Complete works of a e w.., p.510
Complete Works of a E W Mason, page 510
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE LAST
AT NINE O’CLOCK on a morning of July during the next year an auxiliary barquentine of four hundred and fifty tons steamed westward with the tide past the Isle of Wight. Besides the helmsman, Cynthia and Harry Rames were upon the bridge. They stood side by side, Cynthia gripping the rail in front of her with both of her hands. They did not speak. The ship glided past Cowes gay with its white yachts and crowded esplanade and rounded Gurnard Point into Newtown Bay. Cynthia looked ahead through a blur of tears, watching for and yet dreading to see a low square church tower stand out against the sky close to the water in a dip of the coast-line hills. Opposite to that church the ship was stopped and a boat was lowered. Cynthia, with Robert Brook to look after her, was put ashore on Yarmouth pier; and the barquentine dipped her flag and steamed on to the Needles and the open sea on its three years’ voyage.
Robert Brook escorted Cynthia across the water to Southampton, and the next day witnessed her departure from the docks on a steamer of the Royal Mail for Buenos Ayres. He returned to London that afternoon, took a solitary dinner at his club, and walked afterward to Curzon Street. The Rames’s house was all lit up, and from the open windows music drifted out upon the summer night. Harry and Cynthia had let their house a week before, and to-night the new residents were giving a party. Robert Brook had an invitation and went in. He listened for half an hour to a party of coons and then could endure no more. The comic songs and the laughter seemed to him that night in this house a desecration. For in the characters of Harry Rames and his wife he chose to see something of greatness, in their lives something of achievement. He looked about the walls. Some dark and terrible hours must needs have been passed by both Harry and Cynthia within them before the great resolution had been taken which had condemned her to three years of loneliness on an estancia in South America and had stripped him of a sure career in politics.
Robert Brook fell into a black mood and an utter weariness with his own life. For him season was to follow season and to find him still a guest at the parties and the entertainments until he became old and a bore. He envied Harry his expedition, Cynthia her sorrow. He went out wretched and walked by instinct down Whitehall. On his way to his club he passed the windows of the Board of Trade. These, too, were brilliantly lit; for within the building a Cabinet Minister was endeavoring to compose an acute struggle between artisans and their employers. Robert Brook watched those windows; and his disgust with his own life increased. Here again was achievement for others, not for himself. There would never be room for him within that building, nor within any other where the nation’s administration was being done. And his life was going; indeed, the best part of it was done. He walked on to his own small house and let himself in with his key. The passage was dark and the house quite silent. He stood for a while alone in the darkness and the silence. He thought of Cynthia and Harry, of Devenish and his colleagues, of others without eminence, but, at all events, with wives and children. He had given up his life to the House of Commons and the House of Commons repaid him by barely knowing his name. There was probably no man in London more wretched that night than Robert Brook.
THE END
The Witness for the Defence (1913)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
The first edition
The first edition’s title page
CHAPTER I
HENRY THRESK
THE BEGINNING OF all this difficult business was a little speech which Mrs. Thresk fell into a habit of making to her son. She spoke it the first time on the spur of the moment without thought or intention. But she saw that it hurt. So she used it again — to keep Henry in his proper place.
“You have no right to talk, Henry,” she would say in the hard practical voice which so completed her self-sufficiency. “You are not earning your living. You are still dependent upon us;” and she would add with a note of triumph: “Remember, if anything were to happen to your dear father you would have to shift for yourself, for everything has been left to me.”
Mrs. Thresk meant no harm. She was utterly without imagination and had no special delicacy of taste to supply its place — that was all. People and words — she was at pains to interpret neither the one nor the other and she used both at random. She no more contemplated anything happening to her husband, to quote her phrase, than she understood the effect her barbarous little speech would have on a rather reserved schoolboy.
Nor did Henry himself help to enlighten her. He was shrewd enough to recognise the futility of any attempt. No! He just looked at her curiously and held his tongue. But the words were not forgotten. They roused in him a sense of injustice. For in the ordinary well-to-do circle, in which the Thresks lived, boys were expected to be an expense to their parents; and after all, as he argued, he had not asked to be born. And so after much brooding, there sprang up in him an antagonism to his family and a fierce determination to owe to it as little as he could.
There was a full share of vanity no doubt in the boy’s resolve, but the antagonism had struck roots deeper than his vanity; and at an age when other lads were vaguely dreaming themselves into Admirals and Field-Marshals and Prime-Ministers Henry Thresk, content with lower ground, was mapping out the stages of a good but perfectly feasible career. When he reached the age of thirty he must be beginning to make money; at thirty-five he must be on the way to distinction — his name must be known beyond the immediate circle of his profession; at forty-five he must be holding public office. Nor was his profession in any doubt. There was but one which offered these rewards to a man starting in life without money to put down — the Bar.
So to the Bar in due time Henry Thresk was called; and when something did happen to his father he was trained for the battle. A bank failed and the failure ruined and killed old Mr. Thresk. From the ruins just enough was scraped to keep his widow, and one or two offers of employment were made to Henry Thresk.
But he was tenacious as he was secret. He refused them, and with the help of pupils, journalism and an occasional spell as an election agent, he managed to keep his head above water until briefs began slowly to come in.
So far then Mrs. Thresk’s stinging speeches seemed to have been justified. But at the age of twenty-eight he took a holiday. He went down for a month into Sussex, and there the ordered scheme of his life was threatened. It stood the attack; and again it is possible to plead in its favour with a good show of argument. But the attack, nevertheless, brings into light another point of view.
Prudence, for instance, the disputant might urge, is all very well in the ordinary run of life, but when the great moments come conduct wants another inspiration. Such an one would consider that holiday with a thought to spare for Stella Derrick, who during its passage saw much of Henry Thresk. The actual hour when the test came happened on one of the last days of August.
CHAPTER II
ON BIGNOR HILL
THEY WERE RIDING along the top of the South Downs between Singleton and Arundel, and when they came to where the old Roman road from Chichester climbs over Bignor Hill, Stella Derrick raised her hand and halted. She was then nineteen and accounted lovely by others besides Henry Thresk, who on this morning rode at her side. She was delicately yet healthfully fashioned, with blue eyes under broad brows, raven hair and a face pale and crystal-clear. But her lips were red and the colour came easily into her cheeks.
She pointed downwards to the track slanting across the turf from the brow of the hill.
“That’s Stane Street. I promised to show it you.”
“Yes,” answered Thresk, taking his eyes slowly from her face. It was a morning rich with sunlight, noisy with blackbirds, and she seemed to him a necessary part of it. She was alive with it and gave rather than took of its gold. For not even that finely chiselled nose of hers could impart to her anything of the look of a statue.
“Yes. They went straight, didn’t they, those old centurions?” he said.
He moved his horse and stood in the middle of the track looking across a valley of forest and meadow to Halnaker Down, six miles away in the southwest. Straight in the line of his eyes over a shoulder of the down rose a tall fine spire — the spire of Chichester Cathedral, and farther on he could see the water in Bosham Creek like a silver mirror, and the Channel rippling silver beyond. He turned round. Beneath him lay the blue dark weald of Sussex, and through it he imagined the hidden line of the road driving straight as a ruler to London.
“No going about!” he said. “If a hill was in the way the road climbed over it; if a marsh it was built through it.”
They rode on slowly along the great whaleback of grass, winding in and out amongst brambles and patches of yellow-flaming gorse. The day was still even at this height; and when, far away, a field of long grass under a stray wind bent from edge to edge with the swift motion of running water, it took them both by surprise. And they met no one. They seemed to ride in the morning of a new clean world. They rose higher on to Duncton Down, and then the girl spoke.
“So this is your last day here.”
He gazed about him out towards the sea, eastwards down the slope to the dark trees of Arundel, backwards over the weald to the high ridge of Blackdown.
“I shall look back upon it.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a day to look back upon.”
She ran over in her mind the days of this last month since he had come to the inn at Great Beeding and friends of her family had written to her parents of his coming. “It’s the most perfect of all your days here. I am glad. I want you to carry back with you good memories of our Sussex.”
“I shall do that,” said he, “but for another reason.”
Stella pushed on a foot or two ahead of him.
“Well,” she said, “no doubt the Temple will be stuffy.”
“Nor was I thinking of the Temple.”
“No?”
“No.”
She rode on a little way whilst he followed. A great bee buzzed past their heads and settled in the cup of a wild rose. In a copse beside them a thrush shot into the air a quiverful of clear melody.
Stella spoke again, not looking at her companion, and in a low voice and bravely with a sweet confusion of her blood.
“I am very glad to hear you say that, for I was afraid that I had let you see more than I should have cared for you to see — unless you had been anxious to see it too.”
She waited for an answer, still keeping her distance just a foot or two ahead, and the answer did not come. A vague terror began to possess her that things which could never possibly be were actually happening to her. She spoke again with a tremor in her voice and all the confidence gone out of it. Almost it appealed that she should not be put to shame before herself.
“It would have been a little humiliating to remember, if that had been true.”
Then upon the ground she saw the shadow of Thresk’s horse creep up until the two rode side by side. She looked at him quickly with a doubtful wavering smile and looked down again. What did all the trouble in his face portend? Her heart thumped and she heard him say:
“Stella, I have something very difficult to say to you.”
He laid a hand gently upon her arm, but she wrenched herself free. Shame was upon her — shame unendurable. She tingled with it from head to foot. She turned to him suddenly a face grown crimson and eyes which brimmed with tears.
“Oh,” she cried aloud, “that I should have been such a fool!” and she swayed forward in her saddle. But before he could reach out an arm to hold her she was upright again, and with a cut of her whip she was off at a gallop.
“Stella,” he cried, but she only used her whip the more. She galloped madly and blindly over the grass, not knowing whither, not caring, loathing herself. Thresk galloped after her, but her horse, maddened by her whip and the thud of the hoofs behind, held its advantage. He settled down to the pursuit with a jumble of thoughts in his brain.
“If to-day were only ten years on … As it is it would be madness … madness and squalor and the end of everything … Between us we haven’t a couple of pennies to rub together … How she rides! … She was never meant for Brixton … No, nor I … Why didn’t I hold my tongue? … Oh what a fool, what a fool! Thank Heaven the horses come out of a livery stable … They can’t go on for ever and — oh, my God! there are rabbit-holes on the Downs.” And his voice rose to a shout: “Stella! Stella!”
But she never looked over her shoulder. She fled the more desperately, shamed through and through! Along the high ridge, between the bushes and the beech-trees, their shadows flitted over the turf, to a jingle of bits and the thunder of hoofs. Duncton Beacon rose far behind them; they had crossed the road and Charlton forest was slipping past like dark water before the mad race came to an end. Stella became aware that escape was impossible. Her horse was spent, she herself reeling. She let her reins drop loose and the gallop changed to a trot, the trot to a walk. She noticed with gratitude that Thresk was giving her time. He too had fallen to a walk behind her, and quite slowly he came to her side. She turned to him at once.
“This is good country for a gallop, isn’t it?”
“Rabbit-holes though,” said he. “You were lucky.”
He answered absently. There was something which had got to be said now. He could not let this girl to whom he owed — well, the only holiday that he had ever taken, go home shamed by a mistake, which after all she had not made. He was very near indeed to saying yet more. The inclination was strong in him, but not so strong as the methods of his life. Marriage now — that meant to his view the closing of all the avenues of advancement, and a life for both below both their needs.
“Stella, just listen to me. I want you to know that had things been different I should have rejoiced beyond words.”
“Oh, don’t!” she cried.
“I must,” he answered and she was silent. “I want you to know,” he repeated, stammering and stumbling, afraid lest each word meant to heal should only pierce the deeper. “Before I came here there was no one. Since I came here there has been — you. Oh, my dear, I would have been very glad. But I am obscure — without means. There are years in front of me before I shall be anything else. I couldn’t ask you to share them — or I should have done so before now.”
In her mind ran the thought: what queer unimportant things men think about! The early years! Wouldn’t their difficulties, their sorrows be the real savour of life and make it worth remembrance, worth treasuring? But men had the right of speech. Not again would she forget that. She bowed her head and he blundered on.
“For you there’ll be a better destiny. There’s that great house in the Park with its burnt walls. I should like to see that rebuilt and you in your right place, its mistress.” And his words ceased as Stella abruptly turned to him. She was breathing quickly and she looked at him with a wonder in her trouble.
“And it hurts you to say this!” she said. “Yes, it actually hurts you.”
“What else could I say?”
Her face softened as she looked and heard. It was not that he was cold of blood or did not care. There was more than discomfort in his voice, there was a very real distress. And in his eyes his heart ached for her to see. Something of her pride was restored to her. She fell at once to his tune, but she was conscious that both of them talked treacheries.
“Yes, you are right. It wouldn’t have been possible. You have your name and your fortune to make. I too — I shall marry, I suppose, some one” — and she suddenly smiled rather bitterly— “who will give me a Rolls-Royce motor-car.” And so they rode on very reasonably.
Noon had passed. A hush had fallen upon that high world of grass and sunlight. The birds were still. They talked of this and that, the latest crisis in Europe and the growth of Socialism, all very wisely and with great indifference like well-bred people at a dinner-party. Not thus had Stella thought to ride home when the message had come that morning that the horses would be at her door before ten. She had ridden out clothed on with dreams of gold. She rode back with her dreams in tatters and a sort of incredulity that to her too, as to other girls, all this pain had come.
They came to a bridle-path which led downwards through a thicket of trees to the weald and so descended upon Great Beeding. They rode through the little town, past the inn where Thresk was staying and the iron gates of a Park where, amidst elm-trees, the blackened ruins of a great house gaped to the sky.
“Some day you will live there again,” said Thresk, and Stella’s lips twitched with a smile of humour.
“I shall be very glad after to-day to leave the house I am living in,” she said quietly, and the words struck him dumb. He had subtlety enough to understand her. The rooms would mock her with memories of vain dreams. Yet he kept silence. It was too late in any case to take back what he had said; and even if she would listen to him marriage wouldn’t be fair. He would be hampered, and that, just at this time in his life, would mean failure — failure for her no less than for him. They must be prudent — prudent and methodical, and so the great prizes would be theirs.
