HE had succeeded with George beyond expectations, but that easy victory did not deceive him into thinking that his battle was won. Madge, he had said, would neither scream nor faint on hearing her banns announced and he wished he was as confident about it as he had sounded. Much, in his view too much, depended on the vigour of Sarah Pullen’s advice.

He was taking risks all round, but found he rather liked it. There was the risk that the Hell-fire Club would not tire of its toy in time. An encouraging increase in absenteeism amongst the members elated him, but the steadfast faith of an enthusiastic pair depressed him sadly. He hoped, however, to find a way out of that wood.

And there was the risk that some acquaintance of Anne’s would mention the banns to her. He saw no way to counter that. It was a risk he had to take. Fortunately, his father’s best friend, Terry O’Rourke, was a Catholic.

As things stood, he saw Madge as the weakest link in his chain. She collapsed before the will of Anne like an opera hat, and he was candidly afraid of her making a scene in church, either from pleasure or from anger, when the banns were read. Not that he shrank on principle from scenes, only that word of it would undoubtedly be carried to Anne and the fat be in the fire.

Rummaging one day that week at a second-hand bookstall in Withy Grove, without the slightest intention of buying, he was attracted by a title and recklessly planked his tuppence down. Intrigue, he felt, was punishing his finances, but this title gave him too good an opening with Madge to be the subject of economy. The title was “The Clandestine Marriage,” and he knew that Sarah Pullen would be in that night to see Madge.

He was reading the play very earnestly when she called, though it rather bored him and he thought its plot elementary compared with his own. Sarah was no reader, but she noticed the cover because the word “marriage” was an unfailing lure.

“Whatever has the boy got hold of now?” She inquired, taking his bait sweetly.

He showed her. “Do you know what it means?” he asked.

“I know what marriage means,” she said.

“By hearsay,” he told the virgin pungently. “But I meant the middle word.”

She eyed it closely. “You’re always bragging your knowledge. I’m not at the Grammar myself and Greek is Greek to me. Fat lot of good it’ud be in a weaving-shed, and all.” She had a practical mind.

“This isn’t Greek,” he said, “it’s English.”

“It’s not the sort of English we talk in Manchester, choose how.”

“I’ll tell you what it means.”

“Wait till you’re asked, cheeky.”

He didn’t wait. “It means surreptitious.”

“I’m a grand sight the wiser for that. It’ll mean a thick ear for you if you don’t stop coming the schoolmaster over me. I’m here to talk to Madge, not to you.”

He winked at Sarah with the eye which was hidden from Madge. “The Secret Marriage, Sarah. That’s what it means.”

Sarah was interested now. “Does it tell you how to work it?”

“I might do that myself,” he said.

“Don’t talk so foolish, Sam,” said his sister. “Are you coming for a walk, Sarah?”

“When I’m ready,” said Sarah. “Now then, young Sam, spit it out.”

“Oh,” said Sam. “It isn’t much. Only I happened to be out for a walk with George Chappie the other day and we went into a house that’s pretty full of furniture.”

“George Chappie with a house of furniture!” cried Madge.

“I suppose he’s getting married,” said Sam. “He courted you at one time, didn’t he, Madge? I rather liked his taste in furniture.”

“Taste!” cried Madge with spirit. “I’ll taste him. I’ll eat him raw for this. After all he said to me no more than a month ago, to take up with another wench! What’s the hussy’s name?”

“Her name?” said Sam. “Let’s see. Sunday to-morrow, isn’t it? The banns might be up. If I were you I’d go and find out.”

“As true as I’m alive I’ll tear every hair from her head,” said Madge.

“I wouldn’t,” said Sam. “You have red hair, but better red than bald.”

“Her!” said Sarah. “Do you mean——?”

“Look here, Sarah,” Sam interrupted, and used a formula which he had thought out rather carefully. “Do you imagine I’d be giving you a message like this if he hadn’t sent it?”

“Message! What message?”

Then Anne came in.

“Yes, Sarah,” she heard Sam saying with a pedagogic air. “The word clandestine means secret.” He resumed with zest the reading of his play and, though theirs was a small house, managed to avoid being alone with Madge up to church time on the morrow. He had business out that Saturday night—to make sure of George, whom he found full of panting resolution to catch the clerk and cancel the banns. The glamour of that furniture had lasted this long with George, but the awful hazard of the Sunday morning eclipsed the glow as it came nearer. George wilted at the thought of Madge rising in her place with a firm, irrevocable “I forbid the banns” upon her lips.

There had begun, too, to be a quality too much like that of an Arabian night about his visit to the Club. Sam was a wonderful boy and George granted his high superiority; but even George, the humble, did not quite see Sam as a miracle-worker. He even began to doubt the existence of the enchanted Palace which Sam had shown him, and that it was within Sam’s competence to hand over that house to him appeared now ridiculous. Sam came just in time.

“Would you care,” he said, “to have another look at your house?”

George would, but he hadn’t time then: he was going; to see the clerk, and till he saw the clerk he was a man obsessed with an idea. “I suppose,” he said sceptically, “that it’s still there?”

“Of course,” said Sam, “and has a few more things in since you saw it.”

“Well,” said George, “it’s a nice house, but I’m going to see yon clerk to tell him not to put up banns.”

Sam smiled, relieved to know that he was not too late. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Madge is pleased.”

“What!” said George. “Say that again.”

“Madge is pleased,” repeated Sam brazenly. He was sure she was. He trusted Sarah Pullen now.

“Did she tell you so?” asked George.

“Do you imagine I’d be giving you a message like this if she hadn’t sent it?”

George took his cap off. “If that’s so——” he said.

“It’s so,” said Sam, not defining what was so.

The banns went up, and Sam was able to devote his undivided attention to Club affairs, as to which he had an idea arising out of the boredom he suffered while reading “The Clandestine Marriage.” That tuppence was a fruitful investment.

A wet day came and with it, what was now rare, a full attendance at the Club. But, since their repairs and decorations were complete, there was nothing to do except to sit on their reliable chairs and admire their reliability.

“For a Hell-fire Club,” said Sandy, “we lack hellishness.”

“Lance named us,” said Dubby. “He ought to make suggestions.”

“Of a new name?” asked Sandy. “Call it the Eviscerated Emasculates.”

“Call it a damned failure,” said another, and was sat upon. They welcomed the diversion, but the thought had reached home.

“What’s the matter,” said Sam, when order was restored, “is that we aren’t serious enough.”

“Oh, hell!” said Lance.

“I mean it, Lance. We’re not a set of kids from the Lower School. If we were, we might sit round and read Chums and the Boy’s Own Paper.” Two men of the Classical Fifth and the Hell-fire Club looked guiltily at him, but decided that he was not making personal allusions. “As it is, we have higher interests. Now, there are six of us here and that’s enough, with doubling, to take parts in a Shakesperian play. I vote we read a play. In fact, I brought some down.”

This suited Lance, who had aspirations towards the stage. “Bags I Romeo,” he said.

Sandy was less fired to enthusiasm, but, “All right,” he said, “if you choose a play with lots of thick bits in it.”

“We certainly,” said Sam, “shall not read an edition prepared for the use of girls’ schoofs.”

“Merry Wives of Windsor, then,” said Dubby. “Lance can spout Romeo out of his bedroom window to stop a cat-fight.”

Sam would have preferred a tragedy; he feared they would enjoy reading The Merry Wives and so, on the whole, they did, but there were only five promises to turn up next day and two of those were conditional upon its being wet. Sam wasn’t dissatisfied, and as a comedy was postulated chose Much Ado about Nothing, because he thought that it was dull in patches and also for a reason of his own. He wanted to make certain that he had nothing to learn as an intriguer from a famous case of match-making. He found he had.

Although it rained, Much Ado had only four readers at the opening and only two at the close. Lance sent postcards that night to the members announcing Hamlet for the morrow. He wanted to read Hamlet’s part, but if you can’t have Hamlet without the Prince, neither can you read it satisfactorily with one other participant.

Lance and Sam struggled through an act, then Lance gave in. “I’m getting tired of this Club,” he said. “The members have no brain.”

“It isn’t raining,” said Sam.

“No. Lancashire’s batting, too. Let’s go and see Albert Ward and Frank Sugg at Old Tafford.”

Next day, the Club was uninhabited, except by the ghost of Sam’s broadest smile, its only tenant for a week. The freeze-out was accomplished, and its engineer had confidence enough to spend three pounds of his capital on a bed and bedding, “to await instructions before delivering.” Then he saw Lance Travers and pointed out to him that there were better uses to be made of ninepence a week than to waste it on a club which nobody used.

“Nuisance, though, about the chairs and stuff,” said Lance, implying his agreement that the Club had failed.

“I can’t have them back here, because I’m turning our attic into an aviary. That’s why I’ve had no time to go to the Club,” he explained with a faint apology, and took Sam up to see his birds.

“What shall we do about all that furniture at the Club? Pity the fifth of November is so far off.”

“I’ll try to think of something,” said Sam, rather terrified at Lance’s incendiary suggestion. “In any case it must be discussed at a full meeting. Let’s call the members together.”

An urgent whip resulted in a full and slightly shame-faced attendance. Nobody tried to dispute that the Club was a corpse: the only question was what to do with its bones. “Well,” said Sam, “if none of you has a suggestion to make, I’ll make one. Nobody’s aching to take the stuff back where it came from. Now,” he went on candidly, “we could sell it to a dealer, but I’m against that because dealers are thieves and they’d give us about thirty bob for the lot. But my sister’s getting married and I don’t mind offering the Club five pounds for its property. That,” he indicated, “is a pound each for the five of you.”

“Cash on the nail?” asked Dubby, whose forebears came from Scotland. He distrusted Sam in the character of capitalist.

“Oh, yes,” explained the candid Sam. “You see, when I met Lance yesterday I said I’d think of a way out of the difficulty and I came prepared.”

“I vote we take it,” said Sandy. “I can buy a lot of tools with a pound.”

“I don’t see why we should pander to your vices,” said Lance. “We’re still a Club and this is club money.”

“The Club is dead.”

“Not yet. Not till we’ve killed it gloriously on Sam’s sister’s fiver. There’s a hell of a bust in five pounds and we have to drink the bride’s health. Champagne’s my drink.”

It wasn’t, but it was rather too often his father’s, and Lance was emulous, and, frightened a little of his own suggestion, carried things now with a rush. “We’re the Hell-Fire Club,” he said, “and champagne is the dew of Hell. Any member shirking will be held under the tap for half an hour.” They braved it out, most of them conscience-stricken, and the Hell-fire Club almost deserved its name in the hour of its extinction. Things might have been serious had not Sam, by a well-timed push, caused Lance to shatter a full magnum on the floor.

As it was, five hangdog members reached home late, but presentable. But they were most unhappy boys. The sixth boy was happy. He had consumed a sober and interesting meal at other people’s expense, encountering several delectable sorts of food for the first time and experiencing that human but reprehensible thrill which results from feeling that one is a clever fellow.

Distance of course lent enchantment to the Hell-fire Club. When school reassembled and boys fresh from the seaside tried to excite the jealousy of the stay-at-homes with tales of land and sea, they were loftily put in their places and struck to dumb admiration by legends of the dashing vice of the Hell-fire Club. It lived in story as it had never lived in fact.

Sam visited the premises, on the day after the Club died, to wipe up the mess, thriftily to salve some untouched edibles for a coming wedding-feast, and by receiving and installing the bed to dedicate the house to better uses. Then he put the key in his pocket and took it to George. He had kept his bargain and now it was for George to keep his.

There remained the question of Anne, and as a preliminary to its solution Sam had recommended Madge to look peaked. Madge, naturally inclined to that condition, had no difficulty in accentuating its appearance by recourse to the vinegar bottle until even Anne, intolerant as she was of small weaknesses, had to own that Madge looked unhappy and unwell.

On the night before her wedding, Madge shut herself up in her bedroom whence the sounds as of a very ecstasy of woe penetrated to the kitchen. Yet her woe was not ecstatic and hardly woe at all. She wept because she was going to be married next day, because when one is going to be married next day one weeps. One brims with undefinable emotion and overflows into tears.

But Anne, listening from the kitchen, where she sat with Sam, was moved to unaccustomed softness. “That girl is fretting sadly,” she said. “It’s a mort of trouble to be taking over a wastrel like George Chappie.”

“Mother,” said Sam speculatively, “I wonder whether you have ever considered the influence of matter over mind?”

“I’m considering the influence of something that does not matter,” she replied. “The influence of George Chappie.”

“Suppose,” said Sam, “suppose that George Chappie lived in a decent house of his own, with furniture that he took a pride in, instead of in those awful lodgings of his. Don’t you think that he would live up to his surroundings? Don’t you think that it would make a man of him?”

“George Chappie is as far from having a decent house as he is from wedding our Madge.”

“That’s true,” said Sam, “as far—and as near.”

“As near?” asked Anne suspiciously. “Sithee, Sam, have you been up to something?”

“Will you hear me out if I tell you a story?” he asked.

“Am I going to like it?” she fenced cautiously. “I am hoping,” he said piously, “to have your forgiveness. It’s a matter of happiness.”

He told her what he had done and how and why he had done it. “The wedding’s to-morrow,” he ended, “and I hope you’ll go.” He told his exploit without arrogance and without extenuation, and it is not to be supposed that Anne was unaware that a nice moralist would have found much in it to criticize, but Sam had come out on top and that, for Anne, almost excused his methods. It almost excused his coming out on top of her.

“I’ll go to the wedding,” she said, “and I’ll forgive them. They are no more than a pair of naturals in the hands of a schemer.” Sam grinned appreciatively. “But I’ll not let you down so easy,” she went on, and the grin faded. “You’re clever, my lad, but you’re a schoolboy, and the place for showing your cleverness is at school. It’s too long since you brought me home a prize, and if you want my forgiveness for letting you rap my knuckles like this, you’ll bring me a prize this Midsummer. Is that a bargain, Sam?”

“I always try,” he said, which was true.

“Try harder,” said Anne Branstone dryly.