The money market

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The Engagement 9

II. Percy 2£

CHAPTER II. Percy*

PERCY Gerard liad the rare distinction of being considered, for quite six weeks of that Iyondon season, one of the legitimate subjects of conversation. He even ousted the weather from its immemorial position of premier topic, although the arctic character of June that year was really remarkable. How much the distinction is worth, there may be two opinions ; of the rarity of it there can be but one, for six weeks is an immense time, since each season is a year, and, at the pace Tondon goes, each year a lifetime. To those who knew his history — and there were few who did not — he appeared to be a really picturesque figure, and when an eminently dull and ugly age labels a figure picturesque, there can be no doubt that such a one is certainly not dull and ugly. To take the lowest view of him, he was assuredly more intelligent than the greater part of his world, and much more good-looking. His intelligence was shown in many ways : in the first place, though he had known that there would never be the slightest need for him, from a monetary point of view, to stir a finger or think a thought, he had worked hard enough to get an appointment in the Foreign Office ; and in

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the second, he was well aware that, though to be very rich is quite sufficient passport to enable any one to make his way, not only unhindered but also welcome, into the most charmed of circles, there is another standard possible, and that a very rich man may still be exceedingly incomplete in every other way. He realised, also, that, though a lazy selfsufficiency is widely considered to be the sufficient social equipment for a rich man, the same quality is in itself a poisonous thing ; and he was modest, not from any sense of the value of the commodity, but from native propensity. For a rich and handsome young man to be modest he found to be considered in the minds of certain people a pose, but he did not trouble himself much about what conclusions such minds might choose to draw. Further, he had developed in him a very strong sense of drama ; he could not help formulating to himself how other people struck him, and, as a corollary to this, how he struck himself. He was thus studiously critical of his own behaviour.

His connections and history were certainly deserving of a passing consideration. His grandfather, from whom he inherited his great wealth, had been in business. From this business he retired early with a small fortune, but when he died he was found to be enormously wealthy. The will was proved, but no more, as far as was known, was forthcoming about the manner in which he obtained his wealth. He had lived a quiet town-life till he

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was sixty years old, when he had suddenly bought the country house of the Marquis of Abbotsworthy, an enormous eighteenth century building of red brick, added to a castellated barrack of the sixteenth century, with acres of greenhouse, a huge estate, and a ghost. Here he had moved with his son and daughter-in-law and Percy, who was then a baby ; and here he spent his remaining years, never again setting foot in London. The last nine years of his life, indeed, he devoted to two pursuits. From the first of April every year till the last day of September, he spent his whole time on the river Itchen fishing for trout ; and on the 1st of October he began to play picquet, and played it till the last day of March. He never had his house empty, and during the winter months it was always filled with picquet players, during the summer with fishermen. Percy’s father had died a year or two only after his son’s birth, and his wife, Lady Alicia, had survived him not more than three years. Old Mr. Gerard finally had died when Percy was only ten, and since his death, now fourteen years ago, the estate had been managed for the boy by his guardians. The house itself had been let for ten years to some Americans, who had renewed the lease for another five. It would thus fall vacant again the year Percy attained his majority, and their application for the renewal of it he had, owing to his approaching marriage, decided to refuse.

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Of his mother Percy only retained a very faint reminiscence ; his father he did not remember at all, but he had some distant recollection of his red dress-jacket. He had been killed in some punitive expedition in Africa, in rescuing a wounded comrade under fire, and had he lived he would have received the Victoria Cross. With the name of his mother, who died very suddenly when he was only five, he associated a hitherto vague vision of a dark, beautiful woman, but now more vivid to him since he had known Lady Sybil, who was her second-cousin. Indeed, it was strange how that dim figure had started into distinctness ; he even began to recollect little tricks of manner peculiar to her, and shared by his fiancee . She had the same habit of looking over the heads of people, the same exquisite freshness of face, the same slow and graceful movements. How extraordinary such coincidences were ! In the face of his future wife his mother lived again, and he had his childlike adoration for her still burning.

Lord Stoakley, who was a man of great sense, the natural outcome of a life-time of middle age, had brought up the boy with great simplicity. He had been sent to Winchester, and after Winchester he had passed a year and a half abroad, learning French and German. At twenty-one he had got a nomination for the Foreign Office examination, and had entered it as a junior clerk. From that time he had lived ten months of the year in London,

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spending liis leave in Scotland or down _n the country. Till lie was twenty-three he had been kept in ignorance of how enormous was the fortune of which he would, in two years, become master, and when it was made known to him his manner of receiving it was absolutely unaffected and thoroughly characteristic.

“What a bore!” he said. “It is too much for one.’ ’

Lord Stoakley, who had communicated the news to him, was almost playful.

“You can always ask some one to share it with you,” he said, “and thus there will be others as well.”

Percy sighed.

“I shall have to marry,” he said. “What a responsibility ! ” and his handsome boyish face clouded a moment, and then cleared. “But perhaps no one will marry me,” he added hopefully.

Lord Stoakley expressed neither support of nor dissent from this view, and the boy went on :

“ How did my grandfather make such a fortune ? ” he asked. “Was his father very wealthy? ”

“No, Percy,” said Lord Stoakley; “he made his fortune, in the main, himself. How, I am not at liberty to tell you. I cannot even tell you how large, exactly, your fortune will be ; but you will be one of the richest men in England. But on your twenty-fifth birthday, the day on which, as he arranged, you come into your property, I shall give

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you certain instructions and a sealed letter from him, which, perhaps, will tell you the history of his fortune. Till then you are to remain in ignorance. ”

“Why, it is like a play,” cried the lad. “A sealed letter, on the day one comes of age ! How exciting!” And he laughed.

Certainly Fortune, who often showers her favours so blindly and indiscriminately and with so glaring a want of taste, seemed here to have chosen a suitable recipient. Percy was essentially simple-minded, as it is right for rich men to be ; he was built of kindness, and his life was stainless. But he had also in him an ingredient which Nature should never forget to put in, when she is compounding the substance of one who will be a millionaire, — namely, an extraordinary delight in beautiful things, and a most accurate perception of what is beautiful and what is not. Editions of books which were remarkable only for their rarity did not appeal to him at all ; but he coveted with all the ardour of a bibliomaniac a beautiful edition of a book he loved. He detested artificiality, and the fashion of the day meant nothing to him. Beautiful things were desirable only for their beauty, and in no way because they were either rare or ancient; and because people chose to load their rooms with examples of Dresden china, only remarkable for the difficulty which had been overcome in the representation of lace in porcelain, he

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saw no reason for making his own rooms unlivablein. The consequence of this gospel of aesthetics was that they were a strange jumble of admirable objects. A few of the pictures from Abbotswortliy he had moved up to L,ondon, and a dreamy child’s face of Greuze looked at him from over his writing-table, and a Corot hung over the chimney-piece, on which stood a painted terra-cotta from Tanagra, and two pieces of old Satsuma ware. His theory was that all beautiful things are of one family, and each sets off the other, just as the beauty of a blonde is seen best when it is near the beauty of a brunette, and that of £Jie brunette when near the blonde. Certainly, so he thought, Corot, though a painter of the North, was closely allied in genius to the potter who had fashioned that exquisite clay sketch which stood just below the twilight scene. In both there was the same unerring perception of when to stop, the same entire absence of irritating detail ; above all, the same power of arresting and expressing a moment. One knew, looking at the Corot, that the next instant another layer of dusk would have fallen over the sky, the red cap of the peasant woman would have been black, a star more conjectured than actually seen would have become luminous. So, too, with the Greek figurine ; for one moment only the slim graceful girl stood like that, one hand wrapped in her shawl, the other just raising to her face her palmate fan ; the next she would have sat down on the rock behind her, and have Degun fanning herself. Masters whose paintings were chiefly remarkable for their line and composition he was content to have in photograph ; but he would not have exchanged his one little water-color Turner for the first proofs of all the engravings of the artist, nor again would he have taken a picture of Rembrandt in exchange for his three Rembrandt etchings. To the point of his finger-tips the lad was an artist — not creative, but critical. His moral and physical life was similarly directed by the critical faculty. Without in any way being a poseur , he had the habit of regarding as a spectator his own life, and his taste was fastidious. Immorality, to take it on the lowest grounds, seemed to him an ugliness, and he never sought for nasty arguments to justify nasty things. Uprightness and straightforward dealing were natural to him, and he took immense and simple pleasure in simple things. He was never bored, because he could turn from one pursuit to another without any diminution of zest. Finally, he liked his fellow-men, and the word in the dictionary least applicable to him was prig.

This happy fathom of humanity was seated at breakfast on the morning after the opera with a school-friend, Ernest Fellowes, who was staying with him. In spite of the remarkable dissimilarity between the two, they had a cordial affection for each other, and utterly disagreed on every subject under the sun.

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“It’s easy enough for you to smile at life,” Fellowes was saying, “ in fact it would be gross ingratitude of you to do otherwise; indeed, I don’t see how you could do otherwise. But we are not all millionaires with excellent digestions, engaged to professional beauties ; and it would be the merest affectation if I pretended to find such pleasure in life as you do without any affectation at all.”

“Oh, that’s rot!” said Percy, genially. “You find in life exactly what you choose to find in it ; it all depends on how you look at things. If I woke up and found myself a bootblack, I should require a few days for readjustment, but at the end I should spit on my brushes with entire cheerfulness. It would be more difficult to remain cheerful if one had a bad digestion, but no doubt one would find some way of doing it.”

4 ‘ And how if you found yourself what I am ? ’ ’ said the other; “if you, for some inexplicable reason, believed yourself to be less incapable of writing novels than of any other pursuit, and if the public viewed your masterpieces with distressing composure? ”

“ My dear fellow, what does the public matter to an artist? If there is one thing in the world sweeter than to have your merit recognized, it is to have your merit unrecognized. Think of Corot, think of Millet, of— of— of any great artist !”

“I would sooner not die in a garret,” said Fellowes decidedly, “ though perhaps it is a matter of

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taste. But, though I don’t suppose I shall do that, what can be more ignoble than to do as I do? To believe myself capable — for I do so believe, worse luck — of writing something which may be worth reading, and to have to keep the pot boiling by writing critical notices of books I haven’t read, and grind out so much work a week, as if I was a convict who had to mount so many steps of the treadmill every hour.”

“ Of course if you regard your work in that sort of way, no wonder you lose all self-respect. ’ ’

“ My dear fellow,” said Ernest, “ it is a rank impossibility to be a critic for a penny paper and attempt a high line. Editors don’t want high lines.”

Percy looked at him rather shyly.

“Ernest, why are you so absurd?” he said. “Why can’t you put your twopenny pride in your pocket, give up that sort of work, and do as I have so often asked you, and ”

“ Sponge upon you ? ”

“That is an offensive way of putting it. You are offensive this morning, you know. Oh, don’t apologize.”

“I wasn’t going to,” remarked Eellowes, with a smile that he could not suppress; “nothing was further from my thoughts.”

“I knew you weren’t,” said Percy. “I said it to excuse the absence of the apology. I really cannot understand making such a fuss about a few pounds. You, unfortunately, have too little ; I, in

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this instance, fortunately, have too much. Nature demands a readjustment. You are proud, obstinate, ungenerous, and vain.”

“Why vain? ”

“ Because you prefer to pose as a martyr than to pocket your pride. A lot you care about your art ! ”

“ More than the public does.’*

Percy raised his eyes in despair.

“Ernest, you are either a cynic,” he said, “or you have the lowest view of your work that I ever heard of, if you expect the public to care as much for your work as you do yourself. I don’t know which would be the silliest. It is exceedingly silly to be a cynic, but perhaps the other is the more despicable. About your sponging on me, as you call it ”

“I’ll apologize for that.”

“ It is the first sign of grace I have ever observed in }'our conduct. Well, about that, it isn’t as if I was making a sacrifice.”

Ernest smiled at him.

“ Percy, you are the best fellow in the world, I believe,” he said ; “ but you don’t understand. If you were offering me something which really cost you a sacrifice, I should take it. It is taking what you don’t want that beats me.”

Percy rescued a struggling fly from the cream jug, silently and with immense care, and sat watching it brushing its head with its forelegs for a minute or so.

“Ah, that is a new point of view,” he said at

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length, “and it is rather a delicate one. Oh, you have perception at times, I don’ t deny it, ’ ’ and he laughed.

“ But it doesn’t convince you that I am right? ”

“ No, it certainly doesn’t. It is a little too subtle to be of any practical value ; but it implies a certain delicacy. Put it in your next book.”

“The devil take my next book!” said Ernest. “But there’s my reason for not accepting your offer. If you ever come to your last shilling, and I haven’t got a penny, I’ll take sixpence.”

“All right, that is a bargain. In the meantime ”

“ In the meantime I shall take one of your cigarettes,” said Ernest, leaving the table and opening a silver cigarette box. “ Hullo, it’s the last ! ”

“According to your own showing, then, you are bound to take it,” said Percy, “because I want it ; but I hope you won’t.”

Ernest had taken up a knife from the table.

“ I shall cut it in half,” he said, “ and I shall take one half and you shall take the other. Thus we shall be consistent. In the meantime you shall send for some more.”

Percy picked up a torn taggy section.

“You’ve taken the biggest half,” he said, reproachfully. “That does not show the delicacy I had credited you with.”

Percy lunched with the Stoakleys, and after lunch he and Blanche went to Eord’s, where they met

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Lady Sybil and her mother, and watched the cricket for an hour or two. Blanche returned early, as her mother had a dinner-party that night, and people had to be looked out in Debrett. Lady Stoakley was not yet in, and Blanche had tea by herself, looking unusually grave. After tea she got out the list of guests, and sat down to wrestle with precedence, but her eye kept wandering from the paper, and for half an hour she contemplated an irregular oval which she had drawn on a half-sheet of paper, which was meant to represent the dining-room table, without putting any names round it. Younger sons of earls and eldest sons of viscounts seemed to her hardly distinguishable. At last she got up and walked to the window. The sun was swung westward, and she drew up the Venetian blind which had kept the room cool during the day. Outside, St. James’s park was enveloped in a blue haze of heat, and the dusky London grass was dotted with groups of people. The traffic of Pall Mall hummed in the air like the bourdon note of some great organ, with a drowsy persistence now swelling into a crescendo, and now diminishing again, but never stopping. She saw and heard only half consciously, only half consciously she felt the cool lifting of her hair in the evening breeze. Then suddenly her eyes grew moist with tears.

“ Oh, poor Percy ! poor Percy ! ” she said aloud.

CHAPTER III* At Lord's.

Lady Sybil and her mother stopped later at Lord’s, and did not leave till half-past six, when stumps were drawn. Percy was to dine with them en famille and afterwards they were going to see La Dusd in Magda . He put them into their carriage at the gate, and as there was still plenty of time, he walked down towards Baker Street, for the sake of the exercise. He was intensely, almost riotously happy ; he had his boots infamously mishandled by a ragged Ishmaelite boy, to whom he gave sixpence, and he bought a carnation from a flower-girl without remembering that he had already a gardenia given him by Sybil in his buttonhole. That, of course, it was impossible to part with, and with a delicate gentleness he walked on with his carnation in his hand till he was out of sight of the girl, and then bestowed it on an iron railing, smiling to himself out of sheer happiness. He devoted two minutes of serious consideration to a couple of colored chalk drawings made on the pavement by an extremely prosperous-looking street craftsman with the air of an Academician, and was conscientiously able to declare that they contained no merit of any kind whatever, and no seed of any 34

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sort of promise. One represented a forest scene with an amazing number of trees, resembling amorphous ferns, reflected in a woodland pool of violent blue surrounded by black fantastic rocks; and the other a blinding snowstorm at sea, with the lines of a vessel dimly descried throwing up a sickly green rocket. So classic an example of the violation of all the canons of art in two small pictures seemed to him to be worth a shilling, which he bestowed with complete gravity.

Indeed, he had reason to be happy, for he was an accepted lover, and the world can never hold a better fate than that. How unspeakably charming Sybil had been that afternoon, and what an incredible ignorance she had shown of the elements of cricket ! Eighty runs had been scored for three wickets in the first innings when they arrived, and she asked him with the intensest curiosity “ which side was beating.” To enlighten so radical a want of knowledge, it had been necessary to begin with “ You see those three sticks there? Well, they are called stumps.” But she had not been satisfied with this elementary instruction, and before an hour was up she had fully grasped the meaning of “yorker” and “break from the off,” as well as being able to give a wrong name to a majority of the field. By a fine stroke of reasoning she had announced that a man caught by long-on was caught by “ the man at pull,” and with equal felicity she dubbed “point” the “cutter.”

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At the close of the first innings they had left the pavilion and walked with Blanche to the gate, to see her into a hansom, and had then strolled round the ground together. They met numberless people they knew, and received scores of congratulations, for their engagement had been in the morning papers that day. Percy had been universally acknowledged to be the great catch of the year, and Sybil was an acknowledged beauty. The event therefore was of some interest. Sybil received their congratulations with a sort of shy pleasure which seemed to Percy ineffably charming. Then, after they had strolled half round the ground:

“ Oh, Percy,” she had said, “how kind every one is ! They really seem to be happy that we are so happy. But take me back again to the Pavilion. I can’t see any more people now. They seem,” and she paused, — “ they seem to come between you and me.”

Later, while Percy was making his pleasant way down Baker Street, and living over again the delicious moments of that afternoon, Lady Otterbourne and Sybil, both sitting very upright in their victoria, were taken towards Bruton Street. Sybil’s face was prettily flushed, and her eyes were very bright, as if she had been playing some game of skill with well-earned success. But the corners of her beautiful bow-shaped mouth drooped a little, as if the game had tired her. Lady Otterbourne, on the other hand, showed no traces of fatigue.

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She was a tall finely-made woman, only just over forty and the years had but embellished her. She had been the second wife of the late L,ord Otterbourne, who had died some two years after his marriage, leaving her with the one child and a somewhat insufficient allowance, But she had met the world boldly, and as Sybil grew up, clever, winning and beautiful, she felt that the money she was so lavish with in order to give the girl a good chance was merely an investment sure to yield high interest. That she had money troubles all the world knew; once a considerable sum had been given her by her stepson, the present I^ord Otterbourne, to extricate her from an exceedingly tight place, and shield her from declared bankruptcy; but he had intimated on that occasion that any further application to him would be vain, and that he neither would nor could pay any more of her debts. The estate was already encumbered with heavy charges, and it could not be further drained. L,ady Otterbourne had told him with embarrassing frankness on this occasion that she knew the poverty of the estate only too well, and that she was fully aware that he had not at all approved of the father’s second marriage. That, however, had been his father’s affair, and his son could not possibly regret the step more than his second wife had done. She made her bow to him.

But Providence had not forgotten the widow and the fatherless. If in the length and breadth of

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England she had been given a free hand to choose a husband for Sybil, she would not have chosen otherwise. Percy was grandson of a duke on . his mother's side; and if no one knew much about the parentage of his grandfather, so much the better. Best of all, he was, for all practical purposes (and Eady Otterbourne was very practical), a man of unlimited means. Abbotsworthy House was fit for a royal prince, and Sybil would be mistress of it. Percy himself was admirably well-bred, he was good-looking, and, morally, not even the best of his friends — for he had no enemies — could find a word to say against him. He was not, it is true, of quite the type of young man which Lady Otterbourne found amusing; he was too fond of simple pleasures, and scandalous stories did not interest him in the smallest degree. Indeed the only time Lady Otterbourne had seen him forget his manners was when she told him a very ben trovato story about a mutual friend. He had turned on her with a scowl :

“ I don’t want to hear that sort of thing,” he had said. u If it is true, it should never have been repeated ; and if it is untrue, it is scandalous.”

But his admirable character and his simple pleasures had much more to recommend them than the reverse would have had ; and he was very safe, which was delightful for Sybil. But certainly his explanations about cricket had been a trifle wearisome and no wonder Sybil looked a little tired.

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' * Percy was really rather long-winded about that tiresome game,” she remarked to her daughter. “ What pleasure there can be in seeing a man hit a ball with a piece of wood I cannot conjecture. The English classical games are absolutely unintelligible.”

“ Oh, I thought it was thrilling ! ” said Sybil.

Her mother looked at her dryly.

“You behaved very well, dear,” she said, and added to herself, “ But such behaviour is unnecessary now.”

“ Behaved well? What do you mean, mother?”

“Dear child,” said Eady Otterbourne, “it was very nice and wise of you to seem so interested. It is admirable for a man if he is able to be pleased and interested in that sort of game. I envy the people with simple athletic tastes, but I can’t understand them.”

A look — it would be exaggeration to call it foxy — came into Sybil’s face. Her nose seemed to get just a shade sharper, and her lips compressed.

“ Percy is so much interested in so many things,” she said.

“ Yes, dear, and it will be your business to keep him interested in them. Of course he will resign his clerkship in the Foreign Office, for that keeps him ten months of the year in Eondon, but otherwise the more things he takes an interest in the better. I hope, for instance, he will go into Parliament,— that is always considered respectable.

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Again, lie might take to farming. He lias a great deal of practical ability, and endless interest in details. I believe one needn’t lose very much money if one manages a farm carefully. L,uckily, Percy needn’t consider that,” and she sighed amorously.

“ How did his grandfather make his fortune ? ’ ’ asked Sybil.

“I don’t know. I asked Percy about it, but even he didn’t know. He told me something about a sealed letter to him from his grandfather, which would be placed in his hands in September, on his twenty-fifth birth-day. That will be just before your wedding, Sybil. However, his grandfather did make a fortune : there is no doubt about that, and really that is all that matters.”

“It is interesting,” said Sybil. “I wonder if Percy will tell me when he knows ? ”

“ I shouldn’t ask, if I were you. It cannot possibly matter, and if it was made in some — well, some rather shady way, it is just as well that it should not be known. Some people are so absurd and old-fashioned.”