The Treasure of Heaven Part 9

"And," proceeded Benson, "he only took one portmanteau."

"Oh!" again e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the lawyer. And, stroking his bearded chin, he thought awhile.

"Are you going to stay at Carlton House Terrace till he comes back?"

"I have a month's holiday, sir. Then I return to my place. The same order applies to all the servants, sir."

"I see! Well!"

And then there came a pause.

"I suppose," said Sir Francis, after some minutes' reflection, "I suppose you know that during Mr. Helmsley's absence you are to apply to me for wages and household expenses--that, in fact, your master has placed me in charge of all his affairs?"

"So I have understood, sir," replied Benson, deferentially. "Mr.

Helmsley called us all into his room last night and told us so."

"Oh, he did, did he? But, of course, as a man of business, he would leave nothing incomplete. Now, supposing Mr. Helmsley is away more than a month, I will call or send to the house at stated intervals to see how things are getting on, and arrange any matters that may need arranging"--here he glanced at the letter in his hand--"as your master requests. And--if you want anything--or wish to know any news,--you can always call here and inquire."

"Thank you, Sir Francis."

"I'm sorry,"--and the lawyer's shrewd yet kindly eyes looked somewhat troubled--"I'm very sorry that my old friend hasn't taken you with him, Benson."

Benson caught the ring of sympathetic interest in his voice and at once responded to it.

"Well, sir, so am I!" he said heartily. "For Mr. Helmsley's over seventy, and he isn't as strong as he thinks himself to be by a long way. He ought to have some one with him. But he wouldn't hear of my going. He can be right down obstinate if he likes, you know, sir, though he is one of the best gentlemen to work for that ever lived. But he will have his own way, and, bad or good, he takes it."

"Quite true!" murmured Sir Francis meditatively. "Very true!"

A silence fell between them.

"You say he isn't as strong as he thinks himself to be," began Vesey again, presently. "Surely he's wonderfully alert and active for his time of life?"

"Why, yes, sir, he's active enough, but it's all effort and nerve with him now. He makes up his mind like, and determines to be strong, in spite of being weak. Only six months ago the doctor told him to be careful, as his heart wasn't quite up to the mark."

"Ah!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Sir Francis ruefully. "And did the doctor recommend any special treatment?"

"Yes, sir. Change of air and complete rest."

The lawyer's countenance cleared.

"Then you may depend upon it that's why he has gone away by himself, Benson," he said. "He wants change of air, rest, and different surroundings. And as he won't have letters forwarded, and doesn't give any future address, I shouldn't wonder if he starts off yachting somewhere----"

"Oh, no, sir, I don't think so," interposed Benson, "The yacht's in the dry dock, and I know he hasn't given any orders to have her got ready."

"Well, well, if he wants change and rest, he's wise to put a distance between himself and his business affairs"--and Sir Francis here looked round for his hat and walking-stick. "Take me, for example! Why, I'm a different man when I leave this office and go home to lunch! I'm going now. I don't think--I really don't think there is any cause for uneasiness, Benson. Your master will let us know if there's anything wrong with him."

"Oh, yes, sir, he'll be sure to do that. He said he would telegraph for me if he wanted me."

"Good! Now, if you get any news of him before I do, or if you are anxious that I should attend to any special matter, you'll always find me here till one o'clock. You know my private address?"

"Yes, sir."

"That's all right. And when I go down to my country place for the summer, you can come there whenever your business is urgent. I'll settle all expenses with you."

"Thank you, Sir Francis. Good-day!"

"Good-day! A pleasant holiday to you!"

Benson bowed his respectful thanks again, and retired.

Sir Francis Vesey, left alone, took his hat and gazed abstractedly into its silk-lined crown before putting it on his head. Then setting it aside, he drew Helmsley's letter from his pocket and read it through again. It ran as follows:--

"MY DEAR VESEY,--I had some rather bad news on the night of Miss Lucy Sorrel's birthday party. A certain speculation in which I had an interest has failed, and I have lost on the whole 'gamble.' The matter will not, however, affect my financial position. You have all your instructions in order as given to you when we last met, so I shall leave town with an easy mind. I am likely to be away for some time, and am not yet certain of my destination. Consider me, therefore, for the present as lost. Should I die suddenly, or at sickly leisure, I carry a letter on my person which will be conveyed to you, making you acquainted with the sad (?) event as soon as it occurs. And for all your kindly services in the way of both business and friends.h.i.+p, I owe you a vast debt of thanks, which debt shall be fully and gratefully acknowledged,--_when I make my Will_. I may possibly employ another lawyer than yourself for this purpose. But, for the immediate time, all my affairs are in your hands, as they have been for these twenty years or more. My business goes on as usual, of course; it is a wheel so well accustomed to regular motion that it can very well grind for a while without my personal supervision. And so far as my individual self is concerned, I feel the imperative necessity of rest and freedom. I go to find these, even if I lose myself in the endeavour. So farewell! And as old-fas.h.i.+oned folks used to say--'G.o.d be with you!' If there be any meaning in the phrase, it is conveyed to you in all sincerity by your old friend, "DAVID HELMSLEY."

"Cryptic, positively cryptic!" murmured Sir Francis, as he folded up the letter and put it by. "There's no clue to anything anywhere. What does he mean by a bad speculation?--a loss 'on the whole gamble'? I know--or at least I thought I knew--every number on which he had put his money.

It won't affect his financial position, he says. I should think not! It would take a bigger Colossus than that of Rhodes to overshadow Helmsley in the market! But he's got some queer notion in his mind,--some scheme for finding an heir to his millions,--I'm sure he has! A fit of romance has seized him late in life,--he wants to be loved for himself alone,--which, of course, at his age, is absurd! No one loves old people, except, perhaps (in very rare cases), their children,--if the children are not hopelessly given over to self and the hour, which they generally are." He sighed, and his brows contracted. He had a spendthrift son and a "rapid" daughter, and he knew well enough how little he could depend upon them for either affection or respect.

"Old age is regarded as a sort of crime nowadays," he continued, apostrophising the dingy walls of his office, as he took his walking-stick and prepared to leave the premises--"thanks to the donkey-journalism of the period which brays down everything that is not like itself--mere froth and sc.u.m. And unlike our great cla.s.sic teachers who held that old age was honourable and deserved the highest place in the senate, the present generation affects to consider a man well on the way to dotage after forty. G.o.d bless me!--what fools there are in this twentieth century!--what blatant idiots! Imagine national affairs carried on in the country by its young men! The Empire would soon became a mere football for general kicking! However, there's one thing in this Helmsley business that I'm glad of"--and his eyes twinkled--"I believe the Sorrels have lost their game! Positively, I think Miss Lucy has broken her line, and that the fish has gone _without_ her hook in its mouth! Old as he is, David is not too old to outwit a woman! I gave him a hint, just the slightest hint in the world,--and I think he's taken it. Anyhow, he's gone,--booked for Southampton. And from Southampton a man can 's.h.i.+p himself all aboard of a s.h.i.+p,' like Lord Bateman in the ballad, and go anywhere. Anywhere, yes!--but in this case I wonder where he will go? Possibly to America--yet no!--I think not!" And Sir Francis, descending his office stairs, went out into the broad suns.h.i.+ne which flooded the city streets, continuing his inward reverie as he walked,--"I think not. From what he said the other night, I fancy not even the haunting memory of 'ole Virginny' will draw him back _there_.

'Consider me as lost,' he says. An odd notion! David Helmsley, one of the richest men in the whole of two continents, wishes to lose himself!

Impossible! He's a marked multi-millionaire,--branded with the golden sign of unlimited wealth, and as well known as a London terminus! If he were 'lost' to-day, he'd be found to-morrow. As matters stand I daresay he'll turn up all fight in a month's time and I need not worry my head any more about him!"

With this determination Sir Francis went home to luncheon, and after luncheon duly appeared driving in the Park with Lady Vesey, like the attentive and obliging husband he ever was, despite the boredom which the "Row" and the "Ladies' Mile" invariably inflicted upon him,--yet every now and then before him there rose a mental image of his old friend "King David,"--grey, sad-eyed, and lonely--flitting past like some phantom in a dream, and wandering far away from the crowded vortex of London life, where his name was as honey to a swarm of bees, into some dim unreachable region of shadow and silence, with the brief farewell:

"Consider me as lost!"

CHAPTER V

Among the many wild and lovely tangles of foliage and flower which Nature and her subject man succeed in working out together after considerable conflict and argument, one of the most beautiful and luxuriant is a Somersets.h.i.+re lane. Narrow and tortuous, fortified on either side with high banks of rough turf, topped by garlands of climbing wild-rose, bunches of corn-c.o.c.kles and tufts of meadow-sweet, such a lane in midsummer is one of beauty's ways through the world,--a path, which if it lead to no more important goal than a tiny village or solitary farm, is, to the dreamer and poet, sufficiently entrancing in itself to seem a fairy road to fairyland. Here and there some grand elm or beech tree, whose roots have hugged the soil for more than a century, spreads out broad protecting branches all a-s.h.i.+mmer with green leaves,--between the uneven tufts of gra.s.s, the dainty "ragged robin"

sprays its rose-pink blossoms contrastingly against ma.s.ses of snowy star-wort and wild strawberry,--the hedges lean close together, as though accustomed to conceal the shy confidences of young lovers,--and from the fields beyond, the glad singing of countless skylarks, soaring one after the other into the clear pure air, strikes a wave of repeated melody from point to point of the visible sky. All among the delicate or deep indentures of the coast, where the ocean creeps softly inland with a caressing murmur, or scoops out caverns for itself among the rocks with perpetual roar and dash of foam, the glamour of the green extends,--the "lane runs down to meet the sea, carrying with it its garlands of blossoms, its branches of verdure, and all the odour and freshness of the woodlands and meadows, and when at last it drops to a conclusion in some little sandy bay or sparkling weir, it leaves an impression of melody on the soul like the echo of a sweet song just sweetly sung. High up the lanes run;--low down on the sh.o.r.eline they come to an end,--and the wayfarer, pacing along at the summit of their devious windings, can hear the plash of the sea below him as he walks,--the little tender laughing plash if the winds are calm and the day is fair,--the angry thud and boom of the billows if a storm is rising. These bye-roads, of which there are so many along the Somersets.h.i.+re coast, are often very lonely,--they are dangerous to traffic, as no two ordinary sized vehicles can pa.s.s each other conveniently within so narrow a compa.s.s,--and in summer especially they are haunted by gypsies, "pea-pickers," and ill-favoured men and women of the "tramp" species, slouching along across country from Bristol to Minehead, and so over Countisbury Hill into Devon. One such questionable-looking individual there was, who,--in a golden afternoon of July, when the sun was beginning to decline towards the west,--paused in his slow march through the dust, which even in the greenest of hill and woodland ways is bound to acc.u.mulate thickly after a fortnight's lack of rain,--and with a sigh of fatigue, sat down at the foot of a tree to rest. He was an old man, with a thin weary face which was rendered more gaunt and haggard-looking by a ragged grey moustache and ugly stubble beard of some ten days' growth, and his attire suggested that he might possibly be a labourer dismissed from farm work for the heinous crime of old age, and therefore "on the tramp" looking out for a job. He wore a soft slouched felt hat, very much out of shape and weather-stained,--and when he had been seated for a few minutes in a kind of apathy of la.s.situde, he lifted the hat off, pa.s.sing his hand through his abundant rough white hair in a slow tired way, as though by this movement he sought to soothe some teasing pain.

"I think," he murmured, addressing himself to a tiny brown bird which had alighted on a branch of briar-rose hard by, and was looking at him with bold and lively inquisitiveness,--"I think I have managed the whole thing very well! I have left no clue anywhere. My portmanteau will tell no tales, locked up in the cloak-room at Bristol. If it is ever sold with its contents 'to defray expenses,' nothing will be found in it but some unmarked clothes. And so far as all those who know me are concerned, every trace of me ends at Southampton. Beyond Southampton there is a blank, into which David Helmsley, the millionaire, has vanished. And David Helmsley, the tramp, sits here in his place!"

The little brown bird preened its wing, and glanced at him sideways intelligently, as much as to say: "I quite understand! You have become one of us,--a wanderer, taking no thought for the morrow, but letting to-morrow take thought for the things of itself. There is a bond of sympathy between me, the bird, and you, the man--we are brothers!"

A sudden smile illumined his face. The situation was novel, and to him enjoyable. He was greatly fatigued,--he had over-exerted himself during the past three or four days, walking much further than he had ever been accustomed to, and his limbs ached sorely--nevertheless, with the sense of rest and relief from strain, came a certain exhilaration of spirit, like the vivacious delight of a boy who has run away from school, and is defiantly ready to take all the consequences of his disobedience to the rules of discipline and order. For years he had wanted a "new"

experience of life. No one would give him what he sought. To him the "social" round was ever the same dreary, heartless and witless thing, as empty under the sway of one king or queen as another, and as utterly profitless to peace or happiness as it has always been. The world of finance was equally uninteresting so far as he was concerned; he had exhausted it, and found it no more than a monotonous grind of gain which ended in a loathing of the thing gained. Others might and would consume themselves in fevers of avarice, and surfeits of luxury,--but for him such temporary pleasures were past. He desired a complete change,--a change of surroundings, a change of a.s.sociations--and for this, what could be more excellent or more wholesome than a taste of poverty? In his time he had met men who, worn out with the constant fight of the body's materialism against the soul's idealism, had turned their backs for ever on the world and its glittering shows, and had shut themselves up as monks of "enclosed" or "silent" orders,--others he had known, who, rus.h.i.+ng away from what we call civilisation, had encamped in the backwoods of America, or high up among the Rocky Mountains, and had lived the lives of primeval savages in their strong craving to a.s.sert a greater manliness than the streets of cities would allow them to enjoy,--and all were moved by the same mainspring of action,--the overpowering spiritual demand within themselves which urged them to break loose from cowardly conventions and escape from Sham. He could not compete with younger men in taking up wild sport and "big game" hunting in far lands, in order to give free play to the natural savage temperament which lies untamed at the root of every man's individual being,--and he had no liking for "monastic" immurements. But he longed for liberty,--liberty to go where he liked without his movements being watched and commented upon by a degraded "personal" press,--liberty to speak as he felt and do as he wished, without being compelled to weigh his words, or to consider his actions. Hence--he had decided on his present course, though how that course was likely to shape itself in its progress he had no very distinct idea. His actual plan was to walk to Cornwall, and there find out the native home of his parents, not so much for sentiment's sake as for the necessity of having a definite object or goal in view. And the reason of his determination to go "on the road,"

as it were, was simply that he wished to test for himself the actual happiness or misery experienced by the very poor as contrasted with the supposed joys of the very wealthy. This scheme had been working in his brain for the past year or more,--all his business arrangements had been made in such a way as to enable him to carry it out satisfactorily to himself without taking any one else into his confidence. The only thing that might possibly have deterred him from his quixotic undertaking would have been the moral triumph of Lucy Sorrel over the temptation he had held out to her. Had she been honest to her better womanhood,--had she still possessed the "child's heart," with which his remembrance and imagination had endowed her, he would have resigned every other thought save that of so smoothing the path of life for her that she might tread it easily to the end. But now that she had disappointed him, he had, so he told himself, done with fine illusions and fair beliefs for ever. And he had started on a lonely quest,--a search for something vague and intangible, the very nature of which he himself could not tell. Some glimmering ghost of a notion lurked in his mind that perhaps, during his self-imposed solitary ramblings, he might find some new and unexplored channel wherein his vast wealth might flow to good purpose after his death, without the trammels of Committee-ism and Red-Tape-ism. But he expected and formulated nothing,--he was more or less in a state of quiescence, awaiting adventures without either hope or fear. In the meantime, here he sat in the shady Somersets.h.i.+re lane, resting,--the multi-millionaire whose very name shook the money-markets of the world, but who to all present appearances seemed no more than a tramp, footing it wearily along one of the many winding "short cuts" through the country between Somerset and Devon, and as unlike the actual self of him as known to Lombard Street and the Stock Exchange as a beggar is unlike a king.

"After all, it's quite as interesting as 'big game' shooting!" he said, the smile still lingering in his eyes. "I am after 'sport,'--in a novel fas.h.i.+on! I am on the lookout for new specimens of men and women,--real honest ones! I may find them,--I may not,--but the search will surely prove at least as instructive and profitable as if one went out to the Arctic regions for the purpose of killing innocent polar bears! Change and excitement are what every one craves for nowadays--I'm getting as much as I want--in my own way!"

He thought over the whole situation, and reviewed with a certain sense of interest and amus.e.m.e.nt his method of action since he left London.

Benson, his valet, had packed his portmanteau, according to orders, with everything that was necessary for a short sea trip, and then had seen him off at the station for Southampton,--and to Southampton he had gone.

Arrived there, he had proceeded to a hotel, where, under an a.s.sumed name, he had stayed the night. The next day he had left Southampton for Salisbury by train, and there staying another night, had left again for Bath and Bristol. On the latter journey he had "tipped" the guard heavily to keep his first-cla.s.s compartment reserved to himself. This had been done; and the train being an express, stopping at very few stations, he had found leisure and opportunity to unpack his portmanteau and cut away every mark on his linen and other garments which could give the slightest clue to their possessor. When he had removed all possible trace of his ident.i.ty on or in this one piece of luggage, he packed it up again, and on reaching Bristol, took it to the station's cloak-room, and there deposited it with the stated intention of calling back for it at the hour of the next train to London. This done, he stepped forth untrammelled, a free man. He had with him five hundred pounds in banknotes, and for a day or so was content to remain in Bristol at one of the best hotels, under an a.s.sumed name as before, while privately making such other preparations for his intended long "tramp" as he thought necessary. In one of the poorest quarters of the town he purchased a few second-hand garments such as might be worn by an ordinary day-labourer, saying to the dealer that he wanted to "rig out"

a man who had just left hospital and who was going in for "field" work.