"Yes," Aubrey Flood said; "yes, Miss Marriott, here indeed is his Grace, who has come to hear how we are going to attack him."

The duke looked at Flood with a half smile, there seemed to be something condescending in it, then he turned eagerly to Mary. "Oh, Miss Marriott," he said, "you cannot think how interesting all this is to me, and how grateful I am to you for enabling me to see it all."

He looked up and round, and there was something in his voice that showed he was alert and aware--aware and curious.

"We shall be about half an hour before we begin to read the play, your Grace," Aubrey Flood said. "Would you like to be shown over the theatre--that is, have you ever been over a theatre from the 'behind-the-scenes' point of view, as it were?"

"No, I have not," the duke answered, "and I should like to very much."

At the same moment the stage manager came hurrying up to Aubrey Flood.

The actor turned to the duke and to Mary Marriott.

"Miss Marriott," he said, "would you show the duke something of the theatre? I must talk to Mr. Howard."

Mary and the duke moved away together.

"I don't quite know what to show you," she said, "and will you really be interested in the way we present our illusions?"

"Miss Marriott," the duke answered, "I want to know all sorts of things which I have never known before. I've always been boxed up, so to say.

Life has been rather a monotonous procession for me up to the present.

Now I am simply greedy and eager for new sensations."

"Then, come along," the girl answered; "come along, and I will show you the mechanism by which we produce our effects."

"Oh, no," the duke answered, "you cannot show me that, Miss Marriott, at all. You can show me a mere mechanism which surrounds and a.s.sists art.

That is all you can show me. It will be in the future that you will show me art itself."

She looked at him with a quiet, considering eye, forgetting for a moment who he was: "Do you know," she said, "I think you must be an artist."

The duke looked at her rather strangely.

CHAPTER XV

THE Ma.n.u.sCRIPT IN THE LIBRARY

The high wall which shields the great palace of the Dukes of Paddington from the gaze of the ordinary pa.s.ser-by is broken in its centre by the treble ornamental gates of ironwork. They are gates with a history, but they are gates which very few Londoners of the present generation have ever seen opened. But about fifty feet to the right of the central entrance there is a little green door set in the thickness of the high brick wall, with a shining bell-push in the lintel. It is through this door that people who have business with the ducal house, now so void and empty of living interest, enter and make acquaintance with the great courtyard in front of the facade.

The big gates during the last few days had been open for several hours each morning and afternoon, while a policeman had been stationed by them. Carts full of building materials had been driven in, while the gap in the wall, which had been made by the bomb, was built up and repaired.

Therefore, Arthur Burnside, in his black bowler hat and unfashionable overcoat, did not trouble to ring the electric bell, which brought the ducal porter to the little door in the wall, but turned in at the main entrance.

The policeman knew him, and, vaguely recognising him as a henchman of the _entourage_, saluted as the young scholar of Paul's went by. The great front door of the house was closed. Six people lived in the empty palace and kept its solitariness warm, but there was a side entrance which they used, and which Burnside, since Colonel Simpson had confirmed the dukes' appointment, used also.

He went in, walking briskly through the keen air, rang the bell, was admitted by an under-steward, and hung up his coat and hat in a small lobby. Then he traversed a longish corridor, pushed open a green baize door at the end of it, and came into the great central hall of the house. As he did so he looked round him, stopped, and sighed.

There was a great marble staircase before him, a staircase of white marble from Carrara, which mounted to a wonderful marble balcony, which ran round the central square of the famous house. Statues, each one of which was known and priced minutely in the catalogues of the connoisseurs, were standing in their cold beauty on the stairway. The celebrated purple carpet from Teheran ran up to the gallery above. All round in the hall were huge doors of mahogany, leading to this or that marvellous _salon_. Another and older carpet of purple, extraordinarily large and woven in Persia for the late duke many years ago, covered the tesselated pavement. There were chairs set about, examples of priceless Chippendale, and little gla.s.s-topped tables held collections of miniatures, which were as well known as they were priceless.

The three pictures which hung in the lower part of the great hall beneath the gallery, and surrounding the door which led to the library, were three Gainsboroughs of riant beauty and incomparable value.

But it was all a dead house, a house where n.o.body lived, a museum of priceless treasures which n.o.body ever saw.

As the young man stepped across the heavy carpet, walking upon it as one walks upon a well-trimmed tennis lawn, he shuddered a little to think that all this collection of beauty was crammed together in a dead profusion which appealed to n.o.body. He said to himself: "How terrible it all is! How terrible it is to think of this huge palace of art, set in the very centre of London, closed and shuttered with no appeal to the world. No one can come and see these lovely and famous things, and I myself, who appreciate each and every one of them, am oppressed, not only by the silence and seclusion of it all, but also by the fact that in this one house there are stored treasures of art so thickly that one has no time to think about _this_ before the adjacent _other one_ comes and obscures one's comprehension."

He pushed open the vast panelled door which led to the library and entered. The library was a huge place, as big as the central room in the town hall of any flourishing provincial town. The ceiling was designed by Adams, and the supreme genius of that master of plaster-work seemed to burgeon out and down into the place, reminding one always that the great artist had been here. The books, in their gla.s.s-fronted cabinets, reached only to a half-height of the walls. On the top of the shelves stood the late duke's well-known collection of Chinese porcelain of the Ming dynasty.

There were three great fires in the place, and each one of them was glowing now, as the solitary young scholar of Paul's entered and closed the heavy twelve-foot door behind him.

He went up to the largest fireplace of all, where logs were hissing in the hot enveloping flame. He turned his back upon it and surveyed the vast expanse before him. The books in the room were probably worth three hundred thousand pounds. There were the first four folios of Shakespeare, there was a great case which held the Vinegar Bible, the Breeches Bible, and the very earliest black-letter copy of the Scriptures, printed by Schwartz and Pannheim upon the heights of the Apennines in fear of their death should it become known.... It was simply beyond statement, thirty or forty great collections were comprised in this one room. The young scholar's love of books and appreciation of their history thrilled at the sight of all this wealth, thrilled to know that fortune had given him the temporary control of it all.

Upon a great red leather-covered writing-table, set by the princ.i.p.al fireside, lay his papers and the calf-bound volumes in which, with scrupulous care and accurate knowledge, he was completing the work of cataloguing which the death of his predecessor had left unfinished. He went towards the table, looked at the records of his first fortnight's work for a moment or two, sighed a little, and then sat down and concentrated his mind upon what he had to do.

For several hours he worked steadily--it had been through his great capacity for steady, uninterrupted and concentrated work that this young man had risen from the ordinary Board school to the higher-grade school, and had won the most difficult and brilliant scholarship that the aristocratic college of St. Paul's at Oxford had in its gift.

Here was a young man determined to get on; nothing could stop him, nothing could stand in his way. In temperament he was like a steel drill that, driven by tireless energy, goes lower and lower through the granite rock, and through the quartz, until at last the desired strata is reached and won.

He worked the whole morning with hardly a pause. At one o'clock he took a paper of sandwiches from his pocket and made his simple meal. Then he worked onwards till three. At that time, feeling that he had done his duty, or rather more, by his employer the duke, whom, by the way, he had never seen since his appointment as librarian nor subsequently during the extraordinary ferment that his Grace's disappearance, reappearance, and return to health had occasioned in the Press, he put away the catalogue upon which he was engaged.

Then he opened a drawer in the great writing-table, a locked drawer, and pulled out a pile of ma.n.u.script. He turned it over until the last few pages were displayed. Then, with a puckered forehead and a mouth which was undecided only because it was critical, the shabby young man in the black clothes, surrounded by evidence of incalculable wealth read steadily at what he designed to be a key which should open modern political life to him.

He read on and on, now and again making an annotation with his fountain pen, sometimes waiting for two or three minutes before he scored through a pa.s.sage or added a few words. Then at last a clock, a great clock which had been brought from Versailles, beat out the hour of four with deep sonorous notes like the voice of an old man.

Burnside pulled his nickel watch from his pocket, saw that it synchronised with the stately time given by the guardian of the library, and hurried away.

He crossed the hall, went down the pa.s.sage which led to the side door, put on his hat and coat, and disappeared into Piccadilly, quite forgetting that he had left the last pages of his ma.n.u.script upon the writing-table.

It was a fortnight since the duke had been allowed to listen to the reading of the play at the Park Lane Theatre.

When he had heard James Fabian Rose read the work to the company who sat and stood around upon the grey and empty stage the duke had not been very much impressed. He had not been impressed--that is to say--with the actual achievement of Rose's work. He had listened with some bewilderment to the tags, stage directions, and so forth, and now and then he had been caught up into a mental reverie by some biting, stinging paradox or epigram.

As he sat there the duke had been frankly watching Mary Marriott's face as she listened to the author's words. He saw her eyes light up and become intent, or flicker down into a strange gloom. He marked the sudden rigidity of her pose, the relaxation of it when something was afoot in which she was not particularly concerned, the whole careful attention and sympathetic watching of the girl. What all this play meant, he, sitting on a chair on the O.P. side of the stage, could hardly gather. He realised, nevertheless, by watching Mary, and by surveying the other members of the company, that the play was obviously something rather important and out of the usual run of such things.

To him it conveyed little or nothing, but he had become sufficiently mobile in mind to realise that probably this happening in the grey light of the afternoon and the shabby surroundings of the stage were yet instinct with potentiality, and would become--in their full fruition--something charged with purpose and an appeal to the general world.

After it was all over he had thanked Rose, Aubrey Flood, and Mary Marriott, had got into a cab and been driven back to Grosvenor Street.

He was conscious himself at the moment that he had been a little unresponsive and chilly in his manner, but for the life of him he hadn't been able to express himself more pleasantly.

"Thank you so much, Miss Marriott," he had said, "for letting me come here this afternoon. Indeed, Mr. Rose, I think it is most sporting of you to ask me. For my part, I frankly confess I don't realise what it's all about! It's all so new to me, you know, to hear something read in this way, and I cannot grasp it as a whole. At the same time," he concluded with a weary smile, "at the same time, if this is your attack upon me, or, rather, upon people like me, then, my dear Mr. Rose, I think you ought to sharpen your sword."

As he had said this both Aubrey Flood and the great Socialist had chuckled, while the former remarked, "Wait and see, your Grace. Wait and see what we can eventually spin out of such dull ritual on such a grey afternoon as this."

"I will, Mr. Rose," the duke had answered rather shortly, and gone back to the cheery house in Grosvenor Street.