“You good-for-nothing, disreputable scarecrow, where have—”
“Hush, mother. Let him drink. Mr. Cantercot is thirsty.”
“Does he care if my children are hungry?”
Denzil tossed the water greedily down his throat almost at a gulp, as if it were brandy.
“Madam,” he said, smacking his lips, “I do care. I care intensely. Few things in life would grieve me more deeply than to hear that a child, a dear little child—the Beautiful in a nutshell—had suffered hunger. You wrong me.” His voice was tremulous with the sense of injury. Tears stood in his eyes.
“Wrong you? I’ve no wish to wrong you,” said Mrs. Crowl. “I should like to hang you.”
“Don’t talk of such ugly things,” said Denzil, touching his throat nervously.
“Well, what have you been doin’ all this time?”
“Why, what should I be doing?”
“How should I know what became of you? I thought it was another murder.”
“What!” Denzil’s glass dashed to fragments on the floor. “What do you mean?”
But Mrs. Crowl was glaring too viciously at Mr. Crowl to reply. He understood the message as if it were printed. It ran: “You have broken one of my best glasses. You have annihilated threepence, or a week’s school fees for half the family.” Peter wished she would turn the lightning upon Denzil, a conductor down whom it would run innocuously. He stooped down and picked up the pieces as carefully as if they were cuttings from the Koh-i-noor. Thus the lightning passed harmlessly over his head and flew toward Cantercot.
“What do I mean?” Mrs. Crowl echoed, as if there had been no interval. “I mean that it would be a good thing if you had been murdered.”
“What unbeautiful ideas you have, to be sure!” murmured Denzil.
“Yes; but they’d be useful,” said Mrs. Crowl, who had not lived with Peter all these years for nothing. “And if you haven’t been murdered what have you been doing?”
“My dear, my dear,” put in Crowl, deprecatingly, looking up from his quadrupedal position like a sad dog, “you are not Cantercot’s keeper.”
“Oh, ain’t I?” flashed his spouse. “Who else keeps him I should like to know?”
Peter went on picking up the pieces of the Koh-i-noor.
“I have no secrets from Mrs. Crowl” Denzil explained courteously. “I have been working day and night bringing out a new paper. Haven’t had a wink of sleep for three nights.”
Peter looked up at his bloodshot eyes with respectful interest.
“The capitalist met me in the street—an old friend of mine—I was overjoyed at the rencontre and told him the idea I’d been brooding over for months and he promised to stand all the racket.”
“What sort of a paper?” said Peter.
“Can you ask? To what do you think I’ve been devoting my days and nights but to the cultivation of the Beautiful?”
“Is that what the paper will be devoted to?”
“Yes. To the Beautiful.”
“I know,” snorted Mrs. Crowl, “with portraits of actresses.”
“Portraits? Oh, no!” said Denzil. “That would be the True—not the Beautiful.”
“And what’s the name of the paper?” asked Crowl.
“Ah, that’s a secret, Peter. Like Scott, I prefer to remain anonymous.”
“Just like your Fads. I’m only a plain man, and I want to know where the fun of anonymity comes in? If I had any gifts, I should like to get the credit. It’s a right and natural feeling, to my thinking.”
“Unnatural, Peter; unnatural. We’re all born anonymous, and I’m for sticking close to Nature. Enough for me that I disseminate the Beautiful. Any letters come during my absence, Mrs. Crowl?”
“No,” she snapped. “But a gent named Grodman called. He said you hadn’t been to see him for some time, and looked annoyed to hear you’d disappeared. How much have you let him in for?”
“The man’s in my debt,” said Denzil, annoyed. “I wrote a book for him and he’s taken all the credit for it, the rogue! My name doesn’t appear even in the Preface. What’s that ticket you’re looking so lovingly at, Peter?”
“That’s for tonight—the unveiling of Constant’s portrait. Gladstone speaks. Awful demand for places.”
“Gladstone!” sneered Denzil. “Who wants to hear Gladstone? A man who’s devoted his life to pulling down the pillars of Church and State.”
“A man’s who’s devoted his whole life to propping up the crumbling Fads of Religion and Monarchy. But, for all that, the man has his gifts, and I’m burnin’ to hear him.”
“I wouldn’t go out of my way an inch to hear him,” said Denzil; and went up to his room, and when Mrs. Crowl sent him up a cup of nice strong tea at tea time, the brat who bore it found him lying dressed on the bed, snoring unbeautifully.
The evening wore on. It was fine frosty weather. The Whitechapel Road swarmed, with noisy life, as though it were a Saturday night. The stars flared in the sky like the lights of celestial costermongers. Everybody was on the alert for the advent of Mr. Gladstone. He must surely come through the Road on his journey from the West Bow-wards. But nobody saw him or his carriage, except those about the Hall. Probably he went by tram most of the way. He would have caught cold in an open carriage, or bobbing his head out of the window of a closed.
“If he had only been a German prince, or a cannibal king,” said Crowl bitterly, as he plodded toward the Club, “we should have disguised Mile End in bunting and blue fire. But perhaps it’s a compliment. He knows his London, and it’s no use trying to hide the facts from him. They must have queer notions of cities, those monarchs. They must fancy everybody lives in a flutter of flags and walks about under triumphal arches, like as if I were to stitch shoes in my Sunday clothes.” By a defiance of chronology Crowl had them on today, and they seemed to accentuate the simile.
“And why shouldn’t life be fuller of the Beautiful,” said Denzil. The poet had brushed the reluctant mud off his garments to the extent it was willing to go, and had washed his face, but his eyes were still bloodshot from the cultivation of the Beautiful. Denzil was accompanying Crowl to the door of the Club out of good-fellowship. Denzil was himself accompanied by Grodman, though less obtrusively. Least obtrusively was he accompanied by his usual Scotland Yard shadows, Wimp’s agents. There was a surging nondescript crowd about the Club, and the police, and the door-keeper, and the stewards could with difficulty keep out the tide of the ticketless, through which the current of the privileged had equal difficulty in permeating. The streets all around were thronged with people longing for a glimpse of Gladstone. Mortlake drove up in a hansom (his head a self-conscious pendulum of popularity, swaying and bowing to right and left) and received all the pent-up enthusiasm.
“Well, good-by, Cantercot,” said Crowl.
“No, I’ll see you to the door, Peter.”
They fought their way shoulder to shoulder.
Now that Grodman had found Denzil he was not going to lose him again. He had only found him by accident, for he was himself bound to the unveiling ceremony, to which he had been invited in view of his known devotion to the task of unveiling the Mystery. He spoke to one of the policemen about, who said, “Ay, ay, sir,” and he was prepared to follow Denzil, if necessary, and to give up the pleasure of hearing Gladstone for an acuter thrill. The arrest must be delayed no longer.
But