by D. J. Taylor
‘It is all on account of that horse, I suppose?’
Mr Davenant passed his hand over his face to remove some of the water that had dripped there from the brim of his hat. ‘That horse. That law business. A dozen things,’ he said bitterly. They had begun to walk down from the knoll to a pathway that led to the gravel drive which abutted the front of the house. ‘As for the horse, there wasn’t a man in the county wouldn’t have counselled me to buy him. Curbishley’ – Curbishley was the sporting gentleman Mr Davenant employed – ‘said the same. And then he went at that fence as if he meant to eat it and destroyed himself. It is very hard.’
‘It is very hard – certainly,’ said Mr Glenister, who had two thousand a year from his estate and never spent the half of it.
‘And then there was that lawsuit. I don’t think a man was ever more infernally used. Everyone knew that Scratchby was taking the sand. Why, his counsel admitted as much himself. And here am I to pick up the bill.’
By this stage they had reached the front of the house where the gravel drive curved around a patch of grass in the midst of which a disreputable caryatid balanced above a stone fountain. Mr Glenister looked up at the eaves and the distant chimneys, black and smoking beneath the lowering sky, and felt that they oppressed him. He felt, too, that there was an almost piteous tone in his friend’s voice that he had not heard before. In the distance they could hear the noise of the gig beginning to crunch up the gravel at the further end of the drive.
‘They have made good time, I think.’
‘It’s that Macadamed road I subscribed twenty guineas to,’ Mr Davenant said. ‘I tell you what, Glenister, I should have kept my money – and the potholes, too – and let them break their necks in a ditch.’
‘Very gratifying to you, no doubt, but it don’t stop an execution. Well, here they are – you had better talk to them.’
‘I suppose I better had … Damnation! It is that fellow Silas.’
‘He does not look so very terrible to me. What is the matter with him?’
What Mr Davenant said in reply was drowned out by the noise of the gig grinding up the stones of the driveway as it came to rest a yard or so from where they stood. Certainly Mr Silas, the Sleaford attorney, did not look so very terrible as, taking care of his coat, trousers, bag and feet, he climbed out of his equipage. He was a small, neat, demure little man, whose hat sat very solemnly on his head and whose spectacles oddly diminished the size of the eyes behind them, so that they looked like pebbles lying very far away on the beach. There was a clerk with him to deal with the driver, who now rattled off in the direction of the stables, and certain other cases and account books that were unpacked from the gig, and it would have been apparent to the smallest child from the look that Mr Silas gave him that he loved the clerk for the deference he showed.
‘Dear me,’ Mr Silas said, almost to himself, as he held out a little white hand for Mr Davenant to shake, ‘the impudence of those drivers. If it wasn’t that we have to go back to Sleaford, I should have Jones here pay him off. But how are you, Squire, and how are you keeping? That’s a nasty flood you have on your road out there where it meets the common land. I wonder you don’t have it drained.’
And Mr Glenister saw immediately what was so terrible about Mr Silas.
‘This is Mr Glenister,’ Mr Davenant said, with what sounded very like anguish in his voice. ‘I trust you have no objection to his joining us?’
‘Not at all! The more the merrier is what I always say. Know of you, sir,’ said Mr Silas, gravely shaking hands with his host’s friend, ‘and proud to make your acquaintance. Jones, you might just attend to that case, else the mud will be all over it. The study is it we’re to sit in?’ – this to Mr Davenant – ‘A fine room, sir. Never look out of the window without thinking so. Come, Jones, let us not keep the gentlemen waiting.’
No prince could have swept into Scroop Hall more grandly than Mr Silas. He saw a little mark on the lintel as he swept inside and winked at it and rubbed it with his finger. A cat looked up from a chair in the hall as he passed and he stopped and patted it very affably. He looked at the pictures in their frames and the pike that Mr Davenant’s father had pulled out of the Wash in the year of Trafalgar with equal sympathy. Mr Glenister wished that he was back in his library at Glenister Hall with a book in his lap watching the rain fall over the apple trees in his garden.
Mr Davenant’s study was not much used. There was a big japanned desk and a bookcase or two and a map of the county which Mr Silas went and looked at very keenly while further chairs were being procured and a maid brought in four sherry glasses on a tray: the decanter was already out on Mr Davenant’s desk. It was so dark that lamps were called for, and Mr Silas’s shadow burned black and monstrous off the wall, mocking the quaint little body that sat beneath it. Just now he was looking at some pieces of paper held in a wafer of card, which the clerk had presented to him. Mr Davenant sat behind his desk looking as if he wished the earth to swallow him up.
‘Now, sir,’ Mr Silas began, when he had seated himself in his chair, drunk half a glass of sherry, eaten a biscuit and bullied his clerk a little more, ‘you’ll have received our letter in advance of this visit, and you’ll know how things stand. Very bad they are.’
‘I’ve no doubt they are as you say.’
‘Oh, indeed they are. Jones, just give Mr Davenant that schedule, would you? Bills you see, sir’ – this remark seemed to be addressed to Mr Glenister – ‘are very well providing they are renewed. But what if they aren’t, eh?’
Mr Glenister suggested that there were some bills not worth renewing.
‘That’s it, sir. That’s precisely it. But there are some folk, sir, as will press for payment even when they know they are not going to get it. Just for the mischief of the thing. Now, Mr Davenant sir, will you take a look at these figures and tell me if they’re correct?’
‘I am sure that everything is as you say it is.’
‘A trusting nature, sir, is a thing to be applauded,’ Mr Silas remarked. The clerk, laying down more paper at his side, looked at him with admiring eyes. ‘But it can be took too far, if you catch my meaning.’
‘I’m not sure I do catch it,’ said Mr Glenister. He was thoroughly annoyed, not merely by the thought that he would have been better off in his library, or by Mr Silas’s familiarity, but by what he imagined to be his friend’s quiescence. He told himself that Mr Davenant was being unreasonably timid, and that a bold stroke or two would see the attorney back in his gig. Seeing that his friend still sat quite silent in his chair, his eye barely moving over the schedule that Mr Silas had given him, he went on:
‘May I be frank, Mr Silas?’
‘As frank as you like, sir. Frankness is something we always prize in a profession like ours, isn’t that right, Jones?’ Mr Jones simpered horribly.
‘If I am to give my friend the benefit of my advice, based on the information you have given him, then it is necessary that I should speak to him alone. Perhaps you would excuse us for a few moments?’
‘As long as you wish, sir. Half an hour if it suits you. Mr Jones and I will do very well here, I daresay.’
There was a passage on the left-hand side of Mr Davenant’s study door that led to a second, outer door and thence into the stable yard. Here Mr Glenister led his friend, almost laughing as he did so.
‘What a dreadful man.’
‘He is terrible. I believe he is an elder of the Dissenting chapel at Sleaford, and that it has gone to his head.’ Mr Davenant shook his own head at the iniquities of a legal system that allowed a Methodist attorney to come and patronise him in his own study. There was an odd look on his face. ‘You knew my wife, didn’t you, Glenister?’
‘Certainly I did.’
‘This house was everything to her. When I think of her it is to remember her walking in the garden there. Can you conceive what she would have thought of Mr Silas coming here and poking his finger at the spines of the books and sitting in my grandf
ather’s chair?’
‘It is not so bad as that, I think.’
‘You would think it so if you had a letter from Mr Silas.’
Looking at his friend as he pronounced these words, Mr Glenister thought that some graver trouble afflicted him, and that it was not merely Mr Silas and his schedule that had extinguished his spirits. He liked Mr Davenant – liked him perhaps better than anyone else in the world – remembered his wife and her walking in the garden, sympathised with him and thought him hard done by, but he knew that he did not quite grasp the extent of his afflictions.
‘But you should not let it disturb you. A few hundred pounds would settle it, surely?’
‘No doubt they would. But it is worse than that.’
‘How so?’
‘There are other bills owing. Quite apart from Mr Silas’s. And’ – it was clearly a torture to Mr Davenant to say these things – ‘there are people confederate against me.’
‘What kind of people?’
‘People in London. I scarcely know their names. It is all to do with the horse.’
Mr Glenister looked around the stable yard and into the sky beyond it, where there were grey clouds blowing in off the wolds, heard the cries of the rooks assembled in the eaves and a little melancholy drip of water that pattered somewhere in the distance. His friend lived in a very desolate place.
‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Wait you a minute and let me speak to Silas. You are prejudiced against the man – I am not blaming you, but it is so – and not prepared to hear him.’
‘You should not take such trouble over me.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Glenister, and went back along the passage to the study door. ‘A nice enough fellow,’ he heard Mr Silas say, as he stepped inside, ‘but he ain’t got distangey manners, not by a long chalk.’
‘Well now, Mr Silas,’ Mr Glenister said, resuming his chair – Mr Silas’s clerk bent his head meekly over the papers on the desk – and taking up a copy of the schedule. He had an idea of how Mr Silas might be conciliated. ‘You must excuse my friend’s ill humour.’
‘Nothing to excuse, sir,’ Mr Silas said, quite delighted. ‘Of course a gentleman is not going to take kindly to his debts being parcelled up and left on his doorstep, so to speak.’
‘Certainly he is not. By the by,’ said Mr Glenister easily, ‘I think I heard of you from Lady Mary Desmond.’
‘Did you, sir?’ replied Mr Silas, who had never talked to Lady Mary in his life. ‘Well, if Lady Mary has spoken of me, I take that as a great compliment.’
‘As to Mr Davenant,’ Mr Glenister went on, ‘I think he feels that his creditors oppress him unduly. Why’ – he picked up the schedule and studied it for a moment – ‘there’s not more than six hundred pounds owing here.’
‘No more there isn’t, sir. But you see, there’s that account with Loveday the saddler in Lincoln that’s been due for ever so many months. Not to mention what’s owed to the lawyers still. Tradesmen – professional men too – do like to be paid, sir. It’s only human nature.’
‘I think Mr Davenant feels, too, that there is some kind of conspiracy set against him.’
Mr Silas and his clerk exchanged glances.
‘That’s it. That’s it exactly, sir. But it’s none of our doing, indeed it isn’t. He’s nothing to fear from us. Not at all. Four hundred pounds – well, four hundred and fifty, say – would settle this, and old Loveday bow him into his shop next week as if nothing had happened. Thin memories those shopkeepers have, you know. Even that lawyer might take a note of hand at three months if it was managed right. But there’s a gentleman in London been buying up his paper, sir.’
‘Which gentleman is this?’
‘Mr Hipperton. Poppleton. Some such name.’ Mr Jones looked as if he had something to say, but, seeing the look on his superior’s face, meekly subsided.
‘But why should he want Mr Davenant’s paper? If what you say about his position is true, there would be no advantage in owning it.’
‘Indeed there wouldn’t – Jones, I’ll thank you to stop fidgeting. No, you see, it’s the horse he wants.’
‘Davenant’ll not give that up.’
‘He may have to, sir, if this Mr Hipperton is on his track. You see, you may not know it – for all that friendship blossoms in life’s stagnant garden, as the poet says – but Mr D. here’s an embarrassed man. There’s the money he borrowed to buy that horse that broke its leg, and the money he owes to the lawyer, and half a dozen other things besides. And what’s he got in the way of assets?’ Still the clerk was making agitated motions with his forefinger. ‘Why, there’s this house, in which we sits today, drinking this uncommon good sherry, which is mortgaged, sir, up to four-fifths of its value, and there’s that horse sitting in its stable, which may win the Two Thousand or the Derby or then again may not. Why, if it wasn’t for me not wishing to disturb a gentleman’s comfort, the bailiffs would be in here tomorrow taking away the furniture. What is it, Jones? Anyone would think you were a jack-in-the-box, the way you jump up and down so.’
‘His name is Happerton,’ Mr Jones squeaked out.
‘There you are, Happerton. Why didn’t you say so?’ Mr Silas turned solemnly to Mr Glenister. ‘The man’s name is Happerton. And he ain’t buying up Mr Davenant’s bills so he can discount them, that’s for sure.’
Mr Glenister thought about the information that had been vouchsafed to him. He could do nothing about Mr Happerton and his schemes, but he thought he might arrange the present business.
‘Four hundred and fifty, you say, would settle this morning’s affair?’
‘Well, four hundred and seventy. That Loveday, you know, is so very wearing. Let us say four hundred and seventy-five.’
‘You would take my note of hand? To be drawn on Messrs Gurney in Lincoln?’
Mr Silas thought about this. Mr Glenister was a bachelor with a substantial estate, none of whose stamped paper or other evidence of his indebtedness had ever been seen anywhere inside the borders of Lincolnshire, and who was assumed to lead a thoroughly blameless life.
‘I think we could see our way to accommodating you, sir,’ he remarked. ‘Jones, have a paper drawn up, would you? Here, let us mark it on the schedule. It would be in Lincoln you saw Lady Mary, I don’t doubt, sir, for she goes there often I hear.’
And so the business was done. Mr Glenister signed his name on various documents produced by Mr Jones from out of his coat pocket (‘No need for stamps,’ Mr Silas graciously conceded. ‘This ain’t a bill in the regular way of things’), the clerk packed up his paper in various pocketbooks and ledgers that had come in from the gig, and the party debouched into the hall. Here Mr Silas became more affable still. He complimented the maid who held open the door on her complexion, remarked the deer’s antlers that hung over the door-frame and shook his head over a crack in the window pane. Shaking Mr Glenister’s hand on the doorstep, which he did with the air of one who had sealed an eternal friendship, he murmured:
‘They do say the horse will be entered for the Derby.’
‘Very probably he will be,’ Mr Glenister said, thinking that the horse might very probably not be entered by Mr Davenant.
‘Naturally in our line of worship we can’t countenance such things, but it’s well to know of them, I think. They do say that Septuagint – that’s a blasphemous name for a horse – is coming on strong. You’ll remember me to her ladyship I hope, sir?’
‘Certainly I shall,’ Mr Glenister said, handing him into the waiting gig and thinking that he would be damned if he did. The wheels rolled a little in the dirt, the clerk gave a sort of hiccup, and Mr Silas, sitting seraphically beside him, with quite as much dignity as if he had a mitre on his head, was borne away back to Sleaford with Mr Glenister’s note for four hundred and seventy-five pounds in his pocket.
When he had gone Mr Glenister did not, as he had first intended, go back into the stable yard. Instead he roamed about the lower parts of the house with the air of a man wh
o is searching for something he cannot quite put his finger on. He peered into the drawing room, where half a dozen old Davenants looked down at him from a wall whose paper had been quite the fashion in Mr Davenant’s grandfather’s day, put his head into the kitchen where the day’s milking lay on the great oak table waiting to be scalded, stared at the maps and prints of old Lincolnshire that hung in the vestibule next to Mr Davenant’s ulster and his collection of walking sticks, and by degrees walked back to the room he had left five minutes before. A maidservant came along the corridor carrying the half-empty bottle of sherry and the four glasses and he stood to one side to let her pass. Far away in the upper regions of the house there came a little rustling noise and the merest gust of what might have been laughter. Mr Glenister thought the house was very run down: two of the panes in the hall were cracked, the door swollen with damp and the fire that burned in the drawing room insufficient for the season. ‘I suppose Davenant knows what he is about,’ he said to himself. A copy of Mr Silas’s schedule lay on the desk, underscored with marks from Mr Silas’s pen, and he picked it up and put it in the pocket of his coat. The little rustling noise came again from somewhere high in the rafters of the house and he cocked his head to one side to listen to it.
‘How many servants do you keep indoors now?’ he asked, when he returned to his friend in the stable yard.
‘There is Mrs Castell, the housekeeper, and a couple of maids. Why do you ask?’
‘No particular reason. What became of Kennedy?’ Kennedy was the Scroop Hall butler.
‘Ah, Kennedy and I don’t see eye to eye these days, I’m afraid … But what did that man have to say?’
Mr Glenister gave the version of his dealings with Mr Silas that he thought might be least objectionable to his friend’s ears. Mr Davenant shook his head.
‘I am very much obliged to you – but you shouldn’t have paid the money.’
‘It was nothing – nothing at all.’
‘It was very much more than nothing. I am ashamed to be beholden to you, Glenister.’ But something in Mr Davenant’s eye said he was grateful too.
