Judging that the time was ripe, Alfrist confided to the old man a desire to visit his American grandfather. Sir Anthony, always sentimentally inclined, advanced him the money for his fare and sent him off with his blessing. Alfrist went to Paris on the money, enjoyed himself in various slightly dubious ways and returned with a story that his American grandfather had refused to see him, but that the annuity would still be paid.
To strengthen his position with Sir Anthony, Alfrist spent the rest of the vacation tutoring a backward boy for Common Entrance. There was nothing wrong with his own brains and he proved a capable and conscientious mentor. This was not entirely to his credit for, as usual, keeping one eye upon the main chance, he thought that the boy might be useful to him in the future. He was the son of a wealthy industrialist and Alfrist decided that if university life did not suit him, there might be plums awaiting him in the industrial world if he played his cards wisely with regard to his tutoring of the rich man’s lad.
His immediate future, as he saw it, involved the obtaining of a respectable degree and then a university post. After that, Fate, which had been kind to him on the whole, would be certain, he thought, to put opportunities in his way. He had no intention of living on a lecturer’s salary for the rest of his life, but it would do to begin with while he looked around for better – i.e. more lucrative – employment.
After he left college Alfrist obtained a post at a northern university and soon found himself back in an atmosphere to which his schooldays had accustomed him. His fellow-lecturers either barely tolerated him or actually disliked him, for he proved to be arrogant, self-opinionated and conceited. However, so far as his uncle and old Sir Anthony knew, he kept out of trouble. At the age of twenty-six he published a novel which was kindly noticed but did not sell and, two years later, a collection of poems whose slightly erotic flavour brought him a certain amount of notoriety, if not exactly fame.
He had published his poems under the name of Theddeus E. Lawrence, hoping, by this means, to attract the American market, and it was as T. E. Lawrence that he decided in future to be known, thus accomplishing a schoolboy resolve. The hoodwinked old Sir Anthony was delighted with him and showed his good opinion by suggesting him as co-trustee with a nephew of his (Sir Anthony’s) own, for a minor who was to inherit a fortune; the same boy, in fact, as the one whom Alfrist had tutored and who had now entered his seventeenth year and had been left an orphan.
It seemed to Lawrence, né Swinburne, that the accident to his own father had been the most fortunate of occurrences. Death, he realised, was, among other things, a solver of problems. But for his father’s demise, and the manner of it, he would never have been taken up by Sir Anthony. He cultivated the old gentleman and had high hopes of becoming his heir.
CHAPTER 2
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Those who are wise in their own conceit
The garden seemed hardly the right setting for the conversation which was taking place in it. Its tranquillity and its age-old peacefulness were at odds with the matter which was being discussed. Its smooth green lawn was bordered by a broad, moss-grown path and between the path and that part of the old city wall which formed a bastion between the college and a busy street there were flower-beds in their summer colours of red, yellow, white, blue, purple, cream and pink. Trees and shrubs made a background to all this variety of tints and hues and, as though to add a touch of romance to the scene, there was a long flight of stone steps which led up from a scent-filled rose-bed to the top of the crenellated wall. It served as a reminder, perhaps, of old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago, but it was overgrown with lichen now, and never used.
Dividing the lawn into two unequal parts was the famous lime walk. Between its two rows of trees whose pale flowers hung in clusters, filling the air with their elusive fragrance, the two men strolled up and down.
Beyond the lime walk a retaining dry-stone wall separated the lawn from the terrace and from another riotous pageant of summer flowers; this second mass of colour was thrown into masterly assertiveness by the long façade of the fifteenth-century College buildings which acted as its background and its foil.
This long line of pointed gables which made up the west front of the College was broken in the middle by a bold and massive tower which formed part of the Warden’s lodging, and it was the Warden himself who was pacing up and down between the rows of lime trees with his guest, the pair so much engrossed in their conversation that the garden, as such, went unnoticed and, so far as one of them was concerned, brightness fell from the air and no birds sang.
‘So there it is,’ he said at last. ‘Old Sir Anthony will have to be told, I suppose, and what we are to do if a scandal of magnitude is to be avoided, I cannot think. I suppose you have no suggestion to offer?’
If some arrangement could be made – if somebody, for instance, was willing to guarantee the sum involved – could Lawrence pay back the money by instalments?’
‘I know of nobody who would be prepared to offer such security. My own fortune falls short of forty thousand pounds by a considerable margin and in any case I would not be willing to reduce my sister and her daughter to penury on Lawrence’s account. He does not deserve it. It is not, either, as though he were my son. He is not even, strictly speaking, my nephew.’
‘He is not in the hands of the police?’
‘It is only a matter of time, and a short time at that. I have managed to persuade the auditors to keep their findings to themselves for a few days, but they were very unwilling to allow us even that much grace.’
‘Does Lawrence say why he had such need of the money?’
‘He tells me nothing except to deny the charge in its entirety.’
‘Has he ever been in trouble before?’
‘Not in trouble of this magnitude, and not since his undergraduate days. At that time there were occasional debts to be settled and two or three jilted shopgirls had to be compensated. Fortunately he had seen to it that he was not a student here, and as Warden of Wayneflete I was not at all anxious to have him bring his profligate habits to this University, let alone to my own College, so we were in agreement so far as that was concerned.’
‘Is it possible that he is being blackmailed? You say you have settled debts for him before, so one assumes that he would have mentioned the fact if it was simply that he owed the money to someone – although, to a young man on a fixed salary plus, as I understand it, a small annuity, forty thousand pounds must seem a pretty considerable sum, even in these days.’
‘Considerable enough for him to know I could not replace it,’ said the Warden grimly.
‘I wonder whether you would like me to have a word with him?’ suggested Sir Ferdinand Lestrange.
‘I was hoping that you would offer to do so. Your legal training may enable you to elicit something from him which he has not confided to me. I feel that if only we knew why he needed the money so badly, there might still be some way of helping him cope with this dreadful situation. He is staying in College for the present. You will find him in the Senior Commonroom.’
‘From which I excused myself after dinner, as you had suggested this talk. I will return there.’
The Senior Commonroom, like the west front of the College buildings, belonged to another century. It was part of the Tudor wing and its principal features were the linenfold panelling of its walls, a magnificent fireplace and a ceiling heavily plastered with meaningless arabesques and with oval lozenges incorporating the coats of arms of the various benefactors to the College.