Nicol Thain, Materialist. By the author of 'The Life of Thomas Wanless, Peasant,' etc

Front matter

MATERIALIST BY THE AUTHOR OF ' THE LIFE OF THOMAS WANLESS, PEASANT ETC. LONDON WILSONS & MILNE 29 PATERNOSTER ROW 1894 All rights reserved CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE LIKING WHICH WAS NOT LOVE ... I II. A TUTOR WHO TAUGHT NOT 10 III. THE GERMAN GOVERNESS 1 8 IV. WORSE THAN THE POISON OF ASPS . . . 28 V. A RANTER AND A FOOL 45 VI. A WAYFARER ON THE 'BROAD ROAD' . . . 52 VII. AUNT JANET'S RESOLUTION . . . .68 VIII. A QUESTION OF GUARDIANSHIP . . . . 87 IX. FEVER IN THE HOUSE, AND DEATH . . . 105 X. THE MASTERY OF STRONG CUNNING . . . 131 XI. A SPYING MOTHER 1 62 XII. MABEL AND STEPHEN l8l XIII. CAPTAIN WARREN'S SURRENDER . . . .193 XIV. ONLY A CHEMIST'S ASSISTANT 207 XV. NICOL THAIN'S RESOLVE 214 XVI. A DEMON'S TRIUMPH 234 XVII. A MERE FOUR HUNDRED PER ANNUM . . 266 XVIII. IT LOOKED LIKE A CASE OF BLACKMAIL . . 286 XIX. BACK TO PURE AIR AND PEACE . . .304 MATERIALIST

Chapter I The Liking Which Was Not Love The

new tutor to Lord and Lady Thornbury's children began life as a waif and a pauper. His father was the son of a Morayshire farmer named Thain, somewhat more than usually well off. The farmer sent his boy to Aberdeen University, with the view of making him a Scotch parson, but he rebelled, selected medicine, and got into a bad set. Then he fell behind in his work, and had to give up all hope of passing his examinations. Failure would reveal his misconduct to his parents, stop supplies, perhaps, and force him to mend his ways. Nicol did not see the wisdom of waiting for this disgrace to E come. Instead, he set to work to raise money, and extracted, on one pretext or other, about a couple of hundred pounds from his parents and such friends as he could persuade to lend. With this he absconded to London along .with a young woman, whom he had betrayed, and who was the mother of the tutor just mentioned.

Two hundred pounds did not last long in London, and when the runaway student had spent all his money and exhausted his slender credit, he dis appeared again, leaving the woman and child to their fate. The woman sold all she possessed, and made her way back to Aberdeen with the infant, in the steerage of a coasting steamer. Once in Aberdeen she established herself as a 'dressmaker,' and, meeting no countenance from the injured parents of her paramour, lived hardly and dubiously till her boy grew towards manhood. To that boy she from first to last had been a moral blight and curse, for she was a woman wholly selfish, greedy and lust-con sumed in body and soul. Even in mere bodily nurture the boy, named Nicol after his father, and bearing also his father's surname, as the Scotch fashion is, often fared badly, THE LIKING WHICH WAS NOT LOVE 3 and therefore he grew up stunted and weakly in physique, as well as misformed in mind.

Of education he had at the age of seventeen scarcely the rudiments, and what he did know after the mere letters of the alphabet he had painfully acquired himself. Strange to say, vicious as he naturally was, and viciously as he had been reared, young Nicol had a thirst for knowledge ; in other words, the youth loved power ; greedy for mastery over men he determined to know. In quest of this potent knowledge he, devoid though he was of the remotest trace of religious feeling, conformed so far to Scotch habits as to go occasionally to church, and in the winter seasons he became a regular attendant at the meetings of a debating club attached to a place of worship in his neighbourhood. He first attracted attention there by the uncouthness of his speech, raising shouts of laughter often at his mispronunciation of words.

By trade he, at that time, was a plasterer, having been apprenticed by his mother as soon as she could find a master willing to take him. But mockery only spurred Thain on to exertions, and his fellow debaters had soon to recognize that, ignorant or not, he was B too many for most of them in an argument. This waif, in short, displayed such an amazing native acuteness and power of close logical reasoning that he in a little time fairly dominated the society, and became a leader in its debates. Notwithstanding this display of intellectual power, he might have lived and died a plasterer, but for the fact that his abilities attracted the notice of one of the few University students who were members of the society. By the friendly help of this student Thain was not only able to mend his education con siderably, but to attend one of the University classes.

The student was a favourite with one of the scientific professors, and by his influence the waif was per mitted to attend a course of lectures in the winter without payment of fees. This, and a certain assumption of pious forms, brought the ' young plasterer lad,' as he was called, under the notice of some of the religious patrons of learning, who decided to help him to become a teacher. A little money was scraped together for him, and partly to get him away from his mother, whose repute was evil, a cheap training college in London was selected, to which he was sent, in order THE LIKING WHICH WAS NOT LOVE 5 that his morals and his intellect might be improved at one and the same time. Unfortunately, Thain had no moral nature to improve. Hence he had not been long in the train ing college before he endeavoured to corrupt a girl who was a pupil in the female division thereof.

This led to his expulsion, and, after sundry vicissitudes, he became a tutor at a school in Gravesend. While following this occupation his health suddenly broke down. He burst a blood vessel in the lungs, and consumptive tendencies began to show themselves in his constitution. Enfeebled in health, Thain then drifted back to Aberdeen, and occupied himself with science and in trying to find a wife with money, living precariously and chiefly on charity the while. Failing in his endeavour to entangle a pious young girl of pro perty in his net — she rejected him because of the cold, heartless scepticism she found under his smooth surface — he ultimately married an Irish widow, several years older than himself, with three children and an income of per annum. Thain had entered upon this speculation in the belief that the widow's income was ;£8oo a year.

When he found out his mistake he considered him self cheated, and behaved accordingly. His wife was excitable, and raved over her husband's cruelties. She might just as well have dashed her head against a stone wall. The coldness, the faithlessness with which she was met, drove the poor woman to drink. It was a miserable menage in all senses. Thain, however, stuck to the woman because of her income, and even paid some attention to the education of her children when he found nothing more attractive to do. Such was the position of this man when he first attracted the notice of Lord and Lady Thornbury. For the sake of his health he had been staying with his family in the Highlands, and, while there, having a fondness for natural history — that, indeed, was his hobby if he could be said to abandon himself to any pursuit — he made observations on the habits and instincts of the animals around him.

Upon these observations he based the paper which he read at a meeting of the British Association for the Advance ment of Science, held in Dundee. Lord and Lady Thornbury attended that meeting and heard that paper. Her Ladyship there and then, to use her own phrase, ' fell quite in love ' with the pale, delicate, THE LIKING WHICH WA$ NOT LOVE 7 intellectual young man of the sad countenance, and the burning eyes, and it was in no small measure because of her own and her husband's encouragement that Thain decided to drag his wife and family to London in the succeeding spring. After he had been there some little time the Earl and his wife, or rather Lady Thornbury alone, invited him to become the tutor of their children. He accepted the offer at once, and with little or no thought for his own dependents, he forthwith became an inmate of Lord Thornbury's household, and once there he set to work to make Lady Thornbury his slave as coolly as if he had never known a tie in this world, or as if such a thing as duty or moral obligation had no existence.

This task was not very difficult as long as no attempt was made by Thain to entangle her Ladyship in anything criminal. He would not have scrupled to do that had such a course served his purpose. But it in no way did so for him to destroy the self-respect and blight for ever the moral sensibilities of Lady Thornbury. He knew that a crime of that kind could not long go unrevenged, and he loved too well the refinements with which he now found himself surrounded to run so great a risk. Therefore, expert actor as he was, Thain assumed another role, one that far more effectually captivated her Ladyship, and made her ready to go all lengths with her folly. Putting on an air of refined abstractedness of mind, he studied to appear in her eyes a man completely absorbed in the pursuit of science. His talk was all of making discoveries in natural history, of building up theories of development, of carving a name for himself among the roll of men who had added some thing tangible to the knowledge and power of the race.

The better to enact this part, Thain commenced a series of papers in further elucidation of his ideas upon the rudiments of a moral sense in animals, and through Lord Thornbury's influence one or two of these made their appearance in the pages of a semi scientific monthly magazine. This was charming. It flattered her Ladyship's vanity to think that she might be the instrument of bringing to light a new teacher of scientific truths — one who had struggled up from the very dregs of the people. For Thain, wily in this also, took no pains to hide his origin. On the contrary, he apparently gloried in it. Screening from view the blacker passages of it, he THE LIKING WHICH WAS NOT LOVE 9 constructed a romance of poverty, half fiction, half truth, and wholly false in motive, which excited the pity in no ordinary degree of the woman for whose benefit it was told. ' Poor Thain,' she would in her innocence say often to her husband, ' Is it not wonderful to see a man who has led such a life of hardship so gentle and so very refined ? ' and her husband would yawn his acquiescence, or remark that ' these Scotch fellows always do seem to come from the gutter, you know.' The consumptive appearance of the man was another circumstance in his favour.

But for the hectic flush which often suffused his cheek he would have been as pale as little Lord Thornbury himself, although with a less translucent paleness. He was taller than Lord Thornbury, but not much taller, narrow-chested, and slightly rounded in the shoulders. This made him seem to stoop as he walked, and, added to the pale face, the lank, black hair worn long over the ears, but thin on the top, and the clean shaven chin, gave him the appearance of a man weighed down by thought — just the kind of creature to win the heart of a woman prone to admire students and a prey to hero worship for want of a God.

Chapter II

A TUTOR WHO TAUGHT NOT A WOMAN in the common ranks of life would have been immediately ' compromised ' had she behaved with a stranger as Lady Thornbury began to do with Nicol Thain before he had been a month under her roof. But it is open to a titled person to do many things which in a mere commoner would be considered reprehensible. ' Society is,' as the late Charles Greville shrewdly observed, ' sometimes religious, but never moral.' Society was therefore amused, but in no degree shocked, when it found the Countess trotting around to gatherings of the learned, paying afternoon calls, attending drawing-room meetings for the furtherance of scientific research, or going to the theatre, always with this black-browed Scotchman at her side. True, her husband was sometimes with her also, and when he was so appeared to be content with the arrangement ; so presumably it was all right.

Still this new development of a thirst for knowledge on the part of her Ladyship was decidedly amusing in its way, and among the irreverent the opinion did now and again find expression that ' Lord T. must be an awful ass, you know, to allow that Scotch humbug so much liberty with his wife.' If he was that kind of ass, and if his wife chose to make a fool of herself in this style, it was, of course, all right, and nobody's business. Nothing like moral censure was implied or thought about, nothing beyond a pleasant, rather droll bit of scandal, good to relieve the dulness of afternoon teas and ball-room inter ludes. Lady Thornbury was, indeed, very foolish, but in strict justice to her I must declare that in my sincere belief she was guilty of nothing worse than folly, mere thoughtless, selfish folly if you will, but innocent enough in all other respects.

This Scotch adventurer had captivated her by working on her vanity, her pity, her pride of knowledge. New feelings were stirred in her which the cold, half-poisoned, wayward Lord Thornbury had never known how to evoke. She seemed now to have an object in life beyond that of casting her days away in dawdling around the centres of God-denying knowledge. With a skill which testified to his consummate knowledge of all the lower side of human nature, Nicol Thain continued to instil into her Ladyship's mind a notion that she now had a kind of life's mission bestowed upon her. She was to be the foster mother, as it were, of a new master mind in the world of natural science. Thain was going to demonstrate to mankind by proof incontestable that there could not be a God because nature, mere dead nature — as men properly described it — was all-sufficient unto her self.

He preached the gospel of universal death, and Lady Thornbury sat at his feet and believed. But because she was thus possessed, and because there was within her mind no touch of mere sensual rottenness, Lady Thornbury, without thought of scandal, openly exhibited before all who chose to look her fondness for this charlatan prophet of the ever lasting no. For some little time her husband endured his wife's ongoings with an admirable stoical calm, and then, getting bored, suggested that it was about time for them to go back to Capellan Towers and see the youngsters. All these six weeks the new tutor had never seen a pupil. They were waiting for him in the country. Her Ladyship first assented, and then changed her mind. She was not ready yet, she declared. ' There is to be a scientific reunion, you know, love, at the Hon. Miss Stubberly's next week, and I must take Mr. Thain there.' ' I don't see any must about it,' her husband answered, rather sulkily. ' But I do.

I want Mr. Thain to know ever so many of the people who will be there, and get them to take an interest in him. And, besides, he wishes very much to go himself, because he expects to meet William Grindall, the logician, you know. They met abroad and became great friends.' ' Well, let him stay and go by himself, then. Only I think it is about time he thought of attending to his duties. Where's George's education all this time ? ' ' Oh, there's no hurry for that. The Fraulein will do very well for another week or two. And really now, Fitz, you mustn't be cross. One doesn't every day get the pleasure of chaperoning a man of genius. But if you will only be a good boy and behave your self I shall be ready to go home in ten days from now.' ' Can't possibly wait so long,' grumbled his Lord ship, passing from sulks to obstinacy, and making up his mind as he spoke to take his own way for once. ' So if you don't care to come I shall go by myself.

My history is lying neglected all this time, and I can't idle about in town a day longer.' His Lordship looked cross enough to eat one, as Lady Thornbury afterwards told Thain, and took his departure even as he had said. It never seemed to strike her Ladyship that she had given her husband the least cause for anger or jealousy. The pair had jogged along together for some years in good fellowship, but without heart fusion. Each tacitly let the other gratify the whim of the hour, and if the whims were often the same it was more matter of accident than from mutual study of each other's likes and dislikes. Therefore, when Lady Thornbury found an interest in life which drew her away from her lord and master she became absorbed in it with scarcely a thought bestowed on his feelings, without considering at all where her folly might lead her.

And Thain, with the keen perception of a base, cunning nature, saw this indifference and took advantage of it. He artfully flattered her Ladyship's unsophisticated vanity, played with her love of notoriety, and puffed her up with the idea that she had now at last found a task worthy of her heart. This he did while yet never abandoning his role of the rough diamond, the man of crude, undeveloped genius, prone to social gaucheries, and now and then brusque of speech, but unwearied in his pursuit of knowledge. And Lady Thornbury trusted him completely. The restless, inordinate vanity of the man was there fore stimulated to an extraordinary, a ridiculous, pitch. Wherever he appeared in the company of Lady Thornbury he bubbled over with self-satisfaction, assumed great airs of superiority, and bored the company with yarns illustrative of the hard life he had led, the sacrifices he had made in pursuit of science, the things he had done and meant yet to do, now that the ball of fortune lay at his feet.

People of sense resented this vulgar obtrusion of charlatanism, but the multitude had little sense. The crowds who filled Lady Thornbury's drawing-rooms, or the drawing-rooms of her associates, were com posed mostly of sycophants, whose conceit was nourished by the sight and presence of a peeress, and therefore they submitted to the Scotchman's domination with a fairly good grace. Envy might gnaw their hearts, but so long as her Ladyship pleased to take this man for a pet instead of any one of themselves they were ready to humour her in the worship of her new idol, on the chance of obtaining a smile for themselves. After all, too, Thain was no fool. He might be offensive in manners and inclined to domineer, but he was also able to hold his own in a dispute, and displayed his miscellaneous scraps of lore and his keen logical acuteness so skilfully that he often seemed to tower head and shoulders above the multitude.

Beyond question, quack though he was, ill-educated, presumptuous, vain though he might be, Nicol Thain, by his keenness of intellect, his self assertion unrestrained by a spirit of modesty, his assumption of superior enlightenment, and the cool persistence of that assumption where a little special knowledge or the quickly-discerned ignorance of his auditory made him feel safe, more or less dominated the circle wherein his protectress shone. That circle could no longer limit its obsequiousness to mere lionising of the peeress. Perforce, it had to lionise her followers too. The fortnight or so which the pair spent in town after Lord Thornbury struck his flag and departed was therefore one of unalloyed enjoyment to both. Nobody was there to intercept any portion of the hero worship. But this could not go on for ever.

Lady Thornbury had not abandoned her home, had not a ghost of a thought of doing so. She loved her children still, and had no idea of neglecting either them or her husband. It was charming to be in London, to be worshipped by the learned, to witness the admiration exhibited for her new and but half-tamed lion, but the bliss could not last for ever. She had promised her husband to go home in a fortnight, and she kept that promise within a day or two. Back then to Capellan Towers the Countess and the Scotchman went ; she merrily, with a heart unracked by care, with only a sigh for the pleasant, frivolous, gadding life she had to leave behind ; he with a sombre alacrity and sense of deliverance from evil in the shape of neglected incumbrances, and a coldly-calculating anticipation of making for himself a comfortable nest in his new surroundings. C

Chapter III The German Governess

Had affairs at Lord Thornbury's country seat been exactly in the same state as when the Earl and Countess betook themselves to town for a few weeks' pleasure, the likelihood is that Nicol's confidence might not have been justified. Easy-going and feeble-willed as his Lordship was, he was not so soft nor so tolerant of annoyance as to have stood for long the dominating and home-disrupting influence of the Scotchman over the Countess. Expressions of passive disgust would have given way to active hostility and interference, and Thain might have been at least threatened with dismissal. Had he been so he would have changed his tone, bent low before his angry master, and deceived and betrayed him all the same. But it so happened that his Lordship had found a new occupation for his thoughts, and a new amuse ment, during that fortnight of solitude to which his wife's whim consigned him.

He had begun to find enjoyment and relaxation of mind in the society of his children's governess, Fraulein Thekla Brandis. This young lady had been a member of the Thorn bury household for about eighteen months. Until he, however, on this occasion returned home by himself, his Lordship had never taken much notice of her. I doubt if he could have told what her com plexion was with any certitude had he been asked the question when out of her sight, and he was assuredly ignorant of the colour of her eyes and hair. All he could have said, probably, was that the girl was fair. But he acquired a knowledge of these matters, and of several besides, about this German girl in the course of that wifeless fortnight. It all came about naturally, accidentally, as these things usually do. One evening his Lordship was strolling along the gravel drive in front of the house, smoking his after dinner cigar, and feeling undefinedly miserable.

He had scarcely spoken to anybody all day, and his mind was slowly eating in upon itself. Anger against his wife was also fast rising within him. ' I shall write Winifred a stinging letter, and order c her home,' he said to himself over and over again, and his thoughts ran half morbidly over the terms of this epistle. He had been at home only three days, and was already fit to run away again with ennui and disgust. The children, after the first day, bored him, and he had ordered them to stay with their governess and attend to their lessons. Dull the place was beyond description, so his Lordship had no resource except his books, and he was too intermittent a student to find adequate consolation and employment in them without company. In his loneliness he smoked more than usual, and perhaps ate a grain or two more arsenic than his wont, and thereby depressed his spirits to a degree which would have astonished anyone who had seen him four days before, confident, talkative, self possessed.

As he meandered that evening backwards and forwards, hither and thither, in this mood, the sound of music struck his ear. The Fraulein was singing to the children in the schoolroom and accompanying herself on the piano. It was a melancholy song, the ' Zerbrochene Ringlein,' or something of a like sort, and the doleful strains harmonised with Lord Thornbury's mood. Half unconsciously he approached the house to listen. It was a warm May evening, the last of the month, and the windows were open for almost the first time that season. The song ended as he gained the corner of the square tower at the northern end of the house, wherein the schoolroom was situated, and his Lordship was turning away disappointed when the Fraulein struck in with a livelier strain : ' Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland ? ' She sang Moritz Arndt's patriotic strain, and his Lordship paused again, turned on his heel, and went into the house.

He made his way to the schoolroom, and startled the Fraulein by coming forward with a bow to compliment her upon her singing. Thekla Brandis stopped abruptly, blushed to the roots of her hair and all down her neck, stammered some inarticulate phrase or other, and turned away from the piano. But that did not suit his Lordship at all. He begged her to go on and never mind him. She, after a little nervous hesitation, did so, and sang to him song after song, till the nurse appeared and claimed Lady Gwendoline. The child had already fallen asleep. It was nearly an hour past her bed time. At this interruption his Lordship rose, kissed his little ones, bade them good-night, and then came to the piano and warmly thanked the Fraulein for the treat she had given him. ' I hope you will give me many such,' he said, ' for I love music almost enough to be a musician myself.' Again the Fraulein blushed, and, bowing low, answered in her sweet, soft voice and pure though outlandishly accented English : — ' I shall endeavour to do my best to obey your Lordship's wishes, but, indeed, I am a very poor musician.' ' Oh, no, I don't think so at all,' protested his Lordship, and then, finding nothing more to say, he shook hands with the young woman and bade her good-night.

From that evening onward Lord Thorn bury cultivated the society of the German governess. Attracted at first by her singing, he in a day or two's time began to note and admire her appearance, and then in another day or two he came to the conclusion that she had a most superior mind. By the time his wife returned with Thain he was more than half in love with her. And in excuse for him — morality apart — it must be admitted that Thekla Brandis was an attractive girl, much too attractive to be thrown into the society of a man without will or principle. She was only twenty-three to begin with, ten years younger than his own wife, and she was handsome, well favoured, almost striking in appearance. By birth she was Rhenish. Her parents, however, were Prussians from Pomerania, and that probably accounted both for her flaxen fairness of hair and blonde complexion, and for her stature.

She was taller by a good inch than Lady Thornbury, who was five feet seven, and as well and solidly proportioned as an Amazon Oueen. In after years, if I may anticipate and speak of what I have seen or heard, Thekla Brandis became stout and heavy, but at the time she drew Lord Thornbury's eye admiringly upon her she was, although well rounded and strongly built, lithe and graceful as a willow sapling. Her features were as pleasing as her figure. Apart from a certain flatness of skull and smallness of head, she was, to outward appearance, nearly faultless in form. Her face was delicate-looking, with a certain childish neatness of feature, which was rather emphasised than otherwise by her smallish, round eyes, of a pale blue colour. She had a short, stout, soft, not too pronounced nose, and full luscious lips, whose very roundness and fulness of outline may be said to have obscured what selfishness lay behind them.

That smallness of head, in a word, was the only point about this young foreigner likely to catch the eye of a stranger. It did not seem to fit her body. Everything else was proportioned, but the head, as it were, pulled the observer up and made him think a mistake had been committed somewhere. That a tall, graceful, well-filled figure should be finished off by such a small, flat, bullet-like head struck most people at first sight as an anomaly. It did not, however, strike Lord Thornbury so, and his enjoyment of the society of his children's governess smoothed the way for Thain's triumph, in a manner which that gentleman could not have im proved upon had he been asked to arrange it. Lady Thornbury herself at once noticed the altered attitude of her husband towards the Fraulein, and was at first vexed by it.

Had she been less absorbed by her admiration for Nicol Thain, the discovery would probably have cured her of her folly. She would have had a storm with her husband, and then the pair would most likely have made peace upon the understanding that both objectionable persons should be dismissed. Unfortunately, she had been already bitten too deeply for that. Nothing was further from Lady Thornbury's intentions than to part with the ' wonderful Scotchman.' Through his success she was to be glorified in the eyes of the scientific world. Thain was quick to see the advantage which Lord Thornbury's whim gave him, and his faculties were immediately bent to the task of turning all these cross-purposes to his own profit. He made himself agreeable to the Fraulein in order to be master of the Earl, and he smoothed away Lady Thornbury's rising feelings of anger and jealousy, first by devoting him self more than ever to poisoning her mind by cunning adulation, and then by insisting that no harm could come of his Lordship's fancy. ' It is a mere passing whim, Winifred,' he said to her when they were alone one day, she grumbling Before they left London they had agreed to call each other by their Christian names. ' Your best course is to take no notice of it at all.