XXII.
Guy Thwarte had not been back at Honourslove long enough to expect a heavy mail beside his breakfast plate. His years in Brazil had cut him off more completely than he had realized from his former life; and he was still in the somewhat painful stage of picking up the threads.
“Only one letter? Lucky devil, I envy you!” grumbled Sir Helmsley, taking his seat at the other end of the table and impatiently pushing aside a stack of newspapers, circulars, and letters.
The young man glanced with a smile at his father’s correspondence. He knew so well of what it consisted: innumerable bills, dunning letters, urgent communications from book-makers, tradesmen, the chairmen of political committees or art-exhibitions, scented notes from enamoured ladies, or letters surmounted by mysterious symbols from astrologers, palmists, or alchemists—for Sir Helmsley had dabbled in most of the arts, and bent above most of the mysteries. But today, as usual, his son observed, the bills and the dunning letters predominated. Guy would have to put some order into that; and probably into the scented letters too.
“Yes, I’m between two worlds yet—‘powerless to be born’ kind of feeling,” he said as he took up the solitary note beside his own plate. The writing was unknown to him, and he opened the envelope with indifference.
“Oh, my dear fellow—don’t say that; don’t say ‘powerless,’ ” his father rejoined, half-pleadingly, but with a laugh. “There’s such a lot waiting to be done; we all expect you to put your hand to the plough without losing a minute. I was lunching at Longlands the other day and had a long talk with Ushant. With old Sir Hercules Loft in his dotage for the last year, there’s likely to be a vacancy at Lowdon at any minute, and the Duke’s anxious to have you look over the ground without losing any time, especially as that new millionaire from Glasgow is said to have some chance of getting in.”
“Oh, well—” Guy was glancing over his letter while his father spoke. He knew Sir Helmsley’s great desire was to see him in the House of Commons, an ambition hitherto curbed by the father’s reduced fortune, but brought into the foreground again since the son’s return from exile with a substantial bank-account.
Guy looked up from his letter. “Tintagel’s been talking to you about it, I see.”
“You see? Why—has he written to you already?”
“No. But she has. The new American Duchess—the little girl I brought here once, you remember?” He handed the letter to his father, whose face expressed a growing satisfaction as he read.
“Well—that makes it plain sailing. You’ll go to Longlands, of course?”
“To Longlands?” Guy hesitated. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to.”
“But if Tintagel wants to see you about the seat? You ought to look over the ground. There may not be much time to lose.”
“Not if I’m going to stand—certainly.”
“If!” shouted Sir Helmsley, bringing down his fist with a crash that set the Crown Derby cups dancing. “Is that what you’re not sure of? I thought we were agreed before you went away that it was time there was a Thwarte again in the House of Commons.”
“Oh—before I went away,” Guy murmured. His father’s challenge, calling him back suddenly to his old life, the traditional life of a Thwarte of Honourslove, had shown him for the first time how far from it all he had travelled in the last years, how remote had become the old sense of inherited obligations which had once seemed the very marrow of his bones.
“Now you’ve made your pile, as they say out there,” Sir Helmsley continued, attempting a lighter tone, but unable to disguise his pride in the incredible fact of his son’s achievement—a Thwarte who had made money!—“now that you’ve made your pile, isn’t it time to think of a career? In my simplicity, I imagined it was one of your principal reasons for exiling yourself.”
“Yes; I suppose it was,” Guy acquiesced.
After this, for a while, father and son faced one another in silence across the breakfast-table, each, as is the way of the sensitive, over-conscious of the other’s thoughts. Guy, knowing so acutely what was expected of him, was vainly struggling to become again the young man who had left England over three years earlier; but, strive as he would, he could not yet fit himself into his place in the old scheme of things. The truth was, he was no longer the Guy Thwarte who had left, and would probably never recover that lost self. The break had been too violent, the disrupting influences too powerful. Those dark rich stormy years of exile lay like a raging channel between himself and his old life, and his father’s summons only drove him back upon himself.
“You’ll have to give me time, sir-I seem to be on both sides of the globe at once,” he muttered at length with bent head.
Sir Helmsley stood up abruptly, and, walking around the table, laid a hand on his son’s shoulder. “My dear fellow, I’m so sorry. It seems so natural to have you back that I’d forgotten the roots you’ve struck over there.... I’d forgotten the grave....”
Guy’s eyes darkened, and he nodded. “All right, sir....” He stood up also. “I think I’ll take a turn about the stables.” He put the letter from Longlands into his pocket, and walked out alone onto the terrace. As he stood there, looking out over the bare November landscape, and the soft blue hills fading into a low sky, the sense of kinship between himself and the soil began to creep through him once more. What a power there was in these accumulated associations, all so low-pitched, soft, and unobtrusive, yet which were already insinuating themselves through his stormy Brazilian years, and sapping them of their reality! He felt himself becoming again the school-boy who used to go nutting in the hazel-copses of the Red Farm, who fished and bathed in the dark pools of the Love, stole nectarines from the walled gardens, and went cub-hunting in the autumn dawn with his father, glorying in Sir Helmsley’s horsemanship, and racked with laughter at his jokes—the school-boy whose heart used to beat to bursting at that bend of the road from the station where you first sighted the fluted chimney-stacks of Honourslove.
He walked across the terrace and, turning the flank of the house, passed under the sculptured lintel of the chapel. A smell of autumn rose from the cold paving, where the kneeling Thwartes elbowed each other on the narrow floor, and under the recumbent effigies the pillows almost mingled their stony fringes. How many there were, and how faithfully hand had joined hand in the endless work of enlarging and defending the family acres! Guy’s glance travelled slowly down the double line, from the armoured effigy of the old fighting Thwarte who had built the chapel to the Thornycroft image of his own mother, draped in her marble slumber, just as the boy had seen her, lying with drawn lids, on the morning when his father’s telegram had called him back from Eton. How many there were—and all these graves belonged to him, all were linked to the same soil and to one another in an old community of land and blood; together for all time, and kept warm by each other’s nearness. And that far-off grave which also belonged to him—the one to which his father had alluded——how remote and lonely it was, off there under tropic skies, among other graves that were all strange to him!
He sat down and rested his face against the back of the bench in front of him. The sight of his mother’s grave had called up that of his young Brazilian wife, and he wanted to shut out for a moment all those crowding Thwartes, and stand again beside her distant headstone. What would life at Honourslove have been if he had brought Paquita home with him instead of leaving her among the dazzling white graves at Rio? He sat for a long time, thinking, remembering, trying to strip his mind of conventions and face the hard reality underneath. It was inconceivable to him now that, in the first months of his marriage, he had actually dreamed of severing all ties with home, and beginning life anew as a Brazilian mine-owner. He saw that what he had taken for a slowly matured decision had been no more than a passionate impulse; and its resemblance to his father’s headlong experiments startled him as he looked back. His mad marriage had nearly deflected the line of his life—for a little pale face with ebony hair and curving b
lack lashes, he would have sold his birth-right. And long before the black lashes had been drawn down over the quiet eyes, he had known that he had come to the end of that adventure....
All his life, and especially since his mother’s death, Guy Thwarte had been fighting against his admiration for his father, and telling himself that it was his duty to be as little like him as possible; yet more than once he had acted exactly as Sir Helmsley would have acted, or snatched himself back just in time. But in Brazil he had not been in time....
“One brilliant man’s enough in a family,” he said to himself as he stood up and left the chapel.
Forgetting his projected visit to the stables, he turned back to the house and, crossing the hall, opened the door of his father’s study. There he found Sir Helmsley seated at his easel, retouching a delicately drawn water-colour copy of the little Rossetti Madonna above his desk. Sir Helmsley, whose own work was incurably amateurish, excelled in the art of copying, or, rather, interpreting, the work of others; and his water-colour glowed with the deep brilliance of the original picture.
As his son entered he laid down his palette with an embarrassed laugh. “Well, what do you think of it—eh?”
“Beautiful. I’m glad you’ve not given up your painting.”
“Eh—? Oh, well, I don’t do much of it nowadays. But I’d promised this little thing to Miss Testvalley,” the baronet stammered, reddening handsomely above his auburn beard.
Guy echoed, bewildered: “Miss Testvalley?”
Sir Helmsley coughed, and cleared his throat. “That governess, you know—or perhaps you don’t. She was with the little new Duchess of Tintagel before her marriage: came here with her one day to see my Rossettis. She’s Dante Gabriel’s cousin; didn’t I tell you? Remarkable woman—one of the few relations the poet is always willing to see. She persuaded him to sell me a first study of the Bocca Baciata, and I was doing this as a way of thanking her. She’s with Augusta Glenloe’s girls; I see her occasionally when I go over there.”
Sir Helmsley imparted this information in a loud, almost challenging voice, as he always did when he had to communicate anything unexpected or difficult to account for. Explaining was a nuisance, and somewhat of a derogation. He resented anything that made it necessary, and always spoke as if his interlocutor ought to have known beforehand the answer to the questions he was putting.
After his bad fall in the hunting-field, the year before Guy’s return from Brazil, the county had confidently expected that the lonely widower would make an end by marrying either his hospital nurse or the Gaiety girl who had brightened his solitude during his son’s absence. One or the other of these conclusions to a career over-populated by the fair sex appeared inevitable in the case of a brilliant and unsteady widower. Coroneted heads had been frequently shaken over what seemed a foregone conclusion; and Guy had shared these fears. And behold, on his return, he found the nurse gone, the Gaiety girl expensively pensioned off, and the baronet, slightly lame, but with youth renewed by six months of enforced seclusion, apparently absorbed in a little brown governess who wore violet poplin and heavy brooches of Roman mosaic, but who (as Guy was soon to observe) had eyes like torches, and masses of curly-edged dark hair which she was beginning to braid less tightly, and to drag back less severely from her broad forehead.
Guy stood looking curiously at his father. The latter’s bluster no longer disturbed him; but he was uncomfortably reminded of certain occasions when Sir Helmsley, on the brink of an imprudent investment or an impossible marriage, had blushed and explained with the same volubility. Could this outbreak be caused by one of the same reasons? But no! A middle-aged governess? It was unthinkable. Sir Helmsley had always abhorred the edifying, especially in petticoats; and with his strong well-knit figure, his handsome auburn head, and a complexion clear enough for blushes, he still seemed, in spite of his accident, built for more alluring prey. His real interest, Guy concluded, was no doubt in the Rossetti kinship, and all that it offered to his insatiable imagination. But it made the son wonder anew what other mischief his inflammable parent had been up to during his own long absence. It would clearly be part of his business to look into his father’s sentimental history, and keep a sharp eye on his future. With these thoughts in his mind, Guy stood smiling down paternally on his father.
“Well, sir, it’s all right,” he said. “I’ve thought it over, and I’ll go to Longlands; when the time comes I’ll stand for Lowdon.”
His father returned the look with something filial and obedient in his glance. “My dear fellow, it’s all right indeed. That’s what I’ve always expected of you.”
Guy wandered out again, drawn back to the soil of Honourslove as a sailor is drawn to the sea. He would have liked to go over all its acres by himself, yard by yard, inch by inch, filling his eyes with the soft slumbrous beauty, his hands with the feel of wrinkled tree-boles, the roughness of sodden autumnal turf, his nostrils with the wine-like smell of dead leaves. The place was swathed in folds of funereal mist shot with watery sunshine, and he thought of all the quiet women who had paced the stones of the terrace on autumn days, worked over the simple-garden and among the roses, or sat in the oak parlour at their accounts or their needle-work, speaking little, thinking much, dumb and nourishing as the heaps of faded leaves which mulched the soil for coming seasons.
The “little Duchess’s” note had evoked no very clear memory when he first read it; but as he wandered down the glen through the fading heath and bracken he suddenly recalled their walk along the same path in its summer fragrance, and how they had stayed alone on the terrace when the rest of the party followed Sir Helmsley through the house. They had leaned side by side on the balustrade, he remembered, looking out over that dear scene, and speaking scarcely a word; and yet, when she had gone, he knew how near they had been.... He even remembered thinking, as his steamer put out from the dock at Liverpool, that on the way home, after he had done his job in Brazil, he would stop a few days in New York to see her. And then he had heard—with wonder and incredulity—the rumour of her ducal marriage; a rumour speedily confirmed by letters and newspapers from home.
That girl—and Tintagel! She had given Guy the momentary sense of being the finest instrument he had ever had in his hand; an instrument from which, when the time came, he might draw unearthly music. Not that he had ever seriously considered the possibility of trying his chance with her; but he had wanted to keep her image in his heart, as something once glimpsed, and giving him the measure of his dreams. And now it was poor little Tintagel who was to waken those melodies; if indeed he could!
Sir Helmsley had informed him of the engagement in one of his sprightly bulletins, with a flourish of commentary:
I flatter myself that I deserve your congratulations in that, unlike the rest of the world—our world-I view the match as refreshingly piquant. To think of a little ingénue taking on that maîtresse femme Blanche Tintagel! of a little Puritan moving into the temple of Antonio Correggio, whose very saints, whose Assumptions of the Virgin, are voluptuous! As for his classical subjects—you won’t have forgotten that day in Parma when we looked at his Jupiter raping Io in the shape of a cloud and agreed that it may be the most erotic painting of the Christian era....
For a few weeks the news had blackened Guy’s horizon; but he was far away, he was engrossed in labours and pleasures so remote from his earlier life that the girl’s pale image had become etherealized, and then had faded out of existence. He sat down on the balustrade of the terrace, in the corner where they had stood together, and, pulling out her little note, re-read it.
“The writing of a school-girl ... and the language of dictation,” he thought; and the idea vaguely annoyed him. “How on earth could she have married Tintagel? That girl! ... One would think from the wording of her note that she’d never seen me before.... She might at least have reminded me that she’d been here. But perhaps she’d forgotten—as I had!” he ended with a laugh and a shrug. And he turned back slowly to the house, wher
e the estate agent was awaiting him with bills and estimates, and long lists of repairs. Already Sir Helmsley had slipped that burden from his shoulders.
XXIII.
When Their Graces were in residence at Longlands, the Dowager did not often come up from the Dower-House by the gate. But she had the awful gift of omnipresence, of exercising her influence from a distance; so that while the old family friends and visitors at Longlands said, “It’s wonderful, how tactful Blanche is—how she keeps out of the young people’s way,” every member of the household, from its master to the last boots and scullion and gardener’s boy, knew that Her Grace’s eye was on them all, and the machinery of the tremendous establishment still moving in obedience to the pace and pattern she had set.
But at Christmas the Dowager naturally could not remain aloof. If she had not participated in the Christmas festivities the county would have wondered, the servants have gossiped, the tradesmen have thought the end of the world had come.
“I hope you’ll do your best to persuade my mother to come next week. You know she thinks you don’t like her,” Tintagel had said to his wife, a few days before Christmas.
“Oh, why?” Nan protested, blushing guiltily; and of course she had obediently persuaded, and the Duchess had responded by her usual dry jerk of acquiescence.
For the same reason, the new Duchess’s family, and her American friends, had also to be invited; or at least so the Duke thought. The Dowager was not of the same mind; but thirty years of dealings with her son (“from his birth the most obstinate baby in the world”) had taught her when to give way; and she did so now.
“It does seem odd, though, Ushant’s wanting all those strange people here for Christmas,” she confided to her friend Miss March, who had come up with her from the Dower-House, “for I understand the Americans make nothing of any of our religious festivals—do they?”
The Buccaneers Page 22
