Desolate splendour

IN the year that Queen Victoria died Viola Marvell came to Morvane. She was twenty-one, an orphan from beyond the seas, well grown, laconic, a creature of quiet, firm movements and of a reserve as far beyond her years as was her inexperience below them. So lonely was she and yet so vividly complete, that she seemed, in some way indefinable, a thing for worship rather than for pity.

Viola’s father had been at college with both Charles Plethern and his brother James. He was their senior by two years in standing and by more in age, and it remained a mystery how and why his lonely, reflective path ever crossed that of the wealthy twins, who with a crowd of school friends came riotously to Trinity from Eton. Inscrutably, however, their ways met and from the meeting sprang an intimacy with Charles, the elder of the brothers, which subsisted as inexplicably as it had begun. That Marvell, solitary, inarticulate and obscure, should turn an eager face to the sun of Charles Plethern’s vivid smile was to a point comprehensible; that the instinctive attraction should have found soil in which its roots could shoot and thrive was perhaps conceivable; but that Charles—gay, improvident, vowed to Newmarket, hunting and polo, a flaunter of yellow waistcoats in the quads and about the Cambridge streets—that this most typical ‘blood’ should care to pass even five minutes of his leisure in the company of a fumbler and a scrub defied all understanding. Charles found himself a butt of friendly ridicule. He responded with his easy smile and went on his way, bearing no grudge but unsusceptible to criticism, an Englishman of the English. The companionship, such as it was, continued. The two rode together about the country lanes; now and again walked together in the town. There, for a time, the matter ended, for in college among their fellows they lived apart and as strangers—Marvell in his bare, fourth-floor rooms, mooning over his books, working in his own untidy way, trembling for the spring into that empyrean of higher mathematics that was his life’s sole achievement; Charles gambling and ragging with the heedless young squires and lordlings that were his natural companions.

And James? He was of his brother’s set and yet not of it. He shared their amusements, their sports, their social rowdiness. They accepted him, but for tradition’s sake and for that of Charles rather than for himself. Any attempt to define the feeling toward James Plethern of those that formed his college circle were at the very outset dangerous. To attribute constructive judgment to such as they were foolish. And yet, in their fuddled way, they felt now and again that they stood on the brink of perplexity. He was a gentleman, with the unself-consciousness only possessed by those to whom established breeding gives complacency. He thought as they did, lived as they did, knew, so to speak, the vernacular of their common understanding. And yet, despite these unchallenged credentials, they were not free from an occasional recurrent uncertainty. They wondered.... It is facile to brush their uneasiness aside as the unspoken dislike of stupidity for intelligence. Probably they were for the most part stupid; certainly James Plethern was intelligent. But that distrust of mental agility, which marked then, as it does now, the Englishman of the upper class, has a basis of sound common sense. It springs from a conviction that the man who counts the cost of his actions does so because he cannot afford them, while a gentleman can afford anything that befits his caste. James’ Cambridge friends were far from so precise a rendering of their secret feelings; but events were to show that their doubts, however intermittent and illogical, were not unjustified.

At the close of his last year, after the examination that was to make him Fifth Wrangler and set within his reach a choice of fellowships, Marvell, the outsider, and Charles Plethern, the blood, went sailing for six weeks on the Broads. This crowning wonder so staggered comment as finally to hush it altogether; besides, when October came, Marvell had left Cambridge.

The oddly consorted pair vanished into the summer weather. Then one night Marvell saved Charles from drowning. The event touched some emotional chord in the latter’s mercurial but romantic nature. He was genuinely and extravagantly grateful. A month later, after they had parted, he wrote Marvell a very curious letter, a letter of solemn, almost rhetorical thankfulness, of which the last sentence read as follows:

The next news of Marvell to reach his Cambridge acquaintances was that, despite the brilliant result of his tripos, he had refused all fellowships, and accepted a Chair of Pure Mathematics at some Canadian University. There were rumours of an incautious marriage. Cambridge shrugged its shoulders; clearly Marvell was mad. In time it filtered through that his wife had died, leaving one little girl. His few friends in England murmured “How sad!” and forgot all about him until, years later, it was reported that he also was dead. No one troubled to confirm the report, but to Charles Plethern it needed no confirmation, for he received by post from Toronto a letter, addressed in an unknown hand. It contained a sealed envelope bearing his name in the writing of his old friend and three lines on a half sheet of note-paper:

The dead man’s letter committed to Plethern’s care “my orphan child.” Pinned to this message from the grave was a soiled sheet of paper closely written. The concluding sentence was crossed with blue. It was the letter written by Charles to Marvell many years before and the sentence was the promise of unqualified service. The newly appointed guardian shrugged his shoulders and dispatched two cablegrams to Canada.

§ 2

That Charles Plethern should first cable to his ward and only then seek counsel from his mother was, in miniature reflection, the man himself. The twenty odd years that lay between the long vacation on the Broads and its strange consequence—the entry of Viola into English life—had left him as elusive as ever had been the schoolboy and the undergraduate. Pleasure-loving he was; self-centred, if you will; but ever a creature of odd, independent judgment, of rapid impulses, frivolously conceived but brought to maturity with a determination that permitted nor question nor dispute. His mother lived on in her tower. Age had hardly lined her large, pale face and her hair was smooth and fair as that of a young woman. Like an amber threat she loomed over Morvane, withdrawn from a scene she knew not how to dominate, biding her time.

Her sons went their respective ways. When Charles inherited, he found himself master of great wealth. Life offered itself as a luxurious and disjointed dream. The various estates were well tenanted and carefully controlled by a good agent. Investments were sound and profitable. Their owner felt that supervision could as well be exercised from London, the Riviera, Africa or Japan as from Morvane, and his visits home became mere pauses between one round of pleasure and another.

For James, both by temperament and by fortune, matters were different. Had he not been a younger son, he might in any case have acted as he did; being a younger son, inclination harmonized with necessity and he set himself to make his way. James was ambitious where Charles seemed indolent, poor where Charles was rich. Above all, he had that keenest of all spurs to activity—a jealous grievance. Morvane, but for the hazard of birth, would have been his; his brains and his determination, thanks to that lying hazard, were set aside in favour of a frivolous trifler. Direct sympathy from his mother he never sought nor would she have given it. They understood one another too well. But the gall of his minority was ever bitter to his lips and, like the old woman whose son he so truly was, he played his part and waited on fortune.

Politics, even at Cambridge, had been James’ most absorbing interest and to politics, once years of tutelage were over, he turned for livelihood, and for advancement. To young men of his social position the late ’seventies offered of their best; at the same time, James was not one to be content with mediocrity. To him eight hundred pounds of annual income were but a step from beggary, and the facile delights of social gaiety trivial futilities. He must have money and he must have power. Politics could give him power and that, once gained, turned easily to gold. He became private secretary to a Minister and for ten years served his chief, in office and out of it, with accuracy, ardour and unfailing evenness of temper. Noteworthy was it, and indicative of his discreet intelligence, that James’ allegiance was to Liberalism. For one of his origin and background the choice in those days was unusual, but he, who at need upheld the whole rigidity of convention, could divine those rare occasions when the unexpected was the profitable.

Early during his period of secretaryship he married, choosing a bride as he had chosen a career and a party, for her prospects and her usefulness. Long ago, his father had avoided marriage for reasons fundamentally the same as those that now led James to a considered altar. But the son had seasoning of Walsingham in his blood and to the practical sense of ‘King’ Plethern was added a completer self-control. His choice fell on the second child and only daughter of a man richer in financial influence than in financial goods. The girl was slight and very dark, with hard, imperious features and a voice that sheathed its every word from contradiction in armour of brusque assurance. The engagement created interest and discussion, as James intended that it should. He was too cunning to contrive the usual ‘good marriage.’ Heiresses balance a bank account better than a domestic see-saw, and a wife’s money is either tyranny or temptation. James was as disinclined to be dubbed fortune hunter as he was determined to be master in his own house. As for Rosalind Mackworth, she read his mind and approved it. Her own keen instinct for success told her that this was a young man to whom ambition meant achievement. Fully awake to the risk she was running in accepting a suitor unknown, and, as her world went, badly off for wealth, she decided, after an hour’s close thinking, to favour the proposal that was clearly on its way.

Society, for all its bewilderment, smiled a little. The affair was so terribly controlled. The wedding, decked out with all the ceremonial of fashion, was followed in under the year by the birth of a child. Sardonic observers raised their eyebrows. When after a decent interval, another baby appeared, they praised the wonders of modern science. But in this they showed not only their own malice, but also a misconception of the power of mind over matter.

From his chief’s ante-room James Plethern passed into Parliament. His wife, sensitive to his every thought but to little else, was his colleague rather than his helper. Everything was done that could be done by judicious hospitality, by well-regulated servility or rudeness. Relentlessly the young politician made his way until, before the Ministry was two years old, he was in knowledgeable circles marked down for early office. It seemed the desired fruit might at any moment droop to his reach, but fate was unkind and his party fell from power. James allowed no trace of disappointment to ruffle his quiet intensity. He faced what promised to be long years of opposition with calm energy. Early and late he worked, keeping his name before his chief and before the public, allowing to neither chance to forget his claim for recognition, when next the pendulum of patronage swung its course.

At intervals, during these years of industry, there flitted through the forests of James’ solemn and efficient life, the gay dissipation of his brother’s plumage. At intervals gossip reached even James’ preoccupation of this liaison or of that, of Charles with Lottie Wycherley at Cannes, of Charles with La Carmagnola in a flowery garden near Seville, of Charles at the tables, at Ascot, on the lawns and terraces of Long Island homes. The younger brother smiled to himself and, with infinite discretion, wafted gentle encouragement along the elder’s joyful path. His real feeling toward Charles he scrupulously concealed. The two were on terms of friendliness, meeting whenever the fitful wanderings of the one crossed the other’s undeviating way. Charles liked his brother’s children as he liked everything that was gay and unpremeditated; he found in his brother’s wife sufficient response to casual jollity to please his easy nature; of James himself he made pretence of humble admiration.

To one more scrupulous or more sensitive, this outspoken veneration might have brought suspicion, but James Plethern had the obtuseness of conceit and accepted with quiet graciousness his brother’s homage. He encouraged his children to like their uncle, giving every opportunity for meeting and familiarity. In the matter of Charles’ more intimate amusements, the younger brother’s attitude has already been defined. Its basis was logical enough. Let Charles but pass his youth thus, let one debauchery lead to a greater one, and he would come the more quickly to an exhausted middle age, with (maybe) those hampering memories of an improvident past that demand clubland and a complacent flat rather than the rigours and proprieties of autumnal matrimony. The young Christopher was growing up and bade fair to be his uncle’s favourite. To him should fall the inheritance of which his father had been cheated.

To such purpose, behind a mask of dignified and affectionate sympathy, James lived on terms of cordiality with his erratic brother. But beneath his friendliness, his purposeful and secret life moved on its way.

For three years and a half the period of opposition dragged its tedious feet. Then, in the summer of 1899, James Plethern once more did the unexpected thing. He resigned his seat and went into the city. His friends were stupefied. It was known that for some years he had commercial interests—whence else could have come the means for supporting the discreet opulence of his existence?—but so sudden an abandonment of all he had seemed to care for was an impatience incredible in this stealthy, determined man. James received expressions of regret and the curiosity veiled beneath them with polite obtuseness. He appreciated the kindness, but proffered no word of explanation. A few weeks after his disappearance eastward from St. Stephen’s, the smouldering trouble in South Africa broke into flame.

The Boer War found the Plethern brothers true to their respective natures. To James it offered commercial opportunity; to Charles a new diversion. The latter had at one time played with ideas of soldiering as a profession, but the thrust of pleasure edged him from his purpose, until of his military ambitions naught remained but a spasmodic Yeomanry activity, more ornamental than arduous. The South African adventure called to his careless imagination. At any rate it was ‘something fresh.’ Using his prestige as captain of Yeomanry to secure transfer to a cavalry regiment, he sailed for Natal. During two years he found in warfare much excitement, some suffering and a new, affectionate tolerance for all manner of humanity, a tolerance born of comradeship and nurtured on dangers met in mixed but loyal company. Outwardly he came home the same man as he had gone—more bronzed, of course, with, maybe, more markedly the eyes of an idealist, but casual as ever, vowed as wholly as before to the pleasures of fashionable life. Of the change wrought in his heart none could know, but where before had ruled only thought of self was now understanding of others and a sense of man’s duty to his neighbour. Wherefore, although he would at any time have disposed first and spoken afterwards of the legacy of duty left him by his dead friend, it was in part due to the influence of the interlude of war that his reply to Viola bade her sail at once for England, and informed her that money for her journey lay ready in a Toronto bank.

§ 3

To the eyes of his neighbours at Morvane Charles Plethern had emerged from the experience of South Africa the same baffling, inconvenient creature that had titillated their social curiosity before war or Boers were thought of. Maybe he remained at home for periods longer than had been customary; maybe rumours of dissipation came more rarely, less delightfully, to scandalize a country that feared frailty but loved gossip more. In the main, however, Charles was, as always, with but not of his local world. He hunted, shot and performed prodigies at polo; on the Bench he was amiable and unaffected; but the inner chambers of his mind were closed and the treasures (if such there were) that fancy and experience had stored therein, lay hidden from eyes that longed to peep but dared not pry.

Of conditions inside the house and park of Morvane the neighbourhood was mainly ignorant. Charles Plethern’s courtesies were so brittle and so delicately shaped that their recipients instinctively refrained from grasping them too heartily. An occasional dinner-party; whisky and hot baths after hunting; once a great gathering on the shady lawns—to such lengths, but little further, went Morvane’s master in his hospitality. He was reputed wealthy. Freely, if selfishly, he seemed to spend his money. Yet was he clearly not a man to interest himself in the economics of estate-control. With nonchalance he left his agent to the management of his affairs, taking the income, asking no questions. The discretion of the agent aggravated the offence of Morvane. An exclusive landowner was, in effect, an absentee; absentees were phenomena familiar to the county and, if conventionally frowned on, were at least ponderable. But for the resident representative of such a landowner to outdo his master in reserve was contrary to nature, and Wilkinson, as source of fact or fancy, was even more useless than the man he served.

In effect, therefore, local society knew Charles Plethern little and his affairs not at all. At their infrequent mutual contacts he was elusive and genial but never intimate. They reacted variously, with ruffled disapprobation or shy servility. Charles’ very prosperity, because its reasons were obscure, provoked them. “How fortunate,” they would murmur, “that Mr. Wilkinson is so honest,” and murmuring thus, they almost wished themselves Charles Plethern’s agents. “The Man of Pleasure,” he was nicknamed, and to speak thus of him gave satisfaction to one or two, who relished the malice in a phrase that had wandered from Cosmopolis to Gloucestershire. Perplexity and annoyance learnt to cloak themselves in indifference. Plethern was superior and aloof; if he thought himself too grand for local friendships, the neighbours would not break their hearts. Nevertheless they continued secretly to wonder and to envy and to wonder more.

Charles read their minds and on the whole approved his reading. Of moral censure he was contemptuous; his code of manners was his own and personal. If occasionally he regretted the uneasiness that, in the depths of his neighbours’ minds, checked at a point each progressive friendship, he took comfort in the independence of his solitude. He was a man scrupulously to conceal the feelings that most hardly ruled him, and to be held a trifler, to be judged in matters practical an idle fool, proved him successful in dissimulation. The fact flattered his complex self-esteem.

Charles Plethern was ambitious—not personally but dynastically. Many ingredients had gone to his making. He was the son of ‘King’ Plethern and Rowena Walsingham; he was a gentleman of Victorian England; he was a fashionable roué of the glittering nineteen hundreds. Heredity gave him sense of value and lust for acquisition; tradition mellowed heredity, colouring his desire for ownership with pride of land, teaching him to value wealth as a means to permanence rather than to individual salience; finally, keen feeling for actuality helped him to cloak sincerity in indolence and, for his own comfort, to prefer ease and freedom to responsibility and pomp.

So it was that, beneath a careless affectation of heedless idleness, he hid genuine care for his own material well-being, because upon this depended the well-being of Morvane. He would speak never of his position in the county; almost he had none save that residing ex officio in the Plethern of the day. He would show little concern for the history or achievements of his ancestors. But he was proud of his race and of his home and, in his heart of hearts, meant to leave Morvane greater and more prosperous than he had found it.

If period mannerism thus obscured the Victorian preoccupation of his mind, self-indulgence tricked it of its logical development. Land-pride and desire for an unbroken tale of family would seem synonymous with longing for heirs male. But not only had Charles never married, he had never sought to marry. Instinct for direct issue was baulked in him by one still deeper because more characteristic of his generation—the instinct for personal independence. He was that difficult hybrid—a voluptuary with traditions, and he compromised with his own intransigence by building, as it were, an anonymous future for the house of Plethern. The keystone of this much-considered, lovingly-imagined future was Morvane. Inevitably the expansion of Morvane became his hobby, so that, if outwardly he was a connoisseur of life, at heart he was an amateur of property.

The possessions inherited at his father’s death were of a diverse but unspeculative nature. ‘King’ Plethern had invested the majority of his foreign-won wealth in his own country, and Charles received rents from more than one area of London house and office property, mining royalties from Wales, railway dividends, and the quiet, certain income that in Victorian eyes had invested the “funds” with a something of divinity. By the side of these considerable increments, the farm rents and tithes of the Gloucestershire estate might have seemed trivial enough, were it not that of all Charles’ possessive prides the strongest—and consequently the most readily denied—was Morvane. ‘My comic ruin’ he would call it and, when his mother, according to her regular formula, would say: “Going away again, Charles? I wonder you trouble to keep the house at all!” he would answer: “What can be done with something no one wants, except keep it? Besides, you have the tower-habit now and I’d have to build you a new one, if we left here.” Probably Mrs. Plethern was not deceived, but it is doubtful whether she realized the absorbing passion for his home that possessed her son. Only Wilkinson knew that in a drawer of his desk, in a special pocket of his dressing-case when travelling, Charles had a large scale map of the Morvane area of Gloucestershire, upon which map each field and coppice forming part of the estate was neatly, arrogantly marked. He had few moments of delighted pride so keen as those at which he could enclose, in the special red-ink boundary, yet another enclave of what had been other folks’ property, or could throw out into the waste of unmarked map, a promontory of newly-acquired wood or meadowland. Five thousand acres in some other part of Britain were as nothing beside an acre that adjoined his beloved Morvane; the former were for any man to buy who had the money, but the latter bloomed and seeded for him alone.

It says much for the skill with which Charles Plethern played the frivolous spendthrift and for the discretion of the admirable Wilkinson, that the gradual extension of Morvane did not attract more local attention than was the case. Conditions of land tenure were in Plethern’s favour. Small owners abounded in the neighbourhood of Morvane, men who farmed their fifty or their hundred acres by methods as primitive as the land they ploughed. Working on a narrow margin, they fell into difficulties at this or that fluctuation of the agricultural market, at this or that seasonal irregularity. There was always accommodation to be had from Wilkinson and of a kind that left the owner in ostensible possession. Of the acquisitions of Morvane during twenty years few were recognizable by outsiders. Slowly and patiently Charles played his map-game; slowly and skilfully he rearranged the pattern of his varied interests.

As time passed, the progress grew ever slower and more difficult, and with each year of hopeful scheming the obstacles that remained stood out more strongly, more aggressively. Charles would brood over his map until the white patches seemed to move in their places and dance mockingly before his eyes. And chiefly was he taunted, sometimes to the limits of endurance, by one great gash of white, which persisted so obstinately and so near to the centre of his map, that there were times when he could see little else but its staring nudity, when he felt that like a wry, grinning mouth it grimaced there, laughing at his impotence.

Along the western boundary of Morvane, across the green lane by which the iron gates so forlornly stood, lay in slumbrous tanglement, the long valley of Rockarvon. It curved between steep, wooded sides for a matter of six miles and in the heart of it, by the side of the stream, (there widened to a shallow lake) stood an old, grey house. At the most southerly point of the valley, where it debouched into the main valley of the Clan, huddled the once prosperous mill-town of Clanworth. From that now miserable and untidy village, the woods of Rockarvon in their narrow cleft stretched north and north-east and finally due east to where, above the marshy source of the small Arvon river, the ground rose for the last time and the valley ended.

The owner of these woods and of the old grey house had not been seen there for a generation. The house was shut and crumbling; the trees choked one another in luxuriance; the shallows of the stream were flagged with yellow iris and scummed with weed. Clanworth, powerless in the grip of a landlord who exercised to their legal limits the powers of his despotism, slipped slowly deeper into the apathy of squalor. The farms on the uplands struggled with barren, exhausted soil, with rotten hedges and broken fencing. Money, where possible, was wrung from the estate; none came to replace it. It was so long since matters had been otherwise that the neglect and misery of the place had grown into accepted custom. Only Charles Plethern pondered perpetually the case of the valley that lay athwart his threshold; only Charles Plethern was actively aware that, in a gloomy hotel in the Faubourg St. Germain, Stephen George Clavering, Earl of Rockarvon, lingered like a painted image, sneering at death.

Hostility between Morvane and Rockarvon was of long standing. Among the disputes provoked by ‘King’ Plethern in the violence of his humiliated middle age, the most senseless, costly and unproductive was the protracted quarrel between him and the man who now, in the sinister luxury of a London flat or amid the lonely dignities of the Faubourg St. Germain, lounged through the sixth decade of his false and cruel life.

The technicalities of the dispute are now immaterial. There were faults on both sides, but Plethern was the actual aggressor. Having trumped up a cause of disagreement, he went to law. He used every artifice to confuse the issue and prolong the life of the proceedings, pouring out money for the benefit of the lawyers, wearing his own contentment and that of those around him to shreds and tatters. And he achieved nothing. Rockarvon, then a young man, was well served and his sour temper was more than a match for his assailant’s bluster. Also, of two bad cases, his was the least indefensible. Also again, his poverty was already stringent enough to make the debt of costs a thing easily borne, while Plethern, though well able to do so, footed his own tremendous bill with a fury doubly bitter for the failure it represented.

Charles was not the man, other things being equal, to give personal expression to a traditional dispute. It was not even in his nature to carry over land-rivalry into private relationships. But there were special elements in the present case that ranged him with hereditary prejudice. His mother felt the indeterminate issue of the long struggle more bitterly than she would have felt defeat. She nursed her hatred of Rockarvon, keeping alive her husband’s irritation by constant reference and innuendo. As the old man became gradually more listless and less responsive to her goading, she set herself to influence her children, reciting to them the saga of the great law-suit, closing them round with an atmosphere of hostility to their neighbour and to all his works.

For once she was assisted by the character of her eldest son. Had Rockarvon been a pathetic, a genial, even a tolerable figure, Charles would have dismissed his mother’s clamour as another of her whimsies. Had the adversary shown a tendency himself to bear malice, had there been opportunities of meeting and scowling at him in public places, Charles’ sense of the ridiculous would have inclined him to courtesy, if not to overtures of friendship. But Rockarvon was rather an evil shadow than a man; he never set foot on his estate nor indeed in Gloucestershire; worst of all, he showed clearly if indirectly that the law-suit and its implications were things of the unimportant past; he implied that Morvane was a place beyond his consciousness, that the very name of Plethern was without meaning to him. Insolence so calculated found its mark. None feel the lash of scorn so keenly as those who are themselves of contemptuous habit. The master of Morvane grew to loathe Rockarvon as heartily as even Rowena Plethern could have wished, and his loathing was kept lustily alive by the wry, white strip upon the map that leered up at him from the very heart of his own beloved land. Nevertheless, as Charles was to discover, ambitions that make loathing may of themselves put loathing to sleep, only to waken at the last minute of the eleventh hour.