Chapter Twelve

[Admin]

WITHOUT seeing any one at Monkton's but the servant, or even disclosing his identity, Sainty was able in a very few words to establish the correctness of his surmises. Arthur had not been there for weeks. "I can get you 'is address, if you'll wait a minute," the man said; "'e's down at 'is own 'ome; I forwarded some letters to him a day or two back."

"Oh, thanks; if he's there, I know the address and need not trouble you," and Sainty turned again to his hansom. He reflected that to find Miss de Vere was to find his brother, and supposed, in his innocence, that he had only to apply at the theatre to learn the young lady's address. But when he presented himself at the stage-door and blushingly demanded it, he was informed that Miss de Vere was not acting at present, and that, in any case, they were strictly forbidden to give the private address of any of their ladies or gentlemen. A letter sent to the theatre for Miss de Vere would be forwarded.

This was an unlooked-for check, and he wondered blankly what he was to do next. He sent away his cab and began to wander slowly westward again; he could think better on foot. He was walking sadly along Pall Mall, when he was passed by a young man with wonderfully broad shoulders and a wonderfully small waist, who paused, looked at him, and finally held out his hand. Sainty recognised Algy Montgomery.

"Hulloa!" said the guardsman, with the smileless gloom of the fashionable London young man. "Where are you off to? I'm just on my way to call on my stepmother; I understand she says I never come near her. Why don't you come along and see your revered grandmother?"

Sainty had been trying to make himself go and ask Claude for the address he wanted; he had not once set eyes on his cousin during the past year, and to appeal to him again for help was a bitter pill. Think as he would, he could evolve no other way of arriving at his end, and this chance meeting and invitation to Sunborough House seemed like a leading. He would go and see the duchess---what more natural? and if Claude happened to be there, how could he help it?

"All right," he said; "I don't mind if I do."

The pair walked in silence for a few seconds, Lord Algernon trying to accommodate his long stride to his companion's limp.

"Come up to look after your young brother?" he asked presently, through the cigar which he held tightly between his teeth. "He's making no end of an ass of himself with Topsy de Vere; he never leaves her for a minute----"

To talk casually to a comparative stranger of what was gnawing his vitals was gall and wormwood to Sainty, but he grunted some sort of an assent, and then asked as indifferently as he could, "You don't happen to know Miss de Vere's address, do you?"

Lord Algy laughed. "No, for a wonder, I don't," he said; "but I tell you who ought to---your precious cousin Morland. I fancy he knew his way there quite well at one time."

"Oh! did Claude----"

"Got tired of the lady; or perhaps found her rather too expensive (I suspect his grace don't do his secretary particularly well), so passed her on to the little cousin. Sharp fellow, Morland."

The duchess, whom presently they found having tea in company with Lady Rugby and Lady Eva, had also a word to say of her prodigal grandson. "Arthur s'encanaille," she remarked. "He is bad form; he lets himself be seen everywhere with cocottes; the young men of to-day have no tenue---none. Formerly, yes, I don't say men were any better---they have always been monsters; but they did not throw ces demoiselles in the face of the world."

Lady Eva murmured something to the effect that Arthur was a dear, and dropped a platitude about wild oats.

"Oh, I don't want a boy to be a merle blanc," her mother rejoined. "Sainty would be all the better if he were just a little naughty, wouldn't you, my child? I don't suppose Algy here, or your own boy, are models of virtue, but there are ways of doing things. By the way, where is Claude? Ring the bell, Algy, and we will see if he is in; he will like to see his cousin."

Sainty did not feel at all sure that he would, but when Morland presently appeared in answer to the duchess's message, he was as easy and unembarrassed as usual; it was Belchamber who was awkward and ill at ease. There was, perhaps, just a shade of reproachful tenderness in Claude's greeting, an eloquent glance, a silent pressure of the hand, as who should say, "You may be as cantankerous and unreasonable as you like, my patience with those I love is practically inexhaustible." At the merest hint from Sainty that he had something to ask him, he carried him off to his own room, and when the request for Miss de Vere's address had been stammered out, produced a little address-book from a locked drawer, and began to search in it with a great appearance of assiduity.

"Here it is---no, let me see, she left there, that's her old address; how stupid of me. Ah! this is it, a flat she took; I remember now. But she's always moving, I don't guarantee that you'll find her there; but they'll be able to tell you if she's flitted again." His voice was dry and businesslike; Sainty wanted an address, he was trying to help him to it, as he would try to do anything he wanted. Why he had need of it was no affair of his. Claude prided himself on his power of implying much that his tongue never uttered.

He wrung Sainty's hand at parting. "Good luck to you," he whispered. "I could do no good; may you be more fortunate! And oh! by the way, I wouldn't mention me there; I'm not popular in that quarter. Cynthia has taken one of those absurd, unreasoning dislikes to me that half-educated people do, and has set Arthur against me. I suppose she was afraid I might try and get him away from her. It's a bad business. Well, addio, and best wishes."

Oddly enough, Claude was right in his surmise that Miss de Vere might have moved, but Sainty did at last discover her present abode, and arriving there about noon of the following day, found that she had gone to a rehearsal, "but the gentleman was in." Sainty was not sorry to find Arthur alone. The boy was at first of course very much on the defensive; the elder brother had to walk most warily among the eggshells of suspicion and susceptibility, but he soon discovered that his coming was not altogether unwelcome. Arthur did not attempt to disguise the fact that he was living with Cynthia; "he had made her give up her flat, and had taken these rooms for her; they had the whole house, and the people of the house looked after them; it saved the bother of servants; he was answerable for the rent and the housekeeping; naturally he couldn't live at her expense; otherwise she wouldn't take a penny from him, she was very high-minded; it was as much as ever she would let him give her a little present now and then. Anything she made professionally was no business of his; she had gone about a new engagement this morning."

"But how do you do it? Surely to take a whole house like this on the footing of lodgings is the most expensive arrangement you can make."

"It ain't done for nothing, I can tell you," Arthur said ruefully. He was not sorry to unburthen himself a little to his brother. Sainty had had no idea to what extent a young man of family could live on credit in London, for a time at least. By carefully never paying ready money where it was not absolutely necessary, it was astonishing what a lot you could do.

"But what's it all going to lead to?" Sainty asked. "Do you propose to give up the army, never do anything---just live on here with her from day to day? Even supposing you were me, and had all the money you wanted, would this life satisfy you?"

"I believe you, my boy," said Arthur heartily.

"It may for a time; it won't, it can't, for long," Sainty said eagerly. "And mother? Don't you care about her? Mother's awfully cut up about your not passing your exam. There's another coming on in the autumn; it'll be your last chance. Don't you mean to try?"

Arthur's brow grew dark at the mention of his mother. "By Jove!" he said, "you don't know the things she said to me. She can let you have it, when she isn't pleased, the mater can."

"Well, you must admit she had some reason not to be pleased," said Sainty.

"Lots of fellows muff the first time," said Arthur lamely. "I've got another try."

"But are you any more likely to pass the next time? Are you doing a stroke of work for it?" And he narrated to Arthur how it had come to his knowledge that he had not been at Monkton's for weeks. "I happened on these," he said, producing the letters he had found in the hall at Belchamber, "but mother might just as well have found them. She doesn't know yet that you've dropped work altogether, but she must find it out soon. Monkton may write to her any day and ask when you are coming back."

"Damn it all! I hadn't thought of that."

"No. You never think of anything half an hour ahead, do you?"

Then Sainty told him how people were talking about him---his grandmother, Aunt Eva, Algy Montgomery (he did not mention Claude). "Don't you see that in a dozen ways the whole thing may come out to mother at any moment?"

Arthur was very stubborn, took refuge in the reiteration of his devotion to Cynthia and his determination not to be parted from her. Once or twice Sainty almost lost patience.

"You say you won't leave her, and you won't do this or that or anything you don't choose," he said with some warmth: "but what are you going to live on? You own you're up to your ears in debt, and that people are getting impatient. What can you do if mother cuts off your allowance?"

"I'm of age; I've got my own money."

"Five hundred a year! You can keep up this sort of life so easily on that, can't you? You know you can't touch the principal. I don't suppose the next two years' income would begin to pay what you owe now."

Arthur looked doubtful; he began to see the weakness of his position. He tried a few platitudes about "working his fingers to the bone for her," at which Sainty, miserable as he felt, couldn't help laughing.

"You've never done a stroke of work in your life," he said, "and you would find it so easy to get employment, wouldn't you? You would be so valuable in a house of business!"

He wisely refrained from any suggestion that the lady's affection might not be proof against the trials of poverty.

Finally, after long argument and entreaty, Arthur was persuaded to say he would go to a new crammer in the country till after the next examination, and would do his best to pass. "It is no good my trying to work at Monkton's," he said candidly; "I should always be bolting back to Cynthia. You can't think how good she is; she's always telling me I ought to work and pass my exams. and please you. Don't try and make me give her up or say I won't have anything more to do with her, or any rot of that sort."

Sainty, too glad to have carried his point about the work, was ready to promise anything---payment of debts, help in the support of the lady, in short, whatever Arthur liked to demand. "And first of all," he said pleadingly, "you will come down home for a few days before you go to the new place. Poor mother's sore and wretched at the way you've treated her. She doesn't show much, but she feels a lot, and you've always been her favourite. Come and be nice to her for a bit before you take up your work again."

"By Jove! you make me do everything you want," said Arthur tenderly. Sainty could not help smiling at the thought of how very far this was from being the case, but he was thankful for small mercies. He reflected that he had been lucky in hitting on a propitious moment, when the narrow matters of the house had begun to press rather importunately on Miss de Vere's lover. To grant a favour, accepting the money he needed as a condition, was in every way pleasanter to Arthur than having to sue for help.

Sainty declined to stay and lunch and see Miss de Vere. "I want to get home this afternoon," he said. "Mother 'll be so glad to know that you are going to work and do your best to pass; and also that you'll come home for a bit. You haven't been at Belchamber since November, and this is May; I don't think you've ever been away for so long at a stretch before."

He travelled down to the country that same afternoon with a lighter heart than he had carried for many months, pleased to find he still had some influence over his brother, glad to be reconciled to Claude, and rejoicing in the pleasure he should be able to give his mother in the announcement of Arthur's visit and his promise of industry and reformation. He pondered anxiously on the question how much he need say of the temptations and distractions of London life, to explain Arthur's desire to leave Monkton's and once more try a country crammer's, and concluded that there was no necessity to breathe a word of the nature of the occupation that had kept his brother from working in town. He only trusted other people might be equally reticent. He had telegraphed, before leaving London, to his mother that he would be back to dinner, and as soon as he arrived at Belchamber he was met by a message that she would like to see him at once in her own room. It was in vain that he told himself she was naturally impatient to hear what news he brought; it was with an uneasy foreboding that he approached her door, and he had to pause and brace himself before he summoned courage to turn the handle.

His first glance at his mother confirmed his worst anticipations. She was walking up and down the room, so that her back was towards him as he entered; but the white, set face she turned on him as he closed the door showed him at once that she knew everything. It was terrible to see this silent, dignified woman so ravaged and shaken out of her habitual self-control. Even at that moment he noticed with surprise the curious staginess of her movements and method of speech. It was true, then, that people in times of strong emotion did really behave in this way; and these gestures and phrases which he had always supposed to be pure literary and theatrical conventions derived from something in nature after all.

"So," she cried, sweeping round upon him, "I find what I have long suspected was true: my boy, who, if he was thoughtless and a little idle, I thought was a pure-minded, healthy boy, has been degrading himself with loose women; and this has been going on for a year past; it has been common talk; every one has known it; every one but his poor blind idiot of a mother. We must never know anything, of course; our sons may be drifting to perdition, but there is no one who will come and tell a poor woman. People stand by and laugh; I suppose they think it funny; all the godless, indecent, modern books say so. No one, no one will say a word till it's too late, too late to do any good."

She was in a white heat of rage, tearless, tragic, almost distraught, all the mother and the puritan in her crying out in revolt against the eternal mystery of the flesh, the triumph of the senses in the young male. Yes, in the abstract she knew of it, recognised that men were sinners and full of carnal appetites; but that her boy, her child whom she had nursed and tended, whom but a few years back she had held upon her knee, that this pure, bright young creature should voluntarily turn from her to smirch its white raiment in the slough of sensuality---it was not to be believed. If sacred art represented the mother of the one sinless son with seven swords in her heart, what symbol can adequately depict the woes of the mothers of men?

Sainty, with his quick sympathy, divined something of all this in the awful moments that he stood for the first time face to face with his mother. His curious, guarded, sheltered youth, his unhealthy, abnormal perception of other people's feelings, as well as the something feminine and maternal in his relation to his robuster brother, combined to give him a vision of an agony vouchsafed to few of his sex. He saw his mother, his cold, chaste, proud mother, stricken at once in her motherhood, her pride, her chastity, and yet he understood the situation as she could never understand it, as it could never be possible for him to make her understand. His whole heart yearned over her with a pity he seemed to have been specially created to feel in its full force. He made a step towards her with his arms held out, but she turned on him as if she would have struck him.

"And you," she cried, blazing with denunciation, "you come to me with a lying pretence of sympathy; you who have talked to me a dozen times of your anxiety about your brother, and seemed at one with me, so unselfishly, nobly distressed about him. You have known of this all along, have aided and abetted him in his infamy. You, who are too sexless and poor a creature to have known his temptations, have helped him in cold blood to his undoing, and with this in your heart have come to me to consult what was best to be done for him. Oh! you were always subtle and sly when you were hardly more than a baby."

"Mother, mother! for God's sake stop; you don't know what you're saying. What do you mean?"

"Oh! you don't know, do you? Do you deny that you have known this all along? A year ago, didn't you go up and sup and carouse in this creature's company and that of her vile companions? Answer me that. Yes or no? Did you, or did you not? You see, you can't deny it. For all I know, you have been with them often. Is it from her house you have come to me now? to me, the mother of you both!"

"Perhaps I have been wrong, mother, but I don't deserve this at your hands. I have done what I could. I have just come from Arthur. You know he is not very manageable; I have not had an easy part to play. And I have got him to promise to come away; he will come home and----"

"Has he said he won't go back?" She flashed it at him like a whiplash, and her gesture spoke impatient contempt as he answered---

"No, I can't make him say that, but I hope much from home influences; when we get him here, surrounded by all that will speak to him of his childhood, of all he owes to you----"

She cut him short. "You temporise with evil. Your arguments are those of the worldly wise." She was regaining her calm; argument was steadying her, and the old habit of rebuke brought back the judicial tone to her voice. "There are only two ways," she said, "right and wrong. You cannot palter and hold diplomatic parleys with vice. I am willing---I should like---to believe that your motives have been good, but I hope you see the harm you have done by your attempts at compromise. Why, oh why," she broke out again, "knowing all this, haven't you told me? Surely I was the person to know, to be consulted on the subject."

"I wanted to spare you, to save you pain. I may have been mistaken; I haven't seen very clearly what was best, but I hoped to get him away, and that perhaps you might never have the sorrow of knowing. I knew how bitter it would be to you."

"Oh! this eternal deceit! When will you learn that there can be no question of 'not seeing what was best'? My early training of you must have been strangely defective, if at your age you can't tell good from evil. How can it ever be anything but right to tell the truth?"

"It is no new burthen I've had to bear," Sainty answered, "to be alone in my knowledge of what was going on. For years I've stood between Arthur and your knowledge of the scrapes he was in."

"You have, have you! So there has been a conspiracy between you to keep me in the dark. I don't want to be unjust to you; you have not a strong or courageous character; you may have honestly believed you were being kind; but see what has come of your duplicity. Had I known, I might have said a word in season. Arthur would always listen to me."

Sainty thought of the tempests that had raged when Lady Charmington had said a word in season in the autumn on a much less ticklish subject, but he forebore to press this home.

"Well," his mother resumed, with a certain grim ferocity, "I've written now. I am not subtle or diplomatic, I have borne my testimony quite simply and faithfully."

Sainty's heart sank. He thought of his long and anxious contest, of how hardly at length he had prevailed. Of his mother's methods of plain dealing he had just had a specimen; he knew, none better, Arthur's impatience of the smallest interference, and the spirit in which he would receive even the tenderest animadversion on Cynthia.

"Mother!" he cried, "what have you said?"

"Said! What should I say? I haven't temporised and beaten about the bush. I have said plainly that he was living in mortal sin, and imperilling his soul; and I've bidden him leave that woman at once, or never see me again."

Sainty sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands. He saw all he had striven for, all he had effected, swept away at a touch; he saw too that the mischief was done, and irrecoverable; there was no good in saying a word. The despair his attitude expressed must have touched some tenderer chord in his mother. She came across to him, and laid her hand, not unkindly, on his shoulder.

"Pray," she said sternly. "Pray to God for help; He alone can turn this wretched boy from his evil courses. Vain is the help of man."

Sainty never knew how he got through the next two days. He had put a strain upon himself far beyond his feeble strength; the two railway journeys would in themselves have told on him, but the unresting hurrying hither and thither in London, the emotion of meeting Claude again, the terrible nervous excitement of his long argument with his brother, and then, on the top of all, when he was worn out in body and mind, the shock of seeing his mother as he had never seen her, the bitter disappointment of finding all he had done rendered useless at a blow, crushed him utterly. He was glad to take refuge in physical stupor and exhaustion from the bitterness of his own reflections.

In the morning of the third day, when he was gradually coming back to a sense of what had happened, his mother came to his room with an open letter in her hand. Her face was grey and drawn, and she seemed suddenly to have become an old woman. Her voice was hollow and unnaturally quiet. "Read that," she said, and tossed the letter on to his bed. Then raising her hand, which shook as she held it up, "I curse him," she said, still in that same even, horrible tone. "Remember that you have heard me curse my son"; and she went slowly out of the room.

With trembling hand Sainty drew the paper to him; he recognised Arthur's schoolboy scrawl. The letter was meant to be very dignified.

"My dear mother," the boy wrote, "I have received your letter; I will not notice your insults to a woman I love. You say I am living in sin. Very well, then---so be it. I will do so no longer. I came of age last week and am my own master, and curse me if I'll take it from you or any one. I have to announce to you that I was married yesterday at the registry office in Mount Street to Miss Cynthia de Vere." He had begun another sentence, "Till you are prepared," but apparently thinking anything more would weaken the effect of what he had said, he had run his pen through the words. The letter wound up, "I am your son,
    "ARTHUR WELLESLEY CHAMBERS."