Desolate splendour

LEAVING his ward in the care of his brother’s family, Charles returned to Gloucestershire. He had two good months before him in which to reflect upon the future, for Lady Grieve had told him privately that, after Viola had been a while with the James Pletherns in London and at their country place, she would be pressed to go with Corinne to Lavenham for as long as she was free to stay.

The respite was grateful to a newly created guardian. Anxious responsibility for Viola could temporarily give place to thought and Charles Plethern wanted imperatively to think. That he had, fleetingly, already realized the possibilities in dynastic scheming of an official daughter, predisposed him the more to careful consideration of his immediate duty. Oddly enough, his mother supplied an impulse to this very exercise in contemplation.

“A dear, sweet girl, Charles,” she ventured, on the evening of his return from London.

He smiled slightly and nodded.

“You will have to watch her,” the old lady muttered. Then, to his look of cautious questioning, explained: “I mean—there will be men——”

“Oh, men!” said Charles airily. “You underrate me, mother! Whatever my failings, I do know a pretty girl when I see one. That Miss Viola will have her ‘followers’ is obvious even to my brutish intelligence.”

She paid his humour the tribute of a wry, tired smile.

“I hardly meant that, my son. It is not only her beauty. You have no children, you see——”

And she paused apprehensively. This was a subject upon which Charles might resent even hinted curiosity. She did not imagine him to have pondered the problems of succession; they were food too dry, with implications too funereal, for a brain so volatile and so fastidious; but she expected him to shy instinctively from any suggestion of unasked-for counsel. To her surprise he showed delight rather than displeasure, turning to her a face puckered with startled laughter.

“What a clever old lady it is! They’ll chase Viola for my money? A fine idea, mother. So they shall! You’re a brick; you’ve taught me a new game!”

The following morning he walked the spaces of the park, taking the measure of his unfamiliar duty. Slowly it revealed itself, and each moment more alluringly. From two distinct aspects it offered flattering approach to his ambitions. Not only did it provide scope for ingenious territorial match-making; it pandered also to his fancy for independent action in the matter of inheritance.

Mrs. Plethern was mistaken in thinking her son disinclined to entertain problems of succession. In the past Charles had on several occasions given them serious consideration. Freedom to bestow his lands and money where he wished was a vital element in the liberty of personal action for which he had bartered, among other things, his right to paternity. He would have resented an entail as deeply as he would have hated the fetters of domesticity. But, being possessed of the coveted freedom, he was not above exploiting its diversions. It pleased him to keep his relatives in the embarrassment of uncertainty, blandly to receive their diplomatic courtesies, gleefully to read behind their disinterested politeness the probing curiosity of their minds. It pleased him to set up in imagination various possibilities in succession, to set them up one by one and then to knock them down again. It pleased him to picture his own stately death-bed, surrounded by submissive sycophants, to whom he would announce that the revenues and estates of Morvane had doubled themselves during his reign, only, in the next breath, to bestow them all, with the exception of a few paltry thousands, upon some one unthought of, some one unrepresented at the solemn conclave, some one whose very name would thereafter be gall between the lips of those who had so patiently and yet patently counted a stranger’s chickens.

Hitherto, however, the relish of these malicious imaginings had lacked its final savour. That ‘some one,’ that unexpected, eleventh-hour successor, had remained persistently a myth. At times the obstinate non-existence of this unknown figure drove Charles Plethern’s mind to an extreme of propriety, to consideration of the most obvious candidate for Morvane, to his brother’s son. Chris did not displease his uncle. He was no milksop and no crank, and, if Charles had a slight contempt for the healthy, unthinking young barbarian that was the conventional rising aristocrat of the day, he knew that his nephew was not the most unimaginative or clumsy-minded of his generation. But a strange reluctance to acknowledge Chris checked him even at the moments when the boy stood highest in his favor. Of the source of that reluctance Charles was only dimly conscious, but in truth it came from a variety of obscure impulses, from the impulse to annoy his mother, from the impulse to jar his brother from suavity to protest, from that other already recorded impulse to trick the crowd of his expectant relatives by a sudden elfishness at the end of a long life of apparent carelessness. And so Chris’ chances would recede again and Charles come back to his original speculation, to the old quest for an outsider, to the search for an heir that should be of his choosing and of his alone.

An heir. It had always been an heir. Charles knew too many lovely ladies who had angled with skill or with clumsiness for the reversion of his wealth. Instinctively he had excluded women from a problem so serious as the Morvane inheritance. But things were different now. Why not an heiress? The change of view was Mrs. Plethern’s contribution to her son’s strategic plotting, an involuntary one, but not the less destructive of her own cherished plans. Exultantly Charles matched the idea of Viola as legatee with that of Viola as marriageable loveliness. The dual conception was immense. Viola Marvell might, by a simple legal process, become Viola Plethern. Next, her husband, whoever by a guardian’s wisdom he might turn out to be, would surely be tempted, if not to exchange his name for hers, at least to assume, in addition to his own, one that brought with it great possessions. With Charles Plethern, Morvane and the literal appellation of its owning family, counted more than the purism of genealogy. A motive stronger than that of racial continuity gripped and held him. Of the many roads that might lead to wealth and prominence for Viola, only such merited notice as ministered to the supremacy of Plethern of Morvane. Almost grimly he began to wonder how best his ward might serve—not her guardian’s blood, but her guardian’s surname and her guardian’s home.

It was of course that his scheming should at the outset measure its new strength against the challenge of Rockarvon. But there seemed no coming to grips with this hated enemy. The earl himself was childless—nature protects herself against the increase of enormities—but he had two brothers, of whom one (now dead) had left three sons, the eldest strong and thirty-five and not long married. Charles had informed himself of the immediate prospects of the Rockarvon inheritance, long before Viola and Viola’s potentialities had been heard or thought of. He was well placed to obtain reliable advice, for Belinda Grieve was a near cousin of the Claverings and, although a stranger to that family’s unnatural head, was on terms of cordiality with the heir, and with many others of the clan. Consequently (and with due appreciation of her exceptional privilege) she was in Charles Plethern’s confidence so far as was concerned his rivalry and hostility to Rockarvon. Once, jokingly, she had suggested a campaign of poisoning, that should remove Archie Clavering (he was not then married), his two brothers, and his uncle, the earl’s youngest brother. “I believe Dan is next on the list,” she said, “—after me, of course. The title respects women in the case of Rockarvon. The Claverings were always courtiers. But you Pletherns are such cave men! And you would bully us into anything, wouldn’t you?” “I only once remember asking an important favour of you, Belinda,” he had retorted plaintively, “and that you preferred to bestow elsewhere. As for bullying——!” She laughed and smacked his face. It amused Charles to invent romantic incidents in their youthful friendship and the fancy harmed no one, so that, whenever he played the unsuccessful lover of long ago, she would laugh and smack his face, which in turn amused her and did not seriously hurt him.

Rockarvon, then, was impregnable; proof alike against frontal attack and the outflanking subtlety of matrimonial overture. Perforce Charles set himself to find a second best, a fortress conquerable and, if less nobly rewarding than Rockarvon, at least worth conquering.

Rapidly he passed in review the neighbouring gentry, counting their qualifications for his favour, estimating the value of their lands to Morvane, the susceptibilities of their inheritance to the lure of Viola. One by one they failed before his scrutiny, till at last there remained one likely candidate. Charles fixed his attention closely on the household of his choice, and for the first time regretted that he had in the past allowed himself to grow out of touch with the details of his neighbours’ families, to become ignorant of their ways of thought and ways of life.

Of the Grays he knew little enough; of Clonsall, their home, he knew only the cartography. His map had taught him that the Clonsall lands stretched vaguely over the bleak tableland that ran from Morvane southward toward the Wiltshire hills. The estate was large, but in places barren and everywhere starved for want of the care and invigoration only money could provide. Charles had a general impression that Squire Gray, after a youth of extravagant folly, had resigned control into the hands of his eldest son and that Walter—dour, silent, unapproachable as at their occasional encounters he had seemed to be—was struggling with mortgages and neglected buildings to restore in some degree the damage inflicted by his father’s fecklessness. From a personal standpoint, there was perhaps difficulty in imagining Walter Gray as a complacent conspirator in the Plethern marriage plot; but Charles had faith in the power of wealth to vanquish even bearishness, particularly as the man’s gruff incivility was in likelihood itself due to a jealous sense of the greater prosperity of Morvane.

The objective chosen, the next necessity was to decide a method of approach. The problem was the easier for the non-existence, as he conceived it, of any point of view but his own. Viola’s concurrence in his arrangements he took for granted. Girls, whether daughters or wards, did what their fathers and guardians told them until such time as they were entrusted to protection of another sort. The Victorian strain in him, combined with the pride of his Englishry, blinded him to the simple fact that Canada was no more England than were the nineteen hundreds the eighteen seventies. Serene in the shelter of a false security he planned an autumn of social activity. Morvane should come to life as the great house of the district. All the best people should come and go, but the Grays should come earlier and oftener and stay longer and later than the rest. If matters arranged themselves rapidly, well and good; if they dragged, he would devise means of hastening them; if, as was possible, he changed his mind, Clonsall would quickly understand that Morvane favour was withdrawn. Charles had no apprehensions. The affair was simple enough. There remained, between now and Viola’s return, two tasks to be performed. Morvane must be redecorated, the closed saloons reopened, the stables enlarged and thoroughly repaired. That was the first task. He, Charles Plethern, must make a gesture of friendship to Walter Gray. That was the second. Orders were immediately dispatched to a competent firm of builder-decorators. Then the master of Morvane, a terrier at his heels, set out to walk across the fields to southward.

§ 2

Clonsall was a low, irregular house that squatted on a little hill behind an untidy barrier of trees. It seemed, like an undercooked pudding, to have settled down upon itself. At every corner of its unwieldy carcass bulged added rooms, spreading bow-windows, conservatories, porches, lean-to sheds. Had it been possible to strip away the excrescences of a century and a half, there would have stood revealed, as kernel of the whole, a mid-eighteenth century box-like residence that might well, in its pride, have crowned the hill and overtopped the trees with the flat, square arrogance of its kind. But it had suffered every indignity that can befall a house. Its attic floor and the plain cornice that once concealed its unobtrusive tiles had been swept away and a generous slope of grey slate roofing had gratified a change of taste. Next the brick walls were plastered and cream-painted. Next, and on one front only, pilasters and a pediment had tricked an altar to false classicism. Followed a period in which the Grays had sought convenience where most easily it could be found. Back premises had sprouted and the sprouts had themselves put forth smaller shoots. Windows had been blocked and others cut where fancy moved the family and local builders to cut them. Then, and more drastic still, came the passion for glass. Large bow-windows, plate-glass sash windows, verandahs, conservatories, were thrust out and squeezed in wherever was blank wall or garden space to make them possible. The same ’fifties gutted the interior. A spacious drawing-room, airy morning-rooms, high, smiling bedrooms must take the place of eighteenth-century band-boxes, and the poor little rooms were buffeted and knocked and thrown one into another while bulge after extra bulge in the outer walls told of the agony and urgent growth within. When all was over and the fury of spaciousness had spent itself, the interior of Clonsall was mid-Victorian in epitome, but the exterior was like nothing else on earth.

At this juncture, crisis vanquished taste. The grandfather of Walter Gray died and his son, the Squire Gray of this story, came within a few weeks into his majority and his inheritance. In five years he had so abused the former as to dissipate twice the value of the latter. Discouraged as suddenly as, with accession, he had been intoxicated, he fled from London and cosmopolitan gaiety to bury himself in Gloucestershire. The roads of fashion, over whose pavements of wasted gold, he had for five reckless years danced merrily, knew him no more. In a sulk with providence and with himself, he married a boyhood’s love and peevishly begat a numerous family. From embellishment Clonsall had more than peace. There was next to no money with which to stock the farms, little enough to sow the fields and keep the cottages in the barest soundness of repair. On architects and interior decorators Gray turned his back, and took refuge from his own shamefacedness, first in desultory study, then, at the bidding of necessity, in attempts to manage finances that were beyond his powers to organize. Educated to the costly uselessness of a rich man’s son, he lacked both talent and stamina to withstand the inevitable consequences of his own folly.

Blame for the poverty that had for over thirty years weighted Clonsall to the ground, he gradually sloughed off on to his dead father’s shoulders. Almost did he convince himself that he had inherited an empty treasure; almost those five delirious years faded from his memory. The money bags, so he told others and so bit by bit he grew to believe himself, thanks to the insensate spending of his father’s last years, were, when he took control, sagging dangerously to the end. In truth, of course, he had seen himself crumble from ambitious wealth to querulous embarrassment, hated the sight and wished to blot it out for ever.

Thus Clonsall drifted. Mrs. Gray died; the children grew up and began to scatter. The Squire, with those that remained, lived in his queer, bland house, giving occasional and rueful thought to the money that had gone to its adornment and wondering with indolent despair what could be done to make things better in future. While he wondered, Clonsall grew out of fashion, then old-fashioned, then absurd. But the Grays laughed at it more readily than any stranger, for they were now so used to their home that they loved it for its very queerness, as men love an old pipe or women their husbands.

Strange it was that the last Gray with means to gratify his taste in domestic elegance exempted from his ruthlessness the trees that fringed his garden wall. Perhaps he followed a fixed technique in his homage to the modish ’fifties and found, in the textbooks, no rules for the gentlemanly improvement of vegetation. Perhaps, again, he felt keenly the importance of timber among the essential adornments of the fashionable estate and knew not how else to create a well-timbered park than by leaving on their grassy slopes the trees that were already there. In any event, they remained untouched and continued their varied and untutored growths, while behind them the garden was patterned by serpentine walks and flower-beds of every shape, while rustic gazebos nestled in their shade, while around the house grew sombre shrubberies, and over veranda, porch and wall crept intricate creepers with pale, languid flowers.

The family of Squire Gray had something of the casual luxuriance of their home. It was locally supposed that their number had never been completely told, for they came and went with bewildering inconsequence and no man could say how many Grays, all different, he had seen at Clonsall in a year. The house had its permanent garrison, whom everybody knew, but they were seldom alone. Either a married sister with her children, or a sister-in-law with hers, or a younger brother, or a cousin, or an elderly, unspecified lady with a small dog, was for ever staying with Squire Gray, so that the neighbourhood abandoned genealogy and fell back upon fact. In this they were at once helped and hindered by Walter and his sister Madeline, who were the fixed stars in this firmament of comets. Walter, from instinctive shyness and taciturnity, Madeline, from unimaginative cheerfulness, made no attempt to enlighten callers or acquaintances as to the personality of their visitors. Introductions were exceptional or of the least helpful kind. Christian names and nicknames were flung carelessly about and the outsider might let them lie, or, rashly picking one up, presume himself to test its soundness. In the former case, he was largely debarred from conversation by inability to address his remarks to any particular person; in the latter, he took his life in his hand and risked the laughter of the company. Eventually he was comforted, for which so ever course he followed he did right in the eyes of Clonsall, where men made manners and where simple jest and an avoidance of morbidity were the only code.

There can be little doubt that the somewhat wooden-witted freedom of Clonsall was in part due to poverty. But it was as much, if not more, an outcome of family character. Squire Gray, now over sixty, was an easy, rather wistful figure, who had long abandoned even a claim to dominate his home or children. At one time, as has been said, he had pottered over farming and estate-management as formerly he had pottered over his books. Unable to afford an agent, he handled accounts and money policy with a weary indifference that was no less disastrous for being pathetic. Things grew slowly worse, until Walter came of age, and, taking matters from his father’s fumbling control, rendered the Squire finally and suitably an onlooker at life in his own house.

The young man lost no time in asserting his will to rule. On the very evening of his majority, “I should like to relieve you of some of the work of supervision, sir,” he told his father, and the Squire’s indolent, untidy mind reeled with the questions, the schemes, the technicalities jerked out by the son he had regarded as a retiring fool. With a gesture of affectionate amusement old Gray let the boy have his head. He believed Walter ignorant of the joyful readiness with which he surrendered responsibilities. He made a show of wise seniority.

“Of course experience tells, and I shall stand behind you,” he said. “Come to me if you are in any difficulty.”

But Walter never came and, if he derived encouragement from paternal backing, he never showed it. The truth was he knew his father better than the Squire imagined, better maybe than in filial duty he should have done. He had set his heart on a resurrection of Clonsall. The road would be long and weary, and distractions were not for one that followed it. With the silent determination of a mind that distrusted itself but distrusted others more, Walter faced a future of monotonous duty, of economy, of loneliness, and for fourteen years he had not wavered nor once looked aside toward the lights and gaieties and ease that called as loudly to his youth as to that of another.

As time went by, his task grew easier. To begin with, under his careful, conscientious management, the fortune of the family began a slow return to health. Returns increased; first one mortgage was paid off and then another; the reputation of Gray landlordism rose and tenants of a better class came slowly to the scattered farms. But in addition to the satisfaction of seeing his work bear fruit, Walter found solace and strength in the support of his sister Madeline. She was ten years his junior; had been a child when first he buckled on the burden of his father’s failure. As, however, she grew to womanhood and as, one by one, her elder sisters married and went away, she took her place naturally by Walter’s side, working for betterment within the house, as he worked for it without. In externals of manner and appearance Madeline was a contrast to her brother. She had her father’s oval face and ready smile; she was voluble and inconsequent and gay. Walter, with his long, straight nose, his square jaw and the large, ugly mouth that even thick moustaches could not hide, seemed of a different race. He talked little; he laughed less. And yet he and his sister had in common an expression of the eyes, an expression, at once insensitive and brisk, that marked them as of one stock, that—more importantly—set them in mutual sympathy.

It is to be doubted whether, had Walter not possessed at home an intimate as congenial as was his sister Madeline, he could have endured the weariness of his life and duty. He felt himself isolated from his kind, their inferior in mental equipment as well as in money, a being marked by fate for loneliness and drudgery. His shyness grew gruff and sullen. Hardly could he return the greetings of his neighbours, when at market, at local show or on the country roads their ways crossed his. He earned a reputation for boorishness and there were some who accused him frankly of jealous hatred toward persons more prosperous than himself. The charge was a foolish one. Walter Gray was not a vindictive, not even an ambitious man. He coveted nothing, save modest well-being for his home and family, to win which and out of pity for his father, he had deliberately chosen a type of existence that unfitted him for social intercourse.

Not surprisingly, such single-minded self-discipline hardened his nature. Strong in his own moral purpose, he inclined to view without charity those who were clearly out of sympathy with his own ideals. He was not prig enough to blame another man for doing what he would not himself have done, but he felt no call to intimacy with persons whose interests and amusements he could not share. Such emphatically was Charles Plethern. The two men were in many ways as chalk to cheese. Charles was quick and cynical, but secretly an idealist; his cosmopolitan way of life had intensified his natural will to hide under an irreverent habit the delicacy of his inward gravities; he was regarded as a loose liver, and certainly the irregularities, reputed or proven, of his fellows, he greeted with an amused and disquieting smile. Gray, on the other hand, was stolid and slow-minded, with the cautious thinker’s nervous dislike of rapid sarcasm; he seldom made mock of others and never of himself, having been taught to find human frailty a matter for regret rather than for laughter; finally, he was aware of his own provincialism, shrank from the company of men whose experience was wider and more coloured than his own, and came almost to glory in the asceticism of a seclusion that he had deliberately adopted. Hence, if his meetings with Charles Plethern were less frequent than with others of the neighbouring gentry, his inclination to dislike the man was correspondingly the stronger, for to diffidence and to ungracious taciturnity was in this case added the bias of a moral disapproval.

§ 3

To diplomatic encounter with this intended, if unpromising, protégé, Charles walked the more blithely in that he thought not at all of Gray’s actual opinion toward himself, but only of the success or failure of his plan. So hurriedly had he proceeded to set matters in train, so engrossed was he with their ultimate development, that he reached the northern boundary of Clonsall without any very clear design for opening negotiations. The difficulty, thus scrutinized at close quarters, appeared serious enough. He climbed a gate and sat, his back to the lane along which he had come, gazing with thoughtful eyes across a field of untidy grass. Involuntarily he related this field to land of his own over which he had just passed. They ranged well together. His easy optimism leapt forward to a rosy future. In a few moments he was absorbed, not in consideration of the problem of the moment, but in his old game of rearranging frontiers.

The sound of hoofs roused him from reverie. Along the lane, on a dappled mare, Walter Gray came riding. The terrier sprang from slumber, and leapt barking at the intruder’s heels. Gray, when he saw Charles Plethern, raised his hand in formal salutation. He would have passed on, but the other, slipping from the gate, stepped to meet him.

“Good afternoon, Gray,” said Charles. “I’ve been spying you out. I suppose you are as dried up as we are?”

Walter pulled up, a shade reluctantly.

“It is dry,” he assented.

There was a pause while Charles racked his brain for convenient small-talk.

“I wanted to see you some time,” he began hurriedly. “Meant to write, but as we’ve met—— About those Herefords of mine that strayed—— Wilkinson said something——” All memory of what Wilkinson had said, all knowledge of the very issue he himself had raised, fled phantomlike from Charles’ brain. Desperately he improvised. “The details are immaterial now. My bailiff was wrong. That’s the long and short of it. You shall receive every amend through the proper channels. I’m sorry my folk as well as my cattle have been making fools of themselves.”

Gray nodded.

“Very well,” he said. “They were inclined to be obstinate about it, certainly.”

Again silence. Charles wondered if the obstinacy were human or bovine. He longed to ask. This time, however, the initiative was Walter’s.

“You are a long way from home.”

“I have walked farther than I meant,” lied Charles, “and was wondering how best to get back.”

Walter looked over the fields to northward. In reality he was considering how best to direct his neighbour, but Charles read the glance as one of ungracious boredom and his lips tightened in irritation.

“Had you been five minutes later, you would have seen me trespassing,” he said. “I was going to try a cut over yonder.”

Gray smiled under his moustache.

“It is fortunate I came in time to stop you. Your trouble would have been wasted. As for trespassing—go anywhere and welcome.”

Once more a moment of mute awkwardness. Then:

“I wonder,” said Charles suddenly, “whether you and Miss Gray, and any others who care to, would come over now and again to Morvane in September? My ward will be home then. I want to introduce her to her neighbours.”

“We heard you had a new inmate,” replied Walter slowly. “It is kind of you. I will ask my sister.”

Constraint threatened a further and a fatal descent. Suddenly Gray pointed across the hedgerow at his left:

“You see that shed? Cross diagonally from that to the new five-barred gate, take the track past the pond in the corner of the quarry field, and you will come out into the lane to Meston’s farm. From there you will easily see your best way. It is all over your own land. Odd to direct so near a neighbour. But then you are almost a stranger in these parts, aren’t you?”

He jerked his mare into motion, muttered a word of farewell, and trotted quickly down the narrow road. Charles looked after him with a sour, reflective smile.

“Damned clumsily done on my part!” he thought. “But he’s a queer fellow. Not easy to handle. I wonder what she’d make of him.”

Whistling his dog, he started on the homeward walk.

§ 4

Walter, as he trotted away from the scene of this curious encounter, was equally dissatisfied both with his own behaviour and with that of the man he had left. That he should have greeted an invitation to Morvane with a gruff formality of thanks argued no failure on his part to appreciate its significance.

Occasionally he had shot over Plethern fields; occasionally he had drawn Plethern coverts; but never to his knowledge had his people visited at Morvane, never to his knowledge had there previously been social recognition by Morvane of his people.

Gray was of course conscious, in a general sense, of conditions in his neighbour’s home. He knew that Charles had in the past been seldom there, that consequently the Plethern part in county life had been spasmodic and perfunctory. He realized that the coming of a young girl to Morvane would inevitably mean changes. But with every allowance for the contrast between past circumstances and those of the future, Gray felt that his neighbour’s gesture of hospitality—a gesture singularly informal between comparative strangers—possessed more than its face-value. What did it mean? His head drooped in arduous painful thought as, through the piled shadow of shrubberies, he walked his mare into the stable yard.

He waited while the mare was unsaddled and rubbed down, looking about him from habit at the dispositions of his solitary stable-hand, but all the while turning and returning in his mind the problem of Charles Plethern’s motive. Then he walked slowly gardenwards. On the lawn he found tea and scattered figures. Madeline called across sunny spaces:

“Hurry up, slowcoach! We thought you were never coming!”

“I was delayed,” he replied, and looked about him.

“How do you do, Mrs. Fenwick? The doctor well? Hallo, young man!”—this to a child of five who had flung sudden arms about his knees—“want to fight already? After tea, I think, don’t you? What’s become of the kite?”

“Oh, that kite!” said a tired voice from a garden chair. “The time we’ve had with it! It’s in a tree now, and long may it stay there!”

“Poor Tish!” laughed Madeline. “You should have seen her, Walter, chasing her young about in a vain attempt to control them. Nurse has gone to Rushmorton. Mothers are so comic on their nurses’ days out!”

“You may laugh, Mad,” retorted the tired mother. “Wait till you’ve six of your own and then you’ll know.”

“Oh, good gracious! Six! Tishy, darling, do be gentle with me—— No, sweetheart, you’ve had a long brown one and mummy doesn’t allow two with sugar on, does she? Run and see if Pratt has found many eggs. You can ask cook to keep two for breakfast—for you and Paul.”

“Madeline practising maternal discipline,” remarked a youth, who wore a naval jacket and white flannels, and now approached the table for another cup of tea.

“Talking of discipline, Jock,” replied his sister, “what happens on board ship if you break cabin crockery?”

He laughed.

“I’m fearfully sorry, Mad! The wretched thing knocked on the washstand corner as I was lifting it down. Is it a very good one?”

“Priceless!” The soft mocking voice of the squire broke in on the conversation: “Crown Derby, Jock. But you boys smash all the heirlooms.”

The lad glanced at his father in momentary hesitation. He was never sure when the squire was serious. Chuckles from every side relieved, on this occasion, his anxiety.

“I’ll buy you another, dad,” he said. “Does one wire to Derby or to the King, or both?”

“More tea, Walter?” Madeline held out a hand for her brother’s cup. He rose, gave it her, and stood silent by the table. She gave him a quick look. “What’s happened, dear?” she said quietly.

He smiled at her with slow affection.

“Nothing very exciting,” he said, “but I was surprised. I’ll tell you after tea.”

The voice of Mrs. Fenwick, in full gossip with Laetitia Morrell, shrilled across a moment of silence:

“... opening the big drawing-room as well. I was in Sawley this morning, and Crump told me he had orders for new curtains and covers. I hear Masters spoke of more horses....”

Walter turned to listen. Masters was head of the Morvane stables.

“What’s this, Mrs. Fenwick?” asked Madeline.

“I was telling your sister,” replied the lady, delighted at the opportunity of repetition, “that things are going to happen at Morvane. It looks as though the house is to be open again and parties and all sorts. The stables are to be put in order—you know they are half empty and so neglected—and there is talk of fresh servants——”

“But why? Is Mr. Plethern to be married?”

Mrs. Fenwick looked slightly shocked, as though the very idea of Charles Plethern in lawful wedlock provoked improper comparative reflection.

“Oh dear no,” she said primly. “But now that Miss Marvell is to be there——”

“Who’s Miss Marvell?” inquired Jock.

Mrs. Fenwick compressed her lips.

“She is a young lady who has come to live at Morvane.”

Madeline giggled. The doctor’s wife looked stern inquiry.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Fenwick. I wasn’t laughing at you. But it sounded so—so chancy, somehow.”

Tishy came to her sister’s rescue. She called to the squire:

“Have you seen her, dad?”

“Seen whom? Oh—the Marvell girl? Yes—for a moment. She passed Mad and me in the village one day.”

“She’s very pretty,” said Madeline.

Mrs. Fenwick tossed her head.

“Indeed! I am not surprised!”

Embarrassment threatened, but relief came unexpectedly. The sound of angry childhood from afar brought Tishy and Madeline to listening attention.

“Dear, oh dear!” sighed the former. “They’re up to some mischief.” Then, as the yells grew louder, she rose from her chair. “That’s Paul! I’m sure it’s his own fault, little wretch!”

“I’ll go and see, Tish,” said Walter. He hurried off, followed by Jock. The thoughts of those who remained now turned naturally from Morvane and Viola to the inexhaustible subject of child-rearing. For a few minutes they exchanged views and anecdotes. Then Walter reappeared with Paul in his arms. The child was sniffing a little, but the tempest of tears had passed.

“Well?” inquired the mother. “Paul, what have you been doing?”

“Sally—pushed—me,” said the culprit unsteadily.

“One can’t blame her,” explained Walter. “He was trying to put her in the yard cistern and she resisted, and I suppose he slipped and bumped his head on the stones.”

“Oh, Paul!” Mrs. Morrell regarded her son with pained severity.

“Come here, sonny,” said Madeline. “Come and tell Aunty Mad why you wanted Sally to go in the cistern. Was she grubby or were you playing fish?”

The small boy crouched against his mother and mumbled:

“I wanted—to see—her—make bubbles——”

The company laughed.

“And where is poor Sally now?” asked Mrs. Morrell.

“Don’t know.”

“Do you know, Walter?”

“She indoors—being changed. Jock took her in.”

The mother started to her feet.

“Changed? Then she was actually in the water? Paul, you’ll be smacked for this. I must go and see they put her on the right things. Housemaids are such idiots!”

As she hastened to the house Madeline nudged Walter and nodded toward the villain of the piece. He had not moved from his mother’s empty chair, but stood twisting the canvas of its seat between grubby fingers. His head was bowed in sullen apprehension. From a bedroom window came wails.

“Sally being changed,” observed Madeline. “Having her tangles combed, I expect. How I used to hate it!”

Perhaps his sister’s voice recalled Paul to the events of the stable yard.

“Aunty Mad,” he demanded in clear tones, “how many bubbles would Sally have blowed before she was deaded?”

“You horrid child!” cried his aunt. “Don’t you think it was very unkind to put poor Sally in the water?”

“I wanted to see her bubble,” said Paul obstinately.

“Would you like to be thrown in the cistern?”

Paul despaired of adult logic.

“I wanted to see the bubbles,” he repeated.

Mrs. Morrell appeared at a first-floor window.

“Paul!” she shouted, “Paul! Come here!”

He looked over his shoulder toward the house but did not move.

“Mad!” called the mother. “Send him in.”

Madeleine rose quickly. The small boy made a dive for freedom, but too late. In his aunt’s arms he was borne unwillingly to the expiation of a love of bubbles.

Later in the evening, when Mrs. Fenwick had gone and the children were safely put to bed, Walter told Madeleine of his encounter with Charles Plethern.

“It’s all of a piece with what Mrs. Fenwick was saying,” was Madeleine’s comment. “She’s such a busybody! I didn’t believe a word of it, but maybe it’s true after all. Can’t you see her buzzing round Sawley picking up bits of chat! Probably Mr. Plethern means to stay at home all the winter.”

Walter shook his head doubtfully.

“Maybe. I should be surprised. But the odd thing is his going out of the way to invite us.”

“I’m sure we’re very nice,” laughed Madeleine, “and really I have the most beautiful manners in company. What fun it’ll be! I’ve never been inside the gates, except once for the hospital fête, and then not into the house.”

“You think we ought to go then?”

“Go? Of course we ought to go. You old stupid, it’s not our fault we aren’t there every day! The Pletherns have always been too high and mighty to notice us. If they have changed their minds, all the better. There’s no reason for us to get sticky, is there? Besides—I liked the look of that girl and——”

She stopped. Walter waited for her to speak, and his silence was more effective than any prompting.

“——and—I hardly know how to put it—but supposing Mr. Plethern does go away in the winter, it will be dreadfully lonely for the poor thing in that great house with the old lady——”

She shuddered, and Walter saw her shuddering. He was surprised. He wondered what Madeleine knew of the old lady. She could never even have seen her. He forgot that his sister was of a type to tempt confidence from farmer and shopkeeper and casual rustic. He assumed, because he had himself never heard gossip or stories about Mrs. Plethern, that no such gossip existed. Madeleine followed the perplexities of his thought.

“Poor old Walter!” she said, squeezing his arm affectionately.