§ 1
LEAVING his ward in the care of his brother’s family, Charles returned
to Gloucestershire. He had two good months before him in which to
reflect upon the future, for Lady Grieve had told him privately that,
after Viola had been a while with the James Pletherns in London and
at their country place, she would be pressed to go with Corinne to
Lavenham for as long as she was free to stay.
The respite was grateful to a newly created guardian. Anxious
responsibility for Viola could temporarily give place to thought and
Charles Plethern wanted imperatively to think. That he had, fleetingly,
already realized the possibilities in dynastic scheming of an official
daughter, predisposed him the more to careful consideration of his
immediate duty. Oddly enough, his mother supplied an impulse to this
very exercise in contemplation.
“A dear, sweet girl, Charles,” she ventured, on the evening of his
return from London.
He smiled slightly and nodded.
“You will have to watch her,” the old lady muttered. Then, to his look
of cautious questioning, explained: “I mean--there will be men----”
“Oh, _men_!” said Charles airily. “You underrate me, mother!
Whatever my failings, I do know a pretty girl when I see one. That
Miss Viola will have her ‘followers’ is obvious even to my brutish
intelligence.”
She paid his humour the tribute of a wry, tired smile.
“I hardly meant that, my son. It is not only her beauty. You have no
children, you see----”
And she paused apprehensively. This was a subject upon which Charles
might resent even hinted curiosity. She did not imagine him to have
pondered the problems of succession; they were food too dry, with
implications too funereal, for a brain so volatile and so fastidious;
but she expected him to shy instinctively from any suggestion of
unasked-for counsel. To her surprise he showed delight rather than
displeasure, turning to her a face puckered with startled laughter.
“What a clever old lady it is! They’ll chase Viola for my money? A fine
idea, mother. So they shall! You’re a brick; you’ve taught me a new
game!”
The following morning he walked the spaces of the park, taking the
measure of his unfamiliar duty. Slowly it revealed itself, and each
moment more alluringly. From two distinct aspects it offered flattering
approach to his ambitions. Not only did it provide scope for ingenious
territorial match-making; it pandered also to his fancy for independent
action in the matter of inheritance.
Mrs. Plethern was mistaken in thinking her son disinclined to entertain
problems of succession. In the past Charles had on several occasions
given them serious consideration. Freedom to bestow his lands and money
where he wished was a vital element in the liberty of personal action
for which he had bartered, among other things, his right to paternity.
He would have resented an entail as deeply as he would have hated the
fetters of domesticity. But, being possessed of the coveted freedom,
he was not above exploiting its diversions. It pleased him to keep his
relatives in the embarrassment of uncertainty, blandly to receive their
diplomatic courtesies, gleefully to read behind their disinterested
politeness the probing curiosity of their minds. It pleased him to set
up in imagination various possibilities in succession, to set them up
one by one and then to knock them down again. It pleased him to picture
his own stately death-bed, surrounded by submissive sycophants, to whom
he would announce that the revenues and estates of Morvane had doubled
themselves during his reign, only, in the next breath, to bestow them
all, with the exception of a few paltry thousands, upon some one
unthought of, some one unrepresented at the solemn conclave, some one
whose very name would thereafter be gall between the lips of those who
had so patiently and yet patently counted a stranger’s chickens.
Hitherto, however, the relish of these malicious imaginings had lacked
its final savour. That ‘some one,’ that unexpected, eleventh-hour
successor, had remained persistently a myth. At times the obstinate
non-existence of this unknown figure drove Charles Plethern’s mind to
an extreme of propriety, to consideration of the most obvious candidate
for Morvane, to his brother’s son. Chris did not displease his uncle.
He was no milksop and no crank, and, if Charles had a slight contempt
for the healthy, unthinking young barbarian that was the conventional
rising aristocrat of the day, he knew that his nephew was not the
most unimaginative or clumsy-minded of his generation. But a strange
reluctance to acknowledge Chris checked him even at the moments when
the boy stood highest in his favor. Of the source of that reluctance
Charles was only dimly conscious, but in truth it came from a variety
of obscure impulses, from the impulse to annoy his mother, from
the impulse to jar his brother from suavity to protest, from that
other already recorded impulse to trick the crowd of his expectant
relatives by a sudden elfishness at the end of a long life of apparent
carelessness. And so Chris’ chances would recede again and Charles come
back to his original speculation, to the old quest for an outsider, to
the search for an heir that should be of his choosing and of his alone.
An heir. It had always been an heir. Charles knew too many lovely
ladies who had angled with skill or with clumsiness for the reversion
of his wealth. Instinctively he had excluded women from a problem so
serious as the Morvane inheritance. But things were different now. Why
not an heiress? The change of view was Mrs. Plethern’s contribution
to her son’s strategic plotting, an involuntary one, but not the less
destructive of her own cherished plans. Exultantly Charles matched the
idea of Viola as legatee with that of Viola as marriageable loveliness.
The dual conception was immense. Viola Marvell might, by a simple
legal process, become Viola Plethern. Next, her husband, whoever by a
guardian’s wisdom he might turn out to be, would surely be tempted,
if not to exchange his name for hers, at least to assume, in addition
to his own, one that brought with it great possessions. With Charles
Plethern, Morvane and the literal appellation of its owning family,
counted more than the purism of genealogy. A motive stronger than that
of racial continuity gripped and held him. Of the many roads that might
lead to wealth and prominence for Viola, only such merited notice as
ministered to the supremacy of Plethern of Morvane. Almost grimly he
began to wonder how best his ward might serve--not her guardian’s
blood, but her guardian’s surname and her guardian’s home.
It was of course that his scheming should at the outset measure its new
strength against the challenge of Rockarvon. But there seemed no coming
to grips with this hated enemy. The earl himself was childless--nature
protects herself against the increase of enormities--but he had two
brothers, of whom one (now dead) had left three sons, the eldest strong
and thirty-five and not long married. Charles had informed himself of
the immediate prospects of the Rockarvon inheritance, long before Viola
and Viola’s potentialities had been heard or thought of. He was well
placed to obtain reliable advice, for Belinda Grieve was a near cousin
of the Claverings and, although a stranger to that family’s unnatural
head, was on terms of cordiality with the heir, and with many others of
the clan. Consequently (and with due appreciation of her exceptional
privilege) she was in Charles Plethern’s confidence so far as was
concerned his rivalry and hostility to Rockarvon. Once, jokingly,
she had suggested a campaign of poisoning, that should remove Archie
Clavering (he was not then married), his two brothers, and his uncle,
the earl’s youngest brother. “I believe Dan is next on the list,” she
said, “--after me, of course. The title respects women in the case of
Rockarvon. The Claverings were always courtiers. But you Pletherns are
such cave men! And you would bully us into anything, wouldn’t you?” “I
only once remember asking an important favour of you, Belinda,” he had
retorted plaintively, “and that you preferred to bestow elsewhere. As
for bullying----!” She laughed and smacked his face. It amused Charles
to invent romantic incidents in their youthful friendship and the fancy
harmed no one, so that, whenever he played the unsuccessful lover of
long ago, she would laugh and smack his face, which in turn amused her
and did not seriously hurt him.
Rockarvon, then, was impregnable; proof alike against frontal attack
and the outflanking subtlety of matrimonial overture. Perforce Charles
set himself to find a second best, a fortress conquerable and, if less
nobly rewarding than Rockarvon, at least worth conquering.
Rapidly he passed in review the neighbouring gentry, counting their
qualifications for his favour, estimating the value of their lands
to Morvane, the susceptibilities of their inheritance to the lure of
Viola. One by one they failed before his scrutiny, till at last there
remained one likely candidate. Charles fixed his attention closely on
the household of his choice, and for the first time regretted that he
had in the past allowed himself to grow out of touch with the details
of his neighbours’ families, to become ignorant of their ways of
thought and ways of life.
Of the Grays he knew little enough; of Clonsall, their home, he knew
only the cartography. His map had taught him that the Clonsall lands
stretched vaguely over the bleak tableland that ran from Morvane
southward toward the Wiltshire hills. The estate was large, but
in places barren and everywhere starved for want of the care and
invigoration only money could provide. Charles had a general impression
that Squire Gray, after a youth of extravagant folly, had resigned
control into the hands of his eldest son and that Walter--dour, silent,
unapproachable as at their occasional encounters he had seemed to
be--was struggling with mortgages and neglected buildings to restore in
some degree the damage inflicted by his father’s fecklessness. From a
personal standpoint, there was perhaps difficulty in imagining Walter
Gray as a complacent conspirator in the Plethern marriage plot; but
Charles had faith in the power of wealth to vanquish even bearishness,
particularly as the man’s gruff incivility was in likelihood itself due
to a jealous sense of the greater prosperity of Morvane.
The objective chosen, the next necessity was to decide a method of
approach. The problem was the easier for the non-existence, as he
conceived it, of any point of view but his own. Viola’s concurrence
in his arrangements he took for granted. Girls, whether daughters or
wards, did what their fathers and guardians told them until such time
as they were entrusted to protection of another sort. The Victorian
strain in him, combined with the pride of his Englishry, blinded him
to the simple fact that Canada was no more England than were the
nineteen hundreds the eighteen seventies. Serene in the shelter of
a false security he planned an autumn of social activity. Morvane
should come to life as the great house of the district. All the best
people should come and go, but the Grays should come earlier and
oftener and stay longer and later than the rest. If matters arranged
themselves rapidly, well and good; if they dragged, he would devise
means of hastening them; if, as was possible, he changed his mind,
Clonsall would quickly understand that Morvane favour was withdrawn.
Charles had no apprehensions. The affair was simple enough. There
remained, between now and Viola’s return, two tasks to be performed.
Morvane must be redecorated, the closed saloons reopened, the stables
enlarged and thoroughly repaired. That was the first task. He, Charles
Plethern, must make a gesture of friendship to Walter Gray. That was
the second. Orders were immediately dispatched to a competent firm of
builder-decorators. Then the master of Morvane, a terrier at his heels,
set out to walk across the fields to southward.
§ 2
Clonsall was a low, irregular house that squatted on a little hill
behind an untidy barrier of trees. It seemed, like an undercooked
pudding, to have settled down upon itself. At every corner of
its unwieldy carcass bulged added rooms, spreading bow-windows,
conservatories, porches, lean-to sheds. Had it been possible to strip
away the excrescences of a century and a half, there would have stood
revealed, as kernel of the whole, a mid-eighteenth century box-like
residence that might well, in its pride, have crowned the hill and
overtopped the trees with the flat, square arrogance of its kind. But
it had suffered every indignity that can befall a house. Its attic
floor and the plain cornice that once concealed its unobtrusive tiles
had been swept away and a generous slope of grey slate roofing had
gratified a change of taste. Next the brick walls were plastered and
cream-painted. Next, and on one front only, pilasters and a pediment
had tricked an altar to false classicism. Followed a period in which
the Grays had sought convenience where most easily it could be found.
Back premises had sprouted and the sprouts had themselves put forth
smaller shoots. Windows had been blocked and others cut where fancy
moved the family and local builders to cut them. Then, and more drastic
still, came the passion for glass. Large bow-windows, plate-glass
sash windows, verandahs, conservatories, were thrust out and squeezed
in wherever was blank wall or garden space to make them possible.
The same ’fifties gutted the interior. A spacious drawing-room,
airy morning-rooms, high, smiling bedrooms must take the place of
eighteenth-century band-boxes, and the poor little rooms were buffeted
and knocked and thrown one into another while bulge after extra bulge
in the outer walls told of the agony and urgent growth within. When all
was over and the fury of spaciousness had spent itself, the interior
of Clonsall was mid-Victorian in epitome, but the exterior was like
nothing else on earth.
At this juncture, crisis vanquished taste. The grandfather of Walter
Gray died and his son, the Squire Gray of this story, came within a
few weeks into his majority and his inheritance. In five years he had
so abused the former as to dissipate twice the value of the latter.
Discouraged as suddenly as, with accession, he had been intoxicated,
he fled from London and cosmopolitan gaiety to bury himself in
Gloucestershire. The roads of fashion, over whose pavements of wasted
gold, he had for five reckless years danced merrily, knew him no more.
In a sulk with providence and with himself, he married a boyhood’s love
and peevishly begat a numerous family. From embellishment Clonsall had
more than peace. There was next to no money with which to stock the
farms, little enough to sow the fields and keep the cottages in the
barest soundness of repair. On architects and interior decorators Gray
turned his back, and took refuge from his own shamefacedness, first in
desultory study, then, at the bidding of necessity, in attempts to
manage finances that were beyond his powers to organize. Educated to
the costly uselessness of a rich man’s son, he lacked both talent and
stamina to withstand the inevitable consequences of his own folly.
Blame for the poverty that had for over thirty years weighted Clonsall
to the ground, he gradually sloughed off on to his dead father’s
shoulders. Almost did he convince himself that he had inherited an
empty treasure; almost those five delirious years faded from his
memory. The money bags, so he told others and so bit by bit he grew to
believe himself, thanks to the insensate spending of his father’s last
years, were, when he took control, sagging dangerously to the end. In
truth, of course, he had seen himself crumble from ambitious wealth to
querulous embarrassment, hated the sight and wished to blot it out for
ever.
Thus Clonsall drifted. Mrs. Gray died; the children grew up and began
to scatter. The Squire, with those that remained, lived in his queer,
bland house, giving occasional and rueful thought to the money that had
gone to its adornment and wondering with indolent despair what could
be done to make things better in future. While he wondered, Clonsall
grew out of fashion, then old-fashioned, then absurd. But the Grays
laughed at it more readily than any stranger, for they were now so used
to their home that they loved it for its very queerness, as men love an
old pipe or women their husbands.
Strange it was that the last Gray with means to gratify his taste
in domestic elegance exempted from his ruthlessness the trees that
fringed his garden wall. Perhaps he followed a fixed technique in his
homage to the modish ’fifties and found, in the textbooks, no rules
for the gentlemanly improvement of vegetation. Perhaps, again, he felt
keenly the importance of timber among the essential adornments of the
fashionable estate and knew not how else to create a well-timbered park
than by leaving on their grassy slopes the trees that were already
there. In any event, they remained untouched and continued their varied
and untutored growths, while behind them the garden was patterned by
serpentine walks and flower-beds of every shape, while rustic gazebos
nestled in their shade, while around the house grew sombre shrubberies,
and over veranda, porch and wall crept intricate creepers with pale,
languid flowers.
The family of Squire Gray had something of the casual luxuriance of
their home. It was locally supposed that their number had never been
completely told, for they came and went with bewildering inconsequence
and no man could say how many Grays, all different, he had seen
at Clonsall in a year. The house had its permanent garrison, whom
everybody knew, but they were seldom alone. Either a married sister
with her children, or a sister-in-law with hers, or a younger brother,
or a cousin, or an elderly, unspecified lady with a small dog, was for
ever staying with Squire Gray, so that the neighbourhood abandoned
genealogy and fell back upon fact. In this they were at once helped
and hindered by Walter and his sister Madeline, who were the fixed
stars in this firmament of comets. Walter, from instinctive shyness
and taciturnity, Madeline, from unimaginative cheerfulness, made no
attempt to enlighten callers or acquaintances as to the personality of
their visitors. Introductions were exceptional or of the least helpful
kind. Christian names and nicknames were flung carelessly about and the
outsider might let them lie, or, rashly picking one up, presume himself
to test its soundness. In the former case, he was largely debarred from
conversation by inability to address his remarks to any particular
person; in the latter, he took his life in his hand and risked the
laughter of the company. Eventually he was comforted, for which so ever
course he followed he did right in the eyes of Clonsall, where men made
manners and where simple jest and an avoidance of morbidity were the
only code.
There can be little doubt that the somewhat wooden-witted freedom of
Clonsall was in part due to poverty. But it was as much, if not more,
an outcome of family character. Squire Gray, now over sixty, was an
easy, rather wistful figure, who had long abandoned even a claim to
dominate his home or children. At one time, as has been said, he had
pottered over farming and estate-management as formerly he had pottered
over his books. Unable to afford an agent, he handled accounts and
money policy with a weary indifference that was no less disastrous for
being pathetic. Things grew slowly worse, until Walter came of age,
and, taking matters from his father’s fumbling control, rendered the
Squire finally and suitably an onlooker at life in his own house.
The young man lost no time in asserting his will to rule. On the very
evening of his majority, “I should like to relieve you of some of
the work of supervision, sir,” he told his father, and the Squire’s
indolent, untidy mind reeled with the questions, the schemes, the
technicalities jerked out by the son he had regarded as a retiring
fool. With a gesture of affectionate amusement old Gray let the boy
have his head. He believed Walter ignorant of the joyful readiness with
which he surrendered responsibilities. He made a show of wise seniority.
“Of course experience tells, and I shall stand behind you,” he said.
“Come to me if you are in any difficulty.”
But Walter never came and, if he derived encouragement from paternal
backing, he never showed it. The truth was he knew his father better
than the Squire imagined, better maybe than in filial duty he should
have done. He had set his heart on a resurrection of Clonsall. The
road would be long and weary, and distractions were not for one that
followed it. With the silent determination of a mind that distrusted
itself but distrusted others more, Walter faced a future of monotonous
duty, of economy, of loneliness, and for fourteen years he had not
wavered nor once looked aside toward the lights and gaieties and ease
that called as loudly to his youth as to that of another.
As time went by, his task grew easier. To begin with, under his
careful, conscientious management, the fortune of the family began a
slow return to health. Returns increased; first one mortgage was paid
off and then another; the reputation of Gray landlordism rose and
tenants of a better class came slowly to the scattered farms. But in
addition to the satisfaction of seeing his work bear fruit, Walter
found solace and strength in the support of his sister Madeline. She
was ten years his junior; had been a child when first he buckled on
the burden of his father’s failure. As, however, she grew to womanhood
and as, one by one, her elder sisters married and went away, she took
her place naturally by Walter’s side, working for betterment within
the house, as he worked for it without. In externals of manner and
appearance Madeline was a contrast to her brother. She had her father’s
oval face and ready smile; she was voluble and inconsequent and gay.
Walter, with his long, straight nose, his square jaw and the large,
ugly mouth that even thick moustaches could not hide, seemed of a
different race. He talked little; he laughed less. And yet he and his
sister had in common an expression of the eyes, an expression, at once
insensitive and brisk, that marked them as of one stock, that--more
importantly--set them in mutual sympathy.
It is to be doubted whether, had Walter not possessed at home an
intimate as congenial as was his sister Madeline, he could have endured
the weariness of his life and duty. He felt himself isolated from his
kind, their inferior in mental equipment as well as in money, a being
marked by fate for loneliness and drudgery. His shyness grew gruff and
sullen. Hardly could he return the greetings of his neighbours, when
at market, at local show or on the country roads their ways crossed
his. He earned a reputation for boorishness and there were some who
accused him frankly of jealous hatred toward persons more prosperous
than himself. The charge was a foolish one. Walter Gray was not a
vindictive, not even an ambitious man. He coveted nothing, save modest
well-being for his home and family, to win which and out of pity
for his father, he had deliberately chosen a type of existence that
unfitted him for social intercourse.
Not surprisingly, such single-minded self-discipline hardened his
nature. Strong in his own moral purpose, he inclined to view without
charity those who were clearly out of sympathy with his own ideals.
He was not prig enough to blame another man for doing what he would
not himself have done, but he felt no call to intimacy with persons
whose interests and amusements he could not share. Such emphatically
was Charles Plethern. The two men were in many ways as chalk to
cheese. Charles was quick and cynical, but secretly an idealist; his
cosmopolitan way of life had intensified his natural will to hide
under an irreverent habit the delicacy of his inward gravities; he was
regarded as a loose liver, and certainly the irregularities, reputed
or proven, of his fellows, he greeted with an amused and disquieting
smile. Gray, on the other hand, was stolid and slow-minded, with the
cautious thinker’s nervous dislike of rapid sarcasm; he seldom made
mock of others and never of himself, having been taught to find human
frailty a matter for regret rather than for laughter; finally, he was
aware of his own provincialism, shrank from the company of men whose
experience was wider and more coloured than his own, and came almost
to glory in the asceticism of a seclusion that he had deliberately
adopted. Hence, if his meetings with Charles Plethern were less
frequent than with others of the neighbouring gentry, his inclination
to dislike the man was correspondingly the stronger, for to diffidence
and to ungracious taciturnity was in this case added the bias of a
moral disapproval.
§ 3
To diplomatic encounter with this intended, if unpromising, protégé,
Charles walked the more blithely in that he thought not at all of
Gray’s actual opinion toward himself, but only of the success or
failure of his plan. So hurriedly had he proceeded to set matters in
train, so engrossed was he with their ultimate development, that he
reached the northern boundary of Clonsall without any very clear design
for opening negotiations. The difficulty, thus scrutinized at close
quarters, appeared serious enough. He climbed a gate and sat, his back
to the lane along which he had come, gazing with thoughtful eyes across
a field of untidy grass. Involuntarily he related this field to land of
his own over which he had just passed. They ranged well together. His
easy optimism leapt forward to a rosy future. In a few moments he was
absorbed, not in consideration of the problem of the moment, but in his
old game of rearranging frontiers.
The sound of hoofs roused him from reverie. Along the lane, on a
dappled mare, Walter Gray came riding. The terrier sprang from slumber,
and leapt barking at the intruder’s heels. Gray, when he saw Charles
Plethern, raised his hand in formal salutation. He would have passed
on, but the other, slipping from the gate, stepped to meet him.
“Good afternoon, Gray,” said Charles. “I’ve been spying you out. I
suppose you are as dried up as we are?”
Walter pulled up, a shade reluctantly.
“It is dry,” he assented.
There was a pause while Charles racked his brain for convenient
small-talk.
“I wanted to see you some time,” he began hurriedly. “Meant to write,
but as we’ve met---- About those Herefords of mine that strayed----
Wilkinson said something----” All memory of what Wilkinson had said,
all knowledge of the very issue he himself had raised, fled phantomlike
from Charles’ brain. Desperately he improvised. “The details are
immaterial now. My bailiff was wrong. That’s the long and short of it.
You shall receive every amend through the proper channels. I’m sorry my
folk as well as my cattle have been making fools of themselves.”
Gray nodded.
“Very well,” he said. “They were inclined to be obstinate about it,
certainly.”
Again silence. Charles wondered if the obstinacy were human or bovine.
He longed to ask. This time, however, the initiative was Walter’s.
“You are a long way from home.”
“I have walked farther than I meant,” lied Charles, “and was wondering
how best to get back.”
Walter looked over the fields to northward. In reality he was
considering how best to direct his neighbour, but Charles read
the glance as one of ungracious boredom and his lips tightened in
irritation.
“Had you been five minutes later, you would have seen me trespassing,”
he said. “I was going to try a cut over yonder.”
Gray smiled under his moustache.
“It is fortunate I came in time to stop you. Your trouble would have
been wasted. As for trespassing--go anywhere and welcome.”
Once more a moment of mute awkwardness. Then:
“I wonder,” said Charles suddenly, “whether you and Miss Gray, and
any others who care to, would come over now and again to Morvane in
September? My ward will be home then. I want to introduce her to her
neighbours.”
“We heard you had a new inmate,” replied Walter slowly. “It is kind of
you. I will ask my sister.”
Constraint threatened a further and a fatal descent. Suddenly Gray
pointed across the hedgerow at his left:
“You see that shed? Cross diagonally from that to the new five-barred
gate, take the track past the pond in the corner of the quarry field,
and you will come out into the lane to Meston’s farm. From there you
will easily see your best way. It is all over your own land. Odd to
direct so near a neighbour. But then you are almost a stranger in these
parts, aren’t you?”
He jerked his mare into motion, muttered a word of farewell, and
trotted quickly down the narrow road. Charles looked after him with a
sour, reflective smile.
“Damned clumsily done on my part!” he thought. “But he’s a queer
fellow. Not easy to handle. I wonder what she’d make of him.”
Whistling his dog, he started on the homeward walk.
§ 4
Walter, as he trotted away from the scene of this curious encounter,
was equally dissatisfied both with his own behaviour and with that
of the man he had left. That he should have greeted an invitation to
Morvane with a gruff formality of thanks argued no failure on his part
to appreciate its significance.
Occasionally he had shot over Plethern fields; occasionally he had
drawn Plethern coverts; but never to his knowledge had his people
visited at Morvane, never to his knowledge had there previously been
social recognition by Morvane of his people.
Gray was of course conscious, in a general sense, of conditions in his
neighbour’s home. He knew that Charles had in the past been seldom
there, that consequently the Plethern part in county life had been
spasmodic and perfunctory. He realized that the coming of a young girl
to Morvane would inevitably mean changes. But with every allowance
for the contrast between past circumstances and those of the future,
Gray felt that his neighbour’s gesture of hospitality--a gesture
singularly informal between comparative strangers--possessed more than
its face-value. What did it mean? His head drooped in arduous painful
thought as, through the piled shadow of shrubberies, he walked his mare
into the stable yard.
He waited while the mare was unsaddled and rubbed down, looking about
him from habit at the dispositions of his solitary stable-hand, but
all the while turning and returning in his mind the problem of Charles
Plethern’s motive. Then he walked slowly gardenwards. On the lawn he
found tea and scattered figures. Madeline called across sunny spaces:
“Hurry up, slowcoach! We thought you were never coming!”
“I was delayed,” he replied, and looked about him.
“How do you do, Mrs. Fenwick? The doctor well? Hallo, young man!”--this
to a child of five who had flung sudden arms about his knees--“want
to fight already? After tea, I think, don’t you? What’s become of the
kite?”
“Oh, that kite!” said a tired voice from a garden chair. “The time
we’ve had with it! It’s in a tree now, and long may it stay there!”
“Poor Tish!” laughed Madeline. “You should have seen her, Walter,
chasing her young about in a vain attempt to control them. Nurse has
gone to Rushmorton. Mothers are so comic on their nurses’ days out!”
“You may laugh, Mad,” retorted the tired mother. “Wait till you’ve six
of your own and then you’ll know.”
“Oh, good gracious! Six! Tishy, darling, do be gentle with me---- No,
sweetheart, you’ve had a long brown one and mummy doesn’t allow two
with sugar on, does she? Run and see if Pratt has found many eggs. You
can ask cook to keep two for breakfast--for you and Paul.”
“Madeline practising maternal discipline,” remarked a youth, who wore
a naval jacket and white flannels, and now approached the table for
another cup of tea.
“Talking of discipline, Jock,” replied his sister, “what happens on
board ship if you break cabin crockery?”
He laughed.
“I’m fearfully sorry, Mad! The wretched thing knocked on the washstand
corner as I was lifting it down. Is it a very good one?”
“Priceless!” The soft mocking voice of the squire broke in on the
conversation: “Crown Derby, Jock. But you boys smash all the heirlooms.”
The lad glanced at his father in momentary hesitation. He was never
sure when the squire was serious. Chuckles from every side relieved, on
this occasion, his anxiety.
“I’ll buy you another, dad,” he said. “Does one wire to Derby or to the
King, or both?”
“More tea, Walter?” Madeline held out a hand for her brother’s cup. He
rose, gave it her, and stood silent by the table. She gave him a quick
look. “What’s happened, dear?” she said quietly.
He smiled at her with slow affection.
“Nothing very exciting,” he said, “but I was surprised. I’ll tell you
after tea.”
The voice of Mrs. Fenwick, in full gossip with Laetitia Morrell,
shrilled across a moment of silence:
“... opening the big drawing-room as well. I was in Sawley this
morning, and Crump told me he had orders for new curtains and covers. I
hear Masters spoke of more horses....”
Walter turned to listen. Masters was head of the Morvane stables.
“What’s this, Mrs. Fenwick?” asked Madeline.
“I was telling your sister,” replied the lady, delighted at the
opportunity of repetition, “that things are going to happen at
Morvane. It looks as though the house is to be open again and parties
and all sorts. The stables are to be put in order--you know they are
half empty and so neglected--and there is talk of fresh servants----”
“But why? Is Mr. Plethern to be married?”
Mrs. Fenwick looked slightly shocked, as though the very idea of
Charles Plethern in lawful wedlock provoked improper comparative
reflection.
“Oh dear no,” she said primly. “But now that Miss Marvell is to be
there----”
“Who’s Miss Marvell?” inquired Jock.
Mrs. Fenwick compressed her lips.
“She is a young lady who has come to live at Morvane.”
Madeline giggled. The doctor’s wife looked stern inquiry.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Fenwick. I wasn’t laughing at you. But it sounded
so--so chancy, somehow.”
Tishy came to her sister’s rescue. She called to the squire:
“Have you seen her, dad?”
“Seen whom? Oh--the Marvell girl? Yes--for a moment. She passed Mad and
me in the village one day.”
“She’s very pretty,” said Madeline.
Mrs. Fenwick tossed her head.
“Indeed! I am not surprised!”
Embarrassment threatened, but relief came unexpectedly. The sound of
angry childhood from afar brought Tishy and Madeline to listening
attention.
“Dear, oh dear!” sighed the former. “They’re up to some mischief.”
Then, as the yells grew louder, she rose from her chair. “That’s Paul!
I’m sure it’s his own fault, little wretch!”
“I’ll go and see, Tish,” said Walter. He hurried off, followed by Jock.
The thoughts of those who remained now turned naturally from Morvane
and Viola to the inexhaustible subject of child-rearing. For a few
minutes they exchanged views and anecdotes. Then Walter reappeared with
Paul in his arms. The child was sniffing a little, but the tempest of
tears had passed.
“Well?” inquired the mother. “Paul, what have you been doing?”
“Sally--pushed--me,” said the culprit unsteadily.
“One can’t blame her,” explained Walter. “He was trying to put her in
the yard cistern and she resisted, and I suppose he slipped and bumped
his head on the stones.”
“Oh, Paul!” Mrs. Morrell regarded her son with pained severity.
“Come here, sonny,” said Madeline. “Come and tell Aunty Mad why you
wanted Sally to go in the cistern. Was she grubby or were you playing
fish?”
The small boy crouched against his mother and mumbled:
“I wanted--to see--her--make bubbles----”
The company laughed.
“And where is poor Sally now?” asked Mrs. Morrell.
“Don’t know.”
“Do you know, Walter?”
“She indoors--being changed. Jock took her in.”
The mother started to her feet.
“Changed? Then she was actually in the water? Paul, you’ll be smacked
for this. I must go and see they put her on the right things.
Housemaids are such idiots!”
As she hastened to the house Madeline nudged Walter and nodded toward
the villain of the piece. He had not moved from his mother’s empty
chair, but stood twisting the canvas of its seat between grubby
fingers. His head was bowed in sullen apprehension. From a bedroom
window came wails.
“Sally being changed,” observed Madeline. “Having her tangles combed, I
expect. How I used to hate it!”
Perhaps his sister’s voice recalled Paul to the events of the stable
yard.
“Aunty Mad,” he demanded in clear tones, “how many bubbles would Sally
have blowed before she was deaded?”
“You horrid child!” cried his aunt. “Don’t you think it was very unkind
to put poor Sally in the water?”
“I wanted to see her bubble,” said Paul obstinately.
“Would _you_ like to be thrown in the cistern?”
Paul despaired of adult logic.
“_I_ wanted to see the bubbles,” he repeated.
Mrs. Morrell appeared at a first-floor window.
“Paul!” she shouted, “Paul! Come here!”
He looked over his shoulder toward the house but did not move.
“Mad!” called the mother. “Send him in.”
Madeleine rose quickly. The small boy made a dive for freedom, but too
late. In his aunt’s arms he was borne unwillingly to the expiation of a
love of bubbles.
* * * * *
Later in the evening, when Mrs. Fenwick had gone and the children were
safely put to bed, Walter told Madeleine of his encounter with Charles
Plethern.
“It’s all of a piece with what Mrs. Fenwick was saying,” was
Madeleine’s comment. “She’s such a busybody! I didn’t believe a word
of it, but maybe it’s true after all. Can’t you see her buzzing round
Sawley picking up bits of chat! Probably Mr. Plethern means to stay at
home all the winter.”
Walter shook his head doubtfully.
“Maybe. I should be surprised. But the odd thing is his going out of
the way to invite _us_.”
“I’m sure we’re very nice,” laughed Madeleine, “and really I have the
most beautiful manners in company. What fun it’ll be! I’ve never been
inside the gates, except once for the hospital fête, and then not into
the house.”
“You think we ought to go then?”
“Go? Of course we ought to go. You old stupid, it’s not _our_
fault we aren’t there every day! The Pletherns have always been too
high and mighty to notice us. If they have changed their minds, all the
better. There’s no reason for us to get sticky, is there? Besides--I
liked the look of that girl and----”
She stopped. Walter waited for her to speak, and his silence was more
effective than any prompting.
“----and--I hardly know how to put it--but supposing Mr. Plethern
_does_ go away in the winter, it will be dreadfully lonely for the
poor thing in that great house with the old lady----”
She shuddered, and Walter saw her shuddering. He was surprised. He
wondered what Madeleine knew of the old lady. She could never even have
seen her. He forgot that his sister was of a type to tempt confidence
from farmer and shopkeeper and casual rustic. He assumed, because he
had himself never heard gossip or stories about Mrs. Plethern, that no
such gossip existed. Madeleine followed the perplexities of his thought.
“Poor old Walter!” she said, squeezing his arm affectionately.