by Grant Allen
That same winter made a sudden change in Hugh Massinger’s financial position. He found himself the actual and undoubted possessor of the Manor of Whitestrand. Winter always tried Mrs. Meysey. Like the bulk of us nowadays, her weak points were lungy. Of late, she had suffered each season more and more from bronchitis, and Hugh had done his disinterested best to persuade her to go abroad to some warmer climate. His solicitude for her health, indeed, was truly filial, and not without reason. If she chose Madeira or Algiers or Egypt, for example, she would at least be well out of her new son’s way for six months of the year; and Hugh was beginning to realize, as time went on, a little too acutely that he had married the estate and manor of Whitestrand with all its incumbrances, a mother-in-law included; while if, on the other hand, she preferred Nice or Cannes or Pau, or even Florence, or any nearer continental resort, they would at any rate have an agreeable place to visit her in, if they were suddenly summoned away to her side by the telegraphic calls of domestic piety. But Mrs. Meysey, true metal to the core, wouldn’t hear of wintering away from Suffolk. She clung to Whitestrand with East Anglian persistence. Where was one better off, indeed, than in one’s own house, with one’s own people to tend and comfort one? If the March winds blew hard at the Hall, were there not deadly mistrals at Mentone and gusts of foggy Fohn at dreary Davos Platz? If you gained in the daily tale of registered sunshine at Hyeres or at Bordighera,’ did not a superabundance of olive oil diversify the stew at the table-d’hote, and a fatal suspicion of Italian garlic poison the fricandeau of the second breakfast? Mrs. Meysey, in her British mood, would stand by Suffolk bravely while she lived; and if the hard gray weather killed her at last, as it killed its one literary apologist in our modern England, she would acquiesce in the decrees of Fate, and be buried, like a Briton, by her husband’s side in Whitestrand churchyard. Elizabethan Meyseys of the elder stock in frilled ruffs and stiff starched headdresses smiled down upon her resolution from their niched tomb in Whitestrand church every Sunday morning: never should it be said that this, their degenerate latter-day representative, ran away from the east winds of dear old England to bask in the sunlight at Malaga or Seville, among the descendants of the godless Armada sailors, from whose wreckage and pillage those stout old squires had built up the timbers of that very Hall which she herself still worthily inhabited So Mrs. Meysey stopped sturdily at home; and the east wind wreaked its vengeance upon her in its wonted fashion. Early in March, Winifred was summoned by telegram from town: “Come at once. Much worse. May not live long. Bring Hugh with you.” And three weeks later, another fresh grave rose eloquent in Whitestrand churchyard; and the carved and painted Elizabethan Meyseys, smiling as placidly as ever on the empty seat in the pew below, looked forward with confidence to the proximate addition of another white marble tablet with a black epitaph to the family collection in the Whitestrand chancel.
The moment was a specially trying one for Winifred. A month later, a little heir to the Whitestrand estates was expected to present himself on the theater of existence. When he actually arrived upon the stage of life, however, poor frail little waif, it was only just to be carried across it once, a speechless supernumerary, in a nurse’s arms, and to breathe his small soul out in a single gasp before he had even learned how to cry aloud like an English baby. This final misfortune, coming close on the heels of all the rest, broke down poor Winifred’s health terribly. A new chapter of life opened out before her. She ceased to be the sprightly, lively girl she had once been. She felt herself left alone in the big wide world, with a husband who, as she was now beginning to suspect, had married her for the sake of her money only, while his heart was still fixed upon no one but Elsie. Poor lonely child: it was a dismal outlook for her. Her soul was sad. She couldn’t bear to brazen things out any longer in London to smile and smile and be inwardly miserable. She must come back now, she said plaintively, to her own people in dear old Suffolk.
To Hugh, this proposition was simply unendurable. He shrank from Whitestrand with a deadly shrinking. Everything about the estate he had made his OWP was utterly distasteful to him and fraught with horror. The house, the grounds, the garden, the river, above all that tragic, accusing poplar, were so many perpetual reminders of his crime and his punishment. Yet he saw it would be useless to oppose Winifred’s wish” in such a matter the whole idea was so simple, so natural. A squire ought to live on his own land, of course; he ought to occupy the ancestral Hall where his predecessors have dwelt before him for generations. Had not he himself fulminated in his time in the gorgeous periods of the “Morning Telephone” against the crying sin and shame of absenteeism? But if he went there, he could only go on three conditions. The Hall itself must be remodeled, redecorated, and refurnished throughout, till its own inhabitants would hardly recognize it; the grounds must be replanted in accordance with his own cultivated and refined taste; and last of all though this he did not venture to mention to Winifred by fair means or by foul, the Whitestrand poplar that hateful tree must be leveled to the soil, and its very place must know it no longer. For the first two conditions he stipulated outright: the third he locked up for the present quietly in the secret recesses of his own bosom.
Winifred, for her part, was not wholly averse, either, to the remodeling of Whitestrand. The house, she admitted, was old-fashioned and dowdy. Its antiquity went back only to the “bad period.” After the aesthetic drawing-rooms of the Cheyne Row set, she confessed to herself, grudgingly though not to Hugh that the blue satin and whitey-gold paint of the dear old place seemed perhaps just a trifle dingy and antiquated. There were tiny cottages at Hampstead and Kensington that Whitestrand Hall could never reasonably expect to emulate. She didn’t object to the alterations, she said, so long as the original Elizabethan front was left scrupulously intact, and no incongruous meddling was allowed with the oaken wainscot and carved ceiling of the Jacobean vestibule. But where, she asked, with sound Suffolk common-sense was the money for all these improvements to come from? A season of falling rents, and encroaching sea, and shifting sands, and agricultural depression, with Hessian fly threatening the crops, and obscure bacteria fighting among themselves for possession of the cattle, was surely not the best chosen time in the world for a country gentleman to enlarge and complete and beautify his house in.
“Pooh!” Hugh answered, in one of his heroically sanguine moods, as he sat in the dining-room with his back to the window and the hated poplar, and his face to the ground-plans and estimates upon the table before him. “I mean to go up to town for the season always, and to keep up my journalistic connection in a general way; and in time, no doubt, I shall begin to get work at the bar also. I shall make friends assiduously with what a playful phrase absurdly describes as ‘the lower branch of the profession.’ I shall talk my nicest to every dull solicitor I meet anywhere, and do my politest to the dull solicitor’s stupid wife and plain daughters. I’ll fetch them ices at other people’s At Homes, and shower on them tickets for all the private views we don’t care about, and all the first nights at uninteresting theaters. That’s the way to advance in the profession. Sooner or later, I’ll get on at the bar. Meanwhile, as the estate’s fortunately unincumbered, and there’s none of that precious nonsense about entail, or remainders, or settlements, or so forth, we can raise the immediate cash for our present need on short mortgages.”
“I hate the very name of mortgages,” Winifred cried impatiently. “They suggest brokers’ men and bailiffs, and bankruptcy and beggary.”
“And everything else that begins with a B,” Hugh continued, smiling a placid smile to himself, and vaguely reminiscent of “Alice in Wonderland.”
“Why with a B!” Alice said musingly. “Why not?” said the March Hare. Alice was silent. “Now, for my own part, I confess, on the contrary, Winifred, to a certain sentimental liking for the mortgage as such, viewed in the abstract. It’s a document intimately connected with the landed interest and the feudal classes; it savors to my mind of broad estates and haughty aristocrats, and
lordly rentrolls and a baronial ancestry. I will admit that I should feel a peculiar pride in my connection with Whitestrand if I felt I had got it really with a mortgage on it. How proud a moment, to be seized of a mortgage! The poor, the abject, the lowly, and the landless don’t go in heavily for the luxury of mortgages. They pawn their watches, or raise a precarious shilling or two upon the temporary security of Sunday suits, kitchen clocks, and second-hand flat-irons. But a mortgage is an eminently gentlemanly form of impecuniosity. Like gout and the lord-lieutenancy of your shire, it’s incidental to birth and greatness. Upon my word, I’m not really certain, Winnie, now I come to think upon it, that a gentleman’s house is ever quite complete without a History of England, a billiard table, and a mortgage. Unincumbered estates suggest Brummagem: they bespeak the vulgar affluence of the rwuveau rtche, who keeps untold gold lying idle at his bankers on purpose to spite the political economists. But a loan of a few thousands, invested with all the glamor of deposited title-deeds, foreclosing, engrossed parchment, and an extremely beautiful and elaborate specimen of that charming dialect, conveyancers’ English, carries with it an air of antique respectability and county importance that I should be loath to forego, even if I happened to have the cash in hand otherwise available, for carrying out the necessary improvements.”
“But how shall we ever pay it back?” Winifred asked, with native feminine caution went in for the sanguine he did it thoroughly. “One thing at a time, my child,” he murmured low. “First borrow; then set your wits to work to look around for a means of repayment. In the desk at home in London this very moment lies an immortal epic, worth ten thousand pounds if it’s worth a penny, and cheap at the price to a discerning purchaser. Ormuz and Ind are perfect East Ends to it. It teems with Golcondas and Big Bonanzas. In time the slow world must surely discover that this England of ours incloses a great live poet. The blind and battling must open their eyes and look at last placidly about them. They’ll then be glad to buy fifty editions of that divine strain, van-ing in character from the large paper edition de luxe in antique vellum at ten guineas five hundred copies only printed, and issued to subscribers upon conditions which may be learned on application at all libraries to the school selection at popular prices, intended to familiarize the ingenious youth of this nation with the choicest thoughts of a distinguished and highminded living author. Winnie, I’m tired to death of hearing people say when I’m introduced to them: ‘Oh, Mr. Massinger, I’ve often wanted to ask, are you descended from the poet Massinger?’ I mean the time to arrive before long when I can answer them plainly with a bold face: ‘No, my dear sir, or madam, I am not; but I am the poet Massinger, if you care to be told so.’ When that time comes, we’ll pay off the mortgages and build a castle in Spain or elsewhere with the balance of our fortune. Meanwhile, we have always the satisfaction of knowing that nothing on earth could be more squirearchical in its way than a genuine mortgage.”
“I’m not so sure as I once was, Hugh, that you’ll ever make much out of your kind of poetry.”
“Of course not, my child; because now I happen to be only your husband. A prophet, we know on the best authority, is not without honor, et cetera, et cetera. But I mean to make my mark yet for all that; ay, and to make money out of it, too, into the bargain.”
So, in the end, Winifred’s objections were overruled since this was not a matter upon which that young lady felt strongly and the money for “improving and developing the estate,” having been duly raised by the aid, assistance, instrumentality, or mediation of that fine specimen of conveyancers’ English aforesaid, to which Hugh had so touchingly and professionally alluded, a fashionable architect was invited down from town at once to inspect the Hall and to draw up plans for its renovation as a residential mansion of the most modern pattern.
The fashionable architect, after his kind, performed his work well and expensively. He spared himself no pains (and Hugh no money) on rendering the Hall a perfect example on a small scale of the best Elizabethan domestic architecture. He destroyed ruthlessly and repaired lavishly. He put mullions to the windows, and pillars to the porch, and molded ceilings to the chief reception-rooms, and oaken balustrades to either side of the wide old rambling Tudor staircase. He rebuilt whatever Inigo had defaced, and pulled down whatever of vile and shapeless Georgian contractors had stolidly added. He “restored” the building to what it had never before been: a fine squat old-fashioned country mansion of the low wind-swept East Anglian type, a House Beautiful everywhere, without and within, and as unlike as possible to the dingy Hall that Hugh Massinger had seen and mentally discountenanced on the occasion of his first visit to Whitestrand. “You give an architect money enough,” says Colonel Silas Lapham in the greatest romance bar one in the English language, “and he’ll build you a fine house every time.” Hugh Massinger gave his architect money enough, or at least credit enough which comes at first to the same thing and he got a fine house, as far as the means at his disposal went, on that ugly corner of flat sandy waste at forsaken Whitestrand.
When the building was done and the papering finished, they set about the furnishing proper. And here, Winifred’s taste began to clash with Hugh’s; for every woman, though she may eschew ground-plans, elevations, and estimates, has at least distinct ideas of her own on the important question of internal decoration. The new Squire was all for oriental hangings. Turkey carpets, Indian durrees, and Persian thing. But Mrs. Massinger would have none of these heathenish gewgaws, she solemnly declared; her tastes by no means took a Saracenic turn. Mr. Hatherley and the Cheyne Row men would make fun of her, and call her house Liberty Hall, if she furnished it throughout with such Mussulman absurdities. For her own part, she renounced Liberty and all his works: she eschewed everything east of longitude thirty degrees: inlaid coffee-tables were an abomination in her eyes; pierced Arabic lamps roused no latent enthusiasm: the only real thing in decoration was Morris; and on Morris she pinned her faith unreservedly. She would be utterly utter. She had a Morris carpet and Morris curtains; white ivory paint adorned her lop-sided overmantels, and red De Morgan ware with opalescent hues ranged in long straight rows upon her pigeon-hole cabinets. To Hugh’s poetical mind this was all too plaguy modern; out of keeping, he thought, with the wide oaken staircase and the punctilious Elizabethanism of the eminent architect’s facade and ceilings. Winifred, however, laughed his marital remonstrances to utter scorn. She hated an upholsterer’s house, she said, all furnished alike from end to end with servile adherence to historical correctness. Such Puritanical purism was meant for slaves. Why pretend to be living in Elizabethan England or Louis Quinze France, when we’re really vegetating, as we all know, in the marshy wilds of nineteenth-century Suffolk? Let your house reflect your own eclecticism a very good phrase, picked up from a modern handbook of domestic decoration. She liked a little individuality and lawlessness of purpose. “Your views, you know, Hugh,” she cried with the ex cathedra conviction of a woman laying down the law in her own household, “are just the least little bit in the world pedantic. You and your architect want a stiff museum of Elizabethan art. It may be silly of me, but I prefer myself a house to live in.”
“The drawing-room does look so perfectly lovely,’ you remember,” Hugh quoted quietly from her own old letters.: “We’ve done it up exactly as you recommended, with the sage-green plush for the old mantel-piece, and a red Japanese table in the dark corner; and I really think, now I see the effect, your taste’s simply exquisite. But then, you know, what else can you expect from a distinguished poet! You always do everything beautifully!’ Can you recollect, Mrs. Massinger, down the dim abyss of twelve or eighteen months, who wrote those touching words, and to whom she addressed them?”
“Ah, that was all very fine then,” Winifred answered with a pout, arranging Hugh’s Satsuma jars with Japanesque irregularity on the dining-room overmantel. “But you see that was before I’d been about much in London, and noticed how other people smarten up their rooms, and formed my own taste in the matter o
f decoration. I was then in the frankly unsophisticated state. I’d studied no models. I’d never seen anything beautiful to judge by.”
“You were then Miss Meysey,” her husband answered, with a distant cold inflexion of voice. “You’re now Mrs. Hugh de Carteret Massinger. It’s that that makes all the difference, you know. The reason there are so many discordant marriages, says Dean Swift, with more truth than politeness, is because young women are so much more occupied in weaving nets than in making cages.”
“I never wove nets for you,” Winifred cried angrily.
“Xor made cages either, it seems,” Hugh answered with provoking calmness, as he sauntered off by himself, cigar in hand, into the new smoking-room.
Their intercourse nowadays generally ended in such little amenities. They were beginning to conjugate with alarming frequency that verb to nag, which often succeeds in becoming at last the dominant part of speech in conjugal conversation.
One portion of the house at least, Hugh succeeded in remodeling entirely to his own taste, and that was the bedroom which had once been Elsie’s. By throwing out a large round bay window, mullioned and decorated out of all recognition, and by papering, painting, and refurnishing throughout with ostentatious novelty of design and detail, he so completely altered the appearance of that hateful room that he could hardly know it again himself for the same original square chamber. Moreover, that he might never personally have to enter it, he turned it into the Married Guest’s ‘Bedroom. There was the Prophet’s Chamber on the Wall for the bachelor visitors a pretty little attic under the low eaves, furnished, like the Shunammite’s, with “a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick”; and there was the Maiden’s Bower on the first floor, for th$ young girls, with its dainty palegreen wardrobe and Morris cabinet; and there was the Blue Room for the prospective heir, whenever that hypothetical young gentleman from parts unknown proceeded to realize himself in actual humanity; so Hugh ventured to erect the remodelled chamber next door to his own into a Married Guest’s Room, where he himself need never go to vex his soul with unholy reminiscences. When he could look up at the Hall with a bold face from the grass plot in front, and see no longer that detested square window, with the wistaria festooning itself so luxuriantly round the corners, he felt he might really perhaps after all live at Whitestrand. For the wistaria, too, that grand old climber, with its thick stem, was ruthlessly sacrificed; and in its place on the left of the porch, Hugh planted a fastgrowing, new-fangled ampelopsis, warranted quickly to arape and mantel the raw stone surfaces, and still further metamorphose the front of the Hall from what it had once been when dead Elsie lived there. All was changed, without and within. The Hall was now fit for a gentleman to dwell in.
