Edith Wharton - Novel 21

by The Buccaneers (v2. 1)

  “I’d have shot myself rather than sell the Titian,” Guy used to think in moments of bitterness. “But then my father’s sure to outlive me—so what’s the odds?”

  As they moved side by side that summer evening it would have been hard for a looker-on to decide which had the greater chance of longevity; the heavy vigorous man approaching the sixties, a little flushed after his dinner and his bottle of Burgundy, but obliged to curb his quick stride to match his son’s more leisurely gait; or the son, tall and lean, and full of the balanced energy of the hard rider and quick thinker.

  “You don’t adapt yourself to the scene, sir. It’s an insult to Honourslove to treat the terrace as if it were the platform at Euston, and you were racing for your train.”

  Sir Helmsley was secretly proud of his own activity, and nothing pleased him better than his son’s disrespectful banter on his over-youthfulness. He slackened his pace with a gruff laugh.

  “I suppose you young fellows expect the gray-beards to drag their gouty feet and lean on staves, as they do in Oedipe-roi at the Français.”

  “Well, sir, as your beard’s bright auburn, that strikes me as irrelevant.” Guy knew this would not be unwelcome either; but a moment later he wondered if he had not overshot the mark. His father stopped short and faced him. “Bright auburn, indeed? Look here, my dear fellow, what is there behind this indecent flattery?” His voice hardened. “Not another bill to be met—eh?”

  Guy gave a short laugh. He had wanted something, and had perhaps resorted to flattery in the hope of getting it; but his admiration for his brilliant and impetuous parent, even when not disinterested, was sincere.

  “A bill—?” He laughed again. That would have been easier—though it was never easy to confess a lapse to Sir Helmsley. Guy had never learned to take his father’s tropical fits of rage without wincing. But to make him angry about money would have been less dangerous; and, at any rate, the young man was familiar with the result. It always left him seared, but still upright; whereas…

  “Well?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  The father gave one of his angry “foreign” shrugs (reminiscent of far-off Bohemian days in the Quartier Latin), and the two men walked on in silence.

  There were moments during their talks—and this was one—when the young man felt that, if each could have read the other’s secret mind, they would have found little to unite them except a joint love of their house and the land it stood on. But that love was so strong, and went so deep, that it sometimes seemed to embrace all the divergences. Would it now, Guy wondered? “How the devil shall I tell him?” he thought.

  The two had paused, and stood looking out over the lower terraces to the indistinct blue reaches beyond. Lights were beginning to prick the dusk, and every roof which they revealed had a name and a meaning to Guy Thwarte. Red Farm, where the famous hazel copse was, Ausprey with its decaying Norman church, Little Ausprey with the old heronry at the Hall, Odcote, Sudcote, Lowdon, the ancient borough with its market-cross and its rich minster—all were thick with webs of memory for the youth whose people had so long been rooted in their soil. And those frail innumerable webs tightened about him like chains at the thought that in a few weeks he was to say goodbye to it all, probably for many months.

  After preparing for a diplomatic career, and going through a first stage at the Foreign Office, and a secretaryship in Brazil, Guy Thwarte had suddenly decided that he was not made for diplomacy, and braving his father’s wrath at this unaccountable defection had settled down to a period of hard drudgery with an eminent firm of civil engineers who specialized in railway building. Though he had a natural bent for the work he would probably never have chosen it had he not hoped it would be a quick way to wealth. The firm employing him had big contracts out for building railways in Far Eastern and South American lands, and Guy’s experience in Brazil had shown him that in those regions there were fortunes to be made by energetic men with a practical knowledge of the conditions. He preferred making a fortune to marrying one, and it was clear that sooner or later a great deal of money would be needed to save Honourslove and keep it going. Sir Helmsley’s financial ventures had been even costlier than his other follies, and the great Titian which was the glory of the house had been sold to cover the loss of part of the fortune which Guy had inherited from his mother, and which, during his minority, had been in Sir Helmsley’s imprudent hands. The subject was one never touched upon between father and son, but it had imperceptibly altered their relations, though not the tie of affection between them.

  The truth was that the son’s case was hardly less perplexing than the father’s. Contradictory impulses strove in both. Each had the same love for the ancient habitation of their race, which enchanted but could not satisfy them, each was anxious to play the part fate had allotted to him, and each was dimly conscious of an inability to remain confined in it, and painfully aware that their secret problems would have been unintelligible to most men of their own class and kind. Sir Helmsley had been a grievous disappointment to the county, and it was expected that Guy should make up for his father’s short-comings by conforming to the accepted standards, should be a hard rider, a good shot, a conscientious landlord and magistrate, and should in due time (and as soon as possible) marry a wife whose settlements would save Honourslove from the consequences of Sir Helmsley’s follies.

  The county was not conscious of anything incomprehensible about Guy. Sir Helmsley had dabbled dangerously in forbidden things; but Guy had a decent reputation about women, and it was incredible that a man so tall and well set-up, and such a brilliant point-to-point rider, should mess about with poetry or painting. Guy knew what was expected of him, and secretly agreed with his observers that the path they would have him follow was the right one for a man in his situation. But since Honourslove had to be saved, he would rather try to save it by his own labour than with a rich woman’s money.

  Guy’s stage of drudgery as an engineer was now over, and he had been chosen to accompany one of the members of the firm on a big railway-building expedition in South America. His knowledge of the country, and the fact that his diplomatic training had included the mastering of two or three foreign languages, qualified him for the job, which promised to be lucrative as well as adventurous, and might, he hoped, lead to big things. Sir Helmsley accused him of undergoing the work only for the sake of adventure; but, aggrieved though he was by his son’s decision, he respected him for sticking to it. “I’ve been only a brilliant failure myself,” he had grumbled at the end of their discussion; and Guy had laughed back: “Then I’ll try to be a dingy success.”

  The memory of this talk passed through the young man’s mind, and with it the new impulse which, for the last week, had never been long out of his thoughts, and now threatened to absorb them. Struggle as he would, there it was, fighting in him for control. “As if my father would ever listen to reason!” But was this reason? He leaned on the balustrade, and let his mind wander over the rich darkness of the country-side.

  Though he was not yet thirty, his life had been full of dramatic disturbances; indeed, to be the only son of Sir Helmsley Thwarte was in itself a potential drama. Sir Helmsley had been born with the passionate desire to be an accomplished example of his class: the ideal English squire, the model landowner, crack shot, leader and champion in all traditionally British pursuits and pleasures; but a contrary streak in his nature was perpetually driving him toward art and poetry and travel, odd intimacies with a group of painters and decorators of socialistic tendencies, reckless dalliance with ladies, and a loud contempt for the mental inferiority of his county neighbours. Against these tendencies he waged a spasmodic and unavailing war, accusing and excusing himself in the same breath, and expecting his son to justify his vagaries, and to rescue him from their results. During Lady Thwarte’s life the task had been less difficult; she had always, as Guy now understood, kept a sort of cold power over her husband. To Guy himself she remained an enigma; the boy had never found a cr
ack through which to penetrate beyond the porcelainlike surface of her face and mind. But while she lived things had gone more smoothly at Honourslove. Her husband’s oddest experiments had been tried away from home, and had never lasted long; her presence, her power, her clear conception of what the master of Honourslove ought to be, always drew him back to her and to conformity.

  Guy summed it up by saying to himself: “If she’d lived the Titian never would have gone.” But she had died, and left the two men and their conflicting tendencies alone in the old house… Yes; she had been the right mistress for such a house. Guy was thinking of that now, and knew that the same thought was in his father’s mind, and that his own words had roused it to the pitch of apprehension. Who was to come after her? father and son were both thinking.

  “Well, out with it!” Sir Helmsley broke forth abruptly.

  Guy straightened himself with a laugh. “You seem to expect a confession of bankruptcy or murder. I’m afraid I shall disappoint you. All I want is to have you ask some people to tea.”

  “Ah—? Some ‘people’?” Sir Helmsley puffed dubiously at his cigar. “I suppose they’ve got names and a local habitation?”

  “The former, certainly. I can’t say as to the rest. I ran across them the other day in London, and as I know they’re going to spend next Sunday at Allfriars I thought—”

  Sir Helmsley Thwarte drew the cigar from his lips, and looked along it as if it were a telescope at the end of which he saw an enemy approaching.

  “Americans?” he queried, in a shrill voice so unlike his usual impressive barytone that it had been known to startle servants and trespassers almost out of their senses, and even in his family to cause a painful perturbation.

  “Well-yes.”

  “Ah—” said Sir Helmsley again. Guy proffered no remark, and his father broke out irritably: “I suppose it’s because you know how I hate the whole spitting tobacco-chewing crew, the dressed-up pushing women dragging their reluctant backswoodsmen after them, that you suggest polluting my house, and desecrating our last few days together, by this barbarian invasion—eh?”

  There had been a time when his father’s outbursts, even when purely rhetorical, were so irritating to Guy that he could meet them only with silence. But the victory of choosing his career had given him a lasting advantage. He smiled, and said: “I don’t seem to recognize my friends from your description.”

  “Your friends—your friends? How many of them are there?”

  “Only two sisters—the Miss St Georges. Lady Richard would drive them over, I imagine.”

  “Lady Richard? What’s she? Some sort of West Indian octoroon, I believe?”

  “She’s very handsome, and has auburn hair.”

  Sir Helmsley gave an angry laugh. “I suppose you think the similarity in our colouring will be a tie between us.”

  “Well, sir, I think she’ll amuse you.”

  “I hate women who try to amuse me.”

  “Oh, she won’t try—she’s too lazy.”

  “But what about the sisters?”

  Guy hesitated. “Well, the rumour is that the eldest is going to marry Seadown.”

  “Seadown—marry Seadown? Good God, are the Brightlingseas out of their minds? It was well enough to get rid of Dick Marable at any price. There wasn’t a girl in the village safe from him, and his father was forever buying people off. But Seadown—Seadown marry an American! There won’t be a family left in England without that poison in their veins.”

  Sir Helmsley walked away a few paces and then returned to where his son was standing. “Why do you want these people asked here?”

  “I—I like them,” Guy stammered, suddenly feeling as shamefaced as a guilty school-boy.

  “Like them!” In the darkness, the young man felt his father’s nervous clutch on his arm. “Look here, my boy—you know all the plans I had for you. Plans—dreams, they turned out to be! I wanted you to be all I’d meant to be myself. The enlightened landlord, the successful ambassador, the model M.P., the ideal M.F.H. The range was wide enough—or ought to have been. Above all, I wanted you to have a steady career on an even keel. Just the reverse of the crazy example I’ve set you.”

  “You’ve set me the example of having too many talents to keep any man on an even keel. There’s not much danger of my following you in that.”

  “Let’s drop compliments, Guy. You’re a gifted fellow; too much so, probably, for your job. But you’ve more persistency than I ever had, and I haven’t dared to fight your ideas because I could see they were more definite than mine. And now—”

  “Well, sir?” his son queried, forcing a laugh.

  “And now—are you going to wreck everything, as I’ve done so often?” He paused, as if waiting for an answer; but none came. “Guy, why do you want those women here? Is it because you’ve lost your head over one of them? I’ve a right to an answer, I think.”

  Guy Thwarte appeared to have none ready. Too many thoughts were crowding through his mind. The first was: “How like my father to corner me when anybody with a lighter hand would have let the thing pass unnoticed! But he’s always thrown himself against life head foremost…” The second: “Well, and isn’t that what I’m doing now? It’s the family folly, I suppose… Only, if he’d said nothing… When I spoke I really hadn’t got beyond… well, just wanting to see her again… and now..

  Through the summer dark he could almost feel the stir of his father’s impatience. “Am I to take your silence as an answer?” Sir Helmsley challenged him.

  Guy relieved the tension with a laugh. “What nonsense! I ask you to let me invite some friends and neighbours to tea…”

  “To begin with, I hate these new-fangled intermediate meals. Why can’t people eat enough at luncheon to last till dinner?”

  “Well, sir, to dine and sleep, if you prefer.”

  “Dine and sleep? A pack of strange women under my roof?” Sir Helmsley gave a grim laugh. “I should like to see Mrs. Bolt’s face if she were suddenly told to get their rooms ready! Everything’s a foot deep in dust and moths, I imagine.”

  “Well, it might be a good excuse for a clean-up,” rejoined his son good-humouredly. But Sir Helmsley ignored this.

  “For God’s sake, Guy—you’re not going to bring an American wife to Honourslove? I shan’t shut an eye tonight unless you tell me.”

  “And you won’t shut an eye if I tell you ‘yes’?”

  “Damn it, man—don’t fence.”

  “I’m not fencing, sir; I’m laughing at your way of jumping at conclusions. I shan’t take any wife till I get back from South America; and there’s not much chance that this one would wait for me till then—even if I happened to want her to.”

  “Ah, well. I suppose, this last week, if you were to ask me to invite the devil I should have to do it.”

  From her post of observation in the window of the housekeeper’s room, Mrs. Bolt saw the two red cigar-tips pass along the front of the house and disappear. The gentlemen were going in, and she could ring to have the front door locked, and the lights put out everywhere but in the baronet’s study and on the stairs.

  Guy followed his father across the hall, and into the study. The lamp on the littered writing-table cast a circle of light on crowded book-shelves, on Sienese predellas, and bold unsteady water-colours and charcoal-sketches by Sir Helmsley himself. Over the desk hung a small jewel-like picture in a heavy frame, with D. G. Rossetti inscribed beneath. Sir Helmsley glanced about him, selected a pipe from the rack, and filled and lit it. Then he lifted up the lamp.

  “Well, Guy, I’m going to assume that you mean to have a good night’s sleep.”

  “The soundest, sir.”

  Lamp in hand, Sir Helmsley moved toward the door. He paused—was it voluntarily?—half way across the room, and the lamplight touched the old yellow marble of the carved mantel, and struck upward to a picture above it, set in elaborate stucco scrolls. It was the portrait of a tall thin woman in white, her fair hair looped under a narrow
diadem. As she looked forth from the dim background, expressionless, motionless, white, so her son remembered her in their brief years together. She had died, still young, during his last year at Eton—long ago, in another age, as it now seemed. Sir Helmsley, still holding the lifted lamp, looked up too. “She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw,” he said abruptly—and added, as if in spite of himself: “But utterly unpaintable; even Millais found her so.”

  Guy offered no comment, but went up the stairs in silence after his father.

  

  X.

  The St George girls had never seen anything as big as the house at Allfriars except a public building, and as they drove toward it down the long avenue, and had their first glimpse of Inigo Jones’s most triumphant expression of the Palladian dream, Virginia said with a little shiver: “Mercy—it’s just like a gaol.”

  “Oh, no—a palace,” Nan corrected.

  Virginia gave an impatient laugh. “I’d like to know where you’ve ever seen a palace.”

  “Why, hundreds of times, I have, in my dreams.”

  “You mustn’t tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other people’s dreams.”

  Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her; the gate that was so often slammed by careless hands. As if any one could be bored by such dreams as hers!

  “Oh,” said Virginia, “I never saw anything so colossal. Do you suppose they live all over it? I guess our clothes aren’t half dressy enough. I told mother we ought to have something better for the afternoon than those mauve organdies.”