Ancestor Jorico E-Book

William J. Locke

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The „Ancestor Jorico,” the man who wants this, was in his prime a slave owner and a pirate, and yet in his older years lived a supposedly quiet, pious life of modest means. So what happened to all his wealth? And what does the hidden treasure map from Trinidad mean?

Leseprobe

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER I

I suppose, after all, I had better tell this story myself, the story of Toby and his three cousins, all descendants of a dreadful old gentleman, one Captain John Gregory Jorico, who died in 1830. It is mainly, however, the story of Toby, Major Wilfrid Tobin Boyle, D.S.O., M.C., and of Jones, his body-servant through whom Romance entered into Toby’s disgruntled post-war life.

The story, such as it is, might reasonably be entitled “A Family Affair.” I, who speak, am more or less of the Family, though not descended from Ancestor Jorico, and so is my cousin, Lady Jane Crowe, who plays an important part in the narrative. It is only, however, because I have shared in a common, mild adventure, and, as a patient and fairly amiable old buffer, have listened to the confidences, confessions, grievances, hopes and rigmaroles of nearly everybody concerned, that I dare bring myself into the story at all. I needn’t do it, of course; but you must bear with me while I try to do things in my own way.

So I must tell you first, very briefly, something about myself–“declare my authority,” as the winning opener of a jack-pot must do in the game of poker.

I am Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Forester, K.C.B., et cetera. I have a wife and two daughters who have nothing whatever to do with the story, and so you won’t hear much of them. I am just a retired professional soldier, living on scraps. I cannot say that I’m comfortably off. I was discussing ways and means the other day with an old decayed fellow warrior, and he shouted: “Dammit, sir, no gentleman these days is comfortably off. It’s a contradiction in terms.”

At any rate, I must supplement my slender income. The pen, though perhaps not really mightier than the sword, is more useful than the poor darned old steel thing that can’t be pulled out of its scabbard for rust. So I write a bit. I write for anybody or anything, from the “Quarterly Review” to “Home Chat.” I’m not proud. A couple of years or so ago I published a novel–about Burma in the early days when I was a subaltern. Everyone said it was a jolly good novel. I think it was myself, seeing that, up to date, I’ve received two hundred and seventy-three pounds, seventeen and sixpence in royalties.

You see, I’m explaining myself as fast as I can.

Now Toby comes in.

“When are you going to write another novel, sir?”

“As soon as I can get an idea for one,” said I.

If you think you can go out into the hedgerows, no matter how figurative the word may be, and pick ideas like blackberries, you’re mistaken. You might just as well have asked me to find and engender an idea for the conversion of the paper on which I am writing into a negotiable million-pound bank-note.

“What about our little Jorico stunt?” said Toby. “It’s quite a tale.”

“Quite,” said I. “You were always a resourceful chap.”

He had been on my staff during the war, after wounds and gas and what-not had knocked him out of the trenches, and I had found him full of brains and enthusiasm. Besides, he was a sort of second cousin or half-nephew of mine, by marriage–I never can exactly determine which–and I had known him, off and on, since he was born.

“It might be a good yarn,” said Toby. “And I and all the rest of us will be only too happy to put you wise on details.”

“Very good of you,” said I. “I’ll think about it.”

Well, I have thought about it, and the following pages are the result of my investigation of the affairs of people which were influenced by the will of a slave-trading, buccaneering, piratical old sea captain, John Gregory Jorico, who died about a hundred years ago.

It was the fascination of Jones, however, that finally led to my momentous decision.

I don’t know whom to explain first, Toby or Jones. Toby in the war was a very gallant soldier. He was messing about in an Art School when the war came. But he held a subaltern’s commission in a fine Territorial Regiment. His keenness, in the days when the prospect of a European war seemed an absurdity to both the fat bourgeoisie and the intellectual doctrinaires of England, opened my heart to the boy. I would say to him: “Why the devil don’t you get somehow into the Regular Army?” But it was a question of family ways and means, and, also, there was the artistic side of him.

As far as ever I’ve been able to make out Toby, his conception of Valhalla would be the cleaving, for all eternity, of enemies from helm to chine with one hand, while with the other he drew pictures of young Valkyrie in engaging attitudes and diaphanous costume. He never inhabited a dug-out in France without papering it with the joy of all that was alien to the mud and blood in which the males of the race had to wallow.

You see, I have to explain a double-sided Toby: an essential soldier and a youth captivated by an artistic facility in portraying draped and undraped female loveliness. He had an individual line, and a wonderful sense of drapery. I have some of his early drawings which, uncomfortably off though I am, I wouldn’t sell for any money. But at heart–and this I know; for not only do I love the boy, but as a professional who commanded a division in France with no discredit, may therefore claim the privilege of expert judgment–Toby was a soldier and nothing else but a soldier.

I repeat that I knew him as a keen Territorial before the war. As far as the hideous phantasmagoria, which was the mind of a man in high command during the war, allowed, I followed his career. If he hadn’t been knocked out he would have had his battalion. You may call it favouritism, nepotism–what you will–but when a hard-driven General of Division wants a smart fellow on his staff and finds a divinely-created member of his family waiting for a job, he would be a criminally conscientious lunatic not to send for him. That is how Toby and I became real friends.

Toby now is thirty-five. I am any age you like. Put it that my earliest memory was threading Noah’s beard with my baby fingers and asking whether the barnacles I found there were good to eat.

I had better begin with Toby.

You see him at a point when the story is about to open in his private office. It was the last kind of office in which anyone would have dreamed of seeing Toby at work. You must see him closing a door on a laugh and a scent of furs, and turning to a softly lit room all discreet greens on floors and windows, with a Louis XV writing-table and Louis XV chairs. Faintly coloured old French prints hung around the walls. It was supposed to be restful to the nerves of women agitated by the realities of a meaningless existence. So had said its investor, Toby’s mother, who had the cynical grain of muse inherent in the character of all great women.

On an ash-tray smouldered the cigarette-end which the departing visitor had left. He threw it into the fire behind his writing-seat, and pressed a bell. A door opened and a trim young woman entered with a pile of typewritten letters. He sat down; glanced through them; signed them.

“That all?”

“Yes, Major Boyle.”

“Thank God!”

“Mrs. Palmer begs me to tell you that the Honourable Mrs. Bemmerton is being fitted and would like to see you.”

“Damn,” said Toby. “What’s the matter?”

The secretary didn’t know. The appointment was entered on the card in front of him. Toby nodded. The secretary gathered up the letters and retired. Toby, referring to the Hon. Mrs. Bemmerton, damned the woman. He rose, rubbed both eyes with the tips of his fingers, a favourite gesture, and grinned helplessly. The forthcoming interview was a commonplace incident in his daily routine; yet custom could not stale his frantic dislike of Mrs. Bemmerton and her kind. They brought out the worst in him, though on the demonstration of that in him which was most suave depended the prosperity of “Palmyre,” and his own livelihood. For “Palmyre,” which, since his mother’s death, he owned and ran, ranked among the first dozen fashionable dressmaking establishments in London. It had branches in Paris, Deauville, Cannes.... Toby in an almost literal sense of the word was its presiding genius. He had the inspired eye for colour, material, line, drapery and all that goes to the creation of feminine costume. He had been unconsciously cultivating the gift during the war, when he covered dug-outs with dreams of female exquisiteness.

“I must look around for a job,” said Toby on demobilization.

“There’s one to your hand,” said his mother, who had manfully built up the business so as to support not only a post-war Toby, but a husband who, having passed most of his life in the service of a great Insurance Company, had retired on a pension of a few hundreds a year. “A job waiting for you. Come into the business and help with the designing.”

As nobody else in London, or Great Britain, or the British Empire, seemed to be clamouring for the services of a demobilized Major of Territorials, Toby fitted up a little studio in the back of the Hanover Street premises and began to earn his living. And now he owned the concern and put all his strength and his brain into its development–and loathed the sight and the sound and the smell of it.

You see, he was the last fellow in the world you would have taken for a man dressmaker. He was an agreeably and attractively brown man. His hair was brown, his skin was light brown, and of that queer texture that encourages brown freckles. His eyes were brown, and the shaggy eyebrows were of a deeper brown. Without being hirsute there was a hint of brown fluff on his hands. He was fairly tall, loosely built; one of those men who look well in any uniform formally pre-arranged–military uniform, tennis or golfing kit, full evening dress–but the most lounging-looking fellow you ever saw in what is called a lounge suit. He could spot with accuracy the imperfections in a woman’s elaborate attire, but he seemed to be unaware that decently dressed men don’t go about with their collar-stud showing above their tie, their socks unsupported by suspenders and the laces straggling disgracefully over their shoes. Not all Jones’s earnest pressing could maintain the crease in the brown material of Toby’s trousers. Many women called him a bear; others, from another feminine point of view, a pet lamb. The latter he regarded with the greater distaste.

His hand felt a pipe in his jacket pocket. He would dearly have loved to fill it, light it, and, thus furnished with masculine attribute, confront the Hon. Mrs. Bemmerton. But gentlemen don’t interview strange ladies pipe in mouth, and Toby was a gentleman before ever he came to be a dressmaker. He was also, by nature, a cheerful gentleman with an ironical twist at the corners of his lips and a quiet gleam of humour in his eyes. I have, however, seen the quiet gleam of humour grow deadly. Warfare is apt to develop that sort of thing.

Toby passed out of his luxurious pseudo-Louis XV office on the first floor and descended to the show room, a sensuous hall of pile carpets, mirrors and women. Women of all sorts. Saleswomen in impeccably unobtrusive black. Women in furs fingering materials. A queenly woman in evening dress, a mannequin, showing off a cloak to two dull-looking elderly women. At the back was a row of fitting cubicles, and at the door of one stood the fitter on the look-out for Toby. He crossed at her beckoning.

The Hon. Mrs. Bemmerton, thin, dark, raddled, stood within surveying herself in the long mirror. She wore an evening dress of dead rose and old gold. She turned as Toby entered.

“I’m glad you’ve come, Major Boyle. Just look at it.”

She spun round.

“I see,” said he.

“It won’t do at all.”

“It’s rotten,” said Toby.

“I’m glad you agree,” she said acidly.

“It’s nothing to do with me,” said Toby. “If you’d kept to my original design it wouldn’t have been rotten. You insisted on modifications”–he went into details–“this is the result.”

“Well. What are you going to do about it?”

“Whatever you suggest, Mrs. Bemmerton.”

“I think it’s disgraceful not to be able to carry out my idea. What if I leave the dress on your hands?”

Toby shrugged his loose shoulders. Mrs. Bemmerton was both rich and influential and one of the few women he attended to personally. He vowed he would do so no more.

“To put things bluntly, Mrs. Bemmerton,” said he, “if you want your own ideas carried out, this isn’t the sort of place to come to. People come to me for my ideas. That’s my only reason for existence.” He smiled. “You must either leave it on my hands or return to the original design. I can’t let that thing go out under the name of “Palmyre.’ It would ruin my reputation.” He glanced at his wrist-watch. “I’m so sorry. I have an appointment.”

He bowed pleasantly and left her.

Mrs. Bemmerton wanted the dress. The colours suited her. It was for an early special occasion. She had told her friends about it. But she knew that Major Boyle wouldn’t send it to her in its present state. So she capitulated. She was one of the women who looked on Toby as a bear.

Toby, his day’s work done, walked home to his flat in Mount Street, no great distance. It was a fine, brisk evening, and he sniffed the pure air with enjoyment and rejoiced in the sight and sound of men on the busy pavements. He lit his pipe at a street corner. If he had posed theatrically to himself, he would have turned down a side street and drunk a mug of ale at a common pub, and talked man’s talk with frowsty loafers. But Toby was downright and honest, as much to himself–so far as it is granted me to judge the workings of another man’s soul–as to the world at large.

I mention this because it was once the subject of a talk between us.

“Sometimes I feel,” he said, “as if I should like to mix with the lustiness of cabmen and prize-fighters and racing touts–just for the sheer masculinity of it–as a reaction from the dreadful world of women in which I have to live. But that’s all lunatic. I couldn’t be happy outside my own social element.”

I record his words here on account of their relation to after events in Toby’s life.

Toby, although he had a latch-key, rang the bell of his Mount Street flat. The door was opened by one who had the aspect of the perfect manservant; a man of about Toby’s age, thin, of medium height, with a sallow, rather finely cut, intelligent face, and astonishingly quick, light blue eyes. He smiled as he took Toby’s hat and stick. Toby made a few passes in the air. The man shook his head and made the first few movements of a man dealing cards. After the rapid interchange of a few more signs, Toby received the information that his father, Mr. Wilfrid Boyle, was at the Athenæum, where he played bridge most afternoons, and would not be home for dinner. The man preceded his master, and threw open the door of what, in most aristocratic Mount Street flats, would be the drawing-room, but in this case was Toby’s own room, equipped with every article of furniture and adornment that woman would most abhor. His father said it looked like the stranger’s smoking-room of a third-rate club. I never could agree to this, seeing nothing third-rate about Toby. The leather-appointed, anyhow-equipped, loose yet comfortable place was a fit setting for Toby’s clothes, and Toby’s clothes, apart from uniforms, were Toby himself.

He threw himself into a chair before a blazing fire. The man touched his shoulder with a delicate finger. Toby looked up. With twinkling swiftness the man sketched three ideas: the motion of raising a cup; the thumb motion of squirting soda from a siphon; the shaking of a cocktail. Toby smiled and made the thumb gesture. The man departed and returned quickly with a tray on which was whisky decanter, glass and siphon half clouded from its stay in the ice-box. He poured out the drink. Toby made a questioning sketch in the air. The man, in lightning pantomime, informed him that his host at dinner expected him to wear the dress-coat and white tie of ceremony.

“Oh, damn!” said Toby.

The man didn’t hear, but smiled pleasantly; and, drawing from his pocket one of those patent tablets on which you can write and from which you can erase by a slip of the hand, drew with a rapid stroke what was, practically, the ideograph of a woman. Toby took it from him and drew an ideographic hand holding a pistol at the woman’s head. Then they both laughed. It was Toby’s little joke. Mutual comprehension had been perfect. Communication by speech might possibly have taken longer. The man retired. Toby took up the evening paper that had been laid on the club fender-seat to air, refilled his pipe and gave never another thought to Jones.

For this bright-eyed, swift-witted deaf and dumb man was Jones, but for whom this history would never have been written.

In these days I know, except on privileged occasions, one does not mention war to ears polite. The last one was rather a vulgar and messy business, and nice people agree that we should regard it as not having happened. We don’t talk of ropes in the house of a man who has been hanged. A matter of taste. Also, it’s a bit old-fashioned. My old father served as a subaltern in the Crimea and in the Indian Mutiny. He bored my boyhood stiff. I, an old soldier, confess it.

But I can’t explain Jones without dragging in the war, for it made Jones what he was–a Mystery. I’ll be as brief as I can. Toby has told me all about it. He can be picturesque at times when the artist gets hold of him. He also has the soldier’s gift of accurate statement.

You must imagine a hell of a summer dawn on the Western front, cloudy, threatening rain. Attack, counter-attack along a big sector of the line, artillery thundering, a mine explosion on what we hoped was an impregnable position to our left. Hell let loose. You’ll find the engagement recorded in any history of the war. But I’m not going to record it. All that concerns my story is that Toby, then a captain, got back to his trench with a handful of his Company. Our barrage stopped the counter-attack. Stretcher-bearers went out and brought in the wounded. It was a mess, as I say, all along the sector. The rain came down and the mud mingled with the blood in every trench. It was a stalemate of an engagement, anyway, in that we kept the line; but the casualties were horrible....

It was only long after, when the wounded had been cleared from the trench, and the roll of his Company was called with the pitiful response whose memory even now haunts Toby, that he became aware of a stranger, apparently physically fit, in spite of a blood-congealed contusion on the side of his head, who, in the scurry of the retreat, had fallen into the trench. He wore a hacked and horrid tunic of Toby’s regiment. But he was not of Toby’s regiment. Toby learned that he had huddled himself, naked to the waist, in the first tunic to hand that had been stripped from a desperately wounded man. He had fallen into the trench, as I say, half naked. His boots and puttees had gone. A slight abrasion of the skin showed that his identity disc had either been torn or shot away. His clothing consisted solely of a pair of khaki breeches and a sort of bag of stout, old, blackened pigskin, together with the oval medal of the Virgin which most Roman Catholic English soldiers wore under their shirts, slung by a steel chain around his neck. He was deaf and dumb; could give no account of himself. Toby tried the deaf and dumb alphabet on his fingers in vain. By his gestures Toby gathered that he had been blown up in the mine explosion, and concluded that he must have been stripped as dead by enemies of the baser sort, who, however, had the decency to leave him his breeches and the superstition not to remove his medal or the thing that looked like some sort of reliquary. Toby wrote on a writing-pad. The man wrinkled his brow and shook his head. Whether he was illiterate–an uncommon, but far from unknown thing in the Army–or whether the mine explosion had knocked the power of reading and writing out of him, Toby had no means of determining. He certainly had not lost his memory. He had only lost means of self-expression. When Toby tried to discover his regiment a bright idea struck the man. He took Toby’s pad and pencil and sketched a rough but comically adequate map of England. He made three dots, one on the west coast, one in London, one somewhere in the eastern counties. His gestures showed that he was born in the first, worked in the second, and, confirmed by the sign of a scrabbled skeleton man carrying a gun, that he belonged to an eastern county regiment. As his wounded skull seemed to give him no trouble, and he appeared to be only hungry and somewhat cold, Toby had him clothed and fed, and bothered no more about him. The medical staff had their hands full. So had he. Then something hit him on the head and stunned him. It was nothing serious; but it knocked him out. When he recovered consciousness an hour or two later, he found the man, as batman, attending to his wants. “The chap would have it, sir,” said the only surviving sergeant of Toby’s Company, “and so I let him.”

Well, that was how Jones dawned on Toby.

As I say, it was one of our little messes in the war. The people that ought to have relieved the front trenches got messed up themselves. Only the bluff saved the situation. The thinnest of front lines was held for some hours, until the line was relieved. Toby got his D.S.O. for it, though modestly he could never tell why.

All this, I repeat, is with the sole purpose of telling you about Jones.

He accompanied Toby like a faithful dog to more or less comfortable billets of rest behind the lines. And then, of course, Toby had to send the poor fellow back to England, a deaf and dumb man, who can only communicate with his fellows by means of savage gestures and coarse ideographs on paper, being a none too useful soldier in time of war. But Toby, who liked the bright-eyed, efficient and obviously grateful fellow whom he christened Jones, went to some pains to assure a personal touch with him, no matter into what hospital he might be drafted. Toby, as a soldier, was one of the thorough people. He left nothing to chance. That’s why I loved him as a staff officer. He set his nets wide to catch the poor solitary fish, Jones, adrift in the welter of the hospital system of Great Britain. His most direct scheme was to supply Jones with twenty stamped and addressed envelopes, the significance of which the intelligent Jones clearly understood. For Jones and Toby kept up together a queer correspondence. When Toby’s envelopes had come to an end, Jones had obviously requested the hospital authorities to type him a fresh supply. Sometimes the nurses wrote themselves to Major Boyle. They said that mental specialists were most interested in Jones. Complete deafness, the breaking of ear-drums by explosives, aphasia induced by some lesion of the brain, the outward sign of which was the wound in the head, all complicated by common illiteracy; but in other respects a normal intelligence. He was a show case. The ordinary aphasiac could be got at through his ears. But Jones was stone-deaf. Writing was no use. He couldn’t read. He was one of the few cases of complete aphasia, or loss of expression in words. So great specialists, and ordinary doctors and nurses, petted and spoiled Jones, and gave him an exceeding good time in hospital.

That’s all I know of the clinical side of the man’s affliction. You will find his case, which has nothing to do with shell-shock or amnesia–loss of memory–recorded in the “Lancet.” I have only to do with the man as I have known him and his relations with Toby.

It fascinated Toby for a couple of years to correspond pictorially with Jones. The slightest indication of outward form seemed to react on the intelligence of the stricken man, who responded in kind. Between them, almost insensibly, they invented an ideographic system of communication, which tended to become as formal as Egyptian hieroglyphics. No man with a kindly heart and a decent brain could have resisted the joy of the experiment, seeing that the subject, a patient, was in desperate earnest to respond.

Afterwards, when they came together, they could do their ideographs by forefingers moving in the air. This I never could follow. I could generally make myself understood to Jones by my clumsy graphic ideographs and he, as though he were speaking to a child, would convey his ideas to me in simple drawings. And, naturally, there were the ordinary elementary gestures by which the least talented of mortals make their primitive wants known to those who do not speak their language. After that, I am done. The swift ideogrammic air-speed which Toby and Jones have invented between themselves is a mystery that is secret to themselves alone.

Well, perhaps Ruth has it, more or less. I have seen her talk to them both with flickers of fingers.... But I can’t tell you about Ruth yet. I shall explain her later. I never realized, until I sat down to tell what appeared quite a simple tale, what a lot of things and people there were to explain.

At any rate, at the risk of offending your intelligence, I must emphasize the fact that this queer sign language in which Toby and Jones communicated with each other was utterly remote from the deaf and dumb alphabet. Jones, as far as medical science could conjecture, had the full equipment of English words necessary to formulate his thoughts to himself. He had only lost the means of expressing them, could not be taught to recognize them by movement of the lips.

The history of Toby and Jones up to the point of the beginning of my story is simplicity itself. When Toby was demobilized, he sought out Jones and, liking the man exceedingly, engaged him as manservant. With what other human soul was Jones in so close communication as Toby? I think that in those early post-war days Jones must have regarded Toby as a kind of god. What other chance of salvation from madness had the fellow? I put it to you from a material point of view, apart from the natural gushing of human gratitude.... On the one side was life for ever in some post-war home for incurables, as an interesting case–the real interest of which no one could be at the trouble to convey to his mind–occupied like the blind, or like the semi-imbecile, in trivial art and craft handiwork or whatnot; on the other, the freedom of the great world in the service of the only human creature who had what, to Jones, must have been the God-sent genius to establish a living line of thought-transference. As to the rough communications of life, he could be explanatory to nurse and comrades, or to myself, when I came to know him. But, as far as my psychological efforts can go, it was to Toby alone that he felt himself related in the realm of the abstract idea.

Can you wonder that he regarded Toby as a god?

He went into his service. It became one of Toby’s delightful interests in life to invent means of communication with Jones. He discovered, for instance, that Jones, although stone-deaf, was in his body sensitive to certain electrical vibrations. He went to much trouble to rig up such an attuned apparatus in his flat. That was why, in order not to hurt Jones’s feelings, and also to keep him in practice, he generally rang his front-door bell, instead of letting himself in with his latch-key.

And then, as soon as they lived together as master and servant, the pencilled ideograph began to develop into the sign language which I call their aerograph. From this Toby learned that Jones was an orphan, that his father had followed the sea, that he had been brought up as a Roman Catholic–which accounted for the medal respected by looting enemies–and that, having survived many evil days, he had joined up in the war. Many other details, necessarily vague, of his past life did he disclose to Toby. But his own name was beyond his power of ideographing and remained a mysterious secret locked up in his memory.

Toby read his evening paper, smoked his pipe and drank his whisky and soda and dropped off to sleep in front of the fire. Presently Jones appeared, and, waking him up, informed him that it was time to dress, and that his bath was ready. Toby swore. He didn’t want to go out to dinner; especially to one where the presence of ladies ordained the wearing of dress-coat and white tie. He would greatly have preferred to go, just as he was, to his club, and talk with casual men and, perhaps, play a sober game of bridge.

But the dinner was an important one, as you shall see.

CHAPTER II

The dinner-party was no less than a family gathering convened by my second cousin, Commander Sir Gregory Binkley, whose father, the eminent surgeon and first baronet, was my first cousin. This relationship doesn’t matter; but there are others, which, as I warned you, will have to be appreciated. Why he invited me, I don’t quite know; certainly not for my beautiful elderly eyes; possibly because he wanted to rope in Lady Jane Crowe, who stood to him in the same degree of relationship as myself.

He lived in a dull, conventional house in Queensborough Terrace, off the Bayswater Road, and all its appointments were dull and conventional. The few inherited odds and ends of good furniture and pictures seemed to protest against their surroundings and wish to goodness they could get away like their former mistress. For Lady Binkley had got away, got away with a vengeance, and there had been a painful divorce suit; and now she was, as far as I could hear, as merry as ten grigs with her new husband, a lusty engineer who was bridging cataracts somewhere in Africa. I may say at once that she doesn’t come into the story otherwise than as a factor in Commander Sir Gregory Binkley’s warped view of mundane things. I know he was fond of her in his fussy disciplinarian way, and her defection was as amazing and as upsetting of standards and as destructive of values as would be the indecorous flight of naked young witches on broomsticks through the solemn halls wherein Houses of Convocation are wont to assemble. Instead of reflecting, like a reasonable being–myself, for instance: “Hasn’t the fault lain in my own fussy disciplinarianism?” he became more and more fussy and disciplinarian than ever. As an old soldier, I’ve had to carry out, God knows, enough discipline in my time; but, once across the threshold of my own home, I leave all that sort of thing to my wife. After nearly thirty years of marriage, I shoulder arms to her and to my daughters like the rawest of recruits. And I wouldn’t have it otherwise. The three of them regard me as the most helpless of pet lambs, and I’ve always wallowed in domestic comfort. But Binkie...

Here, by the way, is yet another thing to be explained. But it’s remarkably simple. Could a man answering formally to the name of Binkley avoid being called “Binkie”? Of course not.

I must come to the dinner-party.

You know the type of house. A passage. Dining-room to your left. The passage continuing into vague dimness. A carpeted flight of stairs by the dining-room, twisting at right angles half-way up, and then the landing of the double drawing-room.

Ushered by the butler, I found, although I was not late, the company already assembled. Gregory, otherwise Binkie, a spare, short man with sparse hair and restless eyes, welcomed me cordially. He had asked Jane–Lady Jane Crowe–but she was in bed with a cold. Toby, of course, I knew. But Hettie Dalrymple and her brother, Nicholas Egerton?

I think I had seen them as children. I knew more or less about them. She was a widow, of about thirty-two, with a small boy of ten, and was hard put to it to make a living. She was fair, pink-skinned, plump and pleasing, with blue eyes that smiled perhaps a trifle roguishly. I liked her at once. Her brother, Nicholas, many years younger, was a pale, anxious, indetermined, lanky youth, with indeterminate mouse-coloured hair. He called me “sir,” most politely.

“That’s the lot,” said Binkie. “The four of us are the only lineal descendants of old John Gregory Jorico, whose name I bear. You, Tom, I’ve asked because you may give us the benefit of your advice and experience. Pity Jane couldn’t come too; I’ve made a most important discovery.”

The butler announced that dinner was served.

“What’s it all about?” I asked.

“We’ll dine first and then I’ll tell you,” said Binkie, in his crisp, quarter-deck manner.

We dined, not excitingly, but not too badly. The cook maintained the house’s level of dull and undistinguished comfort. There were only the five of us. From Binkie’s invitation one might reasonably have expected a family gathering of twenty. I sat next to Hettie Dalrymple. I must give Binkie credit for his champagne, a rosy Clicquot of 1911. How on earth he thought of getting the rare stuff, or managed to get it, is a mystery. It unlocked tongues. Half-way through the meal we found ourselves discussing the general damnability of the post-war world. I looked at the three men cousins, and judged their ages, fairly correctly, as I soon discovered. Gregory Binkley was forty-four; Toby thirty-five, and young Nicholas five-and-twenty. I belong to a generation that, war or no war, would be on the shelf. If there hadn’t been a war, I might possibly be putting up a gouty foot on a wooden foot-rest, still provided by the United Services Club. As the war has deprived me of the means to consume the amount of port adequate to the cultivation of gout, I walk about freely.

“If I only had something to remember the war by,” said Gregory, “I shouldn’t groan about modern conditions. Talk about the silent Navy. It’s a damn sight too silent. Either I was boxed up in a battleship in Scapa Flow, or I was working my head off in an office in the Admiralty. Never heard a shot fired in anger! Bored, my God! I even missed the bit of spurious excitement at Jutland. Lots of us like that. When it was all over they paid us to clear out. Toby’s the lucky one. He has got some memories to live upon.”

“I trot ’em out of my sub-consciousness as little as I can,” said Toby.

Binkie persisted. “Still, if you hadn’t got ’em you’d find present circumstances pretty hard to stick. You’ve told me as much.”

“I think it makes my present job all the more grotesque,” said Toby, with a laugh.

I intervened. “And our young friend, Nicholas–what does he think about it?”

“I was too young to get into the war, sir,” replied the boy, flushing a little. “I was still at school when it was over.”

Heavens! thought I. Was what it pleased us to call Armageddon such ancient history as all that? And then I reflected that, the minimum age of service being 18, scarcely anyone born after the year 1900 could have taken part in it.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I’m at a loose end, sir, like so many of us.”

“Take up a hobby, my boy, as I’ve done,” said Binkie.

“I’d take up any old hobby you like, Cousin Gregory,” said Nicholas, flushing, “if I could make a living at it.”

“I thought you were fixed up,” said Toby. “Big preparatory school, wasn’t it?”

The boy’s flush deepened. He fiddled about with his bread. Hettie Dalrymple bent across the round table.

“He was till a few days ago. Then he had to chuck it.”

“Chuck up a perfectly good job these days? Why?” asked Binkie.

“First it was a beast of a job, very much underpaid,” flashed Hettie, “and then the Head, who had commanded a battalion of Y.M.C.A.s–”

I smiled. “He couldn’t have done that, my dear.”

She waved an impatient feminine hand. “Something inglorious, anyhow. A Chinese Labour battalion at Brest, or a Rest Camp at Monte Carlo–what does it matter? He was a Colonel and has suffered from military swelled head ever since. Well, he insulted Nick the other day, and Nick knocked him down on the hearthrug, and as far as I can see that’s the end of Nick’s scholastic career.”

In her indignation she waved away the dish that was handed and drank some champagne. The boy, somewhat uncomfortable, turned to me, his left-hand neighbour.

“He wasn’t quite as bad as my sister makes out. He started as a padre and then got a general commission. It was sporting enough of him. But I think power spoiled him. When he got his battalion–it was a Labour battalion–he must have had an awful lot of duds as officers under him. And so he returned to civil life with the impression that all of us under him must be duds too. I stood it as long as I could, three years, ever since I went down from Cambridge. Then he tried to tick me off–I think that’s what you used to call it–in his best military manner, for something I’d never done. I resented it. He called me a liar and I went for him.” He smiled with wry humour. “Saving your presence, sir, that’s all I’ve got out of the war.”

“What’s wrong with you young people of the present generation,” said Binkie, “is that you won’t begin to understand what discipline means.”

“Oh, don’t talk damned nonsense,” cried Toby. “If the General said that, I’d defer politely to an old standard. But he has far too much common sense. And you, you’re far too young. You’re only forty-four. You belong to our generation. Discipline! We’re sick of discipline. We’ve this infernal modern world standing over us like a sergeant-major. We don’t want any individual Colonels or even Lieutenant-Generals”–he threw me a disarming laugh–“to discipline us. We’re out for independence, self-assertion. Damn the sergeant-major. It was all very well in the old days to bow to routine and accept thankfully whatever Providence offered you. I must say that Providence did its best. But now it doesn’t. We’ve got to fend for ourselves.”

Said I: “My dear Toby, you’re fending for yourself and apparently making a fairly good thing out of it. But, as far as I can make out from things you’ve told me, you seem to be as much disgruntled with life as Binkie and our friend, Nicholas.”

Mrs. Dalrymple laid her fingers on my arm.

“I don’t think, General, you’re taking my young brother’s case seriously.”

I protested. “Indeed I do, my dear cousin. A hundred years ago an old soldier in my present position would have said: “Dammit, madam. A lad of spirit. Knocked the schoolmaster’s head off! Splendid! Send him to me and I’ll see him through.’ But, my dear, although these are my real and sincere feelings, the expression of them would be worse than futile in this more sophisticated epoch.”

“It sounds as if you were making a speech,” she said with laughing impertinence.

“It does,” said I. “But if you think a soldier’s only job is to hack people about with a sword, you’re mistaken. He has to talk and talk and talk, and that’s how I’ve got the hang of it.”

“But the Navy is always silent,” she remarked with a glance at our host.

We laughed at the mild jest. I began to like Hettie Dalrymple exceedingly. She was loyal, full of life, responsive, with a little gay sense of humour.

The talk drifted into conventional channels. Presently she said:

“Toby says he’s fed up with women. That’s why he scowled at me when he came in. But I’m fed up with men–and I defy any of you to have seen a trace of a scowl on my face.”

“Why this hidden misanthropy?” I asked.

She explained that she spent her working days in the masculine environment of the advertising department of a young publishing firm. She had to deal with an outside world of men. Some were charming, most indifferent, a few peculiarly horrid. She wrinkled a delicate nose. The intellectuals in journalism are not generally found in the rough and tumble of advertising staffs.

“On the whole–with the exception of the sexual primitives who give one a certain amount of trouble and business delays–I can’t complain of men. But if only one could meet a woman now and then, and interrupt the silly talk and say: “My dear, what a pretty hat! Where did you get it?’ you’ve no idea what a joy it would be. But as a man, I suppose you can’t understand.”

“My dear,” said I. “I’ve a wife and two daughters. I’ll pay you a salary to come and admire their hats and gowns. It’ll save me Heaven knows what.”

“I’ll come for nothing if they’ll let me,” she laughed.

“My wife will write to you tomorrow,” said I.

I know not why, but reflection on the niceties of the English language swept across my mind. Had I said “shall write,” I should have asserted myself as the Grand Bashaw of my harem. By saying “will” I was merely prophesying my dear wife’s suave response to my request.

Coffee came and some abominable prematurely aged brandy. I thought of the rosy champagne. Quantum mutatus ab illo! But I learned later that the wine had been the choice of that prescient connoisseur, his father, and that the brandy was supplied to him, half a dozen bottles at a time, by an obscure wine merchant round the corner. Binkie had no use for the æsthetics of life. A primrose by the river’s brim was to him, as to Peter Bell, but a damned primrose. Food, so long as he could chew it, and it didn’t reek of horrible flavour, was just food. Wine was wine, and brandy was brandy. What more could anybody want?

Perhaps, in the same way, a wife had been to Binkie a wife and nothing more. Wherefore the lady had left him for an engineer with a more highly developed æsthetic perception.

Binkie began to fidget. I could see that he wanted to get to the business of the evening by the way he glanced at our cups and glasses. When the cigars were handed round he said to me:

“Don’t be afraid–we can smoke them upstairs. Hettie won’t mind.”

Then presently: “No more brandy, anybody? Then shall we go?”

We went up to the drawing-room, where he marshalled the four of us as if we were children about to be entertained by a conjurer. There was even a table holding his properties–books and papers–beside the fireplace, where he soon took up his position.

“The first thing I want to know is how many of you have heard of Captain John Gregory Jorico and his curious will, whereby he left a fortune of half a million of money.”

I shook my head. He wasn’t my ancestor, and I had never heard of him.

Toby laughed. “My mother used to refer vaguely to some such legend in her family.”

“Nick and I were both too young to remember our mother, and our father never mentioned the matter.”

“Good,” said Binkie. “What I’m going to say will come to you with all the greater surprise.”

He turned to the table. I felt disappointed that there was no hat on it, from which he might have extracted a rabbit.

CHAPTER III

He took up a few papers and cleared his throat.

“I’ve asked Sir Thomas to come here as a family friend, and a witness, and a man of great experience of men and things, and I feel sure he’ll allow us to benefit by his advice.”

“Anything I can do, my dear fellow...” said I.

“Thanks, Tom. I knew it. But what I want to make clear is that, when I say “we’ and “you,’ I’m referring to the set of four cousins, of whom I am the eldest.

“As you know, we are the children of three sisters, Mary, Jane, and Anne, who unfortunately are now dead. They were the only children of our grandfather Gregory Jorico, who, born in 1835, married a Miss Tobin, whence Toby gets his second Christian name, practised as a doctor in London, and died intestate in the year 1890.

“Gregory Jorico’s father was one John Jorico, born in 1805, a Bristol merchant, who died in 1870. He had issue, Gregory, the doctor, and a daughter who died young. He was our great-grandfather–on our maternal side. I hope I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly,” said Toby.

“This John Jorico’s father, our great-great-grandfather, Captain John Gregory Jorico, is the ancestor with whom the four of us are vitally concerned. He was born in the year 1755 and died in 1830 at the age of 75.

“My mother, the eldest of the three sisters, I fancy was more in the confidence of her father, Dr. Gregory Jorico, than your respective mothers. Besides, she married into his own profession–he and my father, Mowbray Binkley, from whom I inherited the baronetcy, were great friends. I remember him very well. He died when I was about 10–my mother when I was 35. I grew up, as it were, under the legend of the Family Fortune.

“It was, however, not till three years ago, when I was very badly hit–you all know what I refer to–that, finding myself at the very loosest end in life, it struck me that I might occupy myself in looking into this mythical fortune supposed to have been left by our ancestor, Captain John Gregory Jorico.

“All I had to go upon was the tradition that he died in Bristol. Our grandfather had told my mother that his father had said so.

“For three years I have ridden my hobby, and I think I’ve got somewhere.”

He smiled genially, and paused as though he had used a humorous metaphor. Good-natured Toby nodded and said: “Good man.” Young Nicholas stared into the fire.

“I think I’ve searched the records of every parish and every public institution in the city of Bristol. I advertised periodically in the Bristol papers for any information concerning the Jorico family.” He pointed to the table. “I’ve lots of information.

“First, there’s the Will of Captain John Gregory Jorico. Let us call him Ancestor Jorico for short. I’ve seen it with my own eyes in the District Registers of Bristol, which were set up among forty others by the Act of 1857. This is a copy of it...” He handed it round. “But it was almost illegible, written evidently on his death-bed. One would say that the signature was the last dying effort in which he spent himself. Read it.”

We read:

“1st November 1830. I leave my fortune of £500,000 to my son.... (Signed) John Gregory Jorico.”

“It was a paralytical scrawl,” Binkie continued, “but it was a valid will. Laws relating to witnesses and so forth didn’t come in till 1838. His son John proved it, and took possession of his father’s estate.

“Not the half-million of money. That’s the whole point of the business. Not a trace of the half-million was ever found. They had to attribute the great fortune to the megalomaniac dreams of a dying man. John inherited the comfortable little house in Vine Street, Bristol, where his father lived, and two or three thousand pounds loose cash, which, after all, was a jolly good sum to have in those days.

“Here is another fact in the Bristol records. This from the Parish Church of St. Stephen’s, where I found the baptismal register. Great-grandfather John was a younger son. There was an elder called Gregory, born in 1803. I told you John was born in 1805.

“You see a point I must make. The dying Ancestor Jorico said in his will, “My son.’ Which son? I had to find out.

“I found that John married a Bristol girl–one Frances Appleworth. As great-grandfather John predeceased her, it appears that she had the custody of many of his family papers; and, having quarrelled with her son, our grandfather Gregory, because he had London ambitions, transferred all that she could, under his will, of her personal effects to her own Appleworth family. There is still a distant cousin of hers, of the same name, a partner in a considerable Bristol brewery, who, when I tracked him down, I found had kept many interesting oddments of books and papers that had come down to him from the old lady. He has put the whole lot at my disposal. These are the most important ones. This, for instance.”

He handed us a faded four-page newspaper–the “Port of Spain Gazette,” 15th August, 1801. We read a paragraph which he pointed out:

“Just arrived, the Brig Flora, Master, Captain John Gregory Jorico, bringing 103 negroes, eighty males, sixteen females and seven children. All young and in perfect health. The same will be put up to Public Auction at 8 a. m. tomorrow. God save the King!”

“From this you will see,” said Binkie, rubbing his hands with an air of humour, “that our illustrious Ancestor was engaged in the slave-trade. Pretty lucrative in those days. Here’s something else that nobody for practically a hundred years has taken the trouble to look at.”