The Socialist Part 38

"Husband!"

"Wife!"

There was a knock at the door.

"Please, miss," said the housemaid, "lunch is ready. Mr. Goodrick has come, your Grace. And the downstairs rooms are full of gentlemen of the press. And there's men with photographic cameras, too. I've asked the master what I am to do, but he only laughs, miss! I can't get anything out of him. But lunch is ready!"

"Sweetheart," the duke said, "lunch is ready! There's a _fact_! Let's cling to it! And if Rose is laughing, let's laugh, too, and dodge the journalists!"

"It will be a very happy laughter, John," she said.

As the couple came into the luncheon-room--which was full of the leaders of the socialistic movement--Mr. Goodrick cast a swift glance at the duke and Mary, and then left the place with an un.o.btrusive air.

The _Daily Wire_ had no evening edition.

But it had an extraordinary reputation for being "first there" with intimate news at breakfast time.

EPILOGUE

Upon the Chelsea Embankment there is a house which, for some months after its new occupants had taken possession of it, was an object of considerable interest to those who pa.s.sed by.

People used to point there, at that time, and tell each other that "That's where the Socialist duke and his actress wife have gone to live.

The Duke of Paddington--_you_ know!--gave up all his possessions, or nearly all, to be held in trust for the Socialists. They say that he's half mad, never recovered from being captured by those burglars on the night of the big railway smash on the G.E.R."

"Silly Juggins!" would be the reply. "Wish _I'd_ have had it. You wouldn't see _me_ giving it all up--not half!"

But for several years the house has been just like any ordinary house and few people point to it or talk about it any more.

There have been hundreds of sensations since the duke and his wife settled down in Chelsea.

It was about one o'clock in the afternoon.

The duke sat in his library in Cheyne Walk. It was a large and comfortable room, surrounded by books, with a picture here and there which the discerning eye would have immediately seen to be of unusual excellence, and, indeed, surprising in such a house as this. A barrister earning his two thousand a year, a successful doctor not quite in the first rank, a county court Judge or a Clerk in the Houses of Parliament would have had just such a room--save only for the three pictures.

The duke had changed considerably in appearance during the past five years.

The boyishness had departed. The serenity and impa.s.sivity of a great prince who had never known anything but a smooth seat high upon Olympus had gone also.

The face, now strong with a new kind of strength, showed the marks and gashes of Experience. It was the mask of a man who had done, suffered, and learned, but it was, nevertheless, not a very happy face.

There was, certainly, nothing of discontent in it. But there was a persistent shadow of thought--a brooding.

Much water had flowed under the bridge since the night at the theatre when he had made a public renunciation of almost everything that was his.

Life had not been placid, and for many reasons. There had been the long and terribly difficult breaking away from his own cla.s.s and order, for he had not been allowed to go into "outer darkness" without a protracted struggle.

All the forces of the world had arrayed themselves against him. The wisest, the most celebrated, the highest placed, had combined together in that they might prevent this dreadful thing.

He was not as other men.

Hardly a great and stately house in England but was connected with him by ties of kindred. His falling away was a menace to all of them in its opening of possibilities, a real grief to many of them. There had been terrible hours of expostulation, dreadful scenes of sorrow and recrimination.

Compromise had a.s.sailed him on every side. His wife would have been received everywhere--it was astonishing how Court and Society had discovered that Mary Marriott was one of themselves after all--a "Mem-Sahib." He could do what he liked within reason, and still keep his place.

A prime minister had pointed out to him that no one at all would object to his countenance of the Socialistic party. He might announce his academic adherence to Socialism as often and as loudly as he pleased. It would, indeed, be a good thing for Socialism, in which--so his lordship was pleased to say--there was indubitably a germ of economic good. All great movements had begun slowly. These things must ripen into good and prove themselves by their own weight. But it was economically wrong, and subversive of all theories of progress, that a sudden and overpowering weight should be put into one side of the scale by a single individual.

"It will disturb everything" said the Prime Minister. "And any one who, from an individual opinion, disturbs the balance of affairs is doing grave, and perhaps irreparable, harm."

In short, they would have allowed him to do anything, but give up his PROPERTY. They would have let him marry any one if he did not give up his PROPERTY.

For all of them had won their property and sovereignty by predatory strength throughout the centuries, or the years. Landowners of ancient descent, millionaires of yesterday, all knew the power of what they held and had. All loved that power and were determined to keep it for themselves and their descendants.... And, all had sons, young and generous of mind as yet, to whom the duke's example might prove an incentive to a repet.i.tion of such an abnegation.

They were very shrewd and far-seeing, all these people. Collectively, they were the most cultured, beautiful, and charming folk in England.

They were the rulers of England, and by birth, temper, and inheritance he was one of them. The pressure put upon him had been enormous, the strain terrible.

A resolution made in a moment of great emotion, and an enthusiasm fostered by every incident of time and circ.u.mstance, seems a very different thing regarded dispa.s.sionately when the blood is cool, and, so to speak, the footlights are lowered, the curtain down, the house empty.

Once, indeed, he had nearly given in. He had been sent for privately to the Palace, and some wise and kindly words had been spoken to him there by A Personage to whom he could not but listen with the gravest and most loyal attention.

Compromise was once more suggested, he was bidden to remember his order and his duty to it. He was again told that his opinions were his own, that short of taking the irrevocable step he might do almost anything.

Nor does a young man whose inherited instincts are all in fierce war with his new convictions listen unmoved to gracious counsel such as this from the t.i.tular Head of all n.o.bility, for whose ancestors his own had bled on many a historic field.

He had stood quite alone. Mary Marriott, his wife that was to be, had given him no help. Tender, loving, ready to marry him at any cost, she nevertheless stood aloof from influencing his decision in the hour of trial.

He tried hard to get help and support from her, to make her love confirm his resolution, but he tried in vain. With the clear sanity of a n.o.ble mind, the girl refused to throw so much as a feather-weight into the scale of the balance, though in this she also suffered (secretly) as much as he.

Then he went to the others, sick and sore from the buffetings he was receiving at all hands--from his own order and from the great public press they influenced, from the great solid middle-cla.s.s of the country which, more than anything else perhaps, preserves the level of wise-dealing and order in England. The others were as dumb as the girl he loved. It was true that a section of the Socialist party, the noisy, blatant--and possibly insincere--big drum party, hailed him as prophet, seer, martyr, and Galahad in one. But there was a furious vulgarity about this sort of thing which was more unnerving, and made him more wretched than anything else at all. Such people spoke a different language from his own, a different language from that of Fabian Rose and his friends. They said the same thing perhaps--he was inclined to doubt even that sometimes--but the dialect offended fastidious ears, the att.i.tude offended one accustomed to a certain comeliness and reticence even in the new life and surroundings into which he had been thrown.

Both the Pope and General Booth, for example, serve One Master, and live for Our Lord. But it is conceivable that if the Bishop of Rome could be present at a ma.s.s meeting of the Salvation Army in the Albert Hall, he would leave it a very puzzled and disgusted prelate indeed.

Rose and his friends avoided influencing the duke, of set purpose. They were high-minded men and women, but they were also psychologists, and trained deeply in the one science which can dominate the human mind and human opinion.

They wanted the Duke of Paddington badly. They wanted the enormous impetus to the movement that his accession would bring; they wanted the great revenues which would provide sinews of war for a vast campaign.

But they knew that nothing would be more disastrous than an ill.u.s.trious convert who would fall away. The duke had been left alone.

For a month after the few words he had addressed to the people at the theatre supper, the struggle had continued. His name was in every one's mouth. It would not be too much to say that all Europe set itself to wonder what would be the outcome. The journals of England and the Continent teemed with denunciation, praise, sneers. Tolstoi sent a long message--the thing fermented furiously, and, instructed by the journalists, even the man in the street recognised that here was something more than even the renunciation of one man of great possessions for an idea--that it would create--one way or the other--a disintegrating or binding force, that a precedent would establish itself, that vast issues were involved.

After a week of it, the duke disappeared. Only a few of his friends knew where he was, and they were pledged not to say. He was fighting it out alone in a little mountain village of the Riviera--Roqueb.u.me, which hangs like a bird's nest on the Alps between Monte Carlo and Mentone, and where the patient friendly olive growers of the mountain steppes never knew who the quiet young Englishman was who sat in the little _auberge_ under the walls of the Saracen stronghold and watched the goats and the children rolling in the warm dusk, or stared steadfastly out over the Mediterranean far below, to where the distant cliffs of Corsica gleamed like pearls in the sun.

He came back to England, his decision made, his first resolve strengthened into absolute, a.s.sured purpose. The ruffians who had kidnapped him on the night of the railway accident had been unable to torture him into buying his freedom. For what to him would have been nothing--a penny to a beggar--he might have gone free. And yet he had nearly died rather than give in. Save for the chance or Providence which brought his rescuers to him in the very last moment, he would have died--there is no doubt about it.

Now again, he was firm as granite. His mind was made up, nothing could alter it nor move it. His hand had been placed upon the plough. It was going to remain there, and he left the palms and orange groves of the South a man doubly vowed. He had married at once. Mary Marriott became a d.u.c.h.ess. Several problems arose. Should he drop his t.i.tle--that was one of them. He refused to do so, and in his refusal was strongly backed up by the real leaders of the movement. "You were born Duke of Paddington,"