CHAPTER XXIV.

AN OLD STORY.

Mrs. Duff-Scott's drawing-room, at nine or ten o'clock on Friday evening, was a pleasant sight. Very spacious, very voluptuous, in a subdued, majestic, high-toned way; very dim--with splashes of richness--as to walls and ceilings; very glowing and splendid--with folds of velvety darkness--as to window curtains and portières. The colouring of it was such as required a strong light to show how beautiful it was, but with a proud reserve, and to mark its unostentatious superiority over the glittering salons of the uneducated _nouveaux riches_, it was always more or less in a warm and mellow twilight, veiling its sombre magnificence from the vulgar eye. Just now its main compartment was lit by wax candles in archaic candlesticks amongst the flowers and _bric-à-brac_ of an _étagère_ over the mantelpiece, and by seven shaded and coloured lamps, of various artistic devices, judiciously distributed over the abundant table-space so as to suffuse with a soft illumination the occupants of most of the wonderfully stuffed and rotund chairs and lounges grouped about the floor; and yet the side of the room was decidedly bad for reading in. "It does not light up well," was the consolation of women of Mrs. Duff-Scott's acquaintance, who still clung to pale walls and primary colours and cut-glass chandeliers, either from necessity or choice. "Pooh!" Mrs. Duff-Scott used to retort, hearing of this just criticism; "as if I _wanted_ it to light up!" But she had compromised with her principles in the arrangement of the smaller division of the room, where, between and beyond a pair of vaguely tinted portières, stood the piano, and all other material appliances for heightening the spiritual enjoyment of musical people. Here she had grudgingly retained the gas-burner of utilitarian Philistinism. It hung down from the ceiling straight over the piano, a circlet of gaudy yellow flames, that made the face of every plaque upon the wall to glitter. But the brilliant corona was borne in no gas-fitter's vehicle; its shrine was of dull brass, mediæval and precious, said to have been manufactured, in the first instance, for either papal or imperial purposes--it didn't matter which.

In this bright music-room was gathered to-night a little company of the elect--Herr Wüllner and his violin, together with three other stringed instruments and their human complement. Patty at the piano, Eleanor, Mrs. Duff-Scott, and half-a-dozen more enthusiasts--with a mixed audience around them. In the dim, big room beyond, the major entertained the inartistic, outlawed few who did not care, nor pretend to care, for aught but the sensual comfort of downy chairs and after dinner chit-chat. And, at the farthest end, in a recess of curtained window that had no lamps about it, sat Elizabeth and Mr. Yelverton, side by side, on a low settee--not indifferent to the pathetic wail of the far-distant violins, but finding more entertainment in their own talk than the finest music could have afforded them.

"I had a friend who gave up everything to go and work amongst the London poor--in the usual clerical way, you know, with schools and guilds and all the right and proper things. He used to ask me for money, and insist on my helping him with a lecture or a reading now and then, and I got drawn in. I had always had an idea of doing something--taking a line of some sort--and somehow this got hold of me. I couldn't see all that misery--you've no idea of it, Miss King--"

"I have read of it," she said.

"You would have to see it to realise it in the least. After I saw it I couldn't turn my back and go home and enjoy myself as if nothing had happened. And I had no family to consider. I got drawn in."

"And _that_ is your work?" said Elizabeth. "I _knew_ it."

"No. My friend talks of 'his work'--a lot of them have 'their work'--it's splendid, too--but they don't allow me to use that word, and I don't want it. What I do is all wrong, they say--not only useless, but mischievous."

"I don't believe it," said Elizabeth.

"Nor I, of course--though they may be right. We can only judge according to our lights. To me, it seems that when things are as bad as possible, a well meaning person can't make them worse and _may_ make them better. They say 'no,' and argue it all out as plainly as possible. Yet I stick to my view--I go on in my own line. It doesn't interfere with theirs, though they say it does."

"And what is it?" she asked, with her sympathetic eyes.

"Well, you'll hardly understand, for you don't know the class--the lowest deep of all--those who can't be dealt with by the Societies--the poor wretches whom nothing will raise, and who are abandoned as hopeless, outside the pale of everything. They are my line."

"Can there be any abandoned as hopeless?"

"Yes. They really are so, you know. Neither religion nor political economy can do anything for them, though efforts are made for the children. Poor, sodden, senseless, vicious lumps of misery, with the last spark of soul bred out of them--a sort of animated garbage that cumbers the ground and makes the air stink--given up as a bad job, and only wanted out of the way--from the first they were on my mind more than all the others. And when I saw them left to rot like that, I felt I might have a free hand."

"And can you succeed where so many have failed?"

"Oh, what I do doesn't involve success or failure. It's outside all that, just as they are. They're only brutes in human shape--hardly human shape either; but I have a feeling for brutes. I love horses and dogs--I can't bear to see things suffer. So that's all I do--just comfort them where I can, in their own way; not the parson's way--that's no use. I wouldn't mock them by speaking of religion--I suppose religion, as we know it, has had a large hand in making them what they are; and to go and tell them that God ordained their miserable pariah-dog lot would be rank blasphemy. I leave all that. I don't bother about their souls, because I know they haven't got any; I see their wretched bodies, and that's enough for me. It's something not to let them go out of the world without _ever_ knowing what it is to be physically comfortable. It eases my conscience, as a man who has never been hungry, except for the pleasure of it."

"And do they blame you for that?"

"They say I pauperise them and demoralise them," he answered, with a sudden laugh; "that I disorganise the schemes of the legitimate workers--that I outrage every principle of political economy. Well, I do _that_, certainly. But that I make things worse--that I retard the legitimate workers--I won't believe. If I do," he concluded, "I can't help it."

"No," breathed Elizabeth, softly.

"There's only one thing in which I and the legitimate workers are alike--everybody is alike in that, I suppose--the want of money. Only in the matter of beer and tobacco, what interest I could get on a few hundred pounds! What I could do in the way of filling empty stomachs and easing aches and pains if I had control of large means! What a good word 'means' is, isn't it? We want 'means' for all the ends we seek--no matter what they are."

"I thought," said Elizabeth, "that you were rich. Mr. Westmoreland told us so."

"Well, in a way, I am," he rejoined. "I hold large estates in my own name, and can draw fifty or sixty thousand a year interest from them if I like. But there have been events--there are peculiar circumstances in connection with the inheritance of the property, which make me feel myself not quite entitled to use it freely--not yet. I _will_ use it, after this year, if nothing happens. I think I _ought_ to; but I have put it off hitherto so as to make as sure as possible that I was lawfully in possession. I will tell you how it is," he proceeded, leaning forward and clasping his knee with his big brown hands. "I am used to speaking of the main facts freely, because I am always in hopes of discovering something as I go about the world. A good many years ago my father's second brother disappeared, and was never heard of afterwards. He and the eldest brother, at that time the head of the family, and in possession of the property, quarrelled about--well, about a woman whom both were in love with; and the elder one was found dead--shot dead--in a plantation not far from the house on the evening of the day of the quarrel, an hour after the total disappearance of the other. My uncle Kingscote--I was named after him, and he was my godfather--was last seen going out towards the plantation with his gun; he was traced to London within the next few days; and it was almost--but just not quite certainly--proved that he had there gone on board a ship that sailed for South America and was lost. He was advertised for in every respectable newspaper in the world, at intervals, for twenty years afterwards--during which time the estate was in Chancery, before they would grant it to my father, from whom it descended to me--and I should think the agony columns of all countries never had one message cast into such various shapes. But he never gave a sign. All sorts of apparent clues were followed up, but they led to nothing. If alive he must have known that it was all right, and would have come home to take his property. He _must_ have gone down in that ship."

"But--oh, surely he would never have come back to take the property of a murdered brother!" exclaimed Elizabeth, in a shocked voice.

"His brother was not murdered," Mr. Yelverton replied. "Many people thought so, of course--people have a way of thinking the worst in these cases, not from malice, but because it is more interesting--and a tradition to that effect survives still, I am afraid. But my uncle's family never suspected him of such a crime. The thing was not legally proved, one way or the other. There were strong indications in the position of the gun which lay by his side, and in the general appearance of the spot where he was found, that my uncle, Patrick Yelverton, accidentally shot himself; that was the opinion of the coroner's jury, and the conviction of the family. But poor Kingscote evidently assumed that he would be accused of murder. Perhaps--it is very possible--some rough-tempered action of his might have caused the catastrophe, and his remorse have had the same effect as fear in prompting him to efface himself. Anyway, no one who knew him well believed him capable of doing his brother a mischief wilfully. His innocence was, indeed, proved by the fact that he married the lady who had been at the bottom of the trouble--by no fault of hers, poor soul!--after he escaped to London; and, wherever he went to, he took her with him. She disappeared a few days after he did, and was lost as completely, from that time. The record and circumstances of their marriage were discovered; and that was all. He would not have married her--she would not have married him--had he been a murderer."

"Do you think not?" said Elizabeth. "That is always assumed as a matter of course, in books--that murder and--and other disgraces are irrevocable barriers between those who love each other, when they discover them. But I do not understand why. With such an awful misery to bear, they would want all that their love could give them so much _more_--not less."

"You see," said Mr. Yelverton, regarding her with great interest, "it is a sort of point of honour with the one in misfortune not to drag the other down. When we are married, as when we are dead, 'it is for a long time.'"

Elizabeth made no answer, but there was a quiet smile about her lips that plainly testified to her want of sympathy with this view. After a silence of a few seconds, her companion leaned forward and looked directly into her face. "Would _you_ stick to the man you loved if he had forfeited his good name or were in risk of the gallows?--I mean if he were really a criminal, and not only a suspected one?" he asked with impressive slowness.

"If I had found him worthy to be loved before that," she replied, speaking collectedly, but dismayed to find herself growing crimson, "and if he cared for me--and leant on me--oh, yes! It might be wrong, but I should do it. Surely any woman would. I don't see how she could help herself."

He changed his position, and looked away from her face into the room with a light in his deep-set eyes. "You ought to have been Elizabeth Leigh's daughter," he said. "I did not think there were any more women like her in the world."

"I am like other women," said Elizabeth, humbly, "only more ignorant."

He made no comment--they both found it rather difficult to speak at this point--and, after an expressive pause, she went on, rather hurriedly, "Was Elizabeth Leigh the lady who married your uncle?"

"Yes," he replied, bringing himself back to his story with an effort, "she was. She was a lovely woman, bright and clever, fond of dress and fun and admiration, like other women; but with a solid foundation to her character that you will forgive my saying is rare to your sex--as far, at least, as I am able to judge. I saw her when I was a little schoolboy, but I can picture her now, as if it were but yesterday. What vigour she had! What a wholesome zest for life! And yet she gave up everything to go into exile and obscurity with the man she loved. Ah, _what_ a woman! She _ought_ not to have died. She should have lived and reigned at Yelverton, and had a houseful of children. It is still possible--barely, barely possible--that she did live, and that I shall some day stumble over a handsome young cousin who will tell me that he is the head of the family."

"O no," said Elizabeth, "not after all these years. Give up thinking of such a thing. Take your own money now, as soon as you go home, and"--looking up with a smile--"buy all the beer and tobacco that you want."