The Socialist.

by Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger Gull and Guy Thorne.

CHAPTER I

CONCERNING HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF PADDINGTON

There are as many social degrees in the peerage as there are in the middle and lower cla.s.ses.

There are barons who are greater n.o.blemen than earls, viscounts who are welcomed in a society that some marquises can never hope to enter--it is a question not of wealth or celebrity, but of family relationships and date of creation.

When, however, a man is a duke in England, his state is so lofty, he is so inevitably apart from every one else that these remarks hardly apply at all. Yet even in dukedoms one recognises there are degrees. There are royal dukes, stately figureheads moving in the brilliant light which pours from the throne, and generally a little obscured by its refulgence. These have their own serene place and being.

There are the political dukes, Cabinet-made, who are solemnly caricatured through two generations of _Punch_, ma.s.sive, Olympian, and generally asleep on the front benches of the House of Lords.

And every now and then it happens that there are the young dukes.

The fathers of the young dukes have lived to a great age and married late in life. They have died when their sons were little children. For years it seems to the outside public as if certain historic houses are in abeyance. Nothing much is heard of these names, and only Londoners who pay enormous ground rents to this or that Ducal estate office realise what a long minority means.

From time to time paragraphs find their way into the society papers telling of the progress of this or that young dukeling at Eton. The paragraphs become more in evidence when the lad goes to Oxford, and then, like a suddenly-lit lamp, the prince attains his majority.

Paragraphs in weekly papers expand into columns in all the dailies. The public suddenly realises that the Duke of ----, a young man of twenty-one, owns a great slice of London, has an income of from one to two hundred thousand pounds a year, and by the fact of his position is a force in public affairs. For a week every one talks about the darling of fortune. His pictures are in all the journals. His castle in Kent, his palace in Park Lane, his castle in Scotland, his villa at Monte Carlo, are, as it were, thrown open to the inspection of the world. The hereditary jewels are disinterred by popular rumour from the vaults at Coutts' Bank. The Mysore Nagar emerald that the third duke brought from India glitters once more in the fierce light of day. The famous diamond tiara that the second duke bought for his d.u.c.h.ess (in the year when his horse "Strawberry Leaf" won the Derby and His Grace eighty thousand pounds) sparkles as never before. Photographers seek, and obtain, permission to visit the famous picture galleries at Duke Dale, and American millionaires gasp with envy as they read of the Velasquez, the three Murillos, the priceless series of Rembrandt genre pictures, and the "Prince in Sable" of Vandyck, owned by a youth who has in all probability never seen any one of them.

The man in the street has his pa.s.sing throb of envy, and then, being a generous-minded fellow in the main, and deeply imbued with loyalty to all existing and splendid inst.i.tutions, wishes his lordship luck and promptly forgets all about him.

What the man _on_ the street--a very different sort of person--says, is merely a matter which polite people do not hear, for who heeds a few growls in cellars or curses in a cul-de-sac?

Women are even more generous, as is their dear mission to the world. If your dukeling is a pretty lad, presentable and straight as caught by the obsequious camera, they give him kind thoughts and wonder who the fortunate girl will be. Who shall share the throne of Prince Fortunatus? On whose white and slender neck shall that great Indian emerald give out its sinful Asiatic fire? On whose shining coronet of hair shall rise that crown of diamonds that the brave horse won for the "bad old duke" on Epsom Downs?

And then all the stir and bother is over. Some newer thing engages the public mind. Another stone is thrown into another pool; the ripples upon the first die away, and the waters are tranquil once more.

Prince Fortunatus has ascended his throne, and the echoes of the ceremonial trumpets are over and gone.

John Augustus Basil FitzTracy was the fifth Duke of Paddington, Earl of Fakenham in Norfolk, and a baronet of the United Kingdom.

His seats were Fakenham Hall, at Fakenham, Castle Trink, N. B., and the old Welsh stronghold, near Conway, known as Carleon, which had come to him from his mother's aunt, old Lady Carleon of Lys.

In regard to his houses, there was, first and foremost, the great square pile in Piccadilly, which was almost as big as the Duke of Devonshire's palace, and was known as Paddington House. There was an old Saxon house near Chipping Norton, in Gloucestershire, which was used as a hunting-box--the late duke always having ridden with the Heythrop. There was also a big blue, pink-and-white villa upon the Promenade des Anglais at Nice--the late duke liked to spend February among the palms and roses of the Riviera, though it was said that the d.u.c.h.ess never accompanied him upon these expeditions to the sun-lit sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean.

The Duke of Paddington was not a great country n.o.bleman. Fakenham was some three thousand acres, and though the shooting was excellent, as is the shooting of all the big houses which surround Sandringham Hall, the place in itself was not particularly noteworthy. Nor did the duke own coal mines, while no railways had enriched him by pa.s.sing through any of his properties.

The duke's enormous revenues were drawn from London. He and their graces of Westminster and Bedford might well have contended for a new t.i.tle--Duke of London. If extent of possessions and magnitude of fortune could alone decide such an issue the Duke of Paddington would have won.

A huge slice of the outer West End--anywhere north of Oxford Street--belonged to him.

His income was variously stated, but the only truth about it, upon which every one was agreed, was that it was incredibly large.

There was a certain modest, ma.s.sive stone building in the Edgware Road where the duke's affairs were conducted. It was known as the FitzTracy Estate Office, forty clerks were regularly employed there, and only old Colonel Simpson, late of the Army Service Corps, and now chief agent to the duke, knew what the actual income was.

Possessor of all this,--and it is but the barest epitome,--the duke was twenty-three years of age, had no near relations, and was just finishing his university career at Oxford.

Everything that the human mind can wish for was his; there was hardly anything in the world, worthy or unworthy, that he could not have by asking for it.

The duke was an undergraduate of St. Paul's College, Oxford. Much smaller than Christ Church, Magdalen, or New College, St. Paul's is, nevertheless, the richest and most aristocratic foundation in the university. It was a preserve of the peerage; no poor men could afford to enter at Paul's, and it was even more difficult for the sons of rich vulgarians to do so.

On one dull, cold morning at the end of the October term the duke came out of his bedroom into the smaller of his two sitting rooms. It was about ten o'clock. He had cut both early chapel or its alternative roll-call--necessities from which even dukes are not exempt if they wish to keep their terms.

The duke wore an old Norfolk jacket and a pair of grey flannel trousers.

His feet were thrust into a pair of red leather bath slippers. He was about five feet ten in height, somewhat st.u.r.dily built, and deliberate in his movements. His head was thickly covered with very dark red hair.

The eyes were grey, and with a certain calm and impa.s.sivity about them--the calm of one so highly placed that nothing can easily affect him; one sees it in the eyes of kings and queens. The nose was aquiline, and thin at the nostrils, the nose of an aristocrat; the mouth was large, and pleasant in expression, though by no means always genial.

There was, in short, something Olympian about this young man, an air, a manner, an aroma of slight aloofness, a consciousness of his position.

It was not aggressive or p.r.o.nounced, but it was indubitably there.

In the majority of colleges at Oxford undergraduates have only two rooms. In Paul's, more particularly in what were known as the new buildings, men had three, a bedroom, a dining-room or small sitting-room, in which breakfast and lunch were taken, and a larger sitting-room.

The duke came out of his bedroom into the smaller room. It was panelled in white throughout. Let into the panels here and there were first impressions of famous coloured mezzotints by Raphael Smith, Valentine Green, and other masters. They had been brought from the portfolios at Paddington House, and each one was worth three hundred pounds.

The chairs of this room were upholstered in red leather--a true vermilion, and not the ordinary crimson--which went admirably with the white walls and the Persian carpet, brick-dust and peac.o.c.k blue colour, from Teheran. A glowing fire of cedar logs sent a cheerful warmth into the room, and the flames were reflected in the china and silver of a small round table prepared for breakfast.

Although it was November, there was a great silver dish of fruit, nectarines, and strawberries, grapes and peaches, all produced in the new electric forcing houses which had been installed at the duke's place at Fakenham. There was no apparatus for tea or coffee. In some things the duke was a little unusual. He never drank tea or coffee, but took a gla.s.s of thin white wine from Valperga. The tall yellow bottle stood on the table now, and by its side was a fragile gla.s.s of gold and purple, blown in Venice three hundred years ago.

The duke crossed the room and the larger one that opened out of it. He pushed open the swing door--the heavy outer "oak" lay flat against the wall--and shouted down the staircase for his "scout."

Despite the ineradicable belief of some popular novelists, there are no bells at Oxford, and duke or commoner must summon his servant in the good old mediaeval way.

In a minute the man appeared with breakfast. He had previously brought his master a printed list from the kitchens when he called him.

Gardener was an elderly, grey-haired man, clean-shaven, and confidential of manner. He had served many young n.o.blemen on staircase number one, and each and all had found him invaluable. He had feathered his nest well during the years, and was worth every penny of ten thousand pounds. A type produced nowhere in such completeness and perfection as at Oxford or Cambridge, he represented a certain definite social cla.s.s, a cla.s.s more hated by the working man than perhaps any other--the polite parasite!

"Beastly weather, Gardener," said the duke in a voice which every one found musical and pleasant, a contented, full-blooded voice.

"It is indeed, sir," said Gardener, as he arranged two silver dishes upon the table--"very dull and cold. I was told that there would be skating on Port Meadow as I came into college this morning."

"Well, I don't think it will tempt me," said the duke. "You understand thoroughly about lunch?"

"Thoroughly, sir, thank you. Do you wish anything else now, sir?"

"Nothing more, Gardener. You can go."

"I thank your grace," said the scout, and left the room. Gardener had brought the art of politeness to a high point. Indeed, he had elevated it to a science. He always made a distinction, thoroughly understood and appreciated by his masters, between himself and the ordinary flunkey or house servant. He called a duke or a marquis "sir" in general address, reserving the t.i.tle for the moment of leaving the room, thus showing that he did not forget the claims of rank, while he was too well-bred to weary his hearer by undue repet.i.tion.

The duke began his breakfast--a chop and a poached egg. The young man was by no means of a luxurious turn of mind as far as his personal tastes were concerned. Simplicity was the keynote of many of his actions. But he was very punctilious that everything about him should be "just so," and had he dined on a dish of lentils he would have liked them cooked by Escoffier.

There was a pile of letters by his plate. He opened them one by one, throwing most of them on to an adjacent chair for his secretary--who called every day at eleven--to answer.