Chapter 16. The New Life

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_ CHAPTER XVI. THE NEW LIFE

"You haven't mentioned it to the young man himself?" asked Lady Evenswood.

"Certainly not. I've only seen him once, and then he didn't talk of his own affairs. He takes the thing very well. He's lost his position and he's the hero of the newspapers, and he bears both afflictions quite coolly. A lad of good balance, I think."

"Is he agreeable?"

"Hum, I'm not sure of that. No excess of modesty, I fancy."

"I suppose you mean he's not shy? All young men are conceited. I think I should like you to bring him to see me."

For forty years such an intimation from Lady Evenswood had enjoyed the rank of a command; Lord Southend received it with proper obedience.

"The solution I spoke of has occurred to some of us," he went on. "He's poor now, but with that he could make a marriage. The case is very exceptional----"

"So is what you propose, George."

"Oh, there are precedents. It was done in the Bearsdale case."

"There was a doubt there." Lady Evenswood knew all about the Bearsdale case; though it was ancient history to Southend, she had danced with both the parties to it.

"The House was against the marriage unanimously." But he did not deny the doubt.

"Well, what are you going to do?" she asked.

"It would be necessary to approach Disney." Southend spoke with some appearance of timidity. Mr Disney was Prime Minister. "And the truth is, none of us seemed to like the job. So John Fullcombe suggested you."

"What brave men you are!" Her face wrinkled humorously.

"Well, he might bite us, and he couldn't bite you--not so hard anyhow."

"And you want me to ask for a higher rank! That wasn't done in the Bearsdale case, nor in any other that I ever heard of."

"We shouldn't press that. A barony would do. But if Disney thought that under the very exceptional circumstances a viscounty----"

"I don't see why you want it," she persisted. The slight embarrassment in Southend's manner stirred the old lady's curiosity. "It's rather odd to reward a man for his mother's----. There, I don't say a word about Addie. I took her to her first ball, poor girl."

"Disney used to know her as a girl."

"If you're relying on Robert Disney's romantic memories----" But she stopped, adding after a pause, "Well, one never knows. But again, why a viscounty?"

Driven into a corner, but evidently rather ashamed of himself, Southend explained.

"The viscounty would be more convenient if a match came about between him and the girl."

"What, the new Lady Tristram? Well, George, romance has taken possession of you to-day!"

"Not at all," he protested indignantly. "It's the obviously sensible way out."

"Then they can do it without a viscounty."

"Oh, no, not without something. There's the past, you see."

"And a sponge is wanted? And the bigger the sponge the better? And I'm to get my nose bitten off by asking Robert Disney for it? And if by a miracle he said yes, for all I know somebody else might say no!"

This dark reference to the Highest Quarters caused Southend to nod thoughtfully: they discussed the probable attitude--a theme too exalted to be more than mentioned here. "Anyhow the first thing is to sound Disney," continued Southend.

"I'll think about it after I've seen the young man," Lady Evenswood promised. "Have you any reason to suppose he likes his cousin?"

"None at all--except, of course, the way he's cleared out for her."

"Yielding gracefully to necessity, I suppose?"

"Really, I doubt the necessity; and, anyhow, the gracefulness needs some explanation in a case like this. Still I always fancied he was going to marry another girl, a daughter of a friend of mine--Iver--you know who I mean?"

"Oh, yes. Bring Harry Tristram to see me," said she. "Good-by, George. You're looking very well."

"And you're looking very young."

"Oh, I finished getting old before you were forty."

A thought struck Southend. "You might suggest the viscounty as contingent on the marriage."

"I shan't suggest anything till I've seen the boy--and I won't promise to then."

Later in the afternoon Southend dropped in at the Imperium, where to his surprise and pleasure he found Iver in the smoking-room. Asked how he came to be in town, Iver explained:

"I really ran away from the cackling down at Blentmouth. All our old ladies are talking fifteen to the dozen about Harry Tristram, and Lady Tristram, and me, and my family, and--well, I dare say you're in it by now, Southend! There's an old cat named Swinkerton, who is positively beyond human endurance; she waylays me in the street. And Mrs Trumbler, the vicar's wife, comes and talks about Providence to my poor wife every day. So I fled."

"Leaving your wife behind, I suppose?"

"Oh, she doesn't mind Mrs Trumbler. But I do."

"Well, there's a good deal of cackling up here too. But tell me about the new girl." Lord Southend did not appear to consider his own question "cackling" or as tending to produce the same.

"I've only seen her once. She's in absolute seclusion and lets nobody in except Mina Zabriska--a funny little foreign woman--You don't know her."

"I know about her, I saw it in the paper. She had something to do with it?"

"Yes." Iver passed away from that side of the subject immediately. "And she's struck up a friendship with Cecily Gainsborough--Lady Tristram, I ought to say. I had a few words with the father. The poor old chap doesn't know whether he's on his head or his heels; but as they're of about equal value, I should imagine, for thinking purposes, it doesn't much matter. Ah, here's Neeld. He came up with me."

The advent of Neeld produced more discussion. Yet Southend said nothing of the matter which he had brought to Lady Evenswood's attention. Discretion was necessary there. Besides he wished to know how the land lay as to Janie Iver. On that subject his friend preserved silence.

"And the whole thing was actually in old Joe's diary!" exclaimed Southend.

Neeld, always annoyed at the "Joe," admitted that the main facts had been recorded in Mr Cholderton's Journal, and that he himself had known them when nobody else in England did--save, of course, the conspirators themselves.

"And you kept it dark? I didn't know you were as deep as that, Neeld." He looked at the old gentleman with great amazement.

"Neeld was in an exceedingly difficult position," said Iver. "I've come to see that." He paused, looking at Southend with an amused air. "You introduced us to one another," he reminded him with a smile.

"Bless my soul, so I did! I'd forgotten. Well, it seems my fate too to be mixed up in the affair." Just at present, however, he was assisting fate rather actively.

"It's everybody's. The Blent's on fire from Mingham to the sea."

"I've seen Harry Tristram."

"Ah, how is he?" asked Neeld.

"Never saw a young man more composed in all my life. And he couldn't be better satisfied with himself if he'd turned out to be a duke."

"We know Harry's airs," Iver said, smiling indulgently. "But there's stuff in him." A note of regret came into his voice. "He treated me very badly--I know Neeld won't admit it, but he did. Still I like him and I'd help him if I could."

"Well, he atoned for anything wrong by owning up in the end," remarked Southend.

"That wasn't for my sake or for---- Well, it had nothing to do with us. As far as we were concerned he'd be at Blent to-day. It was Cecily Gainsborough who did it."

"Yes. I wonder----"

Iver rose decisively. "Look here, Southend, if you're going to do exactly what all my friends and neighbors, beginning with Miss Swinkerton, are doing, I shall go and write letters." With a nod he walked into the next room, leaving Neeld alone with his inquisitive friend. Southend lost no time.

"What's happened about Janie Iver? There was some talk----"

"It's all over," whispered Neeld with needless caution. "He released her, and she accepted the release."

"What, on the ground that----?"

"Really I don't know any more. But it's finally over; you may depend upon that."

Southend lit a cigar with a satisfied air. On the whole he was glad to hear the news.

"Staying much longer in town?" he asked.

"No, I'm going down to Iver's again in August."

"You want to see the end of it? Come, I know that's it!" He laughed as he walked away.

Meanwhile Harry Tristram, unconscious of the efforts which were being made to arrange his future, and paying as little attention as he could to the buzz of gossip about his past, had settled down in quiet rooms and was looking at the world from a new point of view. He was in seclusion like his cousin; the mourning they shared for Addie Tristram was sufficient excuse; and he found his chief pleasure in wandering about the streets. The season was not over yet, and he liked to go out about eight in the evening and watch the great city starting forth to enjoy itself. Then he could feel its life in all the rush and the gayety of it. Somehow now he seemed more part of it and more at home in it than when he used to run up for a few days from his country home. Then Blent had been the centre of his life, and in town he was but a stranger and a sojourner. Blent was gone; and London is home to homeless men. There was a suggestion for him in the air of it, an impulse that was gradually but strongly urging him to action, telling him that he must begin to do. For the moment he was notorious, but the talk and the staring would be over soon--the sooner the better, he added most sincerely. Then he must do something if he wished still to be, or ever again to be, anybody. Otherwise he could expect no more than to be pointed out now and then to the curious as the man who had once been Tristram of Blent and had ceased to be such in a puzzling manner.

As he looked back, he seemed to himself to have lived hitherto on the banks of the river of life as well as of the river Blent; there had been no need of swimming. But he was in the current now; he must swim or sink. This idea took shape as he watched the carriages, the lines of scampering hansoms, the crowds waiting at theatre doors. Every man and every vehicle, every dandy and every urchin, represented some effort, if it were only at one end of the scale to be magnificent, at the other not to be hungry. No such notions had been fostered by days spent on the banks of the Blent. "What shall I do? What shall I do?" The question hummed in his brain as he walked about. There were such infinite varieties of things to do, such a multitude of people doing them. To some men this reflection brings despair or bewilderment; to Harry (as indeed Lord Southend would have expected from his observation of him) it was a titillating evidence of great opportunities, stirring his mind to a busy consideration of chances. Thus then it seemed as though Blent might fall into the background, his loved Blent. Perhaps his not thinking of it had begun in wilfulness, or even in fear; but he found the rule he had made far easier to keep than he had ever expected. There had been a sort of release for his mind; he had not foreseen this as a possible result of his great sacrifice. He even felt rather richer; which seemed a strange paradox, till he reflected that the owners of Blent had seldom been able to lay hands readily on a fluid sum of fifteen thousand pounds, subject to no claims for houses to be repaired, buildings to be maintained, cottages to be built, wages to be paid, and the dozen other ways in which money disperses itself over the surface of a landed estate. He had fifteen thousand pounds in form as good as cash. He was living more or less as he had once meant to live in this one particular; he was living with a respectable if not a big check by him, ready for any emergency which might arise--an emergency not now of a danger to be warded off, but of an opportunity to be seized.

These new thoughts suited well with the visit which he paid to Lady Evenswood and gained fresh strength from it. His pride and independence had made him hesitate about going. Southend, amazed yet half admiring, had been obliged to plead, reminding him that it was not merely a woman nor merely a woman of rank who wished to make his acquaintance, but also a very old woman who had known his mother as a child. He further offered his own company, so that the interview might assume a less formal aspect. Harry declined the company but yielded to the plea. He was announced as Mr Tristram. He had just taken steps to obtain a Royal License to bear the name. Southend had chuckled again half admiringly over that.

Although the room was in deep shadow and very still, and the old white-haired lady the image of peace, for Harry there too the current ran strong. Though not great, she had known the great; if she had not done the things, she had seen them done; her talk revealed a matter-of-course knowledge of secrets, a natural intimacy with the inaccessible. It was like Harry to show no signs of being impressed; but very shrewd eyes were upon him, and his impassivity met with amused approval since it stopped short of inattention. She broke it down at last by speaking of Addie Tristram.

"The most fascinating creature in the world," she said. "I knew her as a little girl. I knew her up to the time of your birth almost. After that she hardly left Blent, did she? At least she never came to London. You travelled, I know."

"Were you ever at Blent?" he asked.

"No, Mr Tristram."

He frowned for a moment; it was odd not to be able to ask people there, just too as he was awaking to the number of people there were in the world worth asking.

"There never was anybody in the world like her, and there never will be," Lady Evenswood went on.

"I used to think that; but I was wrong." The smile that Mina Zabriska knew came on his face.

"You were wrong? Who's like her then?"

"Her successor. My cousin Cecily's very like her."

Lady Evenswood was more struck by the way he spoke than by the meaning of what he said. She wanted to say "Bravo," and to pat him on the back; he had avoided so entirely any hesitation or affectation in naming his cousin--Addie Tristram's successor who had superseded him.

"She talks and moves and sits and looks at you in the same way. I was amazed to see it." He had said not a word of this to anybody since he left Blent. Lady Evenswood, studying him very curiously, began to make conjectures about the history of the affair, also about what lay behind her visitor's composed face; there was a hint of things suppressed in his voice. But he had the bridle on himself again in a moment. "Very curious these likenesses are," he ended with a shrug.

She decided that he was remarkable, for a boy of his age, bred in the country, astonishing. She had heard her father describe Pitt at twenty-one and Byron at eighteen. Without making absurd comparisons, there was, all the same, something of that precocity of manhood here, something also of the arrogance that the great men had exhibited. She was very glad that she had sent for him.

"I don't want to be impertinent," she said (she had not meant to make even this much apology), "but perhaps an old woman may tell you that she is very sorry for--for this turn in your fortunes, Mr Tristram."

"You're very kind. It was all my own doing, you know. Nobody could have touched me."

"But that would have meant----?" she exclaimed, startled into candor.

"Oh, yes, I know. Still--but since things have turned out differently, I needn't trouble you with that."

She saw the truth, seeming to learn it from the set of his jaw. She enjoyed a man who was not afraid to defy things, and she had been heard to lament that everybody had a conscience nowadays--nay, insisted on bringing it even into politics. She wanted to hear more--much more now--about his surrender, and recognized as a new tribute to Harry the fact that she could not question him. Immediately she conceived the idea of inviting him to dinner to meet Mr Disney; but of course that must wait for a little while.

"Everything must seem rather strange to you?" she suggested.

"Yes, very," he answered thoughtfully. "I'm beginning to think that some day I shall look back on my boyhood with downright incredulity. I shan't seem to have been that boy in the least."

"What are you going to do in the meantime, to procure that feeling?" She was getting to the point she wished to arrive at, but very cautiously.

"I don't know yet. It's hard to choose."

"You certainly won't want for friends."

"Yes, that's pleasant, of course." He seemed to hint, however, that he did not regard it as very useful.

"Oh, and serviceable too," she corrected him, with a nod of wise experience. "Jobs are frowned at now, but many great men have started by means of them. Robert Disney himself came in for a pocket-borough."

"Well, I really don't know," he repeated thoughtfully, but with no sign of anxiety or fretting. "There's lots of time, Lady Evenswood."

"Not for me," she said with all her graciousness.

He smiled again, this time cordially, as he rose to take leave. But she detained him.

"You're on friendly terms with your cousin, I suppose?"

"Certainly, if we meet. Of course I haven't seen her since I left Blent. She's there, you know."

"Have you written to her?"

"No. I think it's best not to ask her to think of me just now."

She looked at him a moment, seeming to consider.

"Perhaps," she said at last. "But don't over-do that. Don't be cruel."

"Cruel?" There was strong surprise in his voice and on his face.

"Yes, cruel. Have you ever troubled to think what she may be feeling?"

"I don't know that I ever have," Harry admitted slowly. "At first sight it looks as if I were the person who might be supposed to be feeling."

"At first sight, yes. Is that always to be enough for you, Mr Tristram? If so, I shan't regret so much that I haven't--lots of time."

He stood silent before her for several seconds.

"Yes, I see. Perhaps. I daresay I can find out something about it. After all, I've given some evidence of consideration for her."

"That makes it worse if you give none now. Good-by."

"It's less than a fortnight since I first met her. She won't miss me much, Lady Evenswood."

"Time's everything, isn't it? Oh, you're not stupid! Think it over, Mr Tristram. Now good-by. And don't conclude I shan't think about you because it's only an hour since we met. We women are curious. When you've nothing better to do it'll pay you to study us."

As Harry walked down from her house in Green Street, his thoughts were divided between the new life and that old one which she had raised again before his eyes by her reference to Cecily. The balance was turned in favor of Blent by the sight of a man who was associated in his mind with it--Sloyd, the house-agent who had let Merrion Lodge to Mina Zabriska. Sloyd was as smart as usual, but he was walking along in a dejected way, and his hat was unfashionably far back on his head. He started when he saw Harry approaching him.

"Why, it's----" he began, and stopped in evident hesitation.

"Mr Tristram," said Harry. "Glad to meet you, Mr Sloyd, though you won't have any more rent to hand over to me."

Sloyd began to murmur some rather flowery condolences.

Harry cut him short in a peremptory but good-natured fashion.

"How's business with you?" he asked.

"Might be worse, Mr Tristram. I don't complain. We're a young firm, and we don't command the opportunities that others do." He laughed as he added, "You couldn't recommend me to a gentleman with ten thousand pounds to spare, could you, Mr Tristram?"

"I know just the man. What's it for?"

"No, no. Principals only," said Sloyd with a shake of his head.

"How does one become a principal then? I'll walk your way a bit." Harry lit a cigar; Sloyd became more erect and amended the position of his hat; he hoped that a good many people would recognize Harry. Yet social pride did not interfere with business wariness.

"Are you in earnest, Mr Tristram? It's a safe thing."

"Oh, no, it isn't, or you wouldn't be hunting for ten thousand on the pavement of Berkeley Square."

"I'll trust you," Sloyd declared. Harry nodded thanks, inwardly amused at the obvious effort which attended the concession. "If you don't come in, you'll not give it away?" Again Harry nodded. "It's a big chance, but we haven't got the money to take it, and unless we can take it we shall have to sell our rights. It's an option on land. I secured it, but it's out in a week. Before then we must table twenty thousand. And ten cleans us out."

"What'll happen if you don't?"

"I must sell the option--rather than forfeit it, you know. I've an offer for it, but a starvation one."

"Who from?"

After a moment's scrutiny Sloyd whispered a name of immense significance in such a connection: "Iver."

"I should like to hear some more about this. It's worth something, I expect, if Iver wants it. Shall I go with you to your office?" He hailed a passing cab. "I've got the money," he said, "and I want to use it. You show me that this is a good thing, and in it goes."

An hour passed in the office of Sloyd, Sloyd, and Gurney. Harry Tristram came out whistling. He looked very pleased; his step was alert; he had found something to do, he had made a beginning--good or bad. It looked good: that was enough. He was no longer an idler or merely an onlooker. He had begun to take a hand in the game himself. He found an added, perhaps a boyish, pleasure in the fact that the affair was for the present to be a dead secret. He was against Iver too in a certain sense, and that was another spice; not from any ill-will, but because it would please him especially to show Iver that he could hold his own. It occurred to him that in case of a success he would enjoy going and telling old Lady Evenswood about it. He felt, as he said to himself, very jolly, careless and jolly, more so than he remembered feeling for many months back. Suddenly an idea struck him. Was it in whole or in part because there was no longer anything to hide, because he need no longer be on the watch? He gave this idea a good deal of rather amused consideration, and came to the conclusion that there might be something in it. He went to the theatre that night, to the pit (where he would not be known), and enjoyed himself immensely.

And Lady Evenswood had made up her mind that she would find a way of seeing Mr Disney soon, and throw out a cautious feeler. Everything would have to be done very carefully, especially if the marriage with the cousin were to be made a feature of the case. But her resolve, although not altered, was hampered by a curious feeling to which her talk with Harry had given rise. There was now not only the very grave question whether Robert Disney--to say nothing of Somebody Else--would entertain the idea. There was another, a much less obvious one--whether Harry himself would welcome it. And a third--whether she herself would welcome it for him. However, when Southend next called on her, she professed her readiness to attack or at least to reconnoitre the task from which he and John Fullcombe and the rest had shrunk.

"Only," she said, "if I were you, I should find out tolerably early--as soon as we know that there's any chance at all--what Mr Tristram himself thinks about it."

"There's only one thing he could think!" exclaimed Southend.

"Oh, very well," smiled Lady Evenswood.

A long life had taught her that only facts convince, and that they often fail. _

Read next: Chapter 17. River Scenes And Bric-A-Brac

Read previous: Chapter 15. An Inquisition Interrupted

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