EVEN to-day a man may be a Jacobite if he likes to be a Jacobite just as he may read the Morning Post, and in the day when Reuben Hepplestall was young there was a variety of reasons for being Jacobite, though most of them were romantic and sentimental rather than practical or good sense, and Hepplestall’s reason was rank absurdity because it was absurdity unredeemed by conviction. He was Jacobite because Sir Harry Whitworth was Hanoverian, from hatred of Sir Harry, not from love of the Stuarts; but Hepplestall was young and as a general principle perversity in youth is better than perversity in age, leaving the longer time for correction.

Certainly, Hepplestall’s was a risky game, which may have had attractiveness for him. He was strong, even in perversity, and having set his hand to the plow, did not rest until he found himself accepted as a power in the inner councils of the local Jacobites; but there was something nourishing to his self-importance in this furtive prominence and he savored the hazards of it not only because it marked to himself his difference from the hard drinking sportsmen of Sir Harry’s set, but as a mental exercise. He took a gambler’s risk in a gambling age, backing his vigilance against all comers, feeling that to touch the fringe of intrigue lifted him above a society which exercised its gullet more than its wits. His secret, especially a dangerous secret, flattered lus sense of superiority.

In sober fact young Hepplestall was intellectually superior to his contemporaries and, aware of it, resented the deference they paid to Sir Harry, the man of acres, the Beau, the Corinthian, the frequenter of White’s and Almack’s, leader unchallenged of local society. By his clandestine unorthodoxy, by his perpetual balancing on a tight-rope, he expressed to himself his opposition to Sir Harry; and there was Dorothy Verners, predestined in the eyes of the county for Sir Harry, waiting only for a question which would have the force of a command. Reuben had, in secret, his own idea of the future of Dorothy Verners. He aspired where he knew himself fitted to aspire, but the county would have dissolved in contemptuous guffaws at the thought of Reuben Hepplestall in the character of rival to Sir Harry. He brooded darkly in rebellion, outwardly accepting Whitworth’s social despotism, inwardly a choked furnace of ambition.

It was little Bantison who involuntarily played the god in the machine and died that the Hepplestalls might be cotton lords in Lancashire. Bantison was not prepossessing; a short man, gross of body with a face like raw beef and hands offensively white, dressed in his clerical coat on which spatters of snuff and stains of wine smirked like a blasphemy, endowed with fine capacity for other people’s Burgundy and distinguished by an eye that earned him, by reason rather of alertness than deformity, the nickname of “Swivel-Eyed Jack.” Some vicars, like Goldsmith’s, were content with forty pounds a year; the Reverend Mr. Bantison had that limited stipend with unlimited desires, and contrived by the use of his alert eye and the practice of discreet blackmail to lead a bachelor life of reasonable amplitude. Not to be nice about the fellow, he was as unprincipled a wolf as ever masqueraded in a sheepskin; but he is not to infest this narrative for long.

They were at table at Sir Harry Whitworth’s, who dined at six o’clock, latish, as became a man of fashion. There was acquiescence in that foible, but no imitation of a habit which was held to be an arbitrary encroachment on the right to drink. The ladies had, in strict moderation, to be treated civilly—at any rate, the ladies had to eat—so that Sir Harry’s guests rarely drew up to the mahogany for the serious entertainment of the evening before eight o’clock, and a man of a position less assured than his would have been suspected of meanness and too great care for the contents of his cellar. But Whitworth was Whitworth and they shrugged their shoulders. After all, with good will and good liquor one can achieve geniality in an evening not beginning (for serious purposes) until eight.

The ladies dismissed to tea and to whatever insipid joys the drawing-room might hold, the men addressed themselves with brisk resolution to the task of doing noble justice to the best cellar in the county. They were there, candidly and purposefully, to drink, and it was never too late to mend sobriety, but under Sir Harry’s roof the process had formality and the unbuttoned rusticity of native debauchery must be disciplined to the restraint of ordered toasts. A pedantic host, this young baronet, but his wines had quality, and they submitted with what patience they could summon to his idiosyncrasy. There were no laggards when Sir Harry bid them to his board.

Ignoring the parson—which, mostly, was what parsons were for and certainly made no breach of etiquette—Sir Harry himself gave the toast of “The King” with a faintly challenging air habitual to him but dÉmodÉ. Lancashire sentiment had veered since the forty-five and there was now no need, especially in Whitworth’s company, to emphasize a loyalty they all shared. It was not a fervent loyalty and no one was expected to be exuberant about the Hanoverians, but bygones were bygones, and one took the court one found as one took the climate.

But did one? Did every one? Did, in especial, Reuben Hepplestall, whom Mr. Bantison watched so narrowly as he drank to the King? To Bantison the enigmatic was a provocation and a hope and as a specialist in enigmas he had his private notion that the whole of Hepplestall was not apparent on the surface: he nursed suspicion, precious because marketable if confirmed, that here was one who conserved the older loyalty, and he watched as he had watched before. Finger-glasses were on the table, but so crude a confession of faith as to pass his wine over the water was neither expected nor forthcoming and Hepplest all’s gesture, except that it repeated one which Bantison had noted mentally when “The King” had been toasted on other occasions, was so nearly imperceptible as to seem unlikely to have significance. But it was a repetition, and did the repetition imply a ritual? It was improbable. The risk was high, the gain non-existent, the defiance in such company too blunt, the whole idea of expressing, however subtly, a rebellion in a house of loyalists was unreasonable. Still, as Reuben raised his glass, it hovered for an instant in the air, it made, ever so slightly, a pause and (was it?) an obeisance which seemed directed to his, fob; and when Mr. Bantison sat down he frowned meditatively at the pools of mellow light reflected from the candles on the table and his face puckered into evil wrinkles till he looked like an obscene animal snarling to its spring; but that is only to say Mr. Bantison was thinking unusually hard.

He was thinking of young men, their follies, their unreasoning audacities and how these things happened by the grace of Providence to benefit their wise elders. His face at its best, when he was doing something agreeable like savoring Burgundy or (if so innocent an action is to be conceived of him) when he smelled a violet, was a mask of malice; it was horrible now as he weighed his chances of dealing to his profit with Reuben. Whether he was right or wrong in his particular suspicion, there was plainly something of the exceptional about this dark young man. Hepplestall, considered as prey, struck him as a tough, tooth-breaking victim, and Mr. Bantison had not the least desire to break his teeth. He decided not to hazard their soundness—their whiteness was remarkable—upon what was still conjecture. He wanted many things which money would buy, but an orange already in his blackmailing grip was yielding good juice and every circumstance conspired with the excellence of Sir Harry’s Burgundy to persuade him to delay. His needs were not urgent. And yet, and yet—

But it wasn’t Bantison’s lucky night. As they sat down, Sir Harry cast a host’s glance round the table in search of a subject with which to set the conversational ball rolling again, and saw the spasm of malevolence which marked Bantison’s face in the moment of irresolution. “I’gad,” he cried to the table at large, “will you do me the favor to observe Bantison? A gargoyle come to meat. If it isn’t the prettiest picture I ever saw of devotion incarnate. Watch him meditating piety.”

The company gave tongue obsequiously, ready in any case to dance when Whitworth piped, doubly ready in the case where a parson was the butt. Their mirth happened inopportunely for Bantison, proving at that crisis of his indecision, a turning point. Left alone, he would have remained passive: the taunt awoke aggression.

“I crave your pardon, Sir Harry. I was in thought.”

“The pangs of it gave your face a woundy twist. Out with the harvest of it, man! A musing that gave you so much travail should shed new light on the kingdom of heaven.”

“I was thinking,” said Bantison, “of a kingdom more apocryphal; of the kingdom of the Stuarts,” and his eye, called Swivel, fell accusingly on Hepplestall.

The attack was sudden, with the advantage of surprise, but in that company of slow-moving brains, already dulled by wine, there was none but Reuben who saw in Bantison’s allusion and Bantison’s quick-darting eye an attack at all. So far, the affair was easy. “They have their place,” said Reuben gravely, “in history.”

“And—,” began Bantison combatively, but Sir Harry cut him short. “Drown history,” he said, “and mend your thoughts, Bantison. A glass of wine with you.” Aggression subsided in Bantison; he murmured, and felt, that it was an honor to drink with Sir Harry. For the time, the incident was closed.

Reuben pondered the case of Mr. Bantison, worm or adder, and admitted to disquiet. This devil of an unconsidered parson, this Swivel-Eyed Jack who seemed good for nothing but to suck up nourishment, and to be the target of contemptuous and contemptible wit, had got within his guard, had plainly detected the meaning of the obscure ritual by which he honored the king over the water and mentally snapped his fingers at Sir Harry even while he dined with him. And Reuben Hepplestall did not mean to forego that mental luxury of finger-snapping at Sir Harry. He damned Sir Harry, but damned more heartily this unexpected impediment to the damning of Sir Harry. And if Bantison showed resolution, so much the worse for him; of the two it was certainly not Reuben Hepplestall who was coming to shipwreck; and how much the worse it was for Bantison depended exactly on that reverend gentleman’s movements. The first move, at any rate, had been a foolish one: it had warned Reuben.

The second move was still more foolish: really, Mr. Bantison’s career as a blackmailer had lain in rosy places, and he grew careless through success. Besides, since Sir Harry had silenced him, forgiven him, drunk with him, Mr. Bantison, as blackmailer, was off duty and a man must have some relaxation; but Burgundy plays the deuce with discretion and was, all the time, brightening his wits in the same ratio as it made him careless of Hepplestall’s resentment. An idea, that was not at all a stupid idea, but in itself a dazzling idea, came into his mind, and the glamor of it obscured any discretion the Burgundy might have left him. Hanging from Hepplestall’s fob were several seals. They interested Mr. Bantison.

By this time not a few appreciators of the Whitworth cellar had slid from their chairs to the floor, and there was nothing exceptional about that. For what reason were their chairs so well designed, so strongly made and yet so excellently balanced but that a man might slide gently from them without the danger of a nasty jar to his chin as it hit the table? Chairs beautiful, and—adapted to their users when to be drunk without shame was a habit. Some one was on the floor by Hepplestall, leaving a vacant chair. Bantison, obsessed by his idea, exaggerated slightly a drunkenness by no means imaginary, lurched from his seat on a mission of discovery and took the empty place by Hepplestall. “What’s the hour?” he asked.

Hepplestall gave him his shoulder, glanced at the clock on the wall behind him and stated the time.

“You do not consult your watch,” said Bantison.

“I have the habit,” said Hepplestall, “of doing things in my own way,” and a soberer man than Bantison would have taken warning at his menace. Mr. Bantison was either too far gone to recognize the mettle of his adversary or else he was merely vinous and reckless. With his notable eye on the seal which he suspected (rightly) to be, in fact, a phial containing water, he made a bold snatch at Hepplestall’s fob.

Sir Harry, comparatively sober, no partisan of Hep-plestall’s, but certainly none of the vicar’s, saw the snatch and rose with a “Good God, has Bantison taken to picking pockets?” but there was, even at that demonstration, nothing like a sensation in the room; they were neutrally ready to acquiesce in picking pockets, in an outraged host, in anything. They were country gentlemen late in the evening.

The snatch, ill-timed, had failed of its objective. Mr. Bantison clawed thin air in ludicrous perplexity and Hep-plestall, assured by Sir Harry’s gesture of his sympathy, took his opportunity. He rose, with his hand down Bantison’s neck, clutching cravat, coat, all that there was to clutch, and with a polite: “You permit?” and a bow to Whitworth, carried the parson one-handed to the window. Bantison choked speechlessly, imprecations and accusations alike smothered by the taut neck-band round his throat. Hepplestall opened the window, breathing heavily, lifted the writhing sinner and dropped him through it.

“And that’s the end of him,” commented Sir Harry, more truly than he knew. “You’re in fine condition, sir. A glass of wine with you.”