Part 1

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

LOVE IN CHIEF

A Novel

BY

ROSE K. WEEKES

“One should master one’s passions (love, in chief), And be loyal to one’s friends.”

NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS · MCMIV

Copyright, 1904, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._

Published September, 1904.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. WRITE ME AS ONE WHO LOVES HIS FELLOW-MEN 1

II. HE THAT SHOWED MERCY ON HIM 11

III. THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND IS MAN 21

IV. I ALWAYS DID WHAT I DEVISED 35

V. SHE GOES ON SUNDAY TO THE CHURCH 48

VI. HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY 64

VII. COURAGE QUAND MÊME 78

VIII. I WILL NOT LET THEE GO 100

IX. WE TOOK SWEET COUNSEL TOGETHER 113

X. WAS THAT THE LANDMARK? 125

XI. IN ARDEN 141

XII. AND WILT THOU LEAVE ME THUS? 156

XIII. THE FIRST DROPS OF THE THUNDER-SHOWER 177

XIV. SMALL BEER 189

XV. COLLOQUIES WITH AN OUTSIDER 205

XVI. A NIGHT-PIECE 218

XVII. THE ONE SHALL BE TAKEN 243

XVIII. THE OTHER LEFT 254

XIX. ROMANCE BRINGS UP THE NINE-FIFTEEN 268

XX. SO THEY TWO WENT ON 283

LOVE IN CHIEF

LOVE IN CHIEF

I

WRITE ME AS ONE WHO LOVES HIS FELLOW-MEN

The waiting-room of Dr. Maude’s surgery at Monkswell was sparely furnished with guests, mainly because the December weather was of that mild and unseasonable type commonly called unhealthy. The darkness outside was pierced by a fine, invisible rain, borne on a south wind, and the waiting-room, though heat as well as light was spread only by a single gas-burner, was not cold. One patient was with the doctor; the details of his complaint could have been overheard by the others if they had cared to listen, but they did not; sufficient unto them were their own diseases. Five centres of self-complacent misery were sitting on a cane-seated bench; the sixth person was leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. The only other representative of the male sex was eight years old, and had come to have a tooth out; too stolid to feel nervous, he sat sucking peppermints. His mother, in a decent black mantilla and a square-fronted bonnet trimmed with red chrysanthemums, was talking to a girl with a baby about wrongs invisible to the unjaundiced eye. The young mother’s dark eyes and delicate features had the remains of real beauty, though two years of matrimony had made her middle-aged; her pretty young sister, sitting beside her, showed what she must have been. The baby was not handsome; its pinkish-purple face was framed in a yellow woollen hood, and the colour which should have tinged its cheeks had settled upon its ugly little button of a nose and on its chin. It wheezed; the mother coughed loosely; the girl stared before her; the young man also coughed, but inobtrusively. He did not give to phthisis its due dignity.

The surgery presently discharged its patient and received the small martyr to toothache. The young man took the seat left vacant; and the gaslight, falling on his face, showed thin, brown features, eyebrows strongly arched and strongly marked, and bright, vagrant eyes which took an interest in everything. He edged a little closer to the young mother and looked inquiring. Finding that did not answer, he plunged into conversation with a speech which was admirable in sentiment but not discreet in wording.

“Jolly baby, that.”

“Yes, he was a fine boy,” said the girl, her tired eyes quickening as she looked down at her child, “but he’s after his teeth now, and it’s pulled him daouwn awful. We didn’t have a wink of sleep with him last night.”

“You must be pretty tired, then,” quoth the stranger. “Wonder if the little chap would come to me?”

“He don’t like strangers,” said the mother, doubtfully. She was unused to hear her boy called either a jolly baby or a little chap; and she distrusted the abilities of a young man, plainly unmarried, moreover, who used such terms.

“I’ll hold him like a patent rocking-chair,” the stranger asserted. “Come on, sonny. You won’t howl at me, will you? Great land, what a weight you are! I never turned ayah before—yes, put my eye out, will you? What’s wrong besides the teeth?”

“He’s got a touch of bromtitus; I caught it washing-day, and he took it from me. Oh, it’s crool work washing in the winter; our houses hasn’t any coppers, and we has to do it all out at the back.”

“Do you mean you wash the clothes in the open air?”

“Every mite of ’em. My husband he’s been to the landlord times and again, but he won’t do nothing for us; and they’re the cheapest houses round, so we just have to put up with it.”

“What a beastly shame! Who’s your landlord?”

“Old Fane, up at Fanes. Ah, he is a hard man. Last time as Mr. Searle went to see him, ‘You can take or leave it,’ he says; ‘I can get plenty more as won’t complain. I will not be pestered with discontented gutter-birds,’ he says. So my husband he come away; there wasn’t nothing to be done.”

“Fane, I think you said,” said the brown-eyed stranger, upon whose face the tale had painted a gleeful anticipation, as he took down the name in a pocket-book. “I’m thinking I’d like a little friendly conversation with Mr. Fane. Whereabouts is your place?”

“Burnt House, they call it; right out in the fields it is. If he’d put in one copper for the six houses, you wouldn’t think he’d ever miss the money. But he don’t care about us poor folks. I wish we was in Farquhar’s houses, that I do.”

Conversation was here broken by Dr. Maude, who summoned Mrs. Searle and her sister and the baby. Her short interview left her in tears. The doctor had ordered milk, which seemed to her as far beyond her means as caviare or turtle-soup. It would be got, but meanwhile Mrs. Searle would starve, Mr. Searle would swear, and the debt at the shop would grow. The stranger gave her a shilling, and fled into the surgery to escape her thanks.

The place smelt strong of drugs; shelves laden with bottles climbed up one wall, and the others were decorated with framed photographs and cases of medical books. Everything was strictly professional and methodically neat; and the doctor, slight and dark in appearance, cool and composed in manner, was the essence of his room embodied.

“What’s your trouble?” he asked of the stranger, who stood before him interested and insouciant, his hands still in his pockets.

“Hæmorrhage from the lungs. Oh, I’ve had the charming complaint before, and I know the ways of it; I’ve been despaired of three times already. But I’d like you just to tinker up my old constitution, if that’s possible.”

“When did the hæmorrhage occur?”

“I had a smart attack Sunday, and it’s been off and on ever since.”

“Then you ought to be in bed.”

“Quite so, Æsculapius, but I haven’t one.”

“There is the workhouse infirmary at Alresworth.”

“To which I’m on the way; but I didn’t think I could git.”

Then there was silence, while Maude applied his stethoscope. After testing the lungs he tried the heart, and after the heart other organs, and soon discovered that his patient was a collection of inceptive diseases. His questions elicited a tale of ill-health lightly borne in which he did not believe, for stoicism is rare in surgery patients.

“I don’t know your face—where do you come from?” Maude asked him.

“I was at Alresworth with a travelling company as a kind of a sort of a shadowy understudy of a sub-super, but I knocked up Sunday and was left behind. Nobody missed me. I can’t act any more than a dead egg,” said the patient, candidly—“ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine; is that enough? But that don’t matter in the profession. Hullo, were you in the cricket-team at Queens? Nice game, cricket. I always shone in it myself.”

He disengaged himself, and walked across to study the photographed groups on the wall.

“Come back, please; I have not done with you,” said the doctor. “What’s your name?”

“Oh, _I_ don’t know—John Smith, I guess. Last time I played cricket was near the English cemetery at Iquique. Jolly ground it was, too. There’s never a drop of rain from year’s end to year’s end, so the turf isn’t too good; but we had thousand-foot precipices on three sides of the ground, and what could you ask more? We played till Saunders made a boundary hit, and then we hadn’t a rope long enough to fetch up the ball. Next time Saunders went up there was after Yellow Jack had done with him. My hat! it was hot enough for kingdom come. The very abomination of desolation; red hills, and never a blade of grass, except the thread of green where the water comes down from the snows.”

“Well, John Smith,” said the doctor, “I can’t do much for you; your constitution’s rotten. You had better stop talking, take this medicine, and go to the infirmary, if it’s true that you have no home. A motor ’bus passes here at seven, and goes to Alresworth.”

The patient made a grimace. “More land of counterpane for me, I suppose. Passes here at seven, does it? I shall certainly be ’bus-sick; but, after all, tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. Take my tip, Æsculapius, and don’t you drop your cricket. Good-night.”

It was only half-past six. Maude felt an impulse to recall the picturesque stoic and bid him wait in the surgery until the omnibus passed; but honesty is a rare quality, and the stranger, by pleasing him, inspired him with mistrust. An observant man, he noticed that John Smith spoke French like a Frenchman: a Parisian could have detected the difference, for his accent was that of Guernsey: but Maude had learned modern languages at a public school. In brief, the rain was inaudible in the surgery; the stranger was a questionable character; and Maude did not ask him in.

John Smith went out whistling; his frame was lean and gaunt and loose-jointed, but he walked with a fine swing. The surgery was the last house of the village. Some hundred yards further on the railway embankment spanned the road, and a lane turning up just beyond it led to the station. John Smith, sauntering along in the increasing rain, found shelter beneath the arch and stayed there. The wind blew up from the south straight through the tunnel, and the scene circumscribed by the arc of masonry was wild and beautiful. Across the black sky raced a froth of fleecy clouds, through which a half-moon shone, girt by a pallid zone of blue and bronze. The wild streamers were so unearthly pale, the heaven so solemnly dark, that only by the moon’s presence could sky be told from cloud. Gray hills, crowned with dark soft masses of woodland, folded down to a valley deep in mist, where a cluster of golden lights burned like a constellation magnified by rain; while up to his very feet the streaming road was turned to a sheet of glory by a common street-lamp.

John Smith immediately brought out a penny pencil and a penny exercise-book and began to write. Valiantly disregarding the inequalities of the brick-work, he rested the paper against the wall. He had thought of some elegant words and phrases for describing the evening sky, and wanted to fix them fast on paper before they escaped from his volatile memory. Actor he had been by chance, artist he was by nature; an artist in words, he professed himself gravely; a lover of apt phrase and finely balanced sentence; one of that happy confraternity whose goal in a strange room is always the bookcase. He had as many interests as ideas, but this reigned paramount.

The wind blew, and the rain came with it. It may have been the cold, or it may have been the weight of Mrs. Searle’s baby, or it may have been the inevitable sequence of his disease, which suddenly arrested the writer’s hand, and made him, choking, press a handkerchief to his lips to quell the flow. He knew how to meet the attack, and, lacking any other couch, lay down in the road; he could not well be wetter, and a mud-bath, at least, is warm. His handkerchief was drenched, but the stream did not stop. Presently the moon dimmed before his eyes, and his own troubled breathing seemed a far-off sound. It crossed his blurred mind that he was about to solve the great riddle, and go out with the wind; and he reflected with satisfaction that Dr. Maude, who had unmercifully turned him out into the rain, would be visited by pangs of conscience. He felt neither fear nor elation, but a certain regret in leaving a world which he had persistently enjoyed in spite of all; after which consciousness went out like a spark, and John Smith lay still in the road.

II

HE THAT SHOWED MERCY ON HIM

Ten minutes later a train passed southwards across the arch. It had discharged passengers at the station, and among them one who soon came driving down the lane in a high dog-cart fitted with pneumatic tyres, acetylene lamps, and a correct groom sitting up behind. As it turned the corner the horse, a handsome chestnut signally well groomed, shied violently at John Smith’s prostrate figure, and was promptly checked by the driver, who had him well in hand. He looked back over his shoulder. “What’s that, Simpson?”

“Drunken man, sir,” said the correct groom, stolidly.

“Pleasant weather to lie in the road. Still, will you?” He gripped the reins as though to curb the restive horse gave him pleasure. “Just go and see if he’s all right, Simpson. He’ll get run over lying under the arch there.”

Simpson got down. He resented his master’s charitable fads when they affected his comfort, but he dared not complain. It was true that Mr. Farquhar carried generosity to his servants to its extreme limit, but those who transgressed his laws had to go. He bent over John Smith and announced with undeviating stolidity: “Been fighting, sir.”

“Fighting, has he? Come and hold the horse for a minute.”

Servant and master changed places, and Farquhar in his turn scrutinised the features of John Smith. He moved the stained handkerchief, sniffed at his lips, laid a finger on the spot where the pulse should have beaten, and then stood up.

“Shift the seat as far forward as it’ll go. Yes; now put the cushions in the bottom of the cart. The rug over them. Is the back let down? That’s right.” He picked up John Smith and shouldered him as if he were a gun. The luckless artist in words weighed less than eight stone, but the strength required to lift him so easily was very great, and was shown more remarkably still when Farquhar raised him up at arm’s-length to put him into the dog-cart. Simpson lent his assistance, protesting only by silence against the introduction of a drunken and excessively muddy prodigal between the folds of the new carriage-rug. His discretion was rewarded by his master, who explained, as he took his seat again and picked up the reins: “It’s a case of illness, poor chap. The man’s not drunk.”

“Very good, sir,” said Simpson, touching his cap; but he did not believe it. Even the irreproachable Mr. Farquhar was no hero to his groom.

About a mile beyond the arch Simpson had to get down to open a gate, and the dog-cart drew up at the front door of The Lilacs, which was the pleasing name of Farquhar’s bachelor residence. It was a large modern villa built of red brick and white stucco, boasting Elizabethan mullioned windows on the first floor, modern bays below, a castellated turret, and a Byzantine porch with a cupola, which tasteful decorations the officious ivy had done its best to veil. Inside, the house was furnished well and, before all things, comfortably; it was heated by an arrangement of hot-air pipes in the Russian fashion, and cooled in summer by genuine punkahs. John Smith was carried in and laid before the library fire; Simpson was sent to fetch the doctor, and the master of the house himself attended on the muddy stranger. Farquhar was a wonderfully good Good Samaritan.

He began by stripping off John Smith’s wet clothes, noting that the shirt, which had seen its best and almost its worst days, was neatly marked in a woman’s writing with the name of Lucian de Saumarez. His other garments, which were in better condition, bore only the red cotton hieroglyphics of the laundress. Few people could have excelled Lucian de Saumarez in the art of dressing badly; his hat alone would have roused envy in a scarecrow. Farquhar did not dare to give him brandy, but he began to practise a remedy potent as alcohol and safer. Kneeling beside the parchment-covered articulated skeleton on the sofa, he ran his fingers over him with subtle, measured movements, unpleasantly suggestive of the coiling and uncoiling of a snake. He had learned the art of massage among strange people in a strange land; it seemed literally to recall the spirit to the body it had quitted.

Lucian de Saumarez became conscious of existence in a tingling thrill of warmth which crept all over his frame. The return to life was exquisitely delicious; a deep peace rapt him far out of reach of pain, and his mental faculties came back one by one while yet his bodily sense was drowned in dreams. But, suddenly, he was aware of a change, the truth being that Farquhar had paused in his task. Vague discomfort followed; then he opened his eyes and saw, as a vignette beyond a tunnel of darkness, the face of a man reading a letter. That letter, written by a woman’s hand on thick blue paper with a gilded monogram, was familiar to Lucian; it was the same which he for nine years had carried close to his heart. Without wonder he saw the dream-stranger turn the page and read to the end, he watched him fold it up and put it back in its place; and then the trance reabsorbed him, and again he revelled in delicious dreams under the magic touch of Noel Farquhar. Some minutes later he came to himself completely, and discovered what was being done to his unconscious frame. Lucian looked on massage as first cousin to hypnotism, and hated both, with all the lively independence of a character which could not bear to place itself, even voluntarily, even for a moment, at the mercy of another man’s will. Prepared with a strong protest, he opened his eyes and was struck dumb. In the open English face of Noel Farquhar he recognized the dream-vision who had read his letter.

“Ah, you’ve come to yourself,” said Farquhar, pleasantly. “You’re with friends; don’t speak. The doctor will be here directly.”

Lucian put up his eyebrows, sent his eyes straying round the room, and brought them back to his host’s face with an air of inquiry. Farquhar smiled.

“How you came here? My horse shied at you and I picked you up. My name’s Farquhar—Noel Farquhar.”

“M. P.?” said Lucian, who was by fits an ardent politician.

“Quite right. Can I communicate with your friends?”

“Don’t own any.”

“I hope you won’t say that long. Now you really must not talk any more; I sha’n’t answer you if you do.”

As he evidently meant to keep his word, Lucian subsided, and gave himself up to observing. The room was conventionally furnished, but he saw on the floor the skin of a black panther, and behind the door the nine-foot spiral ivory horn of a narwhal, trophies which even Whiteley cannot provide. Himself a wanderer, he rejoiced to see such tokens of his host’s pursuits; a sportsman is kin to a sportsman all the world over. From studying the furniture he turned to study Noel Farquhar.

Most people knew the name of the member for Mid-Kent, and his face was tolerably familiar through the slanderous presentations which the papers call portraits. He had been in Parliament for several years, and was supposed to be a coming man. When he got on his legs, members deferred their engagements; his speeches were generally lively, always pithy, and never long, a trinity of virtues rare as the Christian graces, and, like them, culminating in the last. He had the advantage of a good voice and delivery. As a politician he was incorruptible; he would criticise his own party, when it seemed in danger of deviating from that ideal of rectitude which animates the bosom of every British statesman. A Bayard without fear or reproach, a high-souled patriot with a caustic tongue, he had a niche all to himself among parliamentary celebrities.

He stood in his socks only five feet nine, but the width of his shoulders was exceptional, and his frame was lean and hard and supple as a panther’s. Every muscle had been trained and trained again to the pitch of excellency, and every movement had the sure grace of controlled strength. The comeliness of perfect health and physical fitness was his; he diffused a kind of tonic energy which acted on susceptible people almost like an electric current. For the rest, he was the typical Englishman: fair-haired, grey-eyed, sunburnt, pleasant, in spite of the grim curve of cheek and jaw, which matched the almost ominous strength of his physique. Lucian, like other people, would have accepted him for what he seemed, if he had not seen him deliberately reading through his love-letter. As it was, he looked into the fair, open face and knew him for a humbug; though he could not imagine why he should have read it, nor how it could advantage him to befriend a miserable, sordid, reprobate, and degraded outcast such as Lucian de Saumarez.

Dr. Maude came hard on the heels of the returning Simpson; he did not resort to Bob Sawyer’s tactics to increase the reputation of his practice. Farquhar met him in the hall and brought him in, and the patient overheard an edifying fragment of conversation.

“Well, I couldn’t very well leave him out in the road, poor chap, so I had to bring him along.”

“And he will probably recoup himself from your plate-chest.”

“What a cynic you are! I never thought of such a thing,” said Farquhar, laughing.

“Your innocence must stand in your way sometimes, I should think.”

“I never knew it do so. I believe, myself, that trust begets trustworthiness.”

“Ah, you’re a philanthropist,” said Maude, walking into the room. The patient lay quiet, apparently unconscious. “I expected that it was this fellow you’d got hold of,” Maude said, without surprise. “He came to me an hour ago. I told him to go to Alresworth infirmary; I suppose he had an attack while waiting for the ’bus.”

“Well, I think you might have let him wait in the surgery.”

“He’s probably a thief. I don’t profess to be a philanthropist, myself.”

“Philanthropist, indeed!” said Farquhar. “It’s not philanthropy I’m feeling for you, doctor.”

“I dare say,” Maude responded, proceeding with his analysis of Lucian’s bones.

“You persist in crediting me with virtues I don’t possess.”

“Modesty’s your great fault; every one knows that.”

“Well, yours isn’t over-amiability, anyhow,” returned Farquhar, again laughing.