Princess Puck

It was now three weeks since the day when Gilchrist Harborough came to see Theresa and Polly, three weeks since they told Bill he loved her, almost three weeks since she found out what they meant by love and buried her dream among the tall weeds in the orchard-ditch. The grass was long in the orchard now, its flowers were covered in seed, brown and yellow and purple dust blowing off at the lightest breath. The leaves on the trees were thick, so thick that when one looked up it seemed an unbroken roof of green. The year had grown older, much older, it was the first maturity of summer; the light was the warmer light of summer, the shadows the slow-moving shadows of summer; the scents, richer, fuller, were the scents of summer,—the pink briar-roses in the hedge, the wreath of honeysuckle from the tree, the hay half cut in the field beyond the lane. Spring had gone, and even if its indescribable freshness and youth were missing one could hardly ask for anything more than summer.

Bill’s was a supremely contented disposition; after her one outburst on the night when Harborough did not make love to her she accepted fate resignedly. There was, as she herself had said, always to get up and have breakfast next morning even after a tragedy, and she was herself what in domestic parlance is called “a good getter up.” So in the early morning after Harborough’s formal offer of marriage, she thought the matter out and put it on a reasonable basis.

It is true he did not love her in the superlative and ideal way she had imagined, but then neither did other people seem to love in that way. She thought over the married couples of her acquaintance, and came to the conclusion that they loved each other after a fashion. Harborough must have loved her in a fashion, too, or else why had he sought to marry her, seeing how little she had to commend her? Yes, he must have loved her, even though he did not make love to her that night. There were two of him, she knew, and she also knew that she sometimes appealed to one of the two, the one that made love, the lesser and weaker part of his nature. Under these circumstances she had reason to be glad that the other part, the cleverer, more dominant part, liked her well enough to ask her to be his wife. On the whole she did not find the situation impossible. Why should she? Her limited experience showed her no better things; her sunny philosophy led her to take the world as she found it, teaching her to judge it according to a more lenient and elastic standard than any ideal one. It is true that she did not in the present case quite extend this tolerance to Harborough; perhaps she unconsciously gauged his nature, and, measuring it by his own standards, found his love wanting.

But on the whole she was moderately content, and certainly there was no possibility of avoiding the contract; honour demanded its fulfilment, and since it was unavoidable Bill was not likely to dwell on the dark side. She was pre-eminently of that nature which, when its hopes are wrecked, makes a fire of the drift-wood to warm itself and its friends. Moreover, let it be remembered, to supreme ignorance and a sunny temperament the life marked out did not seem an unendurable one. “Besides,” so she had concluded her reflections that morning when she faced facts, “there will be the farm and the dairy and heaps to do.”

So Bill accepted matters, and she and Harborough established themselves on an easy and friendly footing in which love-making played but a small part. Theresa thought them an extraordinarily prosaic and matter-of-fact couple, but it suited Harborough well enough; he did not, as a rule, want to make love to Bill, and she did not now want him to make love to her; in fact, she would not now meet any of his overtures, and had a curiously wayward but uncompromising way of receiving his occasional tendernesses. Even in these early days he found there was a tantalising, untamed trait in her nature with which it would be hard to deal, and yet which constantly attracted while it annoyed him. He felt once or twice that he should like to come to close quarters with and understand it, even as he had come to close quarters on the night when he chased her like a shadow; but the moment for that was passed, and he could not recapture it; the shadow always eluded him now. This feeling occasionally troubled him, but not often, and in other respects he was satisfied. It was as a matter of course that he turned his steps to the orchard that Sunday afternoon, and as a matter of course he told Bill of Mr. Wagnall’s words and the extraordinary possibilities they presented.

Bill listened with absorbed attention. Wood Hall, and all that concerned it, had a great fascination for her, but she could hardly realise that his words contained a bare chance of its coming within her own reach.

“You don’t mean to say,” she said at last, “that there is any way by which you could claim?”

“I am not sure,” Harborough answered cautiously, anxious not to encourage the building of any castles in the air.

“Tell me what you mean then,” she said, and he explained the case as clearly as he could.

“My grandfather,” he said, “is the nearest we can get to the Harboroughs of Gurnett; he was called Gilchrist as I am, and was the middle one of three brothers. About the year 1843 he quarrelled with his family and left England; I think he turned Protestant.”

“He must have had convictions; I wonder if he was like you,” Bill observed under her breath with a particularly provoking look; but Harborough ignored the remark and went on with his history.

“Part of this,” he said, “I heard from Mr. Wagnall on Thursday, part I knew before. I have always been told that my grandfather left England on account of a quarrel; the story was usually told me as a warning against quarrelling, but I don’t know that it made much impression. What he did after he left England I do not know, travelled a bit I think at first, and then the next year he married in Paris. But his wife’s family, though they were living in France, were English; indeed it was from my grandmother, who knew this part of the country, that we had the tradition of our people. She does not seem to have known much about them; my father always said she was vague in her tales, and never knew anything personally of her husband’s relations. My grandfather died the same year that he married and before his son was born; my grandmother continued to live on in Paris with her own people, teaching English, I think, for she must have been poor from what my father said.”

“And he?” Bill asked.

“Lived in Paris too till he was about nineteen when, my grandmother being dead, he emigrated to Australia with a notion of gold-mining. At first he was unlucky; then he married when he was only twenty-two, and after that his luck changed, but as soon as he had made enough he cut the mining and bought a share in a sheep-run. I don’t know if he would have made anything more at the mining, but he was not very successful with the sheep; still there was always enough to live on as far back as I can remember. I am the second of his three sons; my elder brother died when he was a boy, my younger in 1882.”

“And your mother and father?”

“Yes, they died some while ago.”

“You are the only one left?”

“Yes, the only son of an only son. The family curse seems to have fallen upon us inoffensive colonists too; we are near dying out.”

Bill looked at him thoughtfully. “You are a long way from dead,” she remarked and then enquired as to the fate of the brothers of the elder Gilchrist.

“The younger,” Harborough answered, “died in 1845, so Mr. Wagnall told me, that is the year after my grandfather’s death; the elder came into the property and has it still. He is the man at Wood Hall now, a childless widower with no one nearer than a sister’s grandson to succeed him. He was two years older than my grandfather, I think, born in 1820.”

“In 1820,” Bill repeated thoughtfully; “then he was thirteen in 1833. Of course he remembered about the old Squire’s body; why he was the same age as the granddaughter who planned it!”

“Planned what? Whose granddaughter? What are you talking about?”

“Only a tale that is told in Gurnett,” Bill made answer; “I will tell you some other time; finish your family history first.”

He knew nothing as yet about her visit to Wood Hall. She would tell him of course, as she saw no reason why he should object to it; but it was a pity to interrupt his narrative, so she asked him to go on and explain the way in which all this family history bore on his connection with Wood Hall. Accordingly he told her of the custom of the succession of the youngest. “And it appears,” he concluded, “that, as the Harboroughs inherited according to this custom, the youngest son should always have succeeded to the estates.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why,” he answered, feeling the question to be entirely beside the point. “It does not matter why; it was so, that is all. It is a tenure called Borough English by which some estates are held, and apparently the Harboroughs’ originally was so held.”

“I see,” Bill cried; “until the time of your grandfather Gilchrist it was so, and then, owing to his going away before his son was born and the other man not knowing he had a son at all, the elder brother got it.”

“Something of the sort.” Harborough was not inclined so entirely to attribute the chain of events to the ignorance of those in possession, but that did not matter to Bill.

“And you are going to claim through your grandfather?” she said.

“Yes, I expect so, in time,” Gilchrist answered. “But you are in too much of a hurry; wait a bit, and I will explain. Most likely I shall not claim in the present owner’s lifetime, that is if I ever do it at all; he is an old man in bad health, and they say he is not likely to outlast the year; I think I should wait till after his death.”

“It would be kinder,” said Bill.

But that was not Harborough’s reason, and though he did not say so, he made his real motive fairly clear. “It is a very difficult thing,” he said, “to turn out a man who has been in possession such a long time; indeed, it is just possible that if I could not prove that neither I nor my father knew that we had the right to claim for all those years, I should not be able to do it at all. If we had known it, and had for some reason left Mr. Harborough in possession, I don’t believe we could turn him out; but as we did not know I ought to be able to do it, though I don’t think I shall try unless he shows signs of living longer than now seems likely.”

“I see; then he will never know you have a claim?”

“No, not if I can prevent it. I will tell you why. He does not care much for the heir, it is said, though he wishes him to have the property for family reasons; he is altogether rather an eccentric old man”—Bill knew that—“and it is possible that if he is left to himself he will make no will. Now, I don’t want him to make a will, which would only complicate the case. If he has no right to the property he can’t bequeath it; but the existence of a will, bequeathing it to the recognised heir, would give him a show of right which he would not otherwise have. So, you see, I do not want a will made, and I do not want to give Mr. Harborough any reason for making one by hinting at my claim yet.”

“Is that fair?” Bill asked.

“Of course it is fair. What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, I am not quite sure,” she answered thoughtfully; “I shall have to think about it. But don’t let’s bother now; tell me about your case.”

“I don’t know what you mean by fairness,” Harborough said somewhat severely. “If there is anything unfair it is the way in which my people have been kept out all these years. As to my case, there is very little more to tell about it, except, of course, that I shall have to prove my legitimate descent from Gilchrist Harborough, that my grandmother was legally married to him, and all that.”

“How could she be anything else?” Bill asked wondering.

“He could have had another wife living at the same time, or he could have been married before, or something of the sort.”

This was a new but impossible difficulty to Bill. “Oh, but he wouldn’t,—at least, seeing that he was a Harborough—” She paused and then added demurely: “I thought you did not wish to belong to that played-out family, and had a poor opinion of their mortgaged property.”

“I can’t help my ancestors,” Harborough replied, “and besides, they are some way back; we have been honest working men for two generations. As for the property, it is not so much encumbered as is usually thought, so Stevens, the lawyer at Wrugglesby, says; it is his opinion that a practical man with a small capital and reasonable notions could pull the place together yet.”

“You!” Bill cried. “‘Thou art the man’!” and she made the best obeisance to him that she could without getting down from her perch on the low branch of an apple-tree.

“I don’t know about the reasonable notions,” Harborough said seriously, “and as for the small capital, what I have is not large for such a job; still, since I made the lucky speculation which emboldened me to ask you to be my wife, I suppose I can lay claim to a little capital. Something could be done with the place I am sure; I drove past the other day and made observations; there is a lot of fine timber still among all the rubbish in the wood and more in the open park-land—that’s worth something; then a good lot of that park could be cultivated profitably; it would take time, but I believe it could be done.”

“And the house,” Bill added, “is big too. If we lived there we could take boarders in the summer; if we advertised among the seaside and farm-house lodgings in the time-table, we should be sure to get some answers.”

Harborough never was quite sure whether she was in fun or in earnest; he was not sure now, but in either case he was annoyed and felt his annoyance to be justifiable. “That would be impossible,” he said severely, though had he given expression to what was in his mind he would have requested her not to be absurd. However, for politeness sake he contented himself with the milder speech, rising as he uttered it.

“Why?” Bill asked jumping down from her perch.

“Why? Because it would be out of the question. As Mrs. Harborough of Wood Hall how could you receive boarders? It may be all very well for you and Miss Hains to do it in London, though, as you know, I don’t altogether approve of the plan, but here—here it would be impossible.”

“Why impossible? You don’t explain.”

He was holding the gate open for her, and jerked it with annoyance as he answered. “To begin with, in that position—”

“Oh, but there wouldn’t be one,” Bill interrupted; “there would be no position. The stiff-necked county would hardly recognise you on the strength of your grandfather if you ploughed your park; and as for me—even if I were Madame La Princesse your wife I should still be ‘only Bill.’”

She uttered the name with the wealth of contempt and annoyance which Polly, at times of extreme irritation, could concentrate into its one syllable. Harborough felt irritated too; no man who has all his life assumed an indifference to position likes to be shown that he too has a trace of the universal respect for it.

“If you think,” he said coldly, “that I care for the county you are very much mistaken. Other people’s opinion is not of the slightest importance to me as you should know, and though I care a good deal what manner of woman my wife is, it is for myself I care, not for my neighbours.”