Chance

"Leaving the child?" I said interrogatively.

"Yes. Leaving . . . He shirked the problem. He was born that way. He

had no idea what to do with her or for that matter with anything or

anybody including himself. He bolted back to his suite of rooms in the

hotel. He was the most helpless . . . She might have been left in the

Priory to the end of time had not the high-toned governess threatened to

send in her resignation. She didn't care for the child a bit, and the

lonely, gloomy Priory had got on her nerves. She wasn't going to put up

with such a life and, having just come out of some ducal family, she

bullied de Barral in a very lofty fashion. To pacify her he took a

splendidly furnished house in the most expensive part of Brighton for

them, and now and then ran down for a week-end, with a trunk full of

exquisite sweets and with his hat full of money. The governess spent it

for him in extra ducal style. She was nearly forty and harboured a

secret taste for patronizing young men of sorts--of a certain sort. But

of that Mrs. Fyne of course had no personal knowledge then; she told me

however that even in the Priory days she had suspected her of being an

artificial, heartless, vulgar-minded woman with the lowest possible

ideals. But de Barral did not know it. He literally did not know

anything . . . "

"But tell me, Marlow," I interrupted, "how do you account for this

opinion? He must have been a personality in a sense--in some one sense

surely. You don't work the greatest material havoc of a decade at least,

in a commercial community, without having something in you."

Marlow shook his head.

"He was a mere sign, a portent. There was nothing in him. Just about

that time the word Thrift was to the fore. You know the power of words.

We pass through periods dominated by this or that word--it may be

development, or it may be competition, or education, or purity or

efficiency or even sanctity. It is the word of the time. Well just then

it was the word Thrift which was out in the streets walking arm in arm

with righteousness, the inseparable companion and backer up of all such

national catch-words, looking everybody in the eye as it were. The very

drabs of the pavement, poor things, didn't escape the fascination . . .

However! . . . Well the greatest portion of the press were screeching in

all possible tones, like a confounded company of parrots instructed by

some devil with a taste for practical jokes, that the financier de Barral

was helping the great moral evolution of our character towards the newly-

discovered virtue of Thrift. He was helping it by all these great

establishments of his, which made the moral merits of Thrift manifest to

the most callous hearts, simply by promising to pay ten per cent.

interest on all deposits. And you didn't want necessarily to belong to

the well-to-do classes in order to participate in the advantages of

virtue. If you had but a spare sixpence in the world and went and gave

it to de Barral it was Thrift! It's quite likely that he himself

believed it. He must have. It's inconceivable that he alone should

stand out against the infatuation of the whole world. He hadn't enough

intelligence for that. But to look at him one couldn't tell . . . "