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The Mischief Maker, a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
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Book 1 - Chapter 3. A Ruined Career |
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_ BOOK ONE CHAPTER III. A RUINED CAREER Sir Julien Portel stood in the middle of his bedroom, dressed in shirt and trousers only. The sofa and chairs around him were littered with portions of the brilliant uniform which he had torn from his person a few minutes before with almost feverish haste. His perplexed servant, who had only just arrived, was doing his best to restore the room to some appearance of order. "You needn't mind those wretched things for the present, Richards," his master ordered sharply. "Bring the rest of the tweed traveling suit like the trousers I have on, and then see about packing some clothes." The man ceased his task. He looked around, a little bewildered. "Do I understand that you are going out of town tonight, Sir Julien?" he asked. "I am going on to the continent by the nine o'clock train," was the curt reply. Richards was a perfectly trained servant, but the situation was too much for him. "You will excuse me, Sir Julien," he said, "but there is Lord Cardington's dinner tonight, and the reception afterwards at the Foreign Office. I have your court clothes ready." His master laughed shortly. "I am not attending the dinner or the reception, Richards. You can put those things back again and get me the traveling clothes." The man seemed a little dazed, but turned automatically towards the wardrobe. "Shall you require me to accompany you, sir?" he inquired. "Not at present," Sir Julien replied. "You will have to come on with the rest of my luggage when I have decided what to do." Richards was not more than ordinarily inquisitive, but the circumstances were certainly unusual. "Do you mean, sir, that you will not be returning to London at present?" he ventured to ask. "I shall not be returning to London for some time," Sir Julien answered sharply. "Get on with the packing as quickly as you can. Put the whiskey and soda on the table in the sitting-room, and the cigarettes. Remember, if any one comes I am not at home." "Too late, my dear fellow," a voice called out from the adjoining room. "You see, I have found my way up unannounced--a bad habit, but my profession excuses everything." The man stood on the threshold of the room opening out from the bedroom--tall, florid, untidily dressed, with clean-shaven, humorous face, ungloved hands, and a terribly shabby hat. He looked around the room and shrugged his shoulders. "What an infernal mess!" he exclaimed. "Come along out into the sitting-room, Julien. I want to talk to you." "I should like to know how the devil you got in here!" Sir Julien muttered. "I told the fellow downstairs that no one was to be allowed up." "He did try to make himself disagreeable," the newcomer replied. "However, here I am--that's enough." Sir Julien turned to his servant. "Get on with your packing, Richards," he directed, "and let me know when you have finished." Sir Julien followed his visitor into the sitting-room, closing the door behind him. His manner was not in the least cordial. "Look here, Kendricks, old fellow," he said, "I don't want to be rude, but I am not in the humor to talk to any one. I have had a rotten week of it and just about as much as I can stand. Help yourself to a whiskey and soda, say what you have to say and then go." The newcomer nodded. He helped himself to the whiskey and soda, but he seemed in no hurry to speak. On the contrary, he settled himself down in an easy-chair with the appearance of a man who had come to stay. "Julien," he remarked presently, "you are up against it--up against it rather hard. Don't trouble to interrupt me. I know pretty well all about it. I said from the first you'd have to resign. There wasn't any other way out of it." "Quite right," Julien agreed. "There wasn't. I've finished up everything to-day--resigned my office, applied for the Chiltern Hundreds, and I am going to clear out of the country to-night." "And all because you wrote a foolish letter to a woman!" Kendricks murmured, half to himself. "By the bye, there's no doubt about the letter, I suppose?" "None in the world," Julien replied. "There's nothing that the Press can do to set you right?" "Great heavens, no!" Julien declared. "No one can help me. I've no one to blame but myself. I wrote the letter--there the matter ends." "And she passed it on to that shocking little bounder of a husband of hers! What a creature! Did it ever occur to you that it was a plot?" Julien shrugged his shoulders. "It makes so little difference." "You were in Carraby's way," Kendricks continued, producing a pipe from his pocket and leisurely filling it. "There was no getting past you and you were a young man. It's a dirty business." "If you don't mind," Julien said coldly, "we won't discuss it any further. So far as I am concerned, the whole matter is at an end. I was compelled to take part in to-day's mummery. I hated it--that they all knew. I suppose it's foolish to mind such things, David," he went on bitterly, taking up a cigarette and throwing himself into a chair, "but a year ago--it was just after I came back from Berlin and you may remember it was the fancy of the people to believe that I had saved the country from war--they cheered me all the way from Whitehall to the Mansion House. To-day there was only a dull murmur of voices--a sort of doubting groan. I felt it, Kendricks. It was like Hell, that ride!" Kendricks nodded sympathetically. "I suppose you know that a version of the letter is in the evening papers?" he asked.
There was a short silence between the two men. In a sense they had been friends all their lives. Sir Julien Portel had been a successful politician, the youngest Cabinet Minister for some years. Kendricks had never aspired to be more than a clever journalist of the vigorous type. Nevertheless, they had been more than ordinarily intimate. "Have you made any plans?" Kendricks inquired presently. "Of course, you would have to resign office, but don't you think there might be a chance of living it down?" "Not a chance on earth," Julien replied. "As to what I am going to do, don't ask me. For the immediate present I am going to lose myself in Normandy or somewhere. Afterwards I think I shall move on to my old quarters in Paris. There's always a little excitement to be got out of life there." Kendricks looked at his friend through the cloud of tobacco smoke. "It's excitement of rather a dangerous order," he remarked slowly. "I shall never be likely to forget that I am an Englishman," Julien said. "Perhaps I may be able to do something to set matters right again. One can't tell. By the bye, Kendricks," he went on, "do you remember when we were at college how you hated women? How you used to try and trace half the things that went wrong in life to their influence?" The journalist nodded. He knocked the ashes from his pipe deliberately. "I was a boy in those days," he declared. "I am a man now, getting on toward middle age, and on that one subject I am as rabid as ever. I hate their meddling in men's affairs, shoving themselves into politics, always whispering in a man's ear under pretence of helping him with their sympathy. They're in evidence wherever you go--women, women, women! The place reeks with them. You can't go about your work, hour by hour or day by day, without having them on every side of you. It's like a poison, this trail of them over every piece of serious work we attempt, over every place we find our way into. They bang the typewriters in our offices, they elbow us in the streets, they smile at us from the next table at our workaday luncheon, they crowd the tubes and the cars and the cabs in the streets. Why the deuce, Julien, can't we treat them like those sage Orientals, and dump them all in one place where they belong till we've finished our work?" Julien lifted his tumbler of whiskey and soda to his lips and set it down empty. "In a way, you're right, Kendricks," he agreed. "You go too far, of course, but I do believe that women hold too big a place in our lives. I am one of the poor fools who goes to the wall to gratify the vanity of one of them." The journalist muttered a word under his breath which he would have been very sorry to have seen in the pages of his paper. Julien had moved to the open window. There had been a little break in his voice. No one knew better than Kendricks that a very brilliant career was broken. "I think you're wise to go away for a time, Julien," he decided. "Look here, it's six o'clock now. I have a taxicab waiting downstairs. Come round to my rotten little restaurant in Soho and dine with me. Your fellow can meet us at Charing-Cross with your things. You won't see a soul you know where I'm going to take you." Julien turned slowly away from the window. He was looking for the last time from those rooms at the London which he had loved. The setting sun had caught the dome of St. Paul's, was flashing from the dark, placid water of the Thames. The roar of the great city was passing from eastwards to westwards. "You're a good chap, Kendricks," he declared. "I'll come along, with pleasure. I shall have enough solitude later on. But listen, before we go--listen, David, to a speech after your own heart." Julien stood quite still for a moment. His pale face seemed suddenly whiter, his eyes were full of fire. "David," he said, "if ever the time comes in the future when I find that a woman is beginning to claim a minute of my thoughts, a single one of my emotions, to govern the slightest throb of my pulses, I'll take her by the throat and I'll throw her out of what's left of my life as I would a rat that had crept into my room. I've done with them. Curse all women!" There was a silence. Kendricks leaned over to the fireplace and knocked his pipe against the hearth. Then he suddenly paused. "What's that?" he asked abruptly. There was a soft knocking at the outside door. _ |
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