Dwarf's Blood

by Edith Olivier

  On Sundays, Nicholas sometimes walked over to Radway for luncheon, and in this way he came to know Alethea. The girl had lived alone with her grandfather as long as she could remember, and had kept house for him even before she left the schoolroom. She knew how to sit silent while men talked, for she had been trained to this, and for some weeks Nicholas hardly observed her. He only knew that when the Colonel had completed the Sunday ceremony of carving the sirloin of beef and its remains had been carried away to the servants’ hall, then it was Alethea’s part to help the pudding. When the port wine appeared, she left them, murmuring something about the Sunday School, and she sometimes joined them later in the afternoon, when they were making the round of the stables and farmyard. It was only by slow degrees that she emerged for Nicholas as an individual; but when once she had done so, he was surprised to find how vividly she stood out. He wanted to hear her talk.

  By that time, Alethea, on her side, had arrived at a very definite opinion on the subject of the visitor. She felt she knew him very well, for she had watched him week after week, and had listened to what he said. Moreover, she and her grandfather often discussed the new neighbour when they were alone.

  Colonel Bracton said that Nicholas was ‘his grandfather over again’. Bob had always been the handsome one of the family, and the boy had his looks, his colouring, his height, and very much the same figure. He was also like Bob in his enthusiasm for what he was doing, and that made him altogether unlike Sir Henry. When Nicholas was in the house, Colonel Bracton felt that he was once more with his old friend; and as Nicholas was not more than twenty-five years old, the Colonel felt that he too was a boy again. He enjoyed this.

  Alethea found Nicholas attractive. She admired his strength, his vigour, and his ability, and she also thought him far more original than he really was. Her experience was limited to life in an English county at the opening of this century, and she was astonished to find in Nicholas a complete freedom from conventions and prejudices which had appeared to her as irreversible as the laws of Nature. He was the first colonial she had met, and she fancied that he had created the type. It was a type which sometimes shocked her, and often startled her; but she thought it completely individual. Then too, combined with this force and independence of character, she found something in Nicholas which seemed to ask for her pity. She saw him as tragic. His face had traces, or so she thought, of some deep and smothered feeling, and it was this which really drew her to him. It set her pondering about him; and, curiously enough, it sent her mind back to an almost forgotten episode in her own childhood.

  When Alethea was a little girl, she once spent her holidays with some boy cousins. She hated the visit, and she begged with tears that it might not be repeated. Nor was it. But she had never confessed to anyone the cause of her misery. Now, after all these years, it came back to her mind. One Sunday afternoon, she and the boys had gone for a walk together; and as they passed a thick old laurel bush which grew against the wall, they heard a movement among the leaves. Staring out at them, there appeared the yellow eyes of a cat. It was quite still, watching them. One of the boys picked up a stone, and threw it idly at the animal, meaning to drive it away; but instead it remained motionless, still staring out. And then, suddenly, her cousins had all become young savages. Each one armed himself with a handful of stones, and hurled them at the cat. They showered round it, rattling through the dark leaves of the laurel, and yet, in the midst of this storm of missiles, the cat remained uncannily still. It might have been dead, or some strange Egyptian effigy carved in granite, but for those frightful eyes, flaming with horrible pain, which glared at them out of the thicket. It seemed like the vision of a chained prisoner, dying slowly in anguish.

  ‘Don’t do it! Don’t do it!’ Alethea was crying in the background, but no one seemed to hear.

  And then at last one of the boys solved the mystery. The cat was caught in a gin, and in its agony it had crawled into the tree, where the trap had become hopelessly wedged among the branches, while its merciless teeth still gripped the limb it had broken. The cat was chained there, helpless and immovable, to be stoned and tortured by its light-hearted enemies. Overcome with horror and remorse, the boys fled to ask a gardener to come and put an end to the Cat’s misery; while Alethea ran sobbing to her room, and was haunted night after night, by the memory of the dumb and dreadful torment in those flaming fiery eyes.

  Now she remembered them again. The eyes of Nicholas had brought them back to her mind. But his did not glare: they smouldered.

  ‘Still, he is not at all like a cat in a trap,’ she said to herself. ‘ No one could be less so.’

  It would have surprised Nicholas to know that he was thus in Alethea’s thoughts, for in the first few weeks of their acquaintance, he hardly ever thought of her. His mind could only hold one thing at a time, and just then he was thinking of Brokeyates. In fact, his real reason for coming to Radway on Sundays was that when the foreman was away, he felt obliged to go on talking about the work to someone else, and he used the Colonel as his safety valve.

  But in course of time, he found himself wanting to show the house to a new admirer. He had now owned the place for five months and he was proud of what had been done in the time. It was October, and the Park was at its loveliest. In those misty autumn mornings, the house, in its new dignity, stood clear against a gorgeous pageant of colour. The beeches upon the hillside behind it, had the splendour of some old historic battle—a mellay of crimson and scarlet seen through a haze of smoke. The willows which hung over the lake, were each a little golden waterfall, and in the foreground there stood a glorious group of Scotch firs, their stems freed at last from the tangle of elder bushes and seedling sycamores which had hidden them. Now they glowed like red amber in the oblique rays of the sun. Brokeyates was no longer a ruin lost in a thicket. It stood revealed, a noble house in a noble Park.

  A very pretty low wall edged the flower garden to the south of the house, and this had been entirely out of sight when Nicholas came to the place. The men found it when they cleared away the masses of untidy greenery which had grown up about it; and then, overthrown on the ground beside it, they had discovered the fragments of a row of exquisitely carved stone urns. Only one was intact: the others had been completely broken to bits. Nicholas had restored the wall, and he employed the best sculptor he could find to furnish it once more with its row of urns. For some reason that garden wall meant almost more to him than anything he had done. That forgotten fragment of buried formality symbolized for him something which could never have been found in Australia. It was such a trifle to have made so exquisite. It was so unimportant beside the house. Yet, in those autumn mornings, when he stood in the Park and looked towards the house, that little wall seemed to pull the landscape together, giving to the picture its complete and ultimate proportion.

  Nicholas spoke of this when he was lunching at Radway one Sunday, and Colonel Bracton said he had quite forgotten the existence of the wall. ‘Although’ he added, ‘it must have been there in the old days’

  ‘I have always loved it,’ said Alethea, ‘although I have never seen it properly. But I have often climbed in among the bushes and tried to piece those broken urns together. And one summer, I cleared quite a lot of the wall, but it was soon choked up again.’

  Nicholas looked at her with interest.

  ‘Do you often come into the Park?’ he asked, ‘I have never seen you there.’

  ‘Not now. But in those years when Sir Henry was in bed, I used to think that if I didn’t enjoy it, nobody would, and I walked there every day.’

  ‘Come and see it again,’ Nicholas said eagerly. ‘You won’t know the place.’

  ‘I should love to.’

  ‘Perhaps you will think I have tidied away all the romance.’

  ‘It certainly had a romantic look of lovely misery, but it really was getting too bad. Simply dreary and desolate. Brokeyates is so beautiful that it must always be romantic, even without being a ruin.’
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br />   ‘Come to-morrow morning and let me show you everything.’

  ‘I will.’

  And so it was Alethea’s figure which first brought life for Nicholas into his empty house. It was with a thrill that he saw her move down the picture gallery, silhouetted against the window at its end. The library became a new place for him when she sat down in an enormous chair of Spanish leather, the light youth of her head clear against a row of ancient books behind it. He watched her on the staircase, as she stopped with one hand on the banister, and tilted her head at a funny little angle, so as to catch a view of the summer house through the open door. It could only be seen from just that one point. Nicholas couldn’t think why he had noticed her so little at Radway. Here she seemed to catch every ray of light which came through the windows. The sun moved with her, lighting her girlish figure even when she stood in a shadow.

  Alethea suited the house. She was one of the uncommon people who can make an ‘old-fashioned’ appearance distinguished instead of dowdy. This was because her clothes were not old-fashioned at all. It was her type of face, and the way her head was set upon her rippling shoulders, that were so entirely mid-Victorian. She belonged to the crinoline era. Her clothes hung in the same slim, flowing lines as did those of the other girls of her day, and yet she moved in a billowy manner which suggested a hoop. Her hair, parted in the middle, lay close against her head; and she wore ear-rings, a fashion which was then restricted to ladies of a certain age. She might have stepped out of the age of primness; but not the least of her charms lay in the fact that she certainly had stepped out of it. Primness means the perpetual memory that there are certain things which, as young ladies, young ladies are not expected to do or to say. Alethea was entirely spontaneous. She spoke, without remembering that it was she who spoke. She acted, forgetting herself in what she did.

  And now, she said nothing which might have been expected of her. She gave no conventional praise to the tasteful manner in which the changes in the house had been carried out, but she gave Nicholas the impression that she felt just as he did about the place. In his own mind, his task had been merely to release the beauty and character which had lain there all along, imprisoned in the tumble-down house. He hated the idea that people might think he had come from Australia, with no instinct for the past of an old English house, to make his inheritance into a smart new place. He liked to feel that he had created nothing, that he had only let in the light upon what was already there. And Alethea too appeared to see the beauty of Brokeyates as a freed captive. She spoke as if she had known her to have been there all along. And now she rejoiced in her loveliness, without reminding her of the fetters which she had shaken off.

  And how sensitive she was! Although she did not crudely say, ‘How well you have done that!’ or ‘What an improvement you have made there!’ yet Nicholas knew that she saw everything that he wanted her to see. She never missed the charm of a vista seen through a door which he had purposely left open so that that charming vista might appear. She saw when the light fell upon a picture which he had set in that particular spot only in order that it might catch just that very gleam. But when she saw these things, like Nicholas himself, she did not praise the workman, she admired the thing done.

  Nicholas found himself loving Brokeyates more than ever before. He found a subtle flattery in Alethea’s way of taking all that he had done to the place as though it had been a natural growth. She seemed to identify him with his house. He was assured that he really did belong there. Australia became a very long way off.

  One o’clock came, and he asked her to stay for luncheon, although with an inward uneasiness as to the meal which might be served by Mrs. Dybbe. Alethea, however, did not put it to the test. She said that her grandfather would expect her, and she ran swiftly away across the Park.

  ‘Is that the governor’s young lady?’ asked one of the London workmen, as he saw her go.

  ‘His young lady? Bless me, no. That’s Bracton’s maid, from over the way,’ replied the old mason who lived in the village at the gate.

  Chapter Four

  ARTHUR FANSHAWE was an oldish young man of about twenty-six, rich, and rather stupid. He had never been young, but had passed direct from babyhood to middle-age, carrying with him the fat, round, milky face of the first, as his vehicle to express the precise self-satisfaction of the second. He possessed a fine place about five miles from Brokeyates, and here he lived in solid comfort, coddled by his mother, and laying down the law to her. He little knew that, emphatically as he laid it down, it was she who legislated; for the axioms which he declaimed so pompously, had all, in the first place, originated with her. He had made up his mind that Alethea was to be his wife, and so of course had Mrs. Fanshawe. The idea had in fact come from her, like everything else in the house which might be dignified by the name of an idea. The mother and son were further agreed that there need be no hurry about the wedding. Alethea could well wait a few years. Her grandfather needed her; and, too, Mrs. Fanshawe was in no hurry to make way for another mistress of the house, however suitable. Moreover, as she told her son, it is a mistake for girls to marry too young. They have more sense after they have reached twenty-five. It was tacitly agreed between the Fanshawes that Arthur should wait to propose till Colonel Bracton died. Then it would be a graceful act on his part, and very consoling to Alethea.

  Alethea never guessed at these intentions. Had she done so, she would have disliked Arthur even more than she did. Her feeling for him now was merely a somewhat bored indifference: but if she had thought of him as a possible husband, she would have hated him actively.

  They generally met out hunting once or twice in the week during the winter, and they always said a few words to one another at the Meet. Later in the day, they saw little of each other, as Arthur was always too busy looking for gates to be able to attend to anything else.

  Mrs. Fanshawe often drove her phaeton to the Meet, and she sometimes followed the hounds for a short time, watching the hunt from the road. Then she would keep a watch on Alethea, to make sure that the girl remained loyal to her undeclared admirer, and accepted no attentions from other young men. Flirtations in the hunting field are only too common, and Arthur Fanshawe’s wife must be above suspicion, not only after marriage, but before it had even been contemplated by her.

  Alethea was unaware of this supervision; and the fact that she went her way so gaily, and yet succeeded in retaining Mrs. Fanshawe’s approval, suggested that the young men who went out with the hounds were not quick to appreciate beauty.

  Sir Nicholas Roxerby had not been out many times, before Mrs. Fanshawe perceived that he and Alethea seemed to have a good deal to say to each other, for they exchanged words one day at least three times before the hounds moved off. She suspected she knew not what; and then, from her point of vantage on the high road she observed that their two horses were close beside each other while the first covert was being drawn. She remarked on this to her son when they were having tea together that afternoon, saying that she hoped Alethea was not going to allow herself to be talked about. Arthur had, of course, observed nothing, but he was sure that his mother was right. He felt, creeping beneath his skin, a rather sluggish dislike for this new neighbour. The fellow obviously deserved a snub.

  ‘I suppose they hunt on cart-horses in Australia,’ he therefore remarked to Alethea the next week, when Nicholas was seen arriving at the Meet, mounted on a very big horse.

  ‘Cart-horses? Why?’

  ‘Well, look at that clumsy brute.’

  It was not quite clear whether he was speaking of the horse or of its rider.

  ‘He’s a big man, and he wants a big horse,’ said Alethea. ‘He is altogether on the grand scale, don’t you think so?’ she continued, saying this to tease Arthur, for she saw that he was cross.

  He rose to her bait.

  ‘Not very grand. He looks to me like a burglar from Botany Bay.’

  Alethea laughed. She refused to take the argument seriously.


  ‘And you think they ride upon cart-horses,’ she said. ‘I wonder if they do.’

  She moved off, not particularly interested.

  Nicholas had overheard Arthur’s last speech, as it had been intended that he should. It was spoken in no subdued tones.

  His features were immovable, but there was a dark flush on his face, and he marked down Arthur Fanshawe as an enemy. He was hurt with Alethea too, for he had seen her laugh.

  So Mrs. Fanshawe, spying from her phaeton, was not that day annoyed by seeing those two horses together.

  Nicholas rode furiously, and so close upon the hounds that he was sworn at by the master.

  If Alethea had been near at that moment, she would again have been reminded of the trapped cat, for Nicholas’s eyes glared in their deep sockets, as those other eyes had glared from the shadow of the wood. He made up his mind that the members of the hunt were conspiring together to treat him as an outsider, and he imagined himself surrounded by latent enmity. He did not stay out long, but he trotted his horse back before luncheon, and round a corner in a lane near Brokeyates, he overtook Alethea, also riding slowly home.

  He did not want to see her, for at that moment he felt against all the world, but she turned and greeted him with a friendliness which was quite unembarrassed. In spite of this, Nicholas could not forget that she had laughed about Botany Bay.