“He had a good chance when he was at Madingley with us, the summer before last,” Mr. Drayson said, “but he didn’t follow it up.”
Of their own expectations these superior servants said very little.
“I don’t think we’ve any call for anxiety,” Drayson said. “He was every inch a gentleman — and he had large ideas. I make no doubt he will have acted handsomely by us all, each according to position and length of service, down to the scullery maids. All I hope is that stuck-up parson’s widow won’t come out top.”
Ridley laughed.
“You wouldn’t like to see her keeping her carriage, with a flat in South Street, Drayson.”
“I hope I may never see her sour old mug after she leaves this house.”
“How about Miss Smith?” asked Ridley, who had been more reserved than Drayson, and had allowed that gentleman to distribute his master’s fortune as he pleased.
“Miss Smith is a lady, which old Tredgold never was and never would be. Miss Smith is as clever as she can stick, she’s had winning cards, and you may be sure she has known how to play them. She’s one of those quiet women who can look a long way ahead. He will have settled something handsome upon her, tied up so tight that she can’t waste it upon any blackguard husband. I shouldn’t be surprised if he had left her a thousand a year.”
“Very handsome and more than enough to meet the case,” said Mr. Drayson. “How about the contents of this house? I’ve been told the collection is worth over a million. Frominger knows something about that, for he’s drawn all Mr. Field’s cheques for the last twenty years.”
“That,” Ridley replied with authority, “will be left to the nation, with twenty or thirty thousand for a building — something in the Greek style, to carry the name of Conway Field down to posterity.”
“Did Mr. Field tell you as much?”
“Mr. Field wasn’t one to tell anybody what he was going to do. But there’s such a thing as telepathy, and it isn’t likely I should have been with him so long — his companion day and night — without being able to read his thoughts. His collection will go to the nation, and the building will be finer than the Tate Gallery.”
Ridley had now taken up the running, and every other question was referred to him.
“Who will have Madingley?”
“For a guess, I should say Mrs. Hailing, his youngest sister. Her that lives in a picturesque village in Bucks. I have seen her cottage, as artistic as you please, with a garden that was an eye-opener when I saw it in the summer, when Mr. Field sent me down with his birthday present — a six-cylinder landaulette, about as perfect a thing as you ever saw. She was having tea in her garden, and she showed me and the chauffeur round — and I was able to tell Mr. Field what she had done for the place — just a few odd bits of meadowland cultivated in the most up-to-date style, like one of those gardens in Country Life. I gave her brother an exact description of it that evening when I was getting him to bed. ‘Elaine was always a garden worshipper,’ he said in his musing way, more to himself than to me, and I made up my mind then and there that Mrs. Hailing would have Madingley, when his time came.”
“That ain’t much to go upon,” Drayson said dubiously, “but you’re always cocksure. I should just as soon say, for a bold guess, that he’d leave Madingley to Miss Smith. He hung upon her so when she was there with him. And he give her the choicest poodle that money could buy. I shouldn’t wonder if he left that place to Miss S.”
“That’s because you haven’t ever gone as deep into your master’s thoughts as I have, Drayson. No blame to you, for you haven’t had the personal compact that I have. Mr. Field was a man with a profound sense of family obligations, as his father and his grandfather had before him. His sister Guinevere always rubbed him the wrong way, and he was barely civil to her when she came to see him. Yet it would hardly surprise me if he had left his eldest sister Warburton House — minus the art treasures — and the bulk of his fortune, only because she has kept the name of Field.”
“Any of his nephews could take that name, by letters patent, and send it down to posterity, which that stuck-up piece of goods couldn’t” said Drayson, and before the wine and dessert had been put on the table the late Mr. Field’s upper-servants had come to high words about the disposal of his fortune. Butler and valet were both cocksure, and each had that exaggerated value for his own opinion which is one of the characteristics of cocksureness in mortal men.
The dream days went by in those upper floors where there was an oppressive scent of eucharis lilies and a silence as of the grave where Conway Field would soon be lying.
The hall porter never ceased from receiving the flowers for which it would seem the lovely coast of Provence must have been stripped of its beauty to pay honour to that white and wasted figure in the darkened room.
Friends who had not seen Conway Field for thirty years, acquaintances who had only seen him once or twice in his life, strangers who only knew him as the princely subscriber to charities in which they were interested — all sent flowers — wreaths and crosses, hearts and anchors, every costly artifice that fashionable grief has invented.
A great many people came to the house in that season of darkness and muffled footsteps. Ridley and Mrs. Tredgold told each other that Warburton House had never been so much alive as now, when Death reigned with closed doors upon the upper floor. There were people who came on business, and who were closeted with Austin in a room on the ground-floor. Austin had to see everybody. There were men who came from the North, men who dressed and comported themselves as gentlemen, but who were stronger and squarer of figure and more bluff of speech than the West-end Londoner. These came from the “Yard,” men of weight, head officials, in the great ship-building business. They stayed long, and were to reappear on that solemn day when the master of the house was to cross its threshold for the last time. They were to be there in that same spacious and severe dining-room that had been a place of splendour and conviviality forty years ago when Conway Field’s father was master of the house. No one had ever dined in that room since his death.
It was there that Conway Field’s will was to he read, and the representatives of his shipping interests were to be present at the reading.
Among the figures that were seen oftenest in that half light was the funereal form of Guinevere Field, a tall and commanding figure in the deepest mourning that the famous house of Regent Street could provide at a few hours’ notice. From the first day of gloom Guinevere had come there swathed in crape from her neckband to the hem of her skirt.
“He was often wanting to me, but I will not be wanting to him,” she told Mrs. Tredgold, who complimented her upon her achievement in mourning clothes. “He might forget that I was his eldest sister, but I can never forget that he was my only brother.”
She came every day, and she stayed long, prowling about the darkened rooms as she had never been allowed to prowl while their master was alive, bringing the tip of her aquiline nose much nearer his choicest pictures than Conway Field would have liked to see it.
She took up china vases and turned them about to look for marks with a ruthless scrutiny.
“I suppose all these things will have been left to the nation,” she said, with a sigh of resignation. “They will serve to carry my brother’s name to future ages; but this house will look bare without them. The house and its contents seem to belong to each other somehow, my dear Tredgold; it will be a pity to part them.”
Her dear Tredgold assented, and ventured to suggest that both house and contents might be left to the lady to whom she was talking, and who had an ancestral right to them.
Miss Field broke in upon Austin’s solitude two or three times a day, but all her attempts to elicit his opinions upon the thrilling question of the millionaire’s will were useless. Austin knew nothing, or pretended to know nothing, with a stubborn and impenetrable affectation of ignorance.
“Don’t tell me that you who were with your uncle more than any of us throughout th
e last ten years can have been left in the dark as to his intentions,” Guinevere said, offended and contemptuous.
“My dear aunt, the will is to be read to-morrow afternoon, and everybody in this house will know all about it. You are much too well off to feel any anxiety about the disposal of your brother’s fortune; and you ought to know that he was just as well as generous, and not likely to forget any of his obligations.”
“I used to think my father a just man,” Miss Field said gloomily, “but I knew better when I heard his will read, and found that he had given an inordinate share of his wealth to his son and only a pittance to his daughters.”
“A pittance of fifty thousand pounds.”
“Fifty thousand pounds is a pittance when a man is disposing of millions,” Guinevere said sternly. “What your mother must feel when she looks at her two daughters, neither of them beauties, and one getting on for thirty, is more than I like to think about.”
“Then don’t think about it, aunt. My mother will rub along pretty well.”
“No doubt she will, if your uncle has made you his heir,” Miss Field retorted snappishly, and then after a silence, in which Austin went on with a letter he had been writing when she intruded on him, “One question I must and will ask,” she broke out in a louder and more rasping voice.
“Pray do. You have asked a good many.”
“Is that young person to be at the funeral?”
“What young person?”
“Miss Smith. Your protégée.”
“Naturally.”
“Then I hope she will not intrude herself in the carriage I have to sit in.”
“There will be carriages enough for everybody. You can have one to yourself if you like, or you can go with my mother or Aunt Elaine.”
“Elaine will be alone; I had better go with her. Your mother will have her two girls,” said Miss Field, with an idea of crushed crape.
There had been some question as to whether the women of the family wore to appear at the funeral. But as there was to be no memorial service in Mayfair, and the ceremony would be in no manner public, Mr. Field’s sisters had decided that it was their duty to be present at the grave.
“I suppose Miss Smith will go with Mrs. Tredgold?”
“I think not. I would rather have her with Clementina and me.”
Miss Field gasped, a gasp that was distinctly audible, and for some moments the rustle of rich silk as she swept towards the door was the only sound that broke the silence. At the door she stopped, having recovered speech.
“I can only say that this arrangement is on a par with your East-end eccentricities, but if Clementina can put up with Miss Smith it is not for me to object.”
George Bertram had only entered the darkened house once since death had been master there. He had come to look upon the calm dead face, and had knelt by the bed, in a silence of some minutes that might or might not have been spent in prayer, and he had laid his tribute of white flowers at the feet of the shrouded figure, and had gone away. Mary Smith in her upper room did not know of his coming.
His image had flashed across her mind now and then in the depth of her grief, but had never brought with it a thrill of love, or a pang of regret for the stern resolve that had parted them.
XXI
BLINDS had been drawn up, and shutters had been opened all over Warburton House, for the short interval of afternoon light between the departure of the funeral train and the closing of the day, and before the reading of the will had been finished the winter night had begun outside and the house was once more splendid in the light of innumerable lamps.
The will had been read, and everybody knew the worst, and the worst was so bad that Mrs. Tredgold had gone home with Miss Field, who had been seized with violent hysteria immediately after the reading, and had need of some faithful attendant even for the short distance between Warburton House and Lansdowne Mansions. She had gone home tightly packed with her good Tredgold in her miniature brougham where so rarely was anyone but herself allowed to sit.
To-night she was fain to put up with Mrs. Tredgold, and to sob and gasp and emit spasmodic screams with her head on that respectable person’s shoulder.
“I might have expected it,” she screamed, in a sudden outburst, “I ought to have known it when he bought her that poodle. Why wasn’t the poodle at the reading of the will?”
“He was with his mistress,” Tredgold replied meekly. “She was too broken-hearted to be there herself, poor girl. I never saw anyone so changed as she is, in so short a time — quite broken down.”
Even in the midst of her hysterical symptoms Miss Field detected a subtle change in Mrs. Tredgold’s tone.
“She couldn’t face us, Tredgold,” she said severely, “she couldn’t stand before us when the infamous result of her plots and plans was to be brought to light. But you must not suppose that the demented old man’s will is going to hold water. We shall light it, every one of us, Tredgold, shoulder to shoulder — we shall fight that abominable will to the foot of the throne.”
It was an extraordinary will. Everybody who had known Conway Field, or who knew his melancholy story, said the same thing. His will was extraordinary. But no one except Guinevere said that it was an unjust will; no other member of his family hinted at any intention of going to law about it.
A man so rich as Mr. Field, with no heirs of his body, might be allowed to indulge his whim, and to leave a great part of his fortune to a stranger to his blood.
Nobody who could claim relationship had been forgotten. To each of his nephews he had left a third share of the ship-building yard, which meant exactly what Dr. Johnson said of Mr. Thrale’s brewery, the potentiality of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He had divided a hundred thousand pounds among his four sisters, and he had left each of his nieces ten thousand. Poor relations whom nobody had ever heard of were provided for. Every man or woman who had served in his house and had behaved properly, down to the outermost odd man or scullery-maid, gardener, or stable-boy, had been remembered. Servants at Madingley, outdoor or indoor, servants in Mayfair had everyone his or her legacy, proportionate to length of service and good conduct.
Mrs. Tredgold might keep a one-horse brougham and inhabit a flat in the Cromwell Road. Mr. Ridley might retire from service, and saunter about the world as a person of independent means, to be met in seaside hotels and wondered about: a person who, although not quite-quite, would impress strangers as steeped to the lips in the knowledge of high life. Mr. Drayson might realize the butler’s dream of bliss, and take a house for bachelor lodgers in Jermyn Street. Peter Frominger, the ill-used of nature, might realize his far sweeter dream of a cottage in a Devonshire valley, with the sea in front of him, and the hills at his back, and a garden, and a village where the villagers would soon be familiar and pleasant with him, and where perhaps the vicar would come in of an evening to play chess until midnight sounded from his church tower.
Everybody had reason to be satisfied with the rich man’s distribution of his riches, and ought to have been content to wonder, without ill-will to Mary Smith, the residuary legatee.
Mary Smith no longer, since she was described in the will as “Mary Tremayne, known as Mary Smith, my dear friend and companion of three patient years, in which she has borne with me in all my gloom and ill-temper, always gentle, always sympathetic, and always wise. I leave her rich without fear that she will develop any change of character under the influence of riches, and with every hope that wealth in her hands may be a source of good to the largest number. And upon all matters of business I recommend her to consult my nephews, Austin Sedgwick and George Bertram, whom I know as men of honour, and of kindly feeling, who will make her interests their own and in every way carry out my wishes.”
Miss Field had listened to these words in a stony silence, to be followed soon after by that stormy outburst which had required Mrs. Tredgold’s attendance. The hysterical attack had indeed begun in that admirable person’s sitting-room, where Guinevere had r
etired agitated and tremulous when the solicitor had read the last word, and folded up the will.
Mary Smith — otherwise Tremayne — showed much less agitation when Austin told her the particulars of the will; and yet it would have seemed enough to flutter the nerves of any young woman who had never known more of wealth than a salary of three hundred a year.
Warburton House was hers, and all its contents, the matchless collection which she might bequeath to the nation, if she liked, only at her own will and pleasure. Madingley with all its acres was hers, and all that would remain of Conway Field’s fortune when debts, legacies and annuities had been paid. And this residue, which included a third share of the ship-building business, Austin told her, would amount to from forty-five to fifty thousand a year.
“My uncle’s benefactions were large and widely spread,” he told Mary. “but he had always a surplus to invest at the end of the quarter, and he had the financier’s flair, and seldom made a bad investment, though he was something of a gambler and ran risks.”
Mary listened unmoved until Austin spoke of his uncle’s charities.
“I knew he was kind, but he never talked of the hospitals or the private cases he helped. I only heard of them once in a way by accident. Mr. Frominger wrote all his business letters, and I think he must be the only person who knows.”
She broke down and burst into tears and had to struggle against her growing agitation. And now for the first time since his uncle’s death Austin was able to realize the depth of this paid dependent’s grief for the friend who was lying on that wind-swept hill where his father and grandfather had been sleeping in the century that was finished and forgotten.
“You loved him,” Austin said softly, not with surprise, nor yet as a question — only with assurance of his sympathy.
“How could I help loving him? You must understand, for I think you knew him better than anyone else. You knew all his gifts of heart and mind. You and he were the only friends I have ever had — the only near friends. I wish he had not left me his fortune. He told me once that he would provide for me — that I should never know want. If he had told me that he meant to make me rich, I should have begged him not to do so. What can a lonely woman do with all that wealth, except give it away? And what a care! What a responsibility!”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1022
