“You will drink a glass of port, gentlemen,” Septimus said. “Mary, set some chairs and glasses.”
There was no manservant in the house; patriarchs, after all, are waited upon by maidens. Mary cleared three places at the long table, one upon Crottle’s right for Monsieur Hanaud and two upon his left for Mordaunt and Mr. Ricardo. The ladies, of course, had already retired to the drawing-room.
“I welcome you to my house, Monsieur Hanaud,” said Septimus, holding up his glass of wine.
“It was gracious of you to invite me, Mr. Crottle,” Hanaud returned, holding up his.
Both men bowed and drank, and Hanaud, as he put his glass down, exclaimed in an ecstasy: “And this is a wonderful glass of Porto which you are giving me!”
“It’s the best,” said Septimus, quite simply. “It’s mine. George, fill Monsieur Hanaud’s glass.”
A fair-haired youth upon Ricardo’s right obeyed with a broad grin upon his face and a twinkle in his eye.
“The guv’nor decanted it himself from his own private bin, Monsieur Hanaud,” he said genially. “There aren’t many to whom he shows that consideration.”
Hanaud tasted his wine and looked up at the ceiling. He tasted it again and held it for a long time in his mouth, and swallowed it at last slowly, with his eyes closed. Mr. Ricardo was disgusted with his friend’s behaviour. To Hanaud, Porto was Porto, and the blacker it was and the stickier it was, the more Hanaud enjoyed it. “Look at the hypocrite,” Mr. Ricardo said to himself. “He’s obsequious.”
But obviously Septimus was pleased. “I shall offer you a cigar,” he continued, “but I am afraid that must wait until after our reading. Mean while I should like to present to you my nephew, George Crottle. The gentleman sitting on the other side of Captain Mordaunt you may perhaps know.”
Hanaud looked at a thin, tall, narrow man with a grey moustache.
“Yes, yes,” he said with an air of surprise as he held out his hand. “I certainly have had the honour to meet him.”
“Mr. Alan Preedy is one of the Line’s solicitors.”
“But in a very small way,” Preedy put in modestly. “I don’t aspire to famous cases.”
“No doubt they will come,” Hanaud protested.
“But not, I hope, in connection with the Dagger Line,” said George Crottle in mock dismay.
“I think that is unlikely,” said Septimus, with a touch of irritation in his voice. “I have another nephew”—and the irritation was still audible—“who apparently is not giving us the pleasure of his company to-night.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Preedy interrupted rather eagerly, as if he recognised that a smooth relationship between the elder and the younger branches of the Crottle firm was one of his duties. “I fancy Mr. James arrived a moment ago.”
Septimus turned his head and listened.
“I can’t hear a sound,” said George. “Old James has carted us, this night of all nights, when our Uncle Septimus is reading.”
Septimus looked at his nephew with approval, but Alan Preedy still appeared for the absent one.
“It was a taxi stopping at the door which I heard, and the passing of change makes the driver, as a rule, undress himself by several layers of clothes. Ah, there he is!”
Alan Preedy had hardly finished before the housebell rang, but he had finished. Mr. Ricardo looked with admiration at the lawyer, upon whose face there rose a blush.
“Yes,” said George gaily to Ricardo, “if I wanted to listen at a keyhole, I should brief Preedy as my substitute. It’s quite a gift.”
Monsieur Hanaud seemed to be concentrating his attention upon his Porto, and said nothing.
James Crottle, a tall, dark and grim young man, entered the room. He made his apologies to his uncle, clapped Preedy heartily upon the shoulder, and said with a laugh:
“The law’s delays are nothing to a taxicab’s.”
He nodded to Mordaunt, was introduced to Hanaud and Ricardo, and took his seat at the table on the side of the Frenchman. The difference between him and George was remarkable. George, the fair-haired youth, seemed by comparison with him of almost feminine good looks. There was a supple grace in his slim figure and a friendliness in his smile and eyes which James was without. James leaned a little forward and said to Hanaud: “My uncle did not tell us that we were to have the honour to-night of meeting anyone so distinguished as you.”
There was just a hint of a question in his words which Septimus took up: “Monsieur Hanaud has, I gather, some matter of importance which he wishes to talk over with me after wards.”
Coffee was brought in on a great silver tray, and Ricardo, under such security as the clatter of the cups granted him, said to his neighbour, Alan Preedy: “This is to me the greatest blessing of the evening so far. For keep my head from nodding during a reading, that I cannot do.”
“Septimus isn’t so bad,” Preedy returned. “It’s his turn to read to-night, thank the Lord! You’ll see, he’ll probably keep you awake.”
At that moment the parlourmaid entered the room and announced to Septimus that the ladies were assembled in the drawing-room and that the clock had struck the hour three minutes ago.
“Then I suppose that we had better go, Mary,” he said with a smile.
“Yes, sir, and the room all prepared as if it was for a Church Service,” she answered.
For perhaps a minute Mr. Septimus did not budge, a little colour rose into his face, the smile remained upon his mouth, and a sparkle of fire revived the youth of his eyes. He looked and smiled straight ahead of him, savouring in advance the small ritual of the assembly, the resonance of his voice, the stillness of his audience as he held it in a magic web. There was romance in these Sunday nights for Septimus Crottle. At this hour, once in every fourth week, he recaptured some shadow of the thrill and glory of his first command. When he opened the book, he stepped again upon his bridge. He was no longer the owner of the Dagger Line, concerned with questions of policy, he was the young Lord and Master of his ship, of its passengers, its crew and its cargo. He stood at the pilot’s side in Southampton Water with his eyes fixed upon tropical harbours, where after weeks of vigilance he would hear the thunderous rattle of the anchor chains in the bows. He rose from his chair, his old wrinkled face eager and radiant. “Let us go!” he cried on a rising note.
Mordaunt noticed the change and smiled. “He has dropped his pilot. He has set his course between the Spithead Forts for the Nab. Has he the clusters of palm trees in his vision, a scent of strange perfumes in his nostrils, the sing-song of coolies in his ears? And he’s only stepping from a dining-room to a drawing-room in Portman Square.”
But this was Mordaunt’s thought and his alone. It was prompted by the same instinctive sympathy which had once made him row down Helford River to Passage to hear some home-truths from this redoubtable old man.
Mr. Ricardo was not given to such fancies. He was simply troubled by the knowledge that for an hour, in a room where every curtain, every piece of furniture was certain to offend the eye, he must listen to this old fellow droning out the pages of a book. Monsieur Hanaud, for his part, was puzzled, and he was showing that he was puzzled—showing it so much indeed that as he walked towards the door of the room, he felt a hand upon his sleeve. He turned and saw George Crottle at his elbow.
“Something, I can see, is perplexing you, Monsieur Hanaud. Can I help?”
Hanaud was at once all contrition and apology. He stammered, he spread out his hands.
“It was an impoliteness. . . . I beg you to forgive. The habit grows of itself. . . . One asks oneself the questions, and suddenly one is guilty of an inconvenience.”
“Not a bit,” George replied. “I could see you looking from James to me and from me to James.”
Hanaud was more confused than ever. “I had no right to make the comparison,” he said.
“No. And I should not have been surprised. So often one sees it—in brothers—”
“Who don’t seem to belong to the same litter, eh?” George returned with a laugh. “James!” and the dark young man turned back from the door.
“’What is it?” he asked, not too pleasantly.
“All is discovered! We are lost!” George resumed, and he turned again to Hanaud. “You are right, Monsieur Hanaud, we are not brothers at all, and, what’s more, our names aren’t even Crottle.”
James uttered a small cry of impatience and followed the rest of the party out of the room. George, however, detained the Frenchman. He burst into a laugh as he watched James’s abrupt departure. “You may as well have the facts, Monsieur, especially as they throw an amusing light on Uncle Sep’s quarter-deck style.”
Uncle Sep’s sister Maria had married William Martindale, and had had one son, George. But William Martindale was already a widower with a stepson by his first marriage, James Urquhart. Thus both James and George were in no blood relationship to each other. William Martindale was himself a partner in a firm of small prosperity, and upon his death, Septimus bought up the Line, added the few good cargo ships which it owned to the Dagger fleet, and took both boys into the management. James was by three years the elder, but George was the actual nephew, and it was generally understood that on Crottle’s death or retirement, George Martindale would become Chairman of the Line. James, however, was to be left substantially in it, a director and a partner.
“Then one morning,” continued George, “we both woke up to read in The Times that we had changed our names to Crottle. It isn’t what you’d call a pretty name and, as you could see, James is still peeved about it—all the more because the old man, neither before nor since, has ever said a word about it to either of us. He just did it—the bit of brimstone in our treacle, but there’s such a lot of treacle that I, at all events, didn’t notice the bitter taste at all.”
Monsieur Hanaud thanked him for the explanation, and added: “It is, after all, natural that Mr. Crottle should like to leave his name associated with the great Dagger Line. One day, no doubt, he will be Lord Crottle.”
“Not he,” cried George with a laugh. “He’s Mr. Crottle of the Dagger Line—and proud of it.”
But they were in the doorway of the drawing-room now, where conversation was exchanged in low voices, as if they were all in the porch of a church. Monsieur Hanaud was presented by George to the three daughters of Septimus. It was Mordaunt’s story that the Patriarch had turned a most deliberate back upon suitors for their hands. Certainly all three of them were in their thirties. Anne, the youngest, a large handsome woman with a high colour and pronounced features; Audrey, smaller, prettier, but beginning to look a little like a horse; and Agatha, the eternal spinster, angular, acrimonious, awkward. Her hair, gathered in a tight bun, was already grey, and her face, with its high thin nose and a bitter mouth, had lost, so worn it was and tired, any pretension to charm which it might have had. She gave Monsieur Hanaud a hand so thin that it caused him a little shock, as though he had shaken hands with a skeleton; and whereas the other two sisters had shown some little excitement, not at meeting him, but at the recurrence of this weekly ceremonial, she greeted him with a dull eye and a languid voice. “I hope you won’t be too bored.”
“I?” exclaimed Hanaud. “But I am never bored, even when there is reason to be. So how could I be bored here?”
Mr. Ricardo caught the words and once more whispered “hypocrite.” The room was just what he expected. Not one artistic nerve in him but twanged distressfully. The curtains were of crimson red with pelmets disfigured by yellow rectangles; the chairs of black painted wood, with thin gold lines, were upholstered tightly in black and green silk with buttons sunk in little pits; and wherever an antimacassar could be hung, it was hung. One particular piece shook Mr. Ricardo to his centre—a cabinet without a curve, made in black painted wood. There was an oblong bevelled mirror in the raised central back, and below the level surface two cupboards with bouquets of roses painted on the doors. His eye, indeed, rested with pleasure upon an oval mahogany table, a Regency cabinet in white and gold in a corner of the room, and an arm-chair by Chippendale in which Septimus was to sit. An electric lamp with a green shade burned upon the table, and the book from which Septimus Crottle was to read lay closed within the circle of light.
“All ready?” asked George of the company, and each one took the seat arranged. The chairs were grouped in an irregular curve. Thus Hanaud was sitting almost behind old Mr. Crottle’s shoulder; two daughters, Anne and Audrey, came next; the lawyer, Preedy, sat at the head of the table, and Agatha was at his right. Mr. Ricardo sat at Agatha’s right and beyond her Mordaunt. George occupied the end of the table fronting Alan Preedy, and between George and his uncle was an empty place for James. Thus, in a free space, sat Mr. Septimus Crottle of the Dagger Line.
It was remarkable how clearly that order was established in Ricardo’s mind; for his was not a tidy mind. Yet he had hardly to shut his eyes, before he could see each one of those ten people sitting upright and stiff, side by side. It is, perhaps, still more remarkable that Ricardo grasped exactly why the positions were so accurately registered in his memory.
“All ready?” asked George at the table; and at once, by gesture or word, assent was made. Mr. Ricardo expected that now the book would be opened and the reading begin. But George cried over his shoulder “Go!” and James switched off the lights of the room. There was only one left burning, that of the lamp with the green shade upon the table. James slipped into the empty chair. The room sank to darkness, the ugliness of its equipment vanished. Above the coats of the men and the dresses of the women an arc of faces gleamed, all set towards the one lamp, faces lifeless and pallid as masks; and Mr. Ricardo understood that, however dull the book and however inadequate the reader, not once would his head nod or his eyes close until the reading was finished.
He was conscious of an excitement which ran through his veins and throbbed in his ears. For a moment or two he could not trace it to its source. There was the old man with his wrinkled features in the full bright light and, in spite of his frock-coat and upstanding stock, of some obvious brotherhood with the sea. There was, above the green shade of the lamp, the circle of white dead faces. But to neither of these causes was due the expectancy racing through him. He came to the explanation at last and, though he knew it for an illusion and the merest of accidents, it did not lose its hold. The book which lay upon the table directly beneath the lamp was bound in cloth of exactly the same pale colour as the painted handle of the knife which had caused Horbury’s death. It shone in the gloom of that room; it alone shone: it claimed the eyes; it seemed to Ricardo to make a promise—or perhaps a threat. More likely a threat, since it was with a definite relief that he saw the old man’s thickly-veined hands open the book somewhere towards the end where a ribbon marked the place.
Septimus began to read. For a little while Ricardo did not notice the theme of the book. Words followed words in the rhythm of prose—so much he observed, but he was too surprised by the voice of the reader to take to himself their meaning. The voice was clear and musical and muted to the compass of the room, but it was troubled, so troubled that the reader seemed to find in this far-off story of Marie Antoinette—for here and there her name came and went amongst the words—some quite personal and startling application. Mr. Ricardo began to listen now to what was read, and it was read so faithfully that the stodgy room in Portman Square vanished altogether, and he moved in the squalor of the Conciergerie, amongst ruffianly gaolers and elegant dandies and great ladies awaiting, with a jest to hide their fears, the creak and rumble of the tumbrils at door. Against that background the wail of a boy rose and fell like a tide.
Marie Antoinette had paid for the folly of her and her inadequate life. Septimus read of the Dauphin—a boy, sickly, spoilt, but punished by such drawn-out cruelty as, even in these days, few boys have endured. He needed playmates of his own age, he was allowed none. He wanted fresh air, open fields, sunlight and good food. He was given instead the foul, overbreathed vapours of the Conciergerie, a small cell with a high small window on a hall, and once a day a word or two of abuse from his gaoler as his food and his jug of water were brought in to him. The Dauphin of France was too dangerous a magnet for all that was left in France or abroad of the old regime. But he couldn’t be tried. He couldn’t be sent to the guillotine. Even the rabble shrank from that abominable horror. What the most abject slander could do to asperse his character was done. But it was not enough. He must disappear. So he was left, locked up in his cell, a child without books, without clean linen, without a doctor, without a mother, to get through each day and night and the next and the next as best he could. Finally the gaoler ceased to show his face or utter a word. Once a day a panel was opened, food and water were pushed through, and the panel was closed again. That was all. And after an eternity—of what torrents of tears, of what gusts of passion, of what lonely despair!—neither the plate of food, nor the jug of water were touched. For twenty-four hours, for forty-eight hours they were left, and then for the first time in weeks the door of the dark cell was unlocked
Old Septimus read so far, controlling his voice, but stopping now and again to control it, and bending his head a little lower over the page. Then suddenly he stopped, closed the book, and raised a face so ravaged with horror, so old beyond all age, that it imposed silence upon all that company. It was a silence as heavy as a pall, and it was broken at last by one deep sigh.
Every head had been lowered or shaded by a hand or fixed upon the reader, and all had been a little dazed. That one deep sigh must have seemed to have been breathed by a corporate voice, to have issued from the blended emotions of them all But it was a shock to all. It jarred upon all except Septimus Crottle at the table. He was still in the Conciergerie, standing at the door of the cell as the key at last grated in the lock. But to the rest it was grievous. There had been no pity in it, no horror, no refusal. Construed into words it meant “At last!” Something long sought for had been discovered.
Septimus finished before his hour was up, but at the end of a chapter, so that it was natural that he should halt there. He closed the book slowly after marking the page with the ribbon, and said in a voice which surprised the audience, so unmoved and ordinary it was once more: “I think we can stop this book here and choose another one for our next Sunday.”
He rose, and the bright sheen of the blue cover moved out of the circle of light, to Ricardo’s relief. Septimus walked to a table which stood under a window at the end of the room. It had a drawer with a couple of gilt handles. Septimus pulled one of them, but the drawer remained closed. For a moment he was puzzled, and a frightened voice cried “Father, it’s locked.”
The cry sprang from the mouth of Agatha. She jumped up and, pushing the chairs apart, hurried to the mantelshelf. But she was too late. For even while she was fumbling in a china box set on a ledge by the mirror, Septimus pulled the handle again. But this time it was a tug, a jerk, and with a crack the drawer burst open.
“It was locked. Why?”
“The key caught in one’s dress.”
Agatha showed the key to Septimus. It was rather long.
“You see how it juts out. I took it from the lock.” But Septimus had still one foot in the Conciergerie. He nodded his head.
“The drawer’s no use to me now,” he said, and Hanaud was already at his side. Cumbrous though he was, no one moved so swiftly, so unsuspiciously as Hanaud when he chose. “Can I help, Monsieur Crottle?” he asked, and he laid his hand upon the top of the open drawer.
“No, the lock’s broken,” interposed Agatha. “It’s a gimcrack affair, anyway,” and as in the room the lights were turned up she shut the drawer so violently that Hanaud had barely time to snatch his hand away.
“Did I catch your fingers?” Agatha asked, staring at him angrily, and obviously hopeful that she had.
“No, no, mademoiselle.” Hanaud returned with a smile. “You would have to be quicker than that.”
He turned towards Crottle, who walked to the one solid piece of furniture in the room—a Chippendale bureau which stood against a wall opposite to the cabinet. It had a bookcase with shelves and glass doors on the top and below it a front which could be let down to make a writing-table. Septimus Crottle let the front down, pushed the book in, locked up the front again, and pocketed the key. He said in a curious, hard, resentful voice, which astonished no one who had heard him reading, and would have astonished anyone who had not: “I never want to see that book again.”
He was once more Septimus Crottle, the owner of the great Dagger Line. He stepped out to Mordaunt. “You’re off to-morrow, Mordaunt, and I’m sorry to say not on one of my ships. But my ships sail on Fridays, so it couldn’t be helped. I’m going to tell you that your letter put you up a peg or two in my esteem.” A sudden smile made his face very pleasant and friendly. “This is your last night in England, so you will have letters to write. I am to talk with these gentlemen”—he waved a hand towards Ricardo and Hanaud—“so I’ll say good night and good luck.”
He shook hands with Mordaunt, but for a few seconds did not move. Then he said “Yes,” and took a step or two towards the door; and again he said “Yes,” adding, as once more he moved on, “If there’s anything we can do for you, write to me,” and this time he reached the door. But there he turned, having made up his mind. He came straight back into the middle of the room challenging them all to blame him if they dared. “Meanwhile, Mordaunt, you might perhaps do something for me.”
His voice was now firm but gentle, and Ricardo wondered afterwards whether something of the pity which he had felt and imposed upon his audience for that young victim of a nation’s revolt was still working within him.
“My youngest daughter—Rosalind. She was lovely to look at. She said she was stifled in this house. I didn’t understand that. She married against my will. Leete, the name was. She may be still where you are going. I think the marriage has turned out ill. God knows, I take no pride in that! So, if you meet her, will you tell her that her place is here—and empty.”
So it was not pity which had moved him, not even compunction, Mr. Ricardo thought, but just the patriarch’s feeling that, owing to the wrong-headed folly of one of the family, there was an uncomfortable gap which should be closed.
“Of course I will, sir,” said Mordaunt, and at once voices broke out in a babble. The only words Ricardo distinguished were spoken by George Crottle enthusiastically: “It would be fine to have Rosie back again.”
Septimus turned with an apology to his two new guests, and he included in his smile Mr. Alan Preedy. “But these are family matters. You have something to say to me, Monsieur Hanaud. Will you and your friend come along with me to the smoking-room? George, and James too, perhaps, since in so much they take my place. To everyone else, good night.”
He led the four men to a room along the corridor behind the drawing-room.