Desolate splendour

THE avenue sloped upward from the meeting-place of the five rides to where, grandiose on the line of the horizon, tall, wrought-iron gates fenced off a space of sky. Through the uprights and foliations of the grille was seen only sky, for the gates crowned the hill-crest and, as it were, checked with a movement of their graceful fingers the sumptuous procession of the trees. Beyond the veil of the ironwork was nothing: nor earth, nor the bunched greenery of trees, but only sky. Long ago, before the new road from Rushmorton to Sawley had been engineered or even thought of, the eastward highway from the Severn flats bordered the park wall, so that by that way and through the tall gates lay the principal approach to Morvane. All that was past now. The crumbling stones of the boundary wall edged a grass-grown lane, rutted by an occasional cart, but for the rest abandoned to a tangle of wild flowers and to the murmur of indifferent bees. On one side of this ancient road lay Morvane, with its sweep of park-land, its majestic trees, its queer, unhappy house; while on the other the ground fell steeply as a tangled precipice to the deep, secret valley of Rockarvon.

The iron gates of Morvane were now gates by courtesy alone. Between them was access to no carriageway; untidy gaps where once had been stone lodges, divided them from the park-wall on either hand. Powerless alike to admit or to exclude, they stood in the loveliness of their futility, closing with all the pride of a vain gesture a grassy corridor between two rows of beeches, a corridor that was, as ever it had been, the avenue.

Along the deserted avenue the grass grew rank, and the sullen winds crept between the beech trunks and silvered its dull green surface with their breath. To either side of the iron gates the old walls dropped their stones among nettles and hemlock, now sinking almost to the level of the ground, now roughly limbered up at the erratic impulse of an owner, penniless or preoccupied.

The avenue sloped foolishly across the park. Its very starting point had become, through lapse of time and the mutability of man’s handiwork, a vague absurdity. Morvane, of the sheer walls and the huge, exotic tower, stood distant by quarter of a mile from where the five rides met. In the old days a low mullioned wing had stretched from the surviving mansion toward the west, and the carriage road, leaving the avenue, had plunged through an archway and carried the visitor under the windows of those ancient rooms to the main door of the house. With the destruction in the ’twenties of this fragment of the Middle Age, the old approach had received its death blow. Already the road, upon which the carriage-drive debouched, had begun to fail before the rivalry of its supplanter. Each winter its fabric was crumbling a little more, each winter the grass encroached a little farther upon its surface. When, therefore, a night of fire in ’23 left wall-stumps and charred beams to mark the last site of the original Tudor house, the Plethern of the day determined to throw a new drive across the park to eastward, and give his home an approach at once more practical and more magnificent. His design was thwarted by fate. He had time to destroy the lodges that flanked the great grille; he had time to construct of their stones part of the sunk fence necessary to embank his projected road. But at this point unlucky speculation drove him abroad, and it was left to his son to complete the task and finally to close the ceremonial career of the Morvane beeches.

The gates themselves survived. Their value, in the financial crash of the late ’twenties, was not worth the work of their removal. Later, when wealth returned to Morvane, the ruling Plethern saw merit only in modernity.

So it was that, while the nineteenth century died and the twentieth struggled through its teething, the beeches still climbed the slope in solemn files and the great grille, slung like a wisp of mammoth lace across the sky-line, still closed with the serenity of lovely uselessness the avenue that sloped upward across the park of Morvane to the west.

§ 2

By the side of the iron-grey house rose the Morvane campanile. That its nickname—‘The Devil’s Candle’—was more than antiquarian ingenuity is doubtful. Cases are not unknown elsewhere of local legend manufactured in London, eagerly adopted by intellectual residents, but for ever stranger to the rustic mind. Nevertheless, falsehood or verity, the story is pleasant enough, for it tells of a midnight compact between Sir Christopher Plethern, Jacobite and fugitive from Preston Pans, and his Satanic Majesty, according to which the latter was pledged to destroy root and branch the House of Hanover and the former to build on his own land in Gloucestershire a lofty tower, from the summit of which a light should shine for ever to guide lost souls along the way to hell. Queer corroborative evidence was provided by a ghost picture (the term indicates a conglomerate of lines, half impressed, half drawn) on the panelling of an ancient inn near Dunbar. Toward Dunbar, so runs the tale, fled Christopher Plethern, the enemy at his heels. With the connivance of the landlord he hid in the loft of the Joined Hands till the pursuit was past. That night he caroused and, in his cups, praised Satan for his deliverance. From the panelled room came the murmur of voices and the landlord’s wife bore witness to the sulphurous smell that, for days afterward hung about the stairs and corridors. Her husband swore Plethern was alone at dinner and that when morning came he had vanished, leaving a purse of guineas on the table. Picking up the purse the landlord was struck with a darkening of the oak beneath; he bent closer, and the wood showed black and charred. On the wall, phosphorescent and unearthly, shone the ghost picture, a drawing of a great tower, windowed irregularly and topped with a curious bulb-shaped dome. Further fragments of narrative, less reliable than that of the landlord (who, for all his Jacobite opinions, was a solid God-fearing man), but none the less thought worthy of preservation by the investigators of the period, record that the picture, which dimmed rapidly and became in a few weeks’ time the pale jumble of line and space that it has thereafter remained, at first changed from hour to hour. The tapster declared that at midnight, three days after the horrid event which gave the picture birth, he had occasion to visit the panelled parlour on some trivial duty. To his amazement and terror the summit of the tower was blazing with light and tiny objects in vile procession—he described them as tadpoles with forked tails—were writhing toward its base. They crept one by one into the low arched doorway that gave access to the fearful edifice and, as each vanished from view, the light that radiated from the dome gleamed with a fiercer brightness and faded again, while a short, sharp sizzling appalled the ear.

It will be asked why, in view of these disquieting happenings, Sir Christopher Plethern, when he returned to the home of his fathers, encountered none of the hostility generally shown to allies of the Devil. History is incomplete in explanation, but those were troublous times and rumour passed slowly from Scotland to Gloucestershire. The story of the ghost picture near Dunbar, founded though it be on the contemporary evidence summarized above, did not reach the publicity of print till the end of the century, a fact which to the sceptical mind of the present day throws some doubt on its veracity. As to that, the curious may draw their own conclusion; to the chronicler of Morvane the essential is the residue of fact, and fact incontrovertible is the building by this same Christopher, within two years of the fight at Preston Pans, of the Morvane campanile. Those there are that profess to detect close resemblance between the ghost picture (or what remains of it) on the panelling near Dunbar and the tower in Gloucestershire. Here again the curious may investigate and pass judgment. For their convenience they are referred to the third volume of Clandell’s Antiquities of Gloucestershire, in which rare but unreliable book they will find a wood engraving of the campanile as it stood in 1842 and, presumably, as it persisted until the date at which the present narrative begins. Clandell’s illustrator depicts a tall, square tower, vaguely Italianate in design, with windows as seemingly irregular as buds on a branch and, to crown all, a rounded dome, without suggestion of the Moorish or hint of narrowing toward the base, but more elongated and cone-shaped than is usual.

Evidence is scanty as to the use to which this tower was put during the last decade of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Morvane itself was unoccupied between 1828 and 1840, and it is known that in the latter year, from poverty rather than from inclination, the grandfather of those Pletherns with whom this narrative is concerned, crawled back to the home of his heritage as, twenty years before, he had for the same reason left it. Probably therefore the tower stood empty, one of the thousand extravagant relics of the eighteenth century that an unimaginative posterity despised and left to crumble. Matters changed, and startlingly, with the succession in 1848 of the man who seemed destined to restore the fortunes of his house and who, for his ability and arrogance, had earned the nickname of ‘King’ Plethern. As hero of a tale of Victorian ambition ‘King’ Plethern would stand forth with credit and, as matters fell out, with tragic force. He was a strange contrast to his father; the one slipping to his grave in feckless penury, while an unloved and neglected house cracked over his head; the other working secretly and untiringly in London, Paris and the wilds of Caucasia, to amass the wealth that should buy him the life and position that he craved. ‘King’ Plethern was untroubled by scruple and his nature was without that whimsicality that is deemed weakness in the humble, but wide sympathy in the securely placed. He was a rich man when his father died, and if to be forty and unmarried were unusual in men of his class, the oddity was deliberate and part of his scheme of life. He knew well that women, suited to times of struggle and preparation, often prove unfit to wear the glories they have helped to win. To hamper himself for life with a romantic shred of a dead past was not the act of a thinking man. Reason had no difficult triumph over sentiment in the brain of ‘King’ Plethern. If he turned from women during his years of toil, he turned easily enough, but with achievement of ambition came retribution and from the quarter he suspected least.

In 1848, Morvane, with its stark greyness, its wilderness of garden and untidy park, its tower and its avenue, came under the new master. The wealth, so desperately amassed, so carefully unspent, now first found outlet and expression. The gardens were cropped and dug and tamed into hideous submission; the ill-fated carriage-drive, begun thirty years before, was completed with shining gravel and much complexity of unnecessary curve. On the house ‘King’ Plethern was about to lay his ruthless hand, when that intervened which had so purposely been left aside during his obscurity and exile. He married. His bride came from East Anglia; a stately girl with masses of dull, fair hair, pale, obstinate eyes, and a dowry that even her lover respected. Rowena Walsingham was no romantic fool. She married a man twice her age, tempting him with her white shapeliness, her money and her greater expectations, not despite his murky exploits in little known and distant markets but because of them. If she loved her husband at all, it was for his past and for the established splendour that, thanks to that past, he now possessed. To her was it given to detect the chink in the armour of ‘King’ Plethern; unerringly to drive in her goad; unfailingly, when it pleased her, to prick him to fury and so to defeat. The man’s temper had stood him in good stead, while his war was against other men; it was a sword of Harlequin, used against this smooth, calm woman, who learnt to humiliate before she angered him and so to rob his violence of its sole real force—conviction of right and confidence in himself.

It happened that her earliest determination centred round her new home. Something in the sombre exterior of Morvane called to her grim nature and, in preventing the modernization of the house on the lines adopted in the gardens, she showed to her husband the first taste of her quality. Morvane must remain iron grey; the windows should not be thrown out into bays, neither should a steep roof with circular lights bring to Gloucestershire the beauties of the French château. Two changes she not only permitted but demanded. A Palladian hall and a range of fine saloons were to take the place of the existing long, pilastered lobby and the grave reception rooms that neighboured it, and the campanile should be entirely renovated—for her own occupation. Somewhat to his surprise (he had not in those early days learnt his lesson) ‘King’ Plethern found he had consented. There were fierce scenes between the pair during their first years of married life. Maybe house plans slipped through almost unnoticed among the clash of more vital differences. These were as deliberate as were all the lady’s actions in this matter of marriage. Almost at once she recognized in her betrothed a man who affected to despise women and the pleasures of love. Equally clear was it that he wanted her, mainly for her money, but, secretly and a little nervously, for herself. With the instinctive capacity for exploitation of sex that cold, almost sexless women have been known to possess, she realized that Plethern could more thoroughly be controlled through desires of which he was ashamed than through those to the fulfilment of which his life had been devoted. She came, therefore, to marriage with one inflexible reserve. She denied herself to her husband. Uneasy before this obstacle, ignorant of women and their ways, ‘King’ Plethern hesitated. In the past, when denied opportunity of material advancement, he would crash his way to his goal by sheer force of mind and temper. Had he but known it, those methods would have served him now. But he did not know, and he hesitated. Thus doubly armed, his wife went her inscrutable way. First to one thing, then to a greater, then to a greater still he agreed, storming, sulking, sometimes awkwardly imploring, because he hoped by such concessions to win the one thing he had never wanted until it was refused him. Three angry, embittered years, passed in ever-increasing, never-satisfied desire, left him, in the autumn of 1854, a different being from the self-sufficient, forceful master Morvane had known during the opening days of his succession. His spirit was shrunk within the brave carcase of his possessions, and those there were who, in later years, compared him to his stark grey house standing so withered and so tired among the decorative vulgarities of its too elaborate pleasure grounds. They might have gone farther and seen in the Morvane campanile a counterpart of Mrs. Plethern. Rowena had won. She towered triumphant over her husband’s life. Conscious of victory, aware that the concession came so late as rather to bulwark than to endanger her dominion, she passed to the final insult. Choosing her night, and with a calm, contemptuous complacency, she offered herself to the man whose strength she had broken. It was a wet night and raw; the tower, in which Mrs. Plethern now lived, stood away from the house; the man was told he might come to her room for an hour or two. That he went; that he groped his way through the wet darkness of the garden and climbed a hundred stairs to enjoy what was his by right three years ago; that, the pitiful ceremony over, he crept down and out and back again to his own solitary bed—these are indications enough of the completeness of his subjugation.

From the union thus grotesquely consummated were born, in 1855, twin boys. Charles and James Plethern first saw the day in the topmost room of the ‘Devil’s Candle.’ Over the head of their mother in her travail rose the cone-shaped dome from which in picture, a century before, the tapster of a Lowland inn had seen radiate light that was not of heaven nor of earth.

Between her two sons, as they grew to maturity, the mother was not long in choosing. Charles was lean and brown, with thin, dissipated lips and the wide, brown eyes of generations of Morvane squires; James was pale and light-eyed, with straight fair hair, and the long, cleanly-cut nose of the Walsinghams. This alone would have decided the favourite; James made matters doubly sure by proving himself his mother’s son in mind as well as body.

It is arguable that ‘King’ Plethern, when finally admitted to connubial intimacies long withheld from him, had reached a point of hysterical repression at which the individual was merged in the race. It was as though his power for paternity were not his power but that of Morvane. In the interests of heredity, nature seemed to have set aside the shattered personality of the wretched man and used him merely to sire a son for his house rather than for himself. If so, the begetting of Charles was his father’s last act of self-assertion, and even in this the power of his wife all but conquered him. Charles was a Plethern, but James, younger by four hours, was as utterly a Walsingham. It is to be hoped that in his last sour years of life, the old man thanked Providence that his son, and not the woman’s, won the race for birth. Certainly the mother never forgave the trick played by her own pregnancy. Once she understood what nature of boy was Charles and what James, she turned her grim, silent brain to the problem of winning for the one the upper room that nature had allotted to the other.

It should be here recorded that round this very point centred a quarrel between herself and her husband, a quarrel of a kind more futile and at the same time more ghoulish than any that had preceded it. The boys were seventeen. Charles had in some manner more striking than usual revealed himself a Plethern, had brought too vividly to life in some boyish escapade the generations of careless gallants—cavaliers, exiles, Jacobites—that had gone to the making of his youthful egoism. James—Puritan, Whig, Hanoverian—had stood aside and not refused his mother the particulars she demanded. There was a scene between the parents. Finally Mrs. Plethern made a statement so fantastic that anyone but her husband would have feared for her sanity. She had stumbled badly, she said, three months before her lying-in. The jar would have killed a weak woman, or at least her offspring. She had lived and her children had lived, but the wrong child had first come to birth. The old man was staggered for a moment at this solemn lunacy; then he fell before the threat of his wife’s baneful eye and broke weakly from silent astonishment into his usual wailing temper. He raved at her folly; she was talking against nature and science; the idea was a senseless infatuation worthy only of the pauper’s hospital. Her mind, rigid in the groove of its sombre obsession, made no response to his fury. In sullen silence she let him storm and shout, then:

“I have made up my mind,” she said calmly, “and I will use those stairs no more. You will have a lift put into the tower.”

Ludicrous enough to read of, no doubt, but to the weary husband, whose raving had sunk like a rotten boat to the depths of lassitude, any chance to peace might mean peace. He dropped his head on his hands and waited for her to go.

“Well?” she asked.

He nodded heavily, but did not raise his head nor look at her. Quietly and without another word she left him. In due course there was a lift in the Morvane campanile and, later on, came a large bill for its installation, which the old man paid, dully, automatically, as though he knew not what it meant nor greatly cared.

The incident of the lift was doubly significant. It revealed the depths of absurdity to which could sink a narrow and bigoted intelligence, brooding over an imagined wrong; it was also not untypical of the woman’s extravagance in indulging her own queer whims. As time went on she became more and more of a recluse, seldom leaving her tower except for occasional journeys to London, Paris, or the Riviera, seeing fewer people yearly, withdrawing ever more deeply into the sinister fancies of her brain. She developed a hobby, a hobby as infrequent and unlikely as would be looked for from her temperament. She collected playing cards, buying from all over the world and often at great prices, ancient and curious cards, with the less precious and the more reputable of which she would, in irregular rotation, play game after game of mysterious and complicated Patience.

‘King’ Plethern died in the middle ’seventies, a pathetic figure, cowed but savage. His disappearance came as a relief to many, because he had found outlet for his embittered temper in quarrels with persons standing in the way of desired expansion of the Plethern properties. To make wealth breed wealth was the sole ambition of the man’s last years. Conscious that at home he was a cipher and contemptible, he sought balm for vanity in tyrannizing over strangers weaker or poorer than himself. Wherefore they, to whom his vanishing meant peace, came to regard the day on which he died as one for thanksgiving; but from his own place, from the Morvane that was his, he faded unnoticed, his wife being too indifferent either to rejoice at her release or to mourn her widowing. Until the will was read. Then indeed she had a spasm of silent fury. Everything was for Charles. She was not even trustee on his behalf. “For my son James,” the dead man had written, “my dear wife Rowena will, I hope, provide from her private fortune.” Safe in death, the wretched man had thus trivial revenge. “You love your younger son,” he seemed to say. “He is yours. I leave him to you.”

Between the death of her husband and the coming of age of her eldest son, Mrs. Plethern took stock of the future. The psychology of the heir baffled her, and to the instinctive dislike of Puritan for Cavalier was added in her brooding mind a dislike of something she despised but was as yet unable to defeat. Charles eluded her. He was affectionate and dutiful as occasion required, but his self-sufficiency, unaggressive and conciliatory though it was, presented no evident point of weakness. Rowena Plethern had sapped the more obvious strength of her husband by gauging and exploiting the force of a need he hardly realized. Her eldest son had no obvious strength, almost no obvious desires. His casual gaiety might cloak some purpose or be a shroud of emptiness. She puzzled how best to meet the clash of personality, for clash of some kind there would surely be; but she was unable to prepare defence or attack, knowing not whence assault would come, nor at what point opportunity of conquest offer.

Let it not be thought that she permitted her sons at this early age to suspect the feelings crystallizing in her heart toward their so different personalities. Charles, as has been said, was affectionate to his mother, and she treated him with the quiet equanimity that served her for friendliness. To James she behaved with kindness no less tranquil, repelling rather than encouraging the attempts he made to arrive at a closer understanding. So coolly did she play her part, that neither of her sons suspected, on the day that both were twenty-one, how bitter were the ceremonies to a heart that yearned over the younger and rebelled in dumb powerlessness at the new dignity chance had brought to the elder.