§ 1  
The week-end visit is a form of entertainment peculiar to Great Britain. It is a thing that could have been possible only in a land essentially aristocratic and mellow, in which even the observance of the sabbath has become mellow. At every London terminus on a Saturday afternoon the outgoing trains have an unusually large proportion of first class carriages, and a peculiar abundance of rich-looking dressing-bags provoke the covetous eye. A discreet activity of valets and maids mingles with the stimulated alertness of the porters. One marks celebrities in gay raiment. There is an indefinable air of distinction upon platform and bookstall. Sometimes there are carriages reserved for especially privileged parties. There are greetings.
“And so you are coming too!”
“No, this time it is Shonts.”
“The place where they found the Rubens. Who has it now?” ...
Through this cheerfully prosperous throng went the Lord Chancellor with his high nose, those eyebrows of his which he seemed to be able 23to furl or unfurl at will and his expression of tranquil self-sufficiency. He was going to Shonts for his party and not for his pleasure, but there was no reason why that should appear upon his face. He went along preoccupied, pretending to see nobody, leaving to others the disadvantage of the greeting. In his right hand he carried a small important bag of leather. Under his left arm he bore a philosophical work by Doctor MacTaggart, three illustrated papers, the Fortnightly Review, the day’s Times, the Hibbert Journal, Punch and two blue books. His Lordship never quite knew the limits set to what he could carry under his arm. His man, Candler, followed therefore at a suitable distance with several papers that had already been dropped, alert to retrieve any further losses.
At the large bookstall they passed close by Mrs. Rampound Pilby who, according to her custom, was feigning to be a member of the general public and was asking the clerk about her last book. The Lord Chancellor saw Rampound Pilby hovering at hand and deftly failed to catch his eye. He loathed the Rampound Pilbys. He speculated for a moment what sort of people could possibly stand Mrs. Pilby’s vast pretensions—even from Saturday to Monday. One dinner party on her right hand had glutted him for life. He chose a corner seat, took possession of both it and the seat opposite it in order to have somewhere to put his feet, left Candler to watch over and pack in his hand luggage and went high up the platform, remaining there with his back to the world—rather 24like a bigger more aquiline Napoleon—in order to evade the great novelist.
In this he was completely successful.
He returned however to find Candler on the verge of a personal conflict with a very fair young man in grey. He was so fair as to be almost an albino, except that his eyes were quick and brown; he was blushing the brightest pink and speaking very quickly.
“These two places,” said Candler, breathless with the badness of his case, “are engaged.”
“Oh ve-very well,” said the very fair young man with his eyebrows and moustache looking very pale by contrast, “have it so. But do permit me to occupy the middle seat of the carriage. With a residuary interest in the semi-gentleman’s place.”
“You little know, young man, whom you are calling a semi-gentleman,” said Candler, whose speciality was grammar.
“Here he is!” said the young gentleman.
“Which place will you have, my Lord?” asked Candler, abandoning his case altogether.
“Facing,” said the Lord Chancellor slowly unfurling the eyebrows and scowling at the young man in grey.
“Then I’ll have the other,” said the very fair young man talking very glibly. He spoke with a quick low voice, like one who forces himself to keep going. “You see,” he said, addressing the great jurist with the extreme familiarity of the courageously nervous, “I’ve gone into this sort of thing before. First, mind you, I have a far look for a vacant corner. I’m not the sort to spoil 25sport. But if there isn’t a vacant corner I look for traces of a semi-gentleman. A semi-gentleman is one who has a soft cap and not an umbrella—his friend in the opposite seat has the umbrella—or he has an umbrella and not a soft cap, or a waterproof and not a bag, or a bag and not a waterproof. And a half interest in a rug. That’s what I call a semi-gentleman. You see the idea. Sort of divided beggar. Nothing in any way offensive.”
“Sir,” said the Lord Chancellor, interrupting in a voice of concentrated passion, “I don’t care a rap what you call a semi-gentleman. Will you get out of my way?”
“Just as you please,” said the very fair young gentleman, and going a few paces from the carriage door he whistled for the boy with the papers. He was bearing up bravely.
“Pink ’un?” said the very fair young gentleman almost breathlessly. “Black and White. What’s all these others? Athen?um? Sporting and Dramatic? Right O. And—Eh! What? Do I look the sort that buys a Spectator? You don’t know! My dear boy, where’s your savoir faire?”
§ 2
 
The Lord Chancellor was a philosopher and not easily perturbed. His severe manner was consciously assumed and never much more than skin-deep. He had already furled his eyebrows and dismissed his vis-a-vis from his mind before the train started. He turned over the Hibbert Journal, and read in it with a large tolerance.
26Dimly on the outskirts of his consciousness the very fair young man hovered, as a trifling annoyance, as something pink and hot rustling a sheet of a discordant shade of pink, as something that got in the way of his legs and whistled softly some trivial cheerful air, just to show how little it cared. Presently, very soon, this vague trouble would pass out of his consciousness altogether....
The Lord Chancellor was no mere amateur of philosophy. His activities in that direction were a part of his public reputation. He lectured on religion and ?sthetics. He was a fluent Hegelian. He spent his holidays, it was understood, in the Absolute—at any rate in Germany. He would sometimes break into philosophy at dinner tables and particularly over the desert and be more luminously incomprehensible while still apparently sober, than almost anyone. An article in the Hibbert caught and held his attention. It attempted to define a new and doubtful variety of Infinity. You know, of course, that there are many sorts and species of Infinity, and that the Absolute is just the king among Infinities as the lion is king among the Beasts....
“I say,” said a voice coming out of the world of Relativity and coughing the cough of those who break a silence, “you aren’t going to Shonts, are you?”
The Lord Chancellor returned slowly to earth.
“Just seen your label,” said the very fair young man. “You see,—I’m going to Shonts.”
The Lord Chancellor remained outwardly serene. He reflected for a moment. And then he fell into 27that snare which is more fatal to great lawyers and judges perhaps than to any other class of men, the snare of the crushing repartee. One had come into his head now,—a beauty.
“Then we shall meet there,” he said in his suavest manner.
“Well—rather.”
“It would be a great pity,” said the Lord Chancellor with an effective blandness, using a kind of wry smile that he employed to make things humorous, “it would be a great pity, don’t you think, to anticipate that pleasure.”
And having smiled the retort well home with his head a little on one side, he resumed with large leisurely movements the reading of his Hibbert Journal.
“Got me there,” said the very fair young man belatedly, looking boiled to a turn, and after a period of restlessness settled down to an impatient perusal of Black and White.
“There’s a whole blessed week-end of course,” the young man remarked presently without looking up from his paper and apparently pursuing some obscure meditations....
A vague uneasiness crept into the Lord Chancellor’s mind as he continued to appear to peruse. Out of what train of thought could such a remark arise? His weakness for crushing retort had a little betrayed him....
It was, however, only when he found himself upon the platform of Chelsome, which as everyone knows is the station for Shonts, and discovered Mr. and Mrs. Rampound Pilby upon the platform, 28looking extraordinarily like a national monument and its custodian, that the Lord Chancellor, began to realize that he was in the grip of fate, and that the service he was doing his party by week-ending with the Laxtons was likely to be not simply joyless but disagreeable.
Well, anyhow, he had MacTaggart, and he could always work in his own room....
§ 3
 
By the end of dinner the Lord Chancellor was almost at the end of his large but clumsy endurance; he kept his eyebrows furled only by the most strenuous relaxation of his muscles, and within he was a sea of silent blasphemies. All sorts of little things had accumulated....
He exercised an unusual temperance with the port and old brandy his host pressed upon him, feeling that he dared not relax lest his rage had its way with him. The cigars were quite intelligent at any rate, and he smoked and listened with a faintly perceptible disdain to the conversation of the other men. At any rate Mrs. Rampound Pilby was out of the room. The talk had arisen out of a duologue that had preceded the departure of the ladies, a duologue of Timbre’s, about apparitions and the reality of the future life. Sir Peter Laxton, released from the eyes of his wife, was at liberty to say he did not believe in all this stuff; it was just thought transference and fancy and all that sort of thing. His declaration did not arrest the flow of feeble instances and experiences 29into which such talk invariably degenerates. His Lordship remained carelessly attentive, his eyebrows unfurled but drooping, his cigar upward at an acute angle; he contributed no anecdotes, content now and then to express himself compactly by some brief sentence of pure Hegelian—much as a Mahometan might spit.
“Why! come to that, they say Shonts is haunted,” said Sir Peter. “I suppose we could have a ghost here in no time if I chose to take it on. Rare place for a ghost, too.”
The very fair young man of the train had got a name now and was Captain Douglas. When he was not blushing too brightly he was rather good looking. He was a distant cousin of Lady Laxton’s. He impressed the Lord Chancellor as unabashed. He engaged people in conversation with a cheerful familiarity that excluded only the Lord Chancellor, and even at the Lord Chancellor he looked ever and again. He pricked up his ears at the mention of ghosts, and afterwards when the Lord Chancellor came to think things over, it seemed to him that he had caught a curious glance of the Captain’s bright little brown eye.
“What sort of ghost, Sir Peter? Chains? Eh? No?”
“Nothing of that sort, it seems. I don’t know much about it, I wasn’t sufficiently interested. No, sort of spook that bangs about and does you a mischief. What’s its name? Plundergeist?”
“Poltergeist,” the Lord Chancellor supplied carelessly in the pause.
30“Runs its hand over your hair in the dark. Taps your shoulder. All nonsense. But we don’t tell the servants. Sort of thing I don’t believe in. Easily explained,—what with panelling and secret passages and priests’ holes and all that.”
“Priests’ holes!” Douglas was excited.
“Where they hid. Perfect rabbit warren. There’s one going out from the drawing-room alcove. Quite a good room in its way. But you know,”—a note of wrath crept into Sir Peter’s voice,—“they didn’t treat me fairly about these priests’ holes. I ought to have had a sketch and a plan of these priests’ holes. When a chap is given possession of a place, he ought to be given possession. Well! I don’t know where half of them are myself. That’s not possession. Else we might refurnish them and do them up a bit. I guess they’re pretty musty.”
Captain Douglas spoke with his eye on the Lord Chancellor. “Sure there isn’t a murdered priest in the place, Sir Peter?” he asked.
“Nothing of the sort,” said Sir Peter. “I don’t believe in these priests’ holes. Half of ’em never had priests in ’em. It’s all pretty tidy rot I expect—come to the bottom of it....”
The conversation did not get away from ghosts and secret passages until the men went to the drawing-room. If it seemed likely to do so Captain Douglas pulled it back. He seemed to delight in these silly particulars; the sillier they were the more he was delighted.
The Lord Chancellor was a little preoccupied by one of those irrational suspicions that will 31sometimes afflict the most intelligent of men. Why did Douglas want to know all the particulars about the Shonts ghosts? Why every now and then did he glance with that odd expression at one’s face,—a glance half appealing and half amused. Amused! It was a strange fancy, but the Lord Chancellor could almost have sworn that the young man was laughing at him. At dinner he had had that feeling one has at times of being talked about; he had glanced along the table to discover the Captain and a rather plain woman, that idiot Timbre’s wife she probably was, with their heads together looking up at him quite definitely and both manifestly pleased by something Douglas was telling her....
What was it Douglas had said in the train? Something like a threat. But the exact words had slipped the Lord Chancellor’s memory....
The Lord Chancellor’s preoccupation was just sufficient to make him a little unwary. He drifted into grappling distance of Mrs. Rampound Pilby. Her voice caught him like a lasso and drew him in.
“Well, and how is Lord Moggeridge now?” she asked.
What on earth is one to say to such an impertinence?
She was always like that. She spoke to a man of the calibre of Lord Bacon as though she was speaking to a schoolboy home for the holidays. She had an invincible air of knowing all through everybody. It gave rather confidence to her work than charm to her manner.
32“Do you still go on with your philosophy?” she said.
“No,” shouted the Lord Chancellor, losing all self-control for the moment and waving his eyebrows about madly, “no, I go off with it.”
“For your vacations? Ah, Lord Moggeridge, how I envy you great lawyers your long vacations. I—never get a vacation. Always we poor authors are pursued by our creations, sometimes it’s typescript, sometimes it’s proofs. Not that I really complain of proofs. I confess to a weakness for proofs. Sometimes, alas! it’s criticism. Such undiscerning criticism!...”
The Lord Chancellor began to think very swiftly of some tremendous lie that would enable him to escape at once without incivility from Lady Laxton’s drawing-room. Then he perceived that Mrs. Rampound Pilby was asking him; “Is that the Captain Douglas, or his brother, who’s in love with the actress woman?”
The Lord Chancellor made no answer. What he thought was “Great Silly Idiot! How should I know?”
“I think it must be the one,—the one who had to leave Portsmouth in disgrace because of the ragging scandal. He did nothing there, they say, but organize practical jokes. Some of them were quite subtle practical jokes. He’s a cousin of our hostess; that perhaps accounts for his presence....”
The Lord Chancellor’s comment betrayed the drift of his thoughts. “He’d better not try that sort of thing on here,” he said. “I abominate—clowning.”
33Drawing-room did not last very long. Even Lady Laxton could not miss the manifest gloom of her principal guest, and after the good-nights and barley water and lemonade on the great landing Sir Peter led Lord Moggeridge by the arm—he hated being led by the arm—into the small but still spacious apartment that was called the study. The Lord Chancellor was now very thirsty; he was not used to abstinence of any sort; but Sir Peter’s way of suggesting a drink roused such a fury of resentment in him that he refused tersely and conclusively. There was nobody else in the study but Captain Douglas, who seemed to hesitate upon the verge of some familiar address, and Lord Woodenhouse, who was thirsty, too, and held a vast tumbler of whisky and soda, with a tinkle of ice in it, on his knee in a way annoying to a parched man. The Lord Chancellor helped himself to a cigar and assumed the middle of the fireplace with an air of contentment, but he could feel the self-control running out of the heels of his boots.
Sir Peter, after a quite unsuccessful invasion of his own hearthrug—the Lord Chancellor stood like a rock—secured the big arm-chair, stuck his feet out towards his distinguished guest and resumed a talk that he had been holding with Lord Woodenhouse about firearms. Mergleson had as usual been too attentive to his master’s glass, and the fine edge was off Sir Peter’s deference. “I always have carried firearms,” he said, “and I always shall. Used properly they are a great protection. Even in the country how are 34you to know who you’re going to run up against—anywhen?”
“But you might shoot and hit something,” said Douglas.
“Properly used, I said—properly used. Whipping out a revolver and shooting at a man, that’s not properly used. Almost as bad as pointing it at him—which is pretty certain to make him fly straight at you. If he’s got an ounce of pluck. But I said properly used and I mean properly used.”
The Lord Chancellor tried to think about that article on Infinities, while appearing to listen to this fool’s talk. He despised revolvers. Armed with such eyebrows as his it was natural for him to despise revolvers.
“Now, I’ve got some nice little barkers upstairs,” said Sir Peter. “I’d almost welcome a burglar, just to try them.”
“If you shoot a burglar,” said Lord Woodenhouse abruptly, with a gust of that ill-temper that was frequent at Shonts towards bedtime, “when he’s not attacking you, it’s murder.”
Sir Peter held up an offensively pacifying hand. “I know that,” he said; “you needn’t tell me that.”
He raised his voice a little to increase his already excessive accentuations. “I said properly used.”
A yawn took the Lord Chancellor unawares and he caught it dexterously with his hand. Then he saw Douglas hastily pull at his little blond moustache to conceal a smile,—grinning 35ape! What was there to smile at? The man had been smiling all the evening.
Up to something?
“Now let me tell you,” said Sir Peter, “let me tell you the proper way to use a revolver. You whip it out and instantly let fly at the ground. You should never let anyone see a revolver ever before they hear it—see? You let fly at the ground first off, and the concussion stuns them. It doesn’t stun you. You expect it, they don’t. See? There you are—five shots left, master of the situation.”
“I think, Sir Peter, I’ll bid you good-night,” said the Lord Chancellor, allowing his eye to rest for one covetous moment on the decanter, and struggling with the devil of pride.
Sir Peter made a gesture of extreme friendliness from his chair, expressive of the Lord Chancellor’s freedom to do whatever he pleased at Shonts. “I may perhaps tell you a little story that happened once in Morocco.”
“My eyes won’t keep open any longer,” said Captain Douglas suddenly, with a whirl of his knuckles into his sockets, and stood up.
Lord Woodenhouse stood up too.
“You see,” said Sir Peter, standing also but sticking to his subject and his hearer. “This was when I was younger than I am now, you must understand, and I wasn’t married. Just mooching about a bit, between business and pleasure. Under such circumstances one goes into parts of a foreign town where one wouldn’t go if one was older and wiser....”
36Captain Douglas left Sir Peter and Woodenhouse to it.
He emerged on the landing and selected one of the lighted candlesticks upon the table. “Lord!” he whispered. He grimaced in soliloquy and then perceived the Lord Chancellor regarding him with suspicion and disfavour from the ascending staircase. He attempted ease. For the first time since the train incident he addressed Lord Moggeridge.
“I gather, my lord,—don’t believe in ghosts?” he said.
“No, Sir,” said the Lord Chancellor, “I don’t.”
“They won’t trouble me to-night.”
“They won’t trouble any of us.”
“Fine old house anyhow,” said Captain Douglas.
The Lord Chancellor disdained to reply. He went on his way upstairs.
§ 4
 
When the Lord Chancellor sat down before the thoughtful fire in the fine old panelled room assigned to him he perceived that he was too disturbed to sleep. This was going to be an infernal week-end. The worst week-end he had ever had. Mrs. Rampound Pilby maddened him; Timbre, who was a Pragmatist—which stands in the same relation to a Hegelian that a small dog does to a large cat—exasperated him; he loathed Laxton, detested Rampound Pilby and feared—as far as he was capable of fearing anything—Captain 37Douglas. There was no refuge, no soul in the house to whom he could turn for consolation and protection from these others. Slinker Bond could talk only of the affairs of the party, and the Lord Chancellor, being Lord Chancellor, had long since lost any interest in the affairs of the party; Woodenhouse could talk of nothing. The women were astonishingly negligible. There were practically no pretty women. There ought always to be pretty young women for a Lord Chancellor, pretty young women who can at least seem to listen....
And he was atrociously thirsty.
His room was supplied only with water,—stuff you use to clean your teeth—and nothing else....
No good thinking about it....
He decided that the best thing he could do to compose himself before turning in would be to sit down at the writing-table and write a few sheets of Hegelian—about that Infinity article in the Hibbert. There is indeed no better consolation for a troubled mind than the Hegelian exercises; they lift it above—everything. He took off his coat and sat down to this beautiful amusement, but he had scarcely written a page before his thirst became a torment. He kept thinking of that great tumbler Woodenhouse had held,—sparkling, golden, cool—and stimulating.
What he wanted was a good stiff whisky and a cigar, one of Laxton’s cigars, the only good thing in his entertainment so far.
And then Philosophy.
38Even as a student he had been a worker of the Teutonic type,—never abstemious.
He thought of ringing and demanding these comforts, and then it occurred to him that it was a little late to ring for things. Why not fetch them from the study himself?...
He opened his door and looked out upon the great staircase. It was a fine piece of work, that staircase. Low, broad, dignified....
There seemed to be nobody about. The lights were still on. He listened for a little while, and then put on his coat and went with a soft swiftnes............