A CHANGE IN THE CABINET

A CHANGE
IN THE CABINET

BY
H. BELLOC

“STRIVE, STRIVE, HOWE’ER WE STRIVE
YOUTH DECLINES AT FIFTY-FIVE.”
Old Saw

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1909

TO
MISS ALICE BEARDSLEY

A CHANGE IN THE
CABINET

CHAPTER I

SIR—or to speak more correctly, the Right Honourable Sir T. Charles Repton, Bart., M.V.O., O.M., Warden of the Court of Dowry, a man past middle age but in the height of industry, sat at breakfast in his house: a large house overlooking Hyde Park from the North, close to the corner of the Edgware Road, and therefore removed by at least a hundred yards from the graphic representation which marks the site of the old Permanent Gallows that once stood at Tyburn.

I have said that he was Warden of the Court of Dowry, and the reader, if she has any acquaintance with parliamentary affairs, will remember that at the time of which I speak, the month of March, 1915, that post commonly carried with it Cabinet rank. The experienced in political matters will certainly induce that he was also in the House of Commons. He sat there for Pailton, a borough which had been the last to elect him after previous experiences in Merionethshire, Kirkby, Bruton, Powkeley and the Wymp division of Dorset, in which last his somewhat constrained and cold manner had perhaps led to his defeat.

It was not his first experience of office, but he had never stood so high in the Councils of the Nation, nor had his presence in the Cabinet ever more weighed with the young and popular Prime Minister (who was suffering slightly from his left lung) than at this moment. For though Charles Repton did not belong by birth to the group of families from which the Prime Minister had sprung, he was of those who, as they advance through life, accumulate an increasing number of clients, of dependents and of friends who dare not trifle with such friendships.

In figure he was tall and somewhat lean; he was clean-shaven; his brilliant white hair was well groomed; his brown eyes were singularly piercing, and, in contrast with his head, two thick, very dark and strongly arched eyebrows emphasized his expression. He was by persuasion at this time of his life a Second Day Wycliffite, and had indeed professed his connection with that body since at least his fortieth year, before which period in his career he had permanently resided in a suburb of Leicester, to which in turn he had removed from Newcastle.

By profession he was, or rather had been, a solicitor, in which calling he had ever advised those clients who had the wisdom to accumulate wealth to leave the investment of it at his discretion, nor were they disappointed in the regular receipt of a moderate but secure income calculated at a reasonable rate; while to those who (for whatever reason) lay under the necessity of borrowing, he was ever ready to advance at a somewhat higher rate such sums as he had at his disposal.

But this humdrum course of professional life could never satisfy abilities of his calibre. Shortly after his entry into political life he had undertaken the management of numerous industrial ventures, several of which had proved singularly successful, while those which had been less fortunate came to grief through the action of others than himself: nay it was often shown when the winding-up order came that such risks had attracted but little of his spare cash.

He was that morning in March, 1915, eating an egg. He had before him a copy of the Times, the affairs of which newspaper were among his most valued connections. The moments he could spare from its perusal were given to the methodical cutting open of envelopes and the glancing at their contents,—an exercise which it was his rule most methodically to pursue before he permitted his secretary to deal with the answers. Indeed some one or two of these missives he put into his pocket to be dealt with at his private leisure.

He was alone, for his wife—Maria, Lady Repton—would commonly affect to come down after he had left the house; and this, no matter how late divisions might have kept him upon the previous evening, he invariably did at the hour of half-past nine. I may add that he had no children, but could boast no less than five horses in town and sixteen in the country, all his own property, and used to drag in the country I know not how many vehicles; in London three, each suitable for its own function. Of motor cars he kept but one, but that large and in colour a very bright sky-blue. As he had no proficiency in riding, he did not indulge in that exercise; but he was fond of golf and was acquainted with all the technical terms of the game.

To do him justice he was not without means, nay, he was what many would call wealthy, and the salary of £5000 to which, amid the enthusiastic cheers of the Legislature, the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry had recently been raised was of no great consequence to his position.

To another, alas! in the vast and heartless city, such a salary was shortly to mean far more,—and George Mulross Demaine, upon whom I will not for the moment linger, would have been even more benefited in pocket than in status by the handling of it.

Careless, however, as Sir Charles Repton might be of a fringe of income obtainable only while his own Party were in office, it was imagined that he was not a little attached to other advantages connected with his Wardenship. It is doubtful whether a man of this firm, reticent and dominating character could really be attached to such accidents of his post as the carrying of a model ship, bareheaded, in the great procession upon Empire Day, the wearing upon state occasions of shoes which curled up at the toe and were caught back to the ankles by small silver chains, or the presence upon these ornaments of several tiny bells that jingled as he walked; anachronisms of this kind can have produced little but discomfort in one of his stern mould when, upon the rare occasions of court functions, he was compelled to adopt the official dress. But there was more!

The Wardenship of the Court of Dowry carried with it something regal in that great world of affairs in which he moved, and bitter as had been the attacks upon his colleagues in the Nationalist Cabinet,—especially during the futile attempt to pass the Broadening of the Streets Bill—Sir Charles had always been treated with peculiar and exceptional respect, though he would never have used methods so underhand as to foreclose upon any newspaper with whom he might have a political difference or to embarrass by official action any considerable advertiser of patent medicines whose manufacture came under the purview of his Department.

It would be an exaggeration to say that he had raised one of the minor Government posts to the level of the Foreign Office, but, at any rate, it had under his reign become almost as prominent as it had been when GHERKIN had first raised it to the rank of a principal function in the State. It was one of the great spending departments; Repton saw to that.

Sir Charles Repton prepared to leave his house, I say, at half-past nine; his mind was intent upon the business of the morning, which was a Board meeting of the Van Diemens. It need not yet concern the reader, it is enough for her to know (and the knowledge is consonant with Repton’s character) that the Company was prepared to develop all that North-eastern littoral of the Australian Continent for which it had obtained a charter but which no enterprise had as yet succeeded in bringing into line with the vast energies of the Empire.

Of the strategical advantages such a position can give, I need not speak. Luckily they were in the hands of patriots.

The comparatively small sum of £4,000,000 which by its charter the Company was permitted to raise would have been subscribed twenty times over in the rush for shares seven years before, and it is common knowledge that at a particular moment during which values must surely have been inflated, they reached a premium of between 800 and 900 per cent. The cool process of reflection which often follows such errors had by this time driven them if anything too low, and the original one pound share which had twice all but touched £9, had been for now many months unsaleable at a nominal price of 16/3.

There exists a sound rule of public administration of this country—inaugurated, I believe, by Mr. Gladstone—which forbids a Cabinet Minister to hold any public directorship at the same time as his official post, and indeed it is this rule which renders it usual for a couple of men upon opposite sides of the House to come to an arrangement whereby the one shall be Director while his colleague is in office, lest important commercial affairs should be neglected through the too rigid application of what is in principle so excellent a rule. But there had been no necessity for this arrangement in the case of so great an Imperial business as the Van Diemens: it touched too nearly the major interests of the country for its connection with a Cabinet Minister to be remarkable, and all patriotic opinion was sincerely glad when, in the preceding January, Sir Charles Repton had consented to acquire without direct purchase a few thousand shares and to take an active part in raising the fortunes of the scheme.

It was recognised upon all sides that the act was one of statesman-like self-sacrifice, and there were perhaps but two papers in London (two evening papers of large circulation but of no high standing) which so much as alluded to Sir Charles’ labours in this field.

Of these one, the Moon, catered especially for that very considerable public which will have England mistress of the waves, which is interested in the printed results of horse-racing, which had formerly triumphantly carried at the polls the demand for protection, and which was somewhat embittered by so many years of office during which the Nationalist Party had done little more than tax the parts of motor cars, foreign unsweetened prunes, moss litter, and such small quantities of foreign sulphuric acid as are used in the manufacture of beer.

The other, the Capon—to give it its entire name—was of a finer stamp. All the young enthusiasts read it, and it was enormously bought for its Notes on Gardening, its caricatures, its clever headlines, and its short, downright little leaders not twenty lines long, printed, by a successful innovation, in capitals throughout, and in a red ink that showed up finely against the plain black and white of the remainder.

Both these papers had continually and violently attacked the connection of one of our few great statesmen with the last of the vast enterprises of Empire. The Capon, whose editor was a young man with very wild eyes and hair like a weeping willow, attacked it on principle. The Moon—whose proprietor was an intimate friend of Sir Charles’ own—was more practical, and attacked the connection between Repton and the Company with good old personalities worthy of a more virile age.

Well then, at this hour of half-past nine on that March day of 1915, Charles Repton rose from his breakfast. He touched the crumbs upon his waistcoat so that they fell, and those upon his trousers also. He looked severely at the footman in the hall, who quailed a little at that glance, he rapidly put on his coat unaided, and asked briefly to see the butler.

The butler came.

“I’m out to lunch.”

“Yes, Sir Charles.”

“Tell Parker that if one of my letters is ever left again on the table after I have gone, I shall speak to Lady Repton.”

“Yes, Sir Charles.”

“The car is not to be used on any account.”

“No, Sir Charles.”

He turned round abruptly and went down the steps and into the street, while one of his large footmen shut the huge door ever so gently behind him.

He was a man of such character, who conducted his household so firmly, that the man, though now five months in his service, dared exchange no jest with the butler who went quietly off to his own part of the house again. It was a singular proof of what rigid domestic government can do.

From her room Maria, Lady Repton, when she was quite sure that her husband was gone, slunk downstairs. With a cunning that was now a trifle threadbare, she discovered from Parker the housekeeper, from the secretary, from the butler, by methods which she fondly believed to be indirect, what plans her husband had formed for the day. She sighed to learn that she might not have the car, for she had designed to go and see her dear old friend widow, Mrs. Hulker, formerly of Newcastle, now of Ealing, a woman of great culture and refinement and one who gave Maria, Lady Repton, nearly all her information upon books and life. Of course there was always the Tube and the Underground, but they greatly wearied this elderly lady, and it was too far to drive. She sighed a little at her husband’s order.

He, meanwhile, was out in Oxford Street, and with the rapidity that distinguishes successful men, had decided not to take a motor-bus but to walk. The March day was cold and clear and breezy, and he went eastward at a happy gait. He did not need to be at his work until close upon eleven, and even that he knew to be full early for at least one colleague, the stupidest of all the Directors, a certain Bingham, upon whose late rising he counted. For the intolerable tedium of arguing against a man who invariably took the unintelligent side was one of the few things which caused Sir Charles to betray some slight shade of impatience.

The day pleased him, as indeed it pleased the greater part of London, from its fineness. He walked upon the sunny side of the street, and his smile, though restrained and somewhat sadly dignified, was the more genial from the influence of the weather. His brain during this brief exercise was not concerned, as those ignorant of our great men might imagine, with affairs of State, nor even with the choice of investments upon which he was in so short a time to determine. He was occupied rather in planning (for his power of organisation was famous) how exactly he should fit in his engagements for the day.

A Board meeting, especially if there is any chance of long argument with a late riser of exceptional stupidity, may last for an indefinite time. He gave it an hour and a half.

Then he must lunch, and that hour was earmarked for a certain foreigner who could not wholly make up his mind whether to build a certain bridge over a certain river for a certain government or no.

By a quarter to three he must be in the House of Commons to answer questions, for those which fell to his share came early upon the paper, and it was the pride of this exact and efficient man to keep no one waiting. Before four he must see the manager of a bank; the matter was urgent, he did not wish to write or telephone. By five he must be back again in his room in the House of Commons to receive a deputation of gentlemen who would arrive from his distant constituency, and who proposed with a mixture of insistence and of fear to demand certain commercial advantages for their town at the expense of a neighbouring borough whose representative but rarely busied himself with the Great Council of the Nation.

At six he must order with particular care a dinner upon which (in his opinion) the chances of the Saltoon Development largely depended. At seven he must dress, at eight he must dine. His guests (many of whom to his knowledge would drink to excess) would certainly detain him till long after ten. He must be back in the House to vote at eleven; for some half-hour or so after eleven he must be present to attend a short debate (or what he hoped would prove a short debate) concerning his own Department. He would be lucky if he was in bed by twelve.

Let the reader leave him there walking in Oxford Street and turn her attention to George Mulross Demaine, or rather, to Mount Popocatapetl.

CHAPTER II

IT will generally be conceded that an underground river flowing with terrific force through a region of perennial fire, must, of its nature, form a most insecure foundation for any large body of masonry; and the danger of building upon such a bottom will be the more apparent if the materials used in the construction of the edifice be insufficiently cemented through the business capacity of a contractor indifferent to the voice of conscience.

Yet such were the conditions upon the flanks of Mt. Popocatapetl when, in the Autumn of 1914, it was determined to erect on such a site the Popocatapetl Dam, for the containment of the Popocatapetl reservoir and the ultimate irrigation of El Plan.

Mt. Popocatapetl rises in a graceful cone to the height of 22,130 feet above the level of the sea. Its summit is crowned with eternal snows, while round its base, in spite of numerous earthquakes, constantly followed by the outburst of vast fountains of boiling water, cling a score of towns and villages, some with Spanish, others with unpronounceable names. To these the beneficent and lengthy rule of Gen. Porfirio Diaz has lent a political security which Nature would do well to copy,—has led the inhabitants to seek their treasure upon earth, and has bequeathed the inestimable advantage of the great Popocatapetl Dam.

I say the “inestimable advantage,” for though the construction of this remarkable barrage has wholly cut off the insufficient water supply of this region, it has brought into the neighbourhood very considerable sums of American money, an active demand for labour, and a line of railway at the terminus of which can be purchased the most enlightened newspapers of the New World. The simplest journalist,—should such a being be possessed of the means to travel in these distant regions—might also inform the residents,—should they in turn be willing to hear him patiently,—that the irrigation of El Plan, though 150 miles distant from their now desiccated homes, can not but react to their advantage and create a market for their wares.

Mysterious designs of Providence! This mountain (among the noblest of volcanic phenomena) was destined to threaten with ruin a great English family, to precipitate onto the Treasury bench a young man of unassuming manners and of insufficient capacity, to shake half the finances of the world, and to determine a peerage for a man to whom such ornaments were baubles!

To appreciate by what chain of circumstances Popocatapetl’s hoary head might with its nod produce so distant a consequence, it is necessary for the reader once again to fix her mind most firmly upon the truth that an underground river flowing with terrific force through a region of perennial fire, must of its nature form a most insecure foundation for any considerable body of masonry, and that the danger of building upon such a bottom will be the more apparent if the material used, etc.

In the light of this knowledge, which (in common with the majority of rational beings) Ole Man Benson possessed, an investment in the stocks of a Company whose dividends depended upon the security of such an edifice might have seemed to those ill-acquainted with our modern Captains of Industry, an unpardonable folly.

It is none the less true that Ole Man Benson carried a heavy load of “Popocatapetls,” naked and unashamed.

He did not positively control Popocatapetls. Heaven forbid! But apart from a considerable block of which he was the actual owner, no small fraction was held by the Durango Investment Company, the majority of whose shares being the property of the Texas and Western Equalisation Syndicate, gave to Ole Man Benson in his capacity of Chief Equaliser, a distant but effective control over the second lot of Popocatapetls in question; while the very large investment of which the N.N.O. and S.L. Line had made at his command of their reserve funds in the same company, gave him in his capacity of Chief Terroriser thereof yet a third grip upon the venture.

One way and another Ole Man Benson stood in for Popocatapetls in a manner as healthy as it was unmistakable. And strangely enough, the fiercer the perennial fires and the louder the roaring of the subterranean river, the more steadily did Popocatapetls rise, the more sublimely did Wall Street urge their ascension, the more vigorously did the American investor (who was alone concerned) buy as he was told until, upon a certain day, a great Republican statesman of undoubted integrity but of perhaps too high an idealism, was announced to speak upon the great national enterprise.

Ole Man Benson loved, trusted and revered this statesman and supported him in every way: his name escapes me, but upon his decision the future of the undertaking would without question lie; and such was the bond between the two men that the politician had not hesitated to receive from the capitalist certain rough notes which had been jotted down in the office for the supreme verdict which was to be delivered to the nation.

It was to be delivered at Washington upon a certain Wednesday (the date is memorable) at the unconventional hour of ten, in order that a full report of it might reach the foolish and the wise in New York City in ample time for its effects to be fully felt upon the markets; and Ole Man Benson had given instructions to sell not later than half-past three of that same fateful Wednesday.

But what, you cry (if such is your habit), what of all this in connection with the ancient houses of this land? With the Cabinet? With peerages and the rest?

Tut! Have you never heard how sensitive is the modern world to every breath of commercial news, and how all the modern world is one? Well then, I must explain:

Some two years before, in London, one George Mulross Demaine had lain languishing for lack of money.

He was of good birth, and doubtless had he possessed a secure and flowing fortune, his natural diffidence would have been less pronounced, and the strange fatality by which he could hardly place his hands and feet in any position without causing some slight accident to the furniture, would have passed unnoticed, or would have been put down to good nature. But George Mulross was wholly devoid of means.

George Mulross Demaine, like so many of his rank, was related to Mary Smith.

Now Mary Smith, her pleasing, energetic person, her lively eyes and dear soul, the reader can never fully know unless she has perused or rather learned by heart, that entrancing work, “Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election,” in which, like a good fairy, she plumps across the scene and is perceived to be the friend, the confidant, the cousin, the sister-in-law or the aunt of at least three-quarters of what counts in England.

She will not feel, I say, unless she has made that work her bible, how from St. James’s Place Mary Smith blessed Society with her jolly little hands, and indulged in the companionship of characters as varied as the Peabody Yid and Victoria Mosel.

What a woman! Her little shooting-box in Scotland! Her place in the West Country! The country house which she so rarely visited in the Midlands but which she lent in the freest manner! Her vivacity, her charm, her go, her scraps of French—her inheritance from her late husband, himself an American and Smith, as I need hardly say, by name!

The reader unacquainted with the Work which I refer her to, must further have introduced to her at the proper place the notable figure of cousin William Bailey, at what an expense of repetition upon my part I need hardly say. He also was of the gang; he also had been elected of the people: but violent eccentricities now kept him apart from his true world. Thus he professed a vast interest in Jews, making them out to be the secret masters of England. How far that fanaticism was sincere, he could not himself have told you. It diverted him hugely to discover mares’ nests of every kind; he was never happier than when he was tracking the relationship between governing families or the connection of some spotless politician with a spotted financial adventure. There was but one excuse for his manias, that he remained, through the most ardent pursuit of them, a genial cynic. We shall meet him again.

Mary Smith, then, was related to all of them and they were all related to each other, and in their relationship there was friendship also, and they governed England and the taxes bore them on.

That the Leader of the Opposition should be Mary Smith’s close friend goes without saying; much closer and dearer to her was her other cousin, the young and popular Prime Minister, to his friends Dolly, to the world a more dignified name, who suffered slightly from his left lung. He had attained his high position before his fiftieth year was closed. For over four years he had conducted with consummate skill the fortunes of the Nationalist Party, and was at that very moment when Popocatapetl nursed so sullenly its internal rage, piloting in distant Westminster the Broadening of the Streets Bill through an excited session of Parliament.

But of all her relatives, near or distant, of all the friends whom she called by their Christian name, not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, not the First Sea Lord, not the six chief members of the front Opposition bench, not the eight or nine disappointed men with corner seats, not the score or so of great financiers whom she honoured at her board,—not the Secretary of State for the Colonies (a diminished post since the Sarawatta business),—not the young and popular Prime Minister himself, who suffered slightly from the left lung,—was quite so dear to her as that sort of nephew, George Mulross Demaine.

The relationship was distant, and it was less on account of the ties of blood than by reason of the strong friendship that had always existed between his father and herself that Mary Smith first befriended the lad as she had already befriended so many others. For Demaine’s father, though what the world would call a failure and even for many years separated from his wife, had always exercised a peculiar charm over his acquaintance.

Opinion had been sharply divided upon several episodes of his life, so sharply that towards the close of it he preferred to live abroad, and George’s boyhood had been passed in the most uneasy of experiences, now with his father in Ireland, now with his mother in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, and occasionally under the roof of Mary Smith during her short married life.

She had grown to do for him what she would not do for another—for Charlie Fitzgerald for instance,—for he was not a scatterbrain nor one to get rid of money with nothing to show for it. He was simply a quiet, unostentatious English lad, a little awkward (as we know) with his hands and feet but hiding a heart of gold, and destined to inherit nothing. He was not yet of age when his mother died, and during the first years of his manhood he passed more and more time under the roof of this kindly and powerful woman who had determined that the misfortunes or faults of his parents should not be visited upon him.

She took him everywhere, she kept him in pocket money and, most important of all, two years ago she had arranged his marriage.

The moment was opportune: he was twenty-five, he had lost his father, he was penniless, the title of Grinstead into which he would certainly come was distant and was unprovided for. He had not chosen, or rather had not been given, the opportunity of entering, the army, but there had been just enough bungling about that to make him miss the university also. He was so unfitted for diplomacy that even William Bailey, who was accustomed to recommend for that profession the least vivacious of his young friends, shook his head when it was proposed, and after a very short experience in Paris he was withdrawn from it.

No profession naturally proposed itself to a man of his talents, and he had not the initiative to live as a free lance. His marriage, therefore, was one of these providential things which seemed to fit almost too exactly into the general scheme of life to be true. He met his wife when Mary Smith (after making all her inquiries at the Petheringtons’) had caught and branded that heiress: and the wife so branded was Sudie Benson, the daughter of so wealthy an American as made the traffic of London not infrequently halt for his convenience, and who rather more than two years before my story bursts open, had seen fit to bring the radiant girl to London.

The two were forcibly introduced—I mean the boy and the girl—they understood from the first what their destiny was to be. She could find no fault in the society which swam round her and to which such a marriage would introduce her activities; he saw no drawback to the alliance save one or two mannerisms in his prospective father-in-law, which time might modify—or on the other hand, might not.

Ole Man Benson, to give him once more the name by which he was known and hated in another sphere, from the first ten thousand[1] which by the age of forty-three he had laboriously accumulated in shredded codfish, had dealt not with things, as do lesser men, but with figures. He had gone boldly forward like a young Napoleon, using, it must be remembered, not only the money of others but very often his own as well.

He had been born of Scotch-Irish parents, probably of the name of Benson, and certainly married in the First Baptist Church of Cincinnati not quite three-quarters of a century ago. He was the youngest child of a numerous family, and was baptized or named after the poet Theocritus, with a second or middle name of Chepstow, which in his signature he commonly reduced to its initial letter.

Theocritus C. Benson, now familiar to the whole Anglo-Saxon race of every colour and clime, was of that type always rare but now, though rare, conspicuous, which can so organise and direct the acts of others as to bring order out of chaos, chaos out of order, and alternately accumulate and disperse fortunes hitherto unprecedented in the history of the world.

He was accustomed (in the interviews which he was proud to grant to the newspapers of England, America and the Colonies) to ascribe his great position to unwearied industry and to an abhorrence of all excess (notably in the consumption of fermented liquors) and particularly of the horrid practice of gambling. His puritan upbringing, which had taught him to look upon cards as the Devil’s picture-book, and upon racing as akin to the drama in its spiritual blight, was, he would constantly assert, the key to all that he had done since he left his father’s home. But in this manly self-judgment the Hon. Mr. Benson did himself an injustice. These high qualities are to be discovered in many million of his fellow-citizens, and he might as well have pointed, as sometimes he did point with pride, to the number of his Lodge or to his ignorance of foreign languages as the causes of his repeated triumphs.

There was more: To his hatred of hazard and to his stern sense of duty and unbending industry, he added something of that daring which has made for the greatness of the blood in all its adventures Overseas, and for no branch more than for the Scotch-Irish.

He would boldly advance sums in blind confidence of the future, the mere total of which would have appalled a lesser man, and he would as boldly withdraw them to the ruin of prosperous concerns, where another would have been content to let production take its own course. And this fine command of cash and of credit which he used as a General uses an army, had in it something of personal courage; for towards the latter part of his life, when he had come to control a vast private fortune, it was imperative that in many a bold conception he himself should stand to lose or gain.

At the moment when his only daughter left her happy Belgian convent to be presented at the Court of St. James, he was, though at the height of his fortunes, a lonely and to some extent an embittered man.

His wife had married another: their only child he had not seen for three years, and though he knew that her robust common sense would stand against the religious environment of the gentle nuns who had been entrusted with her upbringing, yet he could not but feel that she had passed the most formative years of her life in an alien air, and under influences quite other than those of the Ohio Valley.

He had therefore determined to decline numerous and advantageous offers and to be present himself in London during the season which saw her introduction to the world, and there, in spite of his unfamiliarity with English ways, he soon appreciated the central position of Mary Smith whose late husband indeed he had come across a quarter of a century before when he was freezing the Topekas off the Pit.

Theocritus C. Benson had seen young Demaine and was contented; he was also naturally anxious to come across old Lord Grinstead if possible, that he might estimate for himself how long his daughter might have to wait for her title. Indeed he would not allow the marriage to take place until the old man had been pointed out to him, shrivelled almost to nothingness and pulled with extreme caution and deliberation in a bath-chair through the private gardens of Bayton House.

Had he known that the figure thus exhibited to him so far from being that of the aged peer was but the carcase of a ruined dependant it would perhaps have done little to alter his decision, for though Lord Grinstead was of gigantic stature, with purple face and thunderous voice, yet his habit of gross and excessive drinking gave him a tenure of life at least as precarious as that of the enfeebled figure upon which the financier had gazed; and what is more, Lord Grinstead, though an execrable horseman, had suddenly begun to hunt upon hired mounts with a recklessness and tenacity which, if from that cause alone, should speedily ensure a violent death.

When all was happily settled, when Demaine had been given away by his principal creditor, and Sudie by her upright and handsome old father, when the last of the wedding gifts had been exchanged at the usual discount and the young couple had gone off to Honiton Castle which had been lent them for £2000 during the honeymoon, another aspect of life had to be considered.

A point upon which Mary Smith had done her best and failed was the settlements—£1500 a year to stand between his child and starvation or worse, Theocritus was willing to determine. It was the sum he had himself named before the first negotiations were begun; but as they proceeded he refused to change it by one penny, and at last the discussion was abandoned in despair. All the young people might need they should have—she was his only child, they could trust him to be more than generous. Capital sums when they were required for anything but direct investment, should be always at their disposal, and the half or more than the half of his enormous income should be ready to their call; but he resolutely retained to himself the right to control the management of all save the infinitesimal sum which was to stand between Sudie and her husband’s tyranny, or the world’s harshness.

Mary Smith’s veiled threats and open flattery were alike useless. She capitulated, told the young woman to earmark her tiny allowance for journeys, and gained from Theocritus Chepstow only this:—that he would buy a freehold for them, build and furnish it. Theocritus was on like a bird; and the lovely little lodge which London now knows as Demaine House, with its curious formal gardens, odd Dutch stables and Grecian weathercock on the site of the old mews in what is now Benson Street, is the proof that he kept his promise.

For a year Ole Man Benson had not only kept his promise in the way of building and furnishing for the young people: he had done more. He had floated them upon London with all the revenue that could be reserved from the new venture upon which he designed to double the colossal sums which directly or indirectly stood to his name, and every penny that he could spare from his first early purchases of Popocatapetls went into the status and future social position of his daughter. Now, after two years, Popocatapetl Dam was finished and yet greater things lay before them.

Demaine was put into Parliament by a majority comparable only to the financial advantages which had secured it. His birth, her voice and its timbre, gathered into Demaine House all that so small a Great House could hold.

So things had stood to within a week of the March day upon which we saw that very different man, Charles Repton, walking into the City of London....

But from the name of Charles Repton let me rapidly slew off to the sombre pyramid of that peak in the neighbourhood of Darien and recall the caprice of Popocatapetl upon which so much was to depend.

It was a Wednesday in that March of 1915 that the Statesman was to speak in Washington at ten: (for two years Demaine House had thriven, it slept that Tuesday night unconscious of its fate). It was for the Wednesday at 3.30 that the order to sell stood in Ole Man Benson’s name.... Well ...

CHAPTER III

LATE upon that Tuesday night Ole Man Benson boarded the Louis XV. Rosewood Express de Luxe as it steamed out of the Chicago Depot of the M.N. & C.: he was off to his mountain property in Idaho, and in the privacy of his section, Ole Man Benson slept.

Not so the forces of Nature, so often destructive of the schemes of pigmy man!

An appalling convulsion altogether exceeding anything heard or dreamt of since the beginning of time, totally destroyed the Popocatapetelian landscape in the small hours of that same morning; and as, a thousand miles to the north, the Louis XV. Rosewood Express de Luxe rolled in a terrific manner upon its insufficient rock ballast, the subterranean river, the perennial fires and the unscrupulously erected edifice of the great dam, shot aloft in a vast confusion and were replaced by a chasm some quarter of a mile in breadth and of a depth unfathomable to mortal plummets. It was March; March 1915. In Iowa in March it snows. The locomotive and two of the cars attached to the Louis XV. Rosewood Express de Luxe were buried a little beyond Blucher in a drift of snow the height and dimensions of which exceeded the experience of the oldest settler in that charming prairie town. The same storm which had caused the misadventure had broken the wires for many miles around.

Ole Man Benson awoke, therefore, to a scene of great discomfort, but upon such a date and with a prospect of so considerable an increase of fortune awaiting him upon that very day, he was the gayest of the company, and in spite of his years he shovelled away with the best of them, a-splendid-type-of-Anglo-Saxon-manhood.

By one o’clock that noon the telegraph at last was working, and the first messages came through to the little depot; they concerned a riot in a local home for paralytics. Next, before two, news was conveyed of an outbreak of religious mania in the town of Omaha. It was not till a late hour in the evening that Ole Man Benson, waiting anxiously for the report of the great speech, heard the earliest tidings of the practical joke which Providence—in spite of Gen. Porfirio Diaz’ equable and masterly rule—had played him in the distant tropics.

The same rapidity of thought which had enabled Theocritus to accumulate his vast fortune enabled him in that moment to perceive that he was ruined. Not indeed necessarily for ever,—he had known such things before—but at any rate in a manner sufficiently hefty to produce his immediate collapse.

When, next morning, he could bring himself to read the papers, the disaster appeared before him in its exact proportions and tremendous scale.

That speech, that statesman-like speech, had never been delivered—and for the best of reasons: Popocatapetl had unbosomed first! In the wild fall of prices nothing had done more to ruin the market than the heavy selling of agents acting on account of Theocritus C. Benson. There were dozens within the roaring walls of the building in Wall Street, thousands in the anxious streets without, who saw in the Benson selling yet another move of diabolical cunning proceeding from that Napoleonic brain. His agents had done their work thoroughly and well. They had anticipated his orders with such promptitude that no stock was left unsaleable upon their hands, and when, before the end of that black day, Popocatapetls were offering at the cost of haulage, they could proudly say that every interest of their client’s in the ruined concern had been disposed of. And Theocritus C. Benson, henceforward known as the Earthquake King, was left with no unsaleable paper upon his hands, but on the contrary with a solid cash result equivalent to at least three cents on the dollar of his yesterday’s fortune. This it is to be faithfully served in the intricacies of modern speculation!

A truce to Ole Man Benson! If I have introduced his wretched commercial adventures at such length it is but to explain the portentous effect which they had upon the fortunes of one British statesman.

Far off in London (Eng.) George Mulross Demaine saw nothing in his morning newspaper but the news (to him a serious matter) that Pink Eye was scratched for the Grand National. His wife, whom her father had shielded from the vulgar atmosphere of commerce, noted indeed the news from the Western Hemisphere and was for a passing moment concerned; but Ole Man Benson did not telegraph, for there were no flies upon him, nor did Ole Man Benson even write, and for the same entomological reason.

Oh! no. Ole Man Benson proceeded to New York, had certain interviews with certain people, took certain drugs, went through a certain cure, laid as he hoped the foundations of yet another scheme, and not until 30th of March, a full week after the matter I have described, did Theocritus dictate a brief note to his daughter, which I will here transcribe:

Coming across on Potassic. Depart 4th—probable arrival Plymouth 11th. Shall cable.

(Signed) Father”

With true business instinct the great organiser dispatched the cable upon the 4th of April, so that his daughter received upon the evening of the same day in her London house the reassuring word “eleventh,” which her reception of the letter a few days later easily enabled her to comprehend; and on 11th of April, sure enough, Ole Man Benson in a grave and sober manner embraced his daughter on the landing-stage at Plymouth. George Mulross Demaine was also there, standing a little behind the affectionate group, clothed in a large green ulster and a cap of the same cloth and colour with an enormous peak.

They got into the train together and all the way up to London the master of empty millions said nothing.

As they were driving to Demaine House he spoke: “Any o’ your folk to supper?” he said.

His daughter with filial gaiety assured him that she had waited his orders, to which he replied, “Good girl Sudie.”

During the meal he was as silent as he had been upon the journey, and at the end of it he gave his son-in-law to understand that he desired to talk business with his daughter and preferred to be alone with her: and George Mulross went out, taking his wine with him, for his wife’s father drank none, but only Toxine.

The message Ole Man Benson had to deliver to Sudie was simple enough: there would, for he could not say how long, be no more money forthcoming. He hoped the position might be retrieved; he was confident it would be retrieved before the Fall, by Thanksgiving at latest. Till then, nit!

Sudie had all her father’s readiness; she pointed out to him at once that under the conditions of English politics the total cessation of an income the source of which was familiar to her husband’s friends, would at once affect her father’s credit in future transactions, and clearly showed that no investment could be more to his advantage than the placing of sums at her disposal for the proper up-keep of his daughter’s position in the society of London.

To this powerful argument Theocritus immediately replied that those who looked for hens’ teeth were liable to be stung; that cigars containing explosive matter had been offered him too frequently in the past for him now to entertain the thought of consuming them; and that when he was bulling London he would advise. By which parables he intended to, and did, convey to his daughter his fixed conclusion that it was up to her to bear futures: and lest she should have failed wholly to seize his point, he told her briefly and in the plainest terms that whatever rocks were going were wanted—badly—to sling at something with more dough in it than Mayfair.

With that their brief discourse was ended.

This little conversation over, Demaine was given to understand that he might re-enter the room. He was a little shy in doing so, for interviews of this sort usually meant some new gift or subsidy, but it was shyness of a pleasant sort and he had little doubt that he should hear in a moment the extent or at least the nature of the new bounty which his young household was to receive. He was therefore only puzzled by the novelty of phrasing when his father-in-law, looking at him in a manner rather humorous than severe, remarked:

“Well, I’ve stacked it up with Sudie, and she may stack it up with you.” Then in a kinder tone, he added: “You catch?”

“Yes sir,” said George untruthfully.

“Why then, ’nuff’s said,” concluded the Captain of Industry, and very thoughtfully he picked his teeth with a long fine silver point which he habitually carried in his waistcoat for that purpose of the toilet. “It’s no call ter last long,” he muttered half to himself and half to the bewildered Demaine; “anyhow the pump’s sucking; and there’s no more oil,”—to elucidate which somewhat cryptic phrase Sudie begged her husband not to stand gaping there like a booby, but to sit down and understand as much of it as he could.

Whereupon in the clearest possible language, punctuated by her father’s decisive and approving nods, she translated into older idioms exactly what had happened, and exactly what it meant. They were worth just £1500 a year between them from that day onwards for—well, till there was a change.

It was not tact but nervousness that prevented George at the end of this dreadful passage from suggesting that his father-in-law could do again what he had done before, that the strain was temporary, and that he for his part hoped for the best; but his wife, who was by this time fairly well accustomed to follow his thought, was careful to point out that whatever the future might do for them, the present was dirt black, and the present meant at least two years:

“At least two years?” (to her father).

To which her father very simply and plainly answered her: “Yep.”

There was much of the splendid blood of Theocritus in Sudie; indeed it is often observed that the genius of the father will descend to the daughter—and vice versa. The very next sentence, therefore, with which Sudie prodded her disconsolate spouse, was a demand for a list of those who might be ready to take Demaine House, to take it at once, to take it furnished, to take it high, to take it by the year and not for the season, and, when they had taken it, to pay.

Demaine immediately suggested the name of such of his acquaintance as might most desire to occupy such a position in London, and were also least able to do so, but he was careful to add after each name, some such remark as “But of course they won’t do,” or “but I don’t think he can afford it,”—until his father-in-law in a pardonable lassitude went out.

“The best thing you can do,” said his wife with renewed decision when they were alone, “is to get up right here and go round to Mary’s.” For it was a notable circumstance in Sudie’s relations with Mrs. Smith that while that lady gave her her full title, she would invariably allude to Mrs. Smith by the more affectionate medium of the Christian name.

Demaine assented. He found his father-in-law at the door; they went out together into the night, and when he had timidly admitted that he was going South towards St. James’s, the financier with rapid decision announced that he was going North towards Marylebone,—and they parted.

Mary Smith was not in. It was only eleven and the theatre detained her. George waited. He took counsel from several valuable pictures, was careful to touch and handle nothing upon her tables (for he knew that she detested an accident and with almost-canine-sagacity could invariably detect his interference), and stood, not at ease.

She came in at twelve; she brought a party with her, and she insisted upon supper. It was one before she could talk to him alone, and she talked to him until two.

The first thing she did was to tell him that he could not let his house that season and that he must make up his mind to it. The second was to discover what balance there was at the bank—and to hear that it was pitifully small. The third was to offer him a short loan that would carry him over at least a few weeks of necessary expense, and the fourth to tell him that, not upon the morrow but upon the day after, she would have decided.

Meanwhile he must post a letter for her.

She sat down and wrote at once to William Bailey.

“When you get outside, George,” she said as she gave him the letter, “you will see a very large pillar box. It is much larger than most pillar boxes; it has two slits in it instead of one. Do you follow me?”

“Yes,” he said humbly.

“You will not put this letter in your pocket, George,” she went on firmly and kindly, as certain practitioners do when they propose to hypnotise their patients. “You will carry it in front of you like this.” She put it into his right hand, crooked his arm, held his wrist upright, so that his eyes could not help falling upon the missive. “The moment you get outside you will put it in the right-hand slit of the pillar box, won’t you?”

He said “yes” again, as humbly as before. And as he went out he did all that she had asked him, though to make the matter more sure she watched for a moment from the window.

When William Bailey received the letter next morning he was in the best of moods. For one thing he was going to leave London for three weeks,—a prospect that always delighted him. For another he was going to do some sea fishing, a sport of which he was passionately fond. For a third, an Austrian money-lender and a baron at that, had shot himself—it had of course been kept out of the English papers, but he had read all the details in one of the anti-semitic rags which are the disgrace of Vienna, and his spirits had risen, buoyant at the news. Finally, and what was of perhaps most importance for an eccentric and middle-aged celibate, the house which he had hired for a month he knew exactly suited him. It was the house of Merry, the architect, and stood just so far from Parham Town as would give him the isolation he adored, yet just so near to Parham Harbour as would put him in touch with the sea.

For all these reasons he read Mary Smith’s little note in great gaiety of heart, and in a mood in which men of influence are willing to do what they can for their kind.

Like many men of wealth and ability whom opportunity has made eccentric, William Bailey could not bear to handle the pen. He hesitated for some moments between the extreme boredom of writing and the tantalising business of the telephone, decided in favour of the former, wrote on a form—

“Get Dolly to make room for him.

(Signed) Bill”—

and sent the message out to be telegraphed to his cousin.

Mary Smith, receiving it, received with it a great light.

It was not always easy for her to follow the changes that took place in political appointments, but she was certain of this, that the present administration contained more unfamiliar names than she cared to think of, and that there must be room in such a crowd for a man of poor George’s standing.

Now from the moment that such thoughts as these entered Mary Smith’s head about a man’s appointment, that man was safe: poor George’s future was therefore ultimately secure. But there was no time to lose. He must get on to the front bench, and he must get there with a salary, and the salary must be sufficient, and the promotion must be rapid. She remembered that Dolly would be at the Petheringtons’ that evening, and she determined to be there too. She hoped and prayed that nothing would bring George, though since George was everywhere the chances were against her prayer being answered.

For the moment she thought of warning him not to come, then, remembering certain indiscretions of his in the past, she thought it best to say nothing, but to trust to chance.

CHAPTER IV

CHARLES REPTON, manifold as were his financial interests, knew nothing of Popocatapetls, and cared less.

The manner in which his life was to be influenced by that very distant cataclysm was hidden from him; as (for that matter) it would be hidden from the reader also had not this book been most boldly published.

Yet another thing the full import of which may escape the reader, is the fact that Sir Charles Repton was extremely tender just behind the ears; but for this the reader herself alone and not the author is to blame, for if the reader had any knowledge of Caryll’s Ganglia she would have guessed at twenty things. But no matter: Caryll’s Ganglia and their effect upon self-control very much interrupt the chain of those absorbing adventures which, if she will continue, the reader will presently peruse.

Anyhow, those regions of the head which lie behind either ear were for some reason or other very tender, large, sensitive to pressure, and in a way abnormal in Sir Charles Repton.

When, therefore, somewhere about the corner of Tottenham Court Road (on that March day on which we left him walking to his Board meeting), his hat blew off: when he had run after it: when in doing so he had ruffled his fine crop of white hair; and when, to have it all set right, he had gone into a second-rate barber’s, it may well be imagined that he gave the man who served him minute instructions that the head rest upon the back of the chair should be made comfortable—and so it was. And on to it Sir Charles Repton leant gingerly the head upon whose clear action depended the future fortunes of Van Diemens.

The man in brushing his hair with an apparatus of singular power, turned the monologue on to the commonplaces of the moment, which included the bestiality of the Government and the abhorrent nature of the Italian people, of whom at that particular moment in 1915 the people of London stood in abject terror.

Whether it was the pressure of the violent rotating brush or some looseness in the screw that held the support behind him, with a shock and a clang that support slipped, and Sir Charles Repton’s head came smartly down, first through nothingness and then on to two iron nuts which exactly corresponded to those processes of the skull just behind either ear, in which, as I have taken pains to remark, he was peculiarly sensitive: for they were largely developed in him and nourished it would seem by an unusual supply of blood.

Sharp as was the pain, Charles Repton controlled himself, listened to the explanations and apologies of the barber, and submitted himself again to the grooming for which he had entered.

When he went out again into the street he had almost forgotten the accident. The two places where his head had been struck swelled slightly and he touched them now and again, but they soon passed from his mind; within ten minutes they were no longer painful; yet was there set up in them from that moment, an irritation which was to have no inconsiderable consequence.

He went on into the City, ordered one or two things which he had set down in his memorandum before starting, looked in at a City Club where he knew one or two items of news were awaiting him, and slowly betook himself to the offices of the Van Diemens Company. He had thoroughly planned out the scheme of that morning’s work; it needed no recapitulation in his mind, yet as his habit was, just before opening the door of the Board Room, in the few seconds of going up the stairs, he briefly presented his scheme of tactics to his own mind.

The Directors must ask the shareholders for fresh capital; a nominal million, an increase of 25 per cent. upon the value of the shares at par. That was the first point.

The second point was the object for which this levy should nominally be demanded. On that also he had made up his mind. Paton had quite unconsciously suggested to him the master idea; a little belt of untravelled and unknown country (locally known as the “Out and Out”) wherein the degraded Kawangas—so Paton had told him, and after all Paton had been there—held their orgies in Mutchi-time, alone separated Perks’ Bay from the Straits, and the long detour which all traffic must now make between the coaling station and the high road to the East, could be cut off by a line crossing that region. Paton had assured him with immense enthusiasm that such a line would give its possessor the strategic key to the gate of everything East of the Bay of Bengal, and, what was more important in Sir Charles’ eyes than Paton’s own opinion, a vast mass of gentlemen in the suburbs of London and perhaps five-sixths of the journalists in Fleet Street, were ready to rally to the idea. It had been well preached and well dinned in.

These two points were clear: they must ask for a million and they must ask it for the purpose of building a railway that would at last ensure the Empire against the nightmare of foreign rivals.

There was a third point. The shareholders would not or could not subscribe a million but that was easily turned. They should be asked for no more than 200,000,—a shilling a share—in cash down, “the remainder to be paid,” etc. etc.

Had not Sir Charles possessed an iron control of his face, the strong set smile which he wore as he entered the Board Room would have broadened at the recollection of that last detail. On the other hand had he not possessed such self-control some movement of annoyance might have escaped him to discover present at the table, among his other colleagues, the late-rising and impervious Bingham. The sight was sufficient to exasperate a man of less balance. The hour had been carefully chosen to avoid such an accident, and that accident meant perhaps another half-hour or more of close argument and of subtle effort.

For his colleague Bingham added to a native idiocy of solid texture and formidable dimensions, the experience of extensive travel; and he was in particular well acquainted with the district with regard to which the Board must that day make its decision. It was certain, therefore, that his fellow-Directors would listen to him with peculiar respect, not only on account of his stupidity which necessarily commanded a certain attention, but also on account of his intimacy with plain matters of fact: he had been upon the spot: he was the man who knew.

It was just as Repton had feared. Business that might have been done in a quarter of an hour and a decision which contained no more than the issue of pieces of paper was turned into a long practical discussion by the intolerable ponderance of Bingham, who would wait until every one had had his say, and then would bring in some dreadful little technical point about a marsh, a rainy season or a fly; he was careful to pepper his conversation with local terms a hundred times more remote than the Kawanga and Mutchi-time; in every conceivable manner he put his spoke into the wheels of business.

So considerable was the effect produced by the redoubtable Bingham at that table that, were Cæsarism a common political theory in elderly men, the whole conduct of Van Diemens would for the future have been put into his hands. Luckily for the Company its forms were not so democratic.

Charles Repton waited patiently. When he spoke his point was as simple as falling off a log: what was wanted was not a railway in itself, it was a new issue of capital. He was profoundly indifferent what label should be tied onto that issue, so long as it was a label good enough to get the original shareholders to come in. The public would never come in as things were: its pusillanimity was increased by the fact that the Company had been in existence for now eleven years and had hitherto failed to pay a dividend of any kind. After some thought he had decided, in company with one or two others upon the Board, that a railway through a certain district of the concession, locally known as “The Out and Out,” and remarkable for the fact that no white man had yet visited it, would be the best attraction he could offer. He was prepared to show by the aid of maps upon which should be marked all favourable things, that a line driven through this district would unite with the world two provinces teeming with inexhaustible wealth, of a heavenly climate, and hitherto by the mere accident of the Out and Out belt, cut off from the longing embraces of commerce. More; he could show that this single line of railway would bestow upon his beloved country so vast a strategic superiority over all other nations as would ensure her immediate success in any campaign, no matter what the quality of the troops she might employ. To this he added the attractions of touring in the tropics and the allurements of big game for those wealthy gentlemen whom he designed in the new prospectus to term Shikaris.

With the new capital subscribed and long before the line was surveyed, there was little doubt that the shares which had fallen from over £9 to the comparatively low quotation—but oh! not price—of 16/3 (at which quotation he had first consented to tender his services to the Company) would rise to certainly over £1, perhaps to nearer £2, and what was more to the point they would be readily saleable. He was prepared in that event to transfer his property in them to others, a course which he sincerely hoped his fellow-shareholders would also follow, though of course he would not take it upon himself to advise any one of them.

Bingham, like the practical man he was, pinned himself to the railway. He knew the Out and Out; not that he’d ever been there,—no white man had,—but he had talked to several of the Kawanga in Mutchi-time, and he shook his head despondently. There was one continuous line of precipice 3000 feet deep; there was a river which was now a stream five miles broad, now a marsh and now again dry—, sometimes for years on end. There was a dense mass of forest; there was that much more difficult thing, a belt of shifting sand dunes; there were nearly 300 miles without water through these. He was prepared to speak all day upon the difficulties of building a railway which none but the least intelligent had ever designed to build.

Sir Charles Repton could ride himself on the curb, and more than anything else this mastery had given him his present great position; but that day he had to exercise his will to the full, and in that exercise he felt slight twinges behind the ear where the barber’s rest had struck him. It was all he could do to prevent himself from drumming on the table or from making those interruptions which only serve as fuel to the slow criticisms of the dull.

At last—and heaven knows with what subtlety and patience—he conquered. There was a vote (a thing he had wished to avoid), but he carried it by two; and it was agreed that the issue of new capital should be made, that a General Meeting of the shareholders should be called for Tuesday the 2nd of June, and that he, Repton, should have the task of laying the scheme before them. The new prospectus, which he had already drafted, was passed round and with a very few emendations accepted. Then, after as heavy a bit of work as had ever been undertaken in the way of persuasion, the principal brain in that company was at last free for other things.

It was half-past one. He had just time to meet and to convince yet another fool upon another matter: the foreigner acting as agent for his Government, on the matter of the bridge: a bridge which the Foreign Government might or might not build, and, if they built, might or might not order from a firm which Repton had reason to befriend. Repton must lunch with that foreigner: he must persuade him to build: he must get the order—then he must be in his place in the House in time for questions.

The foreigner was as wax in his hands: not as good warm wax, adulterated wax, candle wax, but rather as beeswax, very ancient and hard. It was a full hour before that wax was pliable, but once again the unceasing, managed, strict watchfulness, the set face which had always in it something stern but never anything aggressive, the balance of judgment, conquered. Down to the smallest detail of that conversation Repton was the artist, his host at the lunch was the public, accepting and gradually convinced, and the bridge was ordered for the Foreign Government, though it was a useless bridge leading from nowhere to nowhere, and though it could have been built much more solidly and much better by the people of the place than by the English firm.

Then Repton went on to the House of Commons, and there, as in every duty of the day, the weight of his character told.

The questions were slight, there were not half a dozen that concerned his Department, but he answered them all with that curious restraint of tone which somehow made it difficult to cross-examine his Department. And he faced the House with such a poise and expression that one almost wondered, as one looked at him, upon which side he was sitting, or whether indeed the mere game of In’s and Out’s entered into his brain at all.

He seemed to be quite above the divisions of party. He seemed a sort of Ambassador from the permanent officials and to carry into the House of Commons an atmosphere at once judicial and experienced which no one could resist. When he had first accepted the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry it had been wondered that he should take so secondary a post. Now, after these four years, it was rather wondered why no one had seen till then the possibilities that lay in the position.

After that typical and decisive day, Repton, for more than a month, refrained from debate.

He was ever in his seat on those two days in each week when it was his business to answer questions: he never let his understrapper appear for him; for one full fortnight he was permanently in attendance, watching the fortunes before a select committee of a certain Bill, for which the public cared nothing but which he knew might change in a very important particular the public fortune—but in general he seemed to be in retirement. He was planning hard.

A mixture of Imperial sentiment and personal pride urged him to put Van Diemens on their legs, and all April, all through the Easter Recess, he remained in London working. He worked right on into May; for the first week after Parliament met again he was seen but little; one thing only troubled him, that at long intervals—sometimes as long as ten days, an uneasy twinge behind the ears, the result of that little half-forgotten accident, incommoded him. These twinges came a trifle more frequently as May advanced. After the last of them he had felt a little dazed—no more. And still he worked and worked, holding twenty reins in his hands.

Before the end of May the fruit of all this labour began to appear. Camptons were reconstructed, arbitration had been forced upon the Docks combination in the North just in time to prevent a wholesale transference of shipping abroad, and more important than all, perhaps, there had begun to crop up in the papers, here, there, and everywhere, the mention—and the flattering mention—of Van Diemens, and the wealthy were already familiar with the conception of a certain railway in the land which was under the Van Diemens charter.

The wealthy, but as yet only the wealthy; it is as fatal to be too early as to be too late, and that brain which knew how to drive and compel, had also known so well how to restrain, that the shares still remained unsaleable with the meaningless quotation of sixteen shillings and a few fluctuating pence still attached to them in the market lists.

So Repton stood in the middle of May, 1915, when he became aware that an obscure member (obscure at least in the House of Commons—and Repton noticed little of, and cared nothing for, the merely luxurious world of London), an aristocrat of sorts, one of the Demaine,—George Demaine it seemed, was being talked about. He was being pushed somehow. Repton hardly heeded so commonplace a phenomenon, save perhaps to wonder what job was on:—he continued to push Van Diemens.

CHAPTER V

THE Petheringtons’ house, to which Mary Smith drove on the evening of 12th of April, under the two pretty little electric lights of her car, one for either side of her face, was one of a hundred similar London houses, a huge brown cube in the middle of Grosvenor Square.

It was no longer called Petherington House; it had once again regained its more familiar appellation of No. 89, under which it had been famous for the complete lack of entertainment of any sort which had distinguished the short session of 1912. Then old Hooker had died, the changes in the Cabinet had come, Hooker’s wife had married the Bishop and also died immediately, and finally the Petheringtons had taken the place, foolishly called it by their own title for a few months, and finding it unknown to cabmen and to their friends’ chauffeurs also under this appellation, they slowly reverted to the old name.

If hospitality is a fault when pushed to an extreme, the Petheringtons exhibited that fault. But so excellent were their arrangements—for business will out even in the smallest details of domestic life—that no one suffered in the crush, and that it was perfectly easy in the time a guest ordinarily allowed himself for the function, to go up the stairs and down again, though perhaps too much time was wasted at the necessarily narrow entrance where men must seek their hats and coats.

The movement of Society in this particular case was rendered the more facile by the emptiness of the hall, from which everything had been taken except the Great Stuffed Bear which had been shot by the servant of a trapper who had sold it to the correspondent of the furrier of Lady Petherington, and which now stood holding a tray, with an expression of extreme ferocity, and labelled “The Caucasus, 17th June, 1910,”—for in those mountains Mr. Petherington—as he then was—had travelled.

Mary Smith was not disappointed. Mooning aimlessly about the crowded rooms above, in an atmosphere surcharged with mauve Moravian music—the loudest of its kind—shuffled the anxious and slightly bowed form of Dolly, the young and popular Prime Minister.

A foreigner might have thought him to have few friends, so slowly did he proceed and with so curious a gaze from one group to another, seeming half stunned by the vigour of the band and fascinated by the vigorous contortions of Mr. Arthur Worth who conducted it for all he was—I mean with his utmost capacity of gesture and expression. That foreigner would have suffered an illusion. The Prime Minister was perfectly well known in face and figure to every one in that room, and there were few who did not hope for some advantage from his presence, but fewer, far fewer still, who attempted to obtain it. I must of course except Professor Kahn.

Dolly knew his Mary Smith, and resigned himself to suffer. She had not come there that night for nothing. She got up to him within half a minute of the view, and found him with peculiar dexterity through a maze of wealthy people. She quietly took him away, and sat him in a large chair that stood in a remote recess, where the light was subdued; she took advantage of a deafening crash in the music to which its previous successes were child’s play, and shouted:

“When are you going to have your next move?”

The Prime Minister implored her not to talk shop. Then somewhat inconsequently he added, weakening: “Why do you want to know?”

The music was now whining and part of it was taking breath for another charge. It was therefore in quite a low but exceedingly business-like tone that Mary Smith remarked:

“Because I want you to do something for Dimmy.”

The name suggested to the Prime Minister one of twenty little jobs; he thought of a jolly little one in Ireland. But she added: “You know what has happened?”

He didn’t.

She told him briefly: Ole Man Benson was broke.

The Prime Minister remembered the explosion of Popocatapetl: he had vaguely connected the news with something at the time: now he knew what it was. He looked extremely grave. And when Mary went on to tell him that Mrs. Demaine had only £1500 he looked graver still.

“There isn’t anything of a big sort going just now, Mary,” he said in quite another tone. But he was thinking his clearest. “I don’t know him as well as you do,” he added. “Can he do anything?”

“No,” said Mary Smith decidedly, “he can’t. But he’d go well in harness.”

The Prime Minister seemed to live more actively as he considered the problem. The warm air, the scent of clothes and flowers suited him well.

The trouble with his left lung which had so endeared him to his fellow-citizens, he felt far less keenly in the beginning of a warm spring than at any other time, and evenings such as this rewarded him for the sacrifice he made every winter to his duty and to England. Of the four years during which he had held the highest of human offices he had spent but one winter on the Riviera, and though it had been necessary in one year to forego an Autumn session, such a session had not in the other three years delayed the meeting of Parliament beyond the end of February. His youth stood him in good stead during this ordeal; but there were those (and they were they who loved him most) who looked with anxiety upon the frail form and thought, although they dared not say, that the years were slipping by and that what a man could do with impunity when still upon the right side of fifty, would become another matter when his fifty-fifth year was passed.... There was of course always the hope of opposition and its leisure.... The Broadening of the Streets Bill had roused a tempest of Party passion.... He had already been publicly stoned in the North.... But no matter; for the moment the Prime Minister was full of appreciation, and for his cousin’s purposes in the kindliest of moods.

Nevertheless he thought (and his cousin read his thoughts) that she was asking the impossible. An idea struck him.

“Has Dimmy been called to the Bar?” he asked.

She looked up, puzzled. “I don’t think so.... No, I know he hasn’t. I put up a hundred for him in 1908 and he buzzed it. I should certainly have heard if he had done anything more before his marriage. Naturally since then....”

“Yes, naturally,” said the Prime Minister sympathetically. He mused. “He wouldn’t go abroad?” he said, looking round.

“What on earth’s the good of that?” said Mary Smith a little testily.

“Well,” answered the Prime Minister vaguely, as he reviewed certain posts in his mind, “... No. There isn’t much in that. Anything that could be of any use wants leading up to.” And he plunged into thought again.

Then with a gesture that many had noticed in him and had thought a mere idle trick but which was really an accompaniment to calculation, he put his ten fingers down upon his knees and lifted them slowly one after another. When he had so lifted nine (it was the ring finger of his left hand) a touch of animation passed over his face, an expression his cousin could see even in that subdued light.

“How long does he want it for?” he asked.

Mary Smith was inclined to say “For ever,” but she checked herself; she remembered the face and manner of Theocritus C. Benson, she trusted his future fortune, and she said:

“I think even a little while would make a difference.”

They were both thinking of the same thing. But the Prime Minister understood what perhaps she did not, that there is no such thing as autocratic intervention in our public life, that time is required for every innovation, and that he who leads must also follow. He was reviewing as she spoke the prejudices and the ambitions of perhaps twenty men, and the power of each. When he spoke again it was as though his decision were final:

“I don’t see how I could do anything for him in the House. He’s hardly ever spoken, and when he did he made a fool of himself.”

“Of course,” said Mary sympathetically.

“He’s the only man,” went on Dolly reflectively, “whom I’ve ever seen fall right off a bench in the House of Commons....”

“You mean he’s physically awkward?” replied Mary in the tone of a woman who knows how to despise such trifles—but she scented danger. “I’ve never known Dimmy betray one word that was confided to him,” she continued gravely.

“If one were beginning all over again,” said Dolly, as though thinking aloud. “But then,” he added, getting up from his chair and making as though to walk away,—“that’s impossible,—there’s Repton.”

It has been said that women are inconsequent in their conversation and that if they desire to obtain a favour they do so by disconnected hints which men cannot follow. It may be so. But perhaps on this very account do they succeed. At any rate from the moment that the Prime Minister had let drop the phrase “there’s Repton,” Mary Smith’s plan was formed. She did not like Sir Charles Repton, largely because he had not known her well. She had half forgotten him; she understood now that in some way he stood as an obstacle to what she desired for poor George, and from that moment she determined that Repton should be thrust into the House of Lords. All she said was:

“Yes, I forgot Repton.”

And then she went back into the crowded rooms, pushing the friend of her girlhood playfully before her with her forefinger pressed into the small of his back, until they reached the open door and entered the main rooms.

The music of Mr. Arthur Worth’s band rose, a triumphant tyrant over, the howling talk, when, during a sharp momentary and calculated pause in the tornado of violins came the loud and unexpected crash of some heavy object falling violently in the hall below. Mary Smith moved very rapidly and silently downstairs towards the sound.

It was as she expected; George Mulross had come! A little flushed and very much annoyed, he had upset the Great Stuffed Bear which stood near the door of the house. George was looking at the Prostrate Monster with angry defiance, and nothing but his dignity forbade him to attempt to raise it. The accident was enough to decide Mary. She dreaded the impression Dolly might receive if the poor lad went up now and was flurried again. She went up and put her hand on his shoulder as he stood there. He jumped round and discovered her.

“Oh Lord!” he said.

“Dimmy,” she commanded firmly, “go out at once. A great deal depends on it. Go out at once. Don’t wait!”

He began to say something about his wife and a carriage.

“Go out at once!” said Mary Smith.

He tried to say something about his hat and coat.

Some yards before them at the open door the noise of a carriage was heard and there were servants waiting. Behind them more servants. But Mary Smith knew her world.

It was a choice of evils, and George Mulross Demaine went out into the night, hatless and coatless. The policemen were pleased to see such familiarity among the great. They doubted not that the gentleman was taking the air, but they wondered why he walked so very rapidly eastward through Mayfair.

Meanwhile from the carriage the daughter of Theocritus C. Benson came out, not without decision, and very soon the rooms of that house were filled and even its Moravian music dominated by the acuteness of her laugh and the tremendous decision of her tread.

When every one had gone, one hat and coat remained. The footman pawned them: they were those of George Mulross Demaine.

He, poor fellow, saw in all this nothing but that eternity of bad luck to which he was born. When his wife asked him next day why he had left the Petheringtons’ so early, he told some ordinary lie: he had left indeed because one wiser than he had told him to leave, but he could make neither head nor tail of the whole affair: and his foot hurt him where the Bear had crushed it.

CHAPTER VI

EASTER, as those who survive will know, fell early in 1915—to be exact, upon April 4th; Ole Man Benson had returned on the 11th; on the 12th Mary had seen Dolly; and the week after Ole Man Benson’s return to these shores, the week after he had delivered his important and somewhat depressing news to the young household, the week after Mary and Dolly had conferred at the Petheringtons’—was the week in which Parliament met after the Recess, the third week in April.

In that week also there began to crop up here and there unexpectedly, beautifully, like the spring flowers, short newspaper notes upon George Mulross Demaine.

They were notes of where he had been, whether he had been there or not,—at least at first they were notes of that kind. There had always been some such notes on him in the papers, but they seemed to be getting numerous.

The public would hear that George Mulross loved his great poodle dog; next that the pressure of his engagements forbade him to open an Enormous Institution for the Cultivation and Study of Virulent Diseases, and in connection with this news the Institution was described at great length, and the passionate regrets at the absence of George Mulross Demaine sounded like a small but perceptible dirge in the corners of the daily press.

He was attacked gently but cleverly in a paper upon his own side of politics; short biographical notes, only a few among several score, gave details of his happy little ways. He was fond of riding, said one author who can have had but little intimacy with her subject; he was fond of children, said another who had even less. He had “an eye for black game,” said a third, whose lack of intimacy included not only George himself but certainly black game as well.

Later came anecdotes of his goodness of heart; how he had run over a boy in the Park with his motor and had then picked him up; and how he had good-humouredly refrained from telling people who he was in the railway accident, and had permitted the wounded to be taken to hospital before he himself would accept conveyance.

Finally, as the month ended, and as May brought in the London season, George Mulross began to find himself uncomfortably prominent. For he very sincerely and very heartily hated fame. He could not so much as upset a glass of wine or stumble over public stairs without hearing his name whispered; and once when he had called at the wrong number, the servant, recognising him from some caricature in the papers, had mentioned his own name to him with reverence, though the door was the door of a house whose occupants he did not know.

Meanwhile the tiny balance at the bank had gone. The overdraft was large and at any moment there might come a note which he dreaded. And Mary Smith had compelled him to look for a small house in Westminster and to make every preparation for leaving Demaine House. He kicked feebly, but she insisted: and even Sudie gave way.

“You haven’t enough to keep the house dry,” Mary said. And she compelled them both to a sense of business which Theocritus himself would have failed to make them feel.

All this business was well advanced when Mary Smith proceeded to the next stage of the campaign.

She carefully looked up the nature of the Court of Dowry, and when she had learned all that she could learn from her books (it took her half a day—though she was a woman of exceptional intelligence and excellent education) she set herself to learn all that could be learned from living men.

The Court of Dowry, in its very survival and still more perhaps in the functions to-day attached to it, affords an admirable example of the value of fixed institutions in the life of a people.

It was originally instituted to try cases falling within the jurisdiction of that Queen Mother of the Middle Ages to whom the poet Gray so pathetically alludes in the striking lines

“She-wolf of France with unrelenting fangs

Tearing the bowels,” etc.

It had cognizance of all Escheats, Novels Tabulate and Malprisions Reguardaunt in the County of Ponthieu and the Seniory of Lucq. But when active jurisdiction over these continental territories was interrupted under King Henry VI., there remained no function for the Court but the trial of cases arising in or without foreign ports upon decks subject to the Crown of England.

It lingered thus into the beginning of the sixteenth century, at which moment it was reduced to a Clerk known as the Mangeur, and a Warden, each holding what were virtually sinecures (and not highly paid sinecures at that) about the Palace.

Henry VIII., whom we cannot call a good but whom surely we may call a great man, rudely suppressed the office of Mangeur with a cruel jest at the executioner’s expense, and only permitted the Wardenship itself to survive on the strict understanding that the salary should be paid to himself. The title, however, remained, a minor distinction among the numerous baubles of the time, and was, if I may so express it, resurrected from obscurity by the great family of Heygate at the moment of the Restoration of Charles II.

In their gladness at their recovery of a legitimate sovereign, this dominant house (now represented by the Parrells) trapped themselves in every accoutrement of joy, and, among other posts, the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry was voted in 1661 an annual salary of £2000, for which sum held by the same Act as an hereditary right, the head of the House of Heygate was content to license the annual holding of the Court within the Royal Manor and Liberties of Tooting.

At first this Court sat for one full day in each year—St. Luke’s—but later, from 1731, this session was maintained in fiction alone. A crier in Westminster Hall, at the opening of every Hilary Term, would rapidly read out a list of three fictitious cases which went by default, claim seventeen and sixpence, and for ever after hold his peace.

During the eighteenth century the fixed yearly salary of £2000 hereditarily enjoyed by the Heygate family steadily grew, till, by the time of the Reform Bill, it had reached the very considerable sum of £15,000, still payable to the Heygates though now all vestige of activity in the office had disappeared.

Our grandfathers, in the zeal of that somewhat iconoclastic moment, swept away the corrupt figment. The emoluments of the post were ruthlessly cut down to the original £2000; its hereditary character was, after a violent debate in the House of Lords, destroyed by a majority of over fifty votes, determined (as were so many of the great changes of that time!) by the voice of Eldon. The Detainer of the office (for such was his official title) received in compensation a lump sum of half a million only—not twenty years’ purchase—and certain apparently unimportant functions were attached to the place which from that day forward became an appointment changing with the Administration.

Mark here the silent virtue of organic constitutional growth, and how a gentry can find it possible to create where demagogues would have destroyed.

Point by point and function by function, one marine interest after another attached itself to the Court of Dowry as the beautiful organisms of the sea attach themselves to the ships that plough its waters, until there had grown up round the Court of Dowry by the end of the nineteenth century so considerable a mass of precedent and custom and, with the vast extension of our maritime commerce, duties so manifold and of such moment to the nation, that the office re-emerged after its life of six centuries, an organ of capital importance in the workings of English Government.

As must be the case in any old and secure State, certain anomalous duties were further attached to it: the inspection of patent medicines for instance, the giving out of contracts for buoys and rockets, and the formal stamping of licences to sell sarsaparilla. Even so the wretched and insufficient salary of £2000 remained the sole remuneration of the Warden, though the great name of GHERKIN had raised it to be among the foremost posts of the Cabinet, and it had since seen the brilliancy, the learning and the judgment respectively of a Dibley, a Powker and a Hump. By 1912 its strict control over the great steamship lines, its supervision of wrecks, derelicts, Hunnage, Mixings, and Ports Consequent, made it second only to the Foreign Office in the matter of public interest, and, like the Foreign Office, largely removed from the wranglings of party.

Some months later the salary was raised, amid the cheers (as I have said) of a united House, to £5000 a year, with a further allowance of £5000 for the expenses of entertainment and travel, which fall with peculiar severity upon this great Department; and in the hands of Charles Repton it had risen to be something even more, if that were possible, than GHERKIN had made it.

So much did Mary Smith discover: partly in what she already knew, partly in her reading. The living voices of men told her further things.

It seemed that in the dingy offices which (by a lovely trait in the character of politics!) house this great Department—they stand between Parliament Street and New Scotland Yard—a certain Mr. Sorrel had for now seven years exercised his marvellous and hidden powers, and while all were prepared to admit the genius of Charles Repton, those who best knew the workings of a great Government office, spoke almost as though Mr. Sorrel were in himself the Court of Dowry.

The quaint customs attaching to the office of Warden, the little bells upon the shoes, the bearing of a model ship, bareheaded, upon Empire Day (a recent innovation and one awkward only to the bald or the blind), though to some they seemed a drawback, to others were but an additional attraction, and the ceremony of waggling in backwards upon all fours into the presence of the Sovereign at Inauguration, had been, with perhaps doubtful wisdom, abolished, to suit the eccentric Radicalism of GHERKIN, who refused to take office under any other condition.

The Accolade, or Ceremonial Stroke, however, heavily administered with a beam of ebony across the back of the Warden Accept, was retained and has often afforded a subject for illustration and archæological research.

Mary Smith learnt even more. She learnt that while decency forbade any saving to be effected on the further £5000 that was an allowance for entertainment and travel, yet custom allowed it to be spent in all forms of hospitality, and that travel might include such social visits as were necessary to the occupant of so high an office. When she learnt this she was but the more confirmed in her determination that Charles Repton who for the moment encumbered the post of Warden, should accept a barony, and that quickly; for she saw the agony of Demaine House already begun. Upon a certain morning in the mid-week of May the last stage of her beneficent action was ready.

In his study on that same morning, Charles Repton, a little weary but with all his action planned and designed, suffered again for a moment that slight dull pain behind the ears, where Caryll’s Ganglia are: he was dazed. He went out and sought his wife, and she was astonished to see as he put to her some simple question on the management of the household, a look of innocence in his eyes. It quickly faded. The pain also departed, and he returned to his study.

Mary Smith sent a note over to Demaine House.

Mary’s note found George Mulross Demaine risen after a lonely lunch and wondering, as he regularly wondered every day, what was going to turn up.

His wonderment had bewilderment in it also. Something was going to turn up he knew ... people were noticing him so. Only last evening there was a savage attack upon him in the Moon, saying that he had torn Hares to pieces with his own reeking hands, and killed a Carted Stag with a blunt knife; while the Capon, with more truth, had pointed out the beauty of the Sir Joshuas in his house, but had erroneously suggested that they were heirlooms in his family.