CHAPTER I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII.

BELCHAMBER

BY
HOWARD OVERING STURGIS

AUTHOR OF
‘TIM,’ ‘ALL THAT WAS POSSIBLE’


Westminster
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE
AND COMPANY, LTD.
1904



Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty


TO

WILLIAM HAYNES SMITH

CHAPTER I

Belchamber is one of the most beautiful places in England. The name, if not the house, dates from days when Norman-French was the polite language of our kings; the reigning monarch, some early Henry or Edward, alighting for the night, as was the habit of reigning monarchs, at the house of his vassal, and having been especially pleased with something about the apartment prepared for his use, is said to have remarked in high good humour, ‘Pardie! tu as là une belle chambre.’ Something of old-world scandal hung about the legend (which in its authorised form is just a little bare and dull for the nucleus round which gathered the fortunes of a noble family), tales of frail beauty not insensible to a royal lover, of feudal complaisance, not to be more overtly acknowledged than by this gracious allusion to the belle chambre, from which the domain was to take its name.

The house, as the humblest tourist may see for himself on certain days of the week, is an exquisite Jacobean structure borrowing largely from the Renaissance palaces of Italy, yet with a certain solid British homeliness about it, that specially fits it for its surroundings, the green undulations of an English park. The view from the front is sufficiently extended, and behind it, the various Dutch and Italian gardens are interspersed with water-works and statues like a miniature Versailles. Great oaks and ashes and Spanish chestnuts stand in the park, and four large avenues of elms draw their straight lines across it to the four points of the compass. The little river, which in the woods and meadows is a natural shallow trout-stream with loosestrife and ragged robin fringing its banks, is pressed in the gardens into many curious uses—fountains and cascades, and oblong rectangular fish-ponds, where old carp and goldfish circle in and out among the stalks of foreign water-lilies sunk in hampers. The huge lawn behind the house is shaded by cedars of Lebanon, that are such a characteristic feature of Restoration places, and there is one that disputes with the famous tree at Addington, and I dare say with half a dozen others, the doubtful glory of being the oldest cedar in England.

Of the thousands of acres of which the property consists, the farms and manorial rights, the livings in the gift of the owner, it is not necessary that I should give a catalogue; it is not the business of the novelist to value for probate, but if possible to convey a vague but imposing impression of wealth and position. Suffice it that the Lord of Belchamber is ground-landlord of the greater part of three large parishes, and that in the county of his residence alone no less than three beneficed clergymen sit in their comfortable rectories by the grace of a sickly young man of no very definite religious beliefs, without counting his lordship’s domestic chaplain, who ministers to the spiritual needs of a small army of in-and out-door servants and their families in the little tame church that is, so to speak, tethered on the lawn.

Belchamber has suffered but little at the hands of restorers; the family have always taken a sort of lazy pride in the beautiful house, which luckily seldom rose to the point of desiring to improve it. The third marquis, to be sure, had some formidable projects for remodelling the building, of which the plans remain in a great Italian cabinet in the hall; but his two favourite pursuits combined to save his home, for he lost so much money at cards that even he drew back before the large expense involved, and while he still hesitated, a bad fall out hunting cut short his building projects with his life. That was more than a hundred years ago, when gambling and unpaid debts were indispensable parts of the ideal of a gentleman.

If Charles James, third Marquis and eighth Earl of Belchamber, lost large sums at the club gaming-tables when he came up to the House of Lords, and died as he had lived, in the hunting-field, his successor, George Frederick Augustus, the fourth marquis, in no way fell short of his respected parent’s example. He played as high, drank as deep, and rode as hard as his father, while he imported into his excesses just that flavour of vulgarity which the bucks of the Regency copied so successfully from their master and pattern. He kept two packs of hounds, and several establishments in addition to his acknowledged and legitimate residence; and if he did not break his own neck, he at least broke his wife’s heart, not to mention such unconsidered trifles as his word, and a large quantity of beautiful old china, when in liquor. Belchamber saw him but little; he preferred London and Brighton, and one of his smaller places which was in a better hunting-country; and here once more the very vices of its owners seemed to conduce to the preservation of the beautiful house and its treasures. The books, the celebrated Vandykes, and the painted ceilings suffered somewhat from want of fires; but neglect has never been so fatal to works of art as attention, and if the pictures cracked and faded a little, at least they were not burnt, or repainted, or buried under a deposit of coachbuilder’s varnish.

To the poor lady, who was occasionally brought from the seclusion of her lord’s hunting-quarters to be exhibited at a drawing-room in the family emeralds and diamonds, a son and heir was born, who received in common with so many of the children of that date the names of Arthur Wellesley. This was the fifth marquis and tenth earl, and the grandfather of the hero of this book. Marquis Arthur differed from his father and grandfather only in his mode of getting rid of money. If he played less, he made up for it by losing large sums on the turf, and by a generally luxurious and extravagant style of living. He was a notorious beauty, and had a straight nose, and an immense bushy pair of whiskers, which were fatal to the peace of mind of great numbers of the fair sex; he was inordinately vain, and a woman had only to tell him she was in love with him, and that she had never seen a man with such small feet, to get anything she wanted out of him. He frittered away more money over bouquets and scent and ugly jewellery than his father and grandfather had lost in their longest nights at Crockford’s. His triumphs over female virtue were so numerous and notorious that many thought he would never give a hostage to fortune in the shape of a wife of his own. But when the nets of the fowler had been spread for many years in the sight of this volatile bird of gay plumage, he surprised every one by bringing home a bride from across the Channel.

If report said true, this beautiful young woman revenged the wrongs of her sex, and of many husbands, most thoroughly on her whiskered lord, who was not her master. At first it was impossible to Lord Charmington (as he then was) to believe that any woman he honoured with his affection could fail to be madly in love with him; then as the conviction grew upon him (and ideas came to him slowly), there were furious scenes of recrimination, anger, and jealousy on his side, and cold contempt and indifference on hers. More than once they were within a short distance of the divorce court; but his vanity never could be reconciled to the thought of appearing coram populo in the character which to him seemed always the most ludicrous and humiliating possible. His wife soon discovered this weakness, and traded on it freely. If she was not a very clever woman, he was a more than ordinarily stupid man, so that he learned to dread her tongue almost as much as the ridicule that must attach to him in case of a scandal. He also began to take a certain pride in her position both in London and Paris. She was certainly for many years one of the most conspicuous figures in the society of both capitals; and if the more particular and old-fashioned ladies held up their hands in horror at the stories told of her, she had a large share in introducing a different standard of morals for the younger set, in which she was always a leader. When no longer in her first youth, she was one of the galaxy of beautiful women who adorned the Second Empire, and though at the severer Court of St. James she was less smiled upon, there were not wanting circles in the land of her adoption hardly less august, and infinitely more congenial, where she was not only received, but highly popular.

Through long years which converted her contemporaries into invalids or grandmothers, in which her husband grew fat and coarse, and took to drink and low company, in which children were born to her, two of whom died in infancy, in which her eldest son and one daughter grew up and married, in which her grandsons were born, and her son died, she remained always ‘the beautiful Lady Belchamber,’ always in the world, and of the world, immutably ‘gay,’ and fast, and frivolous, following the same dreary round of fashionable existence year in and year out, bedizened in jewels not always virtuously come by, dressed and head-dressed in the latest mode, and absorbed in the newest craze or pastime with women who might have been her daughters, and men who were sometimes the sons of her early lovers. As her natural charms faded, they were of course replaced by art; the raven locks that had been admired by Louis Philippe at first only took on an inkier black, then grew a little brown, and passed through dull burnished copper to a rich golden red, while the cream-white skin grew more and more rosy in sympathy. Gradually, as fashion artfully disarranged the hair of its votaries, and the wig-makers’ art developed and improved, so much of her ladyship’s elaborate coiffure came to be false, that it could be almost any colour she chose without inconvenience, and was even known to vary with her gowns.

As for her husband, the flattery of women being as the breath of his nostrils, it was only natural that the older and less attractive he became, the lower he went in the social scale in search of it. The poor little feet that had stepped so nimbly on the hearts of many frail ones, began to spread in the vain attempt to support the Silenus-like body, and, cramped in tight boots, carried their tottering owner into very queer byways indeed. The beautiful nose swelled and grew purple, the Hyperean curls, much thinned at the temples, were still carefully oiled and arranged, and with the famous whiskers became more hyacinthine in hue with each advancing year. When I was a young man, this poor, foolish, wicked old marquis was still strutting about Pall Mall, and ogling the women, with a few other bucks of his own generation, padded, laced, and dyed. I dare say there are bad old men still, but they are bald, and have grey beards, and are somehow not so ridiculous as Lord Belchamber and his peers were. He and his wife met but seldom, and though he sometimes grew quite eloquent over the way she treated him, he was not really unhappy; after all, he was leading just the same life he always had, and if his companions were coarser and commoner, his taste had coarsened too, and the dull, bloodshot eyes had lost their keenness of vision and grown less critical. He outlived his son, and did not die till after the Franco-Prussian war. Almost the only remark of a purely sentimental nature he was ever known to make was on the subject of the siege of Paris and the fall of the Empire. ‘Poor old Paris!’ he said. ‘I’ve had many a good time in Paris, though I did meet my wife there, damn her! but I shouldn’t care to go there again, hanged if I should, with everything so changed, and all that——’

We shall have nothing more to do with him in this work, except to bury him, which, by and by, we will do with befitting pomp. Of direct influence he never had the smallest on any living creature, but who shall say what mysterious legacy of evil tendencies he may have bequeathed to his descendants? The question of heredity is very fashionable just now, but remains not a little obscure; and perhaps it is safer in the interests of morality that we should not know too exactly how little responsibility we have for our bad actions, and how much we can shuffle off on to our grandfathers and grandmothers. Whether it was the result of heredity or education, or a mixture of the two, the children of such a couple did not start in life with the best chance of being quiet, reputable people, and the two who survived the disorders of infancy were left to bring themselves up very much as fortune willed. Lady Eva was a very pretty girl who seldom saw her mother, left entirely to French maids and governesses, and mainly educated on the novels of that country, which she abstracted from her mother’s boudoir and read on the sly, generally with the connivance of her instructress, on condition that she passed them on to her. Lady Belchamber used sometimes to see this official, when she thought of it, for five minutes while her hair was being done.

‘Lady Eva se comporte bien?’

‘Parfaitement, ma’m la marquise.’

‘Qu’est-ce qu’elle apprend? voyons.’

‘Lady Eva étudie, en ce moment, comme géographie, l’Asie orientale, la Chine, le Japon; comme histoire, le dix-septième siècle, les guerres de Louis XIV., la guerre civile en Angleterre, la restauration de Charles II.; comme langues, Italien, I Promessi Sposi, Allemand, la Maria Stuart de Schiller, Français, Le Cid de Corneille; comme mathématique——’

‘Assez, assez! ne faites pas trop étudier cette p’tite, vous en ferez un bas bleu. Elle va bien?’

‘Parfaitement, milady. Désirez-vous voir Lady Eva?’

‘Pas ce soir; je n’ai pas le temps.’

Once, some one asked the little girl to give her mother a message. ‘I will write to her,’ the child said, ‘it will be quicker.’ They were living in the same house.

When in due course she was presented and made her appearance in the world, she was very much admired. At nineteen she was engaged to two men simultaneously, and got out of the difficulty by running away with a third, a rather shady hanger-on of her father, called Captain Morland, who not long afterwards had to disappear from society, owing to an unfortunate difficulty that he experienced in confining himself to the strict laws of the game, at cards. Thenceforth they lived mostly abroad, and little was heard of them. Lady Belchamber, who was not an unkind woman, used to write to her daughter sometimes, and send her old dresses and hats; and the old lord, when on the continent, would have the couple to live with him, and give them money. He had a sneaking kindness for Morland, which he never quite got over, finding him a congenial companion; and his son-in-law was very patient in listening to his tender confidences. Lord Charmington, who was two years older than his sister, had the better chance that comes to boys of being sent away to school. Unfortunately for him, the one thing he did not inherit from his parents was the naturally strong constitution that was common to them both. Lady Belchamber, though herself a marvel of strength and vitality, came of an extremely old family, of which the blood, enfeebled by much marrying of cousins, had had time to run very thin indeed; and though the Chambers stock was originally strong and healthy, the excesses of the last three bearers of the title had not tended to the transmission of a fine physique to their descendants.

From his childhood poor Charmington was a rickety, feeble lad, and more than once came within a tittle of sharing the fate of his younger brothers, instead of surviving to be the father of our hero, in which case this book would never have been written. If he could have stayed out his time at Eton, it might have done much for him, for he was not without some naturally kindly qualities, though he was as stupid as an owl, and never could learn to spell the simplest words. In those days there existed no ruthless law of superannuation, and he might have remained contentedly in fourth form till he was nineteen, had it not been for his unfortunate health: he was always ill, and always having to be taken away and sent to the seaside, or abroad, in the care of any one who could be got to go and look after him. This employment fell as often as not to his future brother-in-law, Captain Morland, than whom a worse companion for a growing lad could hardly be found, and where he could be, Morland found him, and introduced him to his charge. By the time he was twenty, the lad was an accomplished little rip, gambler, and spendthrift, and had materially impaired his already feeble constitution. He was bought a commission in the household cavalry, but at the end of a few years, having come to the end of everything—health, money, credit, and the limits of his father’s patience—he was thenceforward lost to the service of his country.

After a severe hæmorrhage of the lungs, he was ordered to winter abroad, and by way of retrenching and building up his strength, he selected Nice as a quiet inexpensive winter resort, with the chance of a little congenial amusement, in the nearness of the tables at Monte Carlo. Here he found his sister and her husband (whose little trouble at the club had befallen the year before) hanging on to the fringe of society. But here, too, he encountered that veteran statesman, the Earl of Firth, who with his wife and two daughters was recruiting his strength after his retirement from public life at a villa in the neighbourhood. The Morlands were established at Monaco, where the Firth party never set foot, so Charmington had no difficulty in keeping his disreputable brother-in-law out of sight of his new acquaintances. He began to frequent the villa of the old Scottish peer with quite surprising assiduity. Just what there was in either Lady Sarah Pagley or her surroundings to attract a man like Charmington will always remain a mystery. Perhaps the jaded, invalid young man found something of the home atmosphere he had never known among these prosy folk; perhaps the blameless dulness of their lives was rather restful to him; or it may be that he took refuge with them from Morland’s incessant appeals for the money of which he himself was so sorely in need. It has been suggested that he paid court to Lady Sarah from mercenary motives, but to a man of his tastes and traditions her modest £15,000 would have seemed a very trifling price to receive for the surrender of his liberty; and if a rich marriage had been his object, there were wealthier maidens scattered along the Mediterranean shore, who would not have despised the suit of a marquis’s only son. He himself explained his choice to a wondering friend by saying that she was the woman most unlike his mother that he had ever met.

With mere carnal charms the Ladies Pagley were somewhat scantily equipped. They were both fairly well-grown young women, healthy and vigorous; Lady Sarah, as she was the elder, was also slightly the taller of the two. Both wore their smooth brown hair divided in the centre and brushed plainly down behind their ears, a fashion from which Sarah has never departed to this day. Both were badly dressed, and either, in whatever part of the world she was met, would unhesitatingly be pronounced to hail from the British Isles, by people who had never seen an Englishwoman before. Sarah was religious, Susan political, each following the bent of one parent, for Lord Firth had been a member of several Cabinets, and divided his time between nursing his gout and studying blue-books, whereas Lady Firth dosed her body with quack medicines and her soul with evangelical theology. But the old lord had the ingratitude to prefer the daughter who reflected her mother’s tastes. ‘They are both dour women to tackle, my daughters,’ he would say; ‘but Sally’s not unkindly in matters where religion is not in question, whereas Susie has no bowels, none at all.’ Lady Susan was a great talker, and loved argument for its own sake; but Lady Sarah was reserved, silent, and really very shy for all the grimness of her aspect. If it did not seem profane to think of beauty in connection with either of them, who considered it so little, I should say that Susan was the prettier of the two, having a better complexion than her sister, and hair of a brighter, redder shade of brown.

There never were two girls more predestined by nature for old maids, or better fitted to meet the cold world single-handed; and yet they both married, and married what is called ‘well,’ while many of their fairer and more eager sisters were left ungathered on the stem. Susan was led to the altar by a West Country baronet and M.P., Sir Charles Trafford, while Sarah, to every one’s surprise, became in due time Lady Charmington. If it will remain a puzzle what drew her husband to her, it is still more insoluble what attraction she found in him. Old Lady Firth, for all her piety and her sermons, was not above a little worldly gratification that her plain elder daughter at seven-and-twenty should marry the heir to a marquisate and a historic house; but I honestly think Lady Sarah was little swayed by these considerations. She may have felt a thrill at the thought of the power her position would one day put into her hands, but for its own sake she valued that position very lightly. Perhaps poor Char’s weakness appealed to her strength, and his wretched state of health stirred that pity that was so carefully concealed in her proud heart. Perhaps her missionary zeal awoke at the thought of plucking from the fire a brand that was already little more than an ember. No doubt both these feelings worked for him, but I am inclined to think that his most potent advocate was the fact that he was the first man who had ever made love to her. No woman hears those magic accents for the first time unmoved, and if she has reached Lady Sarah’s age without the faintest breath from the wing of Romance, the effect of them is not thereby lessened. Be that as it may, this sick dissipated boy, who was three years her junior, and whose past life had been made up of everything of which she most disapproved, succeeded where a better man might have been very likely to fail, and they were married with great splendour during the ensuing season in London, the occasion being one of the few on which her husband’s parents were ever seen together in public. Lord Firth and his son, Lord Corstorphine, looked very sulky at the wedding, but Lady Firth was all tears and benedictions, and old Belchamber, after much champagne at the breakfast, became quite maudlin over the consideration of his son’s respectable connections. ‘It’ll be the making of Char,’ he hiccoughed into the ear of the sympathetic Lady Firth. ‘Ah, if I’d had such a chance, now! if I’d married a different kind of woman, she might have done anything with me——’ The lady with whom he had just been celebrating his silver wedding was radiant in sky-blue silk and white lace flounces and a Paris bonnet all Marabout feathers and humming-birds. ‘I don’t envy Char,’ she wrote to her daughter, who did not come over for the wedding. ‘Dieu! what people those Firths! Heureusement, they won’t want to see much of me.’

Very likely Lord Belchamber was right, and Sarah might have made something out of the unlikely material she had taken-in hand. Her influence over Charmington was enormous, and he both loved and feared her. She nursed him, ruled him, and generally watched over him, protecting him alike from the scorn of her kinsfolk and the bad influence of his own; she rigorously kept both wine and money from him, doling them out in infinitesimal doses. If she allowed no questioning of her authority, she accomplished the miracle of awakening some glimmerings of self-respect in him, and she bolstered up his shattered constitution so that he lived four years with her, during which she bore him two sons; but his lungs were too seriously affected for the imperfect science of the sixties to heal, and in spite of all her care he did not live to be thirty, dying, as has already been said, while that elderly Adonis, his father, was still figuratively wearing the family coronet.

CHAPTER II

The world is like a huge theatrical company in which half the actors and actresses have been cast for the wrong parts. There are heavy fathers who ought to be playing the lover, and young men on whose downy chins one seems to see the spectre of the grey beard that would be suitable to their natures. Perhaps the hardest case is theirs who by their sex are called upon to ‘have a swaggering and martial outside,’ ‘a gallant curtle-axe upon their thigh,’ and yet, like Rosalind in her boy’s dress, start and turn faint at the sight of blood. The right to be a coward is one of the dearest prerogatives of woman. No man may be one with impunity, and it is precisely the women who are the first to despise him if he be. Those who are born with the gift of personal courage (and they are happily the greater number) have no adequate idea of their blessing. To be in harmony with one’s environment, to like the things one ought to like—that surely is the supreme good. If that be so, then few people have come into the arena of life less suitably equipped for the part they had to play than the subject of this history.

Charles Edwin William Augustus Chambers, Marquis and Earl of Belchamber, Viscount Charmington, and Baron St. Edmunds and Chambers, for all his imposing list of names and titles started in life without that crowning gift—wanting which all effort is paralysed—a good conceit of himself. And in fact, except for the gewgaw of his rank, which sat on him as uneasily as a suit of his ancestral armour, he had not much that would win him consideration from the people among whom his lot was cast. From his father he inherited his feeble constitution, his irresolution and want of moral courage, from his mother her sallow complexion and lack of charm, her reserve and shyness, and the rigid conscience which a long line of Covenanting ancestors had passed down to her, and which in him, who had none of their counterbalancing force of character, tended always to become morbid. In his babyhood he had been called Lord St. Edmunds, as was the custom in the family for the eldest son’s eldest son; his father in half derisive affection had abbreviated the title into ‘Sainty,’ and Sainty he always continued to be to all who were intimate enough and to many who were not. He was only three when his father died, and his baby brother, Arthur, was not yet two. Even in those early days the contrast was strongly marked between the brothers. Sainty was a pale nervous child who cried if spoken to suddenly, while Arthur was as fine a pink and white fat baby as you could see in a picture-book, who crowed and gurgled and clapped his hands and liked his bath and took kindly to his food, so that the nurses adored him. When he had a stomach-ache or was thwarted in his wishes he roared lustily for a minute or two and then returned to his usual placidity, whereas poor Sainty if anything ‘put him out,’ as his nurse would say, whined and fretted, and kept up a little sad bleating cry for hours.

He could not remember his father, but with the help of the large coloured portrait in uniform that stood on a gilt easel in the corner of his mother’s room he had built up for himself a shadowy heroic figure, strangely unlike poor Charmington, which in his imagination did duty for this departed parent. He never spoke of him to any one but Arthur, but to him he talked with such conviction of ‘Papa,’ that the child, not very attentive and perhaps not greatly interested, gathered an impression that the elder boy was drawing on his memory for his facts, and indeed he almost thought so himself, until one day Lady Charmington, hearing some such talk between the two, sharply rebuked poor Sainty for telling falsehoods to his little brother. His earliest impression of his mother was in her black dress with the gleaming white on head and throat and wrists, a dress that lent a dignity to Lady Charmington’s somewhat commonplace figure. When she left off her cap, it was of the nature of a blow to him. Though he could not have described his sensations, she seemed somehow discrowned with her sleek, bare head.

Grandpapa’s funeral was a different matter from these early fleeting impressions. That he remembered clearly, for he was seven when it happened, and had a little black suit of knickerbockers and black stockings and gloves, and led Arthur by the hand similarly attired. Every incident of that frightening, gloomy, yet strangely fascinating and exciting day, remained engraved in his recollection. He remembered the crowd in the churchyard, the murmur that greeted his own appearance, the staggering of the bearers under that long heavy burthen, the gloom of the church full of people in black, and the great yawning hole in the chancel pavement. What he did not grasp until very long afterwards, and then only most imperfectly and by degrees, was the difference the event of that day made in his own position; but his mother realised it fully, and indeed it made much more difference to her than to the meek little boy accustomed from earliest infancy to swallow distasteful puddings and nauseous drugs at her command, and anxiously to examine his conscience, if some remnant of the old Adam ever led him to question her decrees. Henceforth Lady Charmington entered into her kingdom, and it must be confessed that on the whole she ruled it well and wisely, and entirely in the interests of her children. Almost the only sensible thing the old lord had ever done was to appoint her and her brother the guardians of his grandchildren, and under the careful management of his daughter-in-law, aided by the wise advice of Lord Corstorphine, the property was nursed through his grandson’s long minority back to a tolerably healthy condition.

As to Lady Belchamber, nothing would have bored her more than being cumbered in any way with the guardianship of her grandchildren. She carried off what her daughter-in-law declared to be a most ridiculously disproportionate jointure, and the furniture of her private apartments, in which some valuable china and cabinets, that she had certainly not brought into the family, somehow found themselves included at the time of the move. She even showed a decided inclination to keep the famous emeralds which, as Lady Charmington said, everybody knew were heirlooms; but these she was made to send back, by her second husband, the Duke of Sunborough, one of the oldest and most faithful of her admirers, whom she married just a year after her lord’s death. On the other hand, she generously abandoned all claim to a damp and mouldy dower-house in which she had a right to reside for life, which, considering that the duke had a palace in London and five country seats, was very handsome of her. Three generations of gambling and extravagance leave their mark on the most imposing fortunes, and if the Belchamber estates did not come to the hammer, it was due to the action of the last person who might have been expected to save them, in marrying a hardheaded Scotswoman and dying before his father. To get the estate into order was Lady Charmington’s prime object in life. To this end she inaugurated a rigid system of economy, and made a clean sweep of the heads of almost every department under the old régime, toiling early and late to make herself mistress of many details of which she was ignorant; for this, she endured the dislike of the poor, whom she benefited in her own autocratic manner, and much hostile comment from her equals. She was rigidly just, and generous too in her own way; only prodigality and waste she would not tolerate, nor look with a lenient eye on the small peculations which those who serve the great come to regard as quite within the pale of honesty.

If the mother spared neither time nor labour that she might be able to hand over his property to her son free of encumbrances when he came of age, she was not less eager and indefatigable in her efforts to fit him for the position she was making for him; and this task she found incomparably the harder of the two. It was not that he was naughty or insubordinate. A meeker, more obedient child did not live. The difficulty was far more intangible; it is easier to drive a slightly pulling horse in crowded thoroughfares than one with so light a mouth that he never will go properly up to his bit; and Lady Charmington had not the blessed gift of light hands in conducting the education of a child, whatever she might have on horseback. As a girl she had ridden a good deal, and even hunted; and though she gave that up after her marriage, she still found it possible to keep a more effectual eye on all corners of the huge estate from her square seat on the back of a substantial cob than from any other coign of vantage. No farmer ever rode more diligently and thoroughly about his fields; and on these excursions it was her pleasure that the boys, and especially Sainty, should accompany her. Arthur had a natural seat, took to horses from the first, and wanted to gallop his pony and make him jump before the family coachman had thought fit to abandon the leading-rein. With poor Sainty it was far otherwise. He rode, as he ate rice pudding, because he was told to; but he was cold for an hour beforehand, and he sat his pony, as his mother remarked, like a sack of potatoes. The smallest thing unseated him; he was always rolling ignominiously off.

On this and similar shortcomings, he received many admonitions from his mother and uncle, from which the chief impression he derived was a rooted belief in the immense superiority of his younger brother. ‘At the worst there will always be Arthur.’ When and under what circumstances had he overheard that remark? He never was quite sure that he had not formulated it for himself. Be that as it might, it early became the burthen to which his life set itself. Far from resenting the point of view, he drew from it a certain consolation under his abiding sense of his many imperfections. He was still quite a small boy when he decided that his rôle in life would be to die young, and make way for the younger brother who was so eminently fitted for the position that suited himself so ill; and he found a certain gloomy satisfaction in settling the details of pathetic deathbed scenes. I fear an element in these imaginings which was not without attraction for him, was the thought of exhorting Arthur with his latest breath on matters in which his brother’s conduct did not always square with his own more evangelical standard, such as a certain looseness of statement, and somewhat lax ideas of property. If Arthur could not find his own cap, or bat, or riding-whip (and his things were generally tossed about the great house, wherever he happened to be when he last used them), it was always less trouble to take Sainty’s, which were sure to be in the right place, than to go and look for his own. He also on occasion carried the juvenile habit of untruth rather further than mere thoughtlessness warranted; but he told his stories with so open a countenance, and such a fearless gaze, that he was invariably believed, as against poor Sainty, whose knitted brow and downcast eyes, while he sought in his mind for the exact truth, had all the appearance of an effort after invention. ‘Arthur is very thoughtless and tiresome,’ Lady Charmington would say, ‘but there’s one comfort about him, I can always depend on his telling me the truth if I ask him. I wish I could say the same for Sainty; I am sometimes afraid he is rather sly. I try not to be hard on him, for he is timid, and I don’t want to frighten him into telling untruths; but I do wish he was a little more straightforward, and would look one in the face when he talks.’

Many such hints, all showing a like perspicacious insight into the characters of her sons, were given by this conscientious lady to the governess she had engaged to assist her in moulding their dispositions. Alice Meakins was the daughter of the rector of Great Charmington, and had the prime recommendation in her employer’s eyes of being her humble slave and completely under her orders. Had she been a little less in awe of Lady Charmington, and less impressed with the enormity of differing from her, she might perhaps have enlightened her on many matters concerning the little boys. Her mild rule, while it galled his more spirited brother, sat very lightly on Sainty, who worshipped the governess as the most talented and accomplished of mortals. ‘But I like her, I’m fond of her; I don’t want to do what she tells me not,’ he pleaded to the indignant Arthur, as usual incensed by his brother’s want of pluck, in refusing to join in some plot against the authority of their instructress. ‘Ho, ho, Miss Moddlecoddle, you can’t ride, you’ve got no seat and no hands; Bell said so. You’re jolly bad at games, and you like to sit and suck up to an old governess, and do needlework with her, like a beastly girl. I’m a man, and I shan’t do what she tells me. What business has she to order me about? she is only a servant like the others.’

Sainty was shocked. ‘O Arthur! you do say horrid things,’ he said. It was true that he did like sitting with the gentle Meakins, and acquiring the modest arts of which she was the mistress. She had many little manual dexterities such as governesses impart to children, whereby the world is filled with innocent horrors, kettleholders in cross-stitch, penwipers faintly resembling old women with cloth cloaks and petticoats, and little black seeds for faces, and book-markers in the shape of crosses with many steps, plaited of strips of gilt and coloured paper. In all these manufactures Sainty soon became proficient. He also illuminated texts, ‘Be thou faithful unto death,’ and ‘The greatest of these is Charity,’ which were presented to Lady Charmington on her birthday. On the subject of the texts and the little plaited crosses Lady Charmington had a word to say to Miss Meakins in private, as being rather too papistical in tendency; but she was not displeased with the simple presents, on the whole, until her anxious maternal eye was led to detect the danger that might lurk in cross-stitch by some petulant remarks of Arthur’s, who wanted Sainty to come out and play Red Indians in the long shrubbery. ‘Muvver,’ he cried, bursting into the boudoir, where his mother was busy with some farm accounts, ‘isn’t Sainty howid? He won’t come out, though he’s done his lessons, ‘cos he will stick in and do beastly woolwork.’ One of Arthur’s many charms was a babyish imperfection of speech. He never could pronounce ‘th’ or ‘r,’ even when quite grown up.

‘What is it he’s doing?’ asked Lady Charmington.

‘Oh, beastly woolwork; he’s got two-fwee fings he’s makin’, and he likes to sit like a girl, instead of coming out and playing.’

A shade of annoyance crossed the mother’s face. ‘I wish you wouldn’t use such words as “beastly,” Arthur,’ she said severely, but the severity was really addressed to the absent first-born and the effeminacy of his tastes; and the schoolroom was presently visited by the mistress of the house, and Sainty duly turned out to distasteful recreation. When he had gone forth to be scalped by the fraternal savage, his mother turned to the instructress. ‘I think, Alice,’ she said, holding up the offending kettleholder, ‘that it is a pity, on the whole, to teach Sainty to work; he’s quite sufficiently effeminate by nature, without having that side of him encouraged. I will speak to him about it. I shall tell him I don’t approve of his working; it’s not manly.’ She was surprised, when she carried out this intention, by meeting with passionate tears and protestations.

‘O mother, I love my work; it’s the only thing I do enjoy, except botany, and reading, and some lessons (not ‘rithmetic or spelling); and I have to do so many things I don’t like, cricket and riding, and—and—all the dreadful things that men and gentlemen have to do,’ the little boy concluded, quoting a formula frequently used for his encouragement.

Though not habitually distrustful of her own judgment, nothing so confirmed Lady Charmington in a view she adopted as any opposition to it; and the kettleholders became taboo from that day forward. Poor Sainty’s confession of dislike for the manlier sports that, as he said, were considered a necessary part of the education of a gentleman, was perhaps the most unfortunate argument he could have chosen, for it naturally convinced his mother that the mischief lay deeper than she supposed, and suggested to her the advisability of transferring the boys from petticoat government altogether; that is, of course, as far as the subordinate powers were concerned. The particular petticoat that typified her own sway remained in undisturbed possession of the throne in all her plans for the future.

‘I think the boys are getting too much for poor Miss Meakins,’ she said to her brother, on his next visit. ‘She is an excellent girl, though a little inclined to be high church; but they ought to be under a man, I feel sure.’

‘Don’t tell me that Sainty is becoming insubordinate?’ said Lord Corstorphine.

‘No; but Arthur hasn’t the smallest respect for her. With Sainty the danger is of a different kind; he is perhaps too fond of women’s society.’

‘Not a precocious passion for the governess! I can’t believe that.’

Lady Charmington looked resigned. ‘I don’t deny, Corstorphine,’ she said, ‘that you have been a great help to me in the management of my fatherless boys; that is why I am consulting you on the present occasion. But it is no help to be flippant and funny. What I mean is that Sainty is quite sufficiently inclined by nature to be a milksop, without living perpetually with women, and adopting their ways. He likes better than any game to sit indoors with Miss Meakins on fine days, and do woolwork.’

‘Have him out, Sarah, by all means,’ returned her brother. ‘I can’t help being a little pleased at his liking reading. A Chambers who occasionally opens a book, and is tolerably well behaved, will be an agreeable variation of the type. But it’s bad his not wanting to be out, and playing games; it isn’t natural.’

Lord Corstorphine felt that he was as near normal as it was possible to be, without becoming commonplace, and that those whose tastes differed widely from his own must always be more or less blamably eccentric. Still his greater commerce with the world had given him a wider toleration than either of his sisters, who had been known to call him a Laodicean, and Sarah once went so far as to draw a parallel between her brother and Gallio. But though she affected to be shocked at the looseness of his views, his known moderation made her lean the more confidently on his judgment. The knowledge that her opinion was backed by one whom the world praised for common-sense, gave a pleasing security that her own noble zeal was not hurrying her into extremes. It was invariably she who initiated every change in the education of her sons. But, though it may be doubted how she would have borne opposition from her fellow-guardian, his agreement was always a comfort to her.

So Alice Meakins, with her little crosses and penwipers, returned to the paternal rectory, with the highest testimonials from her dear Lady Charmington, to look out for another situation.

Poor Sainty could not be comforted. To be sure, no one tried much to comfort him. For the first time he felt a rebellious bitterness towards his mother. Though he could imagine nothing so dashing as active disobedience, he cherished a dark determination to be very cold and reserved towards the new tutor, with the natural result that Miss Meakins’s successor, a youth fresh from Oxford, and also of the children of the clergy, conceived a great liking for Arthur, and favoured him prodigiously.

This young man, who had been selected mainly for his reputation as a cricketer, left Lady Charmington nothing to desire in the matter of sport, and was quite ready to ride any horse in her limited stable; nor need she feel anxiety as to his holding extreme views in religious matters. It is true he attended family prayers with exemplary punctuality, and accompanied his charges to service twice on Sundays; but she could detect no sign of the interest in matters ecclesiastical which she looked for in a son of the Church, and his waistcoats and riding-boots had a decidedly worldly air.

Under Mr. Kirkpatrick, Sainty early proved the cynical dictum that life were endurable but for its pleasures, the hated pastimes, in which his sex and position in life inexorably demanded that he should find enjoyment. He stood like a martyr at the stake, to be bowled at with the Englishman’s fetish, that terrible disc of solid leather which he knew he should not hit, but which not infrequently hit him; and he would unhesitatingly have indorsed Mr. Pinchbold’s remark that ‘the horse was a fearful animal.’ He was so painstaking, however, and anxious to do what was expected of him, that he might possibly have attained in time to some sort of proficiency in these alien arts, had his efforts been greeted with a little more encouragement, and a little less ridicule; but the race is not yet extinct of those who hold that the best way to teach a child to swim is to throw him into the water.

Meanwhile a new terror arose on Sainty’s horizon. When Mr. Kirkpatrick had been at Belchamber eighteen months, he one day intimated to Lady Charmington that he had been offered a mastership in a public school, and could not afford to remain much longer with his pupils. It was therefore suggested that, as they were both presently to go to Eton, a few years at a private school would not be undesirable as a preparation. Even Arthur was a little daunted at the prospect, while rather fascinated by it; but to Sainty it loomed black as the final end of all brightness, closing in the vista of his life and blotting out the sun. It seemed to him that each step in the via dolorosa of his existence was fated to be more awful than the last. When his beloved Miss Meakins had been replaced by the hated Kirkpatrick, he thought to have tasted the dregs of bitterness; but now a new prospect had come to make life in the familiar places that he loved with a catlike fidelity appear the one thing desirable, even shadowed by the tutor and his cricket-ball. I suppose it seemed a hard thing to our first parents when the Serpent was introduced into Eden; but life in Paradise, even with a snake in the garden, was a very different thing from the flaming sword that drove them out into an unknown world of work and briars. Sainty said little to earthly ears, but he prayed nightly with intense fervour that he might die before the day came to go to school, which seemed the only escape to his poor little hunted mind.

But there was another way, which, if he could have foreseen it, would have taxed his courage with a far more genuine fright than that vague abstraction, death, for which we all cry aloud so readily in our youth when things do not go as we wish. Arthur went to school alone when the time arrived, and this was how it came about.

It was a beautiful day at the end of March. Mr. Kirkpatrick was to leave at Easter, and the dreaded exodus was only a month away. It was a late spring, and the snow still lay on the north side of the hedgerows. But it had rained in the night, and there was that indefinable sense of spring in the air that sometimes comes quite suddenly. The primroses were beginning to gem the coppices, the birds to sing late in the long twilights. Daffodils waved in the fields where the young lambs were bleating.

‘What are you and the boys going to do this afternoon, Mr. Kirkpatrick?’ asked Lady Charmington at lunch.

The tutor looked inquiringly at the boys. ‘I’ll do whatever they wish, Lady Charmington. What should you like?’ he asked of Sainty.

‘I should like to go to One-tree Wood, and get primroses,’ Sainty answered, after the usual slight struggle that it always cost him to express a wish or an opinion.

‘Get Gwanmuvvers!’ burst in Arthur. ‘Bovver pwimwoses; you don’t care about ’em, do you, Mr. Kirkpatrick? I want to wide; Bell says the gwound’s in quite good order to-day, after the wain. We’ve hardly widden at all lately, ‘cos it’s been so hard.’

As usual, Arthur had his way, and poor Sainty was condemned to ride. Generally he gained confidence when he had been out a little while, but to-day somehow everything went wrong. He began by rolling off at the hall door, because his stirrups were too long, and the pony moved on unexpectedly while they were being taken up. He was much chaffed for this misadventure by his companions, and he did not like chaff. Then the pony was fresh and inclined to shy, after the inaction of the long frost, so that he had a bad time of it altogether; but he managed to stick on somehow until they were on their way home.

They had been round by Little Charmington, and their way lay through one of the high woods. When they came to the gate that led into the park, they found it locked.

‘I never knew this gate locked before,’ said Kirkpatrick, pulling feebly at it with his whip. ‘I don’t suppose either of you have got the key by any chance?’

‘Jaggins must have locked it. He’s got some young pheasants further up the wood,’ said Arthur; ‘he told me so.’

‘I suppose we must go back,’ said Kirkpatrick, ‘but it’s an awful long way round. We shall be late for tea, which your mother doesn’t like, and you’ve got some more work to do afterwards. There’s a gap in the hedge a little way along here,’ he added more hopefully. ‘I suppose you couldn’t jump the ditch? It would save us a good two miles, and it’s really nothing of a jump.’

‘Of course we can jump the ditch. Hurray! what fun!’ cried Arthur, and without more words he wheeled his pony, put him at the gap, and the next moment was careering about on the turf beyond, in a great state of excitement and jubilation.

‘You see, it’s quite easy,’ the tutor said, turning to Sainty, whose pony was already beginning to fidget, excited by the trampling about on snapping twigs and the rush past of the other. Sainty was very white.

‘You know I can’t jump, Mr. Kirkpatrick,’ he said, gulping tears. ‘I’m sure to fall off if I try; I always do.’

‘Not you,’ the young man replied encouragingly. ‘You see your little brother has done it. I should be ashamed to have him ride so much better than me, if I were you.’ The poor man was rather in a fix, with one pupil already across the obstacle and the other resolutely declining to follow.

‘See,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you a lead. It’s as easy as easy; you’ve only to sit well back, and give him his head,’ And so saying, he put his horse at the gap, and followed Arthur into the park. ‘Come on,’ he called.

‘Jump, Sainty, jump,’ piped Arthur. ‘I wouldn’t be such a funk.’

Whether Sainty would ever have found the courage to attempt the jump is doubtful, if the pony at this stage of the proceedings had not decided matters by bolting at the gap. But bothered and bewildered by the tugging of his rider’s despairing hands, he swerved just at the jump, and, slipping on the trodden earth where Kirkpatrick’s horse had taken off, he came to the ground; then struggling to his feet, galloped off through the wood by the road they had come.

The young man was horror-stricken when he saw the accident; he was off his horse, and by the side of the fallen boy in a second. Sainty was unconscious, that was all he could tell.

‘Now, Arthur,’ he cried to the younger boy, who was beginning to tremble and cry, ‘this is the moment to show the stuff you’re made of. I must stay here with Sainty, but you must get home across the park as hard as you can go, so as to tell your mother what’s happened, and save her the shock of seeing Donald come home without his rider. And then send people here to carry Sainty in; he may be more hurt than we think.’

Arthur waited for no more, but galloped off in the direction of the house, glad to have something definite to do, instead of staring at poor Sainty.

Lady Charmington had come home sooner than she expected, and was taking off her hat, when she saw Arthur come galloping across the park alone. She looked with pride at the boy, thinking how well he sat his pony; and she gave a little sigh at the half-formed thought that just crossed her mind, ‘What a pity he wasn’t the elder!’ The next minute her heart stood still; she had caught sight in the far distance of a speck, which as it drew nearer she recognised with sickening terror as Sainty’s pony, riderless, and with his saddle turned under his belly. ‘Not that way, my God! I did not mean that.’ Was it possible that God was punishing her for her rebellious thought? could He have thought that she desired the death of her first-born? And she prayed with all the intensity of her soul that whatever had happened her boy might not die. ‘Maimed, crippled, or an idiot, if so it must be; only let him live.’ This was the cry of her heart, again and again repeated, as guided by the child, she stumbled across the park with the men who were to bring him home. Arthur could tell her little, except that Sainty had had a fall and was hurt. Perhaps even then her child was lying dead, while she was wishing in her sinful heart that his brother had his heritage.

But Sainty was not dead, and did not die. The pony had kicked him in its struggles to rise, and he had fainted. There were long nights and days of pain to be borne, and he bore it as nervous people often do, who can stand anything but anticipation.

At first he made sure that the death he had asked for had come to him, and even, one day, when he was a little better, attempted to bring off one of the beautiful scenes with Arthur, which he had so often rehearsed. But somehow it was not a great success. Arthur did not do his part at all nicely. He only said, ‘Oh! bower, dear old Sainty. You ain’t going to die; what’s ve good of jawing?’ and went off to more congenial pursuits.

Though his life was not in danger, Sainty’s injury was a grave one; the hip was broken, and the great London surgeon who was called down, did not conceal from Lady Charmington that the boy would probably always be more or less lame.

On one of his visits, Sainty astonished the great man not a little.

‘Sir John,’ he said, ‘I want you to tell me something. Shall I ever be able to walk and run again?’

The famous surgeon had boys of his own, and his heart smote him at the pathetic question. ‘Yes, my boy, yes,’ he said; ‘certainly to walk. As to running, oh! well, you won’t be very good at running, not for some time; we mustn’t go too fast, not too fast, you know. Walking comes first; we must get you on your legs first.’

‘But I shan’t ever be able to play games, shall I? not like other boys, I mean.’

‘Oh! well, never’s a long word. I can’t say, I’m sure. Not for a long while, I fear. But we never know, we never know——’

‘Well, at any rate, I shan’t be able to ride, shall I?’ persisted the patient.

Poor Sir John hated to extinguish hope; but thus pushed into a corner, he admitted, ‘Oh! well, ride, you know—I don’t know. I doubt if riding would be advisable. My poor little man, if you must know, I’m afraid you mustn’t count on riding again.’

To his surprise, the boy heaved a sigh of unmistakable relief. ‘Ah! well, that’s a comfort, anyhow,’ he said.

CHAPTER III

Probably nothing is less calculated to make a man feel at home in another’s society than the knowledge that he owes him a debt which he cannot pay. Custom enables a number of people to support this awkwardness with tolerable equanimity, but I suspect that even the habitual debtor feels a certain nameless uneasiness under his equable shirt-front; while to a person whose boast has always been that directness of gaze celebrated in the Village Blacksmith, to have to look shiftily before the eye of a creditor must be peculiarly galling.

Something of this consciousness had become the daily burthen of poor Lady Charmington with regard to her first-born son. Certainly nothing was further from claiming damages than Sainty’s attitude, for it never entered his head to hold his mother in any way responsible for his accident. But in the long weeks in which he lay so uncomplainingly bearing pain, and the inaction which to young creatures is worse than pain, she could not look at him without a very distinct twinge of remorse. She was even glad to see the once forbidden needlework cheating the weary hours of some of their dulness. Once when he thanked her for the withdrawal of the interdict on this pastime, her breath caught in her throat like a sob.

‘You must find the time very heavy,’ she said, smoothing back the boy’s hair with an unusually tender touch.

‘Oh no!’ Sainty said, ‘I don’t. I can’t help thinking what a good thing it was it happened to me and not to Arthur. Think how he would have hated it. I’ve never minded keeping quiet. And then it’ll always be such a good excuse for not doing things. Before, when people said “Why can’t he be like other boys?” there wasn’t anything to say. Now you can say “Well, you see, poor boy, he’s lame; he met with an accident.”’

He delivered this piece of consolation quite seriously, and with no ironic intention, but it may be doubted if it cheered his mother as much as he intended.

Poor Kirkpatrick, overwhelmed with remorse, had wished to give up his public school mastership and devote himself to Sainty’s education, but the sacrifice had not been accepted. Lady Charmington, who, in spite of her hard head, was not without some very feminine weaknesses, could not bear the sight of the young man who was incurably associated with the most awful hour of her life.

In her compunction, she made an attempt at regaining the services of Miss Meakins, but the governess had without difficulty obtained a situation in the household of one of those gorgeously dressed little dark women who drive about the north side of Hyde Park in such well-appointed carriages. They are of Lancaster Gate to-day, but who knows if to-morrow they may not be giving laws to fashion from a palace in Park Lane? Miss Meakins, with the stamp of the aristocracy upon her, was quite an important person in this opulent Tyburnian mansion and the beautiful villa at Roehampton, with its velvet lawns and blazing parterres.

‘Tell us about the little marquis and his brother, and the big park at Belchamber, and the deer,’ her little charges would ask of her, as they walked on Wimbledon Common. They had large eyes, and beautiful gentle manners, and that look of ineffable world-weariness that is common to the children of their race. Sainty would have been astonished to know what an object of interest he was to these other children.

It must have been her uneasy desire for compensation that made Lady Charmington give to a suggestion of her sister-in-law that she and her ‘fatherless boy’ should pay Belchamber a visit, a very different reception from that which she would otherwise have accorded to it. Lady Eva had lost the embarrassing Morland, and was inclined to return to her native land and see what she could get out of her kinsfolk. She went first to her mother, who received her very graciously, and was really pleased to see her. Her daughter brought the duchess a whiff of her beloved Paris, and entertained her immensely with anecdotes of a world quite unlike that in which she herself had formerly figured. The younger lady, finding her noble relatives in the Faubourg rather inclined to cold-shoulder her, had gone in for being a sort of Muse, and surrounded herself with all the youngest and most modern of the new school of poets and painters. She wore indecent clothes, with a rope of turquoises round her waist, and lay on a white bearskin, smoking a narghilé, while they recited their verses to her. They spoke of her as ‘la petite Morland’ and ‘la belle Eve.’ Her portrait by a young American of genius had been the great clou of the salon, she told her astonished step-father. ‘It really was épatant; he painted me at full length on the sofa in straight perspective, my feet away from you, and my head hanging over the end, so that my face looks out at you upside down. I have my turquoises in my teeth, and the whole is lit by Chinese lanterns. It is amazing de vérité, and will make his reputation.’

‘And what about yours?’ asked the duke, who thought he was rather a wit.

The duchess was much amused with this talk, and all went well, until she and her daughter happened unfortunately to fix their affections on the same young man, who was a good deal the junior of either, when a violent quarrel ensued, and Sunborough House having become much too hot to hold her, Lady Eva was seized with a sentimental desire to ‘show the home of her childhood to her boy,’ and wrote intimating this wish to her sister-in-law. Lady Charmington knew very little of the lady, beyond the fact that she had made an unfortunate marriage and was now a widow with an only son. The early surroundings of this boy must have been deplorable; but while she trembled for the effect he might have upon her sons, she licked her lips at the thought of the influence she might be privileged to acquire over him. Lady Eva’s cleverly insinuated hint that she did not find the atmosphere of her mother’s house congenial, did much to open the doors of Belchamber to her; but perhaps her best ally was the thought that his cousin might be a companion to Sainty during Arthur’s absence. Sainty at least was not likely to get any harm from unfortunate lads who had been brought up in an atmosphere of papistry or atheism—the two words meant much the same to Lady Charmington—and then who could tell what they might be able to do for him!

Claude Morland was between two and three years older than Sainty and extraordinarily grown up for his age. He was a handsome boy, but of quite a different type of beauty from Arthur, who had the fair curls and florid complexion of the Chambers family, whereas Claude had inherited his colourless white skin, thick, straight black hair, and large dreamy eyes from his French ancestors. He was not unlike what his grandmother had been as a girl, but with a certain heaviness of make and feature that came from his lamented father, and might easily become coarseness as he grew older. He seemed to Sainty like some strongly scented hothouse flower, white with a whiteness in which there was no purity, and sweet with a strong sweetness that already suggested some subtle hint of decay. As the flowers which his cousin recalled to him were among the things he did not like, his first feeling towards him had been one of vague repulsion; but to a naturally shy and silent person, any one with Claude’s ready flow of talk and perfect self-possession must prove attractive in the long-run. Then Claude had charming manners when he chose. To Sainty, accustomed to Arthur’s scornful affection and undisguised contempt, the little attentions and deferential politeness of this older boy were bewildering, but strangely pleasant. Claude’s smile was a caress, the grasp of his hand an embrace; in later years a lady once said of him that she always felt as if he had said something she ought to resent when he asked her how she did. But at thirteen this latent sensuality only made him like some charming feline creature that liked to be stroked and well fed, to lie in the sun and purr. A boy who spoke French as easily as English, and German and Italian a little, and read mysterious foreign books for pleasure, could not fail to be impressive to a small home-grown cousin; while the discovery that this gifted creature had never played cricket in his life, and, though an excellent rider, had not the smallest wish to hunt, made him at once sympathetic and puzzling.

‘Uncle Cor hunts,’ Sainty said, ‘and Arthur is dying to, as soon as ever he is allowed. I can’t, of course; but then I shall never ride any more. But all the men I know hunt—our neighbours Mr. Hawley at Hawley Park and Sir Watkin Potkin at the Grange, and everybody, even the farmers, when they can afford to. I thought all men who rode wanted to hunt as a matter of course.’

‘Well, I don’t want to,’ Claude answered. ‘I like riding, and the manége, and all that; a gentleman should of course be a good horseman. But to get up early, and gallop all day across country after a wretched little vermin, merci cela ne me dit rien.’

‘Ah! you’re sorry for the poor fox; I’m glad of that,’ said Sainty. ‘I can’t help feeling it’s cruel. I think of all it must feel when it hears the dogs getting nearer, and knows it is out of breath and can’t run much farther. And yet very good men hunt, even clergymen. None of our own clergy, because mother doesn’t approve of it; but some of those from the other side of the county, who, I believe, are quite good men. I asked Uncle Cor, who is very kind to animals, about it, but he said if it were not for hunting, the foxes would all have been exterminated long ago, and he didn’t suppose they’d have liked that any better.’

‘There is certainly something in that,’ replied his cousin gravely; ‘but I’m afraid I wasn’t considering the matter from the fox’s point of view. I hate getting tired, and wet, and muddy, and to kill a wretched little yellow animal doesn’t seem worth so much fuss and trouble. Voilà tout. In France, if the foxes eat the poultry, they shoot them; it is much more simple.’

‘Then what do you like to do in the way of exercise and games and that?’ asked Sainty.

‘I like the lawn tennis fairly well,’ said Claude. ‘It is not such a good game as the real tennis, the jeu de paume. I have played that a little, but not much; it was too expensive; but lawn tennis is very well. That, and riding, and fencing have been my principal amusements. But we have moved about so much; my mother is very restless. We have never stayed anywhere long enough for me to settle down and really take to anything seriously.’

‘And cricket?’ asked Sainty, almost under his breath; ‘have you never played cricket?’

‘Mon Dieu! no. A game that takes three days to play! Those stupid stepsons of grandmamma took me to see a match at—what do you call it?—“Lord’s,” when I was in London. It went on all day, and nothing happened. I yawned myself hoarse. I can never do anything for more than two hours at a time.’

Here was some one who was not apologetic or ashamed that he could not play cricket, who spoke of it even with contempt, as of a pastime for fools. Sainty was dumbfoundered. He wondered what Arthur would say to such heresy. What Arthur did say when presently he came home, was that his cousin was a ‘bounder,’ and ‘like a beastly foreigner.’ It was a curious fact that though Claude acquired a considerable influence for harm over Arthur, the latter always continued to speak slightingly of him, and never really liked him; whereas Sainty, who was not influenced by him in the least, and after the first discoveries of superficial agreement, found that they differed essentially in their views on almost every subject, cherished a sneaking regard for his cousin, which died hard even when Claude had done his best to kill it. Arthur’s mind could accept nothing that was not traditional; and this surprising outcome of shady foreign watering-places and Parisian ateliers lay altogether outside of his traditions.