SEALED ORDERS

On a bright morning in April Hughie emerged from the offices of Messrs. Slocum, Spink, and Slocum, Solicitors, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and made for the Strand.

Like most men who have been abroad for a long time, he trod the streets of London with an oddly mingled sensation of familiarity and strangeness. At one moment he felt that he had been living in London for years, at another he felt that he was exploring a new city. The Strand itself, save for the old congested stretch in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, was almost unrecognisable. Gone for ever were the various landmarks of his youth, such as the Old Gaiety and the Lowther Arcade. Holywell Street and Wych Street, with their delectable environs, had vanished like a bad but interesting dream, leaving room for a broad and stately thoroughfare, in the midst of which the churches of St. Mary and St. Clement Danes split the traffic like boulders in a Highland spate, and the Law Courts acquired an unfamiliar prominence. A new fairway of uncanny width and straightness clove its course to Holborn, blocked at its mouth by a dismal patch of excavated territory resembling nothing so much as what Scotsmen term a "free toom," and proclaiming to all and sundry, by means of a gigantic notice-board, that This Site was To Let as a Whole.

The traffic had developed too. There were countless motor-buses, which shook the earth and smelt to heaven; and taxicabs, which skipped like rams and quacked like ducks.

But after all, though landmarks change their bearings and banks be washed away, the stream flows on unchanged. The people were the same, and Hughie felt comforted. The smell of asphalt was the same, and he felt uplifted. And when he beheld the torrents of traffic that converge on the Wellington Street crossing arrest their courses seriatim and pile themselves up in a manner that would have done credit to the waters of Jordan, all at the bidding of an imperturbable figure in a blue uniform, he felt that he was indeed home once more.

Presently he hailed a taxicab, and whizzed along, exulting like a child with a new toy, to a railway station, where John Alexander Goble, having previously superintended the placing of his master's luggage in the train (with a maximum of precaution on his part and a minimum of profit on the porter's), was waiting to see him off.

Hughie dismissed his retainer to take charge of his newly acquired flat until his return, and having secured his seat, followed his invariable custom and went forward to view the engine. He noted with interest that compound locomotives seemed to have made little or no progress in the country's favour, but that the prejudice against high-pitched boilers and six-coupled wheels had disappeared.

He then made his way to the refreshment room,—where alone, he noted, Time's devastating hand appeared to have stood still,—and having lunched frugally off something from under a glass dome which the divinity behind the counter, in response to a respectful inquiry, brusquely described as "fourpence," together with as much bitter beer as remained after the same damosel had slapped its containing vessel playfully down on the fingers of a pimply but humorous youth who was endeavouring to tempt the appetites of two wizened sardines, exposed for sale on a piece of toast, with a hard-boiled egg from a neighbouring plate, returned to his seat in the train; where he was duly locked in by a porter, who displayed an amount of cheerful gratitude for sixpence that an American baggage-man would have considered excessive at a dollar. Here, with a rug, a pipe, and a quantity of illustrated papers, most of which had come to birth since he had left England, and all of which appeared to depend for their livelihood on the exploitation of the lighter lyric drama, Hughie settled himself for a comfortable run along the Thames Valley.

This done, he took two letters from his pocket. One had been opened already. It was an obviously feminine production, and said:—

"Manors, Monday.

"Dear Hughie,—We are all thrilled to hear that you are home at last. You must come down here at once and be our guest until you have looked round, and then you can renew all our acquaintances at one go. There are lots of nice people with us just now, so come! You will be feeling lonely, poor thing, landing in this country after so many years, and of course you will miss poor Mr. Marrable sadly. I suppose you have heard all about his death from the lawyers by this time, or perhaps you saw it in the papers two years ago.

"Mr. D'Arcy is here; also Joan, of course. My husband, too, wants to have the pleasure of entertaining you—that is, if you are prepared not to shoot him on sight! I don't think, though, that I shall be able to command your regretful affections any more. One look at me will be sufficient for you. Alas, I have two chins and three babies!

"However, come down on Saturday, and you can size us all up. I suppose you know that Mr. Marrable asked us to take Manors and look after Joan until you or he came home again; so you won't play the heavy landlord and evict us on the spot, will you?—Yours ever,

"Mildred Leroy."

Hughie put this epistle away with a slightly sentimental sigh. It did not seem so very long since he had been organising May Week festivities in Miss Mildred Freshwater's honour. Now—two chins and three babies! Eheu, fugaces!

The other letter had not yet been opened, and Hughie broke the seal. The envelope looked blue and legal, and its contents consisted of several pages of Jimmy Marrable's stiff upright handwriting. The date was nearly three years old.

"I am leaving England again"—it began—"next week, and I doubt very much if I shall ever come back. It is not in the breed to die in bed of something stuffy. The only tie that keeps me here is Joey, and she is too much occupied at present in collecting scalps to pay much attention to the old ruin who brought her up. In about four years' time she may be fit to live with again: at present she is not; and I refuse point-blank for the time being to play second fiddle to any young cub who ever wore magenta socks and a pleated shirt. I think it quite time that you came home and took her in hand. Indeed, if you don't appear on the scene within two years, I have given instructions that you are to be ferreted out and asked to do so. When you do return you will receive this letter, in which I am going to set down the manner in which I wish my estate to be administered on Joey's behalf if I don't come back.

"In the first place, I must tell you that Manors goes to you by entail, but that all the rest is Joey's, and you will be her sole trustee and guardian. Lance is of age, and independent, and I have disposed of things in such a way that he can't possibly interfere with the management of Joey's affairs. Secondly, I want to tell you something about the children themselves.

"I am not their father, though I very nearly was, and though every old shrew in the neighbourhood thinks I am. Their mother was the most beautiful and lovable girl I have ever known, and the only woman in the world I ever cared a rap for. Ours was a boy-and-girl idyll, though I was ten years her senior. I had known her ever since I could carry her on my back, and it was always a sort of understood thing between us that we were to marry each other when the time came.

"Till she was nineteen and I twenty-nine, I suppose we were the happiest couple under the broad heaven. Then she let down her skirt and put up her hair and made her dÉbut. (I should say that she lived alone with her old father, a retired East Indian of the time of John Company.) To her own surprise and my great pride—at first—she caused quite a sensation, for besides her face she had the prettiest manners possible. If you want to know what she was like you will find a miniature of her among my papers. Or perhaps it would be simpler to look at Joey.

"But now the trouble began. Irene—that was her name—soon discovered an immense appetite for admiration, which was quite natural and excusable. (One can't blame a girl for making all the runs she can while her innings lasts; God knows, it is short enough!) But presently she could not do without it. She was always 'asking for it,' as they say nowadays. Sometimes she made herself rather conspicuous, and people began to smile at her. I ground my teeth, and, finally, at the least suitable moment, I put my oar in. I expostulated. No, I didn't expostulate: I simply ordered her to mend her ways, and generally acted the Grand Turk and proud proprietor rolled into one. My word, Hughie, she was furious! There had never been any definite engagement between us, and she opened her defence by saying so, pat. It happened at a ball, where she had been making herself rather noticeable with a seedy ruffian—half actor, half poet—called Gaymer, against whom I had been fool enough to warn her. She informed me that she was her own mistress, and that I was an officious busybody. If I had had the sense to tell her there and then that I loved her more than all the world, and that I was jealous of the very ground she walked on,—let alone the people she spoke to,—she would have melted at once, I swear; for she was as impulsive and generous as a child, and she loved me, too, I know. If I had even lost my temper and called her a brazen hussy, she would have forgiven me in time: a woman regards a remark like that as a sort of compliment. But—I smiled indulgently, shrugged my shoulders, and said that she would look at these things differently when she was older.

"That did it. Apparently there is only one crime in this world more heinous than telling an old woman that she is old, and that is to tell a young woman that she is young. Irene got straight up and left me sitting, and went home without ever looking in my direction again that night.

"Next day I called at her father's house to make my peace. I was prepared to admit that I had been an irritating young cub, and eat humble pie generally. But I was too late. She was gone! She had bolted, in some wild fit of pique or sentimentalism, with that long-haired exponent of Byronism-and-water, Lance Gaymer, and had married him at a Registry Office that very morning. Probably she had fallen in with his proposals at the ball—after her interview with me.

"Well, Hughie, I would rather pass over the next few years. I cut her out of my scheme of things as completely as I could, and went on my way. Fortunately you began to engage my attention about that time, and I rubbed along somehow, and finally developed into the fine old crusted fogey that you know me to be.

"Ten years later I heard from her. She sent for me. I had never known where she was, nor tried to find out. But I did not expect to find her where I did. She was in a miserable dingy house in Bloomsbury—dying, Hughie! Her ruffianly husband had left her after her second baby was born,—our Joey, that is,—and her old father had been dead eight years. She had not a friend in the world, and yet she would not turn to me till it was too late. Pride, pride, pride! For some years she had been struggling on with a little money her father had left her, and which her husband had not been able to get hold of, and she had also taken in lodgers. Lodgers, Hughie! It was only when she realised that she was going out for good that the thought of the kiddies' future began to frighten her, and she sent for me—at last!

"I was with her during most of the remaining three months of her life, to the scandalisation of virtuous Bloomsbury. I wanted to bring her to Manors, which she had often visited in her childhood, but she said she preferred to die in London; and as she was obviously going to die somewhere pretty soon, I did not press the point. During that time we lived a life of almost perfect happiness; and when she finally slipped away, quite peacefully,—poor child! she was barely thirty-two,—and I took the youngsters home with me, the long waste of years behind us seemed almost as though it never had been, so completely had the recollection of it been wiped out by the intervening three months. Love can work marvels, Hughie, even though it come to a man at the very last.

"I may add that during the closing weeks of her life I had the supreme satisfaction of marrying her, as we received undeniable proof that her accursed husband had died in South America. This gives me a sort of additional hold over Joey, though I have never mentioned it to her; nor do I think it necessary, for I had rather that her attachment to me remained a purely sentimental one, for the present at any rate.

"And now, as regards the future. As I said at the beginning of this letter, I don't know whether I shall ever come back from this trip. If I don't, well and good: Joey can take my money. If I do, I am afraid I must request the use of it for myself for a little while longer. However, you will naturally want me to fix some sort of time-limit, and the question has been occupying my attention a good deal. My original idea was to make a kind of provisional will, leaving all my property to Joey, and entitling her to come into possession automatically in the event of my not returning within five years; but the lawyers tell me this arrangement won't work, as I have to be pukka dead before they can shell out. So I have fixed it this way. For the present Joey will want nothing but her daily bread and her fallals and a roof to sleep under, as her so-called education is now completed. I have therefore let Manors to the Leroys, on the understanding that the child is to live there with them for the present. (Not that they required much persuasion.) She is eighteen at the time of writing this letter.

"Further, I have realised practically all my personal estate, and placed the cash to your credit (on Joey's behalf) at the Law Courts Branch of the Home Counties Bank. When you come home, which I hope will be soon, I want you to take this money and administer it for her benefit. The rest of my property—nothing to speak of in comparison—is set down and duly disposed of in my will (which I have left in the hands of Slocum, Spink, and Slocum, Lincoln's Inn Fields), and cannot be touched until my death is authenticated. I have made you Joey's sole trustee and guardian, and you will enter upon your duties as soon as you get home. She is not to come of age, financially speaking, until she is twenty-four.

"That's all, I think.

"Good luck to you in life, Hughie! I can't, I fear, take my stand on the pinnacle of a successful career and shout down advice to you on your way up; neither will I presume to counsel you as to your future. My only piece of advice to you is not to expect much in this world, and then you won't be disappointed. Roughly speaking, there are only three things in life that matter—health, money, and friends. A woman once told me that the recipe for perfect happiness is a million pounds and a good digestion. The last, I admit, is indispensable. Well, you have it: the Marrable interior is dyspepsia-proof. The million pounds you have not got, and don't want. Wealth, after all, is a purely relative affair. You can measure it either by the greatness of what you have or the smallness of what you want. All that a man needs is enough of the first to ensure his getting the second, and I am inclined to think that in your case this should not be a matter of much difficulty.

"Besides, it is in the small needs of life that money really counts. The yacht, the house in town, the grouse moor—who wants 'em? But the cab home in the rain; the occasional bottle of Pommery; the couple of stalls when an old friend looks you up, or the furtive and sympathetic fiver when his widow does,—these are the things that make money really worth having. Besides, the greatest joys are those you have to save up for, so a millionaire can never know them.

"As for friends—well, there are two classes, men and women. Men I need not trouble you about. If you haven't acquired the knack of handling them during the last ten years you never will, and are no Marrable. Women? I give it up! You can't standardise them. Men are fairly normal as a class. If you deal straight with a man he will realise and appreciate the fact, and though he may not respond by dealing straight with you, he will at any rate recognise you for what you are—a white man. But you can't depend on a woman to do that. They are far stronger in their likes and dislikes than we are, and are hopelessly capricious into the bargain. My general experience—and it has been wider than you might think—has been that, once a woman takes a fancy to you, you may run counter to every canon of honesty, sobriety, and common decency, and she will cleave to you—probably, I fancy, because you arouse all the protective maternal instinct in her. On the other hand, once you get into her bad books,—it may be because you deserve it, but as often as not it is because you have hot hands or once trod on her skirt in a waltz,—nothing that you can do will prevent her shuddering at the very mention of your name. Perhaps, from the point of view of the greatest good of the greatest number, a woman's method of sizing up the male sex is the best possible, but it comes hard on well-meaning but heavy-handed men like us.

"We Marrables have always been men's men, although we have the profoundest reverence for women. (Perhaps that is the reason: a woman never wants you to reverence women; she wants you to reverence her.) What sticks in our throats is the enormous amount of make-believe and shilly-shallying that has to go on between the sexes before any definite business can be accomplished. Whenever I see a Marrable in a drawing-room, sitting on the edge of a chair and balancing a teacup, I always know exactly what he is there for, and I also know that he is dumbly resisting man's primitive instinct to pick up the right girl and run. When that feat, or its equivalent, has been accomplished, all is well: I have never known a Marrable who was not a complete success as a husband. But they are bad starters.

"Your father was an exception. He had the good luck to meet a girl who knew a man when she saw one, and was willing to accept the will for the deed when she found him unable to express articulately what she would have loved to hear. By a further stroke of good luck her parents objected to him, so he had a comparative walk-over.

"And therefore, Hughie, I counsel you to escape all future unhappiness by marrying Joey as soon as you get home—a consummation to which, as you will probably have gathered by this time, the whole of these laboured and transparent testamentary dispositions of mine are directed. I have left the child entirely in your hands. Marry her as quickly as you can, and then I shall know for certain, whatever my state of existence at the time, that the two people whom I care for most on earth are both booked for a life of perfect happiness. I could not wish a man a sweeter wife or a woman a better husband.

"Forgive my clumsy methods, but you know I mean well.—Yours,

"James Marrable."

Hughie folded up this characteristic document and put it carefully back in his pocket. Then he lit his pipe and reflected.

He did not altogether agree with the tone of his uncle's letter, but he knew in his heart that it contained a good deal of truth. He was ready to marry and settle down, but like most of his race he contemplated the preliminary reconnoitring, the manoeuvring for position, and the elaborate enveloping movements which seem inseparable from a modern matrimonial engagement, with something akin to terror. At the same time, it seemed a tame thing to come home and marry a bread-and-butter miss out of the schoolroom to gratify the shade of a departed relative.

The train slowed down. They were approaching Midfield Junction, where he must change. Hughie took his feet down from the opposite cushions and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

"We'll see," he said. "I must have a look at Joey first. Pretty children so often grow up plain. Perhaps it would be simplest to marry her, but there's no hurry. I'm home for a rest, and I'm not going to bother myself. I have roughed it for nine years. Now I'm going to settle down and have an easy time of it."

He was never more mistaken in his life.