Ostermore's eyes were on the ground again. There fell a pause, Mr. Caryll frowning slightly and full of curiosity as to what might be coming.
"How soon, think you," asked his lordship presently, "you will be in case to travel?"
"In a week, I hope," was the reply.
"Good." The earl nodded thoughtfully. "That may be in time. I pray it may be. 'Tis now the best that we can do. You'll bear a letter for me to the king?"
Mr. Caryll passed a hand across his chin, his face very grave. "Your answer to the letter that I brought you?"
"My answer. My acceptance of his majesty's proposals."
"Ha!" Mr. Caryll seemed to be breathing hard.
"Your letters, sir—the letters that you have been receiving will have told you, perhaps, something of how his majesty's affairs are speeding here?"
"Very little; and from that little I fear that they speed none too well. I would counsel your lordship," he continued slowly—he was thinking as he went—"to wait a while before you burn your boats. From what I gather, matters are in the air just now."
The earl made a gesture, brusque and impatient. "Your information is very scant, then," said he.
Mr. Caryll looked askance at him.
"Pho, sir! While you have been abed, I have been up and doing; up and doing. Matters are being pushed forward rapidly. I have seen Atterbury. He knows my mind. There lately came an agent from the king, it seems, to enjoin the bishop to abandon this conspiracy, telling him that the time was not yet ripe. Atterbury scorns to act upon that order. He will work in the king's interests against the king's own commands even."
"Then, 'tis possible he may work to his own undoing," said Mr. Caryll, to whom this was, after all, no news.
"Nay, nay; you have been sick; you do not know how things have sped in this past month. Atterbury holds, and he is right, I dare swear—he holds that never will there be such another opportunity. The finances of the country are still in chaos, in spite of all Walpole's efforts and fine promises. The South Sea bubble has sapped the confidence in the government of all men of weight. The very Whigs themselves are shaken. 'Tis to King James, England begins to look for salvation from this topsy-turveydom. The tide runs strongly in our favor. Strongly, sir! If we stay for the ebb, we may stay for good; for there may never be another flow within our lifetime."
"Your lordship is grown strangely hot upon this question," said Caryll, very full of wonder.
As he understood Ostermore, the earl was scarcely the sentimentalist to give way to such a passion of loyalty for a weaker side. Yet his lordship had spoken, not with the cold calm of the practical man who seeks advantage, but with all the fervor of the enthusiast.
"Such is my interest," answered his lordship. "Even as the fortunes of the country are beggared by the South Sea Company, so are my own; even as the country must look to King James for its salvation, so must I. At best 'tis but a forlorn hope, I confess; yet 'tis the only hope I see."
Mr. Caryll looked at him, smiled to himself, and nodded. So! All this fire and enthusiasm was about the mending of his personal fortunes—the grubbing of riches for himself. Well, well! It was good matter wasted on a paltry cause. But it sorted excellently with what Mr. Caryll knew of the nature of this father of his. It never could transcend the practical; there was no imagination to carry it beyond those narrow sordid confines, and Mr. Caryll had been a fool to have supposed that any other springs were pushing here. Egotism, egotism, egotism! Its name, he thought, was surely Ostermore. And again, as once before, under the like circumstances, he found more pity than scorn awaking in his heart. The whole wasted, sterile life that lay behind this man; the unhappy, loveless home that stood about him now in his declining years were the fruits he had garnered from that consuming love of self with which the gods had cursed him.
The only ray to illumine the black desert of Ostermore's existence was the affection of his ward, Hortensia Winthrop, because in that one instance he had sunk his egotism a little, sparing a crumb of pity—for once in his life—for the child's orphanhood. Had Ostermore been other than the man he was, his existence must have proved a burden beyond his strength. It was so barren of good deeds, so sterile of affection. Yet encrusted as he was in that egotism of his—like the limpet in its shell—my lord perceived nothing of this, suffered nothing of it, understanding nothing. He was all-sufficient to himself. Giving nothing, he looked for nothing, and sought his happiness—without knowing the quest vain—in what he had. The fear of losing this had now in his declining years cast, at length, a shadow upon his existence.
Mr. Caryll looked at him almost sorrowfully. Then he put by his thoughts, and broke the silence. "All this I had understood when first I sought you out," said he. "Yet your lordship did not seem to realize it quite so keenly. Is it that Atterbury and his friends—?"
"No, no," Ostermore broke in. "Look'ee! I will be frank—quite frank and open with you, Mr. Caryll. Things were bad when first you came to me. Yet not so bad that I was driven to a choice of evils. I had lost heavily. But enough remained to bear me through my time, though Rotherby might have found little enough left after I had gone. While that was so, I hesitated to take a risk. I am an old man. It had been different had I been young with ambitions that craved satisfying. I am an old man; and I desired peace and my comforts. Deeming these assured, I paused ere I risked their loss against the stake which in King James's name you set upon the board. But it happens to-day that these are assured no longer," he ended, his voice breaking almost, his eyes haggard. "They are assured no longer."
"You mean?" inquired Caryll.
"I mean that I am confronted by the danger of beggary, ruin, shame, and the sponging-house, at best."
Mr. Caryll was stirred out of his calm. "My lord!" he cried. "How is this possible? What can have come to pass?"
The earl was silent for a long while. It was as if he pondered how he should answer, or whether he should answer at all. At last, in a low voice, a faint tinge reddening his face, his eyes averted, he explained. It shamed him so to do, yet must he satisfy that craving of weak minds to unburden, to seek relief in confession. "Mine is the case of Craggs, the secretary of state," he said. "And Craggs, you'll remember, shot himself."
"My God," said Mr. Caryll, and opened wide his eyes. "Did you-?" He paused, not knowing what euphemism to supply for the thing his lordship must have done.
His lordship looked up, sneering almost in self-derision. "I did," he answered. "To tell you all—I accepted twenty thousand pounds' worth of South Sea stock when the company was first formed, for which I did not pay other than by lending the scheme the support of my name at a time when such support was needed. I was of the ministry, then, you will remember."
Mr. Caryll considered him again, and wondered a moment at the confession, till he understood by intuition that the matter and its consequences were so deeply preying upon the man's mind that he could not refrain from giving vent to his fears.
"And now you know," his lordship added, "why my hopes are all in King James. Ruin stares me in the face. Ruin and shame. This forlorn Stuart hope is the only hope remaining me. Therefore, am I eager to embrace it. I have made all plain to you. You should understand now."
"Yet not quite all. You did this thing. But the inspection of the company's books is past. The danger of discovery, at least, is averted. Or is it that your conscience compels you to make restitution?"
His lordship stared and gaped. "Do you suppose me mad?" he inquired, quite seriously. "Pho! Others were overlooked at the time. We did not all go the way of Craggs and Aislabie and their fellow-sufferers. Stanhope was assailed afterward, though he was innocent. That filthy fellow, the Duke of Wharton, from being an empty fop turned himself on a sudden into a Crown attorney to prosecute the peculators. It was an easy road to fame for him, and the fool had a gift of eloquence. Stanhope's death is on his conscience—or would be if he had one. That was six months ago. When he discovered his error in the case of Stanhope and saw the fatal consequences it had, he ceased his dirty lawyer's work. But he had good grounds upon which to suspect others as highly placed as Stanhope, and had he followed his suspicions he might have turned them into certainties and discovered evidence. As it was, he let the matter lie, content with the execution he had done, and the esteem into which he had so suddenly hoisted himself—the damned profligate!"
Mr. Caryll let pass, as typical, the ludicrous want of logic in Ostermore's strictures of his Grace of Wharton, and the application by him to the duke of opprobrious terms that were no whit less applicable to himself.
"Then, that being so, what cause for these alarms some six months later?"
