Read Online Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) by Dennis Parry - Free Book Online Page B

museum—and had the amusement of observing their steady disappearance during the following months.
    His vice was not so much that of the plain thief as the magpie or the miser, for by all accounts his personal income was in the region of £ 20 , 000 a year.
    ‘I hear,’ he said—and the machinery of flattery started up with an audible purr, ‘that you’re a young man of quite remarkable talents. A future Haldane or Stephen.’
    I muttered something about ‘having a long way to go’.
    Then he said: ‘You’re modest. I expect if the truth were known a good many people have already benefited by your advice.’ Feeling that the second show of interest in my embryonic profession could not be pure coincidence, I gave him much the same rejoinder as I had given to Varvara.
    ‘Nobody in his senses would consult an inexperienced undergraduate.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Cedric with great smoothness, ‘not about the kind of detail which one only picks up with practice. But advice on matters of principle . . . I often think that comes as well from a young, as an old, head.’
    I suddenly made up my mind to string along with him, if only to see where he was going.
    ‘What sort of matters had you in mind?’
    ‘Well . . . for instance . . . respect for the Law . . . making people understand they can’t play fast and loose with it or with documents made under its authority.’
    ‘Such as?’
    ‘I don’t know. Deeds, perhaps, or wills. There are a lot of simple unbusinesslike people who imagine that if you don’t like what’s written in them you can ignore it.’
    ‘It should be easy to squash that notion,’ I said.
    ‘It just needs a word or two of disinterested advice.’
    I continued to wear a bright, astute expression, but he suddenly shut up. I suppose I had played my part too vigorously and he felt that I was trying to push him into some concrete proposition before he was ready.
    We left the museum and went downstairs together. In doing so we had to pass the door of Varvara’s room. It was open and I could see her inside seated in front of a mirror, like the Lady of Shalott.
    ‘Good evening, my dear,’ called her uncle.
    She must have been able to see our reflections, but she did not reply nor did her face flicker. Perhaps, I thought, it is one of those conventions which play such a part in Chinese life that people observing others through a mirror are themselves notionally invisible.
    Cedric sighed. ‘A poor, wild, uncouth creature!’ he said in a lowered voice. ‘I suppose it’s a miracle she survived at all in that terrible wilderness. What my brother can have been thinking of, all those years . . .’
    ‘I’ve wondered why he went to a place like that,’ I said.
    Cedric nodded gravely.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, removing his spectacles and fixing me in a light-grey stare. ‘Yes, you must have wondered. Well . . . there’s no sense in being squeamish about old scandals.’ He paused so that his words should gain emphasis. ‘My wretched brother betrayed our father’s trust.’ For a moment I was not quite sure whether the victim’s name should be spelt with a capital F or not: then he went on. ‘Fulk obtained money as an agent and failed to account for it.’ (This seemed to rule out the Deity.) ‘In those days society had no place for swindlers.’
    It is a significant fact that the possibility of believing him never for an instant crossed my mind.
    ‘It must have been very disturbing,’ I said cautiously.
    ‘It was,’ Cedric agreed, ‘to persons with standards of honour.’
    His awful naïve cunning sometimes achieved results by a kind of double bluff. It filled persons of sensibility with so much vicarious shame that they could not bear the insult to humanity involved in showing him up; consequently they sometimes pretended to have noticed nothing and allowed him to achieve his object. This, of course, led to a vicious circle, since each triumph was put down by its author to a Borgian