The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 25 August 1921, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O’Brien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER XXVII.LORD DRUMSHAUGHLIN MAKES A RESOLUTION. Miss Deborah Harman’s epistle on the enormities, of the picnic at Gougaun Barra followed Lady Drumshaughlin to a country house of the Marchioness of Asphodel at The Meads, in Primrose-shire, where she was one of a large house-party assembled for the slaughter of the Marquis’s pheasants. How Lady Drum came to be opening her letters in a pretty Louis Quinze room at the Meads, with the pink-like Avoids and copses of a rural English shire unrolled like an ancient patent of nobility before her windows, is one of those mysteries of the great world which outsiders can only vaguely guess at. It is certain that Lady Asphodel, at this moment exchanging confidences with her husband in her boudoir, would have rung the bell and ordered Lady Drumshaughlin’s carriage for the twelve o’clock train to King’s Cross, and changed the most objectionable guest in the house into the Louis Quinze room in way of feminine irony, if she was at liberty to consult her own feelings. But what black slave seven hundred feet down in a coal mine is less at liberty than a great lady? and where is a great lady so little at liberty as in her own house For some obscure reason, she invited the dark-skinned, dark-eyed woman to the house, and caressed her sufficiently in company. The chances are that young Lord Amaranth, who had taken to patronising Lady Drum, had given his mother to understand that he would not be of the Meads party if Lady Drum was ruled out and the Marchioness, having reasons of her own for desiring to enchain her son in the quiet charms of Primroseshire, instead of seeing him entangling himself matrimonially with music-hall artistes, prize-fighting at Mile End, or gambling at Monte Carlo, had capitulated to his terms. Young Amaranth was a sad scamp ; and all his mother’s thoughts, and many of his father’s, were devoted to reclaiming him. A fancy he had expressed for one of the American beauties of the season had offered the unfortunate Marchioness the first reasonable hope of rescuing him from the lake of fire and pitch which he was pleased to call life. Miss Ruysdael’s satiny olive skin, blushing with modest self-satisfac-tion at its own loveliness —her soft dark eyes, tiny hands and feet, and lissom figure—her sincerity and fearlessness of speech, and withal the diamond neatness and sparkle of everything that rippled through the ivory and vermillion portals of her pretty —carried all before them in the London drawing-rooms since that other avis insolita, the Wild Irish Girl, had flashed through them into space; and even Lord Amaranth, who was credibly informed that American women were creatures who lectured you by the hour through the nose on Woman’s Rights, and probably spat On the carpet, was graciously pleased to pronounce the Knickerbocker Girl stunning. To his unhappy mother s dismay, however, Lord Amaranth having, under threat to take the next tidal train for Paris, obtained the addition of Lady Drumshaughlin to the shooting party at The Meads, would insist on devoting himself to that lady, who was old enough to be his mother, while he allowed the young men to flutter about the beautiful American with no more concern than if she were a hag of seventy and had a hump.

This little comedy, played on the poor Marchioness's own boards, she herself supplying all the appointments, did not, of course, escape the observation of the guests. The women would not be women if they did not temper their disgust of Lord Amaranth's infatuated flirtation with that old woman with a certain degree of indulgence in view of his neglect of the American heiress. High-born English women are wondrous fair. Who has ever seen the House of Lords on a great night without turning from the v rickety mob of old fellows. on the crimson cushions, to marvel at the beauty that rays down from the Peeresses' Galleries

overhead, more gracious than the frou-frou of their silks, and more splendid than the dazzle of their diamonds The' real power of the Second Estate of the British Realm lies not in one House of Peers, but in 500 houses of. Peeresses. Nevertheless, Lady Asphodel's women guests were given to confess to their own hearts that, for all their own brilliant loveliness —the perfection of delicacy with the perfection of —they were outshone in one of their own shires by this fragile-looking American girl not merely in piquancy of wit or style, for that" they could easily have forgiven, but in that inborn repose of manner, which is supposed to run in the blood like prerogative. The elegance of a kingdom, where women are only pets,' found itself overmatched by the unconscious reposefulness of a republic, where women are queens; and Miss Ruysdael was as much at home as a sunbeam, neither more or less. As the clever minx must, of course, be setting her cap at the young heir of Asphodell and all the more resolutely, that she affected to be as insensible to his existence as if he were one of the Cupids figured on the delicate porcelain tray which brought her afternoon tea; the general feminine circle marked, therefore, with a callous feline interest the neglect with which Lord Amaranth repaid her; and to her own amazement, Lady Drumshaughlin (who had never been able to make much progress among English women) found herself not only the object of the young moon-calf's idiotic attentions, but to some extent, the successful champion of European womanhood against the invasions of an upstart New World. The last thing that occurred to Lady Drumshaughlin %as that she was paying any dangerous price for her singular success. She was even foolish enough to feel flattered.

Miss Deborah's angular note came as a most unwelcome intrusion. At first it so upset her temper that she made as if she would tear it to flitters; then she paused, and laid it down, and struck at it with her clenched fist; and then she began a quick, nervous pacing up and down the room, with an expression of face which she did not care to stop to contemplate in the mirror. It was, of course worrying beyond conception that that girl shouldl be losing hersrelf among those horrid creatures when she might be shaming Miss Ruysdael's waxen cheeks with her own dazzling beauty of morning-rose-color. The insolence of the agent's sister in intruding her intolerable condolences was still worse. But this was a hard, selfish woman, whom the news afflicted chiefly because of its bearing on her own fortunes. Something must be done promptly, it was clear. But her invitation to the Meads covered three weeks, only one of which had expired. If she went up to London to seek her husband, upon what pretext was she to get back? Mabel had unfeelingly deserted her just as her aid seemed indispensable to her mother's safe establishment in society; had preferred to follow her own whimsical and irritating worship of that boy; and left her mother to struggle as best she might up that awful gilded staircase where so many a stout-heart-ed aspirant faints under the silent stare of the Medusaheads of feminine cruelty and insular prejudice which mount guard there. She had got the better of the Medusfe. She had her foot planted on the highest stair —installed in one of the haughtiest houses in England, and no inconsiderable personage in the little drama there enacting. It was all too novel in her shaded life not to be intoxicating, dangerously intoxicating.

She was not going to leave her ground, of vantage. She resolved to send Miss Harman's letter to her husband by post. She inclosed it with a few trebly underlined words of her own, saying: "This is dreadful. Something ought to be done at once. You know Mabel and Ireland, and can best decide what."

The letter , found Lord Drumshaughlin the following morning in his apartments in a demure bachelor's club in Sackville Street, Picadilly. Towzled, unshaved, in an untidy dressing-gown, and presenting altogether the male counterfeit presentment of an elderly lady with her hair in curl-papers, he was stamping up and down in a state of great preturbation. His, mail had been particularly disagreeable. One letter in especial, which lay among the breakfast things, with a clumsily-scribbled cheque, seemed to worry him. We have only to turn over the letter to

sympathise with the unfortunate peer's perturbation. It bore the address, "The Hoses, Glengarriff," embossed in a staring carmine-colored plaster overhead, and was intended to »jo a handsome expression of gratitude from the liew Justice of the Peace; but, alas for his intentions! if Humphrey Dargan had been a mediaeval torturer working the iron boot, he could riot have given Lord Drumshaughlin's gouty toes a more excruciating twist in every sentence. "I am sure," he added, after many profuse expressions of eternal indebtedness, recorded in a hand that could scarcely have been less impressive if it had been the work of an inky caterpillar raised to the judicial bench, "I am sure your lordship will not think, it too presumptions in an humble man like yours to command, if I venture to offer some substantial proof of my undying appreciation of your lordship's kindness, in the shape of the enclosed small cheque for 500?. (five hundred pounds), knowing, as circumstances of a business character have confidenshally brought to my knowledge, that your lordship's private manes are not at all times commenshurate with the requirements of your noble station and of your own generous heart." Then, as if all the flowery resources of the Roses were exhausted in this burst of high-flown eloquence,' the new Justice of the Peace added in a P.S. — "Nobody is any the wiser of this except Mrs. D., whose idea it was. If your lordship was raally pressed, I would not mind making it a thousand as a little matter strictly between your lordship and myself. P.P.S. —I am open to any reasonable offer as to interest on the morgidge.H.D."

"Heaven, and earth, and hell, have I come to that?" roared Ralph Westropp, assaulting his two sidelocks together with a wrench that threatened to be their last. " 'Twasn't. enough to have to raise thisthing to the commission—to defile the name of gentleman by giving him the right to —but he must actually take to patronise me — subsidise me — me, by God —And isn't he quite right? Would it be so much worse, if I slipped that cheque into my pocket!—if I sent him a hint to "make it a thousand?" Would I have been so sure of myself if he had done the thing with less clumsy brutalitywith less vile spelling? And I was once Ralph Westropp. This broken, abandoned, disreputable old man, whom this creepy beetle of a moneylender tips as he might tip the housekeeper at my castle! 0 my God ! —if there is such a being as the God of my young days still left in this infernal upstart world!"

He strode up and down againin a less savage temper now — a more whipt and conscience-stricken —haggard wrinkles ploughing up his face to the —his handsome form bent and twisted as in an ague— whole man so dethroned and ruinous-looking, it seemed as if you could see the grey of the undyed roots of his hair visibly spreading and freezing up the dye before it. They say a drowning man sees his whole life pass in procession before him in one suffocating instant. Humphrey Dargan's well-intended communication brought a perfect ocean of degradation tumbling and surging in Ralph Westropp's ears, and with the suffocating feeling came the awful flash light over his selfish, worthless, bankrupt life:—a great station in his own country shamefully deserted—a vast estate dissipated youth of wit and beauty withered into unlovely, dyed, and patched old age—a home crammed with skeletons and beseiged with duns—a life whose public aspect was summarised in the gombeen-man's bribe, and its private aspect in the gossamer three-cornered note which was breathing out its perfume- alongside the money-lender's letter on the breakfast table. A bitter, bitter retrospect it was of a proud, bright, wilful sprit for ever on the wing from the cold native climes of duty to the tropic lands of indolence and pleasure, without country, without object, without inspiring love to direct its flight—a life spent in evading moral and financial creditors alike—a life opening in broad, generous, sun-gilt sweeps of landscape, and closing in inglorious foetid quagmires of self-indulgence. It was while this dark company of spectres, * all claiming to be his own property, were gibbering past him, a sort of field-day of a reviewing general in the infernal shades," that Lady Drumshaughlin's note with Deborah Harman's letter was delivered to him. He read the note and the epistle it contained with singular calmness. There was even a tranquil nobility about his air that impressed his servant Mundle more than a volley of oaths. Deborah's news com-

pleted his decision. When he had finished the reading he rose, took Dargan’s letter and cheque between his fingers, as if the touch of them burnt' into his blood, and put them in the fire, where he watched them blacken and crumple like damned Souls in the heart of it. Then he gave one indecisive glance at the pretty three-cornered missive, and flung that into the blaze, too. The flimsy little note fluttered like a frightened dainty thing towards the flame, but evaded it and effected a trembling escape into the fender. Lord Drumshaughlin dragged it pitilessly forth, and cast it back into the jaws of the fire, and this time with his boot pressed it to its fate until the poor little pink wings were ashes. Then he strode to his dressing-room. He reappeared, after an incredibly brief interval neatly dressed, but for the first time his grey hairs were left to proclaim themselves in all their greyness; there was not even any suggestion of mysterious pomades about the yellow furrowed cheeks; and from loose appearances about the chest it was plain that the arrangements, whatever they were, that made Ralph Westropp’s juvenile figure the wonder of old clubmen had been discarded. (To be continued.)