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THE JUDGMENT HOUSE
THE JUDGMENT HOUSE GILBERT PARKER "Let them fight it out friend! things have gone too far
God must judge the couple: leave them as they are--
Whichever one's the guiltless to his glory
And whichever one the guilt's with to my story!
"Once more. Will the wronger at this last of all
Dare to say 'I did wrong' rising in his fall?
No? Let go then! Both the fighters to their places!
While I count three step you back as many paces!"
"And the Sibyl you know. I saw her with my own eyes at
Cumae hanging in a jar; and when the boys asked her 'What
would you Sibyl?' she answered 'I would die.'"
"So is Pheidippides happy for ever--the noble strong man
Who would race like a God bear the face of a God whom a
God loved so well:
He saw the land saved he had helped to save and was suffered to tell
Such tidings yet never decline but gloriously as he began
So to end gloriously--once to shout thereafter to be mute:
'Athens is saved!' Pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed."
"Oh never star
Was lost here but it rose afar."
THE JUDGMENT HOUSE
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
THE JASMINE FLOWER
The music throbbed in a voice of singular and delicate power; the air
was resonant with melody love and pain. The meanest Italian in the
gallery far up beneath the ceiling the most exalted of the land in
the boxes and the stalls leaned indulgently forward to be swept by
this sweet storm of song. They yielded themselves utterly to the power
of the triumphant debutante who was making "Manassa" the musical feast
of the year renewing to Covent Garden a reputation which recent lack
of enterprise had somewhat forfeited.
Yet apparently not all the vast audience were hypnotized by the
unknown and unheralded singer whose stage name was Al'mah. At the
moment of the opera's supreme appeal the eyes of three people at least
were not in the thraldom of the singer. Seated at the end of the first
row of the stalls was a fair slim graciously attired man of about
thirty who turning in his seat so that nearly the whole house was in
his circle of vision stroked his golden moustache and ran his eyes
over the thousands of faces with a smile of pride and satisfaction
which in a less handsome man would have been almost a leer. His name
was Adrian Fellowes.
Either the opera and the singer had no charms for Adrian Fellowes or
else he had heard both so often that without doing violence to his
musical sense he could afford to study the effect of this wonderful
effort upon the mob of London mastered by the radiant being on the
stage. Very sleek handsome and material he looked; of happy colour
and apparently with a mind and soul in which no conflicts ever
raged--to the advantage of his attractive exterior. Only at the summit
of the applause did he turn to the stage again. Then it was with the
gloating look of the gambler who swings from the roulette-table with
the winnings of a great coup cynical joy in his eyes that he has
beaten the Bank conquered the dark spirit which has tricked him so
often. Now the cold-blue eyes caught for a second the dark-brown
eyes of the Celtic singer which laughed at him gaily victoriously
eagerly and then again drank in the light and the joy of the myriad
faces before her.
In a box opposite the royal box were two people a man and a very
young woman who also in the crise of the opera were not looking at
the stage. The eyes of the man sitting well back--purposely so that
he might see her without marked observation--were fixed upon the
rose-tinted delicate features of the girl in a joyous blue silk gown
which was so perfect a contrast to the golden hair and wonderful
colour of her face. Her eyes were fixed upon her lap the lids half
closed as though in reverie yet with that perspicuous and reflective
look which showed her conscious of all that was passing round
her--even the effect of her own pose. Her name was Jasmine Grenfel.
She was not oblivious of the music. Her heart beat faster because of
it; and a temperament adjustable to every mood and turn of human
feeling was answering to the poignancy of the opera; yet her youth
child-likeness and natural spontaneity were controlled by an elate
consciousness. She was responsive to the passionate harmony; but she
was also acutely sensitive to the bold yet deferential appeal to her
emotions of the dark distinguished bearded man at her side with the
brown eyes and the Grecian profile whose years spent in the Foreign
Office and at embassies on the Continent had given him a tact and an
insinuating address peculiarly alluring to her sex. She was well aware
of Ian Stafford's ambitions and had come to the point where she
delighted in them and had thought of sharing in them "for weal or
for woe"; but she would probably have resented the suggestion that his
comparative poverty was weighed against her natural inclinations and
his real and honest passion. For she had her ambitions too; and when
she had scanned the royal box that night she had felt that something
only little less than a diadem would really satisfy her.
Then it was that she had turned meditatively towards another occupant
of her box who sat beside her pretty stepmother--a big bronzed
clean-shaven strong-faced man of about the same age as Ian Stafford
of the Foreign Office who had brought him that night at her
request. Ian had called him "my South African nabob" in tribute to
the millions he had made with Cecil Rhodes and others at Kimberley and
on the Rand. At first sight of the forceful and rather ungainly form
she had inwardly contrasted it with the figure of Ian Stafford and
that other spring-time figure of a man at the end of the first row in
the stalls towards which the prima donna had flashed one trusting
happy glance and with which she herself had been familiar since her
childhood. The contrast had not been wholly to the advantage of the
nabob; though to be sure he was simply arrayed--as if indeed he
were not worth a thousand a year. Certainly he had about him a sense
of power but his occasional laugh was too vigorous for one whose own
great sense of humour was conveyed by an infectious rippling murmur
delightful to hear.
Rudyard Byng was worth three millions of pounds and that she
interested him was evident by the sudden arrest of his look and his
movements when introduced to her. Ian Stafford had noted this look;
but he had seen many another man look at Jasmine Grenfel with just as
much natural and unbidden interest and he shrugged the shoulders of
his mind; for the millions alone would not influence her that was
sure. Had she not a comfortable fortune of her own? Besides Byng was
not the kind of man to capture Jasmine's fastidious sense and
nature. So much had happened between Jasmine and himself so deep an
understanding had grown up between them that it only remained to
bring her to the last court of inquiry and get reply to a vital
question--already put in a thousand ways and answered to his perfect
satisfaction. Indeed there was between Jasmine and himself the
equivalent of a betrothal. He had asked her to marry him and she had
not said no; but she had bargained for time to "prepare"; that she
should have another year in which to be gay in a gay world and in her
own words "walk the primrose path of pleasure untrammelled and alone
save for my dear friend Mrs. Grundy."
Since that moment he had been quite sure that all was well. And now
the year was nearly up and she had not changed; had indeed grown
more confiding and delicately dependent in manner towards him though
seeing him but seldom alone.
As Ian Stafford looked at her now he kept saying to himself "So
exquisite and so clever what will she not be at thirty! So well
poised and yet so sweetly child-like dear dresden-china Jasmine."
That was what she looked like--a lovely thing of the time of Boucher
in dresden china.
At last as though conscious of what was going on in his mind she
slowly turned her drooping eyes towards him and over her shoulder
as he quickly leaned forward she said in a low voice which the others
could not hear:
"I am too young and not clever enough to understand all the music
means--is that what you are thinking?"
He shook his head in negation and his dark-brown eyes commanded hers
but still deferentially as he said: "You know of what I was
thinking. You will be forever young but yours was always--will always
be--the wisdom of the wise. I'd like to have been as clever at
twenty-two."
"How trying that you should know my age so exactly--it darkens the
future" she rejoined with a soft little laugh; then suddenly a
cloud passed over her face. It weighed down her eyelids and she gazed
before her into space with a strange perplexed and timorous
anxiety. What did she see? Nothing that was light and joyous for her
small sensuous lips drew closer and the fan she held in her lap
slipped from her fingers to the floor.
This aroused her and Stafford as he returned the fan to her said
into a face again alive to the present: "You look as though you were
trying to summon the sable spirits of a sombre future."
Her fine pink-white shoulders lifted a little and once more quite
self-possessed she rejoined lightly "I have a chameleon mind; it
chimes with every mood and circumstance."
Suddenly her eyes rested on Rudyard Byng and something in the rough
power of the head arrested her attention and the thought flashed
through her mind: "How wonderful to have got so much at thirty-three!
Three millions at thirty-three--and millions beget millions!"
. . . Power--millions meant power; millions made ready the stage for
the display and use of every gift gave the opportunity for the full
occupation of all personal qualities made a setting for the jewel of
life and beauty which reflected intensified every ray of
merit. Power--that was it. Her own grandfather had had power. He had
made his fortune a great one too by patents which exploited the
vanity of mankind and as though to prove his cynical contempt for
his fellow-creatures had then invented a quick-firing gun which
nearly every nation in the world adopted. First he had got power by a
fortune which represented the shallowness and gullibility of human
nature then had exploited the serious gift which had always been his
the native genius which had devised the gun when he was yet a boy. He
had died at last with the smile on his lips which had followed his
remark quoted in every great newspaper of two continents that: "The
world wants to be fooled so I fooled it; it wants to be stunned so I
stunned it. My fooling will last as long as my gun; and both have paid
me well. But they all love being fooled best."
Old Draygon Grenfel's fortune had been divided among his three sons
and herself for she had been her grandfather's favourite and she was
the only grandchild to whom he had left more than a small reminder of
his existence. As a child her intelligence was so keen her perception
so acute she realized him so well that he had said she was the only
one of his blood who had anything of himself in character or
personality and he predicted--too often in her presence--that she
"would give the world a start or two when she had the chance." His
intellectual contempt for his eldest son her father was reproduced
in her with no prompting on his part; and without her own mother from
the age of three Jasmine had grown up self-willed and imperious yet
with too much intelligence to carry her will and power too
far. Infinite adaptability had been the result of a desire to please
and charm; behind which lay an unlimited determination to get her own
way and bend other wills to hers.
The two wills she had not yet bent as she pleased were those of her
stepmother and of Ian Stafford--one because she was jealous and
obstinate and the other because he had an adequate self-respect and
an ambition of his own to have his way in a world which would not give
save at the point of the sword. Come of as good family as there was in
England and the grandson of a duke he still was eager for power
determined to get on ingenious in searching for that opportunity
which even the most distinguished talent must have if it is to soar
high above the capable average. That chance the predestined alluring
opening had not yet come; but his eyes were wide open and he was
ready for the spring--nerved the more to do so by the thought that
Jasmine would appreciate his success above all others even from the
standpoint of intellectual appreciation all emotions excluded. How
did it come that Jasmine was so worldly wise and yet so marvellously
the insouciant child?
He followed her slow reflective glance at Byng and the impression of
force and natural power of the millionaire struck him now as it had
often done. As though summoned by them both Byng turned his face and
catching Jasmine's eyes smiled and leaned forward.
"I haven't got over that great outburst of singing yet" he said with
a little jerk of the head towards the stage where for the moment
minor characters were in possession preparing the path for the last
rush of song by which Al'mah the new prima donna would bring her
first night to a complete triumph.
With face turned full towards her something of the power of his head
seemed to evaporate swiftly. It was honest alert and almost brutally
simple--the face of a pioneer. The forehead was broad and strong and
the chin was square and determined; but the full dark-blue eyes had
in them shadows of rashness and recklessness the mouth was somewhat
self-indulgent and indolent; though the hands clasping both knees were
combined of strength activity and also a little of grace.
"I never had much chance to hear great singers before I went to South
Africa" he added reflectively "and this swallows me like a storm on
the high veld--all lightning and thunder and flood. I've missed a lot
in my time."
With a look which made his pulses gallop Jasmine leaned over and
whispered--for the prima donna was beginning to sing again:
"There's nothing you have missed in your race that you cannot ride
back and collect. It is those who haven't run a race who cannot ride
back. You have won; and it is all waiting for you."
Again her eyes beamed upon him and a new sensation came to him--the
kind of thing he felt once when he was sixteen and the vicar's
daughter had suddenly held him up for quite a week while all his
natural occupations were neglected and the spirit of sport was
humiliated and abashed. Also he had caroused in his time--who was
there in those first days at Kimberley and on the Rand who did not
carouse when life was so hard luck so uncertain and food so bad;
when men got so dead beat with no homes anywhere--only shake-downs
and the Tents of Shem? Once he had had a native woman summoned to be
his slave to keep his home; but that was a business which had
revolted him and he had never repeated the experiment. Then there
had been an adventuress a wandering foreign princess who had fooled
him and half a dozen of his friends to the top of their bent; but a
thousand times he had preferred other sorts of pleasures--cards
horses and the bright outlook which came with the clinking glass
after the strenuous day.
Jasmine seemed to divine it all as she looked at him--his primitive
almost Edenic sincerity; his natural indolence and native force: a
nature that would not stir until greatly roused but then with an
unyielding persistence and concentrated force would range on to its
goal making up for a slow-moving intellect by sheer will vision and
a gallant heart.
Al'mah was singing again and Byng leaned forward eagerly. There was a
rustle in the audience a movement to a listening position then a
tense waiting and attention.
As Jasmine composed herself she said in a low voice to Ian Stafford
whose well-proportioned character personality and refinement of
culture were in such marked contrast to the personality of the other:
"They live hard lives in those new lands. He has wasted much of
himself."
"Three millions at thirty-three means spending a deal of one thing to
get another" Ian answered a little grimly.
"Hush! Oh Ian listen!" she added in a whisper.
Once more Al'mah rose to mastery over the audience. The bold and
generous orchestration the exceptional chorus the fine and brilliant
tenor had made a broad path for her last and supreme effort. The
audience had long since given up their critical sense they were ready
to be carried into captivity again and the surrender was instant and
complete. Now not an eye was turned away from the singer. Even the
Corinthian gallant at the end of the first row of stalls gave himself
up to feasting on her and her success and the characters in the opera
were as electrified as the audience.
For a whole seven minutes this voice seemed to be the only thing in
the world transposing all thoughts emotions all elements of life
into terms of melody. Then at last with a crash of sweetness the
voice broke over them all in crystals of sound and floated away into a
world of bright dreams.
An instant's silence which followed was broken by a tempest of
applause. Again again and again it was renewed. The subordinate
singers were quickly disposed of before the curtain then Al'mah
received her memorable tribute. How many times she came and went she
never knew; but at last the curtain rising showed her well up the
stage beside a table where two huge candles flared. The storm of
applause breaking forth once more the grateful singer raised her arms
and spread them out impulsively in gratitude and dramatic abandon.
As she did so the loose flowing sleeve of her robe caught the flame
of a candle and in an instant she was in a cloud of fire. The wild
applause turned suddenly to notes of terror as with a sharp cry she
stumbled forward to the middle of the stage.
For one stark moment no one stirred then suddenly a man with an
opera-cloak on his arm was seen to spring across a space of many feet
between a box on the level of the stage and the stage itself. He
crashed into the footlights but recovered himself and ran forward. In
an instant he had enveloped the agonized figure of the singer and had
crushed out the flames with swift strong movements.
Then lifting the now unconscious artist in his great arms he strode
off with her behind the scenes.
"Well done Byng! Well done Ruddy Byng!" cried a strong voice from
the audience; and a cheer went up.
In a moment Byng returned and came down the stage. "She is not
seriously hurt" he said simply to the audience. "We were just in
time."
Presently as he entered the Grenfel box again deafening applause
broke forth.
"We were just in time" said Ian Stafford with an admiring teasing
laugh as he gripped Byng's arm.
"'We'--well it was a royal business" said Jasmine standing close to
him and looking up into his eyes with that ingratiating softness which
had deluded many another man; "but do you realize that it was my cloak
you took?" she added whimsically.
"Well I'm glad it was" Byng answered boyishly. "You'll have to wear
my overcoat home."
"I certainly will" she answered. "Come--the giant's robe."
People were crowding upon their box.
"Let's get out of this" Byng said as he took his coat from the hook
on the wall.
As they left the box the girl's white-haired prematurely aged father
whispered in the pretty stepmother's ear: "Jasmine'll marry that
nabob--you'll see."
The stepmother shrugged a shoulder. "Jasmine is in love with Ian
Stafford" she said decisively.
"But she'll marry Rudyard Byng" was the stubborn reply.
CHAPTER II
THE UNDERGROUND WORLD
"What's that you say--Jameson--what?"
Rudyard Byng paused with the lighted match at the end of his cigar
and stared at a man who was reading from a tape-machine which gave
the club the world's news from minute to minute.
"Dr. Jameson's riding on Johannesburg with eight hundred men. He
started from Pitsani two days ago. And Cronje with his burghers are
out after him."
The flaming match burned Byng's fingers. He threw it into the
fireplace and stood transfixed for a moment his face hot with
feeling then he burst out:
"But--God! they're not ready at Johannesburg. The burghers'll catch
him at Doornkop or somewhere and--" He paused overcome. His eyes
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