Chapter III

He dismounted from the motor and went straight to his private office without saying a word to anyone. He began at once to go through the early morning mail. The fifth letter that he glanced at drew an exclamation from him. Some goods had not been delivered on the date promised, and this note now was to cancel the order. Alfred again, he thought; and put it aside to be dealt with later. The eighth letter was in a rough unformed hand, but, after looking at the signature, he read its contents through carefully twice before tearing the white, glazed sheet into minute fragments. It ran as follows:

“16, Medway Street.

“DEAR MR. BRACKNEL,--I would be favoured if you would be so kind as
to call here as I have something to tell you which I do not want to
write as it is private matter. If you would come this morning I
would be favoured, and it will be better than me going to the
office which I do not want to do.

“Yours respectfully,
“MARY BROOKE.”

What did she want? he wondered. His eyes turned to a faded, fly-soiled map that hung on the opposite wall. He began to consider several possibilities, but dismissed them one after another as unlikely. Yet curiously enough the letter did not add to his annoyance--rather his brow cleared a little, till presently the ghost of a smile passed across his face. Certain memories came back to him--memories in which Mary Brooke played a part. He saw her as she had been in her youth--the handsome shop-girl, a little sullen-looking, with dark hair and pouting lips. Well, all that was over now, and the secret of it had remained between them, but he was sure he had never cared for anybody else as he had cared for her then. If he had not been married already he would probably have married her. At least he had never deceived her, had never hidden from her his exact position. And later she had become the wife of Brooke, an anæmic clerk with a pale sickly face and weak eyes--Brooke, dead now for half-a-dozen years--she could never have cared for Brooke. She had married him for the sake of John; and when John was twelve years old they had adopted a little girl, the child of the clerk’s dead brother. He meditated, and gradually a vague regret overshadowed his mind. John was worth a hundred of Alfred and Denis, and yet he could not acknowledge him; he could only help him more or less indirectly. As he brooded over this his mood became more sombre, and the thought that at his death so much would pass into the squandering hands of his wife’s children, and away from the only child he felt to be really his, filled him with bitterness.

He began to go through the rest of his correspondence. He had a meeting at the City Hall at twelve o’clock which he could not miss, and at a quarter to eleven he went out, with the intention of calling first at Medway Street. He hailed a cab and gave the man an address, telling him to drive quickly. Their way lay through the centre of the most populous district of the city. The streets they traversed were narrow, the houses small and far from attractive, disfigured by peeling plaster and discoloured brick. There were long lines of ugly little shops displaying stale-looking fruit and faded vegetables, groceries and butcher’s meat, with a public-house at every corner. Very soon, however, they emerged into a more open quarter. The houses here were small also, but they were clean and respectable, and each could boast a little dingy fuliginous plot of scanty grass and dusty shrubs before its door. At number 16 the cab drew up and Mr. Bracknel stepped out on to the hot pavement, telling the man to come back in half an hour. He walked up the path, but the hall door opened before he had time to ring the bell. Mrs. Brooke stood there, stood to one side, in order that he might pass her in the narrow hall, and enter the little parlour, where he seated himself on a hard, high, slippery sofa of black horse-hair. She herself sat near the window beside a small table on which were arranged a few books that looked like school prizes, and several large pink and white shells on mats of crochet work. Mr. Bracknel glanced round the room. White muslin curtains hung before the window, and a large fat bluebottle was buzzing about them, every now and again banging into the pane. Two vases of artificial flowers under glass shades stood on the chimney-piece on either side of a cheap chromo-lithograph portrait of Queen Victoria, who gazed down placidly and yellowly upon the visitor’s discomfort. On the opposite wall was a framed coloured print of the Duke of Wellington when a schoolboy; and a few black-edged, “In Memoriam,” cards, and an array of cheap photographs, represented, he supposed, the absent friends of the family. Among the photographs he noticed an enlarged portrait of the late Mr. Brooke, which was not rendered more cheerful by the fact of its having been taken toward the end of his life and when he was already in an advanced stage of consumption. Between the door and the fireplace, now filled with pink and green tissue-paper, a sideboard, far too large for the room, projected uncomfortably, and a piano was wedged between the sofa and the window, shutting out a good deal of the light. Mr. Bracknel had time to take in all these details while he sat waiting for the somewhat grim-looking woman opposite him to tell him what she had to say. Every now and again he gave her a quick sidelong glance which was not altogether free from suspicion, and at such moments he became aware of something hard and unyielding in her face. He recollected that she had “got religion” at a Baptist Chapel, and was, somehow, not reassured.

He had laid his hat on the table, but now he took it up again. Mrs. Brooke noticed the movement, and it possibly had the effect of bringing her at once to the point. She spoke simply, without hesitation, and in a rather dry tone.

“I’ve been thinking Rhoda had better look for another place,” she said, “but I wanted to tell you first.”

“What’s the matter with her present place?” Mr. Bracknel asked.

Mrs. Brooke folded her red hands in her lap. “It’s not exactly the place,” she said. “It’s Mr. Alfred. He seems to have taken a fancy to her. He’s been getting too friendly, wanting to take her to theatres and music-halls.”

Mr. Bracknel frowned. “Why doesn’t she send him about his business?”

“She says she has tried to. But I can see it flatters her to think a fine gentleman like Mr. Alfred cares for her, and I don’t want things to go any further than they have gone. I thought I’d better tell you.”

Mr. Bracknel gave her a quick glance, but he said nothing.

The woman remained for a moment or two pondering. “Rhoda’s weak,” she then added quietly. “She’s no sense. She thinks of nothing but amusing herself. John is very good to her. He hires that piano there for her. But I don’t know that they get on particularly well together, or that they’re much company to each other. John and me are too serious for Rhoda. She finds the house dull, and she’s always looking for pleasure outside. I’d better take her away, but if I do I can’t have Mr. Alfred meeting her anywhere. He’s done that once or twice already, though Rhoda says it was an accident.”

“He has met her?”

“It wasn’t her fault.”

Mr. Bracknel rose to his feet. He stood leaning against the chimney-piece, lost in gloomy contemplation of the youthful Duke of Wellington. “You can let Rhoda keep her place,” he presently announced. “I see I shall have to send Alfred away in any case. It seems the only thing to be done. I’ve been thinking of it for some time. He’s got in with a very bad set--drinking, betting, playing cards. I’ll send him out to the house in Switzerland.”

His hostess waited for a moment. Her eyes followed the movements of the restless bluebottle which was now wandering with no very obvious purpose over the portrait of her late husband. It came to a pause in the middle of Mr. Brooke’s high white forehead. She watched it with such apparent earnestness that Mr. Bracknel’s gaze also turned in that direction. “How soon will that be?” she suddenly asked.

“At once--at once. Oh, you needn’t be afraid. I’ll speak to him whenever I get back. I suppose you have warned Rhoda?”

Mrs. Brooke rose and flicked her handkerchief at the fly, which set up a loud buzzing, but almost immediately returned to its former position. “What good does warning do?” she asked impatiently. “I can’t trust Rhoda. She hasn’t any of my blood in her. I don’t understand her. I never know how she’ll act, nor how much she tells me.”

There was a silence during which Mr. Bracknel slowly twirled his hat. He held it listlessly for a few moments and then replaced it on the table. “I’ve been thinking,” he began abruptly. “I mean sometimes I’ve regretted how things-- Sometimes I think John perhaps ought to be told.”

“To be told what?” Mary Brooke asked.

“The truth. I think perhaps I ought--to acknowledge him. Privately, of course,” he added hastily.

“Privately?”

“Yes, that, of course, would be necessary. I haven’t quite made up my mind what would be best; but I feel that I can trust him. I--I like him.” There was something in her face that made it difficult for him to proceed. He had been going to tell her that it was his intention some day to offer a share in the business to John; just as by his own old employers one had been offered to him. He felt a peculiar sentimental expansion moving him to make even further confidences, to compare John’s prospects with his own as they had been at John’s age, to evoke a sympathetic atmosphere in which his youth and that of his unacknowledged son should be mingled, but before beginning he required some slight encouragement and she seemed to give him absolutely none.

Presently she rose to her feet. “Come and see his room,” she said simply.

He followed her in silence, regretting now that he had spoken at all. He did not understand her; he thought she was not treating him fairly. His visits had been rare--in fact it was almost the first time he had been in the house--and he looked about him with a sort of awkward curiosity, trying to imagine it his own home. It is true that if he had married her it would not have been his home, any more than it would have been hers--only, he had not sufficient imagination to picture her anywhere else. He believed that he could have been happy here.

She opened the door, and he passed before her into John’s bedroom. It was a cheerful, sunny room, but he wondered why she wanted him to see it. The walls were bright with coloured pictures from old Christmas Numbers, and in the corner was a book-shelf. Mr. Bracknel was no reader, but he examined the books. They were mostly concerned with economics. Three bird-cages depended from hooks in the woodwork above the window. A small looking-glass was nailed to the wall. A low stretcher, a chest of drawers--serving also as a dressing-table--a wash-stand and a couple of chairs--one of them an arm-chair--completed the furniture of the room.

Mr. Bracknel looked all round. He was pleased with what he saw: it seemed to him to be reminiscent of his own youth. He was proud of his youth; once more he felt a desire to talk of it. He remembered Alfred’s fifth-rate actresses, and sporting prints.

“John’s a fine fellow,” he sighed. “He’s going to do well--particularly well. He’s going to be a success.”

But he got no further than this; an instinctive caution held him back. Through the open window there came the shouts of some children playing in the street below. He descended the narrow staircase and took up his hat for the third time from the parlour table. “Well,” he said, “I must be going. I have a meeting at twelve. I will remember what you told me. You needn’t be afraid.”

“I wouldn’t have troubled you to come, only I thought it better not to write. You never know who may see a letter.”

Mr. Bracknel opened the hall door, and she watched him get into the hansom and drive off.

Before he had gone very far, his mood, which had slightly mellowed under the influence of his visit, began to alter, and his earlier irritation to regain ground. Especially when he thought of Alfred’s conduct was he indignant. Somehow he did not quite seem to have realised it at the time, but he realised it now. It was altogether detestable....

Matters at the meeting did not go particularly well either. Mr. Bracknel’s opinions on all points differed from those of his colleagues, and were apparently of a nature that did not admit of much discussion, let alone contradiction. They were, too, expressed with a pertinacity, a warmth, and above all a personal note, that in the end, though it failed to triumph, led up to a somewhat animated climax in which action promised to supersede argument. Mr. Bracknel wanted the tramway to be brought out as far as a certain tract of ground in his own possession, which at present was of no use to him, though it had long been advertised to let for building purposes. His scheme met with unexpected, and in the end violent opposition. When he returned to the office he felt thoroughly at odds with life, and by no means inclined to overlook anything that might have gone amiss during his absence. The first person he saw was Rhoda Brooke, typing a letter. She was really very pretty, and there was a gaiety, a brightness about her, which was distinctly attractive. But at present she principally reminded him of Alfred, and he asked for that young gentleman, and was informed that he had not yet returned from lunch. Mr. Bracknel inquired at what time he had gone out, and learned that it had been shortly after twelve. He looked at his watch. It was now two o’clock. He sent for John Brooke, and spoke to him of the order that had been cancelled. “Send Mr. Alfred to me as soon as he comes in,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

When he was alone he began to wonder what John thought of him, to wonder if he disliked him. His manner was invariably respectful, but nothing more. Mr. Bracknel would have preferred to see him less independent. He would have liked him to come to him now and then to consult with him about things, to ask his advice, perhaps his help; for he was very young--only a boy....

Three--four o’clock came round, but still Alfred had not returned. At twenty minutes to five he came in, feeling in distinctly good form, and diffusing an odour of the various refreshments he had partaken of during a highly successful game of poker. He was just in a mood when it bored him particularly to have to listen to accumulated indignation, but he listened, nevertheless, with considerable patience. Unfortunately, toward the end of a long tirade, he was thoughtless enough to yawn slightly. Mr. Bracknel’s mouth drew in at the corners. “I have had enough of this, sir,” he said grimly. “To give a kind of completeness to your conduct I understand that you have been making yourself objectionable to one of the girls in the office; that you have taken advantage of her position to insult her. The thing is odious, disgusting. Her aunt would have taken her away if I had allowed it; I had a letter from her to-day.”

Alfred blushed and stared; for the first time in their interview he was considerably taken aback. “What does she say I have been doing?” he asked sulkily. “I saw her once outside the theatre door, I think, and paid for her ticket.”

“I don’t intend to discuss the matter with you. There are some things you are evidently dead to, and a sense of decency appears to be one of them. I intend to write to the Swiss house to-night telling them you leave here as soon as possible, and to find some position for you.”

Alfred shrugged his shoulders. He knew his father sufficiently well to avoid any argument. He simply turned on his heel and left the office.