The Record of Nicholas Freydon Part 30

III

Charles Augustus Everard Barthrop, third son of the baronet and his wife, was the a.s.sistant manager of some financial company in London, of which his father was a director. I fancy the young man himself was also a director, but am not sure as to that. In any case he had the reputation of being one who was likely to achieve big things in the world of finance and company promotion, a world of which I was as profoundly ignorant as though a dweller in the planet Mars. In another field, too, this young man had won early distinction. He was a mighty footballer, and a rather notable boxer. He was very blonde, very handsome, very large, and, I gathered, of a very merry and kindly disposition. He looked it. His sunny face and bright blue eyes contained no more evidence of care or anxiety than one sees in the face of a healthy boy of twelve.

'Here is a man,' I thought, 'peculiarly rich in everything that I lack; and all his life long he has been equally rich in his possession of everything I have lacked. And now he is going to marry Cynthia Lane. The rest seems natural enough, but not this.'

As yet I had little enough of evidence on which to base conclusions.

But, as I saw it, Charles Barthrop was a handsome and materially well-endowed young animal, whose work was company-promoting, and whose diversions hardly took him beyond football and the Gaiety Theatre. I dare say it was partly because he was so refulgently well-dressed that I a.s.sumed him devoid of intellect. As a fact, my a.s.sumption was not very wide of the mark.

'And Cynthia,' I thought, 'has a mind and a soul. She _is_ mind and soul encased, as it happens, in a beautiful body. She is no more a mate for him than a great poet would be mate for a handsome fishwife; an Elizabeth Barrett Browning for a champion pugilist.'

It was natural that, during that Sat.u.r.day evening and the following day, conversation between Lane and myself should turn more than once towards his sister Cynthia and her forthcoming marriage, which, I understood, was to take place within a few weeks at St. Margaret's, Westminster. We had become fairly intimate of late, Lane and myself, and the introduction to various members of his family seemed to have made us much more intimate.

'You have made no end of an impression on Miss Cynthia,' he said pleasantly on the Sat.u.r.day evening. 'She was always the literary and artistic member of the sisterhood. She gave me special instructions to bring you along in time for some tea to-morrow, and she means to force you out of your hermitage while she is at Deene Place, so I warn you.

Seriously, I think, it may be good for you. You will be sure to meet some decent people there, who will be worth knowing, not only just now, but when Cynthia is married and set up in Sloane Street. Barthrop has taken a house there, you know.'

With a duplicity not very creditable to me, I pretended thoughtful agreement. A brother can tell one a good deal without putting his information into plain words. I gathered from our talk then, and on the following day, that the Lane family occupied the difficult position of people who have, as it were, been born to greater riches than they possess. Of them more had always been expected, socially, than their straitened means permitted. The pinch had been a very real one of late years, towards the end of the grand struggle which their parents had pa.s.sed through in educating and launching a family of two sons and five daughters. It was easy to gather that good marriages were very necessary for those five daughters, of whom Cynthia was the first-born. I even gathered that, a year or two earlier, there had been scenes and grave anxiety over a preference which Cynthia had shown for a painter, poor as a church mouse, who, very considerately, had proceeded to die of a fever in Southern Italy. Mrs. Lane had, to a large extent, arranged the forthcoming marriage with Charles Barthrop, I think. In the interests of the whole family Cynthia had been 'sensible'; she had been brought to see reason.

'And, mind you,' said Lane, 'I do think Barthrop is an excellent chap, you know. Oh, yes; he's quite a cut above your average city man. And a kinder-hearted chap you never met. The pater swears by him.'

I gathered that 'the pater' had been given the most useful information and guidance in financial matters by this Apollo of Throgmorton Street.

'He's modest, too,' continued Lane, 'which is unusual in his type, I think. He told me his favourite reading was detective stories, outside the sporting and financial news, of course; but he has the greatest respect for Cynthia's literary tastes-- You know she has published some verse? Yes. Not in book form, but in some of the better magazines. Oh, yes, Barthrop's a good chap: simple-minded, a shade gross, too, perhaps, in some ways. These chaps in the city do themselves too well, I think. But quite a good chap, and sure to make an excellent husband. I fancy his kind do, you know--no tension, no fret, no introspection.'

Again I made signs of agreement which were not strictly honest.

On Sunday afternoon we both drank our tea under the copper beeches at Deene Place. I deliberately monopolised Cynthia's attention as long as I possibly could, and then devoted myself to the cold-blooded study of the man she was to marry. I found him very good-natured, gifted with abundant high spirits, agreeably modest, and, as it seemed to me, intellectually about on a par with a race-horse or a handsome St.

Bernard dog.

'Cynthia tells me we are to bully you into coming out of your hermitage,' he said to me with a sunny smile. 'A good idea, too, you know. After all, being a recluse can't be good for one's health; and I suppose if a man isn't fit, it tells--er--even in literary work, doesn't it?'

I felt towards him as one feels towards some bright, handsome schoolboy. And yet, in many ways, I doubt not he had more of wisdom than I had. I had spoken to Cynthia of Leith Hill, and she had said that, when staying at Deene Place, she walked almost every day either on the hill or the common. Upon that I had relinquished her attention with a fair grace.

Of course, I was entirely unused to the amenities of society. I used no subterfuges, and made no attempt to disguise my interest in Cynthia, or to pretend to other interests. I dare say my directness was smiled upon, as part of the eccentricity of these literary people; one of Ernest's friends, quite a recluse, and so forth. I gathered as much a little later on.

Looking back upon it I must suppose that my conduct during the next week or so would be condemned by most right-thinking people as ungentlemanly and even dishonourable. I have no inclination to defend it; and I could not affirm that, at the time, I loved honour more than Cynthia Lane. To speak the naked truth, I believe I would have committed forgery, if by doing so I could have won Cynthia for my wife. The one and only way in which I showed any discretion (and that, not from any moral scruple, but purely as a matter of tactics) was in withholding any open declaration to Cynthia herself.

My feeling was that my chance of a life's happiness was confined to the cruelly short period of a week or two. There was no time for taking risks. There must be no refusals. I must use my time, every day of it, I thought, in the effort to win her heart; and trust to the very end to win her consent. I availed myself fully of my advantage in living in Dorking while my rival spent his days in London. The obstacles in my path were such as to justify me in grasping every possible advantage within reach, I told myself. Every day we met.

Every day I walked and talked with Cynthia. Every day love possessed me more utterly. And, I believe I may say it, every day Cynthia drew nearer to me. No word did I breathe of marriage; that which was arranged, or that which I desired. It seemed to me that every available moment must be given to the moulding of her heart, to preparation for the last crucial test, when I should ask her to sacrifice everything, and cross the Channel and the Rubicon with me.

There is no need for me to burke the words. Cynthia did love me when she left Dorking for her parents' house in London; not, perhaps, with the absorbing pa.s.sion she had inspired in me; yet well enough, as I was a.s.sured, to face social disaster and a break with her family, in order that she might entrust her life to me.

'Cynthia,' I said, at the end of that last walk, 'London is not to rob me of you? Promise me!'

'If you call me, I will come,' she said, looking at me through tears, and well I knew that perfect truth shone in those dear eyes.

Regarding this as the most serious undertaking of my life, I had endeavoured to overlook nothing. I had obtained a marriage licence. A London registrar's office was to serve our purpose. I had previously secured a temporary lodging in London, and now went there with my luggage. Love did not blind me to practical considerations. While Cynthia was still in Dorking I had no time to spare. Now that she was entangled in her own home among last preparations for the wedding that was not to be, I turned my attention to matters affecting her future life with me.

Three afternoon appointments I kept with Arncliffe in the _Advocate_ office. When I left him after our third talk, I was definitely re-engaged as a member of his staff, at a salary of six hundred pounds per annum, having promised to take up my duties with him in one month from that date. Every nerve in my body had been keyed to the attainment of this result, and I was grateful, and not a little flattered by its achievement. I was still a poor man; but this salary, with the few hundred pounds I might hope to add to it in a year, by means of independent literary work, would at all events mean that Cynthia need not face actual discomfort in her life with me. Further, I sincerely believed (and may very well have been correct in this) that her influence upon me would enlarge the scope and appeal of my literary work. I realised clearly that my beautiful lady-love had very much to give me. My life till then had not entirely lacked culture or intellectuality. But it emphatically had lacked that grace, that element of gentle fineness and delicacy which Cynthia would give it.

Cynthia, who in giving me herself would give all that I desired which my life had lacked, should come to me empty-handed, I thought. I did not want her to borrow from out the life which for my sake she was relinquishing. On the day before that fixed upon for the wedding at St. Margaret's, she should come to me in the park, near her home.

There would be quite another sort of wedding, and by the evening train we would leave for the Continent. Every detail was arranged for. We met on the afternoon of the preceding day. I put my whole fate to the test, and Cynthia never wavered. We arranged to meet at two o'clock next day.

On the morning itself, just before noon, I hurried out from my lodging upon a final errand, intending to change my clothes and lock my bags, upon my return, within half an hour. My papers were in the pockets of the clothes I intended to wear, and a supply of money was left locked in my handbag. The most important moment of my life was at hand, and, as I walked down the crowded Strand into Fleet Street, I was conscious of such a measure of exaltation as I had never known before that day.

And then, for the second time in my life, brute force intervened, and made utter havoc of all my plans and prospects. Crossing Fleet Street, close to Chancery Lane, the pole of an omnibus struck my shoulder and flung me several yards along the road. The driver of a hansom cab shouted aloud as he jerked his horse to its haunches to avoid running over me. And in that moment, pawing wildly, the horse struck the back of my head with one of his fore feet.

For the second time in my life I lay in a hospital, suffering from concussion of the brain. Almost twelve hours pa.s.sed before I first regained consciousness, and the morning of the following day was well advanced before I was able to inform the hospital authorities of my ident.i.ty. No papers, nothing but a handful of silver, had been found in my pockets.

At eleven o'clock that morning there was solemnised at St. Margaret's Church the marriage of Cynthia and Charles Barthrop.

'If you call, I will come.'

But I had not called. I had even left Cynthia to pace to and fro through an afternoon in the park; at that most critical juncture in both our lives I had failed her. In a brief letter, posted to an address given me by her brother, I acquainted Cynthia with the facts of my accident, and nothing more than the facts.

In ten days I was out of the hospital; and Cynthia, another man's wife, was in Norway.

IV

I dare say no place would have looked very attractive to me when I came out from that hospital; but London and my lodging in it did seem past all bearing unattractive. The Dorking lodging had been definitely relinquished, and in any case I had no wish now to see Dorking, Leith Hill, or the common.

Knowing practically nothing of my native land outside its capital, I packed a small bag at my lodging, and walked to the nearest large railway station, which happened to be Paddington. Arrived there, I spent some dull moments in staring at way-bills, and finally took a ticket at a venture for Salisbury. There I found a quiet lodging, and spent the evening in idly wandering about the cathedral close.

The next day found me tramping over short turf--turf more ancient than the cathedral--in the neighbourhood of Stonehenge. And so I spent the better part of a fortnight, greatly to the benefit I dare say of my bodily health. I shall always love the tiny hamlets of that sun and wind-washed countryside, between Warminster, Andover, Stockbridge, and Salisbury. Yet always they will be a.s.sociated in my mind with a bowing down sense of loneliness, of empty, unredeemed sadness, and of irretrievable loss. I cannot pretend that I experienced any sense of remorse or penitence, where my abortive attempt to win another man's bride was concerned. I had no such feeling. But, discreditable as that fact may be, it did not make the aching sorrow that possessed me any the less real.

I was conscious of no remorse, and yet, G.o.d knows my state of mind was humble enough, though too sombre and despairing to be called resigned.

I believe that in the retrospect my loss seemed more, a great deal more to me, than just a lover's loss; though upon that score alone I was smitten to the very dust. It was rather as though, at the one blow, I had lost my heart's desire and a fortune and a position in the world; or, at least, that these had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from my grasp in the moment of becoming mine.

I do not think I could ever explain this to any one else; since I suppose that in the monetary sense the rupture of my plans left me the better off. But I, who had always been something of an outlier in the social sense, an unplaced wanderer bearing the badge of no particular caste, I had grown in some way to feel that marriage with Cynthia would in this sense bring me to an anchorage, and admit me to a definite place of my own in the complex world of London. The idea was not wholly unreasonable. I had lived very rapidly in those few critical weeks. Years of hope, endeavour, determination, and emotional experience, I had crowded into my last days in Dorking. And through it all I had been upheld and exalted by a pervasive conviction (which I apprehend is not part of the ordinary lover's capital) that now, at length, I was to know peace, rest, content; the calm, glad realisation of all the vague yearnings and strivings which had spurred me to strenuousness, to unceasing effort, all my life long.

Cynthia had been the object of my love, of my pa.s.sionate adoration, indeed. But she had also been a great deal more. When she had bowed her beautiful head to my wooing, when she had promised that upon my call she would come, she had (all unconsciously, of course) become more than my beloved. She became for me the actual embodiment, the incarnate end, aim, and reward of all the strivings of my lonely life, from the night of my flight from St. Peter's Orphanage down to that very day. In my rapt contemplation of her, of the personality which enthralled me far, far more than her beautiful person could, I smiled over recollection of my bitter struggles in London slums, of the heart-racking anxiety and grinding humiliation of life with poor f.a.n.n.y. I smiled happily at that squalid vista as at some trifling inconvenience by the way, too small to be remembered as an obstacle in my path toward the all-sufficing and radiant peace of union with Cynthia.

'Now I see why all my life has been worth while,' I told myself on the eve of the clumsy, brutal blow of Fate's hand that had for ever robbed me of Cynthia.

In the living, the end had sometimes seemed too hopelessly far off to justify the wearing strain of the means. There had been so little refreshment by the way. But with Cynthia's promise there had come to me an all-embracing certainty that my whole life had been justified; that the end and reward of all my struggles was actually in my hands; that I now had arrived, and was about to step definitely out from the ranks of the striving, unsatisfied, hungry outliers, into the serene company of those whose faces shine with the light of a.s.sured happiness; of those who fight and struggle no longer; for the reason that they have found their allotted place in life, and are at anchor within the haven of their ambitions.

I may have been very greatly to blame in my pa.s.sionate wooing of another man's affianced wife; but, at least, I believe that my loss of Cynthia was a far greater and more crushing loss for me than the loss of any woman could possibly have been for Charles Barthrop. For me, she had stood for all life held that was desirable--the sum and plexus of my aims. For Barthrop there were his keenly relished sports and pastimes, his host of friends, his family, his luxurious and well-defined place in the world--not to mention the city of London.

V

When I left the s.p.a.cious purlieus of Salisbury, it was to engage chambers--bedroom, sitting-room, and bathroom--in a remodelled adjunct to one of the Inns of Court. Here my arrangement was that a simple breakfast should be served to me each day in my sitting-room, and that I was free to obtain my other meals wherever I might choose. Thus provided for in the matter of a place of residence, I resumed the discarded journalistic life, as a member of the _Advocate's_ editorial staff, in accordance with the engagement entered into with Arncliffe, when I believed I had been arranging to secure an income for Cynthia and myself.

Before renting these rooms I had called upon Sidney Heron, and invited him to share a set of chambers with me.