Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked?—Ecclesiastes vii, 13.

A few days after the disturbance in the dog-cart Geoffrey and Maurice Rankin were dining, on a Sunday, with the Mackintoshes. After dinner a walk was proposed, and Margaret went out with them, very spick-and-span and charming in an old black silk "made over," and with a bright bunch of common geraniums at her belt. She had invited the young lawyer partly because he had seemed so distrustful of Geoffrey, and she wished to bring the two more together, so that Maurice might see that he had misjudged him. In the course of their walk Geoffrey asked, for want of something better to say:

"How goes the law, Rankin? Things stirring?"

"Might be worse," replied Maurice. "By the way, Margaret, I forgot to tell you Mr. Bean actually brought in a client the other day."

"Somebody he had been drinking with, I suppose," said Margaret, who had heard of Mr. Bean.

"Right you are. They supported each other into the office, and before Bean sank into his chair I was introduced by him as his 'jun'or par'ner.'"

"Could not Mr. Bean do the same every day? Supply the office by bringing up his friends when prepared to be lavish with money?"

"I'm afraid not. Bean would be always tipsy himself before the victim was ready. Still, your idea is worth consideration. Of course nobody would want law from Bean unless he were pretty far gone, and in this case the poor old chap knew no more about what was wanted than the inquirer."

"Had the client any money?" asked Geoffrey.

"Money? He was reeking with it. What he wanted, he said, was a quiet lawyer. I told him that the quietness of our business was its strong point, only equaled, in fact, by the unpleasant grave. Then it appeared that he had come on a trip from the States with a carpet-bag full of money which he said he had borrowed, and he wished, in effect, to know whether the United States could take him back again, vi et armis. I told him 'No,' and knocked ten dollars out of him before you could say 'knife.'"

"You might have made it fifty while you were about it," said Geoffrey.

"Well, you see, the man was not entirely sober, and, after all, ten dollars a word is fair average pay. I never charge more than that."

"You mean that the unfortunate was too sober to be likely to pay any more," said Margaret.

Maurice shrugged his shoulders in deprecation of this idea.

Said Geoffrey: "I often meet Mr. Bean on the street. He is a very idle man; I know by the way he carries his pipe in his mouth."

"What has that to do with it?"

"Everything. He smokes with his pipe in the center of his mouth."

"Well?"

"Well, no one does that unless very old or very idle. Men get the habit from smoking all day while sitting down or lounging. No one can walk hurriedly with his pipe in that position; it would jar his front teeth out. I have noticed that an active man invariably holds his pipe in the side of his mouth, where he can grasp it firmly."

"Hampstead, you should have been a detective."

"Such is genius," said Margaret. "Geoffrey has any quantity of unprofitable genius."

"That reminds me that I once heard my grandfather telling my father the same thing, but it was not very correct about my father."

"Indeed! By the way, Geoffrey, if it is not an impertinent question for your future wife to ask, who was your grandfather?"

This ignorance on the part of an engaged girl made Maurice cackle.

"Who is he, you mean. He is still alive, I think, and as old as the hills."

"Dear me! How very strange that you never told me of his existence before!"

"His existence is not a very interesting one to me—in fact, quite the reverse; besides I don't think we have ever lacked a more interesting topic, have we Margaret?"

"I imagine not," quoth Rankin dryly. Margaret stopped; she thought there might be something "queer" about this grandfather that Geoffrey might not care to speak about before a third person. She merely said, therefore, intending to drop the matter gently:

"How very old the senior Mr. Hampstead must be?"

"Hampstead is only the family name. The old boy is Lord Warcote. I am a sort of a Radical you know, Margaret, and the truth is I had a quarrel with my family. Only for this, I might have gone into the matter before."

"Never mind going into anything unpleasant. You told my father, of course, that you were a son of Mr. Manson Hampstead, one of the old families in Shropshire. And so you are. We will let it rest at that. Family differences must always be disagreeable subjects. Let us talk about something else."

"Now we are on the subject, I might as well tell you all about it. First, I will secure Rankin's secrecy. Behold five cents! Mr. Rankin, I retain you with this sum as my solicitor to advise when called upon concerning the facts I am about to relate. You are bound now by your professional creed not to divulge, are you not?"

"Drive on," said Maurice, "I'm an oyster."

"There is not a great deal to tell," said Geoffrey. "The unpleasant part of it has always made me keep the story entirely to myself. When I came to this continent I was in such a rage with everything and everybody that I abandoned the chance of letters of introduction. Nobody here knows who I am. I have worked my own way to the exalted position in which you find me. A good while ago my father was in the English diplomatic service, and he still retains, I believe, a responsible post under the Government. Like a good many others, though, he was, although clever, not always quite clever enough, and in one episode of his life, in which I am interested, he failed to have things his own way. For ten years he was in different parts of Russia, where his duties called him. He had acquired such a profound knowledge of Russian and other languages that these advantages, together with his other gifts, served to keep him longer in a sort of exile for the simple reason that there were few, if any, in the service who could carry out what was required as well as he could himself. From his official duties and his pleasant manner he became well known in Russian society, and he counted among his intimate friends several of the nobility who possessed influence in the country. After a long series of duties he and some young Russians, to whom passports were almost unnecessary, used to make long trips through the country in the mild seasons to shoot and fish. In this way some of the young nobles rid themselves of ennui, and reverted by an easy transition to the condition of their immediate ancestors. They had their servants with them, and lived a life of conviviality and luxury even in the wildest regions which they visited. When they entered a small town on these journeyings they did pretty much what they liked, and nobody dared to complain at the capital. If a small official provoked or delayed them they horsewhipped him. In fact, what they delighted in was going back to savagery and taking their luxuries with them, dashing over the vast country on fleet horses, making a pandemonium whenever and wherever they liked; in short, in giving full swing to their Tartar and Kalmuck blood. On one occasion my father was feeling wearied to death with red tape, but nobody was inclined at the time for another expedition. He therefore obtained leave to go with a military detachment to Semipalatinsk, from which town some prisoners had to be brought back to St. Petersburg. There was little trouble in obtaining his permit, especially as he had been partly over the road before. So he went with his horses and servant as far as the railway would take him, and then joined a band of fifty wild-looking Cossacks and set out. When within a hundred and fifty versts from Semipalatinsk they encountered a warlike band of about twenty-five well mounted Tartars returning from a marauding expedition. They had several horses laden with booty, also some female prisoners. It was the old story of one tribe of savages pillaging another. The Cossacks were out in the wilderness. Although supposed to be under discipline, they were one and all freebooters to the backbone. Their captain, under pretense of seeing right done, allowed an attack to be made by the Cossacks. They drove off the other robbers, ransacked the booty, took what they wanted, and under color of giving protection, took the women also, hoping to dispose of them quietly as slaves at some town. These women were then mounted on several of the pack-horses, and the Cossacks rode off on their journey, leaving everything else on the plain for the other robbers to retake.

"My father had kept aloof from the disturbance. It was none of his business. He sat on his horse and quietly laughed at the whole transaction. He had become very Russian in a good many ways, and he certainly knew what Cossacks were, and that any protest from him would only be useless. It was simply a case of the biter bit. He joined the party as they galloped on to make up for lost time.

"As for the women, it was now nothing to them that their captors had changed. Early in the morning their village had been pillaged and their defenders slain. It was all one to them, now. Slavery awaited them wherever they went. So they sat their horses with their usual ease, veiled their faces, and resigned themselves to their fate. But as the afternoon wore on, the wily captain began to think that my father would certainly see through the marauding escapade of his, and that it would be unpleasant to hear about it again from the authorities, and so he cast about him for the easiest way to deceive or propitiate him. That evening, as my father was sitting in his kibitka, the curtain was raised and the captain smilingly led in one of the captive slaves—a woman of extraordinary beauty. And who do you think she was?"

Margaret turned pale. She grasped Geoffrey's arm, as her quick intelligence divined what was coming.

"No, no," she said. "You are not going to tell me that?"

"Yes," said Geoffrey with a pinched expression on his face. "That is just what I am going to tell you. That poor slave—that ignorant and beautiful savage was my mother."

Margaret was thunderstruck. She did not comprehend how things stood, but with a ready solicitude for him in a time of pain, she passed her hand through his arm and drew herself closer to him, as they walked along.

As for Maurice, he ground his teeth as he witnessed Margaret's loving solicitude. It was a relief to him to rasp out his dislike for Geoffrey under his breath. "I always knew he was a wolf," he muttered to himself.

"You will see now," continued Geoffrey, "why I preferred not to be known in this country. To be one of a family with a title in it did not compensate me for being a thorough savage on my mother's side.

"But I will continue my story. The beauty of the woman attracted my father. He spoke to her kindly in her own language and made her partake of his dinner with him. He thought that in any case he could save her from being sold into slavery by the Cossacks.

"These wild half-brothers of mine took it as a matter of course that my father would be pleased with his acquisition, but they suggested vodki and got it—so that my mother was in reality purchased from them for a few bottles of whisky.

"They went on toward Semipalatinsk and got the prisoners. My father intended to leave the woman at that town, but she wished to see the White Czar and his great city, of which she had heard, and she begged so hard to be taken back with him that he began to think he might as well do so.

"The fact was that a whim seized him to see her dressed as a European, and as they waited at Semipalatinsk for ten days before returning, he had time to have garments made which were as near to the European styles as he could suggest. It was evidently the clothes that decided the matter. In her coarse native habiliments she was simply a savage to a fastidious man, but when she was arrayed in a familiar looking dress assisted by the soft silken fabrics of the East, he was bewitched. She told him, on the journey back, how her father had always counted upon having enough to live on for the rest of his life when she was sold to the traders who purchased slaves for the harems at Constantinople.

"My father took her to St. Petersburg with him, where they lived for three years together. Such a thing as marrying her never entered his head. He simply lived like his friends. I never found out how much she was received in society—no doubt she had all the society she wanted—but I did hear from an old friend of my father, who spoke of her with much respect, that her beauty created the greatest sensation in St. Petersburg, and that when she went to the theatre the spectators were all like astronomers at a transit of Venus. She made good use of her time, however, and at the end of three years she could speak and write English a little.

"At the end of three years from the time he met her, my father was called back to England. He left her in his house in St. Petersburg with all the money necessary, and came home. I think he intended to go back to her when he got ready. But she settled that question by coming to England herself. She could not bear the separation after three months of waiting. Imagine the scene when she arrived! Lord and Lady Warcote were having a dinner party, when in came my mother, as lovely as a dream, and throwing her arms round my father she forgot her English and addressed him fondly in the Tartar dialect.

"My father, for a moment, was paralyzed; but, in spite of the enervating effect of this exotic's sudden appearance, he could not help feeling proud of her when he saw how magnificent she was in her new Paris costume, and it occurred to him that her wonderful beauty would carry things off with a high hand for a while, until he could perhaps get her back to Russia. She, however, after the moment in which she greeted him, stood up to her full height, and glancing rapidly around the table at all the speechless guests, recognized my grandfather from a photograph she had seen. Lord Warcote was sitting—starchy and speechless—at the end of the table.

"'Ah! zo! Oo are ze little faÄzer!' And before he could say a word the handsomest woman in England had kissed him, and had taken his hand and patted it."

"Another brisk look around, and she recognized Lady Warcote in the same way. She floated round the table to greet 'dear mutter.' But here she saw she was making a mistake—that everything was not all right. Lady Warcote was not so susceptible to female beauty as she might have been. She arose from her chair, her face scarlet with anger, and motioned my mother away.

"'Manson,' she said, addressing my father, 'is this woman your wife?'"

"My father had now recovered from his shock, and was laughing til the tears ran down his face. My mother, seeing his merriment, took courage again and said gayly:

"'Yes, yes! He have buy me—for one—two—tree bottle vodki.' She counted the numbers on the tips of her fingers, her shapely hands flashing with jewels. Then her laughter chimed merrily in with my father's guffaw. She ran back to him, took his head in both her hands and said, imitating a long-drawn tone of childish earnestness:

"'It was cheap—che-ap. I was wort' more dan vodki.'

"Lord Warcote had lived a fast life in his earlier days. After Nature had allowed him a rare fling for sixty years she was beginning to withdraw her powers, and my grandfather had become as religious as he had been fast. The effect of my mother's presence upon him was to make him suddenly young again, and although he soon assumed his new Puritan gravity he could not keep his eyes off her. On a jury he would have acquitted her of anything, and when she turned around imperiously and told a servant to bring a chair, 'Good Lord!' he said, 'she's a Russian princess!' and he jumped up like an old courtier to get the chair himself. The more he heard of her story the more interested he became, and when he had heard it all, nothing would suffice but an immediate marriage. My father protested on several grounds, but his protests made no difference to the old man. His will, he said, would be law until he died, and even after he died, and, what with my mother's beauty, which made him take what he understood to be a strong religious interest in her behalf, and one thing and another, he got quite fanatical on the point. He forgot himself several times, and swore he would cut father off with nothing if he refused.

"The end of it was that they were married at once, and afterward I was born. My poor mother had no intention of giving father trouble when she came to England, neither did she wish in the slightest degree for a formal marriage, the usefulness of which she did not understand. She simply felt that she could not do without him. And I don't think he ever regretted the step he was driven to. She had some failings, but she was as true and loving to him as a woman could be, besides being, for a short time, considered a miracle of beauty in London.

"I can only remember her dimly as going out riding with father. They say her horsemanship was the most perfect thing ever seen in the hunting field. It was the means of her death at last. The trouble was that she did not know what fear was while on horseback. She thought a horse ought to do anything. Father has told me that when they were out together a freak would seize her suddenly, and away she would go across country for miles—riding furiously, like her forefathers, waving her whip high in the air for him to follow, and taking everything on the full fly. If her horse could not get over anything he had to go through it. At last, one day, an oak fence stopped her horse forever, and she was carried home dead. I was three years old then."

Geoffrey paused.

The others remained silent. His strong magnetic voice, rendered more powerful by the vehement way he interpreted the last part of the story in his actions, impressed them. They were walking in the Queen's Park at this time, and it did not matter that he was more than usually graphic. When he spoke of the wild riding of the Tartars, he sprang forward full of a bodily eloquence. For an instant, while poised upon his toes, his cane waving high aloft, his head and shoulders thrown back in an ecstasy of abandon, and his left hand outstretched as if holding the reins, he seemed to electrify them, and to give them the whole scene as it appeared in his own mind. Rankin shuddered. Involuntarily he gasped out:

"Hampstead! For God's sake, don't do that!"

"Why not?" said Geoffrey, as he resumed his place beside them, while the wild flash died out of his eyes.

"Because no man could do it like that unless—because, in fact, you do it too infernally well."

Rankin felt that Margaret must be suffering. It seemed to him that. Geoffrey had really become a Tartar marauder for a moment. Perhaps he had.

"Don't mind my saying this," Maurice added, with apology. "Really, I could not help it."

Geoffrey laughed. Margaret was grave. Rankin strayed on a few steps in advance, and Geoffrey, taking advantage of it, whispered quickly. "What are you thinking of, Margaret?"

"I was thinking I saw a wild man," said Margaret truthfully. Then, to be more pleasant, she added, "And I thought that if Tartar marauders were all like you, Geoffrey, I would rather prefer them as a class."

Maurice, who was unconsciously de trop at this moment, turned and said:

"You have got me 'worked up' over your story, and now I demand to know more. Do not say that 'the continuation of this story will be published in the New York Ledger of the current year.' Go ahead."

"Anything more I have to tell," said Geoffrey, "only relates to myself."

"Never mind. For once you are interesting. Drive on."

"Well, where was I? Oh, yes! Well, my father married again six months after my mother's death. He married a woman who had been a flame of his in early youth, and who had developed a fine temper in her virgin solitude. They had six children. I was packed off to school early, and was kept there almost continually. After that I was sent away traveling with a tutor, a sanctimonious fellow who urged me into all the devilment the Continent could provide, so that he might really enjoy himself. Then I came home and got rid of him. It was at this time that I first heard from my father about my mother and my birth. The story did me no good. I got morbid over it. Previously I had thought myself of the best blood in England. We were entitled as of right to royal quarterings, and the new intelligence struck all the peacock pride out of me. I felt like a burst balloon. The only thing I cared about was to go to Russia and see the place my mother came from. I got letters from my father to some of his old friends at St. Petersburg, and with their influence found my way to the very village my mother came from. Some of the villagers remembered quite well the raid when my mother was carried off and how her enterprising father had been killed. What made me wonder was where my mother got her aristocratic beauty. Among the undiluted, pug-nosed, bestial Tartars such beauty was impossible. I found, however, that my mother's mother had also been a captive. No one knew where she came from. Most likely from Circassia or Persia. The villagers at the time of the raid were the remnants of a large predatory tribe that formerly used to sally forth on long excursions covering many hundreds of miles. At that time—the time of their strength—they lived almost entirely by robbery, and their name was dreaded everywhere within a radius of five hundred miles. I have always hoped that my mother's mother was of some better race than the Tartar. There is no doubt, however, that my mother's father was a full-blooded Tartar, though he may have had straighter features than the generality of them. I found there a younger brother of my mother. He was a wallowing, drunken, thieving pig, this uncle of mine, but under the bloated look he had acquired from excesses, one could trace straight and possibly handsome features. As the son would most likely resemble his father, I can only infer that the father was not so bad-looking as he might have been, and so, with one thing and another, I came to understand the possibility of my mother's beauty.

"It may have been morbid of me. I should have left the matter alone, for I believed in 'race' so much that my discoveries ground me into dust. Nothing satisfied me, however, unless I went to the bottom of it. I watched this uncle of mine for two or three weeks, and made a friend of him, merely to see if I could trace in him any likeness to myself. I made him drunk. I made him sober. I made him run and walk and ride. Sometimes I thought I traced the likeness clearly, and then again I changed my mind. I tried him in other ways, leaving in my quarters small desirable objects partly concealed. They always disappeared. He stole them with the regularity of clockwork. I can laugh over these matters now, speaking of them for the first time in twelve years. At that time I groaned over it, and still persevered in trying to find out what could do me no good. I am so like my father that I could find no resemblance in me to the Tartar uncle. But at last I got a 'sickener.' While talking to him I noticed that he made his gestures pointing the two first fingers; instead of all or only one finger. I watched his dirty hands while he mumbled on, half drunk, and then I saw that for a pastime, as a Western Yankee might whittle or pick his teeth, this man threw the third and fourth fingers of his left hand out of joint and in again. He said his father and also, he had heard, his grandfather could do this with ease.

"An hour afterward, I think I must have been a good ten miles off—flying back to civilized Russia, my servants after me, thinking I was mad. Perhaps I was a little queer in the head at the time."

"What made you go off in that way?" asked Maurice, who did not see the connection.

Geoffrey made no verbal reply, but he held out his left hand with the two last fingers out of joint. Then he showed how easily he could put them "in" and "out."

"None of my father's family can do this, but my mother could. Both my mother and the pig of an uncle held out these two fingers in their gestures, and curled the others up so, and I do the same. I can laugh now, but it killed me at the time.

"I traveled all over the world before I came back to England. My half-brothers were then pretty well grown up and were fully acquainted with everything concerning my birth and my mother's history. My step-mother hated me because I was the eldest son, and she poisoned her children's minds against me. She sought out my old tutor, who, when paid well, told her a lot of vile and untrue stories about me. With these she tried to poison my father's mind also in regard to me. I was moody, morbid, and restless. They looked at me as if I was some other kind of creature, the son of a savage, and it galled me, for all my subsequent travelings had never removed the sting of my birth. Some deplore illegitimacy. Rubbish! Wrong selection, not want of a ceremony, is the real sin that is visited unto the children.

"After my return home I could have died with more complacency than I felt in living. Even my father seemed at last to be turned against me by my step-mother. One day while we were at dinner my step-mother, who possessed a fiend's temper, had a hot discussion with me about something which I have forgotten. Words were not well chosen on either side, and she flew into a tantrum. I remember saying at last: 'Madame, it would take two or three keepers to keep you in order.' Everybody was against me, of course, and when her own eldest son half arose and addressed me, his remarks met with applause. What he said to me, in quiet scorn, was:

"'Our mother's temper may not be good, sir, but we don't find it necessary to send a keeper with her to keep her from stealing.'

"I have since found out, in a roundabout way, that my beautiful mother preferred to steal a thing out of a shop rather than pay for it. My father had always looked at this weakness of hers as a most humorous thing. Anything she did charmed him. Sometimes she would show him what she had stolen, and it would be returned or paid for. However, at the time that this was said to me at the table I did not know of these facts. I arose, amid the derisive laughter that followed the 'good hit,' and demanded of my father how he dared to allow my mother's name to be insulted. I secretly felt at the time that the slur upon her honesty might be well founded, but the possible truth of it made the insult all the worse to me.

"This was the last straw. I felt myself growing wild. Father did not look at me. He merely went on with his dinner, laughing quietly at the old joke and at my discomfiture. He said: 'I can not see any insult, when what Harry says is perfectly true—and a devilish good joke it was.'

"I did not appreciate that joke. I was almost crazy at the time. My father's laughter seemed the cruelest thing I had ever heard. I 'turned to,' as Jack Cresswell would say, and cursed them all, individually and collectively, and then took my hat and left the house, which I have never seen since and never intend to see again."

"And what about the tutor that told the stories about you?" asked Rankin.

"Aha, Maurice," continued Geoffrey, brightening up from painful memories, "you have a noble mind for sequences. What about the tutor? Just so, what about him?" and Geoffrey slapped Rankin on the back heartily, as a pleasanter memory presented itself gratefully.

"I wish you would not strike me like that. I am thinking of going to church to-night, unless disabled. What about your beastly tutor? For goodness' sake, do drive on!"

"Oh, well, I can't tell you much about that, not just now. Of course, the first thing I did was to pay him a call at his lodgings in London. Your great mind saw that this was natural. That call was a relief. I came out when it was finished and told somebody to look after him, and then took passage for New York in a vessel that sailed from London on the same day."

Margaret and Rankin smiled at the grim way in which he spoke about the visit to the tutor.

"On arriving in New York I got a small position in a Wall Street broker's office, and learned the business. From that I went, with the assistance of their recommendation, into a bank. While in this bank I fell in with some young fellows from Montreal, and afterward stayed with them in Montreal during holidays. They wanted me to come to that city, and I liked the English way of the Canadians, so I came. On entering the Victoria Bank I got good recommendations from the one I had left. From Montreal I was moved to the head office, and here I am."

There was much to render Margaret thoughtful in this story that Geoffrey told. She was pleased to find that he belonged to the English nobility, because it seemed to assist her opinion when, with the confidence of love, she had placed him in a nobility such as she hoped could exist among mankind. Otherwise, the fact that there was a title in his family meant very little to her. Her own father's family would have declined any title in England involving change of name. What did affect her as a thinking woman, and one given to the study of natural history, was the awful gap on the other side of the house. Following so closely upon the assurance that he was well born, it was a cruel wrench. His interests were hers now, and it seemed as if they suffered jointly—she, through him. She felt that all this bound them more together, and she did her best to appear unconscious and gay.

He looked at her when he had finished, and, behind their smiles, each saw that the other was trying to make the best of things—that there was something now between them to be feared, which might rise up in the future and give them pain.