Geoffrey Hamstead Part 25

"Lord Warcote had lived a fast life in his earlier days. After Nature had allowed him a rare fling for sixty years she was beginning to withdraw her powers, and my grandfather had become as religious as he had been fast. The effect of my mother's presence upon him was to make him suddenly young again, and although he soon a.s.sumed his new Puritan gravity he could not keep his eyes off her. On a jury he would have acquitted her of anything, and when she turned around imperiously and told a servant to bring a chair, 'Good Lord!' he said, 'she's a Russian princess!' and he jumped up like an old courtier to get the chair himself. The more he heard of her story the more interested he became, and when he had heard it all, nothing would suffice but an immediate marriage. My father protested on several grounds, but his protests made no difference to the old man. His will, he said, would be law until he died, and even after he died, and, what with my mother's beauty, which made him take what he understood to be a strong religious interest in her behalf, and one thing and another, he got quite fanatical on the point. He forgot himself several times, and swore he would cut father off with nothing if he refused.

"The end of it was that they were married at once, and afterward I was born. My poor mother had no intention of giving father trouble when she came to England, neither did she wish in the slightest degree for a formal marriage, the usefulness of which she did not understand. She simply felt that she could not do without him. And I don't think he ever regretted the step he was driven to. She had some failings, but she was as true and loving to him as a woman could be, besides being, for a short time, considered a miracle of beauty in London.

"I can only remember her dimly as going out riding with father. They say her horsemans.h.i.+p was the most perfect thing ever seen in the hunting field. It was the means of her death at last. The trouble was that she did not know what fear was while on horseback. She thought a horse ought to do anything. Father has told me that when they were out together a freak would seize her suddenly, and away she would go across country for miles--riding furiously, like her forefathers, waving her whip high in the air for him to follow, and taking everything on the full fly. If her horse could not get over anything he had to go through it. At last, one day, an oak fence stopped her horse forever, and she was carried home dead. I was three years old then."

Geoffrey paused.

The others remained silent. His strong magnetic voice, rendered more powerful by the vehement way he interpreted the last part of the story in his actions, impressed them. They were walking in the Queen's Park at this time, and it did not matter that he was more than usually graphic.

When he spoke of the wild riding of the Tartars, he sprang forward full of a bodily eloquence. For an instant, while poised upon his toes, his cane waving high aloft, his head and shoulders thrown back in an ecstasy of abandon, and his left hand outstretched as if holding the reins, he seemed to electrify them, and to give them the whole scene as it appeared in his own mind. Rankin shuddered. Involuntarily he gasped out:

"Hampstead! For G.o.d's sake, don't do that!"

"Why not?" said Geoffrey, as he resumed his place beside them, while the wild flash died out of his eyes.

"Because no man could do it like that unless--because, in fact, you do it too infernally well."

Rankin felt that Margaret must be suffering. It seemed to him that.

Geoffrey had really become a Tartar marauder for a moment. Perhaps he had.

"Don't mind my saying this," Maurice added, with apology. "Really, I could not help it."

Geoffrey laughed. Margaret was grave. Rankin strayed on a few steps in advance, and Geoffrey, taking advantage of it, whispered quickly. "What are you thinking of, Margaret?"

"I was thinking I saw a wild man," said Margaret truthfully. Then, to be more pleasant, she added, "And I thought that if Tartar marauders were all like you, Geoffrey, I would rather prefer them as a cla.s.s."

Maurice, who was unconsciously _de trop_ at this moment, turned and said:

"You have got me 'worked up' over your story, and now I demand to know more. Do not say that 'the continuation of this story will be published in the New York Ledger of the current year.' Go ahead."

"Anything more I have to tell," said Geoffrey, "only relates to myself."

"Never mind. For once you are interesting. Drive on."

"Well, where was I? Oh, yes! Well, my father married again six months after my mother's death. He married a woman who had been a flame of his in early youth, and who had developed a fine temper in her virgin solitude. They had six children. I was packed off to school early, and was kept there almost continually. After that I was sent away traveling with a tutor, a sanctimonious fellow who urged me into all the devilment the Continent could provide, so that he might really enjoy himself. Then I came home and got rid of him. It was at this time that I first heard from my father about my mother and my birth. The story did me no good. I got morbid over it. Previously I had thought myself of the best blood in England. We were ent.i.tled as of right to royal quarterings, and the new intelligence struck all the peac.o.c.k pride out of me. I felt like a burst balloon. The only thing I cared about was to go to Russia and see the place my mother came from. I got letters from my father to some of his old friends at St. Petersburg, and with their influence found my way to the very village my mother came from. Some of the villagers remembered quite well the raid when my mother was carried off and how her enterprising father had been killed. What made me wonder was where my mother got her aristocratic beauty. Among the undiluted, pug-nosed, b.e.s.t.i.a.l Tartars such beauty was impossible. I found, however, that my mother's mother had also been a captive. No one knew where she came from. Most likely from Circa.s.sia or Persia. The villagers at the time of the raid were the remnants of a large predatory tribe that formerly used to sally forth on long excursions covering many hundreds of miles. At that time--the time of their strength--they lived almost entirely by robbery, and their name was dreaded everywhere within a radius of five hundred miles. I have always hoped that my mother's mother was of some better race than the Tartar. There is no doubt, however, that my mother's father was a full-blooded Tartar, though he may have had straighter features than the generality of them. I found there a younger brother of my mother. He was a wallowing, drunken, thieving pig, this uncle of mine, but under the bloated look he had acquired from excesses, one could trace straight and possibly handsome features. As the son would most likely resemble his father, I can only infer that the father was not so bad-looking as he might have been, and so, with one thing and another, I came to understand the possibility of my mother's beauty.

"It may have been morbid of me. I should have left the matter alone, for I believed in 'race' so much that my discoveries ground me into dust.

Nothing satisfied me, however, unless I went to the bottom of it. I watched this uncle of mine for two or three weeks, and made a friend of him, merely to see if I could trace in him any likeness to myself. I made him drunk. I made him sober. I made him run and walk and ride.

Sometimes I thought I traced the likeness clearly, and then again I changed my mind. I tried him in other ways, leaving in my quarters small desirable objects partly concealed. They always disappeared. He stole them with the regularity of clockwork. I can laugh over these matters now, speaking of them for the first time in twelve years. At that time I groaned over it, and still persevered in trying to find out what could do me no good. I am so like my father that I could find no resemblance in me to the Tartar uncle. But at last I got a 'sickener.' While talking to him I noticed that he made his gestures pointing the two first fingers; instead of all or only one finger. I watched his dirty hands while he mumbled on, half drunk, and then I saw that for a pastime, as a Western Yankee might whittle or pick his teeth, this man threw the third and fourth fingers of his left hand out of joint and in again. He said his father and also, he had heard, his grandfather could do this with ease.

"An hour afterward, I think I must have been a good ten miles off--flying back to civilized Russia, my servants after me, thinking I was mad. Perhaps I was a little queer in the head at the time."

"What made you go off in that way?" asked Maurice, who did not see the connection.

Geoffrey made no verbal reply, but he held out his left hand with the two last fingers out of joint. Then he showed how easily he could put them "in" and "out."

"None of my father's family can do this, but my mother could. Both my mother and the pig of an uncle held out these two fingers in their gestures, and curled the others up so, and I do the same. I can laugh now, but it killed me at the time.

"I traveled all over the world before I came back to England. My half-brothers were then pretty well grown up and were fully acquainted with everything concerning my birth and my mother's history. My step-mother hated me because I was the eldest son, and she poisoned her children's minds against me. She sought out my old tutor, who, when paid well, told her a lot of vile and untrue stories about me. With these she tried to poison my father's mind also in regard to me. I was moody, morbid, and restless. They looked at me as if I was some other kind of creature, the son of a savage, and it galled me, for all my subsequent travelings had never removed the sting of my birth. Some deplore illegitimacy. Rubbis.h.!.+ Wrong selection, not want of a ceremony, is the real sin that is visited unto the children.

"After my return home I could have died with more complacency than I felt in living. Even my father seemed at last to be turned against me by my step-mother. One day while we were at dinner my step-mother, who possessed a fiend's temper, had a hot discussion with me about something which I have forgotten. Words were not well chosen on either side, and she flew into a tantrum. I remember saying at last: 'Madame, it would take two or three keepers to keep you in order.' Everybody was against me, of course, and when her own eldest son half arose and addressed me, his remarks met with applause. What he said to me, in quiet scorn, was:

"'Our mother's temper may not be good, sir, but we don't find it necessary to send a keeper with her to keep her from stealing.'

"I have since found out, in a roundabout way, that my beautiful mother preferred to steal a thing out of a shop rather than pay for it. My father had always looked at this weakness of hers as a most humorous thing. Anything she did charmed him. Sometimes she would show him what she had stolen, and it would be returned or paid for. However, at the time that this was said to me at the table I did not know of these facts. I arose, amid the derisive laughter that followed the 'good hit,'

and demanded of my father how he dared to allow my mother's name to be insulted. I secretly felt at the time that the slur upon her honesty might be well founded, but the possible truth of it made the insult all the worse to me.

"This was the last straw. I felt myself growing wild. Father did not look at me. He merely went on with his dinner, laughing quietly at the old joke and at my discomfiture. He said: 'I can not see any insult, when what Harry says is perfectly true--and a devilish good joke it was.'

"I did not appreciate that joke. I was almost crazy at the time. My father's laughter seemed the cruelest thing I had ever heard. I 'turned to,' as Jack Cresswell would say, and cursed them all, individually and collectively, and then took my hat and left the house, which I have never seen since and never intend to see again."

"And what about the tutor that told the stories about you?" asked Rankin.

"Aha, Maurice," continued Geoffrey, brightening up from painful memories, "you have a n.o.ble mind for sequences. What about the tutor?

Just so, what about him?" and Geoffrey slapped Rankin on the back heartily, as a pleasanter memory presented itself gratefully.

"I wish you would not strike me like that. I am thinking of going to church to-night, unless disabled. What about your beastly tutor? For goodness' sake, do drive on!"

"Oh, well, I can't tell you much about that, not just now. Of course, the first thing I did was to pay him a call at his lodgings in London.

Your great mind saw that this was natural. That call was a relief. I came out when it was finished and told somebody to look after him, and then took pa.s.sage for New York in a vessel that sailed from London on the same day."

Margaret and Rankin smiled at the grim way in which he spoke about the visit to the tutor.

"On arriving in New York I got a small position in a Wall Street broker's office, and learned the business. From that I went, with the a.s.sistance of their recommendation, into a bank. While in this bank I fell in with some young fellows from Montreal, and afterward stayed with them in Montreal during holidays. They wanted me to come to that city, and I liked the English way of the Canadians, so I came. On entering the Victoria Bank I got good recommendations from the one I had left. From Montreal I was moved to the head office, and here I am."

There was much to render Margaret thoughtful in this story that Geoffrey told. She was pleased to find that he belonged to the English n.o.bility, because it seemed to a.s.sist her opinion when, with the confidence of love, she had placed him in a n.o.bility such as she hoped could exist among mankind. Otherwise, the fact that there was a t.i.tle in his family meant very little to her. Her own father's family would have declined any t.i.tle in England involving change of name. What did affect her as a thinking woman, and one given to the study of natural history, was the awful gap on the other side of the house. Following so closely upon the a.s.surance that he was well born, it was a cruel wrench. His interests were hers now, and it seemed as if they suffered jointly--she, through him. She felt that all this bound them more together, and she did her best to appear unconscious and gay.

He looked at her when he had finished, and, behind their smiles, each saw that the other was trying to make the best of things--that there was something now between them to be feared, which might rise up in the future and give them pain.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Those aggressive impulses inherited from the pre-social state--those tendencies to seek self-satisfaction regardless of injury to other beings, which are essential to a predatory life, const.i.tute an anti-social force, tending ever to cause conflict and eventual separation of citizens.--Herbert Spencer, _Synthetic Philosophy._

Nina Lindon had by no means given up the pulse-stirring and secret drives with Geoffrey. The only thing she had given up was saying to herself that in the future she would not go any more. The result of this frequent yielding to inclination was that she was miserable enough when away from him and not particularly contented when with him. Between her and Margaret Mackintosh a coolness had arisen. Margaret was an unsuspicious person, but her affections had developed her womanhood, and in some mysterious way she had divined that Nina cared to be with Geoffrey more than she would confess. There was no jealousy on Margaret's side. She simply dropped Nina, and perhaps would have found it hard to say on what grounds. In such matters women take their impressions from such small occurrences that their dislikes often seem more like instinct even to themselves.

As for Nina, she had liked Margaret only with her better self, and now she had become conscious of a growing feeling of constraint when in her presence. The increasing frigidity with which the taller beauty received her seemed to afford ground for private dislike. She was unconfessedly trying to bring herself to hate Margaret, and was on the lookout for a reasonable cause to do so. To undermine a detested person treacherously would be far more comfortable than undermining a friend. The difficulty lay in being unable to hate sufficiently for the hate to become a support.

Later on in June a ball was given at Government House. The usual rabble was present. Margaret did not go, as her father happened to be ill at the time. Nina was there in full force. Geoffrey appeared late in the evening with several others who had been dining with him at the club. As the host he had been observing the hospitalities, and it took several dances to bring his guests down to the comfortable a.s.surance that they really had their sea-legs on. They looked all right and perhaps felt better than they looked; but during the first waltz or two there seemed to be unexpected irregularities in the floor that had to be treated with care.

After a few dances, which Geoffrey found kept for him as usual, Nina and he disappeared--also as usual. Nina was not among the dissolving views who do nothing but dissolve. She was fond of her dancing as yet, and, as a rule, only disappeared once in the course of the evening. This sounds virtuous, but there is perhaps more safety in a plurality of disappearances.

The next day she telegraphed to some friends in Montreal, from whom she had a standing invitation, that she was coming to see them. They wired back that they would be charmed to see her. Then she telegraphed again: "Had arranged to stop at Brockville on my return from you, but have just heard that they go away in ten days. Would it be all the same if I went to you about Monday week?"

The answer came from Montreal: "That will suit us very well--though we are disappointed. Mind you come." Then Nina wrote and posted to her Montreal girl friend a note, in which she said: "If any letters should come for me just keep them until I arrive. I will go to Brockville now."

Jack Cresswell saw her off by the evening train, bought her ticket to Montreal, and secured her compartment in the sleeper. Her two large valises were carried into the compartment. She said she preferred to have her wearing apparel with her and not bother about baggage-checks.