第66章

The lady patroness of Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle of humanitarian hopes, was one of the most influential and distinguished connections of the Assistant Commissioner's wife, whom she called Annie, and treated still rather as a not very wise and utterly inexperienced young girl.But she had consented to accept him on a friendly footing, which was by no means the case with all of his wife's influential connections.Married young and splendidly at some remote epoch of the past, she had had for a time a close view of great affairs, and even of some great men.She herself was a great lady.Old now in the number of her years, she had that sort of exceptional temperament which defies time with scornful disregard, as if it were a rather vulgar convention submitted to by the mass of inferior mankind.Many other conventions easier to set aside, alas! failed to obtain her recognition, also on temperamental grounds - either because they bored her, or else because they stood in the way of her scorns and sympathies.

Admiration was a sentiment unknown to her (it was one of the secret griefs of her most noble husband against her) - first, as always more or less tainted with mediocrity, and next as being in a way an admission of inferiority.

And both were frankly inconceivable to her nature.To be fearlessly outspoken in her opinions came easily to her, since she judged solely from the standpoint of her social position.She was equally untrammelled in her actions; and as her tactfulness proceeded from genuine humanity, her bodily vigour remained remarkable and her superiority was serene and cordial, three generations had admired her infinitely, and the last she was likely to see had pronounced her a wonderful woman.Meantime, intelligent, with a sort of lofty simplicity, and curious at heart, but not like many women merely of social gossip, she amused her age by attracting within her ken through the power of her great, almost historical, social prestige everything that rose above the dead level of mankind, lawfully or unlawfully, by position, wit, audacity, fortune or misfortune.Royal Highnesses, artists, men of science, young statesmen, and charlatans of all ages and conditions, who, unsubstantial and light, bobbing up like corks, show best the direction of the surface currents, had been welcomed in that house, listened to, penetrated, understood, appraised, for her own edification.In her own words, she liked to watch what the world was coming to.And as she had a practical mind her judgement of men and things, though based on special prejudices, was seldom totally wrong, and almost never wrong-headed.Her drawing-room was probably the only place in the wide world where an Assistant Commissioner of Police could meet a convict liberated on a ticket-of-leave on other than professional and official ground.Who had brought Michaelis there one afternoon the Assistant Commissioner did not remember very well.He had a notion it must have been a certain Member of Parliament of illustrious parentage and unconventional sympathies, which were the standing joke of the comic papers.The notabilities and even the simple notorieties of the day brought each other freely to that temple of an old woman's not ignoble curiosity.You never could guess whom you were likely to come upon being received in semi-privacy within the faded blue silk and gilt frame screen, making a cosy nook for a couch and a few armchairs in the great drawing-room, with its hum of voices and the groups of people seated or standing in the light of six tall windows.

Michaelis had been the object of a revulsion of popular sentiment, the same sentiment which years ago had applauded the ferocity of the life sentence passed upon him for complicity in a rather mad attempt to rescue some prisoners from a police van.The plan of the conspirators had been to shoot down the horses and overpower the escort.Unfortunately, one of the police constables got shot, too.He left a wife and three small children, and the death of that man aroused through the length and breadth of a realm for whose defence, welfare, and glory men die every day as matter of duty, an outburst of furious indignation, of a raging, implacable pity for the victim.Three ringleaders got hanged.Michaelis, young and slim, locksmith by trade, and great frequenter of evening schools, did not even know that anybody had been killed, his part with a few others being to force open the door at the back of the special conveyance.When arrested he had a bunch of skeleton keys in one pocket, a heavy chisel in another, and a short crowbar in his hand; neither more nor less than a burglar.But no burglar would have received such a heavy sentence.

The death of the constable had made him miserable at heart, but the failure of the plot also.He did not conceal either of these sentiments from his empanelled countrymen, and that sort of compunction appeared shockingly imperfect to the crammed court.The judge on passing sentence commented feelingly upon the depravity and callousness of the young prisoner.

That made the groundless fame of his condemnation; the fame of his release was made for him on no better grounds by people who wished to exploit the sentimental aspect of his imprisonment either for purposes of their own or for no intelligible purpose.He let them do so in the innocence of his heart and the simplicity of his mind.Nothing that happened to him individually had any importance.He was like those saintly men whose personality is lost in the contemplation of their faith.His ideas were not in the nature of convictions.They were inaccessible to reasoning.They formed in all their contradictions and obscurities an invincible and humanitarian creed, which he confessed rather than preached, with an obstinate gentleness, a smile of pacific assurance on his lips, and his candid blue eyes cast down because the sight of faces troubled his inspiration developed in solitude.