'Nothing easier. He will be a young man who has been left a little money and wants to start a school of his own. He goes to Ogden's man and suggests that he pay a small premium to come to him for a term as an extra-a.s.sistant-master, to learn the business. Mr Man will jump at him. He will be getting the bargain of his life.

Peter didn't get much of a degree at Oxford, but I believe he was wonderful at games. From a private-school point of view he's a treasure.'

'But--would he do it?'

'I think I can persuade him.'

Mrs Ford kissed her with an enthusiasm which hitherto she had reserved for Ogden.

'My darling girl,' she cried, 'if you knew how happy you have made me!'

'I do,' said Cynthia definitely. 'And now you can do the same for me.'

'Anything, anything! You must have some more hats.'

'I don't want any more hats. I want to go with you on Lord Mountry's yacht to the Riviera.'

'Of course,' said Mrs Ford after a slight pause, 'it isn't my party, you know, dear.'

'No. But you can work me in, darling.'

'It's quite a small party. Very quiet.'

'Crowds bore me. I enjoy quiet.'

Mrs Ford capitulated.

'I fancy you are doing me a very good turn,' she said. 'You must certainly come on the yacht.'

'I'll tell Peter to come straight round here now,' said Cynthia simply. She went to the telephone.

Part Two

In which other interested parties, notably one Buck MacGinnis and a trade rival, Smooth Sam Fisher, make other plans for the Nugget's future. Of stirring times at a private school for young gentlemen.

Of stratagems, spoils, and alarms by night. Of journeys ending in lovers' meetings. The whole related by Mr Peter Burns, gentleman of leisure, who forfeits that leisure in a good cause.

Peter Burns's Narrative

Chapter 1

I

I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning.

The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism.

This thought came to me as I returned to my rooms after the Fletchers' ball. The dawn was breaking as I let myself in. The air was heavy with the peculiar desolation of a London winter morning.

The houses looked dead and untenanted. A cart rumbled past, and across the grey street a dingy black cat, moving furtively along the pavement, gave an additional touch of forlornness to the scene.

I shivered. I was tired and hungry, and the reaction after the emotions of the night had left me dispirited.

I was engaged to be married. An hour back I had proposed to Cynthia Dra.s.silis. And I can honestly say that it had come as a great surprise to me.

Why had I done it? Did I love her? It was so difficult to a.n.a.lyse love: and perhaps the mere fact that I was attempting the task was an answer to the question. Certainly I had never tried to do so five years ago when I had loved Audrey Blake. I had let myself be carried on from day to day in a sort of trance, content to be utterly happy, without dissecting my happiness. But I was five years younger then, and Audrey was--Audrey.

I must explain Audrey, for she in her turn explains Cynthia.

I have no illusions regarding my character when I first met Audrey Blake. Nature had given me the soul of a pig, and circ.u.mstances had conspired to carry on Nature's work. I loved comfort, and I could afford to have it. From the moment I came of age and relieved my trustees of the care of my money, I wrapped myself in comfort as in a garment. I wallowed in egoism. In fact, if, between my twenty-first and my twenty-fifth birthdays, I had one unselfish thought, or did one genuinely unselfish action, my memory is a blank on the point.

It was at the height of this period that I became engaged to Audrey. Now that I can understand her better and see myself, impartially, as I was in those days, I can realize how indescribably offensive I must have been. My love was real, but that did not prevent its patronizing complacency being an insult. I was King Cophetua. If I did not actually say in so many words, 'This beggar-maid shall be my queen', I said it plainly and often in my manner. She was the daughter of a dissolute, evil-tempered artist whom I had met at a Bohemian club. He made a living by painting an occasional picture, ill.u.s.trating an occasional magazine-story, but mainly by doing advertis.e.m.e.nt work. A proprietor of a patent Infants' Food, not satisfied with the bare statement that Baby Cried For It, would feel it necessary to push the fact home to the public through the medium of Art, and Mr Blake would be commissioned to draw the picture. A good many specimens of his work in this vein were to be found in the back pages of the magazines.

A man may make a living by these means, but it is one that inclines him to jump at a wealthy son-in-law. Mr Blake jumped at me. It was one of his last acts on this earth. A week after he had--as I now suspect--bullied Audrey into accepting me, he died of pneumonia.

His death had several results. It postponed the wedding: it stirred me to a very crescendo of patronage, for with the removal of the bread-winner the only flaw in my Cophetua pose had vanished: and it gave Audrey a great deal more scope than she had hitherto been granted for the exercise of free will in the choice of a husband.

This last aspect of the matter was speedily brought to my notice, which till then it had escaped, by a letter from her, handed to me one night at the club, where I was sipping coffee and musing on the excellence of life in this best of all possible worlds.

It was brief and to the point. She had been married that morning.

To say that that moment was a turning point in my life would be to use a ridiculously inadequate phrase. It dynamited my life. In a sense it killed me. The man I had been died that night, regretted, I imagine, by few. Whatever I am today, I am certainly not the complacent spectator of life that I had been before that night.

I crushed the letter in my hand, and sat staring at it, my pigsty in ruins about my ears, face to face with the fact that, even in a best of all possible worlds, money will not buy everything.

I remember, as I sat there, a man, a club acquaintance, a bore from whom I had fled many a time, came and settled down beside me and began to talk. He was a small man, but he possessed a voice to which one had to listen. He talked and talked and talked. How I loathed him, as I sat trying to think through his stream of words.

I see now that he saved me. He forced me out of myself. But at the time he oppressed me. I was raw and bleeding. I was struggling to grasp the incredible. I had taken Audrey's unalterable affection for granted. She was the natural complement to my scheme of comfort. I wanted her; I had chosen and was satisfied with her, therefore all was well. And now I had to adjust my mind to the impossible fact that I had lost her.

Her letter was a mirror in which I saw myself. She said little, but I understood, and my self-satisfaction was in ribbons--and something deeper than self-satisfaction. I saw now that I loved her as I had not dreamed myself capable of loving.

And all the while this man talked and talked.

I have a theory that speech, persevered in, is more efficacious in times of trouble than silent sympathy. Up to a certain point it maddens almost beyond endurance; but, that point past, it soothes.

At least, it was so in my case. Gradually I found myself hating him less. Soon I began to listen, then to answer. Before I left the club that night, the first mad frenzy, in which I could have been capable of anything, had gone from me, and I walked home, feeling curiously weak and helpless, but calm, to begin the new life.

Three years pa.s.sed before I met Cynthia. I spent those years wandering in many countries. At last, as one is apt to do, I drifted back to London, and settled down again to a life which, superficially, was much the same as the one I had led in the days before I knew Audrey. My old circle in London had been wide, and I found it easy to pick up dropped threads. I made new friends, among them Cynthia Dra.s.silis.

I liked Cynthia, and I was sorry for her. I think that, about that time I met her, I was sorry for most people. The shock of Audrey's departure had had that effect upon me. It is always the bad n.i.g.g.e.r who gets religion most strongly at the camp-meeting, and in my case 'getting religion' had taken the form of suppression of self.

I never have been able to do things by halves, or even with a decent moderation. As an egoist I had been thorough in my egoism; and now, fate having bludgeoned that vice out of me, I found myself possessed of an almost morbid sympathy with the troubles of other people.