DESOLATE
SPLENDOUR
DESOLATE
SPLENDOUR
BY
MICHAEL SADLEIR
TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF
CANADA LIMITED, AT ST. MARTIN’S HOUSE
1923
COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1923
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED.
PRINTED IN CANADA
THIS
FLAMBOYANT
TALE--A STORY
OF AMBITIOUS HEDONISM
AND OF THE DESOLATE SPLENDOUR
OF A GIRL’S DEVOTION, A STORY OF
PERVERTED CRUELTY, OF LUST FOR PROPERTY
AND OF THE GENIAL OBTUSENESS OF THE UPRIGHT
IS FROM GRATITUDE FOR HIS FRIENDSHIP
FROM ADMIRATION OF HIS SENSIBILITY
AND FROM A DUE APPRECIATION
OF HIS AUSPICIOUS CIPHER
INSCRIBED WITH CORDIAL
REGARD TO
O. K.
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I PLETHERN OF MORVANE 1
II ROCKARVON 14
III VIOLA 31
IV DANIEL 57
V THE GRAYS OF CLONSALL 79
VI PLEASURES OF LONDON 101
VII PLEASURES OF LAVENHAM 111
VIII BEAUTY CAPRICIOUS 124
IX WINE OF YOUTH AND WATER OF VIRTUE 136
X THREE RETROSPECTS 146
XI MRS. PLETHERN DECIDES FOR WAR 170
XII THE PAINTED EARL 179
XIII THE TENDER MERCIES OF THE WICKED 197
XIV THIS MYSTERY OF LOVELINESS 211
XV A GIRL ALONE 236
XVI SACRIFICE 258
XVII NIGHT AT MORVANE 287
XVIII THE SANDS ARE NUMBERED 309
CHAPTER I: PLETHERN OF MORVANE
§ 1
THE avenue sloped upward from the meeting-place of the five rides to
where, grandiose on the line of the horizon, tall, wrought-iron gates
fenced off a space of sky. Through the uprights and foliations of the
grille was seen only sky, for the gates crowned the hill-crest and,
as it were, checked with a movement of their graceful fingers the
sumptuous procession of the trees. Beyond the veil of the ironwork
was nothing: nor earth, nor the bunched greenery of trees, but only
sky. Long ago, before the new road from Rushmorton to Sawley had been
engineered or even thought of, the eastward highway from the Severn
flats bordered the park wall, so that by that way and through the tall
gates lay the principal approach to Morvane. All that was past now. The
crumbling stones of the boundary wall edged a grass-grown lane, rutted
by an occasional cart, but for the rest abandoned to a tangle of wild
flowers and to the murmur of indifferent bees. On one side of this
ancient road lay Morvane, with its sweep of park-land, its majestic
trees, its queer, unhappy house; while on the other the ground fell
steeply as a tangled precipice to the deep, secret valley of Rockarvon.
* * * * *
The iron gates of Morvane were now gates by courtesy alone. Between
them was access to no carriageway; untidy gaps where once had been
stone lodges, divided them from the park-wall on either hand. Powerless
alike to admit or to exclude, they stood in the loveliness of their
futility, closing with all the pride of a vain gesture a grassy
corridor between two rows of beeches, a corridor that was, as ever it
had been, the avenue.
Along the deserted avenue the grass grew rank, and the sullen winds
crept between the beech trunks and silvered its dull green surface with
their breath. To either side of the iron gates the old walls dropped
their stones among nettles and hemlock, now sinking almost to the level
of the ground, now roughly limbered up at the erratic impulse of an
owner, penniless or preoccupied.
The avenue sloped foolishly across the park. Its very starting
point had become, through lapse of time and the mutability of man’s
handiwork, a vague absurdity. Morvane, of the sheer walls and the huge,
exotic tower, stood distant by quarter of a mile from where the five
rides met. In the old days a low mullioned wing had stretched from the
surviving mansion toward the west, and the carriage road, leaving the
avenue, had plunged through an archway and carried the visitor under
the windows of those ancient rooms to the main door of the house.
With the destruction in the ’twenties of this fragment of the Middle
Age, the old approach had received its death blow. Already the road,
upon which the carriage-drive debouched, had begun to fail before the
rivalry of its supplanter. Each winter its fabric was crumbling a
little more, each winter the grass encroached a little farther upon its
surface. When, therefore, a night of fire in ’23 left wall-stumps and
charred beams to mark the last site of the original Tudor house, the
Plethern of the day determined to throw a new drive across the park to
eastward, and give his home an approach at once more practical and more
magnificent. His design was thwarted by fate. He had time to destroy
the lodges that flanked the great grille; he had time to construct of
their stones part of the sunk fence necessary to embank his projected
road. But at this point unlucky speculation drove him abroad, and it
was left to his son to complete the task and finally to close the
ceremonial career of the Morvane beeches.
The gates themselves survived. Their value, in the financial crash of
the late ’twenties, was not worth the work of their removal. Later,
when wealth returned to Morvane, the ruling Plethern saw merit only in
modernity.
So it was that, while the nineteenth century died and the twentieth
struggled through its teething, the beeches still climbed the slope
in solemn files and the great grille, slung like a wisp of mammoth
lace across the sky-line, still closed with the serenity of lovely
uselessness the avenue that sloped upward across the park of Morvane to
the west.
§ 2
By the side of the iron-grey house rose the Morvane campanile. That its
nickname--‘The Devil’s Candle’--was more than antiquarian ingenuity is
doubtful. Cases are not unknown elsewhere of local legend manufactured
in London, eagerly adopted by intellectual residents, but for ever
stranger to the rustic mind. Nevertheless, falsehood or verity, the
story is pleasant enough, for it tells of a midnight compact between
Sir Christopher Plethern, Jacobite and fugitive from Preston Pans,
and his Satanic Majesty, according to which the latter was pledged to
destroy root and branch the House of Hanover and the former to build
on his own land in Gloucestershire a lofty tower, from the summit of
which a light should shine for ever to guide lost souls along the way
to hell. Queer corroborative evidence was provided by a ghost picture
(the term indicates a conglomerate of lines, half impressed, half
drawn) on the panelling of an ancient inn near Dunbar. Toward Dunbar,
so runs the tale, fled Christopher Plethern, the enemy at his heels.
With the connivance of the landlord he hid in the loft of the _Joined
Hands_ till the pursuit was past. That night he caroused and, in
his cups, praised Satan for his deliverance. From the panelled room
came the murmur of voices and the landlord’s wife bore witness to the
sulphurous smell that, for days afterward hung about the stairs and
corridors. Her husband swore Plethern was alone at dinner and that
when morning came he had vanished, leaving a purse of guineas on the
table. Picking up the purse the landlord was struck with a darkening
of the oak beneath; he bent closer, and the wood showed black and
charred. On the wall, phosphorescent and unearthly, shone the ghost
picture, a drawing of a great tower, windowed irregularly and topped
with a curious bulb-shaped dome. Further fragments of narrative, less
reliable than that of the landlord (who, for all his Jacobite opinions,
was a solid God-fearing man), but none the less thought worthy of
preservation by the investigators of the period, record that the
picture, which dimmed rapidly and became in a few weeks’ time the pale
jumble of line and space that it has thereafter remained, at first
changed from hour to hour. The tapster declared that at midnight,
three days after the horrid event which gave the picture birth, he had
occasion to visit the panelled parlour on some trivial duty. To his
amazement and terror the summit of the tower was blazing with light and
tiny objects in vile procession--he described them as tadpoles with
forked tails--were writhing toward its base. They crept one by one
into the low arched doorway that gave access to the fearful edifice
and, as each vanished from view, the light that radiated from the dome
gleamed with a fiercer brightness and faded again, while a short, sharp
sizzling appalled the ear.
It will be asked why, in view of these disquieting happenings, Sir
Christopher Plethern, when he returned to the home of his fathers,
encountered none of the hostility generally shown to allies of the
Devil. History is incomplete in explanation, but those were troublous
times and rumour passed slowly from Scotland to Gloucestershire. The
story of the ghost picture near Dunbar, founded though it be on the
contemporary evidence summarized above, did not reach the publicity of
print till the end of the century, a fact which to the sceptical mind
of the present day throws some doubt on its veracity. As to that, the
curious may draw their own conclusion; to the chronicler of Morvane
the essential is the residue of fact, and fact incontrovertible is the
building by this same Christopher, within two years of the fight at
Preston Pans, of the Morvane campanile. Those there are that profess
to detect close resemblance between the ghost picture (or what remains
of it) on the panelling near Dunbar and the tower in Gloucestershire.
Here again the curious may investigate and pass judgment. For their
convenience they are referred to the third volume of Clandell’s
_Antiquities of Gloucestershire_, in which rare but unreliable
book they will find a wood engraving of the campanile as it stood in
1842 and, presumably, as it persisted until the date at which the
present narrative begins. Clandell’s illustrator depicts a tall,
square tower, vaguely Italianate in design, with windows as seemingly
irregular as buds on a branch and, to crown all, a rounded dome,
without suggestion of the Moorish or hint of narrowing toward the base,
but more elongated and cone-shaped than is usual.
Evidence is scanty as to the use to which this tower was put during
the last decade of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the
nineteenth century. Morvane itself was unoccupied between 1828 and
1840, and it is known that in the latter year, from poverty rather
than from inclination, the grandfather of those Pletherns with whom
this narrative is concerned, crawled back to the home of his heritage
as, twenty years before, he had for the same reason left it. Probably
therefore the tower stood empty, one of the thousand extravagant relics
of the eighteenth century that an unimaginative posterity despised and
left to crumble. Matters changed, and startlingly, with the succession
in 1848 of the man who seemed destined to restore the fortunes of his
house and who, for his ability and arrogance, had earned the nickname
of ‘King’ Plethern. As hero of a tale of Victorian ambition ‘King’
Plethern would stand forth with credit and, as matters fell out, with
tragic force. He was a strange contrast to his father; the one slipping
to his grave in feckless penury, while an unloved and neglected house
cracked over his head; the other working secretly and untiringly in
London, Paris and the wilds of Caucasia, to amass the wealth that
should buy him the life and position that he craved. ‘King’ Plethern
was untroubled by scruple and his nature was without that whimsicality
that is deemed weakness in the humble, but wide sympathy in the
securely placed. He was a rich man when his father died, and if to be
forty and unmarried were unusual in men of his class, the oddity was
deliberate and part of his scheme of life. He knew well that women,
suited to times of struggle and preparation, often prove unfit to wear
the glories they have helped to win. To hamper himself for life with
a romantic shred of a dead past was not the act of a thinking man.
Reason had no difficult triumph over sentiment in the brain of ‘King’
Plethern. If he turned from women during his years of toil, he turned
easily enough, but with achievement of ambition came retribution and
from the quarter he suspected least.
In 1848, Morvane, with its stark greyness, its wilderness of garden
and untidy park, its tower and its avenue, came under the new master.
The wealth, so desperately amassed, so carefully unspent, now first
found outlet and expression. The gardens were cropped and dug and tamed
into hideous submission; the ill-fated carriage-drive, begun thirty
years before, was completed with shining gravel and much complexity
of unnecessary curve. On the house ‘King’ Plethern was about to lay
his ruthless hand, when that intervened which had so purposely been
left aside during his obscurity and exile. He married. His bride came
from East Anglia; a stately girl with masses of dull, fair hair, pale,
obstinate eyes, and a dowry that even her lover respected. Rowena
Walsingham was no romantic fool. She married a man twice her age,
tempting him with her white shapeliness, her money and her greater
expectations, not despite his murky exploits in little known and
distant markets but because of them. If she loved her husband at all,
it was for his past and for the established splendour that, thanks to
that past, he now possessed. To her was it given to detect the chink
in the armour of ‘King’ Plethern; unerringly to drive in her goad;
unfailingly, when it pleased her, to prick him to fury and so to
defeat. The man’s temper had stood him in good stead, while his war
was against other men; it was a sword of Harlequin, used against this
smooth, calm woman, who learnt to humiliate before she angered him and
so to rob his violence of its sole real force--conviction of right and
confidence in himself.
It happened that her earliest determination centred round her new
home. Something in the sombre exterior of Morvane called to her grim
nature and, in preventing the modernization of the house on the lines
adopted in the gardens, she showed to her husband the first taste of
her quality. Morvane must remain iron grey; the windows should not
be thrown out into bays, neither should a steep roof with circular
lights bring to Gloucestershire the beauties of the French château.
Two changes she not only permitted but demanded. A Palladian hall and
a range of fine saloons were to take the place of the existing long,
pilastered lobby and the grave reception rooms that neighboured it, and
the campanile should be entirely renovated--for her own occupation.
Somewhat to his surprise (he had not in those early days learnt his
lesson) ‘King’ Plethern found he had consented. There were fierce
scenes between the pair during their first years of married life. Maybe
house plans slipped through almost unnoticed among the clash of more
vital differences. These were as deliberate as were all the lady’s
actions in this matter of marriage. Almost at once she recognized in
her betrothed a man who affected to despise women and the pleasures
of love. Equally clear was it that he wanted her, mainly for her
money, but, secretly and a little nervously, for herself. With the
instinctive capacity for exploitation of sex that cold, almost sexless
women have been known to possess, she realized that Plethern could more
thoroughly be controlled through desires of which he was ashamed than
through those to the fulfilment of which his life had been devoted.
She came, therefore, to marriage with one inflexible reserve. She
denied herself to her husband. Uneasy before this obstacle, ignorant
of women and their ways, ‘King’ Plethern hesitated. In the past, when
denied opportunity of material advancement, he would crash his way
to his goal by sheer force of mind and temper. Had he but known it,
those methods would have served him now. But he did not know, and he
hesitated. Thus doubly armed, his wife went her inscrutable way. First
to one thing, then to a greater, then to a greater still he agreed,
storming, sulking, sometimes awkwardly imploring, because he hoped by
such concessions to win the one thing he had never wanted until it was
refused him. Three angry, embittered years, passed in ever-increasing,
never-satisfied desire, left him, in the autumn of 1854, a different
being from the self-sufficient, forceful master Morvane had known
during the opening days of his succession. His spirit was shrunk within
the brave carcase of his possessions, and those there were who, in
later years, compared him to his stark grey house standing so withered
and so tired among the decorative vulgarities of its too elaborate
pleasure grounds. They might have gone farther and seen in the Morvane
campanile a counterpart of Mrs. Plethern. Rowena had won. She towered
triumphant over her husband’s life. Conscious of victory, aware that
the concession came so late as rather to bulwark than to endanger her
dominion, she passed to the final insult. Choosing her night, and with
a calm, contemptuous complacency, she offered herself to the man whose
strength she had broken. It was a wet night and raw; the tower, in
which Mrs. Plethern now lived, stood away from the house; the man was
told he might come to her room for an hour or two. That he went; that
he groped his way through the wet darkness of the garden and climbed a
hundred stairs to enjoy what was his by right three years ago; that,
the pitiful ceremony over, he crept down and out and back again to his
own solitary bed--these are indications enough of the completeness of
his subjugation.
From the union thus grotesquely consummated were born, in 1855, twin
boys. Charles and James Plethern first saw the day in the topmost room
of the ‘Devil’s Candle.’ Over the head of their mother in her travail
rose the cone-shaped dome from which in picture, a century before, the
tapster of a Lowland inn had seen radiate light that was not of heaven
nor of earth.
Between her two sons, as they grew to maturity, the mother was not long
in choosing. Charles was lean and brown, with thin, dissipated lips and
the wide, brown eyes of generations of Morvane squires; James was pale
and light-eyed, with straight fair hair, and the long, cleanly-cut nose
of the Walsinghams. This alone would have decided the favourite; James
made matters doubly sure by proving himself his mother’s son in mind as
well as body.
It is arguable that ‘King’ Plethern, when finally admitted to connubial
intimacies long withheld from him, had reached a point of hysterical
repression at which the individual was merged in the race. It was as
though his power for paternity were not _his_ power but that of
Morvane. In the interests of heredity, nature seemed to have set
aside the shattered personality of the wretched man and used him
merely to sire a son for his house rather than for himself. If so,
the begetting of Charles was his father’s last act of self-assertion,
and even in this the power of his wife all but conquered him. Charles
was a Plethern, but James, younger by four hours, was as utterly a
Walsingham. It is to be hoped that in his last sour years of life, the
old man thanked Providence that _his_ son, and not the woman’s,
won the race for birth. Certainly the mother never forgave the trick
played by her own pregnancy. Once she understood what nature of boy
was Charles and what James, she turned her grim, silent brain to the
problem of winning for the one the upper room that nature had allotted
to the other.
It should be here recorded that round this very point centred a quarrel
between herself and her husband, a quarrel of a kind more futile and
at the same time more ghoulish than any that had preceded it. The
boys were seventeen. Charles had in some manner more striking than
usual revealed himself a Plethern, had brought too vividly to life in
some boyish escapade the generations of careless gallants--cavaliers,
exiles, Jacobites--that had gone to the making of his youthful egoism.
James--Puritan, Whig, Hanoverian--had stood aside and not refused his
mother the particulars she demanded. There was a scene between the
parents. Finally Mrs. Plethern made a statement so fantastic that
anyone but her husband would have feared for her sanity. She had
stumbled badly, she said, three months before her lying-in. The jar
would have killed a weak woman, or at least her offspring. She had
lived and her children had lived, but the wrong child had first come to
birth. The old man was staggered for a moment at this solemn lunacy;
then he fell before the threat of his wife’s baneful eye and broke
weakly from silent astonishment into his usual wailing temper. He raved
at her folly; she was talking against nature and science; the idea was
a senseless infatuation worthy only of the pauper’s hospital. Her mind,
rigid in the groove of its sombre obsession, made no response to his
fury. In sullen silence she let him storm and shout, then:
“I have made up my mind,” she said calmly, “and I will use those stairs
no more. You will have a lift put into the tower.”
Ludicrous enough to read of, no doubt, but to the weary husband, whose
raving had sunk like a rotten boat to the depths of lassitude, any
chance to peace might mean peace. He dropped his head on his hands and
waited for her to go.
“Well?” she asked.
He nodded heavily, but did not raise his head nor look at her. Quietly
and without another word she left him. In due course there was a lift
in the Morvane campanile and, later on, came a large bill for its
installation, which the old man paid, dully, automatically, as though
he knew not what it meant nor greatly cared.
The incident of the lift was doubly significant. It revealed the depths
of absurdity to which could sink a narrow and bigoted intelligence,
brooding over an imagined wrong; it was also not untypical of the
woman’s extravagance in indulging her own queer whims. As time went
on she became more and more of a recluse, seldom leaving her tower
except for occasional journeys to London, Paris, or the Riviera, seeing
fewer people yearly, withdrawing ever more deeply into the sinister
fancies of her brain. She developed a hobby, a hobby as infrequent and
unlikely as would be looked for from her temperament. She collected
playing cards, buying from all over the world and often at great
prices, ancient and curious cards, with the less precious and the more
reputable of which she would, in irregular rotation, play game after
game of mysterious and complicated Patience.
‘King’ Plethern died in the middle ’seventies, a pathetic figure, cowed
but savage. His disappearance came as a relief to many, because he
had found outlet for his embittered temper in quarrels with persons
standing in the way of desired expansion of the Plethern properties. To
make wealth breed wealth was the sole ambition of the man’s last years.
Conscious that at home he was a cipher and contemptible, he sought balm
for vanity in tyrannizing over strangers weaker or poorer than himself.
Wherefore they, to whom his vanishing meant peace, came to regard the
day on which he died as one for thanksgiving; but from his own place,
from the Morvane that was his, he faded unnoticed, his wife being too
indifferent either to rejoice at her release or to mourn her widowing.
Until the will was read. Then indeed she had a spasm of silent fury.
Everything was for Charles. She was not even trustee on his behalf.
“For my son James,” the dead man had written, “my dear wife Rowena
will, I hope, provide from her private fortune.” Safe in death, the
wretched man had thus trivial revenge. “You love your younger son,” he
seemed to say. “He is yours. I leave him to you.”
Between the death of her husband and the coming of age of her eldest
son, Mrs. Plethern took stock of the future. The psychology of the heir
baffled her, and to the instinctive dislike of Puritan for Cavalier was
added in her brooding mind a dislike of something she despised but was
as yet unable to defeat. Charles eluded her. He was affectionate and
dutiful as occasion required, but his self-sufficiency, unaggressive
and conciliatory though it was, presented no evident point of weakness.
Rowena Plethern had sapped the more obvious strength of her husband
by gauging and exploiting the force of a need he hardly realized. Her
eldest son had no obvious strength, almost no obvious desires. His
casual gaiety might cloak some purpose or be a shroud of emptiness.
She puzzled how best to meet the clash of personality, for clash of
some kind there would surely be; but she was unable to prepare defence
or attack, knowing not whence assault would come, nor at what point
opportunity of conquest offer.
Let it not be thought that she permitted her sons at this early age
to suspect the feelings crystallizing in her heart toward their so
different personalities. Charles, as has been said, was affectionate
to his mother, and she treated him with the quiet equanimity that
served her for friendliness. To James she behaved with kindness no less
tranquil, repelling rather than encouraging the attempts he made to
arrive at a closer understanding. So coolly did she play her part, that
neither of her sons suspected, on the day that both were twenty-one,
how bitter were the ceremonies to a heart that yearned over the younger
and rebelled in dumb powerlessness at the new dignity chance had
brought to the elder.