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Commonwealth History
in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by
Saul Dubow · Richard Drayton
Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial
Studies Series

Series Editors
Richard Drayton
Department of History
King’s College London
London, UK

Saul Dubow
Magdalene College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a collection of
studies on empires in world history and on the societies and cultures which
emerged from colonialism. It includes both transnational, comparative
and connective studies, and studies which address where particular regions
or nations participate in global phenomena. While in the past the series
focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, in its current incarna-
tion there is no imperial system, period of human history or part of the
world which lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome the
first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major studies by more
senior scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong thematic
focus. The series includes work on politics, economics, culture, literature,
science, art, medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most exciting new
scholarship on world history with an imperial theme.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/13937
 Saul Dubow • Richard Drayton
Editors

Commonwealth
History in the
Twenty-First Century
Editors
Saul Dubow Richard Drayton
Magdalene College Department of History
University of Cambridge King’s College London
Cambridge, UK London, UK

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

ISBN 978-3-030-41787-1    ISBN 978-3-030-41788-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41788-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Tony Hopkins and Ronald Hyam, both fine scholars of Commonwealth
and Empire and also strong supporters of this series.
 Contents

I ntroduction: The Commonwealth in the Twenty-First Century  1

Saul Dubow and Richard Drayton

 he League of Nations and the ‘Third British Empire’,

T
1919–1940 21
David Thackeray

 ommonwealth History from Below? Caribbean National,

C
Federal and Pan-African Renegotiations of the Empire Project,
c. 1880–1950 41
Richard Drayton

 ommonwealth Constitution-Maker: The Life of Yash Ghai 61

C
Coel Kirkby

‘The Unbridgeable Gulf’: Responsible Self-Government and

Aboriginal Title in Southern Rhodesia and the Commonwealth 81
Edward Cavanagh

 ommonwealth Communities: Immigration and Racial

C
Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain101
Saima Nasar

vii
viii CONTENTS

 etween Insignificance and Importance: The Commonwealth

B
Headship in Contemporary History123
H. Kumarasingham

J awaharlal Nehru, Indian Republicanism, and the

Commonwealth143
Sunil Purushotham

 outh African Indians, Monarchy and the New

S
Commonwealth: Transnational Conversations and
Perspectives, 1946–1948161
Hilary Sapire

‘Cuckoo in the Commonwealth Nest’: The Irish Impact and

the Commonwealth Legacy for Ireland181
Donal Lowry

 he Commonwealth and Apartheid207

T
Thula Simpson

 acial Legacies: South African Apartheid and the Old

R
Commonwealth229
Harriet Aldrich

‘A Bridge to Better Relations Between London and Vichy’:

Jan Smuts, South Africa, and Commonwealth Diplomacy in
the Second World War251
Luc-André Brunet

 lobalising Suez: Commonwealth Diplomacy

G
and the War of Algerian Independence (1955–1957)271
Mélanie Torrent
 CONTENTS ix

 hose Commonwealth? Negotiating Commonwealth

W
Day in the 1950s and 1960s291
Anna Bocking-Welch

 anking on a Commonwealth Future311

B
Sarah Stockwell

Index 329
 Notes on Contributors

Harriet Aldrich is a DPhil candidate at Oxford University exploring the

experience of Ghanaian exiles in the post-independence period. Her
research focusses on modern African history in a global context, particu-
larly Uganda and South Africa. Her most recent articles have appeared in
The Round Table and The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.
Anna Bocking-Welch has been a lecturer in British and Imperial History
at the University of Liverpool since 2013. Her monograph, British Civic
Society at the End of Empire (2018), examines public reactions to decolo-
nisation in 1960s associational life. Her current project examines public
participation in humanitarian activities in post-war Britain.
Luc-André Brunet is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century History at The
Open University and a fellow at LSE IDEAS. He is the author of Forging
Europe: Industrial Organisation in France, 1940–1952 (2017) as well as
articles in French History, Contemporary European History and The
International History Review. His current research project deals with rela-
tions between Vichy France and the Commonwealth during the Second
World War.
Edward Cavanagh is interested in the legal, constitutional and intellec-
tual history of the British Empire. He is an associate fellow at the Institute
of Commonwealth Studies and will be a visiting fellow at both the UCD
Humanities Institute and the ANU School of Law to further his work on
Crown and empire.

xi
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xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Richard Drayton is Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s

College London. His most recent book is Whose Constitution? Law, Justice
and History in the Caribbean (2016)
Saul Dubow teaches at the University of Cambridge, where he is Smuts
Professor of Commonwealth History. His most recent book is Apartheid:
1948–1994 (2014). His next book, forthcoming with Cambridge
University Press, is The Scientific Imagination in South Africa, 1700 to the
Present, jointly authored with William Beinart.
Coel Kirkby is a lecturer at the University of Sydney Law School. He was
elected the Smuts Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the
University of Cambridge for 2017–2018. Before that he was a
McKenzie Fellow at Melbourne Law School, an Endeavour Fellow at
UNSW and a researcher at the Dullah Omar Institute in Cape Town.
He is both a historian of the legal thought and practice of British
imperialism and a comparative constitutional scholar concerned with
its legacies in postcolonial states. He has worked on contemporary
constitutional reform projects including the Fiji Constitution Commission
of 2012.
Harshan Kumarasingham is Senior Lecturer in British Politics at the
University of Edinburgh. He is a political historian of British decolonisa-
tion and subsequent state-building across the Commonwealth. His works
include A Political Legacy of the British Empire—Power and the
Parliamentary System in Post-Colonial India and Sri Lanka (2013). He is
editing a volume on the Crown and political crises across the
Commonwealth since 1945 for this book series as well as working on a
Cambridge University Press monograph on the legacy of the Crown in
South Asia.
Donal Lowry is a senior member of Regent’s Park College at the
University of Oxford and an expert on Ireland and Southern Rhodesia.
His forthcoming publications include ‘Making John Redmond “the Irish
[Louis] Botha”: The Dominion Dimensions of the Anglo-Irish
Settlement, c.1906–1922’, in Martin Farr and Stephanie Barczewski
(eds), The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History, and ‘A “Supreme
and Permanent Symbol of Executive Authority”: The Crown and
Gubernatorial Authority in Northern Ireland in an Age of Troubles’,
in H. Kumarasingham (ed.), Viceregalism: The Crown and Its Representatives
in Political Crises in the Post-War Commonwealth.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Saima Nasar is Lecturer in the History of Africa and its Diasporas at the
University of Bristol. She is a social and cultural historian and focuses on
race, empire and Britain’s diasporic communities. Her forthcoming mono-
graph, ‘Subjects, Citizens, Refugees’, examines the transnational histories
of Britain’s East African Asians.
Sunil Purushotham is a historian of modern South Asia, with interests
in twentieth-century India. His research examines histories of violence,
sovereignty and democracy in the middle decades of India’s twentieth
century. He writes about the princely state of Hyderabad, Partition, revo-
lutionary Telangana, Jawaharlal Nehru, and federal and non-national con-
stitutional imaginaries in late colonial India. His publications include
articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Modern Intellectual
History and Modern Asian Studies.
Hilary Sapire teaches the history of Southern Africa and global history
in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College,
University of London. Her current research focuses on Southern
Africa, monarchy and the contested histories of loyalism in the twen-
tieth century. She has published articles in the Journal of Southern
African Studies as well as The Historical Journal and the History Workshop
Journal.
Thula Simpson is an associate professor in the Department of Historical
and Heritage Studies at the University of Pretoria. He has published
extensively on the ANC’s armed struggle and the broader liberation strug-
gle in South Africa. He is the author of Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s
Armed Struggle (2016) and editor of The ANC and the Liberation Struggle
in South Africa: Essential Writings (2017) as well as of numerous journal
articles and book chapters. His chapter in this collection is based on
research supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social
Sciences.
Sarah Stockwell is Professor of Imperial and Commonwealth History at
King’s College London. She has published books and articles on the his-
tory of the empire and especially British decolonisation. Her most recent
book, The British End of the British Empire, was published in 2018.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

David Thackeray is Associate Professor of History at the University of

Exeter. His most recent book is Forging a British World of Trade: Culture,
Ethnicity, and Market in the Empire-Commonwealth, 1880–1975 (2019).
Mélanie Torrent is a professor at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne,
where she teaches British and Commonwealth history. She is a member of
the Institut Universitaire de France. Her research focuses on the impact of
the ends of empire on British society, diplomatic networks and European
construction, with a particular interest in Franco-British relations.
 Introduction: The Commonwealth
in the Twenty-First Century

Saul Dubow and Richard Drayton

This book arises out of a conference on ‘The Commonwealth Effect’ held

at Magdalene College, Cambridge, on April 6–7, 2018.1 It emerged out
of a view that there were both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ reasons to re-­
engage with the subject. On the one hand, we wanted to collect samples
of a rich new body of twenty-first-century research on Commonwealth
history. On the other, the Commonwealth had suddenly become a touch-
stone of British political debate.
Our meeting was held two weeks before the gathering of the
Commonwealth Heads of Government in London in 2018 which sought

1
We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the Smuts Memorial Fund and Magdalene
College, Cambridge, for supporting this conference.

S. Dubow (*)
Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
R. Drayton
Department of History, King’s College London, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. Dubow, R. Drayton (eds.), Commonwealth History in the
Twenty-First Century, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial
Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41788-8_1
2 S. DUBOW AND R. DRAYTON

to affirm the organisation’s commitment to a ‘fairer future’. The British

media (which tends to ignore such occasions when they meet abroad)
gave extensive attention to the gathering, partly because it was hosted in
London, but more especially because many Brexiters had gestured towards
the Commonwealth as part of a strategy for ‘Global Britain’.2
Standard debates were dusted down and offered up in editorials and
talk-shows: opinion was predictably divided over whether the
Commonwealth continues to have any purpose or meaning; whether it
offered any political, diplomatic and economic advantages to Britain; or
whether the Commonwealth was merely a hangover from the imperial
past. (Prince Charles’s prospect of succeeding his mother as head of the
Commonwealth was another attention-grabber.) Historical depth of field
was not much in evidence in these debates. Thus, few public commenta-
tors seemed to be aware that Britain’s entry into Europe in 1973 was, at
the time, also a choice to downgrade its historic connections with the
Commonwealth, a decision that left countries like New Zealand and
Australia feeling abandoned following a decade of tightening restrictions
on Commonwealth rights of movement. Unsurprisingly, talk about reviv-
ing British trade links with these countries post-Brexit was treated scepti-
cally, and sometimes with hints of schadenfreude, by commentators from
India, Australia, New Zealand and other ex-members of the British
Empire.3
Profound scepticism about the Commonwealth as a viable moral and
political project was also evident in Phillip Murphy’s keynote address,
delivered at the conference dinner, in which he introduced his new book,
The Empire’s New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth (2018). Murphy
wryly rehearsed multiple efforts to remake the Commonwealth and its
repeated, often vainglorious, efforts to secure a role for itself in interna-
tional affairs. One of his themes was that, by continually reinventing the
Commonwealth, advocates of its resurrection were apt to forget its his-
tory. A panel convened at the British Library and chaired by BBC
journalist, Reeta Chakrabarti, debated Philip Murphy’s provocations: in

2
Typical of this was UKIP’s declaration on Commonwealth Day 2016, in the run up to
the referendum, that ‘Outside the EU, the world is our oyster and the Commonwealth
remains that precious pearl within’. https://web.archive.org/web/20180321201944/
http://www.ukip.org/outside_the_eu_the_world_is_our_oyster_and_the_commonwealth_
is_its_pearl (accessed March 20, 2018).
3
M. Kenney and N. Pearce, Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics (London,
2018), p. 155.
 INTRODUCTION: THE COMMONWEALTH IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 3

discussion, Paul Boateng, former British High Commissioner in South

Africa, was rather more positive about the potential of the Commonwealth,
as was Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand, who professed
to see a continuing role for the organisation on the international stage as
a champion of the developmental needs and aspirations of small states.4
The academic conference held at Cambridge did not enter directly into
discussions about the contemporary relevance of the Commonwealth or,
indeed, its utility and future role.5 Rather we sought to assess the historic
influence of the Commonwealth and the state of the field, mindful of the
fact that we were meeting 100 years after Jan Smuts’s 1917 speech in
London where he helped to formulate the twentieth-century idea of
Commonwealth by conceiving it as a ‘system of nations’ comprising free
and equal sovereign states pursuing common interests within the context
of a cooperative international order. In key respects the Commonwealth
marks the first supra-national, global institution representing multiple
states, and it is remarkable that it still exists.

* * *

‘A common wealth is called a society…of a multitude of free men collected

together and united by common accord & covenants among themselves’
declared Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum in 1583.6 It was to
this idea of pooled sovereignty that Lord Rosebery appealed when in 1884
he declared to an Australian audience that ‘The British Empire is a
Commonwealth of Nations…I would say it is a congress of races over
which Great Britain presides (Cheers)’.7 He presumed, of course, that the
free covenanters were in Adelaide or Auckland or Montreal, and not in
Calcutta or Port of Spain. When Jan Smuts in 1917 expanded Rosebery’s
passing thought into a comprehensive vision of the ‘British Commonwealth

4
‘The State of the Commonwealth: debate at the British Library’, British Library, 19 April
2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuoy73WS8w
5
For one attempt to connect the Commonwealth’s history with its possible futures, see
Richard Drayton, ‘The Commonwealth in the Twenty-First Century’, The Round Table,
105, 1 (2016), 21–29.
6
Thomas Smith, De republica Anglorum. The maner of gouernement or policie of the realme
of England (London, 1583), p. 10.
7
Robert Rhodes James, Rosebery (London, 1963), p 196. The full text appears in ‘The
Banquet’, The South Australian Register, 19 January, 1884. Thanks to Daniel Mckay for the
latter reference and for his comments on this introduction.
4 S. DUBOW AND R. DRAYTON

of Nations’, he similarly assumed it would be a family of democracies gov-

erned by and for white men.8 That conception was further developed at
the 1921 Imperial Conference and radically re-examined from 1949 when
the term ‘Dominion’ or ‘Dominion status’ began to fall out of official use
in favour of ‘Commonwealth country’ or ‘member’.9
As an academic subject, Commonwealth history developed out of, and
in parallel with, imperial history; it was very much in service to this Whig
idea of a political destiny shared by Britain with the ‘white Dominions’.10
Keith Hancock, in his superlative Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs
(1937–1942), gave support to this orthodoxy, though he also questioned
the assumption ‘that all the territories marked red on the map were keep-
ing their appointed places in a triumphant procession to the finishing post
of self-government’.11 Only in the aftermath of the Second World War was
the subject, like the Commonwealth itself, reinvented to become some-
thing which belonged to India and Jamaica, as much as to New Zealand
and (white) South Africa.
A marker of this shift was Vincent Harlow’s declaration in 1952, in the
climax of his first volume of The Founding of the Second British Empire,
that the British Commonwealth was a ‘European-Asian-African associa-
tion of emergent democracies’.12 This was also the year in which the Smuts
Professorship of the History of the British Commonwealth was established
in Cambridge. In Oxford, what had been founded as the Beit Professorship
of Colonial History in 1905 became the chair of ‘Commonwealth History’
in 1963 with Jack Gallagher in the role.13 The Rhodes Chair in London
and the Vere Harmsworth in Cambridge, both founded in 1919, opted to
keep ‘Imperial history’ in their titles.

8
J. C. Smuts, ‘The British Commonwealth of Nations’, War-Time Speeches: A Compilation
of Public Utterances in Great Britain (New York, 1917), p. 27.
9
W. David McIntyre, ‘The Strange Death of Dominion Status’, The Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History, 27, 2 (1999), 201.
10
For a history of the origins and history of the subject, see Amanda Behm, Imperial
History and the Global Politics of Exclusion: Britain 1880–1940 (London, 2017) and Richard
Drayton, ‘Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and
the Past and Present of Imperialism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46, 3 (2011), 671–85.
11
W.K. Hancock, Country and Calling (London, 1954), p. 151.
12
Vincent Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, Volume I (London,
1952), p. 647.
13
Andrew S. Thompson, ‘John Andrew Gallagher, 1919–1980’, Dictionary of National
Biography: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.
0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-45976.
 INTRODUCTION: THE COMMONWEALTH IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 5

Commonwealth history has attracted serious scholarship, some of the

best examples of which were produced from the 1930s to the 1960s.
There have been refreshing interventions at regular intervals since. These
include the edited collection by Ronald Hyam and Ged Martin,
Reappraisals in British Imperial History (1975), which bridges imperial
and Commonwealth history; W. David McIntyre’s The Significance of the
Commonwealth, 1965–1990 (1991); Francine McKenzie’s Redefining the
Bonds of Commonwealth (2002) on the economic and political role of the
‘old’ Dominions during and after the Second World War; and Lorna
Lloyd’s Diplomacy with a Difference (2007) which analyses the century-­
long evolving institution of the office of high commissioner in
Commonwealth affairs.14
The field has continued to grow, as testified to by the longevity and
quality of publications like The Round Table and The Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History. Yet, it was clear by the late twentieth century
that the subject was in retreat. Outside of universities where there were
endowments securing its reproduction, few people were hired in the field,
and the teaching of Commonwealth history as a whole was collapsing. In
part, this was due to the ascendency of national and regional ‘area studies’
history, and in particular the vitality of South Asian and African history.
(The election of the last four Smuts professors at Cambridge reflects this
pattern.) The leading imperial and Commonwealth historian, Ronald
Robinson, once remarked tongue-in-cheek that after sorting out the his-
tory of decolonisation, the subject would be ready to shut up shop.15
This prediction proved mistaken. Most British historians, it is true,
shunned Commonwealth history, apparently regarding the empire as an
extraneous embarrassment that contributed little to domestic political,
social, and cultural history. A countervailing tendency was led by British
and imperial historians including Catherine Hall, John Mackenzie and
Andrew Thompson, who set out to show the importance of the empire in
shaping British political and cultural sensibilities. Their contributions to
the ‘new’ imperial history were fortified by the rise, from the mid-1980s,
of post-colonial theory which raised fundamental questions about race,
14
Ronald Hyam and Ged Martin (eds.), Reappraisals in British Imperial History (London,
1975); W. David McIntyre’s The Significance of the Commonwealth, 1965–1990 (Basingstoke,
1991); Francine McKenzie, Redefining the Bonds of Commonwealth, 1939–1948. The Politics
of Preference (Basingstoke, 2002); Lorna Lloyd, Diplomacy with a Difference: The
Commonwealth Office of High Commissioner, 1880–2006 (Leiden, 2007).
15
Personal communication, Ronald Robinson to Saul Dubow, circa. 1984.
6 S. DUBOW AND R. DRAYTON

knowledge and power; here, the writings of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon
and Michel Foucault provided strong theoretical challenges.
By the 1990s, the comparative and connective questions raised by post-­
colonial approaches were given new analytical power through the rise of
world, global, and transnational history. Commonwealth history co-­
existed somewhat uncomfortably in the interstices of the new post-­colonial
and global history. One interesting initiative was the ‘British World’ initia-
tive which allowed scholars trained in the history of the Commonwealth
and the British Dominions to examine the complex interactions of metro-
pole and colony. New connections were thereby forged between Canadian,
Australasian, African, and Caribbean scholars—and often without the pre-
sumption of British leadership. But, within Britain, there seemed some-
thing a little musty to Commonwealth history at the beginning of the
twenty-first century. The brand remained tainted by its white-centric and
pro-imperial origins. In 2006, Cambridge historians decided to change
the name of their ‘Commonwealth and Overseas History Seminar’ to the
World History Seminar, and in 2009 the final year paper on Commonwealth
history which had been taught for 50 years came to an end.
Yet, rather as the Commonwealth itself was rescued from irrelevance
from below and beyond in the era of Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal,
so Commonwealth history has been rejuvenated by exactly those newer
approaches to the international past which appeared to be overwhelming
it. Historians seeking the global in relation to the local are increasingly
seeking to distinguish between real and fictive connections in their sub-
ject. And the Commonwealth, for all its ill-defined capaciousness, has an
identifiable and tangible skein of cultural, historical, economic and legal
relationships ready for exploration. Students have turned to the
Commonwealth in pursuit of new ways of thinking about the comparative
history of law, citizenship, constitution-making, international governance,
humanitarianism, global racism and anti-racism, and comparative imperi-
alism. They are alert to the ways in which imperial power has been under-
stood from below, and of its post-colonial legacies and resonances—not
least in Britain itself. The Commonwealth will never again be a master
paradigm, but it remains an important terrain of contemporary historical
engagement. This collection is not therefore a flag-waving programme for
Commonwealth history, but rather brings together indicative strands of
new work in the field.

* * *
 INTRODUCTION: THE COMMONWEALTH IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 7

There is a long tradition of academic volumes taking perspectival views of

the Commonwealth and empire; a century after its foundation, this anni-
versary seems a fitting moment to add to the lineage. Rather than focus-
sing on the Commonwealth as an ontological assumption cum existential
problem (in the well-rehearsed idiom of prospect/retrospect whither/
wither), participants in our symposium were encouraged to explore
oblique angles and to view the Commonwealth from the ‘outside in’.
Contributors were therefore enjoined to consider the Commonwealth by
looking at it from the vantage point of particular countries and regions or
by highlighting comparative currents that might be more salient on a
south-south axis than between metropole and colony. There was no
attempt to specify how centrally the Commonwealth should feature in
individual presentations or chapters.
One recurrent theme in our deliberations was the issue of how ‘the
colonised’ deployed the Commonwealth idea for their own purposes.
As can be seen in this volume, this was evident both in the early
twentieth-­century Caribbean as a direct riposte to Smuts and in South
Asia in the moment of the making of new nations as ‘Eastministers’ in
Harshan Kumarasingham’s suggestive formulation. It can also be
detected in Ireland which found its republican status incompatible with
continued Commonwealth membership. Major Commonwealth preoc-
cupations such as the anti-apartheid struggle frame several contribu-
tions. Attention has also been given to underexplored dimensions such
as French engagement with the Commonwealth, as well as to how the
institutions of the late colonial state in Britain themselves adapted to
the ends of empire.

* * *

As an international organisation, the Commonwealth is distinctive in not

having a firm date for its creation: its founding myths lie in the late-­
nineteenth-­century Colonial and Imperial Conference system, with the
1926 Imperial Conference and 1931 Statute of Westminster giving the
Commonwealth legal status. Future historians may indeed find it difficult
to pinpoint its eventual demise, for the Commonwealth is as much a pro-
fession of communion as a statutory community; as such, it is governed
more by convention than by means of a constitution.
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Exploring the Variety of Random
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The prospect (probably from being regarded as rather far-off) did
not appear to afford present satisfaction to Roland. He sat pulling at
his whiskers, moodily resenting the general blindness of Fortune in
regard to merit, and then suddenly wheeled round to his own affairs.

"I say, Mrs. J."--a compromise between the two names and serving
for both--"I want a lodging. Couldn't you let me come here?"

She looked up briskly. "What kind of a lodging? I mean as to position

and price."

"Oh, something comfortable," said Roland.

Perhaps for old acquaintance' sake, perhaps because she had some
apartments vacant, Mrs. Jones appeared to regard the proposition
with no disfavour; and began to talk of her house's accommodation.

"The rooms on the first floor are very good and well furnished," she
said. "When I was about it, Mr. Yorke, I thought I might as well have
things nice as not, one finds the return; and the drawing-room floor
naturally gets served the best. There's a piano in the front room,
and the bed in the back room is excellent."

"They'd be just the thing for me," cried Roland, rising to walk about
in pleasurable excitement. "What's the rent?"

"They are let for a pound a week. Mr.----"

"That'll do I can pay it," said he eagerly. "I don't play the piano
myself; but it may be useful if I give a party. You'll cook for me?"

"Of course we'll cook," said Mrs. Jones. "But I was about to tell you
that those rooms are let to a clergyman. If you----"

Roland had come to an abrupt anchor at the edge of the table, and
the look of blank dismay on his face was such as to cut short Mrs.
Jones's speech. "What's the matter?" she asked.
"Mrs. J., I couldn't give it; I was forgetting. They are to pay me a
pound a-week at Greatorex's; but I can't spend it all in lodgings, I'm
afraid. There'll be other things wanted."

"Other things!" ejaculated Mrs. Jones. "I should think there would be
other things. Food, and drink, and firing, and light, and wear and
tear of clothes, and washing; and a hundred extras beside."

Roland sat in perplexity. Ways and means seem to have grown dark
together.

"Couldn't you let me one room? A room with a turn-up bedstead in

it, Mrs. Jenkins, or something of that? Couldn't you take the pound
a-week, and do for me?"

"I don't know but I might make some such arrangement, and let you
have the front parlour," she slowly said. "We've got a Scripture
reader in the back one."

Roland started up impulsively to look at the front parlour, intending

to take it, off hand. As they quitted the room--which was built out at
the back, on the staircase that led down to the kitchen--Roland saw
a tall, fair, good-looking young woman, who stopped and asked
some question of Mrs. Jones. Which that lady answered sharply.

"I have no time to talk about trifles now, Alletha."

"Who's that?" cried Roland, as they entered the parlour: a small

room with a dark paper and faded red curtains.

"It's my sister, Mr. Yorke."

"I say, Mrs. J., this is a stunning room," exclaimed Roland, who was
in that eager mood, of his, when all things looked couleur-de-rose.
"Can I come in today?"
"You can tomorrow, if we agree. That sofa lets out into a bedstead
at night. You must not get into my debt, though, Mr. Yorke," she
added, in the plain, straightforward way that was habitual with her.
"I couldn't afford it, and I tell you so beforehand."

"I'll never do that," said Roland, impulsively earnest in his sincerity.

"I'll bring you home the pound each week, and then I shan't be
tempted to change it. Look here"--taking two sovereigns from his
pocket--"that's to steer on ahead with. Does she live here?" he
added, going back without ceremony to the subject of Miss Rye.
"Alletha, do you call her? what an odd name!"

"The name was a mistake of the parson's when she was christened.
It was to have been Allethea. I've had her with me four or five years
now. She is a dressmaker, Mr. Yorke, and works sometimes at home,
and sometimes out."

"She'd be uncommonly good-looking if she were not such a

shadow," commented Roland with candour.

Mrs. Jones gave her head a toss, as if the topic displeased her.
"Shadow, indeed! Yes, and she's likely to be one. Never was any pig
more obstinate than she."

"Pigs!" cried Roland with energy, "you should see the obstinacy of
Natal pigs, Mrs. J. I have. Drove 'em too."

"It couldn't equal hers," disputed Mrs. J., with intense acrimony.
"She is wedded to the memory of a runaway villain, Mr. Yorke, that's
what she is! A good opportunity presented itself to her lately of
settling, but she'd not take it. She'd sooner fret out her life after
him, than look upon an honest man. The two pigs together by the
tail, and let 'em pull two ways till they drop, they'd not equal her.
And for a runaway; a man that disgraced himself!"

"What did he do?" asked curious Roland.

"It's not very good to repeat," said Mrs. Jones tartly. "She lived in
Birmingham, our native place, till the mother died, and then she
came to me at Helstonleigh. First thing she tells me was, that she
was engaged to be married to some young man in an office there,
George Winter: and over she goes to Birmingham the next
Christmas on a visit to her aunt, on purpose to meet him: stays
there a week, and comes home again. Well, Mr. Yorke, this grand
young man, this George Winter, about whom I had my doubts,
though I'd never seen him, got into trouble before three months had
gone by: he and a fellow-clerk did something wrong with the money,
and Winter decamped."

"I wonder if he went to Port Natal?" mused Roland. "We had some
queer people over there."

"It don't much matter where he went," returned Mrs. Jones, hotly.
"He did go, and he never came back, and he took Alletha's common
sense away with him: what with him and what with the dreadful
affair at our house of that poor Mr. Ollivera, she has never been
herself since. It both happened about the same time."

Roland recalled what he had recently heard from Jenner regarding

the death of the barrister, and felt a little at sea.

"What was Ollivera to her?" he asked.

"What! why, nothing," said Mrs. Jones. "And she's no better than a
lunatic to have taken it as she did. Whether it's that, or whether it's
the pining after the other, I don't know, but one of the two's preying
upon her. There's Mr. Ollivera!"

Roland went to the window. In the street, talking, stood a dark,

small man in the garb of a clergyman, with a grave but not
unpleasant face, and sad dark eyes.

"Oh, that's Mr. Ollivera, is it?" quoth Roland. "He looks another
shadow."
"And it is another case of obstinacy," rejoined Mrs. Jones. "He has
refused all along to believe that his brother killed himself; you could
as soon make him think the sun never shone. He comes to my
parlour and talks to me about it by the hour together, with his note-
case in his hand, till Alletha can't sit any longer, and goes rushing off
with her work like any mad woman."

"Why should she rush off? What harm does it do to her?"

"I don't know: it's one of the puzzles to be found out. His coming
here was a curious thing, Mr. Yorke. One day I was standing at the
front door, and saw a young clergyman passing. He looked at me,
and stopped; and I knew him for Henry Ollivera, though we had only
met at the time of the death. When I told him I had rooms to let,
and very nice ones, for it struck me that perhaps he might be able to
recommend them, he looked out in that thoughtful, dreamy way he
has, (look at his eyes now, Mr. Yorke!) seeing nothing, I'm certain;
and then said he'd go up and look at the rooms; and we went up.
Would you believe that he took them for himself on the spot?"

"What a brick!" cried Roland, who was following out suggested ideas
but imperfectly. "I'll take this one."

"Alletha gave a great cry when she heard he was coming, and said it
was Fate. I demanded what she meant by that, but she'd not open
her lips further. Talk of Natal pigs, forsooth, she's worse. He took
possession of the rooms within the week; and I say, Mr. Yorke, that,
Fate or not Fate, he never had but one object in coming--the sifting
of that past calamity. His poor mistaken mind is ever on the rack to
bring some discovery to light. It's like that search one reads of, after
the philosopher's stone."

Roland laughed. He was not very profound himself, but the

philosopher's stone and Mrs. Jones seemed utterly at variance.

"It does," she said. "For there's no stone to be found in the one
case, and no discovery to be made in the other, beyond what has
been made. I don't say this to the parson, Mr. Yorke; I listen to him
and humour him for the sake of his dead brother."

"Well, I shan't bother you about dead people, Mrs. J., so you let me
the room."

The bargain was not difficult. Every suggestion made by Mrs. Jones,
he acceded to before it had well left her lips. He had fallen into good
hands. Whatever might be Mrs. Jones's faults of manner and temper,
she was strictly just, regarding Roland's interests at least in an equal
degree with her own.

"Do you know," said Roland, nursing his knee as the bargain
concluded, "I have never felt so much at home since I left it, as I did
just now by your fire, Mrs. J.? I'm uncommon glad I came here."

He was genuine in what he said: indeed Roland could but be

genuine always, too much so sometimes. Mrs. J.--as he called her--
brought back so vividly the old home life of his boyhood, now gone
by for ever, that it was like being at Helstonleigh again.

"My eldest brother, George, is dead," said Roland. "Gerald is grand

with his chambers and his club, and is married besides, but I've not
seen him. Tod is in the army: do you remember him? an awful young
scamp he was, his face all manner of colours from fighting, and his
clothes torn to that degree that Lady Augusta used to threaten to
send him to school without any. Where's your husband number two,
Mrs. J.?"

"It is to be hoped he is where he will never come away from; he

went sailing off three years ago from Liverpool," she answered
sharply; for, of all sore subjects, this of her second marriage was the
worst. "Anyway, I have made myself and my goods secure from
him."

"Perhaps he's at Port Natal, driving pigs. He'll find out what they are
if he is."
Mr. Ollivera was turning to the house. Roland opened the parlour
door when he had passed it; to look after him.

Some one else was there. Peering out from a dark nook in the
passage, her lips slightly apart, her eyes strained after the
clergyman with a strange kind of fear in their depths, stood Alletha
Rye. Mr. Ollivera suddenly turned back, as though he had forgotten
something, and she shrank out of sight. Mrs. Jones introduced
Roland: "Mr. Roland Yorke."

Mr. Ollivera's face was thin; his dark brown eyes shone with a
flashing, restless, feverish light. Be you very sure when that peculiar
light is seen, it betokens a mind ill at rest. The eyes fixed themselves
on Roland: and perhaps there was something in the tall, fine form,
in the good-nature of the strong-featured countenance, that recalled
a memory to Mr. Ollivera.

"Any relative of the Yorkes of Helstonleigh?"

"I should think so," said Roland, "I am a Yorke of Helstonleigh. But
I've not been there since I went to Port Natal, seven years and more
ago. Do you know them, Mr. Ollivera?"

"I know a little of the minor-canon, William Yorke, and----"

"Oh! he!" curtly interrupted Roland, with a vast amount of scorn.

"He is a beauty to know, he is."

The remark, so like a flash of boyish resentment, excited a slight

smile in Mr. Ollivera.

"Bill Yorke showed himself a cur once in his life, and it's not me
that's going to forget it. He'd have cared for my telling him of it, too,
had I come back worth a few millions from Port Natal, and gone
about Helstonleigh in my carriage and four."
Mr. Ollivera said some courteous words about hoping to make
Roland's better acquaintance, and departed. Roland suddenly
remembered the claims of his office, and tore away at full speed.

Never slackening it until he reached the house of Greatorex and

Greatorex; and there he very nearly knocked down a little girl who
had just come out of the private entrance. Roland turned to
apologise; but the words died on his lips, and he stood like one
suddenly struck dumb, staring in silence.

In the pretty young lady, one of two who were talking together in
the passage, and looked round at the commotion, Roland thought he
recognised an old friend, now the wife of his cousin William Yorke.
He bounded in and seized her hands.

"You are Constance Channing?"

"No," replied the young lady, with wondering eyes, "I am Annabel."

Mr. Roland Yorke's first movement was to take the sweet face
between his hands, and kiss it tenderly. Struggling, blushing, almost
weeping, the young lady drew back against the wall.

"How dare you?" she demanded in bitter resentment. "Are you out
of your mind, sir?"

"Good gracious, Annabel, don't you know me? I am your old

playfellow, Roland Yorke."

"Does that give you any right to insult me? I might have known it
was no one else," she added in the moment's anger.

"Why, Annabel, it was only done in great joy. I had used to kiss you,
you remember: you were but a little mite then, and I was a big
tease. Oh, I am so glad to see you! I'd rather have met you than all
the world. You can't be angry with me. Shake hands and be friends."
To remain long at variance with Roland was one of the impossibilities
of social life. He possessed himself of Annabel Channing's hand and
nearly shook it off. What with his hearty words, and what (may it be
confessed, even of Annabel) with the flattery of his praises and
general admiration, Annabel's smiles broke forth amidst her blushes.
Roland's eyes looked as if they would devour her.

"I say, I never saw anybody so pretty in all my life. It is the nicest
face; just what Constance's used to be. I thought it was Constance,
you know. Was she not daft, though, to go and take up again with
that miserable William Yorke?"

Standing by, having looked on with a smile of grand pity mingled

with amusement, was a lady in the most fashionable attire, the
amount of hair on her head something marvellous to look at.

"I should have known Roland Yorke anywhere," she said, holding out
her hand.

"Why, if I don't believe it's one of the Joliffes!"

"Hush, Roland," said Annabel, hastening to stop his freedom, and

the tone proved that she had nearly forgiven him on her own score.
"This is Mrs. Bede Greatorex."

"Formerly Louisa Joliffe," put in that lady. "Now do you know me?"

"Well, I never met with such a strange thing," cried Roland. "That
makes three--four--of the old Helstonleigh people I have met today.
Hurst, Mrs. J., and now you two. I think there must be magic in it."

"You must come and see me soon, Roland," said Mrs. Greatorex as
she went out. Miss Channing waited for the little girl, Jane
Greatorex, who had run in her wilful manner into her uncle Bede's
office. Roland offered to fetch her.

"Thank you," said Miss Channing. "Do you know which is the office?"
"Know! law bless you!" cried Roland. "What do you suppose I am,
Annabel? Clerk to Greatorex and Greatorex."

Her cheeks flushed with surprise. "Clerk to Greatorex and Greatorex!

I thought you went to Port Natal to make your fortune."

"But I did not make it. It has been nothing but knocking about; then
and since. Carrick is a trump, as he always was, but he gets floored
himself sometimes; and that's his case now. If they had not given
me a stool here (which he got for me) I'm not sure but I should
have gone into the hot-pie line."

"The--what?"

"The hot-pie line; crying them in the streets, you know, with a
basket and a white cloth, and a paper cap on. There's a fine opening
for it down in Poplar."

Miss Channing burst out laughing.

"It would be nothing to a fellow who has been over yonder," avowed
Roland, jerking his head in the direction Port Natal might be
supposed to lie. And then leaping to a widely different subject in his
volatile lightness, he said something that brought the tears to her
eyes, the drooping tremor to her lips.

"It was so good in the old days; all of us children together; we were
no better. And Mr. Channing is gone, I hear! Oh, I am so sorry,
Annabel!"

"Two years last February," she said in a hushed tone. "We have just
put off our mourning for him. Mamma is in the dear old house, and
Arthur and Tom live with her. Will you please look for the little girl,
Mr. Yorke?"

"Now I vow!"--burst forth Roland in a heat. "I'll not stand that, you
know. One would think you had put on stilts. If ever you call me 'Mr.
Yorke' again, I'll go back to Port Natal."

She laughed a little pleasant laugh of embarrassment. "But, please, I

want my pupil. I cannot go myself into the offices to look for her."

At that moment Jane Greatorex came dancing up, and was secured.
Roland stood at the door to watch them away, exchanged a few light
words with a clerk then entering, and finally bustled into the office.

"Am I late?" began Roland, with characteristic indifference. "I'm very

sorry, Mr. Brown. I was looking at some lodgings; and I met an old
friend or two. It all served to hinder me, but I'll soon make up for it."

"You have been away two hours and a half, Mr. Yorke."

"It's more, I think," said Roland. "I assure you I did my best to get
back. You'll soon find what I can get through, Mr. Brown."

Mr. Brown made no reply whatever. Jenner was absent, but Hurst
was at his post, writing, and the faint hum of voices in the adjoining
room, told that some client was holding conference with Mr. Bede
Greatorex.

Roland resumed his copying where he had left off, and wrote for a
quarter of an hour without speaking. Diligence unheard of! At the
end of that time he looked off for a little relaxation.

"Hurst, where do you think I am going to lodge?"

"How should I know?" responded Mr. Hurst. And Roland told him
where in an undertone.

"Jenner and I were going along Tottenham Court Road, and met
her," he resumed presently, after a short interlude of writing. "She
looks twenty years older."

"That's through her tongue," suggested Mr. Hurst.

"In the old days down there, I'd as soon have gone to live in a
Tartar's house as in hers. But weren't her teas and toasted muffins
good! Here, in this desert of a place--and it's worse of a desert to
me than Port Natal--to get into her house will seem like getting into
home again."

Mr. Brown, looking off his work to refer to a paper by his side, took
the opportunity to direct a glance at the opposite desk. Whether
Roland took it to himself or not, he applied sedulously for a couple of
minutes to his writing.

"I say, Hurst, what a row there is about that dead Mr. Ollivera!"

"Where's the row?"

"Well, it seems to crop up everywhere. Jenner talked of it; she talked

of it; I hear that other Mr. Ollivera talks of it. You were in the thick of
it, they say."

Hurst nodded. "My father was the surgeon fetched to him when he
was found dead, and had to give evidence at the inquest. I went to
see him buried; it was a scene. They stole a march on us, though."

"Who did?"

"They let us all disperse, and then went and read the burial service
over the grave; Ollivera the clergyman, and three or four more.
Arthur Channing was one."

"Arthur Channing!"

Had any close observer been in the office, he might perchance have
noticed that while Mr. Brown's eyes still sought his work, his pen had
ceased to play. His lips were slightly parted; his ears were cocked;
the tale evidently bore for him as great an interest as it did for the
speakers--an interest he did not choose should be seen. Had they
been speaking aloud, he would have checked the conversation at
once with an intimation that it could not concern anybody: as they
spoke covertly, he listened at leisure. Mr. Hurst resumed.

"Yes, Arthur Channing. The rumour ran that William Yorke had
promised to be present, but declined at the last moment, and Arthur
Channing voluntarily took his place out of sympathy for the feelings
of the dead man's brother."

"Bravo, old Arthur! he's the trump he always was. That's the
Reverend Bill all over."

"The Reverend Bill let them have his surplice. And there they stood,
and read the burial service over the poor fellow by stealth, just as
the old Scotch covenanters held their secret services in caves.
Altogether a vast deal of romance encircled the affair, and some
mystery. One Godfrey Pitman's name was mixed up in it."

"Who was Godfrey Pitman?"

Hurst dipped his pen slowly into the ink. "Nobody ever knew. He was
lodging in the house, and went away mysteriously the same
evening. Helstonleigh got to say in joke that there must have been
two Godfrey Pitmans. The people of the house swore through thick
and thin that the real Godfrey Pitman left at half-past four o'clock
and went away by rail at five; others saw him quit the house at dark,
and depart by the eight o'clock train. It got to a regular dispute."

"But had Godfrey Pitman anything to do with Mr. Ollivera?"

"Not he."

"Then where was the good of bringing him up?" cried Roland.

"I am only telling you of the different interests that were brought to
bear upon it. It was an affair, that death was!"
The entrance of Mr. Frank Greatorex broke up the colloquy, recalling
the clerks to their legitimate work. But the attention of one of them
had become so absorbed that it was with difficulty he could get
himself back again to passing life.

And that one was Mr. Brown.

CHAPTER X.

GOING INTO SOCIETY.

The year was growing a little later; the evenings were lengthening,
and the light of the setting sun, illumining the west with a golden
radiance, threw some of its cheering brightness even on the streets
and houses of close, smoky London.

It shone on the person of the Reverend Henry William Ollivera, as he

sat at home, taking his frugal meal, a tea-dinner. The room was a
good one, and well furnished in a plain way. The table had been
drawn towards one of the windows, open to the hum of the street;
the rosewood cabinet at the back was handsome with its sheet of
plate-glass and its white marble top; the chairs and sofa were
covered with substantial cloth, the pier-glass over the mantlepiece
reflected back bright ornaments. Mr. Ollivera was of very simple
habits, partly because he really cared little how he lived, partly
because the scenes of distress and privation he met with daily in his
ministrations read him a lesson that he was not slow to take. How
could he pamper himself up with rich food, when so many within a
stone's throw were pining for want of bread? His landlady, Mrs.
Jones, gave him sound lectures on occasion, telling him to his face
that he was trying to break down. Sometimes she prepared nice
dinners in spite of him: a fowl, or some other luxury, and Mr. Ollivera
smiled and did not say it was not enjoyed. The district of his curacy
was full of poor; poverty, vice, misery reigned, and would reign, in
spite of what he could do. Some of the worst phases of London life
were ever before him. The great problem, "What shall be done with
these?" arose to his mind day by day. He had his scripture readers;
he had other help; but destitution both of body and mind reared
itself aloft like a many-headed monster, defying all solution.
Sometimes Mr. Ollivera did not come in to dinner at all, but took a
mutton-chop with his tea; as he was doing now.

Four years had elapsed since his brother's mysterious death (surely
it may be called so!) and the conviction on the clergyman's mind,
that the verdict was wholly at variance with the facts, had not
abated one iota. Nay, time had but served to strengthen it. Nothing
else had strengthened it. No discovery had been made, no
circumstance, however minute, had arisen to throw light upon it one
way or the other. The hoped-for, looked-for communication from the
police-agent, Butterby, had never come. In point of fact Mr. Butterby,
in regard to this case, had found himself wholly at sea. Godfrey
Pitman did not turn up in response to the threatened "looking after;"
Miss Rye departed for London with her sister when affairs at the
Jones's came to a crash; and, if the truth must be told, Mr. Butterby
veered round to his original opinion, that the verdict had been a
correct one. Once, and once only, that renowned officer had
presented himself at the house of Greatorex and Greatorex.
Happening to be in London, he thought he would give them a call.
But he brought no news. It was but a few weeks following the
occurrence, and there might not have been time for any to arise.
One thing he had requested--to retain in his possession the scrap of
writing found on the table at the death. It might be useful to him, he
said, for of course he should still keep his eyes open: and Mr.
Greatorex readily acquiesced. Since then nothing whatever had been
heard from Mr. Butterby, or from any other quarter; but the sad facts
were rarely out of the clergyman's mind; and the positive conviction,
the expectation of the light, to break in sooner or later, burnt within
him with a steady ray, sure and true as Heaven.

Not of this, however, was Mr. Ollivera's mind filled this evening. His
thoughts were running on the disheartening scenes of the day; the
difficult men and women he had tried to deal with--some of them
meek and resigned, many hard and bad; all wanting help for their
sick bodies or worse souls. There was one case in particular that
interested him sadly. A man named Gisby, discovered shortly before,
lay in a room, dying slowly. He did not want help in kind, as so many
did; but of spiritual help, none could be in greater need. Little by
little, Mr. Ollivera got at his history. It appeared that the man had
once been servant in the house of Kene, the Queen's counsel--Judge
Kene now: he had been raised to the bench in the past year. During
his service there, a silver mug disappeared; circumstances seemed
to point to Gisby as guilty, and he was discharged, getting
subsequently other employment.

But now, the man was not guilty--as he convinced Mr. Ollivera, and
the suspicion appeared to have worked him a great deal of ill, and
made him hard. On this day, when the clergyman sat by his bed-
side, reading and praying, he had turned a deaf ear. "Where's the
use?" he roughly cried, "Sir Thomas thinks me guilty always." It
struck Mr. Ollivera that the man had greatly respected his master,
had valued his good opinion and craved for it still; and the next
morning this was confirmed. "You'll go to him when I'm dead, sir,
and tell him the truth then, that I was not guilty? I never touched
the mug, or knew how or where it went."

Returning home with these words ringing in his ears, Mr. Ollivera
could not get the man out of his mind. So long as the sense of being
wronged lay upon Gisby, so long would he encase himself in his hard
indifference, and refuse to hear. "I must get Kene to go to see the
man," decided Mr. Ollivera. "He must hear with his own ears and see
with his own eyes that he was not guilty, and tell him so; and then
Gisby will come round. I wonder if Kene is back from circuit."

Excessively tired with his day's work, for his frame was not of the
strongest, Mr. Ollivera did not care to go out that evening to Sir
Thomas Kene's distant residence on the chance of not finding him.
And yet, if the judge was back, there ought to be no time lost in
communicating with him, for Gisby was daily getting nearer to
death. "Bede Greatorex will be able to tell me," suddenly thought Mr.
Ollivera, when his tea had been long over and twilight was setting
in. "I'll send and ask him."

Moving to his writing-table, he wrote a short note, reading it over

before enclosing it in an envelope.

"Dear Bede,--Can you tell me whether Sir Thomas Kene is in

London? I wish particularly to see him as soon as possible. It is on a
little matter connected with my parish work.

"Truly yours

"William Ollivera."

It was a latent thought that induced Mr. Ollivera to add the

concluding sentence and the motive shall be told. He and Bede
Greatorex had come to an issue twice upon the subject of his so
persistently cherishing the notion that the now long-past death was
anything but a suicide; or rather, that he should pursue it. Bede
heard so much of it from him that he grew vexed, and at length
vowed he would listen to him no more. And Mr. Ollivera thought that
if Bede fancied he wanted to see Sir Thomas Kene on that subject,
he might refuse to answer him.
Ringing the bell, he gave the note to the servant with a request
(preferred with deprecation and a plea of his own tired state, for he
was one of those who are sensitively chary of giving any extra
trouble) that it should be taken to Mr. Bede Greatorex, and an
answer waited for.

But when the girl got downstairs, there arose some slight difficulty;
she was engaged in a necessary household occupation--ironing--and
her mistress did not care that she should quit it. Miss Rye stood by
with her things on, about to go out on some errand of her own. Ah
me! these apparently trifling chances do not happen accidentally.

"Can't you just step round to Bedford Square, with it, Alletha?"
asked Mrs. Jones. "It won't take you far out of your way."

Miss Rye's silent answer--she seemed always silent now--was to pick

up the note and go out with it. She knew the house, for she worked
occasionally for Mrs. Bede Greatorex, and was passing to the private
entrance when she encountered Frank Greatorex, who was coming
out at the other door. He wished her good evening, and she told him
her errand, showing the note directed to Bede.

"He is in his office still," said Frank, throwing open the door for her.
"Walk in. Mr. Brown, attend here, please."

Miss Rye stepped into the semi-lighted room, for there was only a
shaded lamp on Mr. Brown's desk; and Frank Greatorex, closing the
door, was gone again. Mr. Brown, at work as late as his master,
came forward.

"For Mr. Bede Greatorex," said Miss Rye, handing him the note. "I
will wait----"

The words were broken off with a faint, sharp cry. A cry, low though
it was, of surprise, of terror, of dismay. Both their faces blanched to
whiteness, they stood gazing at each other, she with strained eyes
and drawnback lips, he with a kind of forced stillness on his features,
that nevertheless told of inward emotion.

"Oh, my good heaven!" she breathed in her agitation. "Is it you?"

Miss Rye had heard speak of Mr. Brown, the managing clerk in the
department of Mr. Bede Greatorex. Jenner had mentioned him:
Roland Yorke had commented on him and his wig. But that "Mr.
Brown" should be the man now standing before her, she had never
suspected; no, not in her wildest dreams.

"Sit down, Miss Rye. You are faint."

She put his arm from her, as he would have supported her to a seat,
and staggered to one of herself. He followed, and stood by her in
silence.

"What are you called here?" she began--and, it may be, that in the
moment's agitation she forgot his ostensible name and really put it
as a question, not in mocking, condemnatory scorn:--"Godfrey
Pitman?"

Every instinct of terror the man possessed seemed to rise up within

him at sound of the name. He glanced round the room; at the
desks; at the walls; as if to assure himself that no ear was there.

"Hush--sh--sh!" with a prolonged note of caution. "Never breathe

that name, here or elsewhere."

"What if I were to? To speak it aloud to all who ought to hear it?"

"Why then you would bring a hornet's nest about heads that you
little wot of. Their sting might end in worse than death."

"Death for you?"

"No: I should be the hangman."

"What do you mean?"

"Listen, Miss Rye. I cannot tell you what I mean: and your better
plan will be never to ask me. If----"

"Better for whom?" she interrupted.

"For--well, for me, for one. The fact is, that certain interests
pertaining to myself and others--certain reminiscences of the past,"
he continued with very strong emphasis, "have become so
complicated, so interwoven as it were one with the other, that we
must in all probability stand or fall together."

"I do not understand you."

"I can scarcely expect that you should. But--were any proceeding on
your part, any word, whether spoken by design or accident, to lead
to that fall, you would rue it to the last hour of your life. That you
can at least understand."

The faintness was passing off, and Miss Rye rose, steadying herself
against the railings of Mr. Hurst's desk. At that moment the inner
door was unlatched, and the clerk, recalled to present duties, caught
the note from her unresisting hand.

"For Mr. Bede Greatorex," he said aloud, glancing at the

superscription. "I will give it to him."

It was Mr. Bede Greatorex who came forth. He took the note, and
glanced at Alletha.

"Ah, Miss Rye! Is it you?"

"Our maid was busy, so I brought it down," she explained. "Mr.

Ollivera is waiting for an answer."
Bede Greatorex went back to his room, leaving the intervening door
open. She sat and waited. Mr. Brown, whose work was in a hurry,
wrote on steadily at his desk by the light of a shaded lamp. A minute
or two, and Bede Greatorex brought her a bit of paper twisted up,
and showed her out himself.

With the errand she had come abroad to execute for herself gone
clean out of her head, Alletha Rye went back home, her brain in a
whirl. The streets she passed through were crowded with all the
bustle and jostle of London life; but, had she been traversing an
African desert, she could not have felt more entirely alone. Her life
that night lay within her: and it was one of confused tumult.

The note found Mr. Ollivera asleep: as the twilight deepened, he had
dropped, in sheer weariness, into an unconscious slumber.
Untwisting the scrap of paper, he held it near a lighted candle and
read the contents:--

"Dear Henry,--Kene is back, and is coming to us this evening; we

expect two or three friends. Louisa will be pleased if you can join us.
Faithfully yours,

"B.G."

Mr. Ollivera eschewed gaiety of all kinds, parties included. Over and
over again had he been fruitlessly invited to the grand dinners and
soirées of Mrs. Bede Greatorex, until they left off asking him. "Two
or three friends," he repeated as he put down the note. "I don't
mind that, for I must see Kene."

Dressing himself; he was on the point of setting out, when a

messenger arrived to fetch him to a sick person; so that it was half-
past ten when he reached the house of Mr. Greatorex. And then, but
for his mission to the Judge, he would have quitted it again without
entering the reception-rooms.

Two or three friends! Lining the wide staircase, dotting the

handsome landing, crowding the numerous guest-rooms, there they
were; a mob of them. Women in the costly and fantastic toilettes of
the present day; men bowing and bending with their evening
manners on. Mr. Ollivera resented the crowd as a personal wrong.

"'Two or three friends,' you wrote me word, Bede," he reproachfully

said, seeing his cousin in a corner near the entrance-door. "You
know I do not like these things and never go to them."

"On my word, Henry, I did not know it was going to be this cram,"
returned Bede Greatorex. "I thought we might be twenty, perhaps,
all told."

"How can you put up with this? Is it seemly, Bede--in this once staid
and pattern house?"

"Seemly?" repeated Bede Greatorex.

"Forgive me, Bede. I was thinking of the dear old times under your
mother's rule. The happy evenings, all hospitality and cheerfulness;
the chapter read at bedtime, when the small knot of guests had
departed. Friends were entertained then; but I don't know what you
call these."

Perhaps Bede Greatorex had never, amid all his provocations, felt so
tempted to avow the truth as now--that he abhorred it with his
whole heart and soul. Henry William Ollivera could not hate and
despise it more than he. As to the good old days of sunshine and
peace thus recalled, a groan well nigh burst from him, at their
recollection. It was indeed a contrast, then and now: in more things
than this. The world bore a new aspect for Bede Greatorex, and not
a happier one.
"Is Kene here, Bede?"

"Not yet. What is it that you want with him?"

Mr. Ollivera gave a brief outline of the case; Bede left him in the
middle of it to welcome fresh arrivals. Something awfully fine loomed
up, in pink silk and lace, and blazing emeralds. It was Mrs. Bede
Greatorex. Her chignon was a mile high, and her gown was below
her shoulder-blades. The modest young clergyman turned away at
the sight, his cheeks flushing a dusky red. Not in this kind of society
of late years, the curiosities of fashionable attire were new to him.

"Is Bede mad?" he inwardly said, "or has he lost all control over his
wife's actions?"

Somebody else, not used to society, was staring on with all the eyes
of wonder he possessed. And that was Roland Yorke. Leaning
against the wall in a new suit of dress-clothes, with a huge pair of
white gloves on that would have been quite the proper thing at Port
Natal, stood Roland. Mr. Ollivera, trying to get away from everybody,
ran against him. The two were great friends now, and Roland was in
the habit of running up to Mr. Ollivera's drawing-room at will.

"I say," began Roland, "this is rather strong, is it not?"

"Do you mean the crowd?"

"I mean everything. Some of the girls and women look as if they had
forgotten to put their gowns on. Why do they dress in this way?"

"Because they fancy it's the fashion, I suppose," replied Mr. Ollivera,
drawing down the corners of his thin lips.

"They must have taken the fashion from the Zulu Kaffirs," returned
Roland. "When one has been knocked about amidst that savage lot--
fought with 'em, too, men and women--one loses superfluous
fastidiousness, Mr. Ollivera; but I don't think this is right."
Mr. Ollivera intimated that there could not be a doubt it was all
wrong.

"Down in Helstonleigh, where I come from, they dress themselves

decently," observed Roland, forgetting that his reminiscences of the
place dated more than seven years back, and that fashion
penetrates to all the strongholds of society, whether near or distant.
"The girls there are lovely, too. Just look if they are not."

Mr. Ollivera, in some slight surprise, followed the direction of the

speaker's eyes, and saw a young lady sitting back in a corner; her
white evening dress, her banded hair, the soft, pure flush on her
delicate face, all as simple, and genuine, and modest as herself.

"That's what the girls are in my native place, Mr. Ollivera."

"Mrs. Bede Greatorex is a native of Helstonleigh, also," observed the

clergyman, dryly. And for a moment Roland was dumb. The pink
robe, the tower of monstrous hair, and the shoulder-blades were in
full view just then.

"No, she is not," cried he, triumphantly. "The Joliffe girls were born
in barracks; they only came among us when the old colonel settled
down."

"Who is the young lady?"

"Miss Channing. Her brother and I are old chums. He is the grandest
fellow living; the most noble gentleman the world can show. He--
why, if I don't believe you know him!" broke off Roland, as a
recollection of something he had been told flashed across his mind.

"I!" returned Mr. Ollivera.

"Was Arthur Channing not at a--a certain night funeral?" asked

Roland, dropping his voice out of delicacy. "You know. When that
precious cousin of mine, Bill Yorke, lent you his surplice."
"Yes, yes," said Mr. Ollivera, hastily; "I had forgotten the name. And
so that is Arthur Channing's sister!"

"She is governess to that provoking little wretch, Jane Greatorex,"

said polite Roland, forgetting in his turn that he was speaking of his
listener's cousin, "and she ought to be a queen. She ought, Mr.
Ollivera, and you would say so if you knew her. She looks one, does
she not? She's as like Arthur as two pins, and he's fit for the noblest
king in the world."

The clergyman slightly smiled. He had become accustomed to his

new friend's impulsive mode of speech.

"Yes, we are both of us down just now, dependents of the Greatorex

house--she teacher in it, I office-clerk," went on Roland. "Never
mind: luck may turn some day. I told Annabel so just now, but she
sent me away. I was talking to her too much, she said, and made
people stare. Perhaps it was so: I know her cheeks turned red every
other minute."

"And to make them paler, you take up your position here and gaze at
her," observed Mr. Ollivera with another smile--and smiles were rare
from him.

"Oh, law!" cried Roland. "I'm always doing something wrong. The
fact is, there's nobody else worth looking at. See there! a yellow
gown and no petticoats under it. If this is fashion I hope my mother
and sisters are not going in for it! I shall go back to her," he added,
after a moment's pause. "It's a shame she should sit there alone,
with nothing to look at but those Models, passing and repassing
right before her eyes. If Arthur were here, I believe he'd take her
away, I do."

Roland, vegetating in that unfashionable region, Port Natal, had not

yet become accustomed to the exigencies of modern days; and he
spoke freely. Just then the throng was great in front of him, and he
remained where he was. Taller than almost any one in the room, he
could look at Annabel at will; Mr. Ollivera, about up to Roland's
shoulder, could get but occasional glimpses of her. Many a one
glanced at Roland with interest, wondering who the fine, strong
young man was, leaning against the wall there, with the big white
gloves on, and the good-natured face, unsophisticated as a boy's.

Elbowing his way presently across the room something after the
manner he might have elbowed through a crowd on the quay at
Durban, Roland once more took up his position by Miss Channing.
The old playfellows had become new friends, and Roland contrived
that they should often meet. When Miss Channing was walking in
the Square with her pupil, he was safe to run up, and stay talking;
quite oblivious to the exigencies of the office waiting for his services.
Jane Greatorex had learned to look for him, and would walk where
she was likely to see him, in defiance of Miss Channing. In spite of
Roland's early fever to quit his native place, in spite of his prolonged
rovings, he was essentially a home-bird, and could have been
content to talk of the old days and the old people with Annabel for
ever.

"Where's Jane tonight?" he began, as he joined her.

"In bed. She was very naughty this evening, and for once Mr. Bede
Greatorex interfered and sent her."

"Poor child! She is awfully troublesome, though, and one gets tired
of that in the long run. If you--Halloa!"

Roland stopped. He was gazing in surprise at someone standing

near: a man nearly his own age, tall and strong, and bearing
altogether a general resemblance to himself. But the other's face
had a cynical cast, expressive of ill-nature, and the lips were
disagreeably full. Roland recognized him for his brother, although
they had not met for more than seven years.

"That's Gerald, if ever I saw him in my life."

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