Beaumaroy Home from the Wars Part 17

"Right as rain, sir," Beaumaroy a.s.sured him cheerfully.

Very feebly the old man moved his right hand towards the open grave.

"Plenty--plenty! All yours, Hector! For--for the Cause--G.o.d's with us!"

His head fell forward on Beaumaroy's breast; for an instant again he raised it, and looked in the face of his friend. A smile came on his lips. "I know I can trust you. I'm safe with you, Hector." His head fell forward again; his whole body was relaxed; he gave a sigh of peace.

Beaumaroy lifted him in his arms and very gently set him back in his great chair, placing his feet again on the high footstool.

"I think it's all over," he said, and Mary saw tears in his eyes.

Then Mary herself collapsed; she sank down on the dais and broke into weeping. It had all been so pitiful--and somehow so terrible. Her quick tumultuous sobbing sounded through the place which the vibrations of the old man's voice had lately filled.

She felt Beaumaroy's hand on her shoulder. "You must make sure," he said, in a low voice. "You must make your examination."

With trembling hands she did it--she forced herself to it, Beaumaroy aiding her. There was no doubt. Life had left the body which reason had left long before. His weakened heart had not endured the last strain of mad excitement. The old man was dead.

Her face showed Beaumaroy the result of her examination, if he had ever doubted of it. She looked at him, then made a motion of her hand towards the body. "We must--we must----" she stammered, the tears still rolling down her cheeks.

"Presently," he said. "There's plenty of time. You're not fit to do that now--and no more am I, to tell the truth. We'll rest for half an hour, and then get him upstairs, and--and do the rest. Come with me!" He put his hand lightly within her arm. "He will rest quietly on his throne for a little while. He's not afraid any more. He's at rest."

Still with his arm in Mary's, he bent forward and kissed the old man on the forehead. "I shall miss you, old friend," he said. Then, with gentle insistence, he led Mary away. They left the old man, propped up by the high stool on which his feet rested, seated far back in the great chair, hard by Captain Duggle's grave, where the sceptre lay on a carpet of gold. The tall candles burnt on either side of his throne, imparting a far-off semblance of ceremonial state.

Thus died, unmarried, in the seventy-first year of his age, Aloysius William Saffron, formerly of Exeter, Surveyor and Auctioneer. He had run, on the whole, a creditable course; starting from small beginnings, and belonging to a family more remarkable for eccentricity than for any solid merit, he had built up a good practice; he had made money and put it by; he enjoyed a good name for financial probity. But he was held to be a vain, fussy, self-important, peac.o.c.ky fellow; very self-centred also and (as Beaumaroy had indicated) impatient of the family and social obligations which most men recognize, even though often unwillingly. As the years gathered upon his head, these characteristics were intensified. On the occasion of some trifling set-back in business--a rival cut him out in a certain negotiation--he threw up everything and disappeared from his native town. Thenceforward nothing was heard of him there, save that he wrote occasionally to his cousin, Sophia Radbolt, and her husband, both of whom he most cordially hated, whose claims to his notice, regard, or a.s.sistance he had, of late years at least, hotly resented. Yet he wrote to them--wrote them vaunting and magniloquent letters, hinting darkly of great doings and great riches. In spite of their opinion of him, the Radbolts came to believe perhaps half of what he said; he was old and without other ties; their thirst for his money was greedy. Undoubtedly the Radbolts would dearly have loved to get hold of him and--somehow--hold him fast.

When he came to Tower Cottage--it was in the first year of the war--he was precariously sane; it was only gradually that his fundamental and const.i.tutional vices and foibles turned to a morbid growth. First came intensified hatred and suspicion of the Radbolts--they were after him and his money! Then, through hidden processes of mental distortion, there grew the conviction that he was of high importance, a great man, the object of great conspiracies, in which the odious Radbolts were but instruments. It was, no doubt, the course of public events, culminating in the Great War, which gave to his mania its special turn, to his delusion its monstrous (but, as Doctor Mary was aware, by no means unprecedented) character. By the time of his meeting with Beaumaroy the delusion was complete; through all the second half of 1918 he followed--so far as his mind could now follow anything rationally--in his own person and fortunes the fate of the man whom he believed himself to be, appropriating the hopes, the fears, the imagined ambitions, the physical infirmity, of that self-created other self.

But he wrapped it all in deep secrecy, for, as the conviction of his true ident.i.ty grew complete, his fears were multiplied. Radbolts indeed!

The whole of Christendom--Princ.i.p.alities and Powers--were on his track.

They would shut him up--kill him perhaps! Cunningly he hid his secret--save what could not be entirely hidden, the physical deformity.

But he hid it with his shawl; he never ate out of his own house; the combination knife-and-fork was kept sedulously hidden. Only to Beaumaroy did he reveal the hidden thing; and later, on Beaumaroy's persuasion, he let into the portentous secret one faithful servant--Beaumaroy's unsavoury retainer, Sergeant Hooper.

He never accepted Hooper as more than a distasteful necessity--somebody must wait on him and do him menial service--not feared indeed, for surely such a dog would not dare to be false, but cordially disliked.

Beaumaroy won him from the beginning. Whom he conceived him to be Beaumaroy himself never knew, but he opened his heart to him unreservedly. Of him he had no suspicion; to him he looked for safety and for the realization of his cherished dreams. Beaumaroy soothed his terrors and humoured him in all things--what was the good of doing anything else? asked Beaumaroy's philosophy. He loved Beaumaroy far more than he had loved anybody except himself in all his life. At the end, through the wild tangle of mad imaginings, there ran this golden thread of human affection; it gave the old man hours of peace, sometimes almost of sanity.

So he came to his death, directly indeed of a long-standing organic disease, yet veritably self-destroyed. And so he sat now dead, amidst his shabby parody of splendour. He had done with thrones; he had even done with Tower Cottage--unless indeed his pale shade were to hold nocturnal converse with the robust and flamboyant ghost of Captain Duggle; the one vaunting his unreal vanished greatness, mouthing orations and mimicking pomp; the other telling, in language garnished with strange and horrible oaths, of those dark and lurid terrors which once had driven him from this very place, leaving it ablaze behind. A strange couple they would make, and strange would be their conversation!

Yet the tenement which had housed the old man's deranged spirit, empty as now it was--aye, emptier than Duggle's tomb--was still to be witness of one more earthly scene and unwittingly bear part in it.

CHAPTER XIII

RIGHT OF CONQUEST

What has been related of Mr. Saffron's life before he ascended the throne on which he still sat in the Tower represented all that Beaumaroy knew of his old friend before they met--indeed he knew scarcely as much.

He told the brief story to Doctor Mary in the parlour. She heard him listlessly; all that was not much to the point on which her thoughts were set, and did not answer the riddle which the scene in the Tower put to her. She was calm now--and ashamed that she had ever lost her calmness.

"Well, there was the situation as I understood it when I took on the job--or quite soon afterwards. He thought that he was being pursued; in a sense he was. If these Radbolts found out the truth, they certainly would pursue him, try to shut him up, and prevent him from making away with his money or leaving it to anybody else. I didn't at all know at first what a tidy lot he had. He hated the Radbolts; even after he ceased to know them as cousins, he remained very conscious of them always; they were enemies, spies, secret service people on his track--poor old boy! Well, why should they have him and his money? I didn't see it. I don't see it to this day."

Mary was in Mr. Saffron's arm-chair. Beaumaroy stood before the fire.

She looked up at him.

"They seem to have more right than anybody else. And you know--you knew--that he was mad."

"His being mad gives them no right! Oh, well, it's no use arguing. In the end I suppose they had rights--of a kind--a right by law, I suppose--though I never knew the law and don't want to--to shut the old man up, and make him d.a.m.ned miserable, and get the money for themselves.

That sounds just the sort of right the law does give people over other people--because Aunt Betsy married Uncle John fifty years ago, and was probably infernally sorry for it!"

Mary smiled. "A matter of principle with you, was it, Mr. Beaumaroy?

"No--instinct, I think. It's my instinct to be against the proper thing, the regular thing, the thing that deals hardly with an individual in the name of some highly nebulous general principle."

"Like discipline?" she put in, with a reminiscence of Major-General Punnit.

He nodded. "Yes, that's one case of it. And, then, the situation amused me. I think that had more to do with it than anything else at first. It amused me to play up to his delusions. I suggested the shawl as useful on our walks--and thereby got him to take wholesome exercise; that ought to appeal to you, Doctor! I got him the combination knife-and-fork; that made him enjoy his meals--also good for him, Doctor! But I didn't do these things because they were good for him, but because they amused me.

They never amused Hooper, he's a dull, surly, and--I'm inclined to believe--treacherous dog."

"Who is he?"

"Sacked from the army--sent to quod. Just a gaol-bird whom I've kept loose. But the things did amuse me, and it was that at first. But then----" he paused.

Looking at him again, Mary saw a whimsical tenderness expressed in his eyes and smile. "The poor old chap was so overwhelmingly grateful. He thought me the one indubitably faithful adherent that he had. And so I was too--though not in the way he thought. And he trusted me absolutely.

Well, was I to give him up--to the law, and the Radbolts, and the gaolers of an asylum--a man who trusted me like that?"

"But he was mad," objected Doctor Mary obstinately.

"A man has his feelings--or may have--even when he's mad. He trusted me and he loved me, Doctor Mary. Won't you allow that I've my case--so far?" She made no sign of a.s.sent. "Well then, I loved him--does that go any better with you? If it doesn't, I'm in a bad way; because what I'm giving you now is the strong part of my case."

"I don't see why you should put what you call your case to me at all, Mr. Beaumaroy."

He looked at her in a reproachful astonishment. "But you seemed touched by--by what we saw in the Tower. I thought the old man's death--and fate--had appealed to you. It seems to me that people can't go through a thing like that together without feeling--well, some sort of comrades.h.i.+p. But if you've no sort of feeling of that kind--well, I don't want to put my case."

"Go on with your case," said Doctor Mary, after a moment's silence.

"Though it isn't really that I want to put a case for myself at all. But I don't mind owning that I'd like you to understand about it--before I clear out."

She looked at him questioningly, but put no spoken question. Beaumaroy sat down on the stool opposite to her, and poked the fire.

"I can't get away from it, can I? There was something else you saw in the Tower, wasn't there, and I dare say that you connect it with a conversation that we had together a little while ago? Well, I'll tell you about that. Oh, well, of course I must, mustn't I?"

"I should like to hear." Her bitterness was gone; he had come now to the riddle.

"He was a king to himself," Beaumaroy resumed thoughtfully, "but in fact I was king over him. I could do anything I liked with him. I had him. I possessed him--by right of conquest. The right of conquest seemed a big thing to me; it was about the only sort of right that I'd seen anything of for three years and more. Yes, it was--and is--a big thing, a real thing--the one right in the whole world that there's no doubt about.

Other rights are theories, views, preachments! Right of conquest is a fact. I had it. I could make him do what I liked, sign what I liked. Do you begin to see where I found myself? I say found myself, because really it was a surprise to me. At first I thought he was in a pretty small way--he only gave me a hundred a year besides my keep. True, he always talked of his money, but I set that down mainly to his delusion.

But it was true that he had a lot--really a lot. A good bit besides what you saw in there; he must have speculated cleverly, I think, he can't have made it all in his business. Doctor Mary, how much gold do you think there is in the grave in there?

"I haven't the least idea. Thousands? Where did you get it?"

"Oh yes, thousands--and thousands. We got it mostly from the aliens in the East End; they'd h.o.a.rded it, you know; but they were willing to sell at a premium. The premium rose up to last month; then it dropped a little--not much, though, because we'd exhausted some of the most obvious sources. I carried every sovereign of that money in the grave down from London in my brown bag." He smiled reflectively. "Do you know how much a thousand sovereigns weigh, Doctor Mary?"