CHAPTER XX

MAJOR MEREDITH

"The _Liverpool Post_," said Mrs. Craven, "allows itself to hint gently that you've been rather persecuting Mr. Carter, Kate. Now, I don't call the _Post_ a sensational paper, nor is it given to introducing personal matters, as a rule."

"I wish it would mind its own business and leave mine alone," said Kate crossly.

"'The oppression of nations or individuals,'" read Mrs. Craven, "'may begin by being a matter of merely domestic importance, but when it assumes sufficient dimensions it forces itself into public notice.'"

"Do they couple my name with that?"

"They leave you to do that yourself," said the old lady dryly.

"Well, I don't mind. They may say what they like. I'm entirely within my rights."

"The _Post_ admits that. Here, I'll read you what it says, my dear. 'Mr. George Carter, whose name has been so prominently before the public of late in connection with his splendid efforts in winning over the King of Okky to the side of humanity, has himself been the victim of some very high-handed oppression. He has discovered a most valuable vein of tin in a part of the back country where no European explorer had ever trod before, and with toil and care, and in fact with genius, had brought cargo after cargo of the valuable ore down mysterious African creeks and rivers to a spot where the ocean steamers could conveniently ship it. To be precise, he hired from Messrs. Edmondson's small factory on the Smooth River a piece of waste-cleared ground, dumped his ore on that as he towed it tediously down those unknown creeks in a string of dugouts, and there let it accumulate so as not to flood the markets, and cause ruin to the tin industries in England--' Shall I go on?"

"Please do, Aunt."

"'But presently an interviewer arrived in the shape of a well-known firm of West African merchants and financiers, who bought out Messrs. Edmondson's interest in their Smooth River factory, found that Mr. Carter had no lease, and gave him notice to quit within forty-eight hours. As an alternative to removal they demand an annual rent which amounts to more than fifteen per cent. of the value of the ore stacked there. In other words, they are endeavoring, in a manner that almost smacks of piracy, to force themselves into partnership with him.'"

"Sneak," said Miss O'Neill, "to go and tittle-tattle to the papers like that."

Mrs. Craven looked at the girl over her spectacles, and then said she, "Wait a minute till I read you a little more. 'We should add that what gives these proceedings a more unpleasant flavor than would appear at first sight is the fact Mr. Carter is unable to defend himself. He had left West Africa when action was first taken, and it has been discovered that he was still in ignorance of what had occurred when his steamer called at Las Palmas. The whole thing will be sprung upon him with a shock of unpleasant surprise when he lands in Liverpool to-morrow."

"Ah," said Kate.

Mrs. Craven folded the paper, stood up, and walked towards the door. "As usual, my dear, you have carried out your plan very perfectly."

"What plan?" asked Kate incautiously.

"Of treating Mr. Carter so badly," said Mrs. Craven, turning the handle, "that presently when he hits you back you will be able to bring yourself to hate him. But then you are always successful, Kitty dear, in everything you set your hand to--tryingly successful sometimes," Mrs. Craven added, and went out, and shut the door softly behind her.

Kate nodded at the door. "Aunt Jane," she said viciously, "there are moments when you are a perfect cat. But I will make him detest me for all that, and then I can truly and comfortably hate him. It's all very well their calling him a martyr. Why should everybody's feelings be consulted except mine?"

All the same, Kate bowed in a certain degree to public sentiment. One thinks also that she had not toughened herself sufficiently to meet Carter face to face. Anyway, she discovered that urgent affairs called her to London, and whirled off Aunt Jane to her flat that very night. She left Crewdson to fight the invader when he landed in Liverpool, and gave the old man definite instructions in writing that he was not to budge an inch from the firm's rights. "Show Mr. Carter this letter," she ordered, "if there is the least occasion for it."

But it seemed that West Africa pursued her. The telephone rang as soon as she got to the flat.

"That London? That Miss Head? This is Liverpool, Crewdson. London's just been calling you up. Will you ring Four-owe-seven-three Pad. What's that? No. Four-naught-seven-three Pad. Yes, that's it. Good-night, Miss."

Kate had more than half a mind to let 4,073 Pad alone. She was tired, and somehow in spite of all her successes she was a good deal dispirited. The British public had bought no less than four great rubber companies that she had offered them; the shares were all at a premium; everybody was pleased; and she had transferred her own profits safely into land and trustee securities. Since her first burst of success, money had simply rolled in on her, and already it had ceased to give her amusement. Success lay sour in her mouth. She asked Fortune for just one thing more. Because she was a woman she could not go and get it for herself. She told herself that it was only a convention that held her back--but she shuddered and chilled all over at the thought of breaking that convention.

She sat in a deep soft chair, twisting her long gloves into a hard string, and staring into the glow of the fire, and then with a "Faugh" at her own weakness, she threw the gloves onto the fender, and walked across to a telephone that stood on a side-table.

"Four-owe-seven-three Pad, please. No, Forty-seventy-three Paddington. Yes. Hullo? Hullo? Is that Four-nought-seven-three? This is Miss O'Neill. Liverpool rang up to say you wanted to speak to me. Who is that, please?"

"No one you know," came in the small clear voice of the telephone. "One of those sort of people who writes letters to the papers above some such signature as 'Well-Wisher.'"

"If you don't give me your name," said Kate sharply, "I shall ring off."

"I don't think you will when I tell you I'm going to give you some news about your father."

"My father unfortunately is dead. You've got hold of the wrong Miss O'Neill."

The telephone laughed. "Not a bit of it, it's the lady who is known generally as Kate O'Neill I'm speaking with, but whose real name is Katherine Meredith."

Now Kate knew that Mrs. Craven was only "Aunt Jane" by courtesy and adoption, and had naturally wondered many times over who her real people might have been. She had always been a very practical young woman, and had not worried herself unduly over the matter; but still being human, she had her share of curiosity, and though the subject had always been strictly taboo at the house in Princes' Park, still that did not hinder her from discussing it with her own thoughts. And now, "Katherine Meredith!"

"I think you had better tell me who you are," she said to the telephone.

"I prefer anonymity. Do you know Day-Pearce?"

"No. Yes, perhaps I do, if you mean Sir Edward Day-Pearce, the West African man. I don't know him personally."

"All the better," rasped the telephone. "Anyway, he is lecturing to-night in a non-Conformist temple in Westbourne Grove--the Athenæum, they call it. Begins at eight. He's certain to say something about Meredith. I should try to go if I were you."

"I shouldn't dream--" Kate began, when whizz went the bell, and she was cut off. She rang again, got the inquiry office, found that 4,073 was a hairdresser's shop, once more got 4,073, spoke to the proprietor, learned that the telephone had been hired for an hour by a gentleman who had some business to transact. No, the gentleman had just gone. No, they didn't know who he was: never seen him before--Miss O'Neill's ring off had a touch of temper in it.

She went back to the deep soft chair and tried to bring her thoughts once more to the subject that had been in hand before the interruptions came. She was a business woman, and had trained herself to concentrate the whole of her mind on any matter she chose. But somehow those two little words "My father" kept cropping up; and presently she began trying to picture what her mother was like. She went to the telephone and called up a theatre agency. She had to say three times over "Athenæum--Westbourne Grove" before the young man at the other end grasped the name, and she was rewarded by hearing him laugh as he said he had no seats for Sir Edward Day-Pearce's lecture that evening.

"Where can I get one?" she demanded.

"At the door, madam," was the polite response. "I believe the prices of entrance are threepence, sixpence, and one shilling, unless you happen to be a subscriber."

Supposing the whole thing were a hoax to draw her there, and by some means to make her look ridiculous? It was quite likely. She was a successful woman, and had already learned that one of the prices of success is the spitting of spite and envy. But difficulties did not often stay long in the path of Miss Kate O'Neill. She picked up a telephone directory, turned the pages, found a number, called it up, and made certain arrangements. Thereafter she dressed, dined, and took Mrs. Craven to laugh over the new piece at the Gaiety.

But poor Kate found even the Gaiety dull that night. There was a man on the stage with a red head. He was not in the least like Carter either in looks, speech, or manner, but--well, it must have been the hair which persisted in calling up that unpleasant train of thought which kept her vaguely irritated throughout all the evening.

There was a bundle of type script waiting for her when she got back to the flat, which happened to be the verbatim report of Sir Edward Day-Pearce's lecture which she had arranged that two stenographers should go and take down for her, but she did not choose to open this before the keen eyes of Aunt Jane. Instead she waited till that astute old lady should see fit to go to bed, and watched her eat sandwiches, drink a tumbler of soda-water lightly laced with whiskey, and listened to a résumé of all the other plays that had filled the Gaiety boards since the house was opened. At the end of which Kate had the final satisfaction of being laughed at.

"You've been itching to be rid of me ever since we got back, my dear, and as a general thing you don't in the least mind saying when you want to be alone. I wonder what's in those mysterious papers you're so anxious I shouldn't ask about. Good-night, Kitty dear."

"Good-night, Aunt Jane," said Kate, and opened the package.

The lecture was unexciting. It was the dull record of a dull but capable man, who knew his work thoroughly, did it accurately, and in the telling of it left out all the points that were in the least picturesque or interesting. Sir Edward had spent half a lifetime in Colonial administration, and the only times he rose into anything approaching eloquence was when he had to tell of some colonial interest that was ruthlessly sacrificed by some ignorant official at home for the sake of a vote or a fad. Four several instances he gave of this, and these stood out warmly against the gray background of the rest of the speech.

But to Kate, who knew her West Africa by heart, it was all dull enough reading till he came to almost the last paragraph.

"It is by a peculiar irony," the type report read, "that an agreement should recently have been come to by which the notorious King of Okky promises to discontinue his practice of human sacrifice. It is six-and-twenty years since I first went out to West Africa, and my immediate superior then was Major Meredith. He was a man of the highest ideals, and we all thought of tremendous capabilities. He saw what was wanted on the spot, and carried out his theories with small enough regard for ignorant criticism at home. By the exercise of tremendous personal influence, and at a fearful risk, he made his way to Okky City itself, saw its unspeakable horrors, and made a treaty with the then king. In return for certain concessions the king was to come under British protection, and of course give up objectionable practices. Well, I don't know whether there are any of the Anti-British party here, but I daresay most of you will think that the addition of a quarter of a million of square miles of rich country to the empire was no mean gift. Ladies and gentlemen, you little know what the Government was then. 'Perish West Africa' was one of their many creeds, and with Exeter--" [here the reporter had written the word "Disturbance," and evidently missed the next few sentences]--"I don't care whether you like it or whether you are decently ashamed, the thing's true. They refused to ratify the treaty, and my poor chief was censured for exceeding instructions. Well, the backers of the high-minded potentate, as I believe they called themselves, got their way, and I wish they were not too ignorant to realize what their mean little action caused in human lives. Putting the human sacrifice in Okky City at the very low estimate of eight thousand a year, in five-and-twenty years that brings the figure up to two hundred thousand black men and women whose blood lies at the door of those unctuous hypocrites who made it their business to break Major Meredith because he was an Imperialist."

Again the reporter put in the word "Disturbance," but he apparently managed to catch the next sentence. "Aye, you may yap," the old administrator went on, "and I dare say from the snug looks of some of you you're own sons of the men who did it, and I hope you feel the weight of their bloodguiltiness. Two hundred thousand lives, gentlemen, and all thrown away to pander to the fads of some ignorant theorists who had never been beyond the shores of England. If Major Meredith could have held out against the clamor, I believe that he would have been a man to stand beside Clive, and Rhodes, and Hastings, in the work he would have done for the Empire; but as it was he left the service in disgust, and drifted away into the savage depths of that Africa he knew so well, and had so vainly tried to help. His wife went with him, and, so I heard, bore him a daughter before she died. A rumor reached me that some trader brought the child to England and adopted her, but poor Meredith--well, he has disappeared from the record...."

The lecture closed, a few paragraphs farther on, again with "Disturbance."

Kate folded the sheets and put them on the table. She was somehow conscious of a queer thrill of elation. One of the discomforts that an adopted child who does not know her history must always carry through life, is the feeling of having been bred of parents that were probably discreditable. She had vague memories of her babyhood. There was a village of thatched houses and shade trees. She had clear recollection of one day playing in the dust with the village dogs and the other babies--black babies, they were--when a huge spotted beast sprang amongst them, roared, and for a moment stood over her, the white baby. At intervals she had dreamed of that beast ever since. From maturer knowledge she knew it must have been a leopard, and leopards do not grow beyond a certain normal size. But in dreamland that leopard was always enormous.... She could never remember whether in the dusty village street under the heat and the sunshine it had done damage, or whether the pariah dogs had frightened it away.

Try how she would, she could remember no mother. The women of the village were all black, and she lived, so faint memory said, first with one and then with another. She had no clear recollection of any of them.... And, indeed, there might have been many villages, because there were hammock journeys, with a pet monkey riding on the pole, and walls of thick green bush on either hand that held dangers.... She still had a scar just below the nail on the first finger of her right hand where the monkey bit her one day when she teased it.

But plainest of all these dim pictures of the memory was one of a white man who at rare intervals came into the scene and took her on his knee. He had iron-gray hair and beard which were shaggy and matted, and he always had a pipe between his lips and a glittering eye-glass on a black watered-silk ribbon for her to play with. Furthermore, he always brought some present when he came to see her, and gave another present also, if he was pleased, to the black women with whom she lived. It was he who hung round her neck the Aggry bead that she still had locked away in the bottom tray of her jewel case.

She remembered this man with a vague kindness. But if Godfrey O'Neill cut her off from him with such completeness it must have been for some profoundly good reason. Uncle Godfrey had been far from squeamish. Uncle Godfrey in his lazy way stuck to friends when everybody else voted them far outside the pale. And therefore, she had argued, the iron-gray haired man with the eyeglass must have done something peculiarly disgraceful.

That he was her father she was entirely sure. Occasionally she had tried to argue with herself that she was little more than a babe when she saw him last, and was no judge, and that possibly the iron-gray man was her father's friend. But something stronger than mere human reason always rose up in arms against such a suggestion.

Sir Edward's halting lecture had roused up one recollection in her head that heretofore had persistently eluded her. A thousand times in those dreams of Africa, and the hot villages, and the pet monkey with its red seed necklace, and all the other old dim scenes, she had on the tip of her memory the name of the iron-gray man with the eyeglass, and a thousand times she had missed catching it by the smallest hair. In a flash it came back--he was Meredith.

Was he alive still? She could not tell; but that she would find out now. For once she adjudged old Godfrey O'Neill to be wrong. She was not going to let the discreet veil remain any longer over a man who, whatever his subsequent career had been, at any rate was a martyr once, and her father.