The Apotheosis of Mr. Tyrawley

Front matter

THE APOTHEOSIS OF MR. TYRAWLEY. THE APOTHEOSIS OF MR. TYRAWLEY. BY E. LIVINGSTON PRESCOTT. LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, PUBLISHERS in ORDINARY to HER MAJESTY {All rights reserved.') I896. CONTENTS. CHAPTER .AGE I. A Man of Sin i II. His Affectionate Friend A Sort of Ishmael [6 III. IV. r- A Strange Inspiration 48 V. The Pleasures of Respectability The Doctor's Admonition 6 3 VI. 82 VII. VIII. The Hawk in the Dove's Nest A Rank Impostor 96 no IX. An Unpleasant Exodus Adrift 125 X. 141 XI. XII. XIII. XIV. The Song of the Sirens ... It was the Body of a Man "1 am Dr. MacAdam's Tonic" " i intend to disappear " 152 169 i8i 209 The First Plunge XV. Contents. VI CHAPTER PACE 237 XVI. Mr. Tyrawley's Mentor XVII. " The Cove to Soap 'em Down " XVIII. The Hero of a Street Fight 253 28o XIX. A Business Banquet XX. Hunted Down 288 3 °9 XXI. That Little Viper XXII. Nemesis and Excelsior 327 THE APOTHEOSIS OF MR. TYRAWLEY.

Chapter I

A MAN OE SIX. |fjR. TYRAWLEY was down on his luck. He wore beautiful clothes ; he was peculiarly handsome, having a pure Greek profile, deep blue eyes — which ex pressed sentiments at present unknown to their possessor — a heavy chestnut moustache and chestnut hair, whose hyacinthine waves conventional cropping could not altogether efface ; the figure of an athlete of six feet, and the complexion of a delicate girl. But all these advantages had so far failed to assure to their owner any prospect of dinner, and his breakfast had been slight. So he was depressed, bit his moustache in the absence of anything else to bite, and envied a stout artisan who sat eating hot beefsteak pudding out of a yellow basin, just brought him by his wife, and flinging bits of bread to the seagulls flying round.

The place was the pier at Claretown, on a stormy, sunny, breezy day ; the hour 12.30, the season autumn. There was the usual crowd of promenaders on the esplanade and pier ; and a very few benighted individuals, leaving the gay throng, had descended among the timbers at the lower end of the ladder, with lines and bait, and an impression that they could catch fish. Now, Mr. Tyrawley had outlived all illusions ; therefore, when he descended among these dreamers, it was only that he might escape at once from the beefsteak- A Man os Sin. 3 pudding and his own large circle of unprofit able acquaintances. He leaned in an ill-tempered way against a great black beam, and smoked ; for people will give you tobacco who will not ask you to dinner ; and tobacco deadens one sort of sickness, if it causes another.

Near him sat a small boy in sailor costume of a fancy and aristocratic character, dangling a pair of short, blue silk legs, and a line big enough to catch a dolphin, towards the swirling green water, and absently munching a bun, which Tyrawley felt to be aggravating. He noticed with languid curiosity that the small boy's sister was fishing too, but in a half hearted, feminine way, her eyes strained to the distant horizon, where the black purple clouds were drifting up, or to the deep brown fringe of seaweed sweeping down on the timbers. He was not much interested in girls ; his acquaintance with women, though vast, was superficial, and confined chiefly to married ladies — dowagers for choice — as more worth cultivation. So he only casually remarked that her eyes were dark and large, and her cheek of that warm paleness on which red rose crimson easily Hashes and fades ; that she had a stream of fair hair, not unlike seaweed, with which the wind played wild tricks ; and that she would be pretty some day.

Suddenly something happened — it was the abrupt and unintentional descent of the small boy into the water, bun, line and all ; and this incident was immediately followed by a further development, namely, a flying of female skirts into the green, bubbling whirlpool he had created. " By Jove ! little fool," said Mr. Tyrawley between his clenched teeth. " I think I'll eo too ; " and he swung himself over the edge with a cool and wary calculation of exactly where to drop. A Man of Sin. 5 The girl was actually trying to swim, though the water kept dashing her rather alarmingly against the beams, but she saw Tyrawley's intention, and managed to gasp — " Not me — Bertie." Mr. Tyrawley peevishly changed his course, secured the sailor, who appeared little at home in his native element, and chucked him into the arms of a lad who had been fishing near ; while he snatched up just in time, a limp, white figure that was drifting under the pier, and managed, with the help of excited spectators, to scramble up the slippery steps on to the safe ground.

" Give me the young lady, sir," said the proprietor of the beefsteak-pudding. " You don't look over grand yourself." But Mr. Tyrawley had a feeling that he was much more likely to collapse without his slight burden than with it. So he shook his head and climbed the upper stairs. Here he was greeted by a frantic, flushed, sobbings, lau8shin_r woman in velvet and furs, who announced herself " Her mother," and embraced him and her child alternately. He put her gently aside, and, laying the girl down on a couch of shawls which had been hastily provided, put his hand on her heart. As he did so, and felt a feeble flutter, like a dying bird's wing, her large, dark eyes opened languidly, and fixed on his a look of childish awe and gratitude. It was a look that a sinking soul might cast on a rescuing angel, and it went to the marrow of Mr. Tyrawley's bones, and had the effect of making him feel more than usually unangelic.

So he said, in a voice of studied coolness, still rather panting from his immersion — " She's all right, but you had better get her home. Let one of these beggars run for a fly." He could not remove his hat, because the sea had saved him that trouble. He bowed his handsome head, with that graceful and A Man os Sin. 7 distinguished courtesy which caused the colonel of the local volunteers to say that Tyrawley was the finest gentleman, as well as the biggest rascal, going ; and, turning away, pushed through the crowd, who were admiring his valour and pitying his wetness. But a man, deputed by the girl's mother, rushed after him and caught him by the arm. " I say, Mrs. St. Just— that's the mother of the young lady you saved — wants your card, that she may write and thank you." Mr. Tyrawley murmured something like an oath, as the admiring crowd swarmed round him afresh, but even in that trying moment habitual prudence triumphed, and he extricated a soppy piece of pasteboard from a damp pocket-book, and once more shaking off his admirers, proceeded on his way with a rapid though not very assured step.

The spectacle of a gentleman in fashionable morning costume, bareheaded, and drip ping like a sea-god, being unusual even in Claretown, which is accustomed to eccen tricities, Mr. Tyrawley had some difficulty in eluding public esteem, but eventually, getting rid of the last small boy by a scowl of peculiar atrocity, he made his way through back and bye streets, ever upward, till he attained a small and desolate terrace, the very ragged fringe of the meanest suburb of Claretown, where the wind, sweeping from the downs, cut like a knife, and the autumn mists lay low and chill — a terrace whose immediate outlook was a patch of turnips and a brickfield. Stopping at No. 17 (at Nos. 18, 19, 20 the builder had lost heart, and left them to moulder unconcluded), Mr. Tyrawley applied a latch-key and entered a very narrow, oil clothed passage, where he was confronted by his landlady, a short, pale, middle-aged woman in black, with a figure like a packingcase, and a pair of strange, visionary, grey eyes.

She emerged, however, from her vision sufficiently to glance from her drenched lodger to the stair-carpet — which looked as if any sort of water would have benefited it — and remarked that he was wet. " Yes, Mrs. Higson," he replied. " The sea is wet, and I have been there." "The wicked," said Mrs. Higson, "flee when no man pursueth." " In this case," said he, "the wicked was pursuing, not fleeing. I went after a young lady." She shut her lips with a short nod, con demnatory but acquiescent. " Poor thins: I " " Oh, it was for her good," said he. " Unless you consider it a good thing to be drowned." "That," she replied, "depends on the person, and their state." " For a man of sin like me, I suppose, it would be very bad, as hastening the inevitable." " Yes, Mr. Tyrawley.' " But how about your respected husband, Mrs. Higson, who has been, to my know ledge, drunk for two nights, and yet is a Little Elijah ?

" " Mr. Higson," said she with decision, " is selected ; therefore, he is all right." " Our choice selected, three a penny,'' murmured the lodger, whose teeth were beginning to chatter with cold. " Now, my dear woman, even men of sin catch cold. Let me go upstairs, will you ? " "If you don't mind," said she, "going into the back-kitchen, I'll bring you a change there. Salt water spoils the carpets." Even the boldest scoffer, with a con sciousness of unpaid rent, shrinks from the wrath of his landlady. Tyrawley went meekly to the dank and stony little retreat prescribed, and there made a shivering toilet, and looked thereafter so blue and pinched that Mrs. Higson, with a touch of human feeling, invited him to come and warm himself by the kitchen fire, while she hung his drenched clothes at a prudent distance from it, and he looked ruefully on.

" Awful nuisance," said he. " Bother saving one's fellow-creatures." Then he thought of the little fluttering pulse under his hand, and the big, dark blue eyes, which looked such adoring reverence on his most unworthy self, and his heart smote him, and he added — " But she was only a child, and probably, Mrs. Higson, not selected." " Most likely not," said Mrs. Higson. spreading his coat on the back of a chair ; " the Little Latter End Elijahs are few and feeble as yet." " Mr. Higson," murmured the incorrigible Tyrawley, "is certainly the latter; but I gather' that, if you are a Little Latter End Elijah, you may — excuse a worldly proverb — jump over gates of sobriety, and so on, without any unpleasant results ; whereas, if you're not, you must not even look through them." " lust so," she replied composedly.

"But I ought to tell you, Mr. Tyrawley, that that shirt I have just brought you is the only one you now have that is not ragged, and the man called to-day for the money for new soling your boots which you promised him last week, and " Poor Tyrawley writhed a little at this piece of feminine retaliation. " All right. I know," he said, peevishly. " Now I'm dry enough for that carpet, I think I'll go upstairs. My ducking, or some thing, has given me a racking headache." He rose, but the landlady's back being turned for a moment, his eye — it was the eye of the falcon or the fox, or any creature that lives by preying on its fellows, soft and languid as it appeared — perceived something twisted round a button of the wet coat. It was two or three long fair hairs, so fine that only such an eye could have detected them.

What part of this reprobate's schemes was it that necessitated the rapid and secret seizure of that sentimental memento by those long, taper fingers of gentlemanly whiteness and predatory flexibility ? When he was alone upstairs, he wound his prize round his finger, placed it in an envelope, appending the date methodically, and put it away in the secret drawer of a much-battered Russia leather writing-case. Having done which, he flung himself back in a low chair, as luxurious as could be ex pected for four shillings and sixpence a week, and laughed a bitter, silent laugh ; then took a hard pull at his pipe, and, after a restless turn or two in his narrow den, went down stairs assain and out. " Mr. Tyrawley," said Mrs. Higson, hearing his step, and perhaps smitten with womanly remorse, to which even the Little Latter End Elijahs, albeit a self-justifying sect, are not altogether impervious, " you've got a little tea left in the cupboard, and I have water on the boil ; won't you have a cup before you go out ?

" " No, thanks. One advantage being half drowned has, in common with the complete process, is that you don't want anything to eat or drink afterwards. And the exchequer is low, Mrs. Higson ; I'm going out to fill it." She watched him from the kitchen window as he lounged down the street. " And what you do to fill it," she said, " passes me. And as to how you got half-drowned, it may be true, or it may not. If you're like' Saul, higher by the head and shoulders in stature than most, it strikes me you're uncommonly like him in being lower than most in your principles." It is a just retribution on a scoundrel that, when, by chance, he does a good thing, peculiarly bad designs are sure to be attributed to him, just as a good man who makes a slip is usually forgiven on the score of previous good character. It is only in the eighteenth chapter of the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel and similar pages that the way of judging is " equal."

Chapter II. His Affectionate Friend

MIR. TYRAWLEY'S destination was a certain public-house and billiard-room in the nasty part of Claretown. He entered the bar, imbibed the very cheapest form of liquid refreshment with an unconcealed grimace, and, nodding his head towards the first floor, inquired — " Any one up there ? " The landlord grinned, as landlords do grin at the discomfiture of customers whose taste for liquor is limited. " Nobody," said he. Mr. Tyrawley mounted the dingy stair with a slow and disgusted step. Further discomfiture met him in the person of a strange marker, for with the last one he had had a friendly understanding. "Oh, new face," said he, coolly looking the marker over. "Where's the other fellow, then ? " "Sloped, sir, with some cash. They're after him, I believe." " Poor devil ! " said Mr. Tyrawley, thought fully, as he slowly removed his coat, selected a cue, and chalked it.

The new marker stood watching him as he knocked about the balls, making some brilliant strokes and missing others. Pre sently the man turned his back to rub a cloth over the dusty window, and then Mr. Tyrawley began to play with more pur pose, finally settling down to patient practice of a difficult cannon. As he stood up for a moment to rest, he caught the marker's eye fixed keenly upon him. They looked hard at each other for a moment. The faintest ghost of a smile stole across the man's countenance, but Tyrawley remained quite unmoved. " Play on this table pretty often, I reckon, don't you, sir ? " said the man very civilly. " Pretty often," said Tyrawley. " Why ? " "Seem to know it, that's all." Their eyes met again. The marker strolled to the window, whistling under his breath, and Mr. Tyrawley stroked his moustache, and deliberated.

He played a little more, and then began to put on his coat. The marker came obsequiously to help him, during which operation he remarked casually — " D'ye know, that last man was really a good fellow ; I often come here, and I always remembered him " — a slight pause — "when I was in funds. Thanks." " Thank you, sir." Mr. Tyrawley departed, viewed not with out admiration by the marker. " You're a cool hand, and no mistake,' he muttered. " A real toff, got into trouble and cast off by your friends, I expect. Play a pretty game, too — oh, a pretty, pretty game. Mr. Tyrawley now made his way to his club in the more fashionable part of Clare town. It was not the club — he was wont to laugh and say that the company there was too expensive for a beggar — but it was sufficiently fashionable, and more than sufficiently fast.

Careful fathers objected to their sons becoming members, and mothers deprecated it as a haunt of detrimentals, and Mr. Tyrawley was one of the best-known figures there. There were hawks for com pany, and pigeons to be plucked in a strictly gentlemanly manner. Tyrawley was a popular man because he was always languidly amiable and humorous, however low his exchequer. On his way there he stopped at a small baker's shop, where stale rolls at a halfpenny tempted the hungry, and, after plumbing his pocket, bought one and ate it, leaning against the counter, to the puzzled admiration of the woman in charge. The last crust was between that delicate, predatory finger and thumb, when a stray street dog pattered in and looked up whim pering in his face. "Are you hungry, old chap?" said Tyrawley. The dog replied that he was, rather, which he meant in a slang sense.

So Tyrawley flipped the morsel to him, and left the shop. The wind seemed a shade less bitter, and the memory of the beef steak-pudding less intrusive after that. As soon as he entered the club, young Poyntz (Poyntz & Co., Bacon Merchants) challenged him to a game of billiards. Poyntz was an obnoxious sandy-haired youngster, plump as his sire's pigs, whose boast was that he could make himself at home anywhere, and whose manners and customs aggravated the calmest tempers. But a fox must eat a crow if he cannot procure a pheasant ; so Tyrawley smiled resignation, which Poyntz interpreted as rapture, and they took off their coats and played, presenting as striking a contrast as a thoroughbred plater and a useful mule. But the spectators, who knew Tyrawley's form — there were a good many men in the room, for the afternoon was wettish — began to open their eyes as the latter missed stroke after stroke, and only saved the game through the fatuous idiocy of Poyntz's play.

" Have another game, dear boy," said the latter. " Nearly had you, eh ? About equal, I think;" and he poked Tyrawley in the side with his cue with elegant facetiousness. Every one was surprised when the latter hesitated a little. Perhaps Poyntz poked too hard, or perhaps a ducking in the sea and a halfpenny roll are not the best preparations for cool and scientific play. " Come, I say, give a man his revenge," urged Poyntz. The lookers-on chuckled as he rushed on his doom ; and Tyrawley, taking up his cue with a slight effort, drawled — "All right." He played a stroke or two, failed in the simplest of cannons, laughed faintly, and dropped on one of the red leather settees. "Wait a minute, young man," he said; " I've got a stitch in my side — indigestion or something." " Been lunching ? " suggested somebody.

" Just so," said Tyrawley, with a sarcasm of which his hearers were not aware. Poyntz swelled out his chest, and remarked that he was just getting into good form, and he did not see fellows backing out of things. " If Tyrawley doesn't murder that fellow, I shall," said Waters, adjutant of the local volunteers. " He's really too much of a cad." But to murder the goose, or gander, which produces golden eggs is not the habit of gentlemen of Mr. Tyrawley's profession, so he said with meekness — " I'll go on presently, old man," and held his side hard. Here, however, a man, who had been standing in the background taking in the scene with professional keenness, inter vened. He was a sporting doctor, named MacAdam. " No, you won't," he said, seating himself on the settee, blighting Poyntz parenthetically with a growl, " Shut up !

" " No, you won't," he repeated. " Why ? " inquired Tyrawley, with a weak defiance. " Because," said the doctor, deliberately, " you've got cold shivers, a touch of fever, and — unless I am much mistaken — a threaten ing of pleurisy. You'll go home to bed like a decent chap, in a cab which I shall send for, and send for your family physician. Here, Poyntz, hand over what you owe, and we'll pack him off." Mr. Tyrawley's face lengthened. " Shan't go," he said, writhing peevishly. " I don't believe in physicians." Then he looked up with a smile into MacAdam's face, to take out the sting of his remark. He was an amiable person, and would have loved his kind instead of preying on them had circumstances permitted. Even a Bengal tiger, when fully and regularly fed, has been known to become sweet-tempered.

" I'm not joking," said MacAdam, as Poyntz sulkily placed in his outstretched palm sundry half-crowns, whose chink filled Mr. Tyrawley with most unheroic satis faction. " Here you are, old man. Now, Joe," turning to the marker, "order a cab, will you ? " " No," said Tyrawley, with gasping de cision, getting on his feet. " I shall walk. The air will do me good." " You can't, man," said MacAdam. " Air ! — an east wind like a Pathan's knife. But," he added, another aspect of the case striking him as he observed Tyrawley's welcome of Poyntz's half-crowns, " my trap's at the door, and I'm going your way (which was a fiction), I'll drive you if you like." Tyrawley would fain have refused. He had no wish that anybody at the Club should become acquainted with Alonzo Terrace and the amenities of his landlady.

But he felt he couldn't walk, and a fly was out of the question with the possible expense of illness before him ; so he murmured, " Thanks," and subsided on the settee. As MacAdam turned from the window to announce that the trap would be round as soon as the mare could be persuaded to trot on four legs, instead of standing on two, a waiter brought in a note to Tyrawley. It had a large blue and red monogram, and was addressed in a wild female hand. " Messenger waits, please, sir," said the waiter. His eye was benignant as it rested on Tyrawley, who never swore at him, or chaffed him — as the eye of one who conveys good tidings. He knew the look of a hungry man, and the outward aspect of an invitation to dinner. It was, indeed, a fervid petition from M. A. St. Just that he would come and dine with them quietly that evening, to be thanked, "though he could never be thanked enough, etc., etc., and if not that evening, would he name any evening, and she was ever gratefully his."

A little note was enclosed, written in a school-girl hand — "Dear Mr. Tyrawley, " Mother says I must write and thank you for perilling your life to save Bertie's and mine ; but I can never, never do that properly. Only if there is ever anything I can do to show you what I feel about it, please let me know. I am your affectionate friend, " Nina St. Just." Now, Mr. Tyrawley had various interested friends, and admiring friends, and had had even impassioned friends ; but he had never had an affectionate friend. That adjective belongs to home and tenderness, and other things with which a polite adventurer has nothing to do ; and it went through him with a sense of sudden need and yearning. But a man with pleurisy hanging over him cannot accept dinner invitations ; so he dis gustedly asked for pen and paper, and wrote — " Dear Mrs. St. Just, " I am very sorry I cannot avail myself of your kind invitation, as I am leaving Claretown for a few days.

On my return I shall hope to do myself the pleasure of calling to see that your daughter and Master Bertie are none the worse for their dip. Pray thank Miss St. Just for her note. I am quite overwhelmed at her gratitude for such a trifle. " Yours sincerely, " I. Tyrawley.'' " Ready, my son ? " said the doctor, who had watched his rather faltering scrawl. "Oh yes, bother you — thank you," said Tyrawley, following the little short, stout doctor downstairs. "A man ought never to be seedy who has nobody to coddle him ; he becomes such a nuisance to himself and his chums." " Where to, old man ? " said MacAdam, as the mare executed her usual prologue. He had lowered his voice. Tyrawley felt grateful. " 17, Alonzo Terrace. It is beyond Down Road, on the extreme edge of nowhere." All right," said the doctor, cheerily.

" Miss Fireworks will have you there in no time ; there's nothing she adores like a long spin." It was a long spin. Much conversation was impossible, between the eccentricities of Fireworks and the breathlessness of her passenger, who sat with a very pale face, grasping his side at every bound of the trap. Little MacAdam tucked the rug round his legs once or twice, and, as the mare at last slackened her pace, looked at him with good natured pity. " Now, look here," he said, " you go straight to bed, and let somebody clap you on a big mustard-plaster, and another after that — till the pain abates. Keep warm and quiet, and take slops, and then you'll be all right. I'll come round and see you to morrow. What's amiss ? " " MacAdam, I can't." " Can't what ? Take slops ? You must, man, or you'll be in a regular fever."

"Oh, I can take anything I can get; but, MacAdam, I'm not in a position " " Oh, hang that," said the doctor, hastily. " I come as a friend — that's understood." The helplessness of illness was upon Tyrawley, and he could not fight, so he said faintly — " Thanks, old man," and collapsed on the seat. He got down with difficulty when Fireworks permitted it, and was presently absorbed into the dark passage of No. 17, and was coldly met by the stony and reproachful glance of Mrs. Higson, who foresaw much trouble and small profit. " It seems," he said meekly, when, later on, he was experiencing the tortures of an ill made and ill-applied mustard-plaster at her hands, " almost a pity I wasn't drowned this morning, Mrs. Higson, doesn't it ? We should both have been spared this annoyance." " Everything is a mystery," she retorted tartly, " including who's to pay for all you'll want while you are ill." Tyrawley bit his lip, and felt unequal to further witticisms after this snub.

Chapter III

A sort of ishmael. AC AD AM came next day, and found his patient hollow-eyed and quiescent from pain, bound hand and foot in the iron thrall of Mrs. Higson, whose nursing was of a distinctly penal character. She resented his faint jokes, and the insinuating gaze of those eloquent, deep-blue eyes, which had wheedled so many middle aeed female hearts out of their better judgment, merely aggravated her. She would have preferred him to bewail and even to blaspheme, as more in accordance with his character ; but want of pluck was not among his sins, though Mrs. Higson, armed with a raging mustard-plaster, might have appalled the bravest. So things went on for a day or two. Then came a faint change for the better. Finally, one bitter afternoon, MacAdam, coming in, found his patient up, shivering over a very small cindery fire, clad in an ancient silk dressing-gown, the remnant of some day of extravagant sunshine.

It was a wretched little room, imperfectly carpeted, curtainless, and visited from the turnip-field by the four winds. The bed was unmade, the furniture undusted, and last night's basin of gruel standing congealed on the mantelpiece. The doctor made a face when he saw it. "Hallo!" he said, "is this that woman's idea of nourishment ? No wonder you look all eyes and bones." " Her one idea," said Tyrawley. " Oh," he added, fervently, "it's a mercy to be up ! She always puts everything just out of my reach. I believe she wanted to make me swear, that she might institute unfavourable comparisons between me and her husband, who is always drunk, and in that state talks Scripture in a way that makes even a reprobate like me sick." "What are they ?" said MacAdam, drawing a chair to the fire, and poking it reck lessly.

" Hard-shell Baptists, Ranters — what ? " " No, neither. They have a tea-caddy which they call a chapel, in which nine persons, I think, meet to discuss the faults of their neighbours, and call themselves ' Little Elijahs,' because that prophet was, I believe, a reformer. I had a Baptist landlady once," said Tyrawley, pensively, " but she was a decent woman, though I didn't treat her well ; and I lived eight months with Ranters, who were really awfully good folks. The husband used to talk to me quite paternally about my sins, and the wife made me puddings which she could ill afford, having five olive branches, because, she said, I looked as if I didn't get enough to eat." "Did you?" said the doctor. "Excuse my curiosity, it's professional." " Well, perhaps I didn't ; fellows like me alternately fast and feast.