She read: "We are able to announce the happy intelligence that a marriage has been arranged----" when the paper fell from her fingers upon the carpet.
Mary knew now. The hidden thought had awakened into full and furious life. Her pale face suddenly grew hot with shame and she covered it with her hands. When she eventually picked up the paper and finished the paragraph she found that the duke"s engagement had been a fact for a month past, but was only now formally announced.
CHAPTER XIX
TROUBLED WATERS
The Duke of Paddington was walking up the broad avenue of St. Giles"s at Oxford, going towards "The Corn." The trees of the historic street were all bare and leafless in the late winter sun.
To his right was the Pusey House, headquarters of the High Church Party in the Church of England.
To his left was the facade of St. John"s College, while beyond it was the side of Balliol and the slender spire of the Martyrs" Memorial.
Farther still, as a background and completion of the view, was the square Saxon tower of St. Michael"s. It was a grey and sober loveliness that met his eye, a vista of the ancient university which came sharply and vividly to the senses in all the appeal of its gracious antiquity, unmixed with those sensuous impressions that obtain when all the trees are in leaf and the hot sun of summer bathes everything in a golden haze.
The Duke had been to see Lord Hayle, who was lying in the Acland Home with a broken leg. Lord Camborne"s son had been thrown from his horse on Magdalen Bridge--a restive young cob which had been sent up from the episcopal stables at Carlton, and been startled by the noisy pa.s.sage of an automobile.
Term was in full swing again, and the viscount lay in the private hospital, unable to take any part in it, while the visits of the duke and others of his friends were his only relaxation.
The duke was dressed in the ordinary Norfolk jacket and tweed cap affected by the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge. He was smoking a cigarette and walking at a good pace. Once or twice a man he knew pa.s.sed and nodded to him, but he hardly noticed them. His forehead was wrinkled in thought and his upper lip drawn in, giving the whole face an aspect of perplexity and worry.
Probably in the whole university there was not, at that moment, a young man more thoroughly out of tune with life and with himself than he was.
He was probably the most envied of all the undergraduates resident in Oxford. He was certainly placed more highly than any other young man, either in Oxford, or, indeed, in England. Save only members of the Blood Royal, no one was above him. He was, to use a hackneyed phrase, rich beyond the dreams of avarice. His health was perfect, and he was engaged to the most beautiful girl in the United Kingdom.
He presented to his friends and to the world at large the picture of a youth to whom the G.o.ds had given everything within their power, given with a lavish hand, full measure, pressed down and running over.
And he was thoroughly unhappy and disturbed.
His friends, the young aristocrats of Paul"s, had long noticed the change in him. It had become an occasion of common talk among them, and no one was able to explain it. The general theory--believed by some and scouted by others--was that the duke was still suffering from the shocks of the terrible railway accident outside Paddington Station and his torture and imprisonment at the hands of the vile gang in the West End slum.
It was thought that his mind had not recovered tone, that his hours of melancholy and brooding were the result of that. Men tried to cheer him up, to take him out of himself, but with poor success. His manner and his habits seemed utterly changed. The members of the gang who had kidnapped and imprisoned the duke had been tried at the sessions of the Central Criminal Court and were sentenced to various lengthy terms of imprisonment. The duke had gone up from Oxford to be present at the trial. When he returned he refused to speak of it, but his friends learnt from the daily papers that the ringleader of the criminals had been sent into penal servitude for no less than twenty years, and that, by special permission of the judge, the duke had spent several hours with the prisoner directly sentence had been p.r.o.nounced.
Such a proceeding was so utterly unlike the duke, and his reticence about it was so complete, that every one was lost in wonder and conjecture.
And there was more than this: during term the duke hardly entertained at all. His horses were exercised by grooms, and he took no part in social life. And worse than all, from the point of view of his Oxford friends, he began to frequent sets of whose existence he had hardly been aware before. This shocked the "bloods" of the "Varsity more than anything else. It was incredible and alarming. Had the duke been a lesser man he himself would have been dropped. Few outsiders are aware of, or can possibly realise, the extent to which exclusiveness and a sort of glorified sn.o.bbery prevails in certain circles at Oxford. Social dimensions are marked with a rigidity utterly unknown elsewhere. Even the greater Society of the outside world is not so exclusive.
It was known that the duke was in the habit of taking long walks alone with a poor scholar of his own college. The man was of no birth at all, a "rank outsider," called Burnside. The duke was constantly being seen with this man and with others of his friends--fellows who wore black clothes and thick boots and never played any games. It was nothing less than a scandal!
Now and then men who went to the duke"s rooms would find strange visitors from London there, people who might have come from another world, so remote were they in appearance, speech, and mode of thought.
And the worst of it all was that the duke kept his own counsel, and n.o.body dared to comment upon the change in his hearing. There was a reserve and dignity about him, a sense of power and restrained force which chilled the curiosity of even intimate friends. They all felt that something ought to be done; n.o.body knew how to set about it. Then, unexpectedly, an opportunity presented itself. Lord Hayle was thrown from his horse and was taken to the private hospital with a broken leg.
As soon as it was allowed all the men of his set--the exclusive set to which he and the duke belonged--paid him frequent visits. Lord Hayle himself had noted with growing dissatisfaction and perplexity the marked change in his future brother-in-law. He saw that John was moody and preoccupied, seemed to have some secret trouble, and was changing all his habits. This distressed and grieved him, but he had said nothing of it to his sister or any one else, hoping that it was but a pa.s.sing phase. Moreover, he had only seen the commencement of the change. Away from everything in the hospital he had not been able to witness the full development.
His friends enlightened him; they told him everything in detail, and urged him to remonstrate.
"It will come better from you than from any one else, Hayle," they said.
"You are Paddington"s closest friend, and he"s going to marry your sister. It really is your duty to try and bring him back to his old self and to find out what really is the matter with him."
Lord Hayle had taken this advice to heart, and on this very afternoon he had opened the whole question.
His remarks had been received quietly enough--the two men were friends who could not easily become estranged--but the interview had been by no means a satisfactory one. "It"s perfectly true, Gerald," the duke had said. "I am going through a period of great mental strain and disturbance. But I can"t tell you anything about it. It is a mental battle which I must fight out for myself. No one can possibly help me, not even you or Constance. All I can tell you is that there is absolutely nothing in it that is in any way wrong. I am in no material trouble at all. Let me go my own way. Some day you shall know what there is to know, but not yet."
The duke walked down the busy "Corn" towards Carfax and the entrance to the "High"--the most beautiful street in Europe. He was on his way to his rooms in Paul"s. The interview with Lord Hayle had disturbed him. It had brought him face to face with hard fact, insistent, recurring fact, which was always present and would not be denied.
His mind was busy as a mill. The thoughts churned and tossed there like running water under the fans of a wheel. There was no peace anywhere, that was the worst of all.
And to-day, of all days, was important. It was the early afternoon of the evening on which the play called _The Socialist_ was to be presented at the Park Lane Theatre. He had obtained special permission to go to town by the evening train--there would be no accident this time--and he knew that to-morrow, whether the play was a success or a failure, his name would be in every one"s mouth.
All Oxford, all London, all Society was talking about the play that would see light in a few hours. The public interest in it was extraordinary; his own interest in it was keen and fierce, with a fierceness and keenness a thousand times more strenuous than any one knew. He did not fear that he, as a typical representative of his cla.s.s and order, would be caricatured or held up to economic execration. Even if it were so--and he was aware of Rose"s intention--he did not care twopence. He feared nothing of that sort. He feared that he might become convinced.
For it had come to that.
A complete change and _boulevers.e.m.e.nt_ of opinion and outlook is not nearly so long a process as many people are apt to suppose. To some natures it is true that conviction, or change of conviction, comes slowly. In the case of the majority this is not so. With many people a settled order of mind, a definite att.i.tude towards life, a fixed set of principles, are the results of heredity or environment. A man thinks in such-and-such a way, and is content with thinking in such-and-such a way simply because the other side of the question has not been presented to him with sufficient force. A Conservative, for example, hears Radical arguments, as a rule, through the medium of a Conservative paper, with all the answers and regulations in the next column.
It had been thus with the Duke of Paddington. He had lived a life absolutely walled-in from outside influences, Eton and Oxford, an intensely exclusive circle of that society which surrounds the Court. He had been shut away from everything which might have turned his thoughts to the larger issues of life.
Enlightenment, knowledge, had come suddenly and had come with irresistible force. Reviewing the past weeks, as the duke sometimes did with a sort of bitter wonder, he dated the change in his life from the actual moment when he was crushed down into the swift unconsciousness when the railway accident occurred outside Paddington Station. Since then his mental progress had been steady and relentless. James Fabian Rose, Mr. Goodrick, Peter Conrad, the parson, were all men of extreme intellectual power. Arthur Burnside also was unique in his force and grip, his vast and ever-increasing knowledge. And Mary Marriott--Mary, the actress!--the duke thought as little of Mary Marriott as he possibly could--she came into his thoughts too often for the peace of a loyal gentleman pledged irrevocably to another girl.
All these forces, the c.u.mulative effect of them, had been at work. The duke found himself at the parting of the ways. Day by day he deserted all the friends of his own station and all the amus.e.m.e.nts and pleasures which had always employed his time before. For these he subst.i.tuted the society of Burnside. He went for long walks with the scholar. He drove him out in his great Mercedes automobile; they talked over coffee during late midnights.
An extraordinary attachment had sprung up between the two young men.
They were utterly different. One was plebeian and absolutely poor, the other was a hereditary peer of England and wealthier than many a monarch. Yet they were fast friends, nevertheless. Nothing showed more completely the entire change of the duke"s att.i.tude than this simple fact. All his prejudices had disappeared and were overcome. Regardless of the opinions of his friends, forgetful of his rank and state, he was a close friend of Burnside.
Their relations were peculiar. The duke had offered his companion anything and everything. He proposed to make the scholar independent of struggle for the rest of his life. He pressed him to accept a sum of money which would for ever free him from sordid cares and enable his genius to have full play.
Burnside had absolutely refused anything of the sort. He was delighted to accept the sum which the duke was paying him for his work as librarian of Paddington House. It meant everything to him. But he worked for it; he knew that his work was valuable, and he accepted its due wages.
Apart from that, apart from a mutual attraction and liking which was astonishing enough to both of them, and which was, nevertheless, very real and deep, the relations of the two were simply this: the poor young man of the middle cla.s.ses, the man of brilliant intellect, was the tutor.
The duke was a simple pupil, and day by day he was learning a lesson which would not be denied.
The duke arrived at St. Paul"s College and crossed the quadrangle into the second quad., where the "new buildings" were. He went up the oak stairs to his rooms.
His scout, Gardener--the discreet and faithful Gardener!--was making up the fire in the larger of the two sitting-rooms as the duke came in.
"The kit-bag and the suit cases are already packed, sir," he said. "The valet asked me to say so. You will remember that you have given him the afternoon off. Wilkins will be at the station ten minutes before the train starts. Will you kindly tell me where you will be staying, sir, so that the porter can send the late post letters up to reach you at breakfast?"
"Oh, I shall be at the _Ritz_," the duke answered, "but you"d better send the letters on to me yourself, Gardener."
"At the _Ritz_? Very good, your Grace," the privileged old servant replied. "I saw in the _Telegraph_ that Lord Camborne and her ladyship were down at Carlton, so I thought as you"d be staying at a hotel, sir.
But I"m sorry to say that I must leave the matter of the letters to the porter, because, your Grace, I have leave of absence from the bursar to-night, and I am going to London myself."
"Oh, well, I hope you"ll enjoy yourself, Gardener," the duke answered.
"If you go to the writing-table you will find a pocket-book with five five-pound notes in it. You can take one, and it will pay your expenses.
You"re going on pleasure, I suppose?"