CHAPTER VIII
Whether or not there was truth in what Lady Charmington had said, that no one took so little interest in the festivities of his coming of age as Sainty himself, it certainly came about that hardly any one took so little part in them.
The memory of his birthday remained with him as a shifting phantasmagoria of painful images that partook of the nature of a nightmare. To be the principal figure in any pageant must always have a charm for the imagination of youth, if combined with the ability to play the part becomingly; but it is a very different matter for one conscious in every nerve of his own inadequacy to be set up a butt for disappointment, and a peep-show for ridicule.
The day had begun with a message from his mother that she would like to see him before prayers. He found her in her private sitting-room, where the picture of his father which he had worshipped as a child was enthroned on its gilt easel in the corner. Lady Charmington was clean and cool from her morning toilet, her hair even smoother and tighter than usual. She was dressed in her Sunday black silk, and seated in a high-backed chair beside a little table, with the air of a priestess at the altar. Her large serviceable hands were crossed on the Bible on her lap. They had big knuckles and many rings, some of which, having been her late husband’s, were more massive than is usual in a woman’s. Sainty’s quick eye noticed that a signet she habitually wore was not among them. He also saw that on the table beside her was an imposing pile of ledgers, a small morocco box, and a book which, from its being bound in black with depressing-looking soft flaps folding over the edges of the leaves, he rightly conjectured to be a work of devotion.
Lady Charmington was not a demonstrative woman, and she was a very shy one. She drew her son towards her, and gravely kissed him on the brow, by no means a daily occurrence or matter of course between them; then she plunged rather nervously into a little speech she had prepared for the occasion.
‘This is a solemn day for both you and me, Belchamber’ (he noticed that she did not call him by the familiar nickname), ‘and one to which I have long looked forward. I have worked hard,’ and she glanced at the pile of account-books beside her, ‘in your interests. God forgive me if it is wrong, but I fear it is not without pride that I come to you to-day to give an account of my stewardship.’
Sainty gently pressed his mother’s hand, which he still held. ‘Dearest mother,’ he said, ‘I know well how hard you have worked, and all you have done for me. I assure you I appreciate——’ But Lady Charmington withdrew her hand, and held it up in deprecation.
‘I do not wish to boast or to be thanked,’ she said, ‘but I think I may truly say I have spared neither time nor labour. It has been my object to be able to hand over the estate to you free of debt and unencumbered, and I can do so. To-day my stewardship ends.’
‘But oh, mother!’ Sainty broke in, ‘it mustn’t end to-day, nor, I hope, for many days to come. You know how utterly inexperienced I am, and then I have got to go back to Cambridge till I have taken my degree. You won’t refuse to go on looking after everything just as you have always done, will you?’
Lady Charmington had lost the thread of her discourse; she looked rather anxiously at her son.
‘We have no time to-day to go into accounts,’ she said; ‘but some day, when all these people have gone, you must give me an hour or two, and we will go through everything.’
‘Very well,’ said Sainty.
‘Before we go down,’ his mother went on, ‘I must wish you many happy returns, which I haven’t done yet, and give you my little presents. The new set of harness for your cart is with the other things; you saw that: Arthur says your old one is a disgrace; but, besides that, here is your father’s signet-ring, which I want you to wear,’ and she produced from the morocco case the ring he had missed from her finger. ‘And this is a little book I want you to use every morning and evening; you will find it very helpful.’
Sainty just touched the ring with his lips before he slipped it on his finger, and glanced with passionate tenderness at the simpering image in the corner. Then he began turning over the leaves of the little book with its limp cover that reminded him of French plums. He was wondering if honesty obliged him to say that he did not use such aids to devotion, did not, in fact, very often pray at all. Finally, he decided that he had not the courage to say anything of the sort, so he accepted the volume without much enthusiasm, and put it in his pocket. Then, detaining his mother as she was preparing to leave the room, ‘I want to tell you, mother,’ he said, ‘that, though I don’t say much, I do really value all you have done for me, and been to me, and Uncle Cor too. Between you, you have almost done away with the disadvantage that every boy must be under who has no father.’
Lady Charmington was faintly stirred—probably she was pleased.
‘There are many things, my son, that I should like different about you,’ she said, ‘and especially I wish you stronger. But no one can say you have ever been anything but a good boy.’ They went downstairs, both a little moved by having performed the operation so difficult to the British race, of displaying feeling.
At breakfast the question had arisen of which of the party would attend the service at Great Charmington parish church. This part of the proceedings did not seem to find favour among most of the company, and Lady Charmington’s brow grew dark as one after another excused himself. The duchess was of course out of the question, as she seldom appeared before lunch, her elaborate construction being a thing of time and caution. To Lord Nonsuch, communion after breakfast was nothing short of sacrilege; he was a leading light in the High Church party, and this was his first appearance at Belchamber since a memorable occasion many years before, when he had said Lady Charmington was an Erastian, and she had called him a Jesuit.
‘I should love it, dear Sarah,’ said Lady Eva, ‘but a poor literary hack’s time is not her own. I must work this morning, to be free this afternoon.’
‘What has your mother got to do?’ asked Cissy of Claude. ‘Is she writing a book?’
‘Didn’t you know mamma was “Maidie,” who does “the girls’ tea-table” in the Looking-glass? She has very nearly got the sack because she never gets her article ready in time; but she takes herself very seriously as a journalist, I assure you.’
The Dalsanies were Roman Catholics, and Lady Deans nothing in particular; and Gerald Newby, when he found that the people of higher rank were shirking, discovered that he had letters to write which could not be put off; but the climax of Lady Charmington’s displeasure was reached when Arthur announced he would rather stay at home and play lawn-tennis with Parsons. Lord Firth had not intended to go, but he sacrificed himself to mollify his sister. His religion was of that comfortable, rational kind in which there is more state than church, and which is first cousin to agnosticism, but infinitely more respectable. He took a great interest in the distribution of bishoprics and the proper conduct of the service, which, however, he rarely felt called on to attend, except in such cathedrals and college chapels as gratified his fastidious taste and fondness for sacred music.
Finally, a dozen people had been got together, and made a sufficiently imposing appearance. Old Lady Firth, Mrs. de Lissac and the girls, and Lady Eccleston went as a matter of course. Claude went to please his aunt, Cissy because Claude did, Johnson because Cissy did, and Tommy because his mother told him to. ‘I never have any trouble about church with my boys,’ Lady Eccleston said. ‘I never have made them go, even when they were little. I let them play tennis or do whatever they like, till the time comes; if I’ve time I play with them. Then I just cheerfully say “Now, boys, who’s for church?” and they nearly always say, “All right, mother, we’ll go,” unless they’re ill.’
Lady Charmington, sore over Arthur’s defection, was in no mood to admire the success of this plan. ‘Do you mean to say you play lawn-tennis on Sunday?’ she asked frigidly; and Lady Eccleston discovered she ‘must fly and put her bonnet on, or she’d be late.’
Through the service in the church, and the subsequent ceremony of presenting him with a silver salver and an address from the tradesmen of Great Charmington, the headache with which Sainty had most inopportunely begun the day grew steadily worse. The thought of all these poor men putting their hard-earned pounds together to give a great ugly useless thing to him, who had already so much more than he wanted, unmanned him; the tears were in his eyes as he tried to thank them. Nor was he less cruelly embarrassed by the discovery that the guests in the house had all thought it necessary to come laden with gifts. In his life no one but his mother and uncle had ever given him anything; he was not accustomed to presents, and received them with an awkward sense of obligation.
Belchamber being peculiarly rich in beautiful old plate, Arthur presented him with a huge heraldic claret-jug of monumental hideousness, for which long afterwards he paid the bill, when settling his brother’s debts. The duchess gave him a cabinet inlaid after the manner of Sheraton, in which a whole army of tumblers and sodawater-bottles, lemon-squeezers, spirit-cases, and cigar-boxes rose and sank and manœuvred with incredible ingenuity on innumerable springs. Down to Lady Eccleston, who brought the latest fashionable invention for tearing the leaves of his beloved books, no one was missing from the list; even Lady Deans and the Dalsanies contributed their tale of paper-knives and cigarette-cases.
The only person whose gift showed any care or knowledge of Sainty’s tastes and wants was Claude, who had taken the trouble to get from Paris a really beautiful cane, a true Malacca, strong enough to be a support, with tortoiseshell crutch encrusted with little gold stars, and an indiarubber shoe to prevent its slipping on the floors of the house. Sainty flushed with pleasure at sight of the charming thing, which seemed to adorn his lameness with a certain elegance. He wondered why his cousin, who was full of such pretty little cares and tendernesses, should be so wanting in moral sense. His heart yearned over him. ‘Ah Claude,’ he said, and could say no more.
‘Dear old boy,’ said Claude, pressing his hand, ‘what do I not owe you? There is nothing that a pauper like me can give to you; but such as it is my little present brings real affection and heartfelt wishes for your happiness.’
Sainty’s head was by this time aching cruelly, his temples throbbing like sledge-hammers; he was feeling worn out mentally and physically, ravaged by conflicting emotions. Having what was very rare with him, a slight flush, he looked less ill than usual, and nobody thought of his being tired; but it was at the tenants’ dinner that he set the seal on the ignominy of his failure.
In consideration of the fact that this was a long and crowded day for one who was not robust, it had been settled that he should not preside at the meal, but merely come in and take the chair, for the healths and speeches, when the solid business of feeding had been satisfactorily disposed of. It was between three and four o’clock, the hottest part of the afternoon; and though the sides of the tent had been opened here and there, the atmosphere was stifling, heavy with the odours of meat and drink and the acrid exhalations of humanity. Sainty almost reeled on entering, and had to steady himself by Arthur’s arm. There were some seventy or eighty men present of all ages and degrees of stoutness, all very hot, and mostly somewhat red in the face. Many of them were intimately known to Arthur, who stopped several times in the progress up the tables to shake hands right and left. He met them at the covert side, he shot over their farms, he played in cricket matches with them. Sainty would have given anything for a touch of that happy graciousness, that power of being hail-fellow-well-met. Circumstances had combined to make him almost a stranger to the men who were on such friendly terms with his younger brother. He knew that in his heart he had far more real brotherhood with these sons of the soil, a much more jealous respect for their manhood and independence; but his very sense of equality made him feel the falseness of his position, whereas Arthur’s easy familiarity sprang from a firm conviction of his own unquestionable superiority. Sainty was only too well aware, as he took his seat in gloomy silence, that his grave bow in answer to their friendly greetings, would be set down to pride by most of the people present. When, after loyally drinking the Queen’s health, the guests were once more seated and their glasses filled, the oldest tenant rose to propose the toast of the occasion. He began by complimenting the young man on attaining his majority, spoke shortly of his attachment to the place and the family, and at great length on the badness of times and the difficulties of the agriculturist, which he seemed in some mysterious way to attribute to Mr. Gladstone. The voice went droning on, monotonous by reason of its very emphasis, until Sainty felt almost hypnotised by it and by the buzzing of the numberless wasps and flies that were hovering over the remnants of food and drops of beer on the table-cloths. Sainty had quite ceased to attach any meaning to the sounds, when suddenly the voice stopped; the old man was sitting down; the audience, which had been dozing, shook itself and sat up alert, and all eyes were turned on the hero of the occasion. For weeks past Sainty had given anxious thought to what he should say to his tenants. He had never before had to make a speech, and he had rehearsed many alternative utterances in the privacy of his chamber. He had felt somehow that this was going to be his opportunity, the electrical moment when he was to make himself known to those for whom it was of such importance what manner of man he was. He would let them see that he was not an indifferent invalid, still less a selfish pleasure-seeker, a careless eater of the produce and neglecter of the producer; he would tell them how much he had their welfare at heart. In carefully prepared sentences he would allude to his great obligations (which incidentally were theirs also) to his mother’s long laborious stewardship, his uncle’s enlightened economic teaching. He had devoted hours to the consideration of just how much it would be well to hint at his political convictions; sometimes he had been pleased to fancy himself electrifying his hearers by a militant profession of faith, but in calmer moments more moderate counsels prevailed.
Now the time so anxiously anticipated had actually arrived. With a great shuffling of feet the company got to its legs; some one started ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ rather shakily, which was promptly taken up and cheerfully shouted in a great variety of keys, and then all settled down to await the answering speech.
Sainty rose unsteadily and passed his hand across his forehead; for a second he stood silent, while the guests greeted his rising by drumming on the tables with their knife-handles. Then it seemed as though a crushing weight descended through the top of his head to his brain, the hum of the insects swelled to an organ roar in his ears, the hundred faces before him seemed to float and swim in a mist, and with a kind of gasping cry he sank back unconscious in Lord Firth’s arms.
After this there could be no question of his appearing at the monster fête and garden-party which had been organised for the afternoon. The distant braying of a band, the sounds of many voices and laughter, and the scrunching of innumerable wheels upon the gravel were borne to him on the summer breeze, as he lay prostrate upon his bed. He had not yet come back to any sense of shame or distress; for the moment, pure physical pain was almost a relief, a restful half-consciousness that, with no effort of his, a solution had been found, a way out of all difficulties and disagreeables.
Not till late next day did he crawl downstairs, feeling very weak and battered, to receive the hollow sympathy and polite inquiries of his guests, and apologise with what grace he might for having failed so lamentably in his duties as a host.
Arthur had got up a cricket match. ‘You needn’t worry, old man,’ he said cheerfully, as he carried out his bat and found Sainty among the group of spectators. ‘You weren’t missed a bit. The duke made a speech after dinner, and proposed your health, and I returned thanks for you, and said all sorts of nice things about you, which you never could have said for yourself. I did it much better than you could have done, because I was rather drunk, which you would never have been.’
‘O Lord Arthur! how can you say Lord Belchamber wasn’t missed?’ cried Lady Eccleston. ‘We all missed you dreadfully, didn’t we, Cissy? But your brother did do his best to supply your place, and really made a delightful speech; and I do hope your head is better; it was too bad your breaking down, and we were all quite miserable about you.’
‘I wanted to send you some really wonderful nerve tonic Dr. Haslam gave me,’ said Lady Firth. ‘I’m sure it would have done you good, but your mother said you had everything you wanted.’
Sainty insisted on showing himself at the ‘treat’ for the children and the labourers; this was the one part of the ‘rejoicings’ in which he took a personal interest; but after a very brief appearance he was forced to go and lie down again till dinner, if he hoped to receive the guests at the great ball which was to wind up the proceedings of the second day.
The ball was a very grand affair indeed; there must have been over five hundred people present. Every woman there had put on her most gorgeous raiment, and the best of her jewellery. The duchess positively shone in white and gold brocade, hung in ropes of pearls, and with a great crown upon her head. Even Lady Charmington had had what she considered a low-necked dress made for the occasion, and had withdrawn the Belchamber emeralds from their twenty years’ seclusion at the bank for the pleasure of wearing them before her mother-in-law. Sainty’s share in the entertainment was strictly limited to standing by his mother, under the portrait of his great-great-grandfather, leaning with his left hand on the crutch stick which his cousin had given him, while his right was shaken by a long procession of people, who all one after the other said: ‘I must—er—congratulate you, Lord Belchamber, on this auspicious occasion. Sorry to hear you weren’t well yesterday; hope you’re all right again.’ To which he had to reply, ‘Thanks awfully, very good of you; so glad you could come; you’ll find the dancing through that next room, straight on.’
By the time he had repeated this phrase between three and four hundred times, and the guests had all defiled before him, he felt so sick and giddy that he had to be helped to bed by his valet, where he lay awake hour after hour, listening to the distant strains of the dance music, and picturing the scene in the great saloon to himself. He thought how nice it would be to be an ordinary normal, healthy, courageous young man. He did not desire to be exceptionally gifted, strong, or beautiful, only just like any one of a hundred youths who were at that moment whirling in his ballroom, or eating his supper. Surely, he thought, no one had ever got so little fun out of his own coming-of-age ball before. He thought how pretty Cissy Eccleston had looked, all in delicate pale green, with a sort of white butterfly of some shimmering stuff just poised on her bright curls for only ornament—not a jewel on her beautiful neck or arms. He fancied her, aglow with dancing, sitting to rest under the great palms and banana-trees of the winter-garden, and perhaps Claude ensconced beside her in one of those nooks that he had watched his cousin arranging, ‘for flirtations,’ as he said.
It was in these sleepless hours of the early morning that he decided to say something to Claude Morland which he had had on his mind for two days, and the first time he got him alone, he put his head down, dug his nails into his palms, and said, ‘Claude, may I ask you something?’
‘Of course; what is it?’
Sainty gulped and was silent. He had made up his mind to speak the first time he got an opportunity, but he had been genuinely relieved by every interruption, and was conscious that he had even purposely avoided being alone with his cousin.
‘It is rather a queer question,’ he said, ‘and one which you may resent.’
Claude was lolling in a deep chair with a book; his hat tilted over his eyes left little of his face visible but his moustache and the soft curve of his chin.
‘How could I resent anything from you, old chap?’ he said sweetly, but without looking up. ‘For which of my many sins am I to be taken to task? Fire away.’
‘I know I’ve no right to ask such a question, but I wish you would tell me if there is anything between you and Miss Winston.’
Claude gave an almost imperceptible start, and sank lower into the deep chair. Sainty was conscious that under his air of supreme nonchalance he was suddenly tensely on his guard. ‘Between us?’ he murmured interrogatively.
If Sainty were going to be indiscreet, his cousin obviously did not intend to make it easy for him.
‘I mean, are you in love with each other, or engaged, or anything?’ Sainty persisted. Claude gave a little laugh; he was evidently trying to keep a certain relief out of his voice as he answered in his usual soft tones, ‘I would not be so rude to our dear Aimée as to say I was not in love with her; I have been in love with her any time these two years; as to being engaged, you really do ask the most simple-minded questions. Will you tell me just what you think I have to marry on? Am I in a position to think of marrying, especially another pauper like myself?’
‘That’s just what I was coming to,’ said Sainty eagerly. ‘I didn’t ask from mere idle curiosity. But if you are in love with Miss Winston, of course you want to marry her, and you think you ought not to propose, because you are not in a position to support a wife—isn’t that so?’
‘Well—no, dear boy,’ answered Claude slowly; ‘to be honest, I don’t exactly know that it is. Aimée and I understand one another perfectly,’ he added, after a little pause.
‘Do you think she does understand? Don’t you think you may have given her the impression that you mean more than you do?’
‘I am not the first man Miss Winston has met,’ said Claude, turning rather an ugly grin upon his cousin; ‘the dear creature was having her little flirtations before I went to Eton.’
‘Of course, if you don’t want to, and you are sure she doesn’t want to, there is no more to be said. I only wanted to say that if you were being held back by want of money, perhaps I—perhaps we—you know—I mean, that part might be arranged, don’t you know,’ and Sainty blushed hotly.
Claude reached out a long white hand, and very gently pressed Sainty’s knee. ‘You really are more kinds of an angel than any one I know,’ he said, laughing softly, ‘but you need not worry about Aimée Winston; she has no vocation for matrimony; if she ever makes up her mind to marry it will be some one who can give her a far larger share of this world’s goods than even you could spare for my dot. And as for me, if I should ever find myself, either through your kindness or in any other way, in a position to take to myself a wife, she would be a very different person from la belle Aimée; elle n’est pas de celles que l’on épouse’; and Claude turned again to his book in such a way as to intimate that the subject was closed.
By the time that the opportunity for this singularly abortive conversation presented itself the house-party had dwindled sensibly. Those who came to please the duchess, to meet each other, and to lend the support of names well known to the chronicles of fashion, had fled the day after the ball. They had come for an ‘occasion,’ and the moment existence at Belchamber threatened to resume a course remotely resembling home life, they departed to other ‘occasions,’ with all their baggage and camp-followers. Lord Nonsuch could not spend a Sunday where the services were conducted according to the ideas of Lady Charmington; and by the Monday all had gone except old Lady Firth, the Morlands, the Traffords, and the Ecclestons, who somehow or other contrived to stay on till they should be due at another country-house.
Lord Firth, ere he departed for Scotland, had a talk with his nephew. ‘It has all gone off very well, my boy, on the whole,’ he said, ‘considering how new you and your mother were to anything of the sort. Your breakdown was unfortunate, of course, but it couldn’t be helped. You had better come up to Fours for a bit next month; it’ll do you good; and in November you ought to have another party here, for the covert shooting. You will have to live suitably in the place in future; all these new servants will get lazy and demoralised unless you give them something to do.’
‘But I shan’t be here in November,’ said Sainty, ‘I shall be back at Cambridge, you know.’
‘Your mother and I were thinking that perhaps you wouldn’t want to go back to Cambridge now you are of age,’ said his uncle.
‘Not go back to Cambridge!’ Sainty interrupted, with unfeigned horror; ‘not take my degree!’
‘Many people don’t, you know; and in your case, though it was no doubt right for you to have a little taste of university life, there seem to be claims which call for you more urgently elsewhere.’
‘Don’t ask this of me, Uncle Cor,’ Sainty said earnestly. ‘You and I have both been workers; in my way I have worked as hard as you. You can understand what it must be to be told when one is in sight of one’s goal that one must give it up and not try for it. I gave up the scholarship because I saw that it was a shame to take it from men who needed it; but this is different. I stand no chance with Cook; he deserves to be senior classic, and is safe to be; he has nothing to fear from me, or any one; and if I beat any of the men who come next, well, it won’t hurt them; they will have their first class all the same, and it makes no difference to a man if he is second, third, or fourth.’
‘Do you care as much as all that?’ asked Lord Firth.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Sainty.
His uncle appeared to consider. ‘Well,’ he said, after a pause, ‘I don’t see, if you want to go back and take your degree, why you shouldn’t; but couldn’t you come down for a week, say, for the pheasants?’
‘Uncle Cor,’ said Sainty, ‘why should I come down, just in the middle of my work, and idle away a whole week, in order that other people should shoot pheasants? I don’t shoot, myself; I hate the sound and sight of shooting.’
‘Don’t you think you could get to like it? Of course it’s out of the question for you to hunt, but you could quite well shoot, with a quiet pony and little cart, or even from a campstool, if you couldn’t walk.’
‘I don’t want to shoot; I should hate it. And in my case, the one excuse, the tramping, the manly exercise, would be wanting. I should seem to myself a kind of monster, dragged out to the work of slaughter in some form of machine; sitting down to butchery, like Charles IX. firing on Huguenots out of a window.’
‘Well, I only thought it would give you something more in common with your fellow-men, make you more like other people.’
‘Oh yes, I know; it’s the old story, my unlikeness to other people, my hopeless incurable unfitness for my position in life. I do so hate my position in life.’
‘Many people would be glad to change with you, my boy,’ said his uncle gently.
‘I wish they could, with all my heart,’ said Sainty. ‘Oh, I fully realise, no one more, what an anomaly I am. If only some one of the hundreds of nice impecunious young men with a public school education and no taste for work could have it all instead of me! Arthur, for instance, would be ideal. He would hunt, shoot, play cricket, captain the Yeomanry, be popular, successful, suitable, and enjoy the whole thing immensely into the bargain.’
‘My dear boy,’ said Lord Firth, taking refuge behind Providence with a simple piety worthy of his sister, ‘does it never occur to you that if it had been intended that Arthur should have your birthright, he would have had it?’
‘Oh, if you come to what was “intended,”’ Sainty answered, ‘I give up. I don’t pretend to understand.’
‘It comes down to the simple old rule that you learned in your catechism,’ said Firth, in a more natural manner; ‘“to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me.” (I quote from memory.) You can surely understand that?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Sainty, ‘I can understand that right enough, as a principle; but it is when you come to the question of just what is one’s duty that the difficulty comes in. For instance, I don’t believe that it is a duty incumbent on me from any religious point of view to sit in a chair and shoot tame pheasants, nor to waste money in expensively feeding a whole tribe of people with whom I have no sympathy whatever.’
‘We must “use hospitality,”’ quoted Lord Firth a little half-heartedly.
‘Oh, if you quote Scripture on that matter,’ said Sainty, not without malice, ‘I think you would find I was enjoined to entertain a very different class of person from the duke, or Lady Deans, or the Dalsanies. Indeed, I am not without the highest authority for selling all I have and giving to the poor; I sometimes think it would be the best solution, as it would certainly be the simplest.’
‘And how about the entail?’ asked his uncle.
The wholesale disposal of his property being thus declared out of the question, Belchamber had to try and find some other answer to the riddle of life. For the present he was contented to have carried his point about going back to Cambridge; the terrible coming of age was safely past, and the danger of his university career being cut short averted. As he had not gone up till he was nineteen, he had still a year of happy college life before him, a year of peaceful study, of stimulating discussions, of congenial society, a year of hard work for a definite object. With a sigh of relief he found himself once more in his old rooms, surrounded by the dear familiar shabbinesses, his accommodation a bedroom, sitting-room, and Gyp-closet bounded by a battered ‘oak’; his establishment the tenth part of an old woman in a sat-upon black bonnet, and a twenty-fifth share in the services of a Gyp, but lord of his own soul, and free to follow his own bent, an undergraduate among undergraduates, and not the slave of a cumbrous estate and an unwieldy palace.
CHAPTER IX
Sainty did not think it necessary to go home for the covert shooting, and it is doubtful if he was much missed. Young Traffords and Montgomeries came as usual, Lord Firth brought an older man or two, and Arthur acted as host, not without a few skirmishes with his uncle, who had been accustomed to appear in that capacity on such occasions. Arthur was now at a crammer’s preparing for the army, but he had none of Sainty’s objection to breaking in on his studies for a little sport, and every one thought it quite right and natural that he should do so. It might be all very necessary that he should help to slaughter his fellow-men by and by, but the immediate duty was the destruction of pheasants; and whatever might be the shortcomings of the absent lord of the mansion, Arthur and the guests assembled at Belchamber had a proper sense of their responsibilities in this respect.
Sainty only wished that his brother would take his other duties in life as seriously; there was permanently at the back of his mind an anxiety about Arthur, which, like some latent poison in the blood, might lie dormant for months, but was liable to stir up and give pain at any moment. A certain sense that his own existence, unreasonably prolonged, was, as it were, keeping his brother out of his inheritance, added poignancy to all Sainty’s feelings about him. But for the unfortunate accident of his own eighteen months’ seniority, Arthur would have stepped naturally into his appropriate position, and found congenial occupations, duties, pleasures ready to his hand. He felt that anything that might go wrong with his brother before his own death made tardy restitution, would be almost his fault. It did not occur to his morbid apprehension that with superior means at his command all Arthur’s vicious tendencies would have increased a hundredfold; he only saw the boy who had no aptitude for study obliged by circumstances to work that he might pass examinations, and driven from healthy and innocent recreations at Belchamber into a world of dangerous companions and temptations which he lacked self-control to resist. Sainty appeared to himself as an unwilling Jacob, who by no act or fraud of his own stood possessed of the birthright which was only a burthen to him, and who yet had no appetite for the pottage for which a younger Esau’s full red mouth watered so hungrily. As in the nursery days when he had decided to die young that his brother might succeed him, he still cherished an undefined feeling that he was only occupying for a time. He would never marry; all must eventually go to Arthur and to Arthur’s children; but he was possessed of an ever-growing terror lest meanwhile, before this desirable end should be reached, his brother might steer the frail bark of his good behaviour to some irreparable shipwreck, commit himself irrevocably in some way that should disqualify him for the position ere it should come to him.
Sainty mused much on abdications, on men who had cast aside rank and wealth for the peace and seclusion of the cloister; the monastic calm of his beloved courts drew him like a spell; had he been born in the turbulent times of his fighting ancestors he would probably have been violently dispossessed and immured in some convent of holy monks. He began to wonder whether in spite of all the boasted progress of the centuries they had not managed things in a simpler and more effectual manner in the middle ages. He even went so far as secretly to consult a solicitor as to whether a peer could legally renounce his title and estates in favour of the next heir entail, with the discouraging result that he learned that while he lived no act of his, short of high treason, could make him other than Marquis of Belchamber in the eye of the law, or bestow that title on any other human being.
‘It seems hard,’ he said to Newby one day, ‘that a man can be born into a position with no act or consent of his own and bound in it for life; struggle as he will he cannot free himself.’
‘Are we not all alike in that respect?’ asked Gerald. ‘Are not circumstances, as they are called, the fetters that each man wears? We delude ourselves with a phantom of free-will, but I suspect that men are really born as irrevocably parsons, doctors, politicians, as you are a peer. Who shall free himself from the bonds of fate?’
‘You are strangely inconsistent, Gerald. I can fancy no one less of a fatalist than yourself.’
‘The doctor varies his medicines according to the disease of the patient,’ said Newby sententiously. ‘When men come prating to me of fatality as an excuse from all effort and responsibility, I have a very different word to say to them; but in your case, when you complain of being fettered by your position, I wonder whether some of those who perhaps think they would like their path thus plainly marked for them, may not really, by inherited tendencies and a hundred other intangible threads, be as truly constrained in their life choice as yourself.’
‘“All men are born free,”’ quoted Sainty. ‘There never was a more deplorable fallacy; for my part, I feel like the ghost in Dickens’s story, who had to drag that chain of cash-boxes and keys and deposit-safes wherever he went. Perhaps it is my lameness which accentuates this sense of being hobbled. I can’t take a step without feeling the pull of the whole Belchamber estate; it is hung round my neck like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross.’
‘You certainly have a most deplorable trick of mixing your metaphors,’ said Newby. ‘But,’ he added, with the mild awe of which Sainty had been so disagreeably sensible at Belchamber, ‘yours is certainly a great position, a grave responsibility.’
‘If I might have gone in for a scholarship, like you, and stayed and got work in the college till I could try for a fellowship!’ Sainty sighed. ‘The life would have suited me down to the ground.’
‘There are many leading that life who would be glad to change with you,’ Gerald answered with conviction.
‘That is just what my uncle says, “many people would be glad to change with you.” It is the old saying of our nursery days—“Many a poor man in the street would be glad of that nice pudding.” Do you think it makes unpalatable food more savoury to feel that one is keeping what one does not like from some one to whom it would perhaps be an escape from starvation? It is the strangest doctrine.’
‘Nevertheless Lord Firth is a very sensible man,’ said Newby; ‘and I don’t feel disposed to pity you overmuch.’
‘I don’t think I want pity,’ said Sainty, ‘I want help. It seems too deplorable that there should be no way out of an undesirable position. I think it is this sense of being shut in that drives men to suicide far more than great grief. Is any situation really hopeless, unalterable by human effort? If any one were once persuaded of that, he must go mad. I suppose the pistol or the overdose of chloral is the last supreme refusal to accept such a belief. “What!” you say, “no way out of this impasse? Well, there is always this.”’
‘How theatrical!’ said Newby. ‘You are talking claptrap. Who ever heard of a man committing suicide to avoid a marquisate and £50,000 a year?’ and he resolutely led the talk into other channels.
Arthur hadn’t been a month at his crammer’s before he began to justify his brother’s anxiety. Of course he broke all the rules of the establishment, came and went as he pleased, drove tandem, and hunted several days a week. Then there were complications about dogs, of which he kept a perfect kennel of all sorts and sizes, which raided the reverend gentleman’s poultry-yard, killed his cat and his children’s pet rabbits, and harried his wife’s old pug. Sainty had always wanted a dog, but had never been able to have one because Arthur’s perpetually changing menagerie had kept Lady Charmington’s powers of endurance stretched to their easily reached limit.
In the Christmas vacation Arthur had already stigmatised the establishment to his brother as a ‘damned hole,’ where a gentleman couldn’t live, and obliged him with graphic accounts of his many differences of opinion with its principle.
‘But doesn’t he mind your setting your dogs on his pig?’ Sainty asked.
‘Mind? of course he minds; it makes him wild. But you should see the old woman; she gets twice as mad as he does. She’s always telling us we are “no gentlemen,” and that we shouldn’t do the things at home, and why don’t we treat her as we would any other lady.’
‘And why don’t you?’ asked Sainty, with delicate irony.
‘What, her!’ with fine contempt; ‘the fellows say she was the old man’s cook, and that he had to marry her, ‘cos he’d got her into trouble. You should see her in the evening in a greasy old black satin and a sham diamond locket; she’s awfully particular about our dressing for dinner, so Wood came in the other evening in muddy shooting-boots. She asked if he wanted to insult her, but he said he was awfully sorry but he couldn’t find his pumps, and glanced significantly at her toes that were sticking out of her gown: she has enormous beetle-crushers, and had sported a brand-new pair of patent-leather shoes. She fairly cried with rage.’
Sainty saw the futility of trying to suggest the poor lady’s side of the question; Arthur was never very quick at seeing other people’s point of view.
‘I just don’t pay ’em any attention,’ he said; ‘the old ‘un is always at me about not working. Says I shall never pass my prelim., and objects to my hunting. I tell him it’s necessary for my health.’
‘And how often do you hunt?’
‘Oh, well, not more than two days a week mostly, never more than three. You see, I’ve only got two hunters there; it’s so infernally expensive keeping ’em at livery, and I have to pay for the man’s keep too. It runs into a devil of a lot of money.’
After several such conversations, Sainty was not altogether surprised to hear from his mother that a three days’ absence without leave to attend a race meeting had brought matters to a crisis, and that the care of his brother’s education had been transferred from the church to the army. Arthur went to this new place with only a pony cart and a bicycle, promising great things; the hunters had been suppressed and the kennel cut down to two fox-terriers and a bob-tailed sheep-dog. Sainty was rather surprised at hearing nothing from him for several weeks—not even the familiar demand for money had broken the silence between them—and the day he came home for the Easter vacation he made haste to ask for news.
He was sitting in Lady Charmington’s sitting-room, where she had conceded a cup of tea to his fatigue after a journey, but was rigorously abstaining from refreshment herself. Sainty was drinking his tea and eating cake, while his mother hastily ran through some farm accounts she was going to submit to him.
‘How does Arthur get on at Colonel Humby’s?’ Sainty asked.
Lady Charmington looked up from her ledger with an abstracted air and her mouth full of figures. ‘Thirty-seven, forty-two, fifty, fifty-six, fifty-six pounds, seven and fourpence halfpenny,’ she murmured. ‘Didn’t I tell you he’d moved?’ and she noted the sum at the bottom of the page and turned over.
‘What! again?’ cried Sainty in dismay.
‘He said he couldn’t get on there; he felt he wasn’t making any progress, and he didn’t seem to like the men there; apparently they weren’t a very nice set.’
‘He’ll never pass his exams. if he keeps chopping about like this, a month in one place, a month in another. I’m afraid as long as he’s expected to do any work, he’ll never find a coach who quite suits his views. Where has he gone now?’
‘His friend, young Hunter, who was with him at Oxbourne, had gone to that man in London they say is so wonderful——’
‘Mother! you haven’t let him go to London?’
‘Why not? The boy seemed to think he should do better at Monkton’s; it is such a new thing, as you say yourself, for Arthur to want to work, that it seemed a pity to balk his good intentions.’
‘But surely you must see—London! Dear mother, won’t there be many more distractions there for a boy of Arthur’s temperament than at a dull place like Hog’s Hill?’
‘He said that was one trouble with Colonel Humby’s place, that it was so dull; there was never anything to do there. If he wanted any amusement, he always had to go away for it, and this broke into his work, interfered terribly with it, in fact.’
‘And so you think he’ll be likely to do more work when the things that break into it are under his hand? Oh! why didn’t you ask me before agreeing to this?’ cried Sainty in genuine distress.
This being his first day at home, Lady Charmington only smiled indulgently at the suggestion. She was not in the habit of consulting other people before making up her mind, and least of all Sainty. ‘My dear boy,’ she said, ‘you are scarcely older than your brother, and in some ways have really seen less of the world. Why should you think you can settle things for him so much better than he can for himself? or, for that matter, than I, who have been accustomed for years to arrange your lives for both of you?’
Sainty felt despairingly that there was nothing to be done with his mother in that direction. He had come to know the signals, and to recognise Lady Charmington’s ‘no thoroughfare expression’ as though it were written on a notice-board. He wondered sometimes if she were really as much at ease about her younger son as she seemed, but he never dared try to find out, for fear of awakening in her heart the uneasiness that oppressed his own. It was incredible that a woman so shrewd and far-seeing in most of the relations of life as his mother, should really feel a restful confidence about Arthur. To be sure, she was ignorant of many things that he knew only too well, such as the younger boy’s habit of betting and constant appeals to his elder for money; on the other hand, Arthur took but little pains to conceal his views of life, and occasionally delivered himself in his mother’s presence of remarks which, it seemed to Sainty, could not fail to enlighten a much more obtuse intelligence than Lady Charmington’s.
When he came to breakfast next morning he found her entrenched behind the zareba of teapots and kettles, under the shelter of which she habitually partook of that meal. She looked up from her letters with a certain air of triumph to say, ‘I have a letter from Arthur; he is working so hard that he will not even come home for Easter; he says he might run down just for the Sunday and Monday, but he thinks it would only break into his work, and that on the whole it is best for him not to come away at all.’ That was all the voice said, but the eyes said quite plainly, ‘You see!’
Sainty said nothing. He went and peeped into the dishes on the sideboard, and picked himself out a poached egg with no great appetite. This habit of his of saying nothing when he had nothing to say was called ‘rudeness’ by some people, by others ‘pride’ or ‘indifference.’ If he had spoken out his real thought to his mother she would have told him he was suspicious and could never believe any good of his brother, and would probably have exhorted him to watch against such an unamiable disposition.
The breakfast, the day, the weeks passed in this silence between the two, a silence eloquent of disagreement, yet broken only by a few words on indifferent subjects, except when the presence of guests made necessary some form of conversational rattling of peas in a bladder.
Whether it was duty or pleasure that kept Arthur away, the house seemed strangely empty and silent without him, even when some of the inevitable family party were gathered together in it—perhaps most so then, for though Arthur put himself out for no man, the mere fact that his pursuits were those of the normal young Englishman made him an important help in the entertainment of cousins. Sainty took endless trouble, but sent the men after rabbits who were secretly pining for the last meet of the season, and mounted the only Trafford who hated horses and had come down burning to throw the first fly of spring. Claude made things easier when he arrived a little later, but now that he was the duke’s private secretary, his presence was generally required at one of his grace’s numerous country-houses on the festivals of the Church, so that he was much less at Belchamber than formerly.
‘I’m worried about Arthur,’ Sainty said to him the first time they were alone. ‘You know he’s left the second place he went to, and my mother has let him go to London to read at Monkton’s. They don’t even board there, you know; he has rooms somewhere near.’
Claude’s eyebrows arched themselves, and he gave vent to a low but expressive whistle.
‘Yes,’ said Sainty, ‘that’s what I think; I feel sure he must be in mischief, he’s keeping so quiet. He wouldn’t even come home for Easter; it’s incredible that a woman of mother’s cleverness should really believe that it springs from excessive devotion to work.’
‘Have you told your mother what you think?’
‘I’ve tried, but there’s the difficulty. She thinks it is only my base jealousy and suspicion. I wonder why she so readily believes all good of him, and never gives me credit for even decent feelings. I’ve tried all my life to please her, studied her, thought what she’d like, and I don’t believe Arthur has ever done or given up one single thing for her sake; yet she cares more for his little finger than for my whole body.’
‘Oh, the secret of Arthur’s favour is not hard to guess. In the first place, he’s got nothing, and you’ve got everything. On the face of it, that seems like an injustice to him; so, with true woman’s logic, she takes it out by being thoroughly unjust to you.’
‘Got everything! Heavens! Do you suppose I wouldn’t rather be tall and strong and straight like Arthur, be liked by men and admired by women, than own half England and be fifty Lord Belchambers?’
‘Very likely; though a woman of my aunt Sarah’s respect for “plenishing” is not likely to appreciate that point of view. But the real reason of her partiality is that Arthur is just the one person in the world who isn’t afraid of her. Oh yes, you are afraid of her; it’s not the least use your saying you’re not, and so am I, and so’s every one about the place. Whereas Arthur doesn’t care a damn what she thinks; he does jolly well what he pleases, and, maîtresse-femme as she is, she can’t help admiring him for it.’
‘Well, never mind about that; I didn’t mean to complain; that any one should prefer Arthur to me is not a phenomenon that needs explanation. I only deplore this particular result of her devotion to him for his sake. What am I to do about it?’
‘It’s a good thing you mentioned it to me; I must see what I can do. Perhaps I shall be able to keep an eye on Master Arthur to a certain extent.’
It is true that his cousin’s influence had hitherto been unmixedly bad, yet he seemed so sympathetic, so anxious to help, so entirely at one with him in his desire to keep Arthur from making an ass of himself, that Sainty went back to Cambridge vaguely consoled, and with a feeling that Claude, being on the spot, might really perhaps be able to exercise some kind of check on the object of their common solicitude.
This was his ninth and last term, the term of his tripos exam. and his degree, and he was so busy that he had but little time for thinking of his brother. Lady Charmington mentioned him but rarely in her letters, beyond a casual observation that Arthur was as hard at work as ever. Arthur himself wrote even less than usual, but he did vouchsafe a few brief notes, saying he was ‘all right,’ and ‘sapping like the devil,’ and ending with the usual demands. In spite of his close attention to business, London seemed by no means an economical place of residence. ‘His landlady robbed him shamefully; he was told they all did; and though he was sure of the fact, he knew too little about such things to be able to spot her.’
One day Sainty showed one of these epistles to Newby, and hinted at his uneasiness. ‘You remember my brother Arthur?’ he added, seeing Gerald look a little vague.
‘Remember him? of course I do. A nice lad, a very jolly lad; an awfully charming type of healthy English boyhood.’
‘Oh yes, he’s all that,’ Sainty assented; ‘but I wish he wasn’t knocking about in lodgings in London by himself. He’s very young, and awfully fond of pleasure, and hasn’t a great deal of self-control.’
‘Let him alone, my dear boy,’ returned Newby airily. ‘He must sow his wild oats, like another; but he won’t go far astray. Bon sang ne peut mentir.’
‘Oh, can’t it?’ groaned Sainty; but his friend wouldn’t hear of any danger.
‘That kind of healthy well-bred English lad always comes out all right in the end,’ he said. ‘You can’t ride a thoroughbred with a curb.’
‘Dear me, how sporting you’ve become; you’re as horsey as Ned Parsons when he talked to Lady Rugby.’
‘Talking of Ned, have you heard about his book?’
‘No—what book?’
‘Why, he’s written a book which they say is going to be the success of the year; it ought to be out by now. I saw some of the proofs, and thought it deplorably flippant and vulgar, as anything by him was sure to be, but undeniably clever in a way.’
‘Is it a novel?’
‘Yes, a novel of society—as if Ned knew anything about society!’
‘How came you to see the proofs? Did he show them to you?’
Newby’s pale cheek took on a faint flush. ‘Well, some one told me he had put me into it; there is a young don in the story, and of course some one who wanted to be clever immediately decided it was meant for me, so I just taxed Parsons with it the first time I met him. “I hear you’ve been putting me into your book,” I said.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘At first I thought he looked a little queer, then he laughed one of those irritating insolent laughs of his and said he’d send me the proof-sheets of the chapter where his young don was described, and I could judge for myself.’
‘Well?’
‘Oh, of course, as soon as he offered to show it to me I knew it must be all right, and directly I saw it I found as I expected the character wasn’t the least like me. The fellow was a most egregious prig, and not only that, but a snob; and whatever my faults, that’s a thing my worst enemy couldn’t say I was, could he?’
‘I’m glad it was all right,’ said Sainty. ‘It would have been too caddish of him to return all your kindness in that way, and somehow I don’t think Ned’s a bad sort at bottom.’
As the tripos drew nearer Sainty had less and less time for anything outside his work. It may be said at once that he took a very good degree. In country rectories and cheerful middle-class households from which the clever son of the family had been sent to college at the cost of some privation and not a little grumbling, a place among the first six in the Classical Tripos would have been acclaimed with grateful pride and rejoicing. In Sainty it was accounted an innocent eccentricity to care what degree he took, or whether he took one at all. Lord Firth, who was the most understanding among his kinsfolk, wrote a kind little note of congratulation. Lady Charmington was mildly gratified to find that her boy had brains and the grit to work for a desired end, but she frankly acknowledged that she could see no use his first class would be to him in after life, nor how it would help him to manage his estates. Arthur said ‘his brother was the rummest devil he ever came across, he was hanged if he could understand him.’ They would all have been infinitely better pleased had Sainty taken his uncle’s advice, bought a gun and gone shooting in some form of movable go-cart. It was the more remarkable that he should do so well, as he was always more and more preoccupied about Arthur. Once the examination was over, and his mind at ease on that score, the old anxieties came crowding back upon him, and he decided to go to London and try and find out for himself what his brother was about. He would come up again for his degree. Meanwhile, his work was done and he had kept his term, so there was no difficulty about getting an exeat for a day or two, and he wrote to his uncle to ask if he could put him up.
After old Lord Firth’s death his widow had given up the house in Bryanston Square and retired to Roehampton with an elderly companion, an elderly maid, and an elderly Blenheim spaniel; and the present peer had bachelor quarters somewhere near Whitehall, close to the House of Lords, and with a sidelong squint at the river if you got very close to the windows.
Having arrived and ascertained that his uncle would probably not be in till dinner-time, Sainty went westwards in search of his brother. The educational establishment, familiarly known to candidates for the army as ‘Monkton’s,’ was situated in the wilds of South Kensington, and in order to be handy for his place of study Arthur had taken rooms in the same respectable region. But neither at the crammer’s nor his lodgings did Sainty find trace of him. At the former he heard that his brother had been there in the morning, but had not returned since lunch, and his rooms seemed an even more unlikely place to obtain tidings of the studious youth. ‘Oh yes!’ the maid said who opened the door, ‘’is lordship ‘as rooms ’ere right enough, but ’e isn’t often in ’em; ’e generally either calls or sends for ‘is letters most days, and once in a way ’e’ll sleep ’ere, but it isn’t often. Sometimes I don’t clap eyes on ‘im for days together.’
Neither this information nor the fact that his brother’s ideas of ‘sapping like the devil’ were consistent with taking the whole afternoon, from lunch on, for amusement, struck Sainty as very reassuring. However, there was nothing to be done except to write on a card a request that Arthur would come and see him at his club on the morrow, and trust that it might be one of the days when ‘’is lordship called or sent for ‘is letters.’
As his hansom bore him eastwards again, he could not help having his mind diverted from his anxieties by the rush of London life at five o’clock of a day in the season unrolled before him like a picture-book. The streams of vehicles of all sorts flowing in either direction made progress necessarily slow, and gave ample time for studying their occupants. He was not yet twenty-two, and had hardly ever been in London; the whole pageant was absolutely new to him, and it is small wonder if he found much to interest and amuse him. The great toppling vans and omnibuses were interspersed with equipages beside which the renovated carriages of Belchamber seemed suddenly rustic and old-fashioned. Little victorias slid past, bearing beings in shining raiment and crowned with improbable headgear. Family landaus containing no less gorgeous matrons, and perhaps a brace of pink-cheeked sulky-looking daughters in clouds of blue and white feathers, or small parterres of roses nodding in the summer breeze, made stately progress towards the park, or to fetch papa from his club. One of the prettiest of the passing girls leaned forward in sudden recognition and touched her companion’s arm, and Sainty found himself responding to a volley of smiles and bows from Cissy Eccleston and her mother, which at a touch made him part of the great glittering show, and no longer a mere onlooker and outsider. It occurred to him with a little thrill that it only rested with himself to come in and take his place among all these people, the place that was his by right of birth. Already invitations had poured in, more or less unheeded, on such an eligible young man. Unversed as he was in the ways of the world, he knew enough to be aware that a fatherless peer with a long minority behind him, an unencumbered rent-roll, and one of the show places of England, would not be forced to take the lowest room at the various feasts to which all these votaries of fashion were so eagerly pressing.
But this unusual uplifting of his horn was of brief duration. One glance at the little mirrors on either side of the cab in which he rode, and he would have bartered all his advantages for the health and good looks of the poorest of the well-groomed, broad-shouldered youths in shiny boots who trod the pavement of Piccadilly with floating coat-tails and such a happy insolence. At one point where the throng was thickest, Sainty’s attention was arrested by a tall and very showy-looking young person in a smart private hansom going in the opposite direction from his own. She was much dressed in the height of the prevailing fashion, and wore what is called a ‘picture hat’ adorned with a great number of nodding plumes. Her charms, deftly enhanced by art, were of the more obvious order, and she scattered smiles broadcast among the throng of young men, where dogskin-covered hands flew up to many a burnished hat as she passed, enjoying a sort of triumphal progress with the western sun shining full on her flashing gems and dazzling complexion. As the two cabs came almost abreast of one another she leaned back to say something to the man beside her, and with a clutch of the heart Sainty recognised in the slim youth leaning lazily back with his hat tipped over his eyes, who looked so distressingly boyish beside all this full-blown beauty, his brother Arthur.