Chapter XX

Alfred returned home that night. He had been away at a race-meeting, but the day, so far as he was concerned, had proved a failure, and an injudicious attempt later to neutralize matters by a game of cards had been hardly more successful. He didn’t know where the deuce the money was to come from, and it somehow did not tend to put him in any pleasanter mood to discover his father waiting up. His marriage too had begun to weigh upon Alfred’s mind. From many points of view it was unsatisfactory. The girl, he still felt, was worth it, but it had serious drawbacks, and their meetings at present were accompanied by nearly all the disadvantages and discomforts attendant on illicit loves. What was the use of being married, thought Alfred, when you have to behave as if you weren’t? He felt that he must make his position known on the first suitable opportunity.

As he came in from the obscurity outside, the strong light in the dining-room dazzled him, and he was conscious that he did not show to advantage. The fact naturally irritated him, for he was not at all so drunk as he knew for a minute or two he must appear to be. Mr. Bracknel, his hands under the tails of his coat, his back against the chimney-piece, watched him with considerable interest. The rest of the family had gone to bed.

“Well,” Mr. Bracknel remarked genially, “I hope you’ve had a pleasant day?”

“Very,” answered Alfred, making a sudden, plunging movement to get out of the room. The opportune moment to tell his tale had not yet arrived, and he knew nothing of Rhoda’s betrayal.

“I’m glad to hear that, but you’d better wait a moment; I’ve something to say to you. I’ve been hearing some news about you--quite unexpected news--bright and festive news I might call it.”

His father’s manner was highly disagreeable, and Alfred paused at the door without turning round. “What have you been hearing?” he asked shortly.

“About your increased responsibilities,” said Mr. Bracknel in the same tone of sinister geniality.

A dark flush overspread Alfred’s heavy face, and a vicious spark of light showed itself in his dull little eyes; but he knew that he must be propitiating, that it was his only chance. “What responsibilities?” he asked, trying to throw into his voice an amiability he was far from feeling.

“I mean the responsibilities which are always incurred by matrimony.” Mr. Bracknel spoke in soft purring fashion as he swayed his coat-tails gently up and down. The cheerfulness of his words, their prolonged sarcasm, had an intensely exasperating effect upon his son.

“Who told you I was married?” Alfred asked thickly.

“Your wife’s aunt,” replied Mr. Bracknel, with great relish. “Your wife’s aunt.” He repeated the words, rolling them on his tongue, as if he took a particular pleasure in their sound. “You might at least have given us a chance of going to the wedding or of offering you a present! I hear you were married in church, with the greatest regularity. Well, well; of course you know your own affairs best.”

Alfred said nothing and there was a silence till his father broke it once more: “How do you propose to live? What are your plans?” He rubbed his hands softly together and smiled. “What do you propose to do; but possibly such questions are indiscreet?”

“We haven’t settled yet. We were going to keep it quiet for a time.” It may seem strange, but Alfred had calculated that his father, once he got used to the idea of the marriage, would probably put him in a position to support his wife in reasonable comfort. He now saw these hopes rapidly dwindling. “I suppose she wormed it out of her,” he added gloomily, alluding to Mrs. Brooke and Rhoda.

“I don’t know--I don’t know, I’m sure, what particular method was employed. By the way, your salary is two hundred, isn’t it?”

“It is--at present.”

“At present?” His father grew positively radiant. “Ah, I see. You have something better in view: you are thinking of leaving us--thinking of leaving us.... _Not_ thinking of leaving? Oh well, of course it isn’t impossible to live on two hundred. People do it: though you may find it difficult at first. These little excursions such as you have just returned from to-night, for instance--these pleasant, harmless little excursions I should think must be rather imprudent for a man in your position and with your ties. You see, you will have to allow for so many things--house-rent for example--unless you propose to live with your aunt?”

“I don’t propose doing so,” Alfred muttered. The flush on his face deepened, spreading over his neck and ears and up to the roots of his hair.

“I see. You will take a little house, then?--a little villa, perhaps?--one of those little villas with a porch and a glass door and a name on the gate. I shouldn’t advise you to spend too much on it. A small house in a street, where your wife will not be too far away from her aunt, might be best. I am sorry your abilities, and the intermittent attention which is all you are able to find for business, do not allow me to offer you a better position.”

Alfred’s mouth began to twitch. “No, I should think you would want to keep anything of that sort for your bastard.”

A silence followed these words, a silence in which the ticking of the clock became audible--a creak from the stairs--then nothing but the ticking of the clock. The father and the son still faced each other, but Mr. Bracknel’s geniality had departed. When he spoke again there was an icy note in his voice: “Well, I needn’t detain you any longer. Of course you know your own affairs best.”

Alfred did not move. He was conscious that he had burned his ships with a vengeance. Also, for a moment, he was a little shocked by the sound of his own words, though now that he had spoken them he would have liked them to have had more effect. His father’s apparent indifference--he had neither started nor changed colour--bewildered him. Could there be any mistake? He had received his information from Rhoda in the intimacy of a long discussion of their mutual affairs which had taken place the day after their wedding. It had been startling, but he had almost instantly recognized its truth. There was that in it which one _could_ recognize. Had not Rhoda herself made it all out independently, even if with more to go upon than he had had? For him there had been nothing save an undue favouritism, and a physical resemblance, extraordinary, though not obvious, though not striking indeed perhaps, save to the completely initiated. But this resemblance had flashed upon him the instant she had spoken, and he found himself referring to it now, as if for corroboration, as if for support. Yes; it was there; he believed in it. And simultaneously he discovered that he had something else to say, something which had been bottled up for a long time within him and which an exasperated sense of injury, of accumulated wrong, gave him now the necessary eloquence to express. “You’ve treated me badly from the beginning; you’ve treated me meanly, and you’ve favoured John Brooke. I’ve never had a chance. I have been kept down and he has been pushed forward. You have never given me any authority in the place. I’m nothing more than any of the clerks for all the position I’ve got; and then you grumble at me because I don’t take an interest in the drudgery that you give me to do. What chance have I ever had to take an interest? I can’t do anything without coming to you first to get your permission. That’s what you like. You like everybody to go down on their knees and lick your boots.” His flow of words suddenly subsided. He could get no further though his father waited for him to go on. Mr. Bracknel was perfectly patient, even gravely attentive.

“If you have no authority,” he replied calmly, “it is because you have never shown yourself fit to have any. And, as for John Brooke, he isn’t drawing as much pay as you are.”

“I don’t care what he’s drawing. I’m quite sure you give him as little as you can, though he _is_ your favourite. He has a position all the same, and I haven’t. He does things on his own account and everybody recognizes him. He has responsibilities: he isn’t a machine. I’ve heard you asking him for his opinion when I was standing by, but of course not worth talking to; and others have heard it too. That’s the sort of thing I’ve had to put up with ever since he came into the place.”

“And why _should_ I ask your opinion?” Mr. Bracknel put it to him, with a sort of crushing, brutal deliberateness. “What sort of value do you imagine it has? You surely know that if you were not my son I wouldn’t have you in the place an hour longer than I could help! All you have ever done there has been to set an example of idleness and dissipation. Where have you been all day? What did you do when I sent you out to Switzerland? It has been the same story from the beginning. Cards, betting, drinking, and I don’t know what less mentionable pursuits--these are what have occupied your mind. It is only your constitution that has saved you from being at this moment as great a wreck physically as you are mentally and morally. Do you seriously expect me to entrust my business to men of your stamp?”

“Oh, damn you and your business,” said Alfred violently. “I hope you’ll take it to hell with you.” He turned on his heel, but on the threshold he met his mother standing there, pale and frightened, clad in a long, dark dressing-gown.

“Oh Alfred!” she murmured, horrified. “How could you speak so to your father!”

But Alfred only muttered something incoherent as he pushed past her and on upstairs.

Mrs. Bracknel entered the dining-room. In her long, flowing gown she seemed shadowy, hardly human. Mr. Bracknel’s air of indifference had dropped from him; he regarded her in sombre silence; but since he did not repulse her, which she had half expected him to do, she ventured to draw nearer.

“What is the matter, James?” she asked in a low voice that trembled slightly.

Mr. Bracknel was in a humour when it was a relief to have somebody to whom he could unburden himself.

“The matter?” he answered bitterly. “The matter is that he has done for himself.”

“Done for himself?” a vague vision of some dire deed floated before her mind, though without taking any precise form.

“He’s married,” said her husband laconically, “married a type-writing girl out of the office, that’s all.” He uttered the words with a kind of gloomy contempt, and Mrs. Bracknel gave a sigh of relief. The poor lady had imagined something infinitely worse.

“But when was it? To-day?”

“Oh, a day or two ago. What does it matter when?”

“And you didn’t know anything? You didn’t----”

He looked at her angrily. “Of course I didn’t know. Do you think I’m a fool? They took precious good care that I didn’t know. A silly little doll with a pretty face and the brains of a chicken.”

“But is she--is she a nice girl?--is she a good girl?”

“Oh, damn her,” said Mr. Bracknel. “I don’t know how nice she is. Nice enough for him, I daresay.”

“But is Alfred fond of her--what does he say about it all?”

“Fond of her! What do you mean by ‘fond of her?’ You don’t think he married her for her position, do you? Whether he’s fond of her or not, he’ll be sick of her at the end of a month, and God help her then!” He looked straight before him with unmitigated pessimism.

“Oh, don’t say such dreadful things!” Mrs. Bracknel quavered. “Why should he be like that?”

“Because he’s a brute and she’s a fool.” He spoke thickly, which was a sign that he was much agitated, but quietly, and even with a sort of gloomy fatalism. “What’s the use of sentimentalizing about it? You ought to know him well enough by this time, though he _is_ your son! At any rate, if you don’t, I do.” And he began again to pace up and down the room.

His wife watched him for some moments in a kind of fascinated silence. Then she asked timidly. “What are they going to do?”

Mr. Bracknel smiled mirthlessly. “They’re going to be sorry they ever saw each other. They’re going to live in a squalid little house till they hate the very sight of each other. God knows what they’re going to do! Alfred can’t afford to keep her at any rate--with his tastes, and on his salary.”

Mrs. Bracknel’s gentle countenance was filled with trouble. She sank into a chair. “But where is she now?” she asked helplessly.

“She’s at her aunt’s, I suppose. Where else would she be? She’ll have to go on living there unless he takes a house.”

“She has no father or mother then?”

“It appears not: it’s the one redeeming thing about her.”

Mrs. Bracknel sighed. She tried to see some ray of light in all these gloomy pictures, but she had not yet had time to take in the full significance of what had happened. “Perhaps she is a nice girl,” she murmured, with a weak return to her former position. “After all, we don’t know her, do we?”

Mr. Bracknel broke into a laugh. “If she was a nice girl she wouldn’t have married Alfred.”

“But we don’t know her,” his wife repeated. She was beginning to resent these attacks upon her son. Surely he had not committed a crime in getting married.

“_I_ know her--as well as I’ll ever know her. She’ll never cross this door: you may put away any idea of that sort.”

“Do you think she entrapped Alfred, then? Do you think----”

“I don’t know what she did. She hasn’t drawn a prize at all events, though I suppose she thought it worth the risk. I can’t live for ever, of course, and then it will be all right.”

“But we must do something for them in the meantime, mustn’t we?” Mrs. Bracknel pleaded.

“Must we? I’m pretty sure we won’t. Fortunately you’ve no money of your own to waste on them.”

“But why are you so severe? Is she--is there anything against her character?”

If he had wanted to, he could have told her why he was severe, he could have repeated to her the remark her son had let fall, have repeated those few words, for he remembered them perfectly, they still rang in his mind, in spite of the fact that he had been able, apparently, to ignore them; those words that had sounded like a menace, but a menace he would never yield to. “I tell you I know the type,” was all he said. “If he had married some simple country girl, it would have been different. But a girl like this--no, it won’t do.”

“But now that it _has_ happened,” Mrs. Bracknel wonderfully persisted, “mustn’t we make the best of it? You can’t cast Alfred off. If you allowed----”

“I won’t allow him a penny more than his salary. He’s overpaid as it is.” Suddenly he sat down in a chair. The colour faded from his face and he began to breathe queerly. His wife flew to his assistance, but in a minute or two he was better and able to get on his feet again. “I’m not going to lose my night’s sleep over it either, whoever else may,” he added, with a poor attempt to carry off his curious collapse. But his face was still colourless and a perspiration had broken out on his forehead. He moved a little uncertainly across the room and up the stairs, leaning heavily on the banisters. Mrs. Bracknel followed him closely.