LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER III.

       Table of Contents

       In which the Green Overcoat appears as a point of religion by not being there.

      In the smoking-room of Sir John Perkin's house upon the same evening of Monday, the 2nd of May, sat together in conversation a merchant and a friend of his, no younger, a man whose name was Charles Kirby, whose profession was that of a solicitor. The name of the merchant who had retired apart to enjoy with this friend a reasonable and useful conversation, was Mr. John Brassington. He was wealthy, he dealt in leather; he was a pillar of the town of Ormeston, he had been its mayor. He was an honest man, which is no less than to say the noblest work of God.

      Mr. John Brassington was, in this month of May, sixty years of age. He was tall, but broad in shoulder though not stout. He carried the square grey whiskers of a forgotten period in social history. He had inherited from his father, also a mayor of Ormeston, that good business in the leather trade; it was a business he had vastly increased. He had not been guilty in the whole of his life of any act of meanness or of treachery where a competitor was concerned, nor of any act of harshness in the relations between himself and any of his subordinates. His expression was in one way determined, in another rather troubled and uncertain; by which I mean that there were strong lines round the mouth which displayed a habit of decision in business affairs, some power of self-control, and a well ordered life; but his lips were mobile and betrayed not a little experience of suffering, to which we must attribute certain extremes which his friends thought amiable, but which his critics (for he had no enemies) detested.

      Mr. Brassington had married at thirty-one years of age a woman quiet in demeanour, and in no way remarkable for any special talent or charm. She was the daughter of a clergyman in the town. She brought him a complete happiness lasting for four years. She bore him one child, and shortly after the birth of that child, a son, she died.

      Now Mr. Brassington, like most of his kind, was a man of strong and secret emotions. He loved his country, he was attached to the pictures which the public press afforded him of his political leader, and he adored his wife. Her death was so sudden, the habit of his married life, though short, had struck so deep a root in him, that from the moment of losing her he changed inwardly, and there began to appear in him those little exaggerations of which I have spoken. The best of these was too anxious an attachment to the son who must inherit his wealth. The next best a habit of giving rather too large and unexpected sums of money to objects which rather too suddenly struck him as worthy. To these habits of mind he had added excursions into particular fields of morals. In one phase he had been a teetotaller. He escaped from this only to fall into the Anti-Foreign-Atrocities fever. He read Tolstoy for one year, and then passed from that emotion into a curious fit of land nationalisation. Finally, he settled down for good into the Anti-Gambling groove.

      By the time this last spiritual adventure had befallen Mr. Brassington he was nearer fifty than forty years of age, and the detestation of games of hazard was to provide him for the rest of his life with such moral occupation as his temperament demanded.

      Certain insignificant but marked idiosyncrasies in his dress accompanied this violence of moral emotion. For some reason best known to himself, he never carried an umbrella or a walking-stick. He wore driving gloves upon every possible occasion, suitable and unsuitable, and he affected in particular, in all weathers not intolerably warm, a remarkable type of Green Overcoat with which the reader is already sufficiently acquainted. The irreverent youth of his acquaintance had given it a number of nicknames, and had established a series in the lineage of this garment, for as each overcoat grew old it was regularly replaced by a new one of precisely the same cloth and dye, and lined with the same expensive fur.

      He told not a soul—only his chief friend and (of course) his servants had divined it—but Mr. Brassington lent to that Green Overcoat such private worship as the benighted give their gods. It was a secret and strange foible. He gave to it in its recurrent and successive births power of fortune and misfortune. Without it, he would have dreaded bankruptcy or disease. In the hands of others, he thought it capable of carrying a curse.

      The son to whom his affections were so deeply devoted bore the three names of Algernon Sawby Leonidas (Sawby had been his mother's family name), and was now grown up to manhood. He had been at Cambridge, had taken his degree the year before, but had lingered off and on for his rowing, and "kept his fifth year." He divided his time between London lodgings and the last requirements of his college.

      On that day in May with which I am dealing it was to consult upon this son of his that Mr. Brassington had left the crowd at Sir John Perkin's and had shut himself with Charles Kirby into the smoking-room.

      Mr. Kirby was listening, for the fifteenth or twentieth time, to his friend's views upon Algernon Sawby Leonidas, which lad, in distant Cambridge, was at that moment doing precisely what his father and his father's lawyer were about, drinking port, but with no such long and honest life behind him as theirs.

      It was Mr. Kirby's way to listen to anything his friends might have to say—it relieved them and did not hurt him. In the ordinary way he cared nothing whether he was hearing a friend's tale for the first or for the hundredth time; he had no nerves where friendship was concerned, and friendship was his hobby. But in this late evening he did feel a movement of irritation at hearing once again in full detail the plans for Algernon's life spun out in their regular order, as though they were matter for novel advice.

      Mr. Brassington was at it again—the old, familiar story! How, properly speaking, the Queen should have knighted him when she came to Ormeston during his mayoralty; how, anyhow, King Edward might have given him a baronetcy, considering all he had done during the war. How he didn't want it for himself, but he thought it would steady his son. How he would have nothing to do with paying for such things; how he had heard that the usual price was £25,000; how that was robbing his son! Robbing his son, sir! Robbing his son of a thousand pounds a year, sir! How Mr. Brassington would have that baronetcy given him for the sake of his son, of hearty goodwill, or not at all.

      Mr. Kirby listened, more and more bored.

      "I 've told you, Brassington, twenty times! They came to me about it and you lost your temper. They came to me about it again the other day, and it 's yours for the asking, only hang it all! you must do something public again, they must have a peg to hang it on."

      Whereat Mr. Kirby's closest and oldest friend went at him again, recited the baronetcy grievance at full length once more, and concluded once more with his views upon Algernon Sawby Leonidas.

      When Mr. Brassington had come to the end of a sentence and made something of a pause, Mr. Kirby said—

      "I thought you were going to Belgium?"

      Mr. Brassington was a little pained.

      "I have arranged to take the night mail," he said gravely. "I shall walk down. Will you come to the station with me?"

      "Oh, yes!" said Mr. Kirby briskly. "It 'll give me a nice walk back again all through the rain. If you think all that about Algernon you shouldn't have sent him to Cambridge."

      "I sent him to Cambridge by your advice, Kirby," said Mr. Brassington with dignity.

      "I would give it again," said Mr. Kirby, crossing his legs. "It's an extraordinary thing that a rich man like Perkin has good port one day and bad port another. … He ought to go to Cambridge. I have a theory that everyone should go to Cambridge who can afford it, south-east of a line drawn from——"

      "Don't, Charles, don't," said Mr. Brassington, a little pained, "it 's very serious!"

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