THORPE found the Duke of Glastonbury a much more interesting person to watch and to talk with, both during the dinner Saturday evening and later, than he had anticipated.
He was young, and slight of frame, and not at all imposing in stature, but he bore himself with a certain shy courtliness of carriage which had a distinction of its own. His face, with its little black moustache and large dark eyes, was fine upon examination, but in some elusively foreign way. There lingered a foreign note, too, in the way he talked. His speech was English enough to the ear, it was true, but it was the considered English of a book, and its phrases had a deftness which was hardly native. He looked, if not a sad young man, then one conscious always of sufficient reasons for sadness, but one came, after a time, to see that the mood beneath was not melancholy. It had even its sprightly side, which shone out irregularly in his glance and talk, from a sober mean of amiable weariness.
Thorpe knew his extraordinary story—that of a poor tutor, earning his living in ignorance of the fact that he had a birthright of any sort, who had been miraculously translated into the heir, not only to an ancient title but to vast collateral wealth. He had been born and reared in France, and it was there that the heralds of this stupendous change in his affairs had found him out. There was a good deal more to the story, including numerous unsavoury legends about people now many years dead, and it was impossible to observe the young Duke and not seem to perceive signs that he was still nervously conscious of these legends. The story of his wife—a serene, grey-eyed, rather silent young person, with a pale face of some beauty, and with much purity and intellect—was strange enough to match. She also had earned her own living, as a private secretary or type-writing girl, or something of the sort, and her husband had deliberately chosen her after he had come into his title. One might study her very closely, however, and catch no hint that these facts in any degree disconcerted her.
Thorpe studied her a good deal, in a furtive way, with a curiosity born of his knowledge that the Duke had preferred her, when he might have married his widowed cousin, who was now Thorpe\'s own wife. How he had come to know this, he could never have told. He had breathed it in, somehow, with the gossip-laden atmosphere of that one London season of his. It was patent enough, too, that his wife—his Edith—had not only liked this ducal youngster very much, but still entertained toward him a considerable affection. She had never dissembled this feeling, and it visibly informed her glance and manner now, at her own table, when she turned to speak with him, where he sat at her right hand. Thorpe had never dreamed of thinking ill of his wife\'s friendship, even when her indifference to what he thought had been most taken for granted. Now that this was all changed, and the amazing new glory of a lover had enveloped him, he had a distinct delight in watching the myriad charming phases of her kind manner, half-sisterly, half-motherly, toward the grave-faced young man. It was all a part of the delicious change which these past few days had wrought in her, this warm and supple softness of mien, of eye and smile and voice.
But how the Duke, if really he had had a chance to marry Edith, could have taken the type-writer instead, baffled speculation. Thorpe gave more attention to this problem, during dinner, than he did to the conversation of the table. His exchange of sporadic remarks with the young Duchess beside him was indeed an openly perfunctory affair, which left him abundant leisure to contemplate her profile in silence, while she turned to listen to the general talk, of which Miss Madden and the Hon. Winifred Plowden bore the chief burden. The talk of these ladies interested him but indifferently, though the frequent laughter suggested that it was amusing. He looked from his wife to the Duchess and back again, in ever-recurring surprise that the coronet had been carried past Edith. And once he looked a long time at his wife and the Duke, and formulated the theory that she must have refused him. No doubt that was why she had been sympathetically fond of him ever since, and was being so nice to him now. Yes—clearly that was it. He felt upon this that he also liked the Duke very much.
It was by no means so apparent that the Duke liked him. Both he and his Duchess, indeed, were scrupulously and even deferentially polite, but there was a painstaking effect about it, which, seemingly, they lacked the art altogether to conceal. It seemed to Thorpe that the other guests unconsciously took their cue from this august couple, and all exposed somewhat the effort their civility to him involved. At another time the suspicion of this would have stung him. He had only to glance across the table to where his wife sat now, and it was all right. What other people thought of him—how other people liked or disliked him—was of no earthly importance. Whenever he chose to exert himself, he could compel from them the behaviour that he desired. It was their dull inability to read character which prompted them to regard him as merely a rich outsider who had married Edith Cressage. He viewed with a comfortable tolerance this infirmity of theirs. When the time came, if he wanted to do so, he could awaken them to their delusion as by forked lightning and the burst of thunder.
The whim came to him, and expanded swiftly into a determination, to contrive some intimate talk forthwith with the Duke. The young man seemed both clever and sensible, and in a way impressionable as well. Thorpe thought that he would probably have some interesting things to say, but still more he thought of him as a likely listener. It would be the easier to detach him from the company, since the occasion was one of studied informality. The Duke did not go about in society, in the ordinary sense of the word, and he would not have come to High Thorpe to meet a large party. He was here as a kinsman and friend of his hostess for a quiet week; and the few other guests fitted readily enough into the picture of a family gathering. The spirit of domesticity had indeed so obviously descended upon the little group in the drawing-room, an hour or so after dinner, that Thorpe felt it quite the natural thing to put his arm through that of the Duke and lead him off to his personal smoking-room. He even published his intention by audibly bidding the Hon. Balder Plowden to remain with the ladies.
When the two had seated themselves in soft, low easy-chairs, and the host had noted with pleasure that his guest had no effeminate qualms in the matter of large rich cigars, a brief silence ensued.
“I am very anxious to get your views on a certain subject,” Thorpe was inspired to begin, bluntly pushing preliminaries aside. “If a man of fortune wishes to do genuine good with his money, here in England, how should he best go about it?”
The Duke looked up at his questioner, with a sudden flash of surprise on his dark, mobile face. He hesitated a moment, and smiled a little. “You ask of me the sum of human wisdom,” he said. “It is the hardest of all problems; no one solves it.”
Thorpe nodded his big head comprehendingly. “That\'s all the more reason why it ought to be solved,” he declared, with slow emphasis.
The other expressed by look and tone an augmented consciousness of the unexpected. “I did not know,” he remarked cautiously, “that this was a matter in which you were specially concerned. It pleases me very much to hear it. Even if the solution does not come, it is well to have as many as possible turning the problem over in their minds.”
“Oh, but I\'m going to solve it!” Thorpe told him, with round confidence.
The Duke pulled contemplatively at his cigar for a little. “Do not think me a cynic,” he began at last. “You are a man of affairs; you have made your own way; you should be even more free from illusions than I am. If you tell me that these good things can be done, I am the last one to dispute you. But I have seen near at hand experiments of exceptional importance, on a very grand scale, and the result does not encourage me. I come to doubt indeed if money has any such power in these affairs as we think it has—for that matter, if it has any power at all. The shifting of money can always disorganize what is going on at the moment—change it about and alter it in many ways—but its effect is only temporary. As soon as the pressure is released, the human atoms rearrange themselves as they were before, and the old conditions return. I think the only force which really makes any permanent difference is character—and yet about even that I am not sure. The best man I have ever known—and in many respects the ablest—devoted untold energy and labour, and much money, too, to the service of a few thousand people in Somerset, on land of his own, upon a theory wonderfully elaborated and worked out. Perhaps you have heard of Emanuel Torr and his colony, his System?”
Thorpe shook his head.
“He had worked tremendously for years at it. He fell ill and went away—and in a day all the results of his labours and outlay were flat on the ground. The property is mine now, and it is farmed and managed again in the ordinary way, and really the people there seem already to have forgotten that they had a prophet among them. The marvelous character of the man—you look in vain for any sign of an impress that it left upon them. I never go there. I cannot bear those people. I have sometimes the feeling that if it were feasible I should like to oppress them in some way—to hurt them.”
“Oh! \'the people\' are hogs, right enough,” Thorpe commented genially, “but they ARE \'the people,\' and they\'re the only tools we\'ve got to work with to make the world go round.”
“But if you leave the world alone,” objected the Duke, “it goes round of itself. And if you don\'t leave it alone, it goes round just the same, without any reference whatever to your exertions. Some few men are always cleverer or noisier or more restless than the others, and their activity produces certain deviations and peculiarities in their generation. The record of these—generally a very faulty and foolish record—we call history. We say of these movements in the past that some of them were good and some were bad. Our sons very likely will differ totally from us about which were good and which were bad; quite possibly, in turn, their sons may agree with us. I do not see that it matters. We cannot treat anything as final—except that the world goes round. We appear out of the darkness at one edge of it; we are carried across and pitched off into the darkness at the other edge of it. We are certain about nothing else.”
“Except that some of us have to pay for our ride, and others don\'t,” put in Thorpe. The tone in which he spoke made his meaning so clear that his Grace sat up.
“Ah, you think we do not pay?” he queried, his countenance brightening with the animation of debate. “My dear sir, we pay more than anyone else. Our fares are graduated, just as our death-duties are. No doubt there are some idle and stupid, thick-skinned rich fellows, who escape the ticket-collector. But for each of them there are a thousand idle poor fellows who do the same. You, for example, are a man of large wealth. I, for my sins, carry upon my back the burden of a prodigious fortune. Could we not go out now, and walk down the road to your nearest village, and find in the pub, there a dozen day-labourers happier than we are? Why—it is Saturday night. Then I will not say a dozen, but as many as the tap will hold. It is not the beer alone that makes them happy. Do not think that. It is the ability to rest untroubled, the sense that till Monday they have no more responsibility than a tree-toad. Does the coming of Sunday make that difference to you or to me? When night comes, does it mean to us that we are to sleep off into oblivion all we have done that day, and begin life afresh next morning? No-o! We are the tired people; the load is never lifted from our back............