God's Foundling

Front matter

New SiX'Shilling Novels The Christian By Hall Caine On the Face of the AVaters By Flora A. Steel The Third Violet By Stephen Crane Equality ■ By Edward Bellamy Flames By Robert Hichens The Man of Straw By Edwin Pugh The Spoils of Poynton By Henry James The Captain of the Parish By John Quine Cottage Folk By Mrs. Comyns Carr Illumination By Harold Frederic London : William Heinemann By A. T. Dawson Author of ' "Mere Sentiment," "Middle Greyness," "In the Bight of Benin," etc. London William Heinemann AU rights reserved CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE MASTER . . . . .1 II. THE MAN . . . . . .6 III. "TO MEET MR. BARNARD'S FRIEND" . . 17 IV. MR. MORLEY FENTON'S PROTEGE . . .24 V. THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOLESEY REGATTA . 32 VI. MORNING SUNSHINE AND FRUIT . . .45 VII. A MATTER FOR MR. FENTON TO DECIDE . 49 VIII.

MR. MORLEY FENTON'S DECISION . . 59 IX. CROSS-CURRENTS AND CARISSIMA . . 65 X. FROM NORWOOD TO TROUVILLE . . .73 XI. SOME REMINISCENCES, AND A BIG MAN CALLED CARROLL . . . . . -85 XII. AFTERNOON TEA AND SCANDAL . . -95 XIII. TWO MEETINGS AND A LITTLE SLEEP . . 104 XIV. IN THE MATTER OF A STRAIGHT LINE . . 1 1 5 XV. "UP AT A VILLA, DOWN IN THE CITY" . . 121 XVI. MATTERS OF EXPEDIENCY .... 129 XVII. PROVIDENCE AND MR. MORLEY FENTON . . 140 XVIII. THE WEARINESS OF HAROLD FOSTER . . 148 XIX. HOUSE . . . . . .163 XX. COLD SUPPER, AND A BREATHING SPACE Contents vi CHAPTER PAGE XXI. ON A WAYSIDE SLOPE . . . . l8l XXII. A QUESTION OF DIAGNOSIS . . -194 XXIII. INTERVENTION ..... 198 XXIV. REACTION ...... 207 XXV. PHASES . . . . . .218 XXVI. AFTER MANY DAYS ..... 228 XXVII. BETWEEN TWO WORLDS .... 238 XXVIII. " MORLEY FENTON'S FOUNDLING" . . 245 XXIX. HAROLD FOSTER LOSES HIS WAY . . . 260 XXX. HAROLD FOSTER FINDS HIS WAY . . . 267 CONCLUSION.

Chapter I. The Master

' A'ou saw go up and down Valladolid, A man of mark to know next time you saw." Robf.rt Browning. The 4.30 train from AVaterloo was a little late. AA'hen it did draw up beside the down platform at Sunbury the stationmaster had been standing waiting for it for quite five minutes. Consequently, when he opened the door of a first class smoking carriage, and touched his hat to Mr. Morley Fenton, his expression suggested apologetic regret. " Good-evening, Mr. Fenton. Little late this evening, sir. It's those race-trains again." " Good-evening, Johnson. Yes, we are a little late, I think." And Mr. Morley Fenton, slim, erect, precise, passed down the narrow platform on his way home. This little scene was one of the standing, the outstanding, features of the stationmaster's daily life, and one into which the only variation that ever crept was caused by the punctuality, or otherwise, of the 4.30 train from AA'aterloo.

He did not make a point of opening carriage doors for other passengers, not even for Sir Graham Willoughby or Lord Lesby, who were both fairly regular in their comings and their goings. And he would have found it hard to have given any valid reason for his unvarying daily tribute of respect to Mr. Morley Fenton. He simply paid it as a matter of course, and would no more have thought of omitting the small attention than would the man at the station-gate of asking to see Mr. Fenton's ticket, when that gentleman passed out with his usual slight inclination of the head. On this particular evening Mr. Morley Fenton's face wore a somewhat more serious and abstracted expression than was usual. Midway between the station and his riverside home Mr. Fenton paused, raising his head with the air of a man recalling some half-forgotten circumstance.

Then, turning sharp round, he walked back some twenty paces in the direction of the station. A strip of banana peel lay on the curb. Having flicked it into the roadway with the point of his neatly-rolled umbrella, Mr. Fenton turned once more and resumed his walk towards AA^eir Lodge. The evening was one beautifully typical of the soft radiance of summer in the Thames A^alley. Air and sky and gently rustling leaves were unusually full of lusty summer's glory. Mr. Morley Fenton was a man upon whom, as a rule, one's eyes fell as upon a piece of one's surroundings. He looked as much an expected section of his environment as the figure in a portrait seems of its canvas. On this radiant evening Mr. Fenton's appearance might have suggested to a close observer some fleeting thought of coming autumn, or, more probably, of a previous summer's ending.

AVhen he reached the garden-gate of the quaintly pretty, rambling white house called Weir Lodge, Mr. Fenton paused a moment to throw away the end of a Trichinopoly cheroot, which he had lighted, as his custom was, when leaving his office in Lombard Street. Then he walked more briskly than before, along the trim gravel drive to the THE MASTER 3 porch of the white house. The swinging glass doors in the lobby stood open, and as the master of the house entered a maidservant came forward to take his umbrella. Mr. Fenton handed the girl a compact little grass-mat bag which he had been carrying. " Here is some fish which you might take to the kitchen, Mary. And, Mary, tell your mistress, will you, that I am expecting Mr. George Barnard to dinner." " Yes, sir," said the maid, as she retired kitchenwards with the salmon, repeating to herself for the hundredth time at least that she had quite the nicest master in England. ' He's a real gentleman, he is,' was the opinion held and expressed by most people of Mary's class who were brought into contact with Mr. Morley Fenton.

Having divested himself of a neutral-hued, extremely light top coat, and deposited the same in an oak cabinet, Mr. Fenton walked quietly across the hall — for a house of its modest dimensions AVeir Lodge possessed a remarkably fine hall — holding in one hand his silk hat, and in the other an evening paper, which latter had apparently not yet been opened. Arrived in his study, a small, pretty room over looking the lawn and the bend of the river towards which this lawn sloped, Mr. Fenton laid his hat carefully in a case left open for its reception. Then he placed his evening paper on the centre of the writing-table, and, turning again, closed the door by which he had entered the room. As the master of the house regained the centre of his study, and paused there, gazing out through one of its low windows, he sighed languidly, and murmured a word which seemed to be merely the articulation of the sigh.

The lines of his fine face seemed in a way to droop inward, his lower lip to recede from its sweeping covering of silver-pointed brown moustache, and his eyes to be i — half-closed. His sigh had framed itself into the word " Sanctuary !'' An odd word this, from such a man, at such a time. Then Mr. Fenton coughed, and, passing two well-kept hands slowly over his face, as though to restore its usual impassivity, sat down restfully in a low wicker chair. " After all," he murmured. And then the relaxation which his two hands seemed to have pressed out of his face crept over it again. He drew a slim Russia-leather letter case from an inner pocket, and took out of it a letter on the top of which was printed, "St. Ann's Vicarage, Norwood." He read the letter carefully, and then, allowing it to fall on to his knees, he raised both hands, resting the finger-tips of each on those of the other, as a lawyer who listens, or a child who prays.

" Flesh and blood, and mother's milk : they are stronger than teaching and environment," he murmured slowly. "Or — but then, the teaching and environment must be strengthened. That is all. Yes, yes. They must be made the strongest. Yes, and penitence is at best a poor thing. The only atonement is living, breathing, creative atonement — that is, re-making, evil-effacing. Yes, yes." Almost an hour passed, while Mr. Fenton sat perfectly still in the wicker chair, his hands resting one against the other, his eyes on the golden glamour of the strip of western sky, which seemed to run right down to the dappled surface of the river wherein its glory was reflected. And as he sat there the man's face regained all its habitual smooth serenity, and with it there seemed a light of added strength and fixity of purpose.

Then a tap on the door of the study elicited a quiet " Come in !" from the master of the house, and Mr. Fenton replaced the letter he had been reading in the case from which he had drawn it. The case he slipped into his coat-pocket as he rose and stood facing the door. THE MASTER 5 " Mr. George Barnard, sir, to see you." The speaker was Mary, and as she drew back from the door its opening seemed to be filled, dominated, by the presence of a big fair man with a flowing russet beard, and wide blue eyes which in their expression were like those that in a horse are called "kind." He carried a dark-blue cloth crush hat in one hand, and a short briar pipe in the other. " Ah, Fenton, old chap, how are you ? I made sure I should find you in the garden." The man's voice, like his presence, was big and sweet and clean in its suggestion.

Delivered in such a voice, even the words with which he addressed Mr. Morley Fenton did not seem strikingly ill-suited to the subject of them. "Come in, George — come in. I'm glad to see you, and — it was good of you to come."

Chapter II

the man. " Ask, ere the youngster be rated and chidden, AVhat did he carry, and how was he ridden? Maybe they used him too much at the start ; Maybe Fate's weight-cloths are breaking his heart." Life's Handicap. George Barnard was a briefless young barrister, aged forty-five. He lived, and assisted sundry other persons to achieve the same laudable end, on a private income of some hundred and forty odd pounds per annum, and the casual earnings of an uncertain, but cleverly-wielded pen. He had his headquarters in a roomy, shadowy, untidy set of chambers in Furnival's Inn. The shabby saddle-bag chairs in these rooms had for the most part served different occupants at different times as beds. Some twenty years before this summer evening on which Mr. Morley Fenton welcomed George Barnard in the study at AA^eir Lodge, he had occupied a portion of the same set of shabby chambers in which his friend, the big-bodied, big hearted barrister, had lived ever since.

The two men had purchased their wigs and gowns together, and at one and the same time had been called to the Bar, and earned the right to accept the briefs which never came to either. Then there had been happenings, and Mr. Morley Fenton had subsequently entered his father's counting house, and become one of the well-known banking and THE MAN 7 financial house of Morley Fenton, Son and Co. So George Barnard, his friend's senior by a year or so, had remained the sole tenant, nominally at all events, of the Furnival's Inn chambers. And this was by no means the only tie between the owner of AA'eir Lodge and his lion-headed guest, who, by the way, looked a good deal younger than his host. George Barnard was the only man in England who, having known Mr. Fenton in his early barrister days, had met him subsequently as a member of the Lombard Street firm, and a householder.

He was one of the ver}- few who were aware that the owner of Weir Lodge ever had been called to the Bar. He was the sole connecting link between young Morley Fenton who was "sent down " from Oxford and matured Mr. Morley Fenton upon whose opinion in matters commercial many leading lights in London financial circles were always prepared to risk money. And there were other bonds of union between the two widely-differing men. Mr. Morley Fenton mixed his friend a glass of sherry and bitters ; and then, after a carefully-worded apology, left the room for the purpose of making some change in his dress before dinner. later on, he led George Barnard into the long drawing-room where his wife, his two daughters, and Norah, his niece, were discussing the forthcoming Molesey regatta. Mrs. Fenton, tall and stately, with a miniature head, and the bird-like, winsome face of a petite woman, rose to greet her husband's friend, whom she had known during all her married life.

" I am so glad to see you again, Mr. Barnard," she said, in the trilling small voice which, whilst in admirable accord with her flower-like face, seemed always out of keeping with her queenly figure. "It is positively a whole year since you last honoured us." " it is— it is, Mrs. Fenton, a whole year since I indulged myself. But, as you know, I have been a good deal out of England, and really — er " His hostess took advantage of George Barnard's pause to bring forward Norah, whom the barrister had never met. " This is dear Norah, Mr. Barnard. Our daughter now, you know, since " And this time it was the guest's turn to fill a pause. He did so with a certain manly grace, made half tender by reason of his noticing, as he bowed over the girl's hand, that she was dressed in black. He remembered then that, some six or eight months before, his friend's elder brother had died in rather poor circumstances, leaving a pretty and wholly insignificant wife, and a seventeen-year-old daughter.

Norah he now rightly assumed to be the daughter, and he noticed, with Bohemian quickness of perception in such matters, that the girl's pale face was a very charming one. His recollection of his one meeting with Norah's mother made him sum the situation up in his mind by a thought which, if put into words, would have been : " Charming girl, with an encumbrance — her mother." He did not know the facts of the case, or he would have been aware that Norah had no encumbrances, and, to all intents and purposes, no mother. Her dead father's widow, whom Barnard would have called, " a thread-paper creature," had eagerly accepted Mrs. Morley Fenton's offer to adopt Norah, and herself had left England to travel as companion to a wealthy spinster relative. George Barnard shook hands warmly with Maud and Lucy Fenton, two graceful girls, very much their mother's daughters, with whom the barrister was a prime favourite.

A few minutes later the small party adjourned to the dining-room. Just as everything else about AAreir Lodge was the best which English orthodoxy provides and suggests, so the THE MAN 9 dinner that evening was thoroughly and conventionally good and patriotically British, from its healthy infancy of thick ox-tail to its sturdy final stages of jellies, Cheddar, and wall-fruit The hock was poor, the claret was good, the port was perfection, and the coffee was infamous. Mr. Fenton was serious and a little abstracted, whilst never ceasing to be an attentive host. Mrs. Fenton was charming, and full of the most sympathetic of small talk. Norah was subdued, but in occasional flashes struck the barrister as being very interesting. Maud and Lucy unaffectedly demanded to be amused ; and George Barnard complied with these demands to perfection, whilst mentally flagellating himself at intervals for being lacking in any of the topics of conventional small talk.

" If only one could talk to 'em about the affairs of our kinds of lives !" Barnard had been known to say to a journalistic chum, whilst speaking of ladies and of the rare occasions upon which he felt called upon to show himself in the society whose members call the circle of their acquaintance collectively by that name. As a matter of fact, he always did talk of the affairs of Bohemia, though he was never conscious of so doing. And in this way George Barnard rarely sailed to amuse, even where he could not interest. And the most rigidly orthodox hostesses had found it absolutely impossible, when their gaze had met his great, sailor-child-like blue eyes, to be displeased with one whose devotion to their sex was always apparent, even to smart folk. "You'll excuse my selfishness in not letting George join you, dear?

AAre have a matter of business to discuss," said Mr. Fenton to his wife, as the ladies were leaving the table. " AVell, I don't know. We shall expect to see you for a little while, anyhow, Mr. Barnard." " Yes, do come," added Mrs. Fenton's younger daughter. " And I will have that awful drinking-song ready for you to sing." Mr. Fenton did not resume his seat, but, having handed his old friend a cigar, proposed an adjournment to his study. This was acted upon, and when George Barnard had made himself comfortable before one of the open French windows, Mr. Fenton made some very good coffee, using for the purpose a special apparatus which stood on a side table. " Ah, Morley, your hand's lost none of its cunning, I see," said the big man, tasting his Mocha, as his friend sat down in a low chair before him.

" It's fairly good coffee, is it not? Fairly good, I think." A little twinkle of responsive appreciation of Barnard's compliment had lighted up the City man's eyes, and shown all sorts of new possibilities in his face. It was only a faint gleam, and a fleeting, but in passing it revealed more of Morley Fenton, the man, than had been shown since his arrival at AA'eir Lodge that evening. So a stray quotation wakes to ecstasy a renegade scholar, or a sunset glow an apostate artist. And the cause in this case was a careless comment on a man's ability as a maker of coffee. "And now you've something special to tell me, haven't you ?" asked Barnard, stroking his brown beard as he spoke, with the luxurious air of a man possessing to the full that rare faculty of seizing and appreciating comfort. " Gad ! it's quite like old times, your wanting a yarn with me.

I was very glad to get your wire." " Yes " — the younger man looked distinctly the senior now. "Yes, I particularly wanted to see you, George. How long is it since you had a talk with Harold Foster ?" The barrister looked up sharply through the cloud of blue smoke which hung round his head in the still night air. " Eh — Harold ? He was with me on Saturday ; he always lunches with me on Saturdays, you know. Then THE MAN 11 we generally go to a matinde, and I dine him somewhere, and yarn till it's time to see him off to Norwood. As a matter of fact, I'm ashamed to say it was my breakfast last Saturday, not lunch. I was in my tub when the boy came. But why ?" " Did you — did he seem changed in any way, George ?" "Why, no! Changed? No ; I didn't notice any difference in him. He talked a good deal about the sex, bless 'em ! but that's only natural.

If I remember rightly, I'd had at least half a dozen serious affairs before I was his age. True, I wasn't brought up in a parsonage, but — by Gad ! yes — I might have had a dozen if I had. Dangerous places — very. But why do you ask, old man ?" Mr. Morley Fenton drew his letter-case from his pocket, and handed Barnard the letter which he had read on first entering his study that evening. " Read that, George." " I wish you'd read it to me, old man ; you're close to the light." " Well, it is from the Reverend AA'inthrop at Norwood, and he says : ' I feel it my duty to tell you that your protege has of late been causing me a good deal of anxiety. Of course, I have no means of judging of his conduct during the day, when he is presumably occupied in his studies at the hospital. Latterly, however, he has fallen into a habit of reaching home considerably later in the evening than was the case when he first took up his abode with me.

His tone and attitude towards myself and the family seem changed. He frequently absents himself from the ordinary church services, and is at no pains to excuse this. His correspondence, too, has increased of late, and he shows some contempt for the simple pleasures and relaxations in which I have always encouraged the members of my household. As you know, my dear Mr. Fenton, your protege has attained the years, if not the discretion, of manhood, and it is therefore impossible for me to en force any rules for the guidance of his daily life. Only, as a matter of conscience, I feel bound to inform you of the impression which my careful study of young Mr. Foster gives me, and that unfortunately is, that some change, by no means toward his worldly or spiritual welfare, is at work in him.'" Mr. Morley Fenton replaced the letter in his case, and sighed as he said : "That is the reason, George, of my asking you, who know everything — er — all that Mr. Winthrop does not know — whether you have noticed any change in Harold Foster."

" My dear Fenton, I think, as I thought and told you when Harold first went to Norwood, that, with all respect to Mr. AVinthrop, a parsonage is no place for a medical student, least of all for— for a lad like Hal." " He is under very careful, watchful eyes there, and in the atmosphere of thoroughly good family life." " So well watched that I expect it's getting on his nerves, old man. Such an infernally good atmosphere that I expect it makes him choky. I thought he seemed a little stale and flat on Saturday, now I come to think of it." " Old friend, you know my hopes for Harold Foster, and — you know the fears that live with me. You know all I want to shield him from." " My dear Fenton, believe me, you can't put old heads on young shoulders. This home-shelter business is the worst kind of foolishness.

Fancy how we should have felt at his age if we'd been the subjects of a parson's careful study — and he's a medical student ! You know how medicals talk. My dear fellow, the world you want him to be a man in is not a Norwood vicarage — not much ! — and who knows that better than you ? Let him learn the world he has to live in." THE MAN 13 " And come unassisted into contact with — with all things that bring ruin. George, I have the two lives always before me — his and mine. God knows there's been enough similarity. You know how his college days came to an end." " And yet you put him now, at three-and-twenty, practically in the position of a school-boy. My dear old man, let the lad live as the young fellows around him live, more or less in Bohemia. Let him live with me, if you like. Good heavens ! if there's no open devilment in a young man's life, there's sure to be something a deuced lot worse.

It isn't healthy for a youngster to have no appreciation of wicked ness : it makes him cultivate nastiness. Let him live a worker's life among workers, and find out that green apples make a man's stomach ache ; and if he drinks a glass of wine too many, and has a head in the morning, do you mean to say it's not cleaner than listening to talk of such things and wishing for them, or getting them in secret, and lying to a parson's wife about the morning's head? It is such rot, this cant about pure lives ! Why, hang it, Fenton, you know it is — no man better !" The barrister's ardour made the other man cold and calm. " There are some matters, George, upon which individual opinions must necessarily differ. AVhat seems cant to one man may be a thoroughly wholesome and genuine belief to another. And a third man, again, may neither believe nor disbelieve, and yet be wise enough to uphold certain standards because in the end they are the best policy."

" H'm ! Well, of course, I long ago gave up trying to understand you, Fenton. I just accept you as a marvel, a very fine one, and my old friend. But I don't ask a youngster to be a marvel. I just ask him to be white, and to grow up a clean, strong man. Gad, Fenton ! Think what young blood is. Let him live a complete life. There's not enough oxygen for a youngster in the odour of sanctity and week-night services. Why, why — think of our young days, you know !" " I am thinking of them, George. In connection with Harold Foster, I never cease thinking of them." If the stationmaster at Sunbury could have seen Mr. Morley Fenton's face now, as the light from the green-shaded lamp fell upon the veins which throbbed on each side of the high forehead with its fringe of grey-shot hair, want of recognition might have led to the omission of his usual deferential greeting.

In dealing with some one feature of their lives the inwardness of most men comes to the surface — at least, more so than at other times. In its vibratile force and fulness, Mr. Morley Fenton's voice as he continued speaking was a revelation of a man not known to Mr. Morley Fenton's circle of acquaintance. " AVhen you talk of my letting Harold Foster live in Bohemia, George, you forget much that I remember. If I speak now as a narrow-living man of conventions and orthodoxy — let me speak as such. I, at all events, see some things clearly, and I remember. I do not think of Harold Foster simply as Harold Foster, a young man in the doorway of his life. I think of him in the light of the past, which is stronger, if not brighter, than the light of the present, or of Bohemia. A young man is first a child, and draws in — God knows what a child draws from its mother's milk and — and its father's loins.

AVe do not all start fair, George, and those who have been responsible for the over weighting may at least try to lessen its effects." The barrister stretched out one hand ; but, as though to check any words which might accompany the gesture, Mr. Morley Fenton leaned forward in his chair, and con tinued speaking more rapidly than before. "Your wide tolerance, George, is a far more intolerant thing than what you regard as my narrow conventionality. Prague is not a walled city. Byzantium spreads its colour THE MAN 15 for all beholders. Bohemia is open to all comers ; but all men are not Bohemians, George. Let your thoughts run back to where something holds mine fixed, so far as Harold Foster is concerned. Bohemia was never to me the land it was and is to you. To you it is a living-room — a working, playing, feasting, starving place, but, first of all, a working place.

AVas it ever that to me ? It is clean, breezy moor land — workshop camaraderie — to you, your life's oxygen. It was abandon, dancing exhilaration, or drowsy narcoticism, life's wine, the world's luridity, to me, and straying along its paths brought me But there! this is mere reminiscence to you. Forgive my — my unnecessary warmth ; but you follow the line of my judgment. No, Harold Foster must not be helped into Bohemia." Mr. Morley Fenton leaned far back in his chair, and the light from the green-shaded lamp, playing about his head, made fantastic livid hollows, as irresponsible lamplight will, where smooth reposeful lines were wont to be. Both men were silent for a full minute, and then George Barnard said : " Yes, I suppose you're right, old man. Anyhow, I understand ; but you want to make a change of some sort.

You must introduce some interest in his life — something in the way of a condiment, to take with the week-night services, eh?" Mr. Morley Fenton smiled slightly. It was the faintest, most tentative glimmering of a smile. Then both men were silent till George Barnard leaned forward to throw away his cigar-end. "Yes, there must be a change," said Barnard's host slowly. "An added interest, to give the quiet life's white light shade and colour. George, the boy must visit some comfortable homes, and mix with people who find happiness in a kind of life you rather despise. And for a beginning — for a beginning, why shouldn't he visit here ?'' " Why indeed ? I have often wondered. Why shouldn't a young man in whose life you take an interest visit your house ? And then it will give you the opportunities you have found it so difficult to make of seeing him in a perfectly natural way."