A Change of Air

"Why, he's a famous man, Mr. Mayor. All London's talking of him."

"I never heard his name in my life before," said the Mayor.

"Oh, he's a genius. His poems are all the rage. You'll have to read them now."

"He's having a lot done up there," remarked the Mayor. "Johnstone's got the job. Mr. Bannister don't know as much about Johnstone as some of us."

"How should he?" said Roberts, smiling.

"Johnstone's buildin' 'im a room. It'll tumble down."

"Oh, come, Mr. Mayor, you're prejudiced."

"No man can say that of me, sir. But I knows – I know Johnstone, Doctor. That's where it is!"

"Well, I hope Johnstone's room won't fall on him. We can't spare Dale Bannister. Good-day, Mr. Mayor."

"Where are you goin'?"

"To Tom Steadman's."

"Is he bad again?" inquired the Mayor, with interest.

"Yes. He broke out last week, with the usual result."

"Broke out? Yes! He had two gallons of beer and a bottle o' gin off the 'Blue Lion' in one day, the landlord told me."

"They ought to go to prison for serving him."

"Well, well, a man drinks or he don't," said the Mayor tolerantly; "and if he does, he'll get it some'ow. Good-day, sir."

The Doctor completed his rounds, including the soothing of Tom Steadman's distempered imagination, and made his way home in quite a flutter of excitement. Hidden away in his study, underneath heavy medical works and voluminous medical journals, where the eye of patients could not reach, nor the devastations of them that tidy disturb, lay the two or three little volumes which held Dale Bannister's poems. The Doctor would not have admitted that the poems were purposely concealed, but he certainly did not display them ostentatiously, and he undoubtedly told his wife, with much decision, that he was sure they would not prove to her taste. Yet he himself almost worshiped them; all the untamed revolt, the recklessness of thought, the scorn of respectability, the scant regard to what the world called propriety, which he had nourished in his own heart in his youth, finding no expression for them, and from which the binding chains of fate seemed now forever to restrain his spirit, were in those three slim volumes. First came "The Clarion and other Poems," a very small book, published by a very small firm – published for the author, though the Doctor did not know this, and circulated at the expense of the same; then "Sluggards," from a larger firm, the source of some few guineas to Dale Bannister, of hundreds more if he had not sold his copyright; and lastly, "The Hypocrite's Heaven," quite a lengthy production, blazoning the name of the leading house of all the trade, and bearing in its train a wealth of gold, and praise, and fame for the author: yes, and of rebuke, remonstrance, blame, and hands uplifted in horror at so much vice united to so much genius. Praise and rebuke alike brought new bricks to build the pyramid of glory; and on the top of it, an object of abhorrence and of worship, stood the young poet, prodigally scattering songs, which, as one critic of position said of them, should never have been written, but being written, could never die. Certainly the coming of such a man to settle there was an event for Market Denborough; it was a glorious chance for the poet's silent, secret disciple. He would see the man; he might speak with him; if fortune willed, his name might yet be known, for no merit of his, but as that of Dale Bannister's friend.

Women have very often, and the best of women most often, a provoking sedateness of mind. Mrs. Roberts had never read the poems. True, but she had, of course, read about them, and about their author, and about their certain immortality; yet she was distinctly more interested in the tidings of Tom Steadman, a wretched dipsomaniac, than in the unparalleled news about Dale Bannister. In her heart she thought the Doctor a cleverer, as she had no doubt he was a better, man than the poet, and the nearest approach she made to grasping the real significance of the situation was when she remarked:

"It will be nice for him to find one man, at all events, who can appreciate him."

The Doctor smiled; he was pleased – who would not be? – that his wife should think first of the pleasure Dale Bannister would find in his society. It was absurd, but it was charming of her, and as she sat on the edge of his chair, he put his arm round his waist and said:

"I beat him in one thing, anyhow."

"What's that, Jim?"

"My wife. He has no wife like mine."

"Has he a wife at all?" asked Mrs. Roberts, with increased interest. A wife was another matter.

"I believe not, but if he had – "

"Don't be silly. Did you leave Tom quiet?"

"Hang Tom! he deserves it. And give me my tea."

Then came the baby, and with it an end, for the time, of Dale Bannister.

CHAPTER III.

Denborough Determines to Call

"I will awake the world," Dale Bannister had once declared in the insolence of youth and talent and the privacy of a gathering of friends. The boast was perhaps as little absurd in his mouth as it could ever be; yet it was very absurd, for the world sleeps hard, and habit has taught it to slumber peacefully through the batterings of impatient genius at its door. At the most, it turns uneasily on its side, and, with a curse at the meddlesome fellow, snores again. So Dale Bannister did not awake the world. But, within a month of his coming to Littlehill, he performed an exploit which was, though on a smaller scale, hardly less remarkable. He electrified Market Denborough, and the shock penetrated far out into the surrounding districts of Denshire – even Denshire, which, remote from villas and season-tickets, had almost preserved pristine simplicity. Men spoke with low-voiced awe and appreciative twinkling of the eye of the "doings" at Littlehill: their wives thought that they might be better employed; and their children hung about the gates to watch the young man and his guests come out. There was disappointment when no one came to church from Littlehill; yet there would have been disappointment if anyone had: it would have jarred with the fast-growing popular conception of the household. To the strictness of Denborough morality, by which no sin was leniently judged save drunkenness, Littlehill seemed a den of jovial wickedness, and its inhabitants to reck nothing of censure, human or divine.

As might be expected by all who knew him, the Mayor had no hand in this hasty and uncharitable judgment. London was no strange land to him; he went up four times a year to buy his stock; London ways were not Denshire ways, he admitted, but, for all that, they were not to be condemned offhand nor interpreted in the worst light without some pause for better knowledge.

"It takes all sorts to make a world," said he, as he drank his afternoon draught at the "Delane Arms," where the civic aristocracy was wont to gather.

"He's free enough and to spare with 'is money," said Alderman Johnstone, with satisfaction.

"You ought to know, Johnstone," remarked the Mayor significantly.

"Well, I didn't see no 'arm in him," said Mr. Maggs, the horse-dealer, a rubicund man of pleasant aspect; "and he's a rare 'un to deal with."

Interest centered on Mr. Maggs. Apparently he had spoken with Dale Bannister.

"He's half crazy, o' course," continued that gentleman, "but as pleasant-spoken, 'earty a young gent as I've seen."

"Is he crazy?" asked the girl behind the bar.

"Well, what do you say? He came down a day or two ago, 'e and 'is friend, Mr. 'Ume – "

"Hume," said the Mayor, with emphasis. The Mayor, while occasionally following the worse, saw the better way.

"Yes, 'Ume. Mr. Bannister wanted a 'orse. 'What's your figger, sir?' says I. He took no notice, but began looking at me with 'is eyes wide open, for all the world as if I'd never spoke. Then he says, 'I want a 'orse, broad-backed and fallen in the vale o' years.' Them was 'is very words."

"You don't say?" said the girl.

"I never knowed what he meant, no more than that pint-pot; but Mr. 'Ume laughed and says, 'Don't be a fool, Dale,' and told me that Mr. Bannister couldn't ride no more than a tailor – so he said – and wanted a steady, quiet 'orse. He got one from me – four-and-twenty years old, warranted not to gallop. I see 'im on her to day – and it's lucky she is quiet."

"Can't he ride?"

"No more than" – a fresh simile failed Mr. Maggs, and he concluded again – "that pint-pot. But Mr. 'Ume can. 'E's a nice set on a 'orse."

The Mayor had been meditating. He was a little jealous of Mr. Maggs' superior intimacy with the distinguished stranger, or perhaps it was merely that he was suddenly struck with a sense of remissness in his official duties.

"I think," he announced, "of callin' on him and welcomin' him to the town."

There was a chorus of approbation, broken only by a sneer from Alderman Johnstone.

"Ay, and take 'im a bottle of that cod-liver oil of yours at two-and-three. 'E can afford it."