Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (219 page)

And Augustus had suggested that they should follow the fortunes of Charles Collar Kelleg. They were the
sort
of thing, those papers, and he hoped to get some tips occasionally from Eleanor. He did not say that he had never really believed that Don was as much estranged from his father as he and Eleanor had pretended. “But now,” he said, “Kellegs are falling as if the bottom had come out of a bucket. And they’re saying in the City that Kelleg committed suicide.”

It came into Eleanor’s head to wonder how in the world “in the City” they had already come to say that. For the rumour was not to have been spread abroad by Kelleg’s agent till the Monday. Or it might have been the Saturday. She could not precisely remember the day mentioned in the cable: but it was some days ahead still. She said:

“I don’t see how it’ll affect
your
pocket. It’s only the Catholics who will lose.”

“My dear child,” he said sententiously, “it will make all the difference in the world to my pocket.” She wondered for a moment and then said:

“But surely a solicitor is not responsible for money a client loses.”

He said darkly:

“That’s it. You always remember that I’m a solicitor. You forget that I’m a gentleman too,” and she knew that his tone meant: “That’s why you’ve always refused to marry me.”

“Oh dear,” she said, “the trouble’s always been that I forget you’re a solicitor. You’re much more like a big baby when you get on the high horse.” - He choked angrily for a moment, and then remembered that you could not expect from a member of your family the aloof politeness that you ought to receive from the rest of the world.

“This is intimacy,” he said bitterly.

“Oh, Oggie,” she said quickly, “I wish you weren’t so sensitive. One always forgets that you haven’t grown out of it.”

“You always forget that I’m in love with you,” he answered grimly. —

It bobbed up so quickly that, to retain her self-possession, she could not say anything better than:

“I’ve never been in the least sure of it!” But she had mastered her desire to laugh — a discourtesy that would have shocked her father’s daughter — sufficiently to add: “And of course, in that case the less I go out of my way to spare your feelings the better.”

“For us both?” he asked saturninely.

“For you,” she rejoined determinedly.

“Then perhaps you’ll explain,” he said, with a business-like disagreeableness, “why you say I’m more like a baby than a solicitor.’

She told him — to show him that she did not fear that he’d resent it enough to break with her — that he could not in the least withstand his infantile tempers. He could be shrewd enough whilst he kept collected. Take this case in point: there was not the least moral call upon him to guarantee the Bishop from loss. On his own showing the Monsignor had wanted a gamble — well, Augustus had given him a gamble for his money. But at the suggestion that he should let the church and mission suffer, Augustus got on his high horse and said he was a gentleman!

“Well, I am,” Augustus said. “It was a moral duty in me to advise the Bishop against chucking his money away. I let him do it. If I cannot discover whether this chap’s dead — if I cannot discover it in time and he
is
dead — I shall consider myself as in honour bound to pay the money back out of my own pocket.”

“My dear Oggie,” she said sharply, “I doubt whether you’re a gentleman at all. I really do.”

And at his gasp of outraged astonishment she went on:

“It’s romantic, what you propose to do. And a gentleman is never romantic. It isn’t fair to others. It’s not fair even to the Bishop. He needs a lesson, and if you stand between him and his lesson you’re doing him no end of harm.” She felt that she spoke with the robust commonsense of her Tory father: she knew that she was perfectly right and speaking like a man, not a woman. “It’s a gentleman’s business — it’s a decent man’s business — to be normal. You’ve got to play the game and do what’s expected of you; anything else is not fair.”

She wished that Don had ever given her occasion to advise him, as she could always advise Augustus. But Don’s problems were always too nebulous for her: he was not a person who gave way to passion: he was always, on the contrary, giving way to scruples.

“I wonder,” Augustus sneered, “that you do not ask me why I should ‘throw away my money.’ Upon my word, at times you speak just like a desiccated solicitor yourself.”

“Well, I hope I’ve got some commonsense.” She answered his gibe composedly.

“Oh, you’ve got a little, for a woman,” he said, “but you haven’t a grain of imagination — any more than any other solicitor.”

He smiled deviously and continued:

“I’m not such a fool as you think,” he said. “I’ve got it in my head to play the game of getting together a large practice. And I shan’t do it if, like one of your sort of dry practitioner, I cut my client’s losses — especially if he’s the first client of a large and unbusiness-like class.”

He looked at her with a little perky air of triumph at the close of this speech. For his little “game” was simply this: that if he indemnified his Bishop against loss when all the world, very markedly, was losing its all, he would, in the little, reverberating, gossiping hill of that communion in England, attract to himself the faith — and the custom — of half a dozen, a dozen, a score — nay, of every Bishop in England. “For they’re all the same,” he concluded, “desperately greedy — or desperately in need of funds if you like.”

He opened his lips again to shoot at her:

“So I’m not the fool you take me for and, in the language of your bridegroom, it’s up to you. I score one.”

“Oh,” she said amiably, “if it’s a question of cadging for business it’s all the way up to me. I thought it was a question of a gentleman.”

A sudden gloom had descended upon him though he had not listened to her retort. He raised his head suddenly to bring out, with a good deal of passion:

“Look here, Ellie, do the decent thing. Give me a pointer. I’ve insured at Lloyd’s against the chances of the Bishop’s loss. But it’ll cripple me to keep up the premiums. I can’t do it at the pace. You can take my word for it that I won’t use the knowledge to make any movements in the market. But just save me personally.”

The deeply-pleading note of his voice, his dark, searching eyes, his graceful, small presence that seemed to move into sympathy with his words — his whole atmosphere and her remembrances of which he made so large and innocent a part, moved her deeply.

“I can’t do it, Oggie,” she said — and she remembered when she had run to help him land a huge conger, on Deal pier, on a wet, blowy day twenty years ago.

“If I lose the Bishop and the chances of what he’ll bring me,” he pleaded on, “I may as well shut up shop.”

“Ask Don himself,” she said in a low voice, and her eyes wandered to the table. The private cable that she and Don had read together an hour before lay creased and blurred where her father had left it after perusing it.

“That sentimental ass!” he said negligently, and resumed his deeper tone with:

“Look here, Ellie.” He stumbled and halted and then went on. “It’s not the money. It’s the — the — my theory — my idea of how a practice is to be made. I’ve had to back my own ideas — I haven’t gone on in the old humdrum way. I’ve told no end of the old, conveyancing, horn-spectacled dodgers that they’re fools. If I have to shut up shop mother will keep me: I shan’t starve.... But....” and a minute shudder of violence went all over his dark being,” those other beggars will laugh at me, I won’t stand it. By God, I won’t stand it....”

His eyes went to the paper, towards which her hand was already reaching out. From where he stood he could read, positively, the first words: “Mr Charles Collar Kelleg...” and with a deep, sudden passion his hand raced hers for it. She sank back in her chair nervelessly and without it. His sigh was almost like a sob and he held it close to his eyes, with a cat-like fierceness, for he had inherited the shortness of sight of her father’s family. His head in a minute came up from his reading, his eyes sought her face, dilated and wide-lidded.

“By heaven!” he said. “What a scheme! I can make a hundred thousand if I’m cautious.”

She said, as if now she sought guidance from him — as if, in her grief, she were asking him how far a man — who
must
in the end know more of what a gentleman could do — how far a man
could
go — just the one word:

“Oggie!”

He answered a non-comprehending:

“Well?” and then slowly he folded the piece of paper into a little strip.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “of course it comes to that.

If you do not feel inclined to give me the pointer I haven’t read this precious message.”

She said, with pauses between each word:

“I only half understand. What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said, with a deep bitterness, “that if you don’t care enough to tell me — knowing that I shall be ruined — if you don’t care enough to say that you’d have told me in any case, I don’t care enough about life to use the knowledge the paper has given me.”

“You mean that you’re too decent a man,” she said. “Say that that’s what you mean.”

“I don’t mean anything of the sort,” he said pitilessly. “Your American’s fair game, papers and all. If a man’s fool enough to leave such a paper on a table he’s...” He stopped and said: “I mean literally that if you do not care for me — at least enough to save me from ruin — I don’t care enough about life to keep my end up.”

“You’re asking me, in fact, for permission to use your knowledge,” she uttered.

“Look here,” he said, and she knew that the moment for his stereotyped form of words had come, “why don’t you marry me?” He went on swiftly: “I can make enough with this to keep us for ever and ever. You can make what you like out of me. You know it. You cannot make a man out of that — that sponge. You
can’t
marry him. You
can’t.
He’s like the tamest sort of cat. He’s an incredible ass.... Why, the other day I was walking up Buckingham Street with him and a loafer came and offered him a box of matches — one of those wastrels that ought to be hanged: one of the curses of the day. And what did your Don say to him?—’No, I thank you!’” Augustus spurted out the words with a bitter contempt. “He’s polite: he’s sweet, like that, to the very pests, the cancers of Society. You cannot marry such a man. Not
you!
You!”

“Why don’t you marry me?” he repeated, “why — don’t — you — marry — me?”

It was whilst the words were vibrating in the air that Don came smiling into the room. He had, in her eyes, an air of blind greatness, a vast, credulous benevolence that made him approach Augustus with his hand stretched out and the words:

“Who’s going to marry you?”

He had heard only the last two words.

And it was the feeling that he ought to be warned that there were traitors in the world that she brought out the words:

“Augustus has been reading the cable.”

But all the stress died out of the room with Don’s next words.

“Well, that’s famous, I was just going to tell him myself,” and Eleanor, with all her sense of sane equity, could not bring herself to explain to him, at least at that moment, precisely how overbearing and outside all bounds her cousin had been. Perhaps it relieved her to escape the necessity; at any rate, next moment it was too late. For Don’s succeeding words were:

“It works out at this: we’re all going to New York, and Aunt Emmeline is to be of the company!”

And into the gasp that seemed to come to both of them he threw:

“Your father is of opinion” — he addressed himself to Eleanor—” that you need a chaperon. I tried to persuade him that those institutions aren’t modern necessities. But he puts it that if you became ill — which he considers the likeliest thing in the world considering what American cooking is — it would be the most awkward thing in the world to have no other woman in the party.” He waived, characteristically, their desire to know more facts by diverging into: “It’s astonishing how your father can, in a common-sense way, prove that a convention is a convenience. Personally I’m all for kicking conventions overboard. But there it is: there’s no doubt that in American hotels — for you cannot, he says, very decently quarter yourselves in any of
my
half-dozen palaces — the only decent servants are the negro bell-boys, who are not, obviously, adapted for waiting upon a sick lady. Which shows you, once more,” he was continuing, “how the New World does redress....”