawg," said Bill. "Keep it in subjection, so to
speak, and it's yer faithful friend."

"Where's Jane?" Paul asked.

"She's busy. Half the borough seem to be calling, or telephoning"--
and even at that moment Paul could hear the maid tripping across the
hall and opening the front door--"I've told her what occurred. She
seemed half skeered. She's had a dreadful day, pore gal."

"She has indeed," said Paul.

He threw himself into a chair, dead beat, at the end of emotional
strain, and remained talking with the old man of he scarce knew
what. But these two--Jane and the old man--were linked to him by
imperishable ties, and he could not leave them yet awhile in the
house of death. Barney Bill stirred the fire, which blazed up,
making the perky animals on the hearth cast faint and fantastic
shadows.

"It's funny how he loved those darned little beasts, isn't it now? I
remember of him telling me as how they transported him into magic
something--or the other--medi--he had a word for it--I dunno--"

"Mediaeval?"

"That's it, sonny. Mediaeval forests. It means back of old times,
don't it? King Arthur and his Round Table--I done a bit of
reading, yer know." The old man took out pouch and pipe. "That's
what drew us together, sonny, our taste for literature. Remember?"

"Can I ever forget?" said Paul.

"Well, he was like that too. He had lots of po'try in him--not the
stuff that rhymes, yer know, like 'The Psalm of Life' and so forth,
but real po'try. I wish I could tell yer what I mean--" His
face was puckered into a thousand wrinkles with the intellectual
effort, and his little diamond eyes gleamed. "He could take a
trumpery common thing like that there mug-faced, lop-eared hare and
make it stand for the medi-what-you-call-it-forest. I've said to
him, 'Come out with me on the old 'bus if you want green and
loneliness and nature.' And he has said--I recollect one talk in
particular--he said, 'I'd love to hear' something about a pipe--
I'm getting old, sonny--"

"The Pipes of Pan?" Paul suggested.

"The very words. Lor lumme! how did you guess it?" He paused, his
fingers holding the lighted match, which went out before he could
apply it to his tobacco. "Yus. 'The Pipes of Pan.' I don't know what
it means. Anyway, he said he'd love to hear them in the real forest,
but duty kept him to bricks and mortar and so he had to hear them in
imagination. He said that all them footling little beasts were
a-listening to 'em, and they told him all about it. I remember he
told me more about the woods than I know myself--and I reckon I
could teach his business to any gamekeeper or poacher in England. I
don't say as how he knew the difference between a stoat and a weasel--he
didn't. A cock-pheasant and a hen-partridge would have been
the same to him. But the spirit of it--the meaning of it--he
fair raised my hair off--he knew it a darned sight better nor I.
And that's what I set out for to say, sonny. He had po'try in him.
And all this"--he swept an all-inclusive hand--"all this meant
to him something that you and I can't tumble to, sonny. It meant
something different to what it looked like--ah!" and impatient at
his impotence to express philosophic thought, he cast another
lighted match angrily into the fire.

Paul, high product of modern culture, sat in wonder at the common
old fellow's clarity of vision. Tears rolled down his cheek. "I
know, dear old Bill, what you're trying to say. Only one man has
ever been able to say it. A mad poet called Blake.

'To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour'."

Barney Bill started forward in his chair and clapped his hand on the
young man's knee. "By gum! you've got it. That's what I was
a-driving at. That's Silas. I call to mind when he was a boy--
pretty dirty and ragged he was too--as he used to lean over the
parapet of Blackfriars Bridge and watch the current sort of swirling
round the piers, and he used to say as how he could hear what the
river was saying. I used to think him loony. But it was po'try,
sonny, all the time."

The old man, thus started on reminiscence, continued, somewhat
garrulous, and Paul, sunk in the armchair by the fire, listened
indulgently, waiting for Jane. She, meanwhile, was occupied upstairs
and in the library answering telephone messages and sending word out
to callers by the maid. For, on the heels of Paul, as Barney Bill
had said, many had come on errand of inquiry and condolence and all
the news agencies and newspapers of London seemed to be on the
telephone. Some of the latter tried for speech with the newly elected
candidate whom they understood to be in the house, but Jane denied
them firmly. She had had some training as a politician's private
secretary. At last the clanging bell ceased ringing, and the maid
ceased running to and from the street door, and the doctor had come
and given his certificate and gone, and Jane joined the pair in the
dining-room. She brought in from the hall a tray of visiting cards
and set it on the table. "I suppose it was kind of them all to
come," she said.

She sat down listlessly in a straight-backed chair, and then, at a
momentary end of her fine strength suddenly broke into tears and
sobs and buried her head on her arms. Paul rose, bent over her and
clasped her shoulders comfortingly. Presently she turned and blindly
sought his embrace. He raised her to her feet, and they stood as
they had done years ago, when, boy and girl, they had come to the
parting of their ways. She cried silently for a while, and then she
said miserably: "I've only you left, dear."

In this hour of spent effort and lassitude it was a queer physical
comfort, very pure and sweet, to feel the close contact of her
young, strong body. She, too, out of the wreck, was all that he had
left. His clasp tightened, and he murmured soothing words.

"Oh, my dear, I am so tired," she said, giving herself up, for her
part also, to the foolish solace of his arms. "I wish I could stay
here always, Paul."

He whispered: "Why not?"

Indeed, why not? Instinct spoke. His people were her people and her
people his. And she had proved herself a brave, true woman. Before
him no longer gleamed the will-o'-the-wisp leading him a fantastic
dance through life. Before him lay only darkness. Jane and he, hand
in hand, could walk through it fearless and undismayed. And her own
great love, shown unashamed in the abandonment of this moment of
intense emotion' made his pulses throb. He whispered again: "Why
not?"

For answer she nestled closer. "if only you could love me a little,
little bit?"

"But I do," said Paul hoarsely.

She shook her head and sobbed afresh, and they stood in close
embrace at the end of the room by the door, regardless of the
presence of the old man who sat, his back to them, smoking his pipe
and looking, with his birdlike crook of the neck, meditatively into
the fire. "No, no," said Jane, at last. "It's silly of me. Forgive
me. We mustn't talk of such things. Neither of us is fit to--and
to-night it's not becoming. I have lost my father and you are only
my brother, Paul dear."

Barney Bill broke in suddenly; and at the sound of his voice they
moved apart. "Think over it, sonny. Don't go and do anything rash."

"Don't you think it would be wise for Jane to marry me?"

"Ay--for Jane."

"Not for me?"

"It's only wise for a man to marry a woman what he loves," said
Barney Bill.

"Well?"

"You said, when we was a-driving here, as you are going to live for
the Truth and nothing but the Truth. I only mention it," added the
old man drily.

Jane recovered herself, with a gulp in the throat, and before Paul
could answer said: "We too had a talk to-day, Paul. Remember," her
voice quavered a little--"about carrots."

"You were right in essence," said Paul, looking at her gravely. "But
I should have my incentive. I know my own mind. My affection for you
is of the deepest. That is Truth--I needn't tell you. We could
lead a happy and noble life together."

"We belong to two different social classes, Paul," she said gently,
again sitting in the straight-backed chair by the table.

"We don't," he replied. "I repudiated my claims to the other class
this evening. I was admitted into what is called high society,
partly because people took it for granted that I was a man of good
birth. Now that I've publicly proclaimed that I'm not--and the
newspapers will pretty soon find out all about me now--I'll drop
out of that same high society. I shan't seek readmittance."

"People will seek you."

"You don't know the world," said he.

"It must be mean and horrid."

"Oh, no. It's very just and honourable. I shan't blame it a bit for
not wanting me. Why should I? I don't belong to it."

"But you do, dear Paul," she cried earnestly. "Even if you could get
rid of your training and mode of thought, you can't get rid of your
essential self. You've always been an aristocrat, and I've always
been a small shop-keeper's daughter and shall continue to be one."

"And I say," Paul retorted, "that we've both sprung from the people,
and are of the people. You've raised yourself above the small
shop-keeping class just as much as I have. Don't let us have any
sham humility about it. Whatever happens you'll always associate
with folk of good-breeding and education. You couldn't go back to
Barn Street. It would be idiotic for me to contemplate such a thing
for my part. But between Barn Street and Mayfair there's a refined
and intellectual land where you and I can meet on equal ground and
make our social position. What do you say?"

She did not look at him, but fingered idly the cards on the tray.
"To-morrow you will think differently. To-night you're all on the
strain."

"And, axing yer pardon, sonny, for chipping in," said the old man,
holding up his pipe in his gnarled fingers, "you haven't told her as
how you loves her--not as how a young woman axed in marriage ought
to be told."

"I've spoken the Truth, dear old friend," said Paul. "I've. got down
to bed-rock to-night. I have a deep and loyal affection for Jane. I
shan't waver in it all my life long. I'll soon find my carrot, as
she calls it--it will be England's greatness. She is the woman
that will help me on my path. I've finished with illusions for ever
and ever. Jane is the bravest and grandest of realities. To-night's
work has taught me that. For me, Jane stands for the Truth. Jane--"

He turned to her, but she had risen from her chair, staring at a
card which she held in her hand. Her clear eyes met his for an
instant as she threw the card on the table before him. "No, dear.
For you, that's the Truth."

He took it up and looked at it stupidly. It bore a crown and the
inscription: "The Princess Sophie Zobraska," and a pencilled line,
in her handwriting: "With anxious inquiries." He reeled, as if
someone had dealt him a heavy blow on the head. He recovered to see
Jane regarding him with her serene gravity. "Did you know about
this?" he asked dully.

"No. I've just seen the card. I found it at the bottom of the pile."

"How did it come?"

Jane rang the bell. "I don't know. If Annie's still up, we can find
out. As it was at the bottom, it must have been one of the first."

"How could the news have travelled so fast?" said Paul.

The maid came in. Questioned, she said that just after Paul had gone
upstairs, and while Jane was at the telephone, a chauffeur had
presented the card. He belonged to a great lighted limousine in
which sat a lady in hat and dark veil. According to her orders, she
had said that Mr. Finn was dead, and the chauffeur had gone away and
she had shut the door.

The maid was dismissed. Paul stood on the hearthrug with bent brows,
his hands in his jacket pockets. "I can't understand it," he said.

"She must ha' come straight from the Town Hall," said Barney Bill.

"But she wasn't there," cried Paul.

"Sonny," said the old fellow, "if you're always dead sure of where a
woman is and where a woman isn't, you're a wiser man than Solomon
with all his wives and other domestic afflictions."

Paul threw the card into the fire. "It doesn't matter where she
was," said he. "It was a very polite--even a gracious act to send
in her card on her way home. But it makes no difference to what I
was talking about. What have I got to do with princesses? They're
out of my sphere. So are Naiads and Dryads and Houris and Valkyrie
and other fabulous ladies. The Princess Zobraska has nothing to do
with the question."

He made a step towards Jane and, his hand on her shoulder, looked at
her in his new, masterful way. "I come in the most solemn hour and
in the crisis of my life to ask you to marry me. My father, whom
I've only learned to love and revere to-night, is lying dead
upstairs. To-night I have cut away all bridges behind me. I go into
the unknown. We'll have to fight, but we'll fight together. You have
courage, and I at least have that. There's a seat in Parliament
which I'll have to fight for afterwards like a dog for a bone, and
an official position which brings in enough bread and-butter--"

"And there's a fortune remarked Barney Bill.

"What do you mean?" Paul swung round sharply.

"Yer father's fortune, sonny. Who do yer suppose he was a-going to
leave it to? 'Omes for lost 'orses or Free Zionists? I don't know as
'ow I oughter talk of it, him not buried yet--but I seed his will
when he made it a month or two ago, and barring certair legacies to
Free Zionists and such-like lunatic folk, not to speak of Jane ere
being left comfortably off, you're the residuary legatee, sonny--
with something like a hundred thousand pounds. There's no talk of
earning bread-and-butter, sonny."

"It never entered my head," said Paul, rather dazed. "I suppose a
father would leave his money to his son. I didn't realize it." He
passed his hand over his eyes. "So many things have happened
to-night. Anyhow," he said, smiling queerly, in his effort to still
a whirling brain, "if there are no anxieties as to ways and means,
so much the better for Jane and me. I am all the more justified in
asking you to marry me. Will you?"

"Before I answer you, Paul dear," she replied steadily, "you must
answer me. I've known about the will, just like Bill, all the time--"

"She has that," confirmed the old man.

"So this isn't news to me, dear, and can't alter anything from me to
you."

"Why should it?" asked Paul. "But it makes my claim a little
stronger."

"Oh, no," she replied, shaking her head. "It only--only confuses
issues. Money has nothing to do with what I'm going to ask you. You
said to-night you were going to live for the Truth--the real naked
Truth. Now, Paul dear, I want the real, naked Truth. Do you love
that woman?"

At her question she seemed to have grown from the common sense,
clear-eyed Jane into a great and commanding presence. She had drawn
herself to her full height. Her chin was in the air, her generous
bust thrown forward, her figure imperious, her eyes intense. And
Paul too drew himself up and looked at her in his new manhood. And
they stood thus for a while, beloved enemies.

"If you want the Truth--yes, I do love her," said he.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23