Mark Ablett Quotes

“Funny thing that about Mr. Mark’s brother. Fancy not seeing your brother for fifteen years.”

“And when he stays in Australia fifteen years, as Mr. Mark says, and as I know for myself for five years, he has his reasons. And a respectably brought-up girl doesn’t ask what reasons.”

Mr. Cayley, the master’s cousin, was a surprise; and, having given a little exclamation as she came suddenly upon him, she blushed, and said, “Oh, I beg your pardon, sir, I didn’t see you at first,” and he looked up from his book and smiled at her. An attractive smile it was on that big ugly face.

“Such a gentleman, Mr. Cayley,” she thought to herself as she went on, and wondered what the master would do without him.

She told her aunt afterwards that she would have known him anywhere for Mr. Mark’s brother, but she would have said that in any event. Actually she was surprised.

Dapper little Mark, with his neat pointed beard and his carefully curled moustache; with his quick-darting eyes, always moving from one to the other of any company he was in, to register one more smile to his credit when he had said a good thing, one more expectant look when he was only waiting his turn to say it; he was a very different man from this rough-looking, ill-dressed colonial, staring at her so loweringly.

“I want to see Mr. Mark Ablett,” he growled. It sounded almost like a threat.

“What d’you call this place, eh?” “The office, sir.” “The office?” “The room where the master works, sir.” “Works, eh? That’s new. Didn’t know he’d ever done a stroke of work in his life.”

The fact that Mr. Mark “wrote,” though nobody knew what, was a matter of pride in the housekeeper’s room.

The thoughts were not of any great value; moreover, they were given off at the dinner-table more often than they got on to paper, and got on to paper more often than they got into print. But that did not prevent the master of The Red House from being a little pained when a visitor treated the Temple carelessly, as if it had been erected for the ordinary purposes of flirtation and cigarette-smoking.

Mark came in. He was generally the last. He greeted them and sat down to toast and tea. Breakfast was not his meal.

“Good God!” said Mark suddenly. There was an instinctive turning of heads towards him. “I beg your pardon, Miss Norris. Sorry, Betty.” Miss Norris smiled her forgiveness. She often wanted to say it herself, particularly at rehearsals.

“Got any brothers, Major?” “No.” “Well, take my advice, and don’t have any.” “Not likely to now,” said the Major.

“Who is it?” said Antony. “Robert Ablett.” “Oh!” said Antony. “I thought his name was Mark,” he added, more to himself than to the other. “Yes, Mark Ablett lives here. Robert is his brother.” He shuddered, and said, “I was afraid it was Mark.” “Was Mark in the room too?” “Yes,” said Cayley absently. Then, as if resenting suddenly these questions from a stranger, “Who are you?”

“Mark is my cousin. I mean, Mark is the brother I know best.”

Guests at the Red House were allowed to do what they liked within reason—the reasonableness or otherwise of it being decided by Mark. But when once they (or Mark) had made up their minds as to what they wanted to do, the plan had to be kept.

“Mark Ablett never talked about him?” “Hardly ever. He was very much ashamed of him, and—well, very glad he was in Australia.”

“They’d never liked each other as boys. There was never any affection between them. I don’t know whose fault it was in the first place—if anybody’s.”

Robert is a stranger; Mark is an intimate friend. Robert has written a letter that morning, the letter of a man in a dangerous temper. Robert is the tough customer; Mark the highly civilized gentleman. If there has been a quarrel, it is Robert who has shot Mark.

He knew nothing about Mark; he knew nothing about Robert. He had seen the dead man before he was told who the dead man was. He knew that a tragedy had happened before he knew that anybody was missing. Those first impressions, which are so vitally important, had been received solely on the merits of the case; they were founded on the evidence of his senses, not on the evidence of his emotions or of other people’s senses.

Cayley’s qualities, as they appeared to Bill, may have been chiefly negative; but even if this merit lay in the fact that he never exposed whatever weaknesses he may have had, this is an excellent quality in a fellow-guest (or, if you like, fellow-host) in a house where one is continually visiting. Mark’s weaknesses, on the other hand, were very plain to the eye, and Bill had seen a good deal of them.

Yet, though he had hesitated to define his position that morning in regard to Mark, he did not hesitate to place himself on the side of the Law against Cayley. Mark, after all, had done him no harm, but Cayley had committed an unforgivable offence. Cayley had listened secretly to a private conversation between himself and Tony. Let Cayley hang, if the Law demanded it.

“My dear Tony, he had more clothes than anybody in the world. He just kept them here in case they might be useful, I expect.

“It was a hobby with him, collecting clothes. If he’d had half a dozen houses, they would all have been full of a complete gentleman’s town and country outfit.”

“He was very finicking.”

What is he to do? He does the natural thing, the thing which Mark would always do in such circumstances. He consults Cayley, the invaluable, inevitable Cayley.”

“Good Cayley. Faithful Cayley! Mark’s courage comes back. Cayley will explain all right. Cayley will tell the servants that it was an accident. He will ring up the police. Nobody will suspect Cayley—Cayley has no quarrel with Robert.”

“Mark had an extraordinary characteristic voice.”

But it was not as “eligibles” that the visitors from the Red House were received with such eagerness to-day, and even if her special smile for “possibles” was there, it was instinctive rather than reasoned. All that she wanted at this moment was news—news of Mark.

Other suitors, upon whom her mother had smiled, had been embarrassed by that championship; Mark appeared to depend on it as much as on his own attractions; great though he thought these to be.

“Such a gentleman. So nice-looking, in his artistic way. A regular Velasquez—I should say Van Dyck.”

“You see,” he said to Bill, as they walked back, “we know that Cayley is perjuring himself and risking himself over this business, and that must be for one of two reasons. Either to save Mark or to endanger him. That is to say, he is either whole-heartedly for him or whole-heartedly against him. Well, now we know that he is against him, definitely against him.”

What was it which Cayley was going to hide in that pond that night? Antony thought that he knew now. It was Mark’s body.

“I suppose you meant that Cayley deliberately betrayed Mark, and tried to make him look like a murderer?”

“I wanted to warn you that we should probably find Mark in the passage, alive or dead.”

“Now I think that his dead body is there.”

My theory is that he quarrelled violently with Mark over the girl, and killed him in sudden passion. Anything that happened after that would be self-defense.

“He did a lot of early morning exercises which were supposed to make him bright and cheerful at breakfast. They didn’t do that, but they seemed to keep him pretty fit.”

To live on terms of intimate friendship with a man whom you hate is dangerous work for your friend.

His whole life was make-believe, and just now he was pretending to be a philanthropist.

Mark could never live alone. There must always be somebody to listen to him.

Yes, I kept him outwardly decent; and perhaps now I was becoming like the cannibal who keeps his victim in good condition for his own ends.

I used to gloat over Mark, thinking how utterly he was mine to ruin as I pleased, financially, morally, whatever way would give me most satisfaction.

To have lived with that shrivelled little soul would have been hell for her; and a thousand times worse hell when he began to drink.

Then he killed himself. That futile little drunkard, eaten up with his own selfishness and vanity, offered his beastliness to the truest and purest woman on this earth.

Certainly he had some ability for the stage, so long as he had the stage to himself and was playing to an admiring audience.

“To be called an artist was what he longed for most. Now I knew that I had him.”

He was being what he wished most to be—an artist.

“I am lonely to-night without Mark. That’s funny, isn’t it?”

I mean he may have been so full of his appearance as Robert that he had almost got to believe in Robert, and had to tell everybody.

He generally gets discovered in the end; a professional criminal; perhaps not—but an amateur like Mark!