The Hall and the Grange: A Novel
by Archibald Marshall · English · Gutenberg #39595 · 629,179 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Hall and the Grange: A Novel
Author: Archibald Marshall
Release date: May 2, 2012 [eBook #39595]
Most recently updated: April 30, 2014
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39595
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HALL AND THE GRANGE: A NOVEL ***
Produced by Annie McGuire. This book was produced from
scanned images of public domain material from the Google
Print archive.
THE HALL AND THE GRANGE
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE HOUSE OF MERRILEES
RICHARD BALDOCK
EXTON MANOR
THE SQUIRE'S DAUGHTER
THE ELDEST SON
THE HONOUR OF THE CLINTONS
THE GREATEST OF THESE
THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH
WATERMEADS
UPSIDONIA
ABINGTON ABBEY
THE GRAFTONS
THE CLINTONS, AND OTHERS
SIR HARRY
MANY JUNES
A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE
PEGGY IN TOYLAND
THE HALL AND THE GRANGE
THE HALL AND THE GRANGE
A NOVEL
BY
ARCHIBALD MARSHALL
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1921
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
TO
WILLIAM LYON PHELPS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE HALL 1
II THE GRANGE 11
III NORMAN 23
IV PAMELA 40
V THE FAMILY 53
VI BARTON'S CLOSE 67
VII YOUNG PEOPLE 79
VIII WELLSBURY 92
IX LETTERS 108
X RECONCILIATION 122
XI A QUESTION OF LABOUR 139
XII NEW IDEAS 154
XIII DISCUSSION 169
XIV CHURCH AND AFTER 181
XV THE RIFT 197
XVI CRISIS 211
XVII HONOURS 221
XVIII FRED COMFREY 234
XIX INVESTIGATION 249
XX A QUESTION OF FINANCE 262
XXI PERSHORE CASTLE 271
XXII A SUMMER AFTERNOON 285
XXIII APPROACHES 302
XXIV ALMOST 316
XXV MISS BALDWIN LOOKS ON 328
XXVI BEFORE CHRISTMAS 343
XXVII TWO YOUNG MEN 353
XXVIII AND THE THIRD 366
XXIX THE NEW CHAPTER 378
XXX THE TRODDEN WAY 388
XXXI AN ENDING AND A BEGINNING 401
THE HALL AND THE GRANGE
CHAPTER I
THE HALL
Colonel Eldridge was enjoying an afternoon doze, or a series of dozes,
in the Sabbath peace of his garden. His enjoyment was positive, for he
had a prejudice against sleeping in the day-time, and sat upright in his
basket chair with no support to his head; so that when sleep began to
overtake him he nodded heavily and woke up again. If he had provided
himself with a cushion from one of the chairs or lounges by his side, he
would have slumbered blissfully, but would have been lost to the charm
of his surroundings.
These included a great expanse of lawn, mown and rolled and tended to a
sheeny perfection of soft rich colour; the deep shade of nobly branching
trees in their dark dress of mid-July; bright flower-beds; the terraced
front of a squarely built stone house of a comfortably established age.
These were for the eye to rest upon after one of those heavy nods, and
to carry their message of spacious seclusion and domestic well-being.
For the other senses there were messages that conveyed the same
meaning--the hot brooding peace of the July afternoon, tempered by the
soft stirring of flower-scented breezes, the drone of bees and of
insects less usefully employed, the occasional sweet pipe of birds still
mindful of earlier courtships, the grateful and secure absence of less
mundane sounds. The house was empty, except for servants, who obtruded
themselves neither on sight nor hearing. The tennis net on the levelled
space by the rose garden hung in idle curves. Colonel Eldridge had the
whole wide verdurous garden to himself, and the house, too, if he cared
to enter it. Though he liked to have his family around him as a general
rule, he found it pleasant to keep his own company thus for an hour or
so.
He was just approaching the time when one of those droops which
punctuated his light slumbers would wake him up to a more lively sense
of well-being, and he would take up the book that lay on his knee, when
his half-closed eyes took in a figure emerging from the trees among
which the lawn lost itself at the lower end of the garden. He aroused
himself and waved a welcoming hand, which meant among other things:
"Here you have a wide-awake man reading a book on Sunday afternoon, but
you need not be afraid of disturbing him." The grateful lassitude,
however, which enveloped his frame prevented his rising to greet his
brother, who came towards him with an answering wave of the hand, and
took a seat by his side.
There was not much difference in the age of the two brothers, which was
somewhere in the fifties. In appearance, also, they were something
alike, of the same height and build, and with the same air of wearing
their years well. Colonel Eldridge had the military caste impressed upon
him, with closely cropped hair underneath his straw hat, small grey
moustache, and a little net-work of wrinkles about his keen blue eyes.
His clothes were neat and unobtrusive, as of a man who gets the best
tailoring and leaves it at that.
Sir William Eldridge also, quite obviously, got the best tailoring. He
wore a suit of soft brown, with boots polished to an enviable pitch; the
narrow sleeves of his jacket, ornamented with four buttons, showed the
doubled-over cuffs of his blue flannel shirt, fastened with enamelled
links; a gay bandana tie heightened the agreeable contrast of blue and
brown; his soft felt hat was of light grey, with a black band. With a
new pair of chamois leather gloves he would have been beautifully
dressed for any occasion that did not demand a silk hat and whatever
should go with it. But he wore or carried no gloves for a walk of half a
mile across the fields, by the river, from Hayslope Grange, where he
lived, to Hayslope Hall, his brother's house. He had the same regularity
of feature as his brother; his hair was a shade or two greyer, but he
looked some years younger, with his fresh skin and his active figure.
There was almost an exuberance about him. If Colonel Eldridge had
allowed his hair to grow longer than convention demanded, it would only
have looked as if it wanted cutting. If Sir William had done so it would
have seemed natural to his type.
"Been having a little nap?" he said, as he dropped into a chair by his
brother's side.
Colonel Eldridge flinched ever so little. His strict regard for truth
forbade him to deny the charge, but it should not have been brought
against him. "Couldn't have much of a nap sitting up in a chair like
this," he said, rather brusquely.
Sir William ignored this. "How jolly and peaceful it is here," he said.
"Really, I don't know a more delicious garden than this anywhere. It
would take a hundred years to produce just this effect at the Grange,
though I've spent pots of money over the gardens there."
"Gardening with a golden spade," said his brother. "You can't do
everything with money."
"You can do a good deal. And if you've got big trees you can do
practically everything. The misfortune about the Grange is that there
are no big trees immediately around the house. If there had been I
should have aimed at something of this sort. I could have got the lawn
all right. It's the best sort of garden to look out on--an expanse of
lawn and shady trees--quiet and green and peaceful. You're quite right,
Edmund. With all I've done, and all I've spent on my garden, it's fussy
compared to this. You remember I wanted you to do certain things here,
when I first got keen on the game. Well, I'm glad you didn't. If you
had, I should have wanted you to undo them by this time."
Colonel Eldridge smiled, his momentary pique forgotten. "Oh, well,
people come miles to see your garden," he said. "It's worth seeing. But
on the whole I'd rather have this one to live in."
"Ah, that's it; you've just hit it. There's all the difference between a
garden to look at and a garden to live in. I've come to see that, and I
suppose you've always seen it. I generally do come around to your views
in the long run, old fellow. In this matter of a lawn shaded by trees,
I've come round so completely that I've got to have it, though I'm
afraid I can't have it to walk straight out of the house onto, and to
look at from my windows. But there's that four-acre field--Barton's
Close--down by the wood. I want to bring that in--I suppose you'll have
no objection. By thinning out a bit, so as to leave some of the bigger
trees isolated, and planting judiciously, I can get the effect there."
"Rather a pity to cut up old pasture, isn't it? And it must be half a
mile from the house."
"Oh, nothing like as much as that--not more than five hundred yards, I
should say. I wish it were nearer; but it will be effective to lead down
to it by a path through the corner of the wood. You'll come upon a
charming, restful, retired place that you hadn't been expecting. I only
wish the lake had been closer, so as to have brought that in; but I
think we could get a vista by cutting down a few trees. I might ask you
to consider that later on; but we'd better see how the lawn turns out
first."
"I don't think I should want to cut down trees there, William. Whatever
distance Barton's Close may be from the Grange, the lake is certainly
over a mile. You can't turn the whole place into a garden. As it is,
it's overweighted. You've got to consider the future. It would have been
all right if poor Hugo had lived. He'd have succeeded me here, and I
suppose Norman would have gone on living at the Grange after you."
"Oh, I know, old fellow, but--"
"Let me finish. When I die, and you or Norman come here, Cynthia and the
girls will have to live at the Grange. It's much too big a place for
them already. I dare say you'd get a big rent for it; but that's not
what they'll want. They would have had enough to live on there as it
used to be; but with the way things are going now it'll be a place that
will want a lot of keeping up. It will want a good deal more keeping up
than this."
"Of course you're right to think about the future, old fellow." Sir
William spoke more slowly, leaning forward in his chair with his elbows
on his knees and tapping his stick on the turf. "I've thought about it a
good deal, too. Things are altered now--unfortunately. I come into it
more, don't I?--I and Norman."
"Oh, yes, of course. Still, I'm not an old man yet. And Cynthia.... It's
not out of the question.... But we needn't think of that. The chances
are you'll succeed me. But for a good many years yet--in the ordinary
way--I shall be here at Hayslope, and--"
He did not finish, and Sir William did not help him out. He frowned a
little as he sat looking down on the grass and tapping his stick, but
there was no alteration in the kindly tone of his speech when he said
after a time: "If Cynthia bears you another son, nobody will be more
pleased than I shall. Some people might think I didn't mean that, but
you know better. That's why we can talk over the future between us
without misunderstanding one another."
Colonel Eldridge stirred in his seat. "Oh, yes, Bill," he said. "You
don't want to step into my shoes yet a while. I know that well enough.
You will step into them sooner or later. I know that, too. We shan't
have any more children. And as for what's to come after us, Norman will
make a better squire of Hayslope than poor Hugo could have done. I
wouldn't say so to Cynthia--I don't know that I'd say it to anybody but
you--but I've come to see that the poor fellow had made too much of a
mess of things for us to have hoped that he'd ever pull up. I feel no
bitterness against him--God knows. I did; but that's all wiped out. I
loved him when he was a little fellow, and I never really left off
loving him, though he brought me a lot of trouble. Now I'm free to love
his memory. He did well at the end."
"Oh, yes. You can be proud of him. There was lots of good in him, and it
came out at the last. No need to think about all the rest. I haven't
thought about it for a long time."
"Well, I've got to think of it occasionally, I'm afraid. Things are
still difficult because of poor Hugo. But--"
"Look here, old fellow--why don't you let me wipe all that off? I can do
it without bothering myself in the least."
"Thanks, Bill, you're very good. But I'll bear my own burdens."
"Between you and me--what is there to quibble about? I've been lucky in
life. But you're a better man than I am, when all's said and done. And
you're the head of the family. We ought to stand together--'specially
now, when I'm almost in the same position towards you as Hugo was, you
might say. Take it as done for Hayslope. In a way, I'm as much
interested in the place as you are."
"Thanks, William, but this is a personal matter. Most of my income comes
from the place, but I'm only tenant for life. I've got to make good on
my own account. It means a bit of skimping, but that's all. There's
enough for me and Cynthia and the girls, and I'll hand over Hayslope to
you, or whoever it may be, as I received it from our father."
"Well, I won't press you. But you know at any time that the money's
there if you want it, and you'll give me pleasure if you'll take it.
What's money between you and me? I've been in the way of making it and
you haven't. There you have it in a nutshell. But after all, I'm not a
money-grubber. I only care for it for what it will bring. It's at your
service any time, Edmund--five thousand, ten thousand--whatever you want
to clear off that old trouble. Take it from me, that you'll be doing me
a real pleasure if you'll ask for it at any time. Are you coming over to
tea? I promised Eleanor I'd get back. I think there'll be some people
from the Castle."
He rose from his seat. Colonel Eldridge retained his. "I don't think
I'll come, thanks," he said, with a slight frown. "I don't particularly
care about meeting people from the Castle."
Sir William looked away. There was a slight frown on his face now, but
not of annoyance. "I know it's rather difficult for you," he said. "But
wouldn't it be better to face it? You must meet them sooner or later.
And as far as they are concerned, it's all over. There'd be no real
awkwardness. As a matter of fact I don't think that the Crowboroughs are
coming themselves. It's the Branchleys--who are staying with them. If
they do come, there'd be more or less of a crowd--with all the young
people. You'd get over the first meeting, and then it would all be
buried."
"I know I've got to meet them some time or other. I know that
Crowborough did have cause for complaint against Hugo. But he went much
too far, and I can never forget it, now the poor boy's dead."
"You couldn't have forgotten it if he hadn't taken back the worst of
what he accused Hugo of. I admit that. But he did take it back, didn't
he?"
"Well, did he? That's what I'm not so sure about. I've got to behave as
if he did--I know that. If we were to have it out together again,
there's likely to be such a row that we should be enemies for life. I
don't want that, for the sake of Cynthia and the girls. I suppose he
doesn't want it, either, or he wouldn't have tried to mend the row we
did have."
"But, surely--"
"I know what you're going to say. He wrote and said he'd never intended
to accuse Hugo of swindling young Horsham. It was the way I'd taken what
he did say that made him lose his temper and go farther than he'd meant
to. That's all very well. But he didn't withdraw the charge."
There was a look of perplexity on Sir William's face as he stood by his
brother, preparing to leave him, but not to leave the discussion into
which they had so lightly drifted with a ragged edge of uncertainty.
"Poor Hugo!" he said. "He made trouble for you, Edmund--for all of us.
It's all forgiven and ought to be forgotten. But where it remains alive
it ought to be faced, oughtn't it? He did lead Jim Horsham into bad
ways. You've admitted as much as that."
"Yes, I did admit it. It was bad enough. But to lay that a son of mine
cheated a brother officer out of a large sum of money--! That was the
accusation."
"Crowborough made it when he was worked up about what he had discovered,
and he withdrew it."
It was Colonel Eldridge who ended the discussion, and allowed his
brother to go free. "Well, that's what we began with," he said. "I'm
ready to act on the supposition that he did withdraw it. But I don't
feel inclined to meet him this afternoon, William. Thanks all the same."
Sir William took his departure. His brother watched his smart, alert
figure crossing the lawn, until it was lost among the trees at the
bottom of the garden. Then he rose and sauntered slowly towards the
house, and his face was thoughtful and disturbed--more disturbed than
the previous conversation might have seemed to warrant.
CHAPTER II
THE GRANGE
Sir William Eldridge, with a step wonderfully light and quick for a man
of his years and weight, came out of his brother's garden by a gate that
led to a woodland path, and so down a long slope under the thick shade
of trees, till the wood gave place to an open meadow bordered by a
placid-flowing stream--almost a river. The meadow sloped up to the high
woods which enclosed it in a long crescent, but on the other side of the
stream was open grass-land, with lines of willows here and there, dykes,
and little bits of wooden fences. Cattle were dotted all over it,
feeding peacefully in the hot afternoon sunshine, or recumbent on the
rich turf. In the distance were more woods, and where the river took a
turn and followed the contour of the hill in front, it was seen to be
flowing towards a lake of considerable size, to judge by the growth of
the trees which encircled and hid all but the nearer end of it.
The river path continued for a quarter of a mile or so, and then once
more became a woodland path, turning sharply to the left and rising more
steeply than it had dropped in the other wood. The exit there had been
by a stile, not as firm as it might have been under the weight of a big
man. But this entrance was by a closely fitting gate, and a new solid
fence ran away to right and left of it, gate and fence alike carrying
an elaborate wire defence against rabbits.
Sir William climbed the steep path, slowly, but not, apparently, because
of any necessity to save his breath. He looked to right and left of him
with interest at the plantings of shrubs and flowers and ferns that had
been made in clearings under the trees. On the outside this was a thick
wood, as the other had been; but once through the gate it was seen to be
a garden, full of interest and surprise. Little winding paths led off
from the main ascent, and Sir William followed one or two of these to
look at some treasure that he had established, and lingered over it as
if his chief interest in life were the planting and the growth of
flowers.
The steep path became a rocky staircase, which emerged from the wood
into an elaborate rock garden, so artfully constructed that it seemed
almost a natural outcrop from the leafy soil. On the further side the
trees closed in on it again, but they had been still further thinned out
here and did not conceal the artificially flat expanse of tennis and
croquet lawn upon which the path came somewhat too suddenly. Immediately
beyond the lawn was a house--a long rambling structure of many-gabled
red brick and tile, with rose-covered verandas, loggias, pergolas, and
all the paraphernalia of a rich man's country cottage. The original
house, of a date somewhere about the seventies, was ugly enough, and had
never pretended to be a cottage; and the additions, though in much
better architectural taste, were incongruous to it. But it might have
been supposed, even from an outside view, that everything about this
house would be of the highest possible convenience for a life of country
pleasure, and that if anything should occur to its occupants that would
improve its amenities in this respect it would promptly be supplied.
Four young people were playing lawn tennis, and four older people were
playing croquet, as Sir William came within sight of the lawn, and on
the broad pillared veranda which finished off the house at this end
other people were sitting, and servants were arranging tea-tables. House
and garden seemed to be fulfiling their purpose with these groups of
people laughing and talking and playing games in the summer afternoon,
and everything at hand to enhance their enjoyment. Sir William's face
lightened as he waved his greetings. He loved these lively gatherings of
the summer time. He had something to offer at Hayslope Grange that
people found it worth while to seek out and enjoy. There was more coming
and going between the Grange and Pershore Castle, the Earl of
Crowborough's seat five miles away, than between the Castle and Hayslope
Hall, although the two families had run neck and neck in this part of
the country for generations, and intimacy had established itself between
their two houses almost to the exclusion of others.
It was with Lord Crowborough that Sir William walked down to the meadow
which he wanted to bring into his garden, while the rest of the party
were still busy round the tea-tables. Lord Crowborough was a man of
sixty, heavy in bulk and somewhat heavy in demeanour, though with a
kindly expression of face and of speech that relieved him of the charge
of pomposity. He was disturbed, it appeared, at the coolness that had
arisen between him and his old friend and neighbour, Edmund Eldridge,
and wanted a word about it alone with Sir William. "Such old friends!"
was the burden of his regrets. And he enlarged on it: "Surely such old
friends ought to be able to speak freely to one another--even lose their
tempers; we both did that, but surely--"
Sir William was more silent under the complaints than would have seemed
to be natural to him. "It was the charge of swindling," he said rather
shortly.
"Oh, I know," said Lord Crowborough. "After all your kindness, one
doesn't want--"
"Never mind about that," Sir William interrupted him almost
peremptorily. There was a hint in his manner that spoke of another man
than the one who grew his flowers and welcomed his friends at Hayslope
Grange. Lord Crowborough, some years older, and of greater apparent
importance, seemed to bow to it. "I know it was never to be mentioned,"
he said, apologetically. "Very well. But really, you know, William--!
Well, the poor fellow's dead; but he was an out and out wrong 'un. I did
do my best to hush it all up. Edmund must know that. If it had come out
he'd have been kicked out of the regiment. I should think he must know
that, too, if he thinks straight about it at all."
"Perhaps he doesn't think quite straight about it, poor old chap! You
can hardly blame him. As far as I'm concerned I'm going to do all I can
to encourage him to think that Hugo was just sowing his wild oats, and
that he'd have settled down to be a credit to his name. I'm afraid it
isn't true, but surely it's a good thing if Edmund can think so."
"Oh, yes, I quite agree. Poor old fellow! I'll ask him to dine. I
remember him quite well as a little fellow--you too, of course. I
believe I was even a sort of hero of his when I was a big boy and he was
a little one."
Sir William laughed. "Of course you were," he said. "I think that's the
line to go on, you know. Old times, and all that. At least, I shouldn't
mention the affair again, if I were you. Treat him with--well,
affection. I know you feel that for him. The row will pass over. He's
sore all round. He's sore about Hugo. He's a little sore about my
stepping into the position of heir to him--though, goodness knows,
_I've_ no wish to change places with him in any way."
"No, you've made yourself a bigger man than he is."
"Well, that's as may be. Anyhow, I'm in a different line altogether.
He's nothing to be sore about there; and we stick together. I can help
him in lots of ways, if he'll let me."
"He's stiff about things; he's got stiffer as he's got older."
"Yes, that's true. He's the military type; and going back to his old job
during the war has brought it out in him, more than ever. Still, I know
well enough how to deal with men of that sort--had lots of practice at
it lately. And Edmund's my brother. I'm fond of him. In some ways I
look up to him; he's straight and honest as the day. And he's
affectionate, too, under his stiffness. You can't drive him, but you can
lead him, if you're careful in the way you do it. Hold out a hand to
him, Crowborough. He'll respond all right, and you'll soon git rid of
_that_ soreness."
They strolled back to the upper garden together, and Lord Crowborough
lost no time in goading his wife into asking Mrs. Eldridge to dine. It
was necessary to detach her from the side of Lady Eldridge and draw her
a little aside, and it was plain to everybody that something in the way
of pressure was being exercised. Lady Crowborough did not want to invite
the Eldridges. She was more incensed against Colonel Eldridge than her
husband, and had no memory of intimacies of early childhood to soften
her towards him. However, she obeyed her husband, as a good wife should.
She had not yet had any conversation with Mrs. Eldridge, and might even
have been supposed to have avoided her. But she went straight up to her
and said: "We haven't really seen anything of each other for months. I
wish you and your husband and Pamela would come over and dine to-morrow
evening. Lord and Lady Branchley aren't going until Tuesday, and I've
asked the Hobkirks and one or two other people."
Mrs. Eldridge looked up at her from the cushioned chair in which she was
sitting, so very much at her ease, showing the neatest feet and ankles
under her short-skirted summer frock. A wonderful woman for her age, it
was the custom to say of her. Her age might have been forty-five, but
she looked at least ten years younger than that, and on some occasions
younger still. There was not a thread of grey in her rippling, lustrous
brown hair; her cheeks were softly rounded, her skin was fresh. She wore
a large flowery hat, which accentuated the graceful slimness of her
form. She looked up at Lady Crowborough, looming profusely above her,
out of untroubled blue eyes. "Thanks so much," she said. "I'm not sure
what Edmund is doing to-morrow. Pamela and I could come. I could let you
know if _he_ can't."
Lady Crowborough grunted. She was a tall, upright woman with a
decorative façade, and seemed to have been formed by nature to play the
part of a great lady. But there was something lacking in her equipment.
She was easily flustered, and when confronted with any difficulty seemed
to lose even in physical bulk. "Crowborough particularly wanted me to
ask Colonel Eldridge," she said in a tone that did not carry out the
promise of the preliminary grunt.
"So I saw," said Mrs. Eldridge, with unbaffled sweetness. "It was very
good of him. I don't see in the least why he shouldn't come, but it's
never safe to make promises for him. If you don't want me and Pamela
without him--"
"Oh, of course I do, if he _can't_ come. Yes, of course I shall be
delighted. It's really ages since we saw anything of one another."
She suddenly became friendly and confidential, dropping into a seat next
to Mrs. Eldridge's, and demanding her ear for a low-spoken account of
the trouble she had been going through with a laundry maid who had
unwisely loved a Canadian soldier. Mrs. Eldridge was all sympathy, but
managed to impart some lightness into an affair that Lady Crowborough
had never thought to regard as anything but a gloomy tragedy. When she
took leave of her Lady Crowborough's manner was intimately affectionate.
She kissed her and called her "my dear," and said what a comfort it was
to pour out one's troubles to an old friend.
Afterwards, in conversation with her husband, she was a little doubtful
whether she had not gone rather too far. "Of course I have known her for
a good many years," she said. "And I've always liked her too. But the
fact is, I like her better when I'm with her than when I'm away from
her; I don't know why. She's got a sort of way with her."
"She's a very charming woman," said Lord Crowborough. "I've nothing
against her at all. I don't know why you shouldn't like her when you're
away from her. Anyhow, I'm glad you made a bit of a fuss with her. And
evidently she responded, from what you say. No doubt she wants this
trouble ended. So do we. Poor old Edmund! I've forgiven him for what he
said, though 'pon my word it was outrageous."
"Well, I said I never would forget it," said Lady Crowborough. "And
really, John, when I come to think of it, I'm not at all sure you're
right in making it so plain that we are anxious to see Colonel Eldridge
back on the old terms with us. Perhaps he'll even refuse my invitation,
and we shall have given him a handle. If he does come, of course I shall
be polite to him, but I've no intention of treating him in the same way
as I have Cynthia."
"Well, I don't suppose you'll kiss him; but I'm quite sure you won't
treat him stiffly, my dear. You may begin like that, but you're
incapable of keeping it up."
Lady Crowborough sighed. "I _am_ like that," she admitted. "I get
carried away."
When the party from Pershore Castle had driven off, Lady Eldridge took
her sister-in-law into the house, leaving the young people still at
their games, and Sir William, who had changed into gleaming white,
playing with them. Lady Eldridge was a handsome dark-eyed, dark-haired
woman, very well preserved for her years, which were about the same as
those of Mrs. Eldridge, but without the look of fragile youth that was
the note of that lady's appearance in her most favourable moments. She
had an agreeable, decisive manner of speech, and a straightforward,
honest look. The two of them had been friends at school, and it was at
Hayslope Hall that Lady Eldridge had first met her husband, at that time
a young barrister, not entirely briefless, or he would not have been in
a position to marry, but with nothing in his prospects to indicate the
opulence that he now so much enjoyed.
Lady Eldridge's special room was the most recent addition to the house,
pleasing in its proportions and decoration, and beautifully but quietly
furnished. Mrs. Eldridge sank into a deep cushioned chair, and said with
a plaintive sigh: "I wish I could afford a room like this. You've made
such a perfect success of it, Eleanor. I don't think it could possibly
be nicer."
"It's very sweet of you to say so, my dear. But I don't think you have
any cause to grumble, with all the beautiful old things you have in your
room. Of course these are mostly old, too, but then they have all been
bought. I might easily have gone wrong, you know. You don't think it
looks like just money, do you?"
"Oh, no! Oh, no!" Mrs. Eldridge held up hands of expostulation. Then she
dropped the subject. "The Crowboroughs want to bury the hatchet," she
said. "I'm glad enough, I do hate rows, especially between old friends.
But my poor old Edmund had a lot to put up with. I suppose Lord
Crowborough means well. It's what everybody says of him. It's what they
generally do say of thoroughly tiresome people, isn't it?--especially if
they've got titles. Of course he is tiresome, and so is she, but both of
them have their uses, so one puts up with it."
Lady Eldridge laughed. Her laugh was agreeable to listen to, and always
meant that she was amused. "What uses?" she asked.
"Well, there's the Castle to go to, for one thing."
"You used to bewail your lot in being expected to go so much to the
Castle."
"My dear, I've grown wiser, as well as a good deal poorer. Nobody can
deny that the Castle is desperately dull, entirely owing to the people
who inhabit it; for it's a fine enough house. But they do occasionally
have people to stay, though I don't know whether you've noticed that the
same people seldom come twice. It's a house to go to. To that I've
come--that I'm thankful for an invitation to dine at Pershore Castle.
I'm not sure that I didn't even angle for it. I certainly intimated that
if Edmund didn't think it good enough, the invitation was on no account
to be withdrawn from Pam and me. I made eyes at her, and she gave in at
once. She thinks I'm a very sweet woman, until she goes away from me,
and then she's not so sure about it. Am I a sweet woman, Eleanor, or a
bit of a cat? I'm never quite certain."
"You were a very sweet child," said Lady Eldridge, whose face had become
rather serious during this speech. "I always loved you and always shall.
And as long as you say everything you think to me...."
"Oh, my dear, I shall always do that. You're one of the few comforts
left to me in life. I can't grumble to Edmund, or the children. Besides,
you're so generous. I should never have had my little bit of London this
year but for you. How I should have missed it! And how I enjoyed it!
There is no doubt that one does enjoy pleasures that come to one
unexpectedly more than those that one takes as a matter of course."
"Well, Cynthia, you know that until you have a house of your own again
in London, ours is there for you to come to whenever you like. And for
the girls too. It doesn't want saying, does it, dear? We've always been
very close together. There was a time when I owed almost all my
pleasures in life to you, and I don't forget how generous _you_ were.
We've been fortunate, Bill and I, and at a time when so many people have
had to alter their way of living. It's nice to think that our good
fortune is of use not only to ourselves; that those we love can share it
with us. I suppose there aren't many people who are so close together
as you and Edmund and Bill and I. And our children too. I can't imagine
anything that would come between us."
"No," said Mrs. Eldridge. "I can't either. It's a great comfort to have
you here. I don't know what we should do without you."
CHAPTER III
NORMAN
Norman Eldridge and his cousin Pamela detached themselves from the
tennis players and strolled off through the bare blaze of the upper
garden with its elaborate architecture of walls and steps and pavings
and pergolas, and its bright, restless plantings, into the shade of the
woods.
They were close friends, these two, and had been so ever since Norman as
a boy of eight had fallen in love with Pamela as a baby of two. It's a
nice sort of boy who loves children, and Norman had been a very
attractive small boy, high-spirited, energetic and mischievous, but
never a source of anxiety with his mischievousness, as his cousin Hugo
had been. Hugo was a year older than Norman, and always eager to make
his seniority felt. In those early days Norman had paid visits from the
little house in Hampstead where his parents then lived, to Hayslope
Hall, and greatly enjoyed the ample life of the country house, with
ponies to ride, the river to fish, later on rabbits and birds to shoot,
and all the blissful freedom of the woods and fields. But Hugo, his
constant companion in holiday activities, had spoilt a good deal of the
pleasure of them. At first Norman had given way and been bullied. It
seemed as if Hugo were unable to enjoy himself without being unpleasant.
He was bigger and stronger than Norman, and had all the advantage of
being on his own ground. In earlier visits, when both children had been
under the eye of nurses and governess, there had been frequent quarrels,
but Hugo had been forced more or less to behave himself. But during that
month of Christmas holidays, when Hugo had come home from his first term
at school, he had turned Norman's excitement and pleasure into a
dragging unhappiness, which increased so much that he came to count the
days before the end of his visit as eagerly as he had counted those
which had brought him to it.
Hugo, as a schoolboy, tyrannized over him, and yet he wanted him for his
games, and hardly ever left him in peace. There was another boy, a year
older than Hugo--Fred Comfrey, son of the Rector of Hayslope--who was
constantly with them. He took his line from Hugo, and helped in the
bullying. Poor little Norman used to cry himself to sleep every night,
but it was his pride never to let his tormentors see how much they hurt
him. His uncle and aunt were kind to him. It would sometimes come over
him with a sense of bewilderment how little they knew of his real
feelings; for everything seemed to be right when the boys were with
them. No doubt they thought he was enjoying himself to the full, having
everything that a boy could want to make him happy.
It was at this time that he came to adore little Pamela, whose bright
prattle and pretty, loving ways with him soothed his sore heart. But it
was only now and then that he could forget himself, playing with her.
The other boys were brutally scornful of his taste for the companionship
of a baby.
He did not go to Hayslope again until a year later. By that time he was
a schoolboy himself. He had thought a good deal about his cousin Hugo,
and about Fred Comfrey, in the interval, and come to the conclusion,
assisted by an intimate friend of his own age to whom he had disclosed
the matter, that he had been a bally ass to be put down by them.
He had entered the republic of his school with unhappy anticipations of
the life he would lead there, with forty tyrants to domineer over him
instead of two. If it had not been for his experience with Hugo and
Fred, he would have escaped months of anticipatory dread. But his fears
proved groundless. This was a very good school for small boys, with a
headmaster whose outstanding aim was to make friends of them all and to
keep them happy. He was helped by his wife, who loved children and had
none of her own. The forty boys were her family, and outside school
hours they used the whole house as if it were their home. Under this
happy rule there were no awkward fences for a little boy new to school
life to surmount. He was welcomed as a member of the family, and one who
was expected to do it credit. Everything was done to bring out whatever
originality of character he had in him. The elder boys, taking their
tone from the headmaster, his wife and assistants, were kind and
protective. The only objection to the system was that a new boy of
self-assertive habits occasionally made himself something of a nuisance.
But the standards and ideals of school life soon told on all but the
incorrigibles; the headmaster knew when and how to exercise severity on
the rare occasions on which it was required; and if a boy had not
submitted himself to the tone of the school by the end of his first year
his parents were asked to remove him. That sometimes made trouble for
the headmaster, but he was content to put up with that now and then for
the sake of his beloved school.
Norman, after a pause of bewilderment, expanded under this treatment. He
was gay and bright and bubbling over with life; he was quick with his
work and had an aptitude for the pursuits that are valued among boys. He
was made much of from the first, but his native modesty prevented his
being spoilt.
It was this agreeable modesty of his that had led him to knuckle under
to Hugo and Fred the year before, and they had taken advantage of it. He
went down to Hayslope with his father and mother for Christmas with the
determination to knuckle under in nothing, and rather enjoyed, though
with some tremors, the prospect of making it quite plain where he stood,
and where he intended to stand for the future. He had learnt to box a
little at school, and thought it might come in useful. He didn't suppose
that he was capable of taking on Hugo and Fred together, but if it
should be necessary he was not averse from trying.
To his immense surprise, however, Hugo greeted him affably, and seemed
to have forgotten the disagreeables of the previous visit. They played
together with no more than the normal amount of friction between small
boys, and settled their differences as they arose without coming
anywhere near to blows.
Then Fred Comfrey, who had spent Christmas away from home, came on the
scene. Now was the time for the three of them to take stock of one
another. So far, Norman had been content to make friends with an
apparently much improved Hugo, without bothering himself about whether
he would have liked him if he had seen him in contact with other boys.
In the give and take of school life a boy finds his level very quickly.
He is known through and through, and sized up with an accuracy seldom at
fault, though the rule by which he is measured is more rigid than any
that is applied in after life. Outside, the rule is somewhat relaxed.
Boys not acceptable to their fellows may find themselves liked by older
people, and show themselves in an altogether different light. The
ordinary courtesies of life, disregarded at school, have some sway.
There is the softening influence of feminine and family society. A truce
is called, and allowances unconsciously made. So it was with Hugo and
Norman, who were not made to run together, but managed to find some
community of interest in the pursuits of holiday time.
But with the advent of the third party new adjustments had to be made.
There was a pause of observation, and then the struggle began.
The Rector's son was a stocky, dark-haired boy of considerable strength
for his age. He was already at one of the minor public schools, where
they took boys from the age of eleven. His manners were rough, as his
school was, and his ideals did not include that of any sort of
courtesy, though he was retiring enough in the company of his elders.
Hugo was as tall as Fred, but not nearly so broad or strong. He was
dark, too, and good-looking in boy fashion, though not remarkably so.
His manners were agreeable in grown-up society, and Norman had lately
found them inoffensive when not affected by outside influences. In a
very short time it was to be proved whether he would keep up his
new-found amity with his cousin or put himself on Fred's side against
him. His character was weak, and a year before Fred had played upon it,
ostensibly following his lead, because with unpleasant precocity he
recognized his superiority of place, but actually pushing him into the
attitude that suited his inclinations.
Now came Norman's second surprise. During the pause of observation which
came before the three of them settled down to the respective places
which their characters and experience had earned for them, Fred seemed
to realize that Norman partook in some measure of Hugo's superiority. It
would have been marked enough to anybody who had seen the three of them
together. The frankness of demeanour which had been encouraged by
Norman's short experience of admirably conducted school life formed a
significant contrast with Fred's clumsy diffidence in presence of his
elders and his sniggering audacities when released from restraint. He
was an unpleasant boy even at that early age, and Norman instinctively
disliked him from the first moment of the second period of intimacy, and
was inclined to hug his dislike.
It was he who made the breach that presently came. Otherwise, Fred would
have kept the peace, and they would have got on as long as they were
together without an open quarrel.
Three-year-old Pamela was the cause of it. Norman had found her more
entrancing than ever, and had made no attempt to hide his love for her
during the week before Fred had come on the scene. Hugo had grumbled
sometimes when Norman had wanted to play with her, and he had wanted him
to do something else, but there had been no repetition of the contempt
that this unmanly preference for the society of a baby had previously
called forth. Hugo was rather fond of his little sister, though he never
put himself out to amuse her.
On the third day after Fred's arrival he came up to the hall immediately
after breakfast, all agog for the game devised the evening before.
It had been snowing hard, then and through the night, and now it was a
glorious, sparkling morning, with the garden and the park and the woods
all muffled in white, under a frost which bound the whole landscape into
gleaming, motionless beauty. The boys had found a pair of Canadian
snowshoes in a lumber-room. They were to use them for a game of Indian
trackers in the woods, and had agreed upon their several parts, not
without some dispute, but on the whole amicably. Hugo and Fred were
eager to be off at once. So was Norman, but he was rolling on the floor
of the hall when Fred arrived, Pamela pursuing him with shrieks of
laughter, and did not at once respond to Fred's urgings. When they were
repeated with impatience he responded still less. He wasn't going to be
ordered about by Fred, and his latent hostility impelled him to make it
plain to him that the more insistent the summons the less quickly would
it be obeyed. When Hugo added his impatient word, he said: "All right,
you go out and begin, if you're in such a hurry. I'll come when I'm
ready."
The two boys flung off grumbling, and Norman played with Pamela until a
nurse came to fetch her. Then he set out to join them, not without some
tremors over the reception he would meet with. But there was something
not altogether disagreeable about these tremors, and he grinned widely,
though he was not in the least amused, as he turned the corner of the
house and saw Hugo and Fred sitting on a snow-covered log at the edge of
the wood some distance off. Curiously enough, this scene came back to
him vividly ten years later as he was crouching under the lee of a
trench in Flanders, waiting for the signal to attack a more formidable
foe. And, though he didn't know it, there was actually the same grin on
his face when the signal came.
He walked slowly across the park towards them, stepping rather carefully
in the footmarks that one of them had made in the snow. When he got
within hailing distance of them he called out: "Haven't you tried the
snowshoes yet?"
There was no reply. They had their heads together and Fred was eyeing
him balefully.
When he got near them Fred rose from his seat, and said: "Look here,
we're not going to stand this any longer."
"Well, then sit it," replied Norman, rather pleased with the readiness
of the repartee.
Fred looked uglier than usual, but his next speech was more in the tone
of reason than Norman had expected. "You're the youngest of the three of
us," he said. "You're not going to keep us hanging about waiting for you
when we've all settled on something to do. The cheek of it!"
Norman glanced at Hugo, who still sat on the log. There was nothing in
his face yet to show whether he was hostile or not. He looked more
interested than anything, and it came home to Norman that if he got the
better of Fred, Hugo need no longer be feared as an adversary.
"Well, I'm sorry I kept you waiting," said Norman. "But I'm here now, so
let's begin."
Fred was still inclined for argument. "I'm the oldest," he said, "but
we're both here to play with Hugo, I suppose. As you're staying with
him, naturally he doesn't like to make too much fuss over your cheek.
But--"
"He didn't mind making a fuss last year," interrupted Norman, "and you
sucked up to him and helped him. I was a bally ass to stand it then, and
I'm not going to stand it now."
Fred made a threatening gesture. "Sucking up!" he repeated. "You'd
better be careful what you say."
Hugo still held aloof, hunched up on the log, with his hands in his
pockets. Somehow Norman felt it necessary to bring him in. "He does suck
up to you," he said. "_I'm_ not going to, you know."
Hugo stirred uneasily, and said: "It's quite true what he says. It's
cheek keeping us waiting like this for a quarter of an hour."
"To play with a baby," added Fred with scorn. It was the charge, so
frequently brought, which had hurt him the year before. But it hurt him
no longer. "I like playing with little Pam," he said. "So does Hugo
sometimes, when you're not here. You'd like it too, if you weren't such
a dirty scug."
This was the turning-point. Fred made another gesture of attack, but did
not follow it up. If he had done so the battle would have been short and
sharp, and whoever had won--it must have been he--bad blood would have
been let off and the three boys would have settled down together.
Instead, he turned to Hugo. "Really, that's a bit too much!" he said
angrily. "Shall I teach him his lesson?"
Hugo rose. "Oh, let's chuck it," he said. "What's the good of scrapping
when there's a game to play?"
They played their game, which none of them enjoyed. The contest had
seemed to be quite indecisive, but Norman had won it hands down. It was
Hugo, the weakest character of the three, who was the decisive factor.
Fred deferred to him, and lost ground by doing so. Norman made no effort
to gain ascendancy over him, being content with equal terms, but his
ascendancy none the less became marked. Because he disliked Fred,
finding something in him antagonistic to all the clean ideals in which
he had been reared, Hugo came rather to dislike him too. Fred met this
attitude with deprecation, which made matters worse. He began to be
cold-shouldered, and towards the end of the holidays his society was as
much as possible dispensed with.
The next time that Norman came to Hayslope, in the summer, Fred had made
his ground good again, having become necessary to Hugo in the meantime.
There was no quarrel this time, but Norman never liked Fred, and their
intimacy was only on the surface. He didn't like Hugo much either, or
wouldn't have liked him if he had known him at school among a lot of
other boys. But there was some sense of relationship and he was part of
Hayslope Hall and all its keen delights.
As the years of boyhood went by, the cousins remained friends in some
sort. But Norman's lead became more pronounced. Hugo went to Harrow,
which was his father's school. William Eldridge by this time had left
the Bar to engage in commerce, and was already beginning to make money.
Norman was sent to Eton. When he had been there a year his foot was on
the ladder. He was one of those boys to whom success in school life
comes naturally, while Hugo was a potential rotter, destined to remain
in the ruck, unless he should emerge from it for some discreditable
reason.
When Norman was fifteen and Fred nearly eighteen, the antagonism between
them at last found its vent. Fred had grown into a lout of a boy, whose
only saving grace was athleticism. He was already in his school eleven
and fifteen, and Norman, though coming on well, was as yet far below
those altitudes. Fred, uplifted by his successes, was not so careful now
to conciliate him. He encouraged the worst side of Hugo, and had
established an influence over him while Norman had been off the field.
This always happened, but now Hugo did not gradually come over to
Norman, as he had done before. His adolescence had brought him to Fred's
unsavoury views of life and conduct. Fred was his chosen companion at
Hayslope, in a way that Norman would never be.
Norman, an attractive, light-hearted boy, in the early years of his
school life, was not without experience of evil, to which he had shut
his eyes as much as possible. The talk of the two older boys offended
and troubled him, but he did not at first combat it. He was parted from
them by more than years. Hitherto they had all been boys together; now
the other two were essentially men, of the baser sort, and he remained a
boy, with a boy's clean distaste for what was as yet none of his
business. He fell silent when they pursued their promptings, and
presently began to withdraw himself from them.
Pamela had reached the age of nine. She was an engaging little
sylph-like creature, with laughing, mischievous ways, and a bright
intelligence beyond her years. She was quite fit to be a companion to
Norman, and he took pleasure in her society. Judith was only a year
younger, and companionable, too, in a more serious way. Alice and
Isabelle were five and four. All of them loved Norman, who played
childish games with them, and was entirely happy in doing so. But this
brought on him some return of the treatment by which he had been made so
unhappy during his first intercourse with Hugo and Fred together. It did
not make him unhappy now, but contemptuous of them. Still, there was the
fact that Norman's childhood still hung about him, while they had got
rid of theirs; and no boy of fifteen likes having his youth emphasized,
especially by those, rather older, with whom he desires to be on equal
terms. Fred and Hugo held this advantage over him, which delayed the
outbreak for some time.
It came suddenly when it did come, and its beginnings were almost a
repetition of the quarrel of years before. Norman was wanted to do
something with the other two, and was not to be found. They came upon
him by chance, with Pamela, in a retired part of the garden. They were
sitting on a bench deep in conversation, for they found plenty to talk
about that interested them, and Pamela was often very serious in these
confabulations, when she laid aside the quick activities of her nature
and was content to sit quietly and talk to a friend.
The discovery was made an occasion of whooping triumph by Fred and Hugo,
as if they had surprised some secret. Pamela flamed out against them for
disturbing her and Norman, and told them to go away and leave them
alone. Their interference stung Norman to a cold fury that was quite a
new experience to him, and beyond what was natural to his years. He
stood up with a white face and confronted Fred, whose eyes flickered for
a moment before him. "I'll just go and get my cap," he said, "and then
I'll come with you. Wait for me down by the wood."
So he got Pamela away. She expostulated indignantly as they crossed the
lawn together. "I hate Fred Comfrey," she said. "Why do you want to go
with him instead of staying with me?"
"Oh, we'd already arranged something. I'd forgotten," he said shortly.
"I can't always be with you."
It was beyond him altogether to affect indifference before her, and this
unusual brusqueness served its turn. "You're ashamed of them finding you
talking to a girl," she said hotly. "You're like that horrid Fred. Very
well, then, you needn't pretend to be friends with me any more. Go with
him."
"Oh, don't be silly," he said, and left her.
He went through the garden and across the park to where they were
waiting for him. As he went he gave reign to his anger. Little Pamela!
That coarse brute to jeer at their being together! And Hugo had stood
by, grinning, if not even adding jeers of his own. His fist clenched as
he walked up to them. "You're a foul swine," he said, stopping short
within a yard of Fred, and added more, in language that seemed to come
readily to his lips, though as a rule he avoided the grosser forms of
schoolboy abuse.
Fred was taken aback for the moment by the violence of the attack, and
Norman turned to Hugo. "You're a swine, too," he said. "Fancy letting
this filthy cad treat your own sister like that!"
Fred began to say something; Norman did not wait to hear what. Fred's
speech goaded him to action, and he dashed his fist in the other's face.
Then they were at it. Fred's anger was loosed, too, and for a few
moments it was a desperate scrimmage, with no science shown on either
side. Norman, battered by the attack, was the first to gird himself to
some self-possession, and by fighting warily delayed the end for a
little. But he had no chance whatever against the much stronger and
bigger boy, and was soon on the grass with the fight knocked out of him.
He was struggling up to continue it, but Hugo intervened. "This is rot,"
he said, more decisive than his wont. "Fred was only chaffing. He meant
nothing by it."
Norman was gasping and sobbing, the blood dripping from his nose. "He's
a swine," he cried, "a filthy swine."
Fred stood over him, breathing hard. Norman had marked him, but not
enough to keep his blood hot. Already he was feeling some compunction at
having let himself go to the full against a boy of Norman's size. "It
was just chaff," he repeated; "nothing to get shirty about."
Norman struggled to his knees and unsteadily to his feet, and with his
handkerchief to his face went off into the wood away from them.
Fred and Hugo looked at one another. "Better go after him," Hugo said.
"There'll be a row if--"
"No good my going," said Fred sulkily. Dread of what should happen began
to take hold of him. "You'd better go. He won't want to sneak."
Hugo caught Norman up. He was standing against a tree, sobbing. "You put
up a jolly good fight against him," Hugo said awkwardly. "Better shake
hands, now it's all over."
"I shan't," cried Norman passionately. "He's a foul swine."
"Well, you keep on saying that, but I think you're making too much of
it. He didn't mean anything beastly about Pam. Naturally, I shouldn't
stand that."
"Yes, you would," said Norman, facing him. "You'd stand anything from
that beast. You're just like you used to be with him. I'll tell you
this--I stood it then, but I'm not going to stand it now. I won't have
anything more to do with him, and when you have him here I won't have
anything to do with you. You can go and be swines together. I'll play
with the children instead. You can say what you like about it. I don't
care what you say about it."
He was still somewhat incoherent, but Hugo understood him. "I dare say
it was rotten to chaff you about that," he said. "Anyhow, I apologize
for it, and I'm sure Fred will. Now you've had a scrap, you ought not to
keep it up against him."
Norman turned away. "I'm going down to the river to wash my face," he
said. "I don't want _you_."
"Aren't you going to make it up with Fred?"
"No, I'm not. I hate the beast, and I've had enough of him."
"Well, you won't say anything--"
Norman cut him short. "I'm not a cad," he said.
Hugo went back to Fred. The result of their confabulation was that Fred
kept away from the hall until Norman's visit was over. Norman did not
see him again until years afterwards.
CHAPTER IV
PAMELA
"Pam, I've got something to tell you."
Norman had waited until they were away from the glare of the garden, and
the green gloom of the summer woods was all about them, cool and secret
and inviting to confidences.
He had not changed much since those days of boyhood, though he was now
nearly twenty-five, and the last years of the war had caught him, and
taught him some things that he wanted to forget, as well as much that
had strengthened the fibre of which he was made. There was a boyish
atmosphere about him still. He was tall and slim, and his fair hair,
which he tried to keep plastered to his head, was always breaking away
from the bounds of its cosmetics and dropping a skein over his forehead.
Nothing he had undergone had affected that bright light-hearted charm of
his boyhood. He seemed to be rejoicing in his youth and his strength,
and in all the world about him, which, in spite of the shadows that
still hung over it, he at least found as good as the young men of a
generation earlier had found their more untroubled world.
Pamela was very young still, and very pretty. Her hair and her colouring
were as fair as Norman's, whom she resembled in a cousinly way. Indeed
the resemblances between them were more than superficial. They had the
same eager pleasure in whatever life they found about them. They thought
alike in most things to which they put their adventurous minds, and to
neither of them did it seem odd that Pamela, who had not long since left
the schoolroom, and had grown up under the shadow that had dulled and
limited the life of her kind, should claim an equality of opinion with
Norman, who was six years older, and knew so much more than the
generality of young men had ever known before.
One may pause for a moment to note this unexpected attribute of those
whose early years of manhood, instead of being passed in the pursuits
and interests, educative or otherwise, adapted to their youth, had been
given to the war, of which they had borne the ultimate brunt. The years
which divide us from it are passing away. The social phenomena of each
successive stage of the long struggle, and those that have succeeded it,
too familiar to call for much notice at the time, will become blurred,
and half forgotten even by those who were part of them; and in after
years they will be difficult to gauge. This, among them, is not likely
to be seen as it was, when the years have increased, and later
generations try to recapture the spirit of the great war: that the young
men, and the older men too, who lived through it, and came out of it
whole, or not too broken to make what they would of their lives, put it
to all effective purposes out of their minds. While it was going on they
did the work appointed to them as if it were no more than any other work
proper to their years, and pursued their recreations with an added zest.
And when at last they were released, they crowded back into the various
ways of life open to them, and put it all behind them as just an
experience like any other which might have come to them. It could never
be forgotten, but it was not to come between them and the life to which
they had returned; and the interests of that life were exactly what they
would have been if it had never happened.
So Norman Eldridge, who would have gone to a university in the ordinary
way, but for the war, was at Cambridge now, three years later than his
time, and with his three years of service behind him. His enjoyment of
undergraduate life was even greater than it would have been in normal
times, for it was a more conscious enjoyment, and he could gauge his
opportunities better. Games, in which he excelled, though he had not
quite succeeded in gaining his hoped-for Blue for cricket, did not take
up even the greater part of his attention. He was a lover of the arts,
and found Cambridge a delectable place in which to pursue them. He had
plenty of money at his disposal, and social life was open to him at its
widest. When term-time was over he could go where he liked, and enjoy
himself as he pleased. And at this time he was enjoying himself to the
full.
"Pam, I've got something to tell you," he said as they went down into
the wood together.
"Is it the real thing this time?" she asked, with a quick smiling glance
at his face.
"Oh, none of the others have been anything--just fancies--boyish
fancies, you know."
He laughed gaily. He was very good to look at, with his close-cropped
shapely head thrown back on the firm column of his neck. Pam smiled up
at him again, with a sort of proprietary fondness. She admired him, as
she had always admired him ever since she could remember, and had never
met a young man whom she thought his equal. And it was a source of pride
to her that he was one of her own family--to all intents and purposes a
brother. Poor Hugo, over whose death she had cried, as something strange
and unexpected and infinitely pathetic, had been a kind brother to
her--she liked to remember that the last time she had said good-bye to
him, never to see him again, he had given her ten pounds to spend as she
liked--but he had never made a confidante of her, as Norman had always
done. She had known very little of Hugo's life as it was spent away from
Hayslope, but she thought she knew all about Norman's life. He had
fallen in love once or twice, and had always told her everything about
it. Hugo seemed to have gone through life without falling in love. Poor
Hugo! She could not but believe, from her intimate talks with Norman,
that he had died without acquiring the crown of his manhood. Norman was
attractive under the influence of his love affairs, and she was not
surprised that he had them continually, though she saw quite plainly
that without some such guidance as she was fortunately able to give him
he might have got into trouble with them. Men were so foolish where
girls were concerned. Even the best of them, who had a lot to give--like
Norman--fell in love with girls who were in no way their equals. But it
never did to tell them so. Give them all sympathy and affection, and
the affair died away of itself. So it had been three times with Norman
already, and Pamela, who had been a little alarmed over the first
affair, was confirmed in the belief that she had dealt most wisely with
each situation as it had arisen. Still, the genuine lasting emotion must
come into play sooner or later. There must be, somewhere, a girl who was
worthy of such a rare prize as Norman's love, and Pamela had always told
herself that when that girl was found she would welcome her
whole-heartedly.
"Yes, you've been in love with love," she said impressively; and they
both laughed, for this was a quotation.
"Trying my wings," said Norman. "They were all dears, but there wasn't
enough _to_ them when it came down to the things one is interested in."
"Well, now I'm free to speak," said Pamela, "I'll confess that they
seemed to me a set of brainless idiots. I hope the new one has got
_some_ intelligence. It would be such an advantage if you had to spend
your life with her. She's pretty, of course. Have you got a photograph
of her?"
"Not a proper one. I'm not up to that point yet."
"Worshipping at a distance?"
"No, not exactly. We've danced together a lot in London, and been the
greatest pals. Really, I've been rather clever about it. She's very
young--only in her first season. She's out to have a jolly good time,
but her life isn't only amusement. She's slogging hard at the piano.
She'd like to be a pro, but of course her people won't let her."
"Why not?"
"Oh, well, her father's a Duke. She's Lady Margaret Joliffe. I dare say
you've seen pictures of her in the papers. But they don't do her
justice. She's perfectly lovely. Oh, I've got it terrible bad this time,
Pam."
"Yes, I've seen her pictures. She's very pretty indeed," said Pam. "And
Jim knows her. He says she's very clever."
The time seemed to have come at last, then. If Norman succeeded in
winning a girl like this, nobody could say he was not getting as good as
he gave, not even Pam, who thought that hardly anybody would be good
enough for him. Yet she did not experience the quick sense of pleasure
which she had persuaded herself would be her response whenever Norman
did come to announce the real thing.
"Oh, clever!" repeated Norman. "That's not the word for her. She
_knows_. She's got extraordinary perceptions for a girl of her age. It
isn't only music. It's books, and art--everything that's jolly and
interesting. And she's such fun with it all. No more of a highbrow than
you are. In fact, she's the only girl I've ever met who sees things in
the way that you do."
Pamela did feel some pleasure at this. "That's topping," she said. "Of
course prettiness isn't everything. I suppose the others were pretty,
except the girl with a squint; but they--"
"Oh, come now, Pam, she hadn't got a squint. She--"
"Well, a slight cast in the eye, then; and some people think it an
added beauty. But they all seemed to have the brains of rabbits. I was
beginning to think that you never _would_ fall in love with anybody that
had got beyond Short Division. Of course I'm glad you've found somebody
intelligent at last. But do you mean to say that you never got beyond
talking about Hanbert and Ravel and Augustus John with her?"
Norman looked at her with a slightly pained expression. "Pam dear!" he
expostulated. "Why this acidulation?"
Pamela laughed, and they began again. "Well, it's really rather
exciting," she said. "Do tell me about it, Norman. You haven't told me
anything yet. When did you catch fire?"
His face took on a beatific expression. "Well, I'd held off just a
trifle," he said. "We'd had a topping time together here and there. She
always seemed to be pleased to see me, but--well, there was generally
the old Duchess somewhere in the background; she's not really old, of
course, but-- You see, it seemed to be flying a bit high for me. I was
at school with Cardiff--her brother--and he was in the Regiment too for
a bit."
"Whose brother? The Duchess's?"
"No. Margaret's."
"Do you call her Margaret?"
"Well, I was going to tell you. I lunched with them at the Harrow match.
Duchess rather cordial. Duke ditto. He used to be a bit of a cricketer,
and he knew I'd got my Eleven at Eton. I was feeling a bit bucked with
myself--seemed to be getting a sort of domestic hold, you know. So I
plumped myself down beside her, without being invited to do so, and she
didn't turn me away. I made her laugh. I believe I made them all laugh
at our end of the table. I was feeling good and happy, you know, and
rather let myself go. So after lunch I asked her to perambulate with me;
and we perambulated. I don't think it was quite in the bargain. I could
amuse them as a bright young lad, while they were stuffing, but I
mustn't take liberties. She gave a sort of quick look at the old Dutch,
and said: 'Yes, come along; we'll run away.' The old Dutch caught us
with her eye as we were twinkling off, and called out, 'Margaret!' But
Margaret wasn't taking any, so we had a very pleasant half-hour
together, and she gave me most of her dates."
"Most of her dates!"
"Oh, we weren't eating 'em out of a paper bag. I found out most of the
places she was going to when they left London. I don't anticipate an
invitation to Balmoral, or anything of that sort; but Goodwood's open to
everybody, and there are one or two houses in Scotland I think I can
wangle myself into later on, and there's a chance of her going to the
Canterbury cricket week. If she does, Norman Eldridge will also take
part in that festival. Oh, it's not over yet, by any means. By the time
I have to resume my studies at Cambridge University, I hope--"
"Yes, but what about--?"
"Wait a minute. You're in such a hurry. I took her back to the Dukeries.
They were in a box, and fortunately Cardiff was there. He'd been off on
a little line of his own at lunch, and I hadn't seen him for some time.
His welcome was obstreperous. He was feeling good and happy himself,
owing to his own particular fairy smiling on him, I suppose. He'd
brought her with him. She was some peach."
"Oh, never mind about her. Stick to the point."
"I did. I took advantage of the genial atmosphere, and brought the old
Dutch into it. She didn't want to laugh at first, but I made her. I
wanted to remove the impression that I was a sort of snatch-lady pirate,
but only wanted to play with them all together. I could tell the point
where I succeeded. Soon kind of unhitched herself generally, and--"
"Oh, do come to the point, Norman. You're getting as long-winded as one
of the old almshouse women. When did you call Margaret Margaret? That's
the important thing."
"Yes, I know it is. It was a thrill, Pam. I didn't do it as if I'd done
it by accident. I did it loud and bold--at least, not loud; I thought it
would try the old Dutch too much. But it was all quite simple. When we
said good-bye, I looked at her straight, and said: 'Good-bye,
Margaret.'"
"I think it _was_ rather bold--if not crude."
"No, dear; not crude. Not crude at all. I put a world of meaning into
it--the auld hackneyed phrase, which may mean so little and may mean so
much."
Pamela laughed. "I don't believe you're in love with her at all, if you
can make fun of it," she said.
"How little you know, Pam! I jest to hide my emotions. I've fed on that
sweet moment ever since."
"You've told me of other moments rather like it. I suppose her eyes
dropped before yours."
"They did not. That's where she's different from all other girls--except
you."
"Thanks awfully, Norman. I'll try and keep my eyes from dropping if it
ever happens to me. But from what you've said before I thought they
ought to drop. What did she do then--or say?"
"She looked at me straight, and said: 'Good-bye, Norman,' with a little
half smile."
Pamela considered this. "That was the end, then," she said.
"Yes, but what an end, Pam! It was the beginning too. You can see what a
thrill it was, can't you?"
"Yes, I think I can," she said slowly.
"Mind you, this was the very first time. Up to then there hadn't been a
word or a sign. That's what makes it something to remember, you know.
Oh, Pam! It's a heavenly feeling being in love. And it's such a score
having somebody like you to tell it to. I don't know who I should have
told if I hadn't had you--my tailor, I dare say; I shouldn't have been
able to keep it to myself, and I owe him something which it isn't quite
convenient to pay just yet. I told her about you, you know."
"Did you?"
"Oh, yes. I always do talk about you when I get really confidential."
"What did you tell her? And what did she say?"
"She was very sweet about you, and said you were just the sort of girl
she would like to have for a friend. A lot of her friends were such
ninnies."
"I never meet that sort of girl now," said Pamela with a sigh. "If only
I hadn't had flu when Auntie Eleanor asked me to stay with you in
London, I suppose I should have met her."
"Yes, that was jolly bad luck. We should all three have had a jolly good
time together."
Pamela laughed again. "Perhaps I should have had somebody of my own,"
she said. "I'm old enough now, you know, Norman."
"Of course you are. You're just the same age as Margaret, as a matter of
fact. You'd have had 'em swarming. But there are precious few of them I
should think good enough for you. I say, old girl, what about Jim
Horsham?"
"Well, what about him?"
"I don't think _he's_ good enough, you know, though he _is_ a Viscount."
"I like Jim. I've known him all my life."
"He's a good chap, but he's a desperate dull dog. Don't go falling in
love with Jim, Pam."
"I'm not likely to fall in love with him."
"It occurred to me this afternoon that he showed some slight inclination
to fall in love with you. There was a sort of concentrated heaviness on
him whenever he was with you. I suppose he'd sparkle if he could, under
emotion, but as he can't, he's got to be duller than usual. Perhaps
there's nothing in it. But I shouldn't blame him if he did fall in love
with you. In fact, I should think it rather cheek, in a way, if he
didn't. He's not likely to meet anybody more worth falling in love
with. But it isn't good enough, Pam."
"Well, I shouldn't worry about it, if I were you. Jim isn't my ideal,
though he's a nice old thing, and I think you're too superior about him
altogether. Did you know Fred Comfrey had come home?"
"Fred Comfrey!" Norman frowned. "I shouldn't think you're likely to fall
in love with _him_," he said.
"Oh, bother falling in love! I'm leaving that to you at present. But
there aren't many people to play with about here just now. He makes
another one. He's much improved."
"Oh, Pam, he's an awful creature. Surely, you're not going to have
anything to do with him!"
"I used to hate him; but he's quite different now. I should never have
known him. You know he went out to China, before you came to live here,
and he never came home until he joined up for the war. He did very well
in the war--got his Commission quite soon, and the Military Cross. He
was badly wounded too, and isn't fit yet. I'm sorry for him; and really,
Norman, he's quite nice. Anyhow, we couldn't _not_ have him to play with
us, because of Mr. and Mrs. Comfrey. I expect Auntie Eleanor will ask
him here too. He only came yesterday."
"Well, I suppose you've got to give everybody his chance. He was an
unmitigated beast as a boy, but perhaps he's improved. He couldn't very
well have got any worse. Still, it does rather stick in my gizzard that
he should be making friends with you, as I suppose he'll want to. I
should be a bit cautious if I were you, Pam. After all, one does know
something of what a man is, when one has known him as a boy. I should
say that Mr. Fred Comfrey was a nasty specimen, even if he has succeeded
in disguising it, as he used not to. How long is he staying here?"
"I think he may stay in England altogether. He has done very well in
business in China, and thinks he may be able to carry on in London."
"I wish he'd stayed in China. But how long is he staying in Hayslope?"
"For some time, I think. He had to go back to China, directly he was
demobbed, and hasn't had a holiday since the war. You ought to be nice
to him, Norman. Poor Hugo liked him. He talked to me very nicely about
Hugo this morning."
"When did you see him?"
"After church. Mother asked him to lunch, but he thought he'd better go
home."
"He wasn't at all a good friend for Hugo, you know."
"Perhaps not; but that's so long ago. Hugo improved too, afterwards."
Norman acquiesced perfunctorily. He knew that Hugo had not at all
improved, afterwards, but also that Pamela didn't. "Well, I'll try to
forget what he used to be like," he said. "But don't let's talk about
him any more. Let's talk about Margaret."
CHAPTER V
THE FAMILY
Colonel Eldridge rode into his stable-yard and delivered up his horse to
Timbs, who came hobbling out to receive it with a cheerful morning air
and a general appearance of satisfaction with himself and his
circumstances. Yet there were those who would have said that Timbs had
no particular reason to be pleased with the way things had gone for him.
He had come to Hayslope Hall as groom ten years before, and had
succeeded the old coachman four years later. He might have considered
himself lucky then, for he was only twenty-six years of age. He had half
a dozen horses in his stables and two grooms under him. There was also a
chauffeur for the big car and the little runabout. Timbs had a young
wife and a new baby, and comfortable quarters in which to keep them. In
fact there seemed nothing left for him to desire, unless it was another
baby of a sex complementary to the first one.
Then the war came. Timbs joined up among the first, and was turned into
a good soldier, always cheerful and reliable, and diligent in writing
home to the young wife who was being taken care of at Hayslope. Colonel
Eldridge, who had gone back to soldiering himself, had exercised
pressure, where it was required, as it was not in the case of Timbs,
upon the able-bodied men on his estate to join the army, but had
done his utmost to ensure their leaving their homes free of anxiety to
those dependent upon them. So Mrs. Timbs and the baby prospered, while
Timbs fought for his country; but Mrs. Timbs always wished that the war
would end and Timbs would come home again, in which she differed from
many wives in similar circumstances.
Timbs did come home at last, and she did not have to wait for him until
quite the end. His left leg was shattered, and he had been for a long
time in a hospital before she was allowed to have him. About the time
the armistice was signed he was ready for work again. But it was not in
his master's power to give him the work he had done before the war.
Hayslope Hall could no longer support a coachman, two or three grooms
and a chauffeur. Timbs took the place of all of them. One horse was kept
and both the cars, but the bigger one was seldom used because of the
price of petrol and tires. Timbs turned himself into an efficient
chauffeur, and liked the change in his duties. He had higher wages than
before, but perhaps not quite so high as he could have got elsewhere if
he hadn't preferred to stick to his old master. His quarters were the
same, his wife was as devoted to him as ever, and his baby had grown
into a pretty little girl of seven, who was the apple of his eye, and
made a pet of by the young ladies. Timbs thought himself well off, even
with his crooked leg; and perhaps he was, as things go nowadays.
Timbs knew when the Colonel was in the mood for a little chat, and when
it was wise to render quick service with a silent tongue. In the good
old days the Colonel had seldom come in from his morning ride without a
cheery word or two to this favourite servant of his. He loved his horses
and found plenty to say about them, though most of it might have been
said many times before. And he would have something to say to Timbs
about what he might have seen in the course of his inspection of farms
and fields, which he liked to undertake before breakfast in the summer.
In the autumn there were early starts for cubbing, and then of course
there was plenty to talk about on the return.
The good days did not seem to have disappeared entirely when the war was
over, though Hugo's death had made him more silent than before, and the
reduction in stables and outdoor upkeep generally had already begun. But
there was a season's hunting, and Pamela had made her first appearance
in the field. Timbs, with one groom to help him, had been kept busy
enough, but his first winter at home had seemed to him very good. This
was what the Colonel and he had always looked forward to--the time when
the young ladies would hunt regularly, one after the other. Miss Pamela
was good company for her father. He would soon pick up his spirits, and
everything would be as it had been again.
But by the next season the economies had increased. There was no more
hunting from Hayslope Hall. The Colonel kept one horse to get about on,
and there was an old pony for pottering work on the place, which the
younger children sometimes rode. That was what the war had brought to
Colonel Eldridge in return for his services, which had included a year
in the field, and after that four years of routine work in various
provincial centres of industry. As a soldier he made no complaints. At
his age he expected no reward other than the conviction of having done
his duty where he could be made most useful. As a landowner he had many
complaints to make, but kept them mostly to himself. He had passed for a
rich man before the war; now he was a poor one. But one did not flaunt
one's poverty before the world. That was why he had dropped hunting
altogether; his old Caesar would have carried him well enough for a day
or so a week, if he had cared to go on.
The morning chats with Timbs were getting rarer. There would certainly
be none this morning. After a look at his master's face Timbs led Caesar
away without a word, and the Colonel went into the house. Something
happened to put him out. Timbs's own face was overcast, and it was fully
two minutes before he began to whistle at his work.
It was a quarter past eight. Breakfast was at half-past, and as Colonel
Eldridge would ride no more that day, he went upstairs to change his
clothes. He came down as the gong sounded, and his expression had
somewhat cleared. He held strong opinions about keeping an even temper
before his family.
An English family assembled for breakfast in an old-established country
house--the nations of the earth may be invited to contemplation of it.
Here at Hayslope Hall was an example that could have been multiplied by
thousands at that hour, or at one a little later; for as a nation we are
not early risers except on compulsion.
The room was large, but not too large for an air of domesticity when
there was only the family to use it. It had three long small-paned
windows, which on this summer morning were open to the wide, yet
secluded garden. The walls were hung with pictures, some good, some
indifferent, and all so familiar that they were never looked at. Of the
portraits none were older than the middle of the eighteenth century; but
five or six generations of men and women of the same blood who have
lived in the same house, and, allowing for differences of era, in much
the same way, is already something substantial in the way of background.
The furniture was not more than about a hundred years old, of that
period of solid and dignified ugliness which was yet so much more
satisfactory than the fashions succeeding it that by contrast with them
it is now beginning to acquire merit. How it had come to replace the
eighteenth century furniture which the periwigged gentlemen and hooped
ladies on the walls had used when in the flesh was now forgotten; but it
is only of late years that old furniture has been preferred to new, and
there was nothing remarkable in this. The refurnishing of the
dining-room might very well have been set in hand again since the last
clearing out a hundred years before if it had not been thought that it
would do very well as it was, and that there were more important rooms
to spend money on, if money was to be spent in this way. As a setting
for the family that now used it the room was eloquent of an ancestry
already respectably established, and it told somehow of interests that
were not markedly concerned with the decorations and appointments of a
house. To the Eldridges, their dining-room was the place for the
enjoyment of food and the sociability that went therewith, and it
fulfilled all purposes that could be required of it. It was only in the
matter of large assemblies, of which the great expanse of dark mahogany
and the score or so of well-padded chairs seemed to make perpetual
suggestion, that any incongruity might have been felt. The time for that
was not now. But with the table lessened to the needs of family use and
the space around it thus agreeably increased, the normal occupation of
the room was sufficient for it. Here began the day with the assembling
of those who would go their ways, some together and some apart,
throughout its course, but all with a sense of the nearness of the rest;
and here they would meet twice again before the day was done, to keep
alive one of the best of the good things that English country life has
cherished and made complete--the community of the family.
Colonel Eldridge, after greeting his daughters with a mixture of
formality and affection, occupied himself with his breakfast and the
letters which lay in a little pile beside his plate. It had not been his
habit to deal thus with his correspondence in the days before the war.
He had been more ready to talk then. He would choose a few letters out
of the pile and perhaps discuss them, as Mrs. Eldridge did with hers at
the other end of the table, and leave the rest for afterwards. Now he
went through them all, business letters as well as private, and,
schooled as he was to hide his emotions, he could not always keep from
his face some expression of annoyance, or even dismay. But it was only
in his face that this showed, and his wife and daughters knew that it
was not meant to show at all. By degrees they had learnt to ignore it.
If they addressed him he would always respond, and he would have been
annoyed if they had tried to suit themselves to his moods. He liked to
hear them chattering gaily among themselves, though he was not always
ready to join in their chatter. They were, indeed, the reward that all
his anxieties and schemings brought him. It was the happiness and
freedom of their lives in the home which it behooved him to keep intact
about them that sweetened it to him. But for them there would have been
no anxiety, but only some reduction of opportunities which would still
have left the main interests of his life untouched.
Colonel Eldridge was very neat in his suit of grey tweed, well-cut,
well-brushed, but well-worn, his white stock creaseless, his figure thin
and a little stiff, but not with the stiffness of age, his gold-rimmed
glasses on the ridge of his thin, straight nose, his well-shaped nervous
hands manipulating his papers or the implements of his meal. He was as
different as possible, in outward appearance, from those ancestors of
his whose pictures hung upon the walls; but probably he was very like
them at root. Certainly there was not one who had been more attached to
the house and acres which had been theirs and were now his. He had been
a good soldier, of a limited kind, but he was above all a country
gentleman, and looked thoroughly in his place in this room, which could
only have been found, just as it was, in an English country house.
Mrs. Eldridge also looked thoroughly in place behind the old silver and
china of her equipage. She always came down to breakfast in a state of
apparent content with herself and her surroundings, cool and unruffled
both in dress and demeanour. In the time that was past there had been so
much to look forward to in the day of which this gathering was the
inauguration. Though not, presumably, attached to the life of the
country by the same ties as bound her husband, and enjoying her life
equally when the periodic moves were made to London, she would have
chosen the country rather than the town for permanent residence. The
choice had not been hers, but it had had to be made. Much had gone that
had made life agreeable to her at Hayslope, but much remained. On these
summer mornings it was not so unlike what it had always been to her.
There was the pleasant meal with her husband and her children, whom she
loved; the appointments of the table, in which she never failed to take
pleasure, though she had used them regularly for over twenty years; the
sense of being newly and becomingly dressed; the birds singing in the
garden, which was so fresh and inviting, and with the windows open so
much a part, as it were, of the room itself. Her letters never brought
her worries, as her husband's sometimes brought him--only occasionally a
mild regret for opportunities of which she could no longer take
advantage. But at this time of the day she was not much inclined to want
more than she had. Her domestic duties were immediately in front of her,
and she enjoyed them. She enjoyed them even more than before, for with
fewer servants more depended on her. Only half of her desired the
distractions due to wealth; the rest of her was pure domesticity. She
had never been happier than during the first few years of married life,
before her husband had succeeded his father as Squire of Hayslope. She
was happy now in much the same responsibilities as had then devolved
upon her, had she but known it. In these early hours of the day the
consciousness of what she had lost did not trouble her. Besides,
something might always happen in the long hours before her. She was not
so old as to have lost that sense of the unexpected.
Pamela was happy too. She might grumble sometimes--to Norman--about the
restrictions that had come to spoil the life of Hayslope Hall; but she
loved it. And all the future was before her, golden and glamorous. It
wrapped her in a sort of happy aura, which contained no definite point
of desire. Anything might happen to her, in any one of these summer
days, which began with the family meeting at breakfast. Something was
bound to happen some day, and in the meantime life was sweet, and the
shadow that had come to lie over her home hardly darkened at all the
radiance in which she walked.
Judith was as pretty as Pamela in her way, which was an entirely
different way. She was the only dark member of the family, now that
Hugo was dead. Some forgotten ancestress had bequeathed her her lustrous
hair, of which the shadows were almost visibly blue, and her large,
deep, solemn eyes, her very skin was dark, but with the bloom of youth
on it, and the healthy blood that flowed beneath its soft surface, it
was rich and delicate. At the age of eighteen she had not yet come into
the full heritage of her beauty, which did not depend so much as
Pamela's upon youth. She hardly even seemed aware of it, and clothes
were not yet a matter of much interest to her. She had alternations of
childish high spirits and brooding reflection. Out of doors she was
still something of a tomboy, in her young and restless energy; but she
would sit for hours over a book, and in those moods she was oblivious to
everybody and everything around her. She seldom talked about what she
read, and indeed her reading would have been a puzzle to anyone who had
tried to draw inferences of literary taste from it. Pamela had once
reported to Norman the books over which Judith had spent hours of a wet
day. They were Grimm's Fairy Tales, "The Wide, Wide World," and Bacon's
Essays, and she seemed to have spent about the same time over each.
Pamela held that she had no literary taste whatever; Norman was inclined
to treat her preferences as a touchstone of merit. If Judith liked
something, it was probably good. This theory was strengthened when she
said she liked a picture of Gaugin's, of which he submitted to her a
reproduction, and weakened by her absorption in Martin Tupper's
"Proverbial Philosophy," which she had found in the library and carried
up to her room with her. She was quite ready to laugh with them over her
tastes, but she would never give any explanation of them. "I like it,"
or "I don't like it," was her sole contribution to literary criticism,
and she would never be moved a hair's breadth by any consensus of
opinion. Judith went her own way in everything, but her way at present
was confined almost entirely to Hayslope, where she found everything
that she wanted. Less than Pamela did she feel the loss of what had made
the life of her home rich in interest before the war. She had grown up
from childhood under the new conditions and was happy in them.
The exceptional family beauty seemed to have stopped short at Judith.
Alice and Isabelle, who were thirteen and twelve, respectively, had
their abundant fair hair to recommend them, and their active youth, but
nothing much else as yet in the way of looks. They were agreeable
children, much alike in their eager interest in whatever went on around
them, and their unerring pursuit of pleasure. They were always "the
children" to the rest of the family, and what they thought was of small
importance, though what they did sometimes obtruded itself upon their
elders. Sitting at breakfast, one on either side of their mother, in
their neat clothes, which would not be so neat later on in the day,
their thick manes confined in heavy plaits, they seemed eminently _good_
children, showing a healthy appetite, but no greediness, in the
consumption of viands, taking a bright part in the conversation when it
touched their orbit, but not obtruding themselves in such a way as to
make their company noxious. Their presence at the breakfast table
seemed, indeed, to heighten the effect of a family at one and at peace;
for young children in a happy home have no desires outside it. Their
parents, their brothers and sisters, even the servants and dependants
who are also part of the family for the time being, are the chief
characters in their little world. Not even their parents themselves are
so bounded in their interests by the home they have made for them. And
the wonderful imagination of children makes it the chief place of
delight to them, even where its opportunities are small. Opportunities
were not small at Hayslope Hall for these two, and they were as happy as
children of their age could very well be.
If Miss Baldwin, their governess, was not completely happy--as what
woman living always in other people's houses can be?--she was as
contented as the accidents of her lot in life could make her. She was a
precise spinster of middle age, and sat very prim and mindful of her
manners between Pamela and Alice, never speaking unless when spoken to,
but then speaking with an attention to the composition of sentences and
the correct enunciation of her vowels which was a lesson to everybody
present, and intended to be so to at least two of them. Colonel Eldridge
addressed her directly, at least once in the course of every meal at
which she was present, out of politeness. Mrs. Eldridge always found it
difficult to remember that she was there, but also addressed her
occasionally; but her attention was apt to wander over the reply.
Miss Baldwin had been at Hayslope for two years, but was no nearer to
making one of the family circle than when she arrived. She was strict in
the schoolroom and a good teacher in a limited way, but without any real
interest in the subjects which she taught. Nobody would have thought,
from her appearance and manner, that she was an incurable
sentimentalist. She lived in a world of her own--a world of romance, of
which the materials were sent her once a week in official-looking long
envelopes with a typewritten address. Her time came when the children
were in bed, and the life of the house, in which she had no wish to take
part, was concentrated below. Then, in the large quiet schoolroom,
sitting by the open window in the summer, or in winter time by the fire,
she would be wafted away from the actual life about her, with all its
restrictions for one of her age and class, to live richly and freely
with the heroes and heroines of her chosen world. Baldness of narrative
troubled her not at all. In the novels by authors of repute which she
sometimes heard people discussing, there seemed no room for the play of
imagination; the novelist would have it just so and not otherwise, and
the characters to which he introduced his readers were so much like the
characters one might meet at any time in the dull and sterile flesh.
Those strong heroes of her favourite romances were as gods beside the
emasculate earth-dwellers who stood for hero even in the best of stories
bound between boards; the very virtue of their titles, if titles they
had, seemed to be denied them. Nor did the heroines please her any
better. She could never imagine herself one of them with any pleasure.
If stately, they were never stately enough; if blushing and timid, they
were merely passed by as of no account. Even Ouida, for whom she made an
exception, having read some of her novels in early life, under a strong
sense of immodesty, concerned herself with unessentials. Miss Baldwin
wanted no pages of description, however poetic. She could get that in
Wordsworth, duly annotated, so that there should be no mistake as to
locality. If it was question of a garden in which a love scene was to be
enacted, she only wanted to imagine it for herself--the most beautiful
garden that ever was, not without indications of wealth on the part of
its owners; or if a cottage garden, the mere mention of roses and
honeysuckle would suffice. It was the people who mattered and what
happened to them, and with them she smiled and wept, and felt, to the
depths of her being.
So perhaps Miss Baldwin was happy after all, if not in the circumstances
of her daily life, which she went through conscientiously and
efficiently, in that paradise the gates of which were always open to
her, where men were as gods, and women were worshipped by them, and none
of them ever behaved in the way that Miss Baldwin was always impressing
upon her pupils was the only possible way to behave.
CHAPTER VI
BARTON'S CLOSE
Such was the family party that sat round the breakfast table at Hayslope
Hall on that summer morning. Colonel Eldridge was the only member of it
upon whom a weight seemed to lie, and his disturbance of mind was
guessed at by nobody but his wife, who threw occasional exploratory and
sympathetic glances at him, but made no particular effort to lighten his
mood, unless by being more than usually responsive to the chatter of the
girls. Whatever it was that was troubling him, she would hear of it
after breakfast, when she always went to his room with him before
setting herself to the occupations that would keep them apart for the
rest of the morning.
She was a trifle apprehensive as to whether she herself might not have
given him cause for displeasure. He had refused to dine at Pershore
Castle two nights before, but she and Pamela had gone, and he had not
objected to that. What he might possibly object to, however, was the
invitation she had given to young Lord Horsham to lunch at Hayslope that
very day. She had not told him yet that she had done so, for her reason
for asking the young man had been quite clearly defined in her own mind,
and she did not want him to guess at it. Perhaps Pamela had told him
that Horsham was coming, he had guessed why, and was displeased about
it.
But no! She knew before breakfast was over that that was not the cause
of his mood.
Pamela said: "Jim is coming to lunch and I suppose he will want to play
tennis afterwards. We'd better mow the lawn, Judy, and mark out the
court again."
Colonel Eldridge frowned, and Mrs. Eldridge's spirit drooped, but rose
again when he said: "It isn't your business to mow lawns. That's one of
the things that Perkins ought to see to."
Poor dear man, he hated the idea of his daughters doing work that had
always been done as a matter of course by servants. He was sore about
all the things that they ought to have had and he could no longer give
them, even when they were things that made no difference to them
whatever.
"Oh, we like doing it, Daddy," said Pamela. "It makes us feel that we've
earned our games on it. Don't deprive us of the rewards of virtue."
He left the subject. "You'd better ask Fred Comfrey to lunch, if Horsham
is coming," he said. "You'll want a four, and I shan't be able to play
this afternoon."
So it was settled, to Mrs. Eldridge's relief. It was the first time that
Horsham had been asked to Hayslope Hall since the disturbance in which
he had been concerned, and her husband had made no comment on it. It was
not that that was troubling him.
Nevertheless, she made first mention of it when they went into his room
together. "I'm glad you don't mind Jim coming here," she said. "I
forgot to tell you that I'd asked him."
"Mind him! Oh, no, I don't mind him. It wasn't he who behaved in any way
that I could be annoyed over. And as for the Crowboroughs, I shan't keep
it up against them any longer. I couldn't bring myself to go over there
on Monday, but I'm glad you and Pamela went. We must get them over here
some time. Cynthia, I'm extremely annoyed at something I've seen this
morning."
"Yes, dear? What is it?"
She sat herself down by the window, while he stood by his writing table,
or moved between it and the fireplace, while he unburdened himself.
"William talked to me on Sunday about making an addition to his
garden--a big addition, taking in a grazing meadow of four acres;
Barton's Close, it's called--at the bottom of the wood."
"Yes, dear, I know it, and William and Eleanor told me about it. You
don't object, do you?"
"Object! It means cutting up pasture, and he has no right to do that
without my permission; no right whatever. It isn't a thing that ought to
be done in these days. Besides, his garden is out and away too big as it
is. This addition would make it double the size of our garden. It's
quite unreasonable. The house isn't his. I let it to him as a country
cottage, and never thought of it being turned into a large country house
wanting a great deal of money to keep it up. I talked to him about all
that on Sunday, and thought he understood. Certainly I didn't consent to
cutting up Barton's Close, and he must have known I didn't. But I
happened to go down there this morning, and they are already at
work--his own gardeners and half a dozen labourers besides. Really, it's
too bad. From what Coombe told me, it was all settled last week--design
and everything, and the labour arranged for. So it was a mere pretence
asking for my permission at all. I didn't give it; yet he goes straight
away and puts the work in hand."
"Did you say definitely that you wouldn't consent?" Mrs. Eldridge asked.
She was rather taken aback. She knew all about those garden plans, and
had even made suggestions of her own about them. William had mentioned
once the necessity of asking a landlord's permission to cut up pasture,
but it had been taken for granted that there would be no difficulty
about that. She was not quite sure that she had not said herself that
there would be no difficulty about that. Certainly it had never crossed
her mind that there would be.
"I objected," said her husband decisively. "Possibly I didn't say in so
many words: 'No, you can't do it.' I shouldn't say that to William. I
pointed out to him plainly why it was inadvisable, and he seemed to
understand."
"Is it very important, Edmund? There's plenty of pasture about there,
isn't there?"
"I don't know that there's more than can be made use of. But that wasn't
the chief point. It's the enlarging and enlarging at the Grange that has
become objectionable. It has gone beyond all reasonable grounds already.
All very well, as long as William is there, and treats it as a toy on
which to spend his money. But if anything happens, it will be a white
elephant--a big house with no land to it, which nobody else is likely to
want, and no longer any good as a second house on the place, which it
has always been before. _You_ and the girls couldn't live there if
anything happened to me."
"I never thought of that," she said slowly. "I don't want to think of it
either. Of course William has become very lavish; but he is so rich now
that I suppose it doesn't matter. And it _is_ different, isn't it, dear,
now that poor Hugo is dead?"
"Oh, that's what he kept driving in on me. He'll come after me here. I'm
not likely to forget it. Still, the place _is_ mine, as long as I'm
alive, and I'm not going to hand over the reins to William. He's no
_right_ to act in that way, as if I counted for nothing."
"No," she said; "it's unfortunate. What are you going to do? I suppose
you didn't tell Coombe to stop the work?"
"No; I shouldn't put an affront upon William before his servants. Seems
to me he's no objection to putting an affront upon me. Coombe knew well
enough that I hadn't been consulted, and that I ought to have been. I
don't like that fellow Coombe. He may be a very good head-gardener, but
he doesn't come from these parts, and he doesn't seem to realize how
things are. He's respectful enough in manner, but he was giving me to
understand all the time that his master was a much bigger man than I
was, and he wished I'd clear out and leave him to go on with his work.
At one point I really did think of ordering him to knock it off. I
_could_ have done it, and I think he'd have been rather surprised if I
had."
"I'm glad you didn't. It's tiresome, of course; but we don't want to
quarrel with the Williams, do we? You're not going to tell him to stop
it, are you?"
"Oh, I suppose I shall have to swallow it. William is such a much bigger
man than I am now. He's made a lot of money, and they've knighted him. I
dare say they'll give him a peerage, if he makes much more. _I_ can't
stand out against him. I'm only an old dug-out of a soldier, and don't
matter."
"Well, dear, you're Squire of Hayslope, which counts for something. As
for me, I'd rather be Mrs. Eldridge of Hayslope Hall than Lady Eldridge
of Hayslope Grange. I don't mean I'd rather be me than Eleanor, though
of course I would. But _she_ isn't spoilt by all their money, and I
certainly don't want to quarrel with her."
"Oh, quarrel! I don't want to quarrel with William, either. We've been
good friends all our lives, and nobody's more pleased with his success
than I am. Still, what I feel, and feel strongly, is that he ought not
to make his success an excuse for changing his attitude towards me. I'm
his elder brother, and he has always treated me so until lately. He'd
never have thought of doing a thing like this a few years ago, and he
wants telling so. Then I dare say we shall get on as we ought to. This
has got to be the last of it. Anything further I _shall_ veto. The
Grange is mine as well as the Hall. When I'm dead he can do what he
likes with both of them. Until then he must be content with what he
has."
"Oh, I think he will be. And he's sure to see your point, if you put it
to him without irritation. Of course you _are_ irritated, dear, and it's
only natural. I should be myself, though I'm not an irritable person. I
flatter myself that I can see below the surface of things, and I'm sure
William is really devoted to you, and looks up to you. He wouldn't want
to do anything to displease you, and Eleanor would be horrified at the
very idea. Eleanor is very level-headed. I have a great admiration for
her, and I'm not a woman who gives her admiration to everybody. Just say
something to William when they come down again, and I'll say something
to Eleanor: and I'm sure everything will be all right for the future."
"They are not coming down this week; and I have something else to write
to William about. I shall write about this too, and if he takes what I
say in the right spirit I shan't mention it again."
Mrs. Eldridge rose. "Oh, I'm sure he will," she said, "especially if you
don't show irritation, dear. It's always a mistake to show irritation.
Now I must go and see about things. Lunch at half-past one. That will
give us a nice long morning."
She kissed him, as she always did, and went out. He had already lost
some of the irritation which she had so deprecated. If he had sat down
and written to his brother without further reflection, he would
probably have made a mild protest against the gardening scheme and at
the most reminded him of certain arguments that he had used to him
already. But his pen never got started very easily. He had to think over
the best way of putting the business affair upon which he had meant to
write, and when that was decided his mind went back to the other
question, and his anger rose again at the way in which he had been
treated. When he did sit down to his table, it was with a face as dark
as he had worn on riding into the stable-yard an hour before, and he
embarked upon his protest at once.
"Dear William:--I was much annoyed this morning, and I must say
surprised too, to find that you had disregarded my wishes in the
matter of Barton's Close, and that there is a small army of men
there already, cutting it up. I don't want to go again into the
reasons I gave you on Sunday for my objection to turning the
greater part of your holding into an extravagant pleasure garden.
They seem to me to be eminently sound, and I do not remember your
bringing any counter-arguments that would affect them. What you
have done is simply to ignore them, and treat me on my own
property as if my undoubted rights in a matter of this sort could
be set aside with not even so much as a word of warning. I must
say now at least, that this sort of treatment must stop. However
superior your standing may be in the world outside, here at
Hayslope I am on my own ground, and you ought to show respect to
my position, as until lately you always have done."
A pause came to the rapid scratching of the pen, and Colonel Eldridge
looked up towards the garden outside, so quiet and green and happy, with
the whirr of the mowing-machine already to be heard where the girls were
busy with the lawn, and their young voices coming to him between their
bursts of energy. His face had cleared. He had written a straightforward
protest, without any beating about the bush. There was no need to say
more, though more might very well have been said. In days gone by
William had treated him with the respect due from a younger brother to
the head of the family. There had been affection between them from their
early childhood, but the elder brother had been the leading spirit, as
was only right, and when it had been necessary to rebuke the younger he
had done it in much the same way as this. William had accepted the
rebuke and they had remained as good friends as before. This would be
all that would be wanted. William could have his garden, which, after
all, didn't so much matter with things as they were now--poor Hugo dead
and he the one to come after--although--although--
The frown returned faintly to his face, and he added another paragraph:
"You said on Sunday that in spite of all the money you had spent
on your garden, this was really a better one. Well, you know that
I have had to cut down labour in it, and at this moment Pamela and
Judith are at work on the tennis lawn, which they have to keep in
order themselves if they want to play on it. That's how it is
here at Hayslope Hall now, and the girls are happy enough, though
I can't spend what I used to on them, and what I should like to.
So it really isn't necessary, especially in these days, when
nearly everybody is feeling the pinch, to spend a fortune on a
garden to get pleasure out of it. If I may say so, I think there's
even a touch of vulgarity in it."
Another pause. He didn't want his pen to run away with him. Didn't the
last sentence go rather beyond what he could say to William without
offence?
No. They had had that out once, years before, in their father's time.
Edmund Eldridge was at home on leave from the Curragh, and William on
summer vacation from Cambridge. They were driving over to lunch at
Pershore Castle, and William appeared for the expedition in a pair of
lemon-coloured spats, a form of decorative summer attire then in its
infancy. The cavalry subaltern, spick and span in a style of sober
correctitude, objected to the lemon-coloured spats, and used the same
word, vulgarity, in connection with them; and the undergraduate bowed
meekly to his ruling and took them off.
Better leave it at that, though. He had said quite enough to bring
William to his bearings, and relieved his own mind of the annoyance that
had irked it. It was with quite another feeling underlying his words
that he went on to write about the estate affairs in which he was
relying upon William's help to deal with the Government. But this was
not a matter in which there could be much indication of any state of
feeling, unless it was annoyance with the obliquity of the Department
concerned; and his letter ended as his letters to William always did,
whatever their subject: "Your affec. brother, Edmund Eldridge."
He read the letter over again before dispatching it, but did not detach
himself from the varying moods in which it had been written, and when
Mrs. Eldridge asked him later what he had said to William, he told her
that he had just said that it would be a mistake to enlarge the Grange
garden any further, and had written chiefly about another matter.
"You didn't say that he mustn't make _this_ enlargement, did you, dear?"
she asked.
"Oh, no. He can go on with that, as he has begun it. I must say that I
think it _will_ be the best thing that he has done there. I can't say
that I like to see the pasture broken up, but there's been such a lot of
it during the war that perhaps it's not so much of a point as it was.
One seems to have to change one's views about everything nowadays. I
dare say I'm a bit old-fashioned. Got to recognize that I'm getting
older, I suppose."
"Dear man!" she said cooingly. "You'll never be old to me, and you don't
look old either. Of the two I think you look younger than William,
though he pays more attention to his appearance than you do. I hope I
don't look _very_ old myself. I don't really feel it. Still, women
_have_ to pay attention to their appearance when they reach the forties.
Otherwise, people would leave off looking at them. Eleanor doesn't,
much; but she's handsome in a different sort of way. I should think she
would outlast me; but I shan't make a fuss about it. I love Eleanor;
she's so reliable. I'm glad you don't really mind their having their
extra garden, dear. It will suit Eleanor better than all the tiresome
pergolas and things. She will be able to be quiet in it."
CHAPTER VII
YOUNG PEOPLE
The day had advanced to a heat unusual in our temperate climate. All
nature seemed to be holding its breath in an endeavour to support it.
There was no sound of bird life, and even the insects had ceased their
stir of activity. After one set, somewhat languidly pursued, the tennis
players betook themselves to the seats disposed near at hand, in a shade
almost as torrid as the sun-steeped open. Judith was the only member of
the party who showed no manifest signs of being overheated. Her almost
southern-looking beauty was enhanced by the heat. She laughed at the
others, and said that it could never be too hot for her.
Jim Horsham looked at her seriously, and said that in Australia he had
experienced a heat of a hundred and twenty degrees, and at Christmas
time, which made it all the more remarkable.
Pamela's eyes twinkled, and she roused herself from an exhausted
reclining to ask: "Why does it make it all the more remarkable?"
"Well--Christmas time, you know," replied Jim, in the tone of one
humouring an intellectually weaker vessel.
"Yes, I see that, Jim. But aren't the seasons just the other way round
in Australia?"
"Well, of course they are. That's just what I was saying."
She laughed, and subsided again. "It's too hot to argue," she said.
"When were you in Australia?" asked Fred Comfrey.
Horsham replied conscientiously, with dates of arrival and departure,
and the further information that he had acted as A. D. C. to an uncle
who was Governor of one of the States.
"How informative you are, Jim!" said Pamela lazily. But Judith
unexpectedly showed interest in Australia, and asked for exact details
of the behaviour of the thermometer in that Dependency, which was given
to her.
"Oh, it's much too hot to listen to all this," said Pamela, springing up
from her low chair with no appearance of any essential lack of energy,
in spite of the heat. "Let's go for a stroll in the wood."
This was said to Fred Comfrey, who responded with alacrity. His eyes had
repeatedly rested upon Pamela, across the luncheon table, where she had
talked and laughed with the gay freedom that was hers when she was
feeling what Norman would have called good and happy, and during the
game in which her light movements had been partnered with Horsham's
responsible but slow-moving efforts, to their ultimate defeat. Horsham
also looked at her as she rose, as if he would like to follow her; but
his explanations to Judith were in full flood, and had to be carried to
a conclusion. Pamela and Fred moved off together, and his eyes followed
them until they were lost among the trees, though there was no faltering
in his firm dealings with degrees Fahrenheit.
"Jim's a dear old thing," said Pamela, when they were out of hearing,
"but the idea sometimes crosses my mind that he's just a little bit of a
bore. I hate to think it of him, so the best thing is to run away when
he begins to show signs of it. We needn't run very far. There's a seat
just out of hearing of them."
It was the seat in which she and Norman had been surprised by Fred and
Hugo years before, from which had followed that quarrel that she had
never heard about. She had even forgotten the disturbance that led up to
it, but it was fresh enough in Fred's mind, and impelled him to ask with
some awkwardness. "What sort of a fellow has Norman grown into? I didn't
see him when he was here last week."
This brought her to a recollection of the hostility between them, and
she answered a little stiffly: "He's just as much of a dear as ever."
She had shared Norman's dislike of Fred in her childhood. She thought
him improved, and wanted him to have a new chance with all of them. But
she was on Norman's side--always, if it was a question of taking sides.
The improvement in Fred, from the hobbledehoy of twelve years before,
would have been remarked by anybody. He was still stocky of build, but
his frame had become smartened, and his stature, rather below the
average, only indicated its strength. The close-cropped moustache that
he wore had improved his appearance, and there was a degree of
self-confidence in his bearing which had not been there of old, when he
had been alternately truculent and diffident. Whether or not he had
improved in character was not so plain to see, but the years had brought
him at least to a better understanding of the face that a man was
expected to show before the world.
He laughed, a shade nervously, with his fingers at his moustache. If
Pamela had been looking at him at that moment she would have seen him
more like he had been as a boy than she had seen him hitherto in his
manhood. "Norman and I had a quarrel about you the very last time I saw
him," he said.
She did look at him then, with a hint of displeasure on her face.
Recollection began to come to her. "Oh, yes," she said. "It was when you
and Hugo found us here together."
He saw that he had made a mistake, and hastened to retrieve it. "I've
always been sorry for what happened then," he said. "I'm ready to tell
Norman so when I see him. Probably he has remembered it against me. We
didn't always get on very well as boys, but I always liked him,
really--and admired him too, for his pluck."
The slight frown had not yet left her face. "What did happen?" she
asked.
"Well, we fought," he said, greatly daring. "That's what I so much
regret. I was much bigger and stronger than he was. It didn't last long,
and I don't think I damaged him much, for I don't believe you or anybody
knew. Still, I don't excuse it in any way. I know I was rather a beast,
as a boy. When one goes out into the world, and gets some sense knocked
into one, one becomes ashamed of a good many things, and some of them
stick in one's mind. That did--that I fought a younger smaller boy, when
I'd been in the wrong from the first. It's always been a sort of
nightmare to me."
He spoke quietly, and with apparent sincerity. Pamela had a sense of
something underlying the quarrel of which he spoke that she did not want
to explore, brought by his first words--that the quarrel had been about
her. But it was possible to put that aside. Her youthful generosity was
touched by his admission. It fitted in with her own observation of him
that the man and the boy might be two quite different creations, and
this fact seemed to have presented itself to her out of her own
knowledge of life, upon which she prided herself. "I think horrid little
boys often turn into quite nice men," she said with a laugh. "I suppose
you were rather horrid as a boy, though I don't remember much about you.
So was poor Hugo, sometimes, though he turned into a very nice man. The
war altered him a lot, before he was killed--poor Hugo! That's the sad
thing, I think--that so many young men who were really made better by
what they were doing in the war were killed, after all."
"Yes," he said. "It was a pretty hard school for some of us. But I had
had a good deal of my schooling beforehand. I've always been glad that I
was pitched out into the world when I was quite young. I had to fight
for myself; and it wasn't fighting with boys younger than myself
then--rather the other way about. I suppose that was what made me so
ashamed of that business with Norman, and kept it alive in my mind."
She had forgiven him for that now, as he seemed to have found it
difficult to forgive himself. "I don't think Norman has kept up any
feeling about it," she said. "I suppose the smaller boy doesn't, does
he? When you were the smaller boy and had to fight, I suppose you rather
enjoyed it."
"Well, I did," he said. "It made a man of me. And it isn't over yet. I'd
practically won my battle over there, and could go back and rest on my
laurels. But I've a mind to begin it all again over here. There's
something exhilarating in the fight itself; and if I win it the rewards
will be greater."
It sounded rather fine to her. She did not translate the symbolism into
the struggle of a young man of considerable commercial astuteness to
gain a footing for himself, and when he had done so to seek the best
opportunity of enlarging it. He was worthy of respect, in having already
made a success of his work at an early age, and having left it to fight
for the great cause, in which he had also made good. There was stuff in
him, as there had been in his boyhood, when he had done well at his
school; and it showed up now, to the disguising of what might have
turned her against him. She had no suspicion that he was rapidly falling
under the spell of her bright charm, for he had learnt some wisdom and
self-control, and knew that there was a long and difficult road to
travel before she could be expected even to see him on her level. He was
content now, after the first little mistake, the reception of which had
given him warning, to arouse and keep alive her interest in him, and to
establish terms of friendship with her, upon which there would be no
suspicion of his presuming. She found it interesting to talk to him
already, and was inclined to back him up with Norman, though not to the
extent of turning herself into his champion. But he ought not to be held
to the mistakes of his boyhood; and with all his faults he had been poor
Hugo's friend, and had fought well in the war and been wounded, not
lightly.
She asked him about that, and he answered her questions, modestly
enough, though not without the design of attracting her sympathy. And
they talked a little about Hugo. He seemed to have seen more good in
Hugo than Norman had ever done, though Norman had never criticized him
to her. But Norman had never said, as Fred did, that Hugo was a
thoroughly good fellow, who had been a bit wild, like a good many more,
but no more than that; and of course his fine service in the war had
wiped out those mistakes many times over.
"Yes, that's what I feel," she said gratefully. "There was some trouble
with Jim. I don't know what it was, but I know that Lord Crowborough
made a fuss about it, and Dad was very angry. So it couldn't have been
very bad. Besides, you can see what Jim is. If poor Hugo is supposed to
have led him into mischief he couldn't have led him very far. _Nobody_
could lead Jim very far into mischief. He wouldn't go."
She laughed her tinkling laugh, which was delicious music in Fred's
ears. He laughed too, but did not make the mistake of taking up her
criticism of Horsham. "I heard something about that too," he said; "but
I don't know any details either. I shouldn't think there could have
been much in it. Naturally, Colonel Eldridge would have felt sore at his
being criticized at all."
Norman had always kept off this subject, and would answer no questions
about it. But he had never exonerated Hugo, though he had said that Jim
was ass enough for anything. Norman _was_ apt to be over-critical. He
had nothing much to say in favour of Hugo, her own brother, who had been
killed; he was contemptuous of Jim, who was only rather slow, and
perhaps dull; and he was almost violent in his dislike of Fred, whom he
hadn't seen for years. Of course he was head and shoulders above all
three of them in everything that mattered, but perhaps he should have
left it more to others to recognize that fact. At any rate, Fred was
giving her something now which Norman withheld from her, and she was
grateful for it.
Judith, left alone with Horsham, showed no disposition to regard herself
in the light of a sacrifice. It seemed as if she really did take an
interest in his statistics, and though she did not talk much herself her
attention had the effect of drawing him out to be more informative than
ever. "I do like to hear about real things," she said. "Such a lot that
you read is so--so fluffy: do you know what I mean?"
"I suppose you mean poetry," he said.
"Well, I like some poetry; but it doesn't seem to be the sort that
people who think they know call good poetry." She laughed at herself,
the low musical laugh that was all her own. "Pam and Norman are always
making fun of my tastes."
"Does Pamela like poetry?" Horsham asked, with a shade of anxiety.
"Oh, yes," she said, and a hint of mischief showed itself in her eyes.
"Can you repeat any by heart?"
"Well, I don't know that I can, except the things I used to have to
learn. I've never forgotten them. It seems as if I can't forget anything
that I've once learnt. I could repeat 'The Wreck of the Hesperus,' which
I learnt when I was five or six, I should think--you know, about the
skipper had taken his little daughter to bear him company--I should
think I could repeat that now, without a mistake."
The dark eyes were dancing with mischief now. "Oh, yes, I know it," she
said. "It's lovely. And funnily enough it's one of Pamela's favourite
poems, and Norman's too."
"Is it?" said Horsham doubtfully. "I didn't really think much of it
myself; it was only that I did learn it once and couldn't forget it.
Still, of course it is by Longfellow."
"Yes, I know. I like Longfellow myself. Pam and Norman pretend they
don't. But Pam loves that particular poem. If you'd say it over to
her--!"
"Well, I don't know that I should care about doing that. I expect she
knows so much more poetry than I do."
"You could get her to talk about poetry and then just bring it out
casually. Say you think it's so salient--that's the way she and Norman
talk--and then say it over. I think she'd be pleased at finding you
liked something that she did."
"Well, perhaps I might do that. What word did you say--salient?"
"Yes, or basic. That's another word they use a good deal. Perhaps you
might bring them both in."
"Oh, I don't pretend to be learned in that sort of way. And as a matter
of fact I don't really care much for poetry and all that sort of thing.
I'm like you: I like facts."
Judith, having laid her train, returned to serious conversation. "I
don't know why one should be ashamed of it," she said. "But I do keep my
actual tastes rather dark before Pam. Of course she's much cleverer than
I am, and I don't mind her poking fun at me a bit; in fact I rather
enjoy it. But you're the first person I've ever confessed to that I
really like dates and things of that sort. I find them--refreshing. Do
you feel that too?"
Horsham's face lit up. It seemed that he did, and that he had never
forgotten those of the Kings and Queens of England, which he had also
learnt in childhood. They recited them together, with mutual pleasure,
in a sort of measured chant, and laughed heartily when they had done so.
"Of course, that capacity, which we both seem to have, is going to be
very useful to me in my career," Horsham said. "If you can get facts at
your fingers' ends, and keep them there--"
"What career do you mean?" inquired Judith. "I didn't know you'd got
one."
"Oh, yes. Don't tell anybody, because it isn't _quite_ settled yet, but
I'm going to be Private Secretary to--unpaid, of course--to--well,
perhaps I'd better not mention his name, even to you; but he's a Cabinet
Minister. Perhaps I shall try to get into Parliament by and by."
"You can't, if you're a lord, can you?"
He explained that difficulty away for her for ever, so exhaustively did
he handle it. He was going to take politics seriously. He thought it his
duty; but it would also be his pleasure. "I've played the fool a bit,"
he confessed; "but that's all over now. I was young, and--"
He broke off in some confusion. He had suddenly remembered Hugo, and
didn't know how much she knew of the disturbance of three years before.
She knew no more than Pamela, which was scarcely anything; but they had
discussed it together. "You and Hugo played the fool together, didn't
you?" she asked, with a slight frown.
He was rather taken aback by her directness, but he spoke as directly,
after a short pause of reflection. "Hugo was blamed for what was just as
much my fault as his," he said stoutly. "He was older than me--that was
all. It's all over long ago--poor fellow!--and we don't want to think
about it any more."
"I'm glad you've said it like that," she said with a glance of approval
at him. "So will Pamela be. I shall tell her. But don't _you_ say
anything to her about it."
"You don't think--?"
"No, I don't. What you've said is quite enough, and we don't want to
talk about it any more at all. Let's go and find Pamela, and Fred. We
might have another game before tea."
Horsham was quite willing to go and find Pamela, though he had
unexpectedly enjoyed his chat with Judith, who struck him as a girl of
quite remarkable intelligence. He told her so, as they walked together.
"Of course you were only a kid when I was here last," he said, making
allowances for her, and for himself.
"Yes," said Judith. "And you weren't much to write home about, either."
He looked surprised at this speech, until she laughed, when he laughed
too. "You and Pamela both like chaffing a fellow, don't you?" he said.
"I suppose some fellows wouldn't see it, and be offended. But I'm rather
quick at seeing things, and I don't mind."
Judith suddenly felt an immense liking for him, compounded in a curious
way of respect and tenderness. He was a heavily built young man, though
his figure was upright, and had the activity of his youth. His face was
neither handsome nor ugly, but there was a look of honesty and
simplicity in it that gave it character. She felt a strong compunction
at having prepared a trap for him. "I was chaffing you when I advised
you to recite poetry to Pamela," she said hurriedly. "Don't you. At
least, don't recite 'The Wreck of the Hesperus.' She'd think that tosh;
and so do I."
This disturbed him for a moment, but he soon recovered. "I was an ass
not to see what you were driving at," he said. "But you must remember
that _I_ never said I thought that was a fine poem."
"No, you didn't," she said soothingly. "And I don't suppose either of us
really care much for what _they_ would call fine poetry. What I do like
of Longfellow's is his 'Psalm of Life'."
"Do you mean that?" he asked; and when she said she did he repeated
slowly and impressively, as they walked beneath the trees:
"'Life is real, life is earnest,
And the grave is not its goal.
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.'
"Ah, yes. That's poetry. I don't envy people who can't see the beauty of
that."
CHAPTER VIII
WELLSBURY
Sir William and Lady Eldridge were spending the week-end at a great
country house, the seat of a Cabinet Minister with whom Sir William had
worked arduously during the war, to the undoubted advantage of the
Department of which Lord Chippenham had been the head, and also to the
advantage of the British taxpayer. For this Department--or at least that
part of its work for which Sir William had been responsible--had escaped
those accusations of waste and extravagance which were so freely and so
regrettably made. The work had been done quietly, resourcefully and
economically, and there were few who knew anything about its details. In
fact, but for the large number of people who were rewarded for services
during the war of whom nobody had ever heard before their names appeared
in the Honours List, Sir William's knighthood might have aroused
speculation. He had deserved it, at least as well as most, but it was
not generally known what he had done, and there were to be found here
and there those who thought that he had made money out of the war, and
that his knighthood had eventuated in some way out of the money he had
made. As a matter of fact he had done five years' hard work for nothing,
and would have been richer than he was if he had confined his energies
to his own affairs. But that never troubled him. He was rich enough for
all ordinary purposes as it was, even with the ruinous taxation to which
his income was subjected; and now that his public work had been wound
up, and he was free again to work for himself, he was likely to become
richer still.
There had been two flies in the ointment of his public success. One was
that a K. B. E. was hardly a sufficient reward for his valuable
services. He knew how valuable they had been, and that others who had
done work that could not be compared with his had won regards far
higher. He had asked for nothing, and had not breathed to a soul except
his wife the disappointment he had felt at the closing of the chapter.
Perhaps if he had advertised himself more-- But reflection always
brought him the gratifying sense of having done his work not for the
sake of reward, and he was too active and eager in pursuing the aims to
which he had now returned to dwell upon the disappointment. At the same
time his chief had also known the value of his work, and might, if he
had exerted himself, have influenced a higher recognition of it.
The other source of dissatisfaction was a much smaller affair. In fact
he was rather ashamed of allowing it entrance to his mind, and had never
mentioned it to his wife.
Lord Chippenham was an eminent public servant. He was also--or rather
Lady Chippenham was--an eminent personality in the social world. Sir
William had worked with him over years, but had never become intimate
with him. He had dined once or twice with him in London; but in those
strenuous times of the war that meant nothing, and since the war, when
social entertainments were beginning to take their normal course, he had
not even done that. Indeed, Lord Chippenham seemed to have forgotten him
altogether, and he could not help feeling a little sore about it.
But then at last had come the invitation to Wellsbury, the famous
Elizabethan house where it had been Lady Chippenham's pleasure to gather
together parties of all that was most brilliant in the world, not only
of fashion but of art and letters and whatever else could add variety
and interest to her parties. The invitation gave him great pleasure,
which he could not keep from his wife, who took it calmly enough. There
were plenty of what are called "good houses" open to them, and if it had
been their ambition to climb into the social prominence that is
represented by mixing always with those who keep in the busy swim, there
would have been no difficulty about it. That was no more of an end to
him than it was to her; but Wellsbury was different. The climbers were
not asked there; or if they were, their climbing ambitions were not the
qualities most apparent in them. Also, you went to Wellsbury to enjoy
yourself.
Sir William enjoyed himself exceedingly. So did Lady Eldridge, who found
people among the numerous guests whom she liked and who liked her. They
were not all strangers either. The Eldridges had a large circle of
acquaintance in London, which touched other circles, and was always
enlarging itself. There were people at Wellsbury during that week-end
who knew less of the world gathered there than they did.
At least half the guests bore names that were well known, and some were
of real eminence. And there were many young people, who made themselves
merry, and were encouraged to do so, not only by their hostess, who was
merry and high-spirited herself, but by the venerated Minister of State,
who listened with a twinkling eye to the hubbub of talk and laughter
that arose around him, and sometimes contributed to it. He spent much of
his time during the day with the children who were collected there with
the rest, and had a grandchild seated on either side of him at lunch on
Sunday. He was a very charming benign old gentleman in his own lovely
home; the word "harmless" might perhaps have been used to describe him
as he showed himself there, and William Eldridge gained some amusement
from the recollection of episodes in his official hours, when that
epithet would not have seemed suitable.
It did occur to Sir William once or twice during those lovely summer
days to ask himself whether he had been invited to Wellsbury with any
particular object. He and his wife had been received there almost as if
they were habitués of the house; and yet it was over a year since he had
had word with Lord Chippenham at all, and this private recognition of
him was at least tardy. But there was so much to see and to do, in the
great house, full of its wonderful treasures, and full, too, of
agreeable and interesting people, that he gave himself up to the flow
of it all, and put aside the idea of anything to come of the visit
except the pleasure of the visit itself.
Rain came on late on Sunday morning, and though it was not enough to
keep everybody indoors and never looked like continuing, Sir William
took the opportunity of writing a few letters after luncheon. There was
a little panelled room off the billiard-room, which he had seen the
evening before, with just one lovely early Dutch picture in it, and he
went there rather than to his own room upstairs, partly because he
wanted to look at the picture again, partly because of the satisfaction
of making use of as many rooms as possible in this beautiful ancient
house, in which for two days he was at home.
There was nobody in the billiard-room, or in the inner room, which was
open to it, but also in part concealed. He had been there for some
little time when two young men came into the billiard-room and began to
play. He recognized them by their voices as Nigel Byrne, Lord
Chippenham's private secretary, and William Despencer, the youngest son
of the house. He went on writing, being now immersed in what he was
doing, as his habit was, and paid no further attention to them. It did
not occur to him that they would not know that anybody was in the inner
room; he did not think about it at all, concentrated as his mind was on
his writing. The click of the balls and the voices of the young men, who
were playing in desultory fashion and talking all the time, came to him
as an accompaniment to his thoughts, but with no more meaning than the
noises of traffic would have had if he had been writing in a room in
London.
But presently, as he leant back in his chair to consider something, a
phrase struck upon his ear, and he woke up to the disagreeable fact that
they were talking about him, and for all he knew might have been talking
about him for the last ten minutes.
"The Chief thinks a lot of him. He did extraordinarily good work in the
war."
"I know he did. These big business men did make themselves useful--some
of them. Did pretty well out of it too."
"Eldridge didn't."
It was at this point that Sir William woke up to their speech, but what
had come immediately before his name was mentioned, which his ears had
taken in without conveying it to his brain, also turned itself into
meaning.
"Perhaps not; though you never know. Anyhow, he's a new man, and I think
we've saddled ourselves with quite enough of them. I think we ought to
get back to the old sort--the men who come of good stock. They've always
been the backbone of our party, and--"
The speaker was surprised by the appearance of the man he had been
criticizing. Sir William stood in the arched recess at the end of the
room, his pen in his hand, and a smile upon his face.
"I'm awfully sorry," he said. "I've been writing in there, and have only
just realized that you were talking about me."
The young men stared at him in consternation, and he spoke again, with
the air of one who meant to dominate the situation. That was exactly
what he did mean. A sudden crisis always strung him up to the most
effective control of his powers, and he had formed his decision in the
few seconds that had elapsed between the mention of his name and his
standing before them.
"I really haven't been listening," he said. "I was too busy with what I
was doing, or I'd have stopped you before. But I'm not exactly a new
man, you know. You can look me up in a book, if you like. Eldridge of
Hayslope, in Downshire. And I give you my word I haven't made a bob out
of the war." Then he turned to go back to his writing.
William Despencer had been collecting himself during this speech. He was
a young man of a serious cast of mind, conspicuously honest and
straightforward, though of an outlook not of the widest. "I'm sorry you
overheard what we were saying," he said. "And I apologize for the
mistake I seem to have made. I'm glad you corrected me."
Sir William turned to him again, but Nigel Byrne broke in before he
could speak. "You heard me defend you," he said with a pleasant smile,
which, with his attractive appearance and ready speech was part of his
qualification for the position he so admirably filled. "William was
talking generally, and I happened to know that you weren't of the type.
You'd have heard me say so when he came to the end of his speech; but
he's always too long-winded."
"Oh, I don't mind that a bit," said Sir William. "I've been doing the
things that the new men do--and some of the old ones too--for some
years past. It was a natural mistake. I'm only sorry I let you in for it
by keeping quiet in here. To tell you the truth, I wasn't thinking of
you. Perhaps I ought to apologize for that. Anyhow, please forget it."
"We will," said Byrne. "No offence meant and none taken, eh? I was
coming to look for you after William and I had had our little game. The
Chief wants you to go for a stroll with him at half-past three, if it
clears up, and if not, will you go and have a chat with him in his room?
I'll take you to him."
The invitation was so significant that it put out of Sir William's mind
the awkwardness of the late occurrence, as he waited for the time when
the great man should be ready for him. Perhaps it was only a mark of
politeness to a guest, and there would be talk about this and that, but
about nothing that would matter much to him. The work that they had been
engaged upon together was over, and Lord Chippenham was not likely to
want to go back to that. What could he want to see him about then? He
hardly permitted himself to conjecture; but there was a sense of
excitement hanging over him, and he looked many times at his watch as he
went here and there in the house and examined the pictures and the other
treasures of it, with appreciation, but not with all his attention.
When he had left the billiard-room the two young men looked at one
another and Nigel Byrne laughed. "He took it very well, I think," he
said. "Quite a nice fellow!"
William Despencer kept a grave face. "I wish I'd known he was there,"
he said. "Why didn't he let us know he was there when we came in?"
"Oh, I don't think he was eavesdropping. I say, let's look him up. I'm
bound to say I never thought of him as anything but the usual rich city
fellow, with no father to speak of."
"Like Melchizedek. I thought you were going to defend him against my
aspersions, if he'd given you time."
"That was my famous tact, William. Eldridge of what, did he say? Ah,
here it is."
There were current books of reference on a table in the billiard-room,
and Byrne had opened one which dealt faithfully with the County Families
and their genealogies.
"Oh, quite respectable!" he said, as they read the entry together. "He's
next man in, too, do you see? Present man's only son killed in the war.
He was at Harrow and Cambridge. We've done him an injustice, William. If
at any time he likes to make a little contribution to party funds, and
somebody or other recommends him for a peerage, he won't have to begin
everything from the beginning like so many of them."
"Is that the idea?"
"Oh, I wouldn't say that. Peerages aren't bought and sold in the market,
you know, William. You ought to know better than that."
"Well, I still think the mistake was a natural one," said William
Despencer, turning away. "He's too elaborate altogether. Those clothes!
Just what a rich city fellow would wear who'd just discovered Saville
Row."
"They're no better than mine. He's a good-looking fellow and likes to
keep his youth. The Chief thinks a lot of him, you know. He'd like to
work with him too, if he was in Parliament."
"His wife's a nice woman. I shall talk to her this evening. I'm sorry he
heard me say what I did."
The sun had come out by the time Lord Chippenham was ready for his
afternoon walk. Sir William's expectations of a serious talk were a
little dashed when he discovered that it was to be taken in the company
of two little granddaughters and two little dogs, and as they went down
through the gardens and across the park it seemed as if Lord
Chippenham's attention would be chiefly taken up by the four of them.
However, no other grown-up person had been invited to join the party,
and presently the children and the dogs detached themselves, and only
returned to their base now and then, when Lord Chippenham broke off in
whatever he might have been saying and talked to them until they were
off again.
When the walk was over, and Sir William tried to give some concise
account of what had happened to his wife, he found it difficult to put
any particular point to it. Lord Chippenham seemed to want him in some
undefined way, but had made no actual proposal. He ought to be in
Parliament--perhaps as a preliminary to--to office? It almost seemed as
if that were indicated; but it was all so vague, and the children were
always interrupting at the most critical moments. At one time it almost
seemed as if he were hinting that a seat in the House of Lords would be
the simplest way to--to what? Really, it was impossible to say. The only
definite thing that could be taken hold of was that when they had come
in, Lord Chippenham, turning to go into his room, had said: "Well, I
think we could do good work together again, and I hope we shall."
The i's seemed to be dotted to some extent later on in the day by Nigel
Byrne, who made himself agreeable to Lady Eldridge, and told her that
the Chief thought a lot of her husband. "Of course, he ought to be in
Parliament," he said. "Has he ever thought about it, do you know?"
Eleanor thought that was intended as a preliminary to anything that
might be preparing, though why Lord Chippenham or Mr. Byrne couldn't say
so outright she couldn't think. And why had the constituency of West
Loamshire been mentioned as a likely one, to her and not to William?
Politics seemed to be a curiously mysterious game. Still, West
Loamshire, where there was likely to be a vacancy shortly--though this
was not to be repeated--_had_ been mentioned; and, "I suppose your
husband knows George Weldon--the Whip, you know," had been one of the
things said that she had to report. She supposed they were meant to put
two and two together. Probably, if William went to see George Weldon, he
would get on to a more direct path altogether.
They talked it all over, motoring back to London the next morning.
William had sometimes considered a parliamentary career, but not very
seriously. He had been too busy with his affairs to take a great deal
of interest in politics except where they touched his interests. It
would be beginning something all over again, and the preliminary steps
to candidature and election would take up a lot of time and money. But
it would be different if the preliminaries were made easy for him, and
there was something waiting for him that other men had to work up to
through years. He was confident of being able to fill any position that
might come to him, and had enough patriotism to make the prospect of
doing something for his country that he could do better than other
people attractive to him.
Eleanor would encourage him too. She was quite as interested in the
possibilities they discussed together as he was. He knew that she was
not particularly interested in his financial career. It had already
brought them to the point where they had everything they wanted that
money would give them, and that was all that business meant to her. What
was the good of going on for the rest of your life just making more
money? But she had liked him to tell her about the work he had been
doing during the war, and it would be the same if he took up public work
again.
They fell silent for a time, after they had talked it all over, and the
big car carried them easily and swiftly along the country roads.
Wellsbury was a two hours' run from London by the most direct route, but
they were making it rather longer, so as to see more of the country and
to avoid the straight high roads.
Sir William never failed to enjoy a ride in this fine car of his, which
he had recently acquired, at immense expense. He did thoroughly enjoy
all the things that his money bought him, and liked spending it on them;
and the point of satiety which lies somewhere ahead on that road was not
yet in sight with him. He enjoyed the luxurious upholstery of his new
car; and even the well-clothed back of his chauffeur, with the discreet
figure of Eleanor's maid beside it, gave him satisfaction, as adding to
the conveniences of his life and hers. He liked to feel well dressed
too, and that Eleanor should also be so; and that she should be the kind
of woman who carried off beautiful and expensive clothes. He thought
that she looked the equal of any of the women who had been at Wellsbury,
and he was proud of her, and of the notice that had been taken of her.
Whatever might be the result of this visit, or if there should be no
result of it, it stood as a source of completed gratification in itself.
It seemed to have put the seal of success upon his career, and to have
set him where he rightly belonged. It was not the sort of recognition
that could have been gained by the possession of money, though in his
case success in money-making had indirectly led up to it. His
reflections were crossed by a momentary shadow at the remembrance of the
mistake those two young men--or at least one of them--had made about him
yesterday. Surely Lord Chippenham's son might have known that a merely
new rich man would not have been made welcome at Wellsbury as he had
been. There had been no one remotely resembling that breed among the
guests of this party. Still, he had put that right, and it didn't really
matter. He was perhaps aware in the background of his mind that
exuberance was a note to be watchful of; his upbringing and the
standards it had inculcated had made him careful to prune himself. He
would not have been so careful if criticism from time to time had not
shown him the necessity. Edmund, to whom as a young man he had looked up
as the pattern of quiet, self-possessed good breeding, had criticized
him on those grounds. He had never quite lost the feeling that Edmund
was a finer type of gentleman than himself--until lately, when his own
brilliant gifts had brought him into such prominence as Edmund would
never attain to. Now he was a little impatient of that old feeling of
slight inferiority to his brother, and whatever had survived of it
seemed to have been wiped out by this visit to Wellsbury. Edmund would
never have been invited to such a house unless it had happened to lie in
his local zone of dignity as a landowner.
Sir William considered, in the glow of his satisfaction, as he was
carried along between the hedgerows and the full-blossomed trees, the
stock from which he had sprung and the altitudes to which he had arisen,
which wanted some adjustment if he were to be proud of both, as his
inclination was.
A family that went back two or three hundred years, and for most of the
time as landowners in the same county, was something that only a small
minority could claim. Yet the Eldridges had never really done anything
that put them above the ruck of country squires. They had intermarried
here and there with families of higher standing; they had kept their
heads up in the world, and were in all the County Histories--as names,
but little more. Their dignity had hardly extended beyond the head of
the family for the time being. The younger sons were scarcely better off
in that respect than the sons of other men, who could give them the
right sort of education and start in life. He himself had begun life
with no greater advantages than his contemporaries at school and
university of birth not so good as his, and if he had not brought his
own exceptional gifts into play he would have had just the position that
his success at the Bar might have brought him, and no higher. Of course
the altered circumstances brought about by the death of his brother's
heir would have made a great difference to him, at least in prospect;
but that loomed small now. But for the sentimental attachment which he
felt towards the home of his fathers, he would not have cared much now
to be Squire of Hayslope. It would not now be his chief claim to
consideration, and if he had wished he could have bought himself a finer
house than Hayslope and a larger property. Still, Hayslope did mean a
good deal to him, and he was inclined to congratulate himself upon being
content with the enlarged Hayslope Grange as his country house, and the
consequent playing second fiddle to his brother, when he could so easily
have been first somewhere else.
He spoke some of the thoughts which were running through his mind when
he broke the silence to say to his wife: "I'm afraid poor old Edmund is
having a thin time at Hayslope. Hard luck that the owner of a property
like that should be pinched, as most of them are in these days, and we
who used to think ourselves so much less fortunate should have got
quite past them!"
She thought it nice of him to be thinking about his brother's
difficulties at this time. She knew that he was exalted by the visit to
Wellsbury, and the expectation of something to come out of it. He might
have been thought to be full of his own affairs.
"I've had them a good deal on my mind," she said--"Edmund and Cynthia
too, and the girls. But we can do something for them, can't we? I think
I've been able to do something for Cynthia already, and without making
her seem under an obligation."
"Oh, you can do things for Cynthia. But Edmund--he stands so on his
dignity, you see. I think he's inclined to stand too much on his
dignity, at least with me. After all, a country squire--I've come to be
a good deal more than that, and I'm the one person whom he might accept
help from."
"Does he really need help?"
"Oh, he can get along all right, of course. But it's a different life
for him now. I suppose I couldn't expect him to accept money from me so
that they could carry on in the way they did before the war. I'd give it
him readily enough if he would, and be glad to. But there are ways in
which I _could_ help him--one in particular. But one must take him as he
is. We must do what we can for Cynthia and the girls, and I shall always
be on the lookout to do something for him if I can. I've got on and he's
stood still--or gone back, rather. I don't want him to go back any
further."
CHAPTER IX
LETTERS
The Eldridges arrived home in time for luncheon. They lived in a large
house in Belgravia, old enough to have some character of space and
dignity, but old enough also to have been exceedingly inconvenient if
much money had not been spent in modernizing it. It had been their
London home for about fifteen years, and was a trifle behind the latest
fashion in furnishing and decoration. The latest of such fashions, it
should be recognized, rests upon the recognition of the value of older
fashions, which in its fulness dates from a very few years back. There
was plenty of good old furniture in the Eldridges' house, some of it now
of considerable value, but it would have welded itself into quite a
different whole if the "doing up" and furnishing of the house had been
taken in hand some years later than it was. The time was approaching
when Sir William would acquire another, possibly still larger house, and
begin all over again. He was already vaguely dissatisfied with this one;
but it had qualities which pleased him too, and he had never quite lost
the sense of satisfaction with which he had moved into it from a smaller
house and spent money upon making it the place in which they should live
the larger life that was then opening out before them. His own room,
with its outlook upon a little square of walled-in garden, was a very
refuge, and he and his wife sometimes sat there in the few evenings when
they were at home together alone, in a grateful seclusion of green
morocco and bright Turkey carpet, with books and prints on the
Morris-decked walls, and only the huge and hideous American desk, of the
palest possible growth of oak, to indicate the sterner purposes to which
the room was primarily dedicated.
Sir William went into this room on their arrival, and turned over the
pile of letters and papers that were there awaiting him. He opened a few
of them, and glanced over their contents, and then unlocked his desk,
but only to put certain of the papers away. He was too excited to take
up his immediate affairs in the short time that remained before
luncheon, though on ordinary occasions he would have done so, for he
hated wasting even a few minutes of his time.
He had thought over what had happened, and what might happen during the
journey to London. But, coming thus into his familiar room, he seemed to
see it all with a new significance. He had the feeling that he had come
back to this room a different man--a bigger man than the one who had
used it before; and the feeling rather surprised him. For, after all, to
spend a few days in a large country house was no new experience to him,
he had been in close contact with Lord Chippenham before for many months
upon end, and the idea of a seat in Parliament was not entirely a
novelty. What had happened, he decided, as he walked up and down the
room, or stood looking out upon the green and bright colour of the
little paved square of garden, was that he had attained to recognition,
when he had thought that the official chapter of his life was closed. It
set a higher value on it, even to himself. He was not the same man as
had for so long occupied this room, and thought of his public work as
efficiently done for the good of his country, but as already a thing of
the past. The chapter was not closed, but might lead to other chapters,
beyond the present scope of his imagination. It had put him among the
men of his time who counted for something. Lord Chippenham, whatever his
stirring of expectation might have meant, undoubtedly thought of him as
counting for something already. The last year, during which he had
attended to his affairs, and spent as much of his time as he could spare
from them at Hayslope, had only been a lull. His foot was already on the
ladder of distinction, and he might mount on it higher than he had ever
thought of mounting.
He was summoned to luncheon, and took some of his as yet unopened
letters in with him. He did not come to the one from his brother until
he and his wife were alone together.
"Well, I never--!"
Lady Eldridge looked up, to see his face dark and angry. "Read that," he
said, throwing the letter across to her; "the first part, I mean," and
waited till she had done so, though phrases of indignation kept rising
to his lips, which he stifled by occupying them with food and drink, too
hastily consumed.
He did not wait for her remarks, when she looked up again, with
consternation on her face. "You heard what I said about Edmund only
just this morning," he broke out. "I'm always thinking what I can do for
him, and that's the way he treats me in return. Really, it's
incredible!"
"I must say I'm surprised," she said unwillingly as it seemed, and
turned to the letter again.
"It's beyond everything," he went on angrily. "'This treatment must
stop'--what is it that he says? Haven't I always deferred to him at
Hayslope, because he's my elder brother, and lately I've been sorry for
him? What on earth can he mean by writing to me like that? _What_
treatment, I should like to know! I've spent thousands of pounds on his
property, and should never have got a penny of it back if it hadn't been
for Hugo's death. His position on his own ground! What have I ever done
to belittle it?"
She looked up again. "I thought you did consult him about the garden,"
she said.
"Of course I did. I've never left anything of that sort undone, though
under the circumstances in which we stand to one another most men
wouldn't have expected it. But I know what he is where his rights are
concerned."
"But didn't he give his consent?"
Sir William hesitated. "After that letter, I suppose one has to say that
he didn't. But you can see how it was. There was absolutely no reason
for his withholding it. I practically told him I was going to do it, and
he put forward some objections, which I met. He didn't press them, and I
went away thinking it was all understood. If you like to say so, perhaps
I didn't ask his permission at all. It would have seemed absurd to do
so."
"I am very sorry that he has taken it like this. Of course his letter is
unreasonable, but I think it is only meant to assert his rights. He
doesn't mean to stop you going on."
"Oh, I'm not going on in the face of that. I shall wire to Coombe to
stop the work. Besides, he does mean that, doesn't he? Let me read it
again."
She handed over the letter. Her face was disturbed. "I don't think
Cynthia can have seen it before it was sent," she said.
"There's nothing about going on. I'm told that I've overstepped my
rights, and 'this sort of treatment must now stop.' And fancy writing
this! 'I think there's a touch of vulgarity in it.' Vulgarity! It's a
most offensive letter. One would say that he was laying himself open to
quarrel with me. I'm not going to quarrel with him; but I shall be
precious careful not to give him a handle against me again."
"I don't think he wants to quarrel. It's his way. He wouldn't think of
the effect his words might have. I don't think he even wants to stop you
making the garden."
"Oh, I'm not going on with it now. For one thing, this would spoil all
the pleasure of it. After all, I've got other things to think of besides
garden-making at the Grange. It has just been a recreation, but now I
dare say I shall be too much occupied to be able to pay so much
attention to it. Really, you know, it's ridiculous for Edmund to give
himself those airs of superiority over me. I've given way too much to
them in the past. I wouldn't say so to anybody but you, but what _is_
Edmund's position compared to mine? I'm the last man in the world to
give myself airs because of what I've done in the world; and with him
especially I've made nothing of it, because--well, because I've hated
the idea of making a contrast between him and myself. But what I can't
help feeling is that _he_ might consider all that too. I think if I were
the elder brother I should have shown a good deal more pleasure than
_he_ has ever done at whatever success I have had."
"Perhaps he's a little bit jealous. I've thought that sometimes. I don't
think Cynthia is, and perhaps such a feeling might be expected more from
her than from him."
"Of course he's jealous. That's at the root of it all. It's a very
unworthy feeling from one brother to another."
"I don't think he would recognize it as jealousy, and if he detected
such a feeling in himself I think he would be ashamed of it. He _is_
fond of you, there's no doubt about it, and he relies on you, perhaps
more than he knows. He _can't_ mean to quarrel, and if you don't treat
this letter as an offence it will all blow over."
"My dear girl, what would you have me to do? I'm not going to sit down
under it. My position at Hayslope would be impossible if I were to give
in to this sort of thing."
"No, dear, I don't think so. You know Edmund so well. You know that he
is fond of you. You have always liked being near one another, and you've
had little jars before, which have made no difference."
"Nothing like this. I call a letter like that positively insulting."
"It can't have been meant to be that. If you take it in the right way
he'll be sorry for having written it. If you take it as an insult--"
"What _is_ the right way of taking it then?"
She thought for a moment, and said with slightly heightened colour: "You
are bigger than Edmund. If he has made a mistake, you can afford not to
make the same mistake."
His face changed at that. "You always put me right," he said, with a
smile at her. "Yes, of course. Poor old fellow! He's had a lot to try
him. He doesn't get out into the world as I do, and of course he broods
over his troubles. Any little thing upsets him."
She smiled at him in her turn. "That's how I'm sure it is," she said.
"If he does object to this garden plan, it isn't much to give it up, is
it? Just a little extra amusement, as you said."
He laughed, rather ruefully. "I don't like giving up something that I've
set in hand," he said. "But if it will placate my respected brother--"
"Perhaps he won't want you to, if you return him a soft answer."
"I'll do that all right. If a thing's worth doing at all it's worth
doing well. Besides, you've blown away my annoyance, and, after all,
it's more in accordance with my nature to be generous than to be
resentful--don't you think?"
That was just what she did think. He was quick-tempered, but she had had
abundant experience of the quick revulsion of feeling that came to him
when his generosity was appealed to, and loved him for it. Her own
impulsions drove her upon a more level course. He had no idea of the
anger that his brother's letter had aroused in her mind, that had held
her even while she was pleading for him, and that held her still, when
by her prompting he had chased his away from him. Her accusation of
jealousy had been the only sign of it in her speech, and she had
entirely agreed with him when he had stigmatized that as a most unworthy
feeling under the circumstances that had called it forth. It had cost
her an effort to insist upon the ties that held the brothers together.
To her mind, Colonel Eldridge, with his narrow outlook, and his claims
of superiority, was undeserving of the affection which her husband
constantly showed towards him, and showed little enough of it in return,
though it was true that he relied upon his brother, and made use of him.
Still, when she was alone and thought it all over, she was glad that she
had spoken as she had, putting aside her own feelings, and playing, as
she always could, upon his, which were so large and generous. There was
Cynthia to be thought of, who was putting a brave face upon the
restrictions that had so marred her life, and who expressed only to her,
because she was her best-loved friend, what they meant to her. And there
were the dear children, whom she loved, and the more because she had no
daughter of her own. No, it would never have done to allow a breach to
open, as might well have happened, if Edmund's crabbed obstinacy had
been answered in the way it deserved. They were too much bound up
together at Hayslope not to make all allowances for one another, even
where no allowance was rightly due. Besides, the path of tolerance was
always the right path, though it might not be easy to take it.
To Sir William, that path had its allurements. His nature was generous
and he recognized it. It was with a glow of self-gratulation that he sat
down after luncheon to answer his brother's letter; and he enjoyed the
art with which he brought to bear upon it, so that his meaning should be
made plain, and also his large-minded tolerance.
Beginning "My dear Edmund," he first of all wrote fully about the affair
in which he was interesting himself on behalf of his brother. A good
deal depended upon the way in which he dealt with it, and he showed that
his interests were deeply engaged. In fact, something had already been
done, for the Government Department concerned was that of which Mr.
Vincent, one of his fellow guests at Wellsbury, was the head.
"We have just returned from our visit to Wellsbury, and fortunately
Henry Vincent was staying there. I had a talk with him about the
principle of the thing, and I think I may say that I put the right idea
into his head, and that he will act on it generally. I told him that
there was a personal application of it which I wouldn't trouble him
with, and he told me the right man to go to, and said that I could say
he had done so. I shall follow it up to-morrow, and I hope everything
will be satisfactorily arranged. It is fortunate that I was able to talk
it over with Vincent. I had never happened to meet him before, and it
didn't do me any harm to come first into contact with him at Wellsbury."
That was that. Edmund would be pleased at the probability of this
tiresome affair being settled, and perhaps impressed with the ease with
which such settlements were arranged, when it was possible to approach
the well-guarded head of a Department on equal terms.
And now for the other matter! which should be dealt with shortly but
decisively, and cleared out of the way altogether as a source of
complaint.
He considered it for a time. He was sincere in his desire to act
generously in face of an unreasonable attack. But the offence was really
considerable, pointed as it was by that disagreeable charge of
vulgarity, and it was of no use to pretend it wasn't there. He would
give way; but with a gesture. The gesture would be that it was not worth
while bothering about so small an affair, which could best be expressed
in a few lines. Edmund was not to suppose that he had given him
annoyance; the annoyance was past--or nearly so. He clung to the idea of
terseness, but lest it should be misunderstood, the atmosphere of
friendliness might perhaps best be indicated by something more intimate
coming before it.
So he added a paragraph or two about the visit to Wellsbury, the
magnificence of the house, and the illustriousness of the party gathered
there. There was something also about Lord Chippenham in his private
relations. "I had worked with him for nearly four years," he wrote,
"without really knowing him intimately. He is extraordinary in the way
he keeps his public and private lives apart, and one feels it an honour,
even after all this time, to have been accepted on terms of personal
friendship with him."
The kernel of the letter immediately followed.
"I am sorry that I inadvertently went against your wishes in the matter
of Barton's Close. I didn't understand you actually withheld your
consent to the garden-making, or of course I should not have set it in
hand. I have wired to Coombe to stop the work."
That was terse enough. The only thing was that it might settle it too
completely. He didn't want to give up his garden if it could be avoided.
Edmund ought not to be discouraged from asking that the work should go
on, though he would not write anything to show that that was in his
mind. He went on:
"I was rather keen on this addition to the garden, and think it would
have improved the property, if anything. But where Hayslope is
concerned, my chief desire is to work in with your ideas, even where
they differ from mine."
Would Edmund recognize this note of large generosity? It was to be hoped
so--and give way.
He read his brother's letter again, and asked himself whether it was
possible to ignore the rudeness of it. After careful consideration he
added another paragraph.
"I think, my dear Edmund, that your general charge against me of
overriding your wishes and belittling your position at Hayslope can
hardly be seriously made. Such an attitude would be very far from my
intentions, and I cannot charge my memory with any single instance of my
having done so. If I have given you any cause for such an accusation, as
I suppose I must have done, or you would not have brought it against me,
it can only have been because I have been so occupied with affairs
outside Hayslope that I have perhaps treated Hayslope itself as of less
importance than it naturally is to you. If so, I apologize. Hayslope
still holds the warmest corner in my heart of any place in England, or
out of it for that matter. But the world is a large place, and when one
is taking a part, however modest, in dealing with the difficulties that
it is now involved in, the affairs of one small corner of it do not bulk
so large as if one could give all one's attention to them."
He ended resolutely. The intended terseness had already been somewhat
whittled away, and it was not his idea to read Edmund a lecture, or he
might have read him a much longer one. This would suffice. In the future
he might be more closely devoted to the task of putting the world
straight again than he was now, and Hayslope would be of still less
importance to him. If Edmund had his dignity as Squire of Hayslope so
much at heart, it must strike even him that the dignity of a probable
Cabinet Minister--so far had Sir William's aspiring thoughts led him in
the last few hours--was considerably above it. On reading his letter, he
thought that it might have been better to close with the sentence
ending, "my having done so," and omit that beginning, "If I have given
you any cause." But that would have involved rewriting four whole
pages, and the _coda_ was really only a slight fault in the technique of
his protest, and not in its intention. So he left the letter as it was,
and presently posted it himself.
Lady Eldridge also addressed a letter to Hayslope that afternoon, to her
sister-in-law. She usually wrote to her once in the week, and knew that
she would want to hear all about the visit to Wellsbury. But she did not
begin with that.
"Dearest Cynthia:--I am sorry that Edmund is annoyed about the
garden. I am sure _you_ know that neither William nor I would want
to do anything at the Grange that he objected to, but I can't help
thinking that his putting a veto on it is rather unreasonable.
William has telegraphed for the work to be stopped, but I do hope
that Edmund doesn't really mean that the garden is not to be made.
It would be such a disappointment, for you know what fun we have
had in working it all out. William does love Hayslope, and all
that he has done at the Grange. Perhaps in the future he may have
more work to do, and Hayslope will be more of a recreation to him
than ever. So try to get it put right if you can. William thinks
so much of Edmund, and I'm sure Edmund does of William too. He
can't really want to put such a slight on him as this would be. I
think William has shown, by wiring at once for the work to be
stopped, that he doesn't want to go against Edmund. I'm not sure,
from his letter, that Edmund will even have expected that. If not,
do get him to withdraw. I can write this plainly to you, though
perhaps William couldn't to Edmund, after his letter. Men are more
unreasonable than we are, though they prefer to call it logical.
But we can't helping loving them all the same--those that we _do_
love."
Then she went on to tell all about Wellsbury, and gave an amusing
account of their visit, full of light descriptive detail of the men and
women they had met there, with some descriptions from the inside of a
house that was famous throughout the world. But she wrote nothing of
what had been said to her about her husband, and gave no hint of
anything that might be coming to him.
CHAPTER X
RECONCILIATION
The Earl of Crowborough, though he lived in a Castle, and enjoyed a
rent-roll which provided him with everything that was suitable to his
rank in the way of elaborate living, yet shared many simple tastes with
people of less exalted station. Among them was that of propelling
himself about on a tricycle. He had acquired one of those machines in
their early days of solid rubber tires, before the invention of the
safety bicycle, and ridden it for many years, until it became almost a
curiosity, or what the shops call an "antique." He would probably have
continued to ride it until it could be repaired no longer; but riding
through the village of Pershore one morning he had heard somebody--he
never wished to inquire whom--call out: "Here comes that old fool on his
bone-shaker!" After that he had bought a new tricycle of the latest
pattern and its pneumatic tires and easy running had given him a new
delight in his chosen form of exercise and locomotion; so that he could
hardly be persuaded to drive in a motor-car or behind horses when he was
in the country, and would have ridden his tricycle in London if he had
not shrunk from the comments that might reach his ears.
It was on his tricycle that he rode over to Hayslope one afternoon to
look up his old friend, Colonel Eldridge. He did want this
unpleasantness between them ended, and though he believed that he had
been the chiefly injured party, his kindness of heart prompted him to
have done with it all and forget it. He was a creature of habit, and
Hayslope and the people who lived there had come into his life in the
country ever since his childhood. At the height of the recent
disturbances he had never got rid of the feeling of discomfort when
custom had suggested to him that he should ride over to Hayslope, as he
had so often been wont to do, and he had realized that the familiar road
was closed to him. He had continued to visit the Grange, but it was not
the same thing. The Grange was new, at least in its present aspect; the
Hall was the same as he had always known it--a nice comfortable place
full of old memories which kept alive old friendships. There was no
other house within reach of his that he liked so much. And though he
liked William Eldridge, it was Edmund towards whom his deeper feelings
went out. They had been friends for nearly fifty years. Lord Crowborough
did not possess many intimate friends, and there was no special
community of taste between him and Colonel Eldridge, or even of
interest, outside their common interests as neighbouring landowners. But
a tie had grown up between them. Edmund Eldridge did not make the
demands upon his substantial but slow moving intellect that William did;
they were always at ease together.
He could not do without his old friend. Speculation was alien to his
habit of mind, but he did sometimes wonder, during the course of their
estrangement, whether the same sense of blankness might not be working
in Edmund as well. At last he decided to go over and see. He made no
plans as to what he should do if he were received coldly, nor did he
intend to make any appeal. He wanted Edmund again, and it was in his
mind, though not consciously defined as an expectation, that Edmund
would be glad to see him.
Behold him, then, laboriously pedalling up the drive to Hayslope Hall on
a warm afternoon, a not undignified figure, though his large form
lurched and swayed as he took the rise, and his chosen form of country
costume was a suit of pepper and salt and a high-crowned felt hat. But
for his coloured tie, he might have been taken for a country parson of
the older school, and he would not have been displeased at the
comparison, for he was a pillar of the church on its official side, and
had a greater regard for its religious significance than many of its
supporters in that aspect.
Life was pursuing its ordinary course at Hayslope Hall on a summer
afternoon. In these leaner times lawn tennis was apt to be the chief of
its recreations, and the excuse for the gathering together of
neighbours. There were several of them in the garden as Lord Crowborough
was convoyed across the lawn, mopping his super-heated brow, and wishing
that his first appearance were a little less public. Colonel Eldridge
was playing; but he left off immediately, and after greeting his old
friend called to somebody else to take his place in the game, though
Lord Crowborough begged him to continue it.
Colonel Eldridge was not a man to show his emotions except occasionally
that of annoyance, but they were strong within him as his eyes fell upon
the familiar figure advancing towards him, and would have made it
impossible for him to continue the game, though he was in the middle of
his service.
He had never realized until that moment--perhaps he had forbidden
himself the realization--how warm a corner there was in his heart for
this tall, bulky figure, and how empty that place had been of late. The
last vestiges of resentment against him melted away completely. He was
as glad to see him as he had ever been to see anybody.
But nothing of this showed in his face, hardly even the pleasure, as he
shook hands with him, and said: "Halloa! Tricycled over? Afraid you've
got rather warm."
A little later they were sitting together indoors, in grateful coolness,
and there was a tumbler at Lord Crowborough's elbow, which, however,
contained nothing alcoholic. No word had been said about the late
dispute, but the two men were on their old terms. There was gratitude in
the minds of both of them, but it did not show in their speech, which
was level and unconcerned.
They talked first chiefly about the land, and the difficulties of
landlords, with special reference to Mr. Henry Vincent, and whether he
knew anything about the conditions of landowning at all or was only out
to screw as much as possible out of the unfortunate landlord. The
question admitted of some doubt, and there were instances to be brought
forward in support of either view. The matter that was engaging Colonel
Eldridge's attention at this time, which also affected Lord Crowborough,
was fully discussed, and Sir William's name came up in the course of
discussion.
"I don't think he knows Vincent," said Colonel Eldridge; "but I suppose
it would be easy for him to get an introduction. He has the whole
business at his fingers' ends, and is keen to get it settled on the
lines we've agreed upon."
"William's a very capable fellow," said Lord Crowborough. "If he throws
himself into a question of this sort he's likely to get it put
through--unless he puts their backs up."
"Why should he do that?"
"Well, I've a great admiration for William, and of course it has been a
pleasure to me, knowing him ever since he was a boy, to see him climb up
the ladder; he did extraordinary good work during the war; I've heard
fellows say so. But I've met people who say that--well, that he does put
people's backs up; that he's got a way of pushing his own ideas, and
won't listen to anything against them. _I_ don't say it, mind you."
"I think it's a very unfair accusation." Colonel Eldridge spoke warmly,
and it delighted Lord Crowborough's heart to hear him. He even disposed
himself to increase his indignation, because if they two could dispute
upon a subject, as they always had done, and still remain fast friends,
the larger dispute which had set them at enmity for a time must hold out
no further danger.
"Well, that's what a number of people do say," he said dogmatically.
"Then you ought to contradict it if they say it to you. You know
William."
"Oh, yes; and I like William. Nobody likes William more than I do, but
he does set great store by his own opinion. It's a very good thing, if
you're running a business or whatever it may be. Make up your mind what
you want done and don't listen to the people who want it done
differently. I dare say that's all it really means. Still, that's the
general opinion of William, and there's no good shutting your eyes to
it. Besides, you must have had experience of it yourself. You and
William get on very well here--better than most brothers would, I dare
say--but if William wants his own way I'll bet he takes it."
Lord Crowborough went rather beyond what he had grounds for saying here,
for the sake of keeping up that mood of opposition which under the
circumstances was gratifying to him, and was not prepared to give
chapter and verse for his statement, as he was now requested to do.
"Has anybody told you that? What do you mean by it exactly? Is there any
gossip about any dispute between William and me? It would annoy me very
much if it were so."
"Oh, I don't say that, Edmund. You know best what's passing between you
and William."
Colonel Eldridge jumped to conclusions. "It's damnably annoying how
things get put about, and exaggerated," he said. "William and I are the
best of friends--always have been; but each of us has got his own way
of looking at things and sometimes I don't say we don't have a little
breeze, which makes no difference, or we shouldn't have chosen to live
here close together for so many years."
"That's true enough; though of course it's William who has chosen to
live here, for you can't help yourself."
"That's a foolish way of putting it. If I hadn't let William do what he
liked with the Grange he wouldn't have wanted to live here; there
wouldn't have been a house for him. It hasn't altogether suited me what
he has done there, but I've let him do it because I like having him
there."
"I suppose as he and his boy will come after you it doesn't so much
matter what he does. I must say I shouldn't like, myself, to have a
house of that sort growing up within a stone's throw of my own. I should
think the Grange is as big as this house now, isn't it? And with William
I should never be surprised to see it a good deal bigger. He's a fellow
who likes spending his money and never seems satisfied with what he's
got."
"There's some truth in what you say there, and as a matter of fact
William and I have discussed that very question. He is making an
addition to his garden there at this very minute. I dare say gossip has
got about that I objected. Well, I did tell him that I thought it had
gone quite far enough, and I shouldn't care for any further additions to
be made."
"But you didn't stop him making this one?"
"Of course I didn't. I tell you that we understand one another
thoroughly."
"There you are then. In the long run it comes to this, that he does
exactly what he likes, which is what I said at the beginning. Still,
William's a good fellow, and I know he's devoted to you; I've reason to
know it. I should like to have a brother of that sort myself, but my
brother Alfred has always been a nuisance to me, with his schemes for
making enormous fortunes which never came off. It's different when your
brother has a lot more money than you have. It's a very good thing, with
all the burdens they're heaping on land nowadays, to have money brought
into a property from outside. I suppose William could buy another place
now, if he wanted to. I rather admire him for sticking to Hayslope, and
if it amuses him to spend money on the Grange--well, it's because he
likes it better than any other place."
Colonel Eldridge walked to the lodge gates with Lord Crowborough, who,
mounted on his machine, suited his pace to his. They parted with much
good will on either side, though with no more than a "Good-bye then for
the present" to show it.
As he walked slowly back to the house, his heart was tender within him.
It was almost worth while to have quarrelled with this old friend to
have him back on the old terms again. But quarrelling was never worth
while. He had come rather near to quarrelling with William over that
affair of Barton's Close. He remembered with some compunction that he
had spoken angrily to his wife about it, and had written to William
with more irritation than he now liked to think about; though he had
shown in the latter part of his letter that the strength of his protest
was not meant to go deeper than its expression. William had not yet
answered his letter, as there would have been just time for him to do,
which seemed to show that he had not taken it in offence; and the work
of his garden was still going on. Colonel Eldridge had been inclined to
take exception to that, although he was quite prepared for it to go on.
It would have been better if William had written, saying that he had not
understood his objection as serious, or something of that sort. It gave
some colour to Crowborough's criticism of his way of pushing through his
intentions. But it was true, what Crowborough had also said, that he
loved Hayslope, and preferred to spend his money there rather than to
make another place to his liking. Colonel Eldridge well knew that itch
for improvement, and more improvement, and had acted upon it himself in
the days when there had been money to spare for that sort of thing. He
now thought of his protest as altogether exaggerated, and wished he
hadn't made it. He was even inclined to be interested in the new garden
that William had designed, and thought that he might be able to suggest
some slight improvement in the details of the design when they came
together on it, with the protest put aside and forgotten.
As he walked slowly along on the grass by the drive, with the wide acres
of his park surrounding him, the sheep and cattle feeding peacefully, or
lying in the shade of the trees in which he took pride, he thought of
himself as too apt to get annoyed about trifles.
It had not always been so. He was rigid in the demands he made upon
others, but he thought about them kindly too--even his servants, whom he
treated with old-fashioned stiffness, but whose welfare he would take
pains to promote; much more the members of his family, in whose
happiness his was bound up. He was the head of his house, and that must
be recognized by everybody around him. But his rule was not exercised
for his own exclusive benefit, and it had been his pride not to make it
irksome by indulgence in transitory moods.
He was more at peace with himself at this moment than he had been since
his troubles had come upon him. He saw that the trouble about money had
loomed too large in his mind. There was enough money to have in the
quiet way in which life had been going at Hayslope Hall, now for some
time past. Cynthia was making herself happy in it; the children were
happy. Why shouldn't he be? For the first time he caught a glimpse of a
life lived more closely to the soil than it had come to be lived in such
houses as his before the war. In the time of his great-grandfather,
before a rich marriage had brought more money into the family, when a
London house had been added to the country one, and the country house
keyed up to a more elaborate style, Hayslope had been occupied for by
far the greater part of the year, with a rare visit to London or Bath,
or to the country houses of friends or relations. There were old letters
and diaries in the library which told of the life that had centred at
Hayslope in those days. It was far simpler than the life that he and his
had lived there before the war, but it seemed to have contented those
who lived it.
They saw the seasons in and out, and each had its duties as well as
pleasures. Guests would be entertained for weeks together, and live the
daily life of their hosts; they seemed to see even more of their country
neighbours, who lived in the same way as they did, with their recognized
indoor and outdoor pursuits to fill the days, and their merry-makings in
company, more eagerly looked forward to than the more frequent and
elaborate amusements of to-day. The great charm of those days seemed in
part actually to rest upon the difficulty of communication with the
world outside, which concentrated the sweets of life upon the country
home. And where the home was of the spacious and well-provided kind of
Hayslope Hall, it must have been more cherished than if it were only
resorted to for periods in the year, and even those periods broken up by
frequent departures elsewhere.
Perhaps that old stay-at-home life of the country house would come back
of compulsion, now that so many people were straitened in circumstances.
It would be a good thing in many ways if it did; if the men who owned
the land lived more closely to it, and identified themselves with those
who were bound to it. That was a larger question; but there was no doubt
that it could be made a satisfying life, if the necessary changes were
squarely faced and accepted, and the life was arranged on a new basis.
It came to his mind, with a gratifying sense of discovery, that for him
and his family that basis had already been found. It only remained to
cease always casting back towards what had been before and could now be
no longer. The best part remained, and life for him and his at Hayslope
might be happy as it had ever been.
And the other deeper trouble was clearing too. He was glad that it had
been mentioned between him and his old friend, whom for a time it had
parted. At the last, as they had gone down the drive together, Lord
Crowborough had said to him, quite simply: "We fell out about your poor
boy, Edmund. I don't want to go away and leave him as something that
must never be mentioned between us. It was a sad business, but for him
it was wiped out when he fought well and was killed. He was your only
son, and you've lost him. I've been more lucky in keeping mine."
That had put the finishing touch to their reconciliation. Hugo's lapses
could be forgotten now, as they had been forgiven. They had been bad.
For a long time after his death one trouble after another had come
because of him, one revelation after another had been made. He had kept
them nearly all to himself. Only his brother knew something of them, and
he knew by no means all. His wife knew nothing. But an end seemed to
have come to it at last. The burden on his mind was lifting, though it
still lay heavy upon his purse, and would mean rigid economy for years
to come.
How good William had been about it all! A real consolation and support
in his troubles, and willing, as he was able, to lift even the money
burden of them from him. He blamed himself for having shown the
irritability that had grown upon him, under the stress he had gone
through, towards his brother. It was a poor return for what he had been
so ready to do for him, to make a mountain out of that little molehill
of irritation over Barton's Close. But William would not make too much
of that. Perhaps the very best way to show him that it had been only a
surface irritation, which did not affect the permanent tie of affection
between them, would be to accept the help that he had so freely offered.
Only pride had held him back, and that had prevented him from even
acknowledging the generosity of the offer. He had simply put it aside.
With that burden removed, scarcely any trouble would remain to him at
all. He had already everything that was necessary to his own life for
the remainder of his years. It was only upon Cynthia and the children
that the economies which now had to be practised bore hardly. With this
relief, which it was open to him to take at any time, he could give them
more--if not all that he would have been able to give them but for the
war. And he knew that William would be pleased if he w
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