Tales of two people

VI

THE following Saturday fortnight the Bittleton Press scored what journalists call a “scoop” at the expense of the rival and Radical organ, the Advertiser. Such is the reward of sound political principle! Here is the paragraph – “exclusive,” the editor was careful to make you understand:

We are privileged to announce that a marriage has been arranged and will shortly be solemnised between Captain Spencer Fullard, D.S.O., of Gatworth Hall, and Henrietta, daughter of the late Rev. F. E. Tyler, Vicar of Worldstone. We extend, in the name of the county, our cordial congratulations to the happy pair. Captain Fullard is the representative of a name ancient and respected in the county, and has done good service to his King and country. The romantic story of the lady whose affections he has been so fortunate as to win will be fresh in the minds of our readers. As we sympathised with her sorrow, so now we may with her joy. We understand that Miss Gladwin of Worldstone Park, following what she is confident would have been the wish of her lamented father, the late much-respected Sir Thomas Gladwin, Bart., M.P., D.L., J.P., C.A., is presenting the prospective bride with a wedding present which in itself amounts to a fortune. Happy they who are in a position to exercise such graceful munificence and to display filial affection in so gracious a form! It would be indiscreet to mention figures, but rumour has not hesitated to speak of what our gay forefathers used to call “a plum.” We are not at liberty to say more than that this in no way overstates the amount.

Whereupon, of course, the Bittleton Club at once doubled it, and Miss Gladwin’s fame filled the air.

This was all very pretty, and it must be admitted that Beatrice Gladwin had performed her task in a most tactful way. For reasons connected with the known condition of the finances of the Gatworth Hall estate, it sounded so much better that Miss Gladwin’s present should come as a result of the engagement than – well, the other way round. The other way round would have given occasion for gossip to the clubmen of Bittleton. But now – Love against the World, and an entirely unlooked-for bonus of – “a plum,” as the editor, with a charming eighteenth-century touch, chose to describe the benefaction. That was really ideal.

Really ideal; and, of course, in no way at all correspondent to the facts of the case. The truth was that Miss Beatrice Gladwin had secured her “fair fight” – and, it seemed, had lost it very decisively and very speedily. As soon as it was reasonably possible – and made so by Miss Gladwin’s action – for Fullard to think of marrying Nettie Tyler, he had asked her to be his wife. To which question there could be only one answer. Miss Gladwin had given away too much weight; she should have quartered that “plum,” I thought.

But that would not have made a “fair fight”? Perhaps not. Perhaps a fair fight was not to be made at all under the circumstances. But the one thing which, above all, I could not see was the old point that had puzzled me before. It might be fair to soften the conflict between Captain Fullard’s love and Captain Fullard’s duty as a man of ancient stock. It might be fair to undo some of fate’s work and give Nettie Tyler a chance of the man she wanted – freedom to fight for him – just that, you understand. But where came in the chance for herself of which Beatrice Gladwin had spoken?

As I have said, I was Captain Fullard’s lawyer as well as Miss Gladwin’s, and he naturally came to me to transact the business incident on his marriage. Beatrice Gladwin proved right: he was not overwhelmed, nor, from his words, did I gather that Miss Tyler was. But they were both highly appreciative.

The captain was also inclined to congratulate himself on his knowledge of character, his power of reading the human heart.

“Hard, if you like,” he said, sitting in my office arm-chair; “but a sportsman in the end, as I told you she was. I knew one could rely on her doing the right thing in the end.”

“At considerable cost,” I remarked, sharpening a pencil.

“It’s liberal – very liberal. Oh, we feel that. But, of course, the circumstances pointed to liberality.” He paused, then added:

“And I don’t know that we ought to blame her for taking time to think it over. Of course it made all the difference to me, Foulkes.”

There came in the captain’s admirable candour. Between him and me there was no need – and, I may add, no room – for the romantic turn which the Bittleton Press had given to the course of events; that was for public consumption only.

“But for it I couldn’t possibly have come forward – whatever I felt.”

“As a suitor for Miss Tyler’s hand?” said I.

The captain looked at me; gradually a smile came on his remarkably comely face.

“Look here, Foulkes,” said he very good-humouredly, “just you congratulate me on being able to do as I like. Never mind what you may happen to be thinking behind that sallow old fiddle-head of yours.”

“And Miss Tyler is, I’m sure, radiantly happy?”

Captain Fullard’s candour abode till the end. “Well, Nettie hasn’t done badly for herself, looking at it all round, you know.”

With all respect to the late Sir Thomas, and even allowing for a terrible shock and a trying interval, I did not think she had.

Miss Gladwin gave them a splendid wedding at Worldstone. Her manner to them both was most cordial, and she was gay beyond the wont of her staid demeanour. I do not think there was affectation in this.

When the bride and bridegroom – on this occasion again by no means overwhelmed – had departed amidst cheers, when the rout of guests had gone, when the triumphal arch was being demolished and the rustics were finishing the beer, she walked with me in the garden while I smoked a cigar. (There’s nothing like a wedding for making you want a cigar.)

After we had finished our gossiping about how well everything had gone off – and that things in her house should go off well was very near to Beatrice Gladwin’s heart – we were silent for a while. Then she turned to me and said: “I’m very content, Mr Foulkes.” Her face was calm and peaceful; she did not look so hard.

“I’m glad that doing the handsome thing brings content. I wonder if you know how glad I am?”

“Yes, I know. You’re a good friend. But you’re making your old mistake. I wasn’t thinking just then of what you call the handsome thing. I was thinking of the chance that I gave myself.”

“I never quite understood that,” said I.

She gave a little laugh. “But for that ‘handsome thing,’ he’d certainly have asked me – he’d have had to, poor man – me, and not her. And he’d have done it very soon.”

I assented – not in words, just in silence and cigar smoke.

She looked at me without embarrassment, though she was about to say something that she might well have refused to say to any living being. She seemed to have a sort of pleasure in the confession – at least an impulse to make it that was irresistible. She smiled as she spoke – amused at herself, or, perhaps, at the new idea she would give me of herself.

“If he had,” she went on – “if he had made love to me, I couldn’t have refused him – I couldn’t, indeed. And yet I shouldn’t have believed a word he was saying – not a word of love he said. I should have been a very unhappy woman if I hadn’t given myself that chance. You’ve been a little behind the scenes. Nobody else has. I want you to know that I’m content.” She put her hand in mine and gave me a friendly squeeze. “And to-morrow we’ll get back to business, you and I,” she said.

THE PRINCE CONSORT

I HAD known her for some considerable time before I came to know him. Most of their acquaintance were in the same case; for to know him was among the less noticeable and the less immediate results of knowing her. You might go to the house three or four times and not happen upon him. He was there always, but he did not attract attention. You joined Mrs Clinton’s circle, or, if she were in a confidential mood, you sat with her on the sofa. She would point out her daughter, and Muriel, attired in a wonderful elaboration of some old-fashioned mode, would talk to you about “Mamma’s books,” while Mrs Clinton declared that, do what she would, she could not prevent the darling from reading them. Perhaps, when you had paid half-a-dozen visits, Mr Clinton would cross your path. He was very polite, active for your comfort, ready to carry out his wife’s directions, determined to be useful. Mrs Clinton recognised his virtues. She called him an “old dear,” with a fond pitying smile on her lips, and would tell you, with an arch glance and the slightest of shrugs, that “he wrote too.” If you asked what he wrote, she said that it was “something musty,” but that it kept him happy, and that he never minded being interrupted, or even having nowhere to write, because Muriel’s dancing lesson occupied the dining-room, “and I really couldn’t have him in my study. One must be alone to work, mustn’t one?” She could not be blamed for holding her work above his; there was nothing at all to show for his; whereas hers not only brought her a measure of fame, as fame is counted, but also doubled the moderate private income on which they had started housekeeping – and writing – thirteen or fourteen years before. Mr Clinton himself would have been the last to demur to her assumption; he accepted his inferiority with an acquiescence that was almost eagerness. He threw himself into the task of helping his wife, not of course in the writing, but by relieving her of family and social cares. He walked with Muriel, and was sent to parties when his wife was too busy to come. I recollect that he told me, when we had become friendly, that these offices made considerable inroads on his time. “If,” he said apologetically, “I had not acquired the habit of sitting up late, I should have difficulty in getting forward with my work. As it happens, Millie doesn’t work at night – the brain must be fresh for her work – and so I can have the study then; and I am not so liable to – I mean, I have not so many other calls then.”

I liked Clinton, and I do not mean by that that I disliked Mrs Clinton. Indeed I admired her very much, and her husband’s position in the household seemed just as natural to me as it did to himself and to everybody else. Young Gregory Dulcet, who is a poet and a handsome impudent young dog, was felt by us all to have put the matter in a shape that was at once true in regard to our host, and pretty in regard to our hostess, when he referred, apparently in a casual way, to Mr Clinton as “the Prince Consort.” Mrs Clinton laughed and blushed; Muriel clapped her hands and ran off to tell her father. She came back saying that he was very pleased with the name, and I believe that very possibly he really was. Anyhow, young Dulcet was immensely pleased with it; he repeated it, and it “caught on.” I heard Mrs Clinton herself, with a half-daring, half-modest air, use it more than once. Thus Mrs Clinton was led to believe herself great: so that she once asked me if I thought that there was any prospect of The Quarterly “doing her.” I said that I did not see why not. Yet it was not a probable literary event.

Thus Mr Clinton passed the days of an obscure useful life, helping his wife, using the dining-room when dancing lessons did not interfere, and enjoying the luxury of the study in the small hours of the morning. And Mrs Clinton grew more and more pitiful to him; and Muriel more and more patronising; and the world more and more forgetful. And then, one fine morning, as I was going to my office, the Prince Consort overtook me. He was walking fast, and he carried a large, untidy, brown-paper parcel. I quickened my pace to keep up with his.

“Sorry to hurry you, old fellow,” said he, “but I must be back in an hour. A fellow’s coming to interview Millie, and I promised to be back and show him over the house. She doesn’t want to lose more of her time than is absolutely necessary: she’s in the thick of a new story, you see. And Muriel’s got her fiddle lesson, so she can’t do it.”

“And what’s brought you out with the family wash?” I asked in pleasantry, pointing to the parcel.

The Prince Consort blushed (though he must have been forty at least at this date), pulled his beard, and said:

“This? Do you mean this? Oh, this is – well, it’s a little thing of my own.”

“Of your own? What do you mean?” I asked.

“Didn’t Millie ever tell you that I write too? Well, I do when I can get a few hours. And this is it. I’ve managed to get a fellow to look at it. Millie spoke a word for me, you know.”

I do not know whether my expression was sceptical or offensive, but I suppose it must have been one or the other, for the Prince Consort went on hastily:

“Oh, I’m not going to be such an ass as to pay anything for having it brought out, you know. They must do it on spec. or leave it alone. Besides, they really like to oblige Millie, you see.”

“It doesn’t look very little,” I observed.

“Er – no. I’m afraid it’s rather long,” he admitted.

“What’s it about?”

“Oh, it’s dull, heavy stuff. I can’t do what Millie does, you see. It’s not a novel.”

We parted at the door of the publisher who had been ready to oblige Mrs Clinton, and would, I thought, soon regret his complaisance; and I went on to my office, dismissing the Prince Consort and his “little thing” from my mind.

I went to the Clintons’ about three months’ later, in order to bid them farewell before starting for a holiday on the Continent. They were, for a wonder, without other visitors, and when we had talked over Mrs Clinton’s last production, she stretched out her hand and pointed to the table.

“And there,” she said, with a little laugh, “is Thompson’s” (the Prince Consort’s Christian name is Thompson) “magnum opus. Vincents’ have just sent him his advance copies.”

The Prince Consort laughed nervously as I rose and walked to the table.

“Never mind, papa,” I heard Muriel say encouragingly. “You know Mr George Vincent says it’s very good.”

“Oh, he thought that would please your mother,” protested the Prince Consort.

I examined the two large thick volumes that lay on the table. I glanced at the title page: and I felt sorry for the poor Prince Consort. It must have been a terrible “grind” to write such a book – almost as bad as reading it. But I said something civil about the importance and interest of the subject.

“If you really don’t mind looking at it,” said the Prince Consort, “I should like awfully to send you a copy.”

“Oh yes! You must read it,” said Mrs Clinton. “Why, I’m going to read – well, some of it! I’ve promised!”

“So am I,” said little Muriel, while the Prince Consort rubbed his hands together with a sort of pride which was, on its other side, the profoundest humility. He was wondering, I think, that he should have been able to produce any book at all – even the worst of books – and admiring a talent which he had not considered himself to possess.

“I’m going to worry everybody who comes here to buy it – or to order it at Mudie’s, anyhow,” pursued Mrs Clinton. “What’s written in this house must be read.”

“I hope Vincents’ won’t lose a lot over it,” said the Prince Consort, shaking his head.

“Oh well, they’ve made a good deal out of me before now,” laughed his wife lightly.

I did not take the Prince Consort’s book away with me to the Continent. Whatever else it might be, it was certainly not holiday reading, and it would have needed a portmanteau to itself. But the reverberation of the extraordinary and almost unequalled “boom” which the book made reached me in the recesses of Switzerland. I came on The Times of three days before in my hotel, and it had three columns and a half on Mr Thompson Clinton’s work. The weekly Budget which my sister sent to me at Andermatt contained, besides a long review, a portrait of the Prince Consort (he must have sat to them on purpose) and a biographical sketch of him, quite accurate as to the remarkably few incidents which his previous life contained. It was this sketch which first caused me to begin to realise what was happening. For the sketch, after a series of eulogies (which to my prepossessed mind seemed absurdly extravagant) on the Prince Consort, reached its conclusion with the following remark: – “Mr Thompson Clinton’s wife is also a writer, and is known in the literary world as the author of more than one clever and amusing novel.” I laid down the Budget with a vague feeling that a revolution had occurred. It was now Mrs Clinton who “wrote too.”

I was right in my feeling, yet my feeling was inadequate to the reality with which I was faced on my return to England. The Prince Consort was the hero of the hour. I had written him a line of warm congratulation, and I settled at once to the book, not only in order to be able to talk about it, but also because I could not, without personal investigation, believe that he had done all they said. But he had. It was a wonderful book – full of learning and research, acute and profound in argument, and (greatest of all surprises) eminently lucid, polished, and even brilliant in style; irony, pathos, wit – the Prince Consort had them all. I laid the second volume down, wondering no longer that he had become an authority, that his name appeared in the lists of public banquets, that he was quoted now by one, now by the other, political party, and that translations into French and German were to be undertaken by distinguished savants.

And of course both The Quarterly and The Edinburgh had articles – “did him,” as his wife had phrased it. Upon which, being invited by Mrs Clinton to an evening party, I made a point of going.

There were a great many people there that night. A large group was on the hearthrug. I am tall, and looking over the heads of the assembly I saw the Prince Consort standing there. He was smiling, still rather nervously, and was talking in quick eager tones. Everyone listened in deferential silence, broken by murmurs of “Yes, yes,” or “How true!” or “I never thought of that!” And Muriel held the Prince Consort’s hand, and looked up at him with adoration in her young eyes. I rejoiced with the Prince Consort in his hour of deserved triumph, but I did not, somehow, find Muriel as “pretty a picture” as a lady told me later on that she was. Indeed, I thought that the child would have been as well – or better – in bed. I turned round and looked for Mrs Clinton. Ah, there she was, on her usual sofa. By her side sat Lady Troughton; nobody else was near. Mrs Clinton was talking very quickly and vivaciously to her companion, who rose as I approached, gave me her hand, and then passed on to join the group on the hearthrug. I sat down by Mrs Clinton, and began to congratulate her on her husband’s marvellous triumph.

“Yes,” said she, “do you see he’s in both the quarterlies?”

I said that such a tribute was only natural.

“And it’s selling wonderfully too,” she went on. “You may imagine how much obliged Vincents’ are to me for sending him there!”

“Did you know he was doing it?” I asked.

“Oh, I knew he was working at something. Muriel used to be always chaffing him about it.”

“She doesn’t chaff him now, I should think.”

“No,” said Mrs Clinton, twisting a ring on her finger round and round. Suddenly the group opened, and the Prince Consort came through, leading Muriel by the hand. He marched across the room, followed by his admirers. I rose, and he stood close by his wife, and began to talk about her last novel. He said that it was wonderfully clever, and told us all to get it and read it. Everybody murmured that such was their intention, and a lady observed:

“How charming for you to be able to provide your husband with recreation, Mrs Clinton!”

“Papa doesn’t care about novels much, really,” said Muriel.

“You do, I suppose, young lady?” asked someone.

“I like papa’s book better,” the child answered, and we all laughed, Mrs Clinton leading the chorus with almost exaggerated heartiness.

And then an enthusiastic woman must needs see where Mr Thompson Clinton (the Prince Consort bid fair to be double-barrelled before long) worked. She would take no denial, and at last Mrs Clinton rose, and, in spite of her husband’s protests, led the way to the study. I had been in the room a little while before I went abroad. It was much changed now. A row of Mrs Clinton’s novels, indeed, still stood on the top of the whatnot, but her “litter” (it had been her own playful name for her manuscripts and other properties) had vanished. Large, fat, solemn books, Blue-books, books of science, of statistics, and other horrors dominated the scene.

“And to think that the great book was actually written in this very room!” mused the enthusiastic woman in awestruck accents. “I shall always be glad to have seen it.”

Again we murmured assent; and the enthusiastic woman, with an obviously sudden remembrance of Mrs Clinton, turned to her, and said:

“Of course you don’t work in the same room?”

“Oh, I do my little writing anywhere,” smiled Mrs Clinton.

“In the dining-room, generally,” added Muriel “when it’s not wanted you know.”

“Ah, well, you don’t need such complete quiet as Mr Thompson Clinton must have to think out his books, do you?” asked the enthusiastic woman, with a most amiable smile.

“There’s plenty of thought in my wife’s books,” said the Prince Consort.

“Oh yes, of that sort,” conceded the enthusiastic woman.

Then we went back to the drawing-room, and the worshippers gradually took their leave, till only Lady Troughton and I were left. The child Muriel looked at her watch.

“Papa’s got to go on to a party at the – ,” she begun.

“There’s no hurry, my dear; no hurry at all,” interposed the Prince Consort.

“And, anyhow, I’m not going out, Muriel,” said Mrs Clinton. “I’m not asked there, you know.”

Yet Lady Troughton and I said “Good-bye.” The Prince Consort came downstairs with us, and made us renew our promises to procure his wife’s novel. “It’s really a striking book,” said he. “And, look here, Tom; just write her a line, and tell her how much you like it, will you? You’re sure to like it, you know.”

Lady Troughton stopped on the doorstep, and looked him full in the face. She said nothing; neither did he. But when they shook hands I saw her squeeze his. Then she was good enough to offer me a lift in her carriage, and I handed her in and followed myself. We drove a quarter of a mile or so in silence, and when we had gone thus far Lady Troughton made what appeared to me to be the only remark that could possibly be made.

“Poor little goose!” said Lady Troughton.

WHAT WAS EXPECTED OF MISS CONSTANTINE