________________________________________________
_ Humphrey Greddon, in the Duke's place, would have taken a pinch of
snuff. But he could not have made that gesture with a finer air than
the Duke gave to its modern equivalent. In the art of taking and
lighting a cigarette, there was one man who had no rival in Europe.
This time he outdid even himself.
"Ah," you say, "but 'pluck' is one thing, endurance another. A man who
doesn't reel on receipt of his death-warrant may yet break down when
he has had time to think it over. How did the Duke acquit himself when
he came to the end of his cigarette? And by the way, how was it that
after he had read the telegram you didn't give him again an hour's
grace?"
In a way, you have a perfect right to ask both those questions. But
their very pertinence shows that you think I might omit things that
matter. Please don't interrupt me again. Am _I_ writing this history,
or are you?
Though the news that he must die was a yet sharper douche, as you have
suggested, than the douche inflicted by Zuleika, it did at least leave
unscathed the Duke's pride. The gods can make a man ridiculous through
a woman, but they cannot make him ridiculous when they deal him a blow
direct. The very greatness of their power makes them, in that respect,
impotent. They had decreed that the Duke should die, and they had told
him so. There was nothing to demean him in that. True, he had just
measured himself against them. But there was no shame in being
gravelled. The peripety was according to the best rules of tragic
art. The whole thing was in the grand manner.
Thus I felt that there were no indelicacy, this time, in watching
him. Just as "pluck" comes of breeding, so is endurance especially
an attribute of the artist. Because he can stand outside himself,
and (if there be nothing ignoble in them) take a pleasure in his own
sufferings, the artist has a huge advantage over you and me. The Duke,
so soon as Zuleika's spell was broken, had become himself again--a
highly self-conscious artist in life. And now, standing pensive on the
doorstep, he was almost enviable in his great affliction.
Through the wreaths of smoke which, as they came from his lips, hung
in the sultry air as they would have hung in a closed room, he gazed
up at the steadfast thunder-clouds. How nobly they had been massed
for him! One of them, a particularly large and dark one, might with
advantage, he thought, have been placed a little further to the left.
He made a gesture to that effect. Instantly the cloud rolled into
position. The gods were painfully anxious, now, to humour him in
trifles. His behaviour in the great emergency had so impressed them
at a distance that they rather dreaded meeting him anon at close
quarters. They rather wished they had not uncaged, last night, the
two black owls. Too late. What they had done they had done.
That faint monotonous sound in the stillness of the night--the Duke
remembered it now. What he had thought to be only his fancy had been
his death-knell, wafted to him along uncharted waves of ether, from
the battlements of Tankerton. It had ceased at daybreak. He wondered
now that he had not guessed its meaning. And he was glad that he had
not. He was thankful for the peace that had been granted to him, the
joyous arrogance in which he had gone to bed and got up for breakfast.
He valued these mercies the more for the great tragic irony that came
of them. Aye, and he was inclined to blame the gods for not having
kept him still longer in the dark and so made the irony still more
awful. Why had they not caused the telegram to be delayed in
transmission? They ought to have let him go and riddle Zuleika with
his scorn and his indifference. They ought to have let him hurl
through her his defiance of them. Art aside, they need not have
grudged him that excursion.
He could not, he told himself, face Zuleika now. As artist, he saw
that there was irony enough left over to make the meeting a fine one.
As theologian, he did not hold her responsible for his destiny. But as
a man, after what she had done to him last night, and before what he
had to do for her to-day, he would not go out of his way to meet her.
Of course, he would not actually avoid her. To seem to run away from
her were beneath his dignity. But, if he did meet her, what in
heaven's name should he say to her? He remembered his promise to
lunch with The MacQuern, and shuddered. She would be there. Death,
as he had said, cancelled all engagements. A very simple way out of
the difficulty would be to go straight to the river. No, that would
be like running away. It couldn't be done.
Hardly had he rejected the notion when he had a glimpse of a female
figure coming quickly round the corner--a glimpse that sent him
walking quickly away, across the road, towards Turl Street, blushing
violently. Had she seen him? he asked himself. And had she seen that
he saw her? He heard her running after him. He did not look round, he
quickened his pace. She was gaining on him. Involuntarily, he ran--ran
like a hare, and, at the corner of Turl Street, rose like a trout, saw
the pavement rise at him, and fell, with a bang, prone.
Let it be said at once that in this matter the gods were absolutely
blameless. It is true they had decreed that a piece of orange-peel
should be thrown down this morning at the corner of Turl Street. But
the Master of Balliol, not the Duke, was the person they had destined
to slip on it. You must not imagine that they think out and appoint
everything that is to befall us, down to the smallest detail.
Generally, they just draw a sort of broad outline, and leave us to
fill it in according to our taste. Thus, in the matters of which this
book is record, it was they who made the Warden invite his grand-
daughter to Oxford, and invite the Duke to meet her on the evening of
her arrival. And it was they who prompted the Duke to die for her on
the following (Tuesday) afternoon. They had intended that he should
execute his resolve after, or before, the boat-race of that evening.
But an oversight upset this plan. They had forgotten on Monday night
to uncage the two black owls; and so it was necessary that the Duke's
death should be postponed. They accordingly prompted Zuleika to save
him. For the rest, they let the tragedy run its own course--merely
putting in a felicitous touch here and there, or vetoing a
superfluity, such as that Katie should open Zuleika's letter. It was
no part of their scheme that the Duke should mistake Melisande for her
mistress, or that he should run away from her, and they were genuinely
sorry when he, instead of the Master of Balliol, came to grief over
the orange-peel.
Them, however, the Duke cursed as he fell; them again as he raised
himself on one elbow, giddy and sore; and when he found that the woman
bending over him was not she whom he dreaded, but her innocent maid,
it was against them that he almost foamed at the mouth.
"Monsieur le Duc has done himself harm--no?" panted Melisande. "Here
is a letter from Miss Dobson's part. She say to me 'Give it him with
your own hand.'"
The Duke received the letter and, sitting upright, tore it to shreds,
thus confirming a suspicion which Melisande had conceived at the
moment when he took to his heels, that all English noblemen are mad,
but mad, and of a madness.
"Nom de Dieu," she cried, wringing her hands, "what shall I tell to
Mademoiselle?"
"Tell her--" the Duke choked back a phrase of which the memory would
have shamed his last hours. "Tell her," he substituted, "that you have
seen Marius sitting among the ruins of Carthage," and limped quickly
away down the Turl.
Both his hands had been abraded by the fall. He tended them angrily
with his handkerchief. Mr. Druce, the chemist, had anon the privilege
of bathing and plastering them, also of balming and binding the right
knee and the left shin. "Might have been a very nasty accident, your
Grace," he said. "It was," said the Duke. Mr. Druce concurred.
Nevertheless, Mr. Druce's remark sank deep. The Duke thought it quite
likely that the gods had intended the accident to be fatal, and that
only by his own skill and lightness in falling had he escaped the
ignominy of dying in full flight from a lady's-maid. He had not, you
see, lost all sense of free-will. While Mr. Druce put the finishing
touches to his shin, "I am utterly purposed," he said to himself,
"that for this death of mine I will choose my own manner and my own
--well, not 'time' exactly, but whatever moment within my brief span
of life shall seem aptest to me. Unberufen," he added, lightly tapping
Mr. Druce's counter.
The sight of some bottles of Cold Mixture on that hospitable board
reminded him of a painful fact. In the clash of the morning's
excitements, he had hardly felt the gross ailment that was on him. He
became fully conscious of it now, and there leapt in him a hideous
doubt: had he escaped a violent death only to succumb to "natural
causes"? He had never hitherto had anything the matter with him, and
thus he belonged to the worst, the most apprehensive, class of
patients. He knew that a cold, were it neglected, might turn
malignant; and he had a vision of himself gripped suddenly in the
street by internal agonies--a sympathetic crowd, an ambulance, his
darkened bedroom; local doctor making hopelessly wrong diagnosis;
eminent specialists served up hot by special train, commending local
doctor's treatment, but shaking their heads and refusing to say more
than "He has youth on his side"; a slight rally at sunset; the end.
All this flashed through his mind. He quailed. There was not a moment
to lose. He frankly confessed to Mr. Druce that he had a cold.
Mr. Druce, trying to insinuate by his manner that this fact had not
been obvious, suggested the Mixture--a teaspoonful every two hours.
"Give me some now, please, at once," said the Duke.
He felt magically better for the draught. He handled the little glass
lovingly, and eyed the bottle. "Why not two teaspoonfuls every hour?"
he suggested, with an eagerness almost dipsomaniacal. But Mr. Druce
was respectfully firm against that. The Duke yielded. He fancied,
indeed, that the gods had meant him to die of an overdose.
Still, he had a craving for more. Few though his hours were, he hoped
the next two would pass quickly. And, though he knew Mr. Druce could
be trusted to send the bottle round to his rooms immediately, he
preferred to carry it away with him. He slipped it into the breast-
pocket of his coat, almost heedless of the slight extrusion it made
there.
Just as he was about to cross the High again, on his way home, a
butcher's cart dashed down the slope, recklessly driven. He stepped
well back on the pavement, and smiled a sardonic smile. He looked to
right and to left, carefully gauging the traffic. Some time elapsed
before he deemed the road clear enough for transit.
Safely across, he encountered a figure that seemed to loom up out of
the dim past. Oover! Was it but yesternight that Oover dined with him?
With the sensation of a man groping among archives, he began to
apologise to the Rhodes Scholar for having left him so abruptly at the
Junta. Then, presto!--as though those musty archives were changed to a
crisp morning paper agog with terrific head-lines--he remembered the
awful resolve of Oover, and of all young Oxford.
"Of course," he asked, with a lightness that hardly hid his dread of
the answer, "you have dismissed the notion you were toying with when I
left you?"
Oover's face, like his nature, was as sensitive as it was massive, and
it instantly expressed his pain at the doubt cast on his high
seriousness. "Duke," he asked, "d'you take me for a skunk?"
"Without pretending to be quite sure what a skunk is," said the Duke,
"I take you to be all that it isn't. And the high esteem in which I
hold you is the measure for me of the loss that your death would be to
America and to Oxford."
Oover blushed. "Duke" he said "that's a bully testimonial. But don't
worry. America can turn out millions just like me, and Oxford can have
as many of them as she can hold. On the other hand, how many of YOU
can be turned out, as per sample, in England? Yet you choose to
destroy yourself. You avail yourself of the Unwritten Law. And you're
right, Sir. Love transcends all."
"But does it? What if I told you I had changed my mind?"
"Then, Duke," said Oover, slowly, "I should believe that all those
yarns I used to hear about the British aristocracy were true, after
all. I should aver that you were not a white man. Leading us on like
that, and then--Say, Duke! Are you going to die to-day, or not?"
"As a matter of fact, I am, but--"
"Shake!"
"But--"
Oover wrung the Duke's hand, and was passing on. "Stay!" he was
adjured.
"Sorry, unable. It's just turning eleven o'clock, and I've a lecture.
While life lasts, I'm bound to respect Rhodes' intentions." The
conscientious Scholar hurried away.
The Duke wandered down the High, taking counsel with himself. He was
ashamed of having so utterly forgotten the mischief he had wrought at
large. At dawn he had vowed to undo it. Undo it he must. But the task
was not a simple one now. If he could say "Behold, I take back my
word. I spurn Miss Dobson, and embrace life," it was possible that his
example would suffice. But now that he could only say "Behold, I spurn
Miss Dobson, and will not die for her, but I am going to commit
suicide, all the same," it was clear that his words would carry very
little force. Also, he saw with pain that they placed him in a
somewhat ludicrous position. His end, as designed yesterday, had a
large and simple grandeur. So had his recantation of it. But this new
compromise between the two things had a fumbled, a feeble, an ignoble
look. It seemed to combine all the disadvantages of both courses. It
stained his honour without prolonging his life. Surely, this was a
high price to pay for snubbing Zuleika . . . Yes, he must revert
without more ado to his first scheme. He must die in the manner that
he had blazoned forth. And he must do it with a good grace, none
knowing he was not glad; else the action lost all dignity. True, this
was no way to be a saviour. But only by not dying at all could he have
set a really potent example. . . . He remembered the look that had
come into Oover's eyes just now at the notion of his unfaith. Perhaps
he would have been the mock, not the saviour, of Oxford. Better
dishonour than death, maybe. But, since die he must, he must die not
belittling or tarnishing the name of Tanville-Tankerton.
Within these bounds, however, he must put forth his full might to
avert the general catastrophe--and to punish Zuleika nearly well
enough, after all, by intercepting that vast nosegay from her
outstretched hands and her distended nostrils. There was no time
to be lost, then. But he wondered, as he paced the grand curve
between St. Mary's and Magdalen Bridge, just how was he to begin?
Down the flight of steps from Queen's came lounging an average
undergraduate.
"Mr. Smith," said the Duke, "a word with you."
"But my name is not Smith," said the young man.
"Generically it is," replied the Duke. "You are Smith to all intents
and purposes. That, indeed, is why I address you. In making your
acquaintance, I make a thousand acquaintances. You are a short cut to
knowledge. Tell me, do you seriously think of drowning yourself this
afternoon?"
"Rather," said the undergraduate.
"A meiosis in common use, equivalent to 'Yes, assuredly,'" murmured
the Duke. "And why," he then asked, "do you mean to do this?"
"Why? How can you ask? Why are YOU going to do it?"
"The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play. Please
answer my question, to the best of your ability."
"Well, because I can't live without her. Because I want to prove my
love for her. Because--"
"One reason at a time please," said the Duke, holding up his hand.
"You can't live without her? Then I am to assume that you look forward
to dying?"
"Rather."
"You are truly happy in that prospect?"
"Yes. Rather."
"Now, suppose I showed you two pieces of equally fine amber--a big one
and a little one. Which of these would you rather possess?"
"The big one, I suppose."
"And this because it is better to have more than to have less of a
good thing?"
"Just so."
"Do you consider happiness a good thing or a bad one?"
"A good one."
"So that a man would rather have more than less of happiness?"
"Undoubtedly."
"Then does it not seem to you that you would do well to postpone your
suicide indefinitely?"
"But I have just said I can't live without her."
"You have still more recently declared yourself truly happy."
"Yes, but--"
"Now, be careful, Mr. Smith. Remember, this is a matter of life and
death. Try to do yourself justice. I have asked you--"
But the undergraduate was walking away, not without a certain dignity.
The Duke felt that he had not handled his man skilfully. He remembered
that even Socrates, for all the popular charm of his mock-modesty and
his true geniality, had ceased after a while to be tolerable. Without
such a manner to grace his method, Socrates would have had a very
brief time indeed. The Duke recoiled from what he took to be another
pitfall. He almost smelt hemlock.
A party of four undergraduates abreast was approaching. How should he
address them? His choice wavered between the evangelic wistfulness of
"Are you saved?" and the breeziness of the recruiting sergeant's
"Come, you're fine upstanding young fellows. Isn't it a pity," etc.
Meanwhile, the quartet had passed by.
Two other undergraduates approached. The Duke asked them simply as a
personal favour to himself not to throw away their lives. They said
they were very sorry, but in this particular matter they must please
themselves. In vain he pled. They admitted that but for his example
they would never have thought of dying. They wished they could show
him their gratitude in any way but the one which would rob them of it.
The Duke drifted further down the High, bespeaking every undergraduate
he met, leaving untried no argument, no inducement. For one man, whose
name he happened to know, he invented an urgent personal message from
Miss Dobson imploring him not to die on her account. On another man he
offered to settle by hasty codicil a sum of money sufficient to yield
an annual income of two thousand pounds--three thousand--any sum
within reason. With another he offered to walk, arm in arm, to Carfax
and back again. All to no avail.
He found himself in the precincts of Magdalen, preaching from the
little open-air pulpit there an impassioned sermon on the sacredness
of human life, and referring to Zuleika in terms which John Knox would
have hesitated to utter. As he piled up the invective, he noticed an
ominous restiveness in the congregation--murmurs, clenching of hands,
dark looks. He saw the pulpit as yet another trap laid for him by the
gods. He had walked straight into it: another moment, and he might be
dragged down, overwhelmed by numbers, torn limb from limb. All that
was in him of quelling power he put hastily into his eyes, and
manoeuvred his tongue to gentler discourse, deprecating his right to
judge "this lady," and merely pointing the marvel, the awful though
noble folly, of his resolve. He ended on a note of quiet pathos. "To-
night I shall be among the shades. There be not you, my brothers."
Good though the sermon was in style and sentiment, the flaw in its
reasoning was too patent for any converts to be made. As he walked
out of the quadrangle, the Duke felt the hopelessness of his cause.
Still he battled bravely for it up the High, waylaying, cajoling,
commanding, offering vast bribes. He carried his crusade into the
Loder, and thence into Vincent's, and out into the street again,
eager, untiring, unavailing: everywhere he found his precept
checkmated by his example.
The sight of The MacQuern coming out top-speed from the Market, with a
large but inexpensive bunch of flowers, reminded him of the luncheon
that was to be. Never to throw over an engagement was for him, as we
have seen, a point of honour. But this particular engagement--hateful,
when he accepted it, by reason of his love--was now impossible for the
reason which had made him take so ignominiously to his heels this
morning. He curtly told the Scot not to expect him.
"Is SHE not coming?" gasped the Scot, with quick suspicion.
"Oh," said the Duke, turning on his heel, "she doesn't know that I
shan't be there. You may count on her." This he took to be the very
truth, and he was glad to have made of it a thrust at the man who had
so uncouthly asserted himself last night. He could not help smiling,
though, at this little resentment erect after the cataclysm that had
swept away all else. Then he smiled to think how uneasy Zuleika would
be at his absence. What agonies of suspense she must have had all this
morning! He imagined her silent at the luncheon, with a vacant gaze at
the door, eating nothing at all. And he became aware that he was
rather hungry. He had done all he could to save young Oxford. Now for
some sandwiches! He went into the Junta.
As he rang the dining-room bell, his eyes rested on the miniature of
Nellie O'Mora. And the eyes of Nellie O'Mora seemed to meet his in
reproach. Just as she may have gazed at Greddon when he cast her off,
so now did she gaze at him who a few hours ago had refused to honour
her memory.
Yes, and many other eyes than hers rebuked him. It was around the
walls of this room that hung those presentments of the Junta as
focussed, year after year, in a certain corner of Tom Quad, by Messrs.
Hills and Saunders. All around, the members of the little hierarchy, a
hierarchy ever changing in all but youth and a certain sternness of
aspect that comes at the moment of being immortalised, were gazing
forth now with a sternness beyond their wont. Not one of them but had
in his day handed on loyally the praise of Nellie O'Mora, in the form
their Founder had ordained. And the Duke's revolt last night had so
incensed them that they would, if they could, have come down from
their frames and walked straight out of the club, in chronological
order--first, the men of the 'sixties, almost as near in time to
Greddon as to the Duke, all so gloriously be-whiskered and cravated,
but how faded now, alas, by exposure; and last of all in the
procession and angrier perhaps than any of them, the Duke himself
--the Duke of a year ago, President and sole Member.
But, as he gazed into the eyes of Nellie O'Mora now, Dorset needed not
for penitence the reproaches of his past self or of his forerunners.
"Sweet girl," he murmured, "forgive me. I was mad. I was under the
sway of a deplorable infatuation. It is past. See," he murmured with a
delicacy of feeling that justified the untruth, "I am come here for
the express purpose of undoing my impiety." And, turning to the club-
waiter who at this moment answered the bell, he said "Bring me a glass
of port, please, Barrett." Of sandwiches he said nothing.
At the word "See" he had stretched one hand towards Nellie; the other
he had laid on his heart, where it seemed to encounter some sort of
hard obstruction. This he vaguely fingered, wondering what it might
be, while he gave his order to Barrett. With a sudden cry he dipped
his hand into his breast-pocket and drew forth the bottle he had borne
away from Mr. Druce's. He snatched out his watch: one o'clock!--
fifteen minutes overdue. Wildly he called the waiter back. "A tea-
spoon, quick! No port. A wine-glass and a tea-spoon. And--for I don't
mind telling you, Barrett, that your mission is of an urgency beyond
conjecture--take lightning for your model. Go!"
Agitation mastered him. He tried vainly to feel his pulse, well
knowing that if he found it he could deduce nothing from its action.
He saw himself haggard in the looking-glass. Would Barrett never come?
"Every two hours"--the directions were explicit. Had he delivered
himself into the gods' hands? The eyes of Nellie O'Mora were on him
compassionately; and all the eyes of his forerunners were on him in
austere scorn: "See," they seemed to be saying, "the chastisement of
last night's blasphemy." Violently, insistently, he rang the bell.
In rushed Barrett at last. From the tea-spoon into the wine-glass
the Duke poured the draught of salvation, and then, raising it
aloft, he looked around at his fore-runners and in a firm voice cried
"Gentlemen, I give you Nellie O'Mora, the fairest witch that ever was
or will be." He drained his glass, heaved the deep sigh of a double
satisfaction, dismissed with a glance the wondering Barrett, and sat
down.
He was glad to be able to face Nellie with a clear conscience. Her
eyes were not less sad now, but it seemed to him that their sadness
came of a knowledge that she would never see him again. She seemed to
be saying to him "Had you lived in my day, it is you that I would have
loved, not Greddon." And he made silent answer, "Had you lived in my
day, I should have been Dobson-proof." He realised, however, that to
Zuleika he owed the tenderness he now felt for Miss O'Mora. It was
Zuleika that had cured him of his aseity. She it was that had made
his heart a warm and negotiable thing. Yes, and that was the final
cruelty. To love and be loved--this, he had come to know, was all that
mattered. Yesterday, to love and die had seemed felicity enough. Now
he knew that the secret, the open secret, of happiness was in mutual
love--a state that needed not the fillip of death. And he had to die
without having ever lived. Admiration, homage, fear, he had sown
broadcast. The one woman who had loved him had turned to stone because
he loved her. Death would lose much of its sting for him if there were
somewhere in the world just one woman, however lowly, whose heart
would be broken by his dying. What a pity Nellie O'Mora was not really
extant!
Suddenly he recalled certain words lightly spoken yesterday by
Zuleika. She had told him he was loved by the girl who waited on
him--the daughter of his landlady. Was this so? He had seen no sign
of it, had received no token of it. But, after all, how should he
have seen a sign of anything in one whom he had never consciously
visualised? That she had never thrust herself on his notice might mean
merely that she had been well brought-up. What likelier than that the
daughter of Mrs. Batch, that worthy soul, had been well brought up?
Here, at any rate, was the chance of a new element in his life, or
rather in his death. Here, possibly, was a maiden to mourn him. He
would lunch in his rooms.
With a farewell look at Nellie's miniature, he took the medicine-
bottle from the table, and went quickly out. The heavens had grown
steadily darker and darker, the air more sulphurous and baleful. And
the High had a strangely woebegone look, being all forsaken by youth,
in this hour of luncheon. Even so would its look be all to-morrow,
thought the Duke, and for many morrows. Well he had done what he
could. He was free now to brighten a little his own last hours. He
hastened on, eager to see the landlady's daughter. He wondered what
she was like, and whether she really loved him.
As he threw open the door of his sitting-room, he was aware of a
rustle, a rush, a cry. In another instant, he was aware of Zuleika
Dobson at his feet, at his knees, clasping him to her, sobbing,
laughing, sobbing. _
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