THE experiences of the breakfast room were very agreeable indeed. Thorpe
found himself the only man present, and, after the first few minutes of
embarrassment at this discovery, it filled him with surprised delight
to note how perfectly he was at his ease. He could never have imagined
himself seated with four ladies at a table--three of them, moreover,
ladies of title--and doing it all so well.
For one thing, the ladies themselves had a morning manner, so to
speak, which differed widely from the impressions he had had of their
deportment the previous evening. They seemed now to be as simple and
fresh and natural as the unadorned frocks they wore. They listened with
an air of good-fellowship to him when he spoke; they smiled at the right
places; they acted as if they liked him, and were glad of his company.
The satisfied conviction that he was talking well, and behaving well,
accompanied him in his progress through the meal. His confession at the
outset of his great hunger, and of the sinister apprehensions which
had assailed him in his loitering walk about the place, proved a most
fortuitous beginning; after that, they were ready to regard everything
he said as amusing.
“Oh, when we're by ourselves,” the kindly little old hostess explained
to him, “my daughter and I breakfast always at nine. That was our hour
yesterday morning, for example. But when my son is here, then it's
farewell to regularity. We put breakfast back till ten, then, as a kind
of compromise between our own early habits and his lack of any sort of
habits. Why we do it I couldn't say--because he never comes down in any
event. He sleeps so well at Hadlow--and you know in town he sleeps
very ill indeed--and so we don't dream of complaining. We're only too
glad--for his sake.”
“And Balder,” commented the sister, “he's as bad the other way. He
gets up at some unearthly hour, and has his tea and a sandwich from the
still-room, and goes off with his rod or his gun or the dogs, and we
never see him till luncheon.”
“I've been on the point of asking so many times,” Miss Madden
interposed--“is Balder a family name, or is it after the Viking in
Matthew Arnold's poem?”
“It was his father's choice,” Lady Plowden made answer. “I think the
Viking explanation is the right one--it certainly isn't in either
family. I can't say that it attracted me much--at first, you know.”
“Oh, but it fits him so splendidly,” said Lady Cressage. “He looks the
part, as they say. I always thought it was the best of all the soldier
names--and you have only to look at him to see that he was predestined
for a soldier from his cradle.”
“I wish the Sandhurst people would have a good long look at him, then,”
put in the mother with earnestness underlying the jest of her tone. “The
poor boy will never pass those exams in the world. It IS ridiculous,
as his father always said. If there ever was a man who was made for a
soldier, it's Balder. He's a gentleman, and he's connected by tradition
with the Army, and he's mad about everything military--and surely he's
as clever as anybody else at everything except that wretched matter
of books, and even there it's only a defect of memory--and yet that
suffices to prevent his serving his Queen. And all over England there
are young gentlemen like that--the very pick of the hunting-fields,
strong and brave as lions, fit to lead men anywhere, the very men
England wants to have fighting her battles--and they can't get places
in the Army because--what was it Balder came to grief over last
time?--because they can't remember whether it's Ispahan or Teheran
that's the capital of Persia.
“They are the fine old sort that would go and capture both places at the
point of the bayonet--and find out their names afterward--but it seems
that's not what the Army wants nowadays. What is desired now is superior
clerks, and secretaries and professors of languages--and much good they
will do us when the time of trouble comes!”
“Then you think the purchase-system was better?” asked the American
lady. “It always seemed to me that that must have worked so curiously.”
“Prefer it?” said Lady Plowden. “A thousand times yes! My husband made
one of the best speeches in the debate on it--one do I say?--first and
last he must have made a dozen of them. If anything could have kept
the House of Lords firm, in the face of the wretched Radical outcry, it
would have been those speeches. He pointed out all the evils that
would follow the change. You might have called it prophetic--the way
he foresaw what would happen to Balder--or not Balder in particular, of
course, but that whole class of young gentlemen.
“As he said, you have only to ask yourself what kind of people the lower
classes naturally look up to and obey and follow. Will they be ordered
about by a man simply because he knows Greek and Latin and Hebrew? Do
they respect the village schoolmaster, for example, on account of his
learning? Not in the very slightest! On the contrary, they regard him
with the greatest contempt. The man they will serve is the man whose
birth gives him the right to command them, or else the man with money in
his pockets to make it worth their while. These two are the only leaders
they understand. And if that's true here in England, in times of peace,
among our own people, how much truer must it be of our soldiers, away
from England, in a time of war?”
“But, mamma,” the Hon. Winifred intervened, “don't you see how badly
that might work nowadays? now that the good families have so little
money, and all the fortunes are in the hands of stockjobbing people--and
so on? It would be THEIR sons who would buy all the commissions--and I'm
sure Balder wouldn't get on at all with that lot.”
Lady Plowden answered with decision and great promptness. “You see so
little of the world, Winnie dear, that you don't get very clear ideas of
its movements. The people who make fortunes in England are every whit
as important to its welfare as those who inherit names, and individually
I'm sure they are often much more deserving. Every generation sniffs
at its nouveaux riches, but by the next they have become merged in the
aristocracy. It isn't a new thing in England at all. It has always been
that way. Two-thirds of the peerage have their start from a wealthy
merchant, or some other person who made a fortune. They are really the
back-bone of England. You should keep that always in mind.”
“Of course--I see what you mean”--Winnie replied, her dark cheek
flushing faintly under the tacit reproof. She had passed her
twenty-fifth birthday, but her voice had in it the docile
self-repression of a school-girl. She spoke with diffident slowness,
her gaze fastened upon her plate. “Of course--my grandfather was
a lawyer--and your point is that merchants--and others who make
fortunes--would be the same.”
“Precisely,” said Lady Plowden. “And do tell us, Mr. Thorpe”--she turned
toward where he sat at her right and beamed at him over her spectacles,
with the air of having been wearied with a conversation in which he
bore no part--“is it really true that social discontent is becoming more
marked in America, even, than it is with us in England?”
“I'm not an American, you know,” he reminded her. “I only know one or
two sections of the country--and those only as a stranger. You should
ask Miss Madden.”
“Me?” said Celia. “Oh, I haven't come up for my examinations yet. I'm
like Balder--I'm preparing.”
“What I should like Mr. Thorpe to tell us,” suggested Lady Cressage,
mildly, “is about the flowers in the tropics--in Java, for example, or
some of the West Indies. One hears such marvelous tales about them.”
“Speaking of flowers,” Thorpe suddenly decided to mention the fact; “I
met out in one of the greenhouses here this morning, an old acquaintance
of mine, the gardener, Gafferson. The last time I saw him, he was
running the worst hotel in the world in the worst country in the
world--out in British Honduras.”
“But he's a wonderful gardener,” said Lady Cressage. “He's a magician;
he can do what he likes with plants. It's rather a hobby of mine--or
used to be--and I never saw his equal.”
Thorpe told them about Gafferson, in that forlorn environment on the
Belize road, and his success in making them laugh drew him on to other
pictures of the droll side of life among the misfits of adventure. The
ladies visibly dallied over their tea-cups to listen to him; the
charm of having them all to himself, and of holding them in interested
entertainment by his discourse--these ladies of supremely refined
associations and position--seemed to provide an inspiration of its own.
He could hear that his voice was automatically modulating itself to
their critical ears. His language was producing itself with as much
delicacy of selection as if it came out of a book--and yet preserving
the savour of quaint, outlandish idiom which his listeners clearly
liked. Upon the instant when Lady Plowden's gathering of skirts, and
glance across the table, warned him that they were to rise, he said
deliberately to himself that this had been the most enjoyable episode of
his whole life.
There were cigar boxes on the fine old oak mantel, out in the hall, and
Winnie indicated them to him with the obvious suggestion that he was
expected to smoke. He looked her over as he lit his cigar--where she
stood spreading her hands above the blaze of the logs, and concluded
that she was much nicer upon acquaintance than he had thought. Her
slight figure might not be beautiful, but beyond doubt its lines were
ladylike. The same extenuating word applied itself in his mind to her
thin and swarthy, though distinguished, features. They bore the stamp
of caste, and so did the way she looked at one through her eye-glasses,
from under those over-heavy black eyebrows, holding her head a little
to one side. Though it was easy enough to guess that she had a spirit of
her own, her gentle, almost anxious, deference to her mother had shown
that she had it under admirable control.
He had read about her in a peerage at his sister's book-shop the
previous day. Unfortunately it did not give her age, but that was not so
important, after all. She was styled Honourable. She was the daughter
of one Viscount and the sister of another. Her grandfather had been
an Earl, and the book had shown her to possess a bewildering number
of relationships among titled folks. All this was very interesting to
him--and somewhat suggestive. Vague, shapeless hints at projects rose in
his brain as he looked at her.
“I'm afraid you think my brother has odd notions of entertaining his
guests,” she remarked to him, over her shoulder. The other ladies had
not joined them.
“Oh, I'm all right,” he protested cordially. “I should hate to have
him put himself out in the slightest.” Upon consideration he added: “I
suppose he has given up the idea of shooting to-day.”
“I think not,” she answered.” The keeper was about this morning, that
is--and he doesn't often come unless they are to go out with the guns. I
suppose you are very fond of shooting.”
“Well--I've done some--in my time,” Thorpe replied, cautiously. It did
not seem necessary to explain that he had yet to fire his first gun on
English soil. “It's a good many years,” he went on, “since I had the
time and opportunity to do much at it. I think the last shooting I did
was alligators. You hit 'em in the eye, you know. But what kind of a
hand I shall make of it with a shot-gun, I haven't the least idea. Is
the shooting round I here pretty good?”
“I don't think it's anything remarkable. Plowden says my brother
Balder kills all the birds off every season. Balder's by way of being
a crack-shot, you know. There are some pheasants, though. We saw them
flying when we were out this morning.”
Thorpe wondered if it would be possible to consult her upon the question
of apparel. Clearly, he ought to make some difference in his garb, yet
the mental vision of him-self in those old Mexican clothes revealed
itself now as ridiculously impossible. He must have been out of his mind
to have conceived anything so preposterous as rigging himself out, among
these polished people, like a cow-puncher down on his luck.
“I wonder when your brother will expect to start,” he began, uneasily.
“Perhaps I ought to go and get ready.”
“Ah, here comes his man,” remarked the sister. A round-faced,
smooth-mannered youngster--whom Thorpe discovered to be wearing
cord-breeches and leather leggings as he descended the stairs--advanced
toward him and prefaced his message by the invariable salutation. “His
Lordship will be down, sir, in ten minutes--and he hopes you'll be
ready, sir,” the valet said.
“Send Pangbourn to this gentleman's room,” Miss Winnie bade him, and
with a gesture of comprehensive submission he went away.
The calm readiness with which she had provided a solution for his
difficulties impressed Thorpe greatly. It would never have occurred to
him that Pangbourn was the answer to the problem of his clothes, yet how
obvious it had been to her. These old families did something more than
fill their houses with servants; they mastered the art of making these
servants an integral part of the machinery of existence. Fancy having a
man to do all your thinking about clothes for you, and then dress you,
into the bargain. Oh, it was all splendid.
“It seems that we're going shooting,” Thorpe found himself explaining, a
few moments later in his bedroom, to the attentive Pangbourn. He
decided to throw himself with frankness upon the domestic's resourceful
good-feeling. “I haven't brought anything for shooting at all. Somehow I
got the idea we were going to do rough riding instead--and so I fetched
along some old Mexican riding-clothes that make me feel more at home
in the saddle than anything else would. You know how fond a man gets of
old, loose things like that. But about this shooting--I want you to fix
me out. What do I need? Just some breeches and leggings, eh? You can
manage them for me, can't you?”
Pangbourn could and did--and it was upon his advice that the Mexican
jacket was utilized to complete the out-fit. Its shape was beyond doubt
uncommon, but it had big pockets, and it looked like business. Thorpe,
as he glanced up and down his image in the tall mirror of the wardrobe,
felt that he must kill a large number of birds to justify the effect of
pitiless proficiency which this jacket lent to his appearance.
“We will find a cap below, sir,” Pangbourn announced, with serenity, and
Thorpe, who had been tentatively fingering the big, flaring sombrero,
thrust it back upon its peg as if it had proved too hot to handle.
Downstairs in the hall there was more waiting to be done, and there was
nobody now to bear him company. He lit another cigar, tried on various
caps till he found a leathern one to suit him, and then dawdled about
the room and the adjoining conservatory for what seemed to him more than
half an hour. This phase of the aristocratic routine, he felt, did not
commend itself so warmly to him as did some others. Everybody else,
however, seemed to regard it as so wholly a matter of course that
Plowden should do as he liked, that he forbore formulating a complaint
even to himself.
At last, this nobleman's valet descended the stairs once more. “His
Lordship will be down very shortly now, sir,” he declared--“and will you
be good enough to come into the gun-room, sir, and see the keeper?”
Thorpe followed him through a doorway under the staircase--the existence
of which he had not suspected--into a bare-looking apartment fitted like
a pantry with shelves. After the semi-gloom of the hall, it was almost
glaringly lighted. The windows and another door opened, he saw, upon a
court connected with the stable-yard. By this entrance, no doubt, had
come the keeper, a small, brown-faced, brown-clothed man of mature
years, with the strap of a pouch over his shoulder, who stood looking at
the contents of the shelves. He mechanically saluted Thorpe in turn, and
then resumed his occupation. There were numerous gun cases on the lower
shelf, and many boxes and bags above.
“Did his Lordship say what gun?” the keeper demanded of the valet. He
had a bright-eyed, intent glance, and his tone conveyed a sense of some
broad, impersonal, out-of-doors disdain for liveried house-men.
The valet, standing behind Thorpe, shrugged his shoulders and eloquently
shook his head.
“Do you like an 'ammerless, sir?” the keeper turned to Thorpe.
To his intense humiliation, Thorpe could not make out the meaning of the
query. “Oh, anything'll do for me,” he said, awkwardly smiling. “It's
years since I've shot--I daresay one gun'll be quite the same as another
to me.”
He felt the knowing bright eyes of the keeper taking all his
measurements as a sportsman. “You'd do best with 'B,' sir, I fancy,” the
functionary decided at last, and his way of saying it gave Thorpe the
notion that “B” must be the weapon that was reserved for school-boys. He
watched the operation of putting the gun together, and then took it, and
laid it over his arm, and followed the valet out into the hall again, in
dignified silence. To the keeper's remark--“Mr. Balder has its mate with
him today, sir,” he gave only a restrained nod.
There were even now whole minutes to wait before Lord Plowden appeared.
He came down the stairs then with the brisk, rather impatient air of a
busy man whose plans are embarrassed by the unpunctuality of others.
He was fully attired, hob-nailed shoes, leggings, leather coat and cap,
gloves, scarf round his throat and all--and he behaved as if there was
not a minute to lose. He had barely time to shake perfunctorily the
hand Thorpe offered him, and utter an absent-minded “How are you this
morning?”
To the valet, who hurried forward to open the outer door, bearing his
master's gun and a camp-stool, he said reproachfully, “We are very late
today, Barnes.” They went out, and began striding down the avenue of
trees at such a pace that the keeper and his following of small boys and
dogs, who joined them near the road, were forced into a trot to keep up
with it.
Thorpe had fancied, somehow, that a day's shooting would afford
exceptional opportunities for quiet and intimate talk with his host,
but he perceived very soon that this was not to be the case. They walked
together for half a mile, it is true, along a rural bye-road first and
then across some fields, but the party was close at their heels, and
Plowden walked so fast that conversation of any sort, save an occasional
remark about the birds and the covers between him and the keeper, was
impracticable. The Hon. Balder suddenly turned up in the landscape,
leaning against a gate set in a hedgerow, and their course was deflected
toward him, but even when they came up to him, the expedition seemed
to gain nothing of a social character. The few curt words that were
exchanged, as they halted here to distribute cartridges and hold brief
consultation, bore exclusively upon the subject in hand.
The keeper assumed now an authority which Thorpe, breathing heavily over
the unwonted exercise and hoping for nothing so much as that they would
henceforth take things easy, thought intolerable. He was amazed that
the two brothers should take without cavil the arbitrary orders of this
elderly peasant. He bade Lord Plowden proceed to a certain point in one
direction, and that nobleman, followed by his valet with the gun and
the stool, set meekly off without a word. Balder, with equal docility,
vaulted the gate, and moved away down the lane at the bidding of the
keeper. Neither of them had intervened to mitigate the destiny of their
guest, or displayed any interest as to what was going to become of him.
Thorpe said to himself that he did not like this--and though afterward,
when he had also climbed the gate and taken up his station under a
clump of trees at the autocrat's behest, he strove to soothe his ruffled
feelings by the argument that it was probably the absolutely correct
deportment for a shooting party, his mind remained unconvinced.
Moreover, in parting from him, the keeper had dropped a blunt injunction
about firing up or down the lane, the tone even more than the matter of
which nettled him.
To cap all, when he presently ventured to stroll about a little from
the spot on which he had been planted, he caught a glimpse against the
skyline of the distant Lord Plowden, comfortably seated on the stool
which his valet had been carrying. It seemed to Thorpe at that moment
that he had never wanted to sit down so much before in his life--and he
turned on his heel in the wet grass with a grunt of displeasure.
This mood vanished utterly a few moments later. The remote sounds had
begun to come to him, of boys shouting and dogs barking, in the recesses
of the strip of woodland which the lane skirted, and at these he
hastened back to his post. It did not seem to him a good place, and when
he heard the reports of guns to right and left of him, and nothing came
his way, he liked it less than ever; it had become a matter of offended
pride with him, however, to relieve the keeper of no atom of the
responsibility he had taken upon himself. If Lord Plowden's guest had
no sport, the blame for it should rest upon Lord Plowden's over-arrogant
keeper. Then a noise of a different character assailed his ears,
punctuated as it were by distant boyish cries of “mark!” These cries,
and the buzzing sound as of clockwork gone wrong which they accompanied
and heralded, became all at once a most urgent affair of his own.
He strained his eyes upon the horizon of the thicket--and, as if by
instinct, the gun sprang up to adjust its sight to this eager gaze, and
followed automatically the thundering course of the big bird, and then,
taking thought to itself, leaped ahead of it and fired. Thorpe's first
pheasant reeled in the air, described a somersault, and fell like a
plummet.
He stirred not a step, but reloaded the barrel with a hand shaking for
joy. From where he stood he could see the dead bird; there could never
have been a cleaner “kill.” In the warming glow of his satisfaction in
himself, there kindled a new liking of a different sort for Plowden
and Balder. He owed to them, at this belated hour of his life, a novel
delight of indescribable charm. There came to him, from the woods, the
shrill bucolic voice of the keeper, admonishing a wayward dog. He was
conscious of even a certain tenderness for this keeper--and again the
cry of “mark!” rose, strenuously addressed to him.
Half an hour later the wood had been cleared, and Thorpe saw the rest
of the party assembling by the gate. He did not hurry to join them, but
when Lord Plowden appeared he sauntered slowly over, gun over arm, with
as indifferent an air as he could simulate. It pleased him tremendously
that no one had thought it worth while to approach the rendezvous by
way of the spot he had covered. His eye took instant stock of the game
carried by two of the boys; their combined prizes were eight birds and a
rabbit, and his heart leaped within him at the count.
“Well, Thorpe?” asked Plowden, pleasantly. The smell of gunpowder and
the sight of stained feathers had co-operated to brighten and cheer his
mood. “I heard you blazing away in great form. Did you get anything?”
Thorpe strove hard to give his voice a careless note. “Let some of the
boys run over,” he said slowly. “There are nine birds within sight, and
there are two or three in the bushes--but they may have got away.”
“Gad!” said Balder.
“Magnificent!” was his brother's comment--and Thorpe permitted himself
the luxury of a long-drawn, beaming sigh of triumph.
The roseate colouring of this triumph seemed really to tint everything
that remained of Thorpe's visit. He set down to it without hesitation
the visible augmentation of deference to him among the servants. The
temptation was very great to believe that it had affected the ladies of
the house as well. He could not say that they were more gracious to him,
but certainly they appeared to take him more for granted. In a hundred
little ways, he seemed to perceive that he was no longer held mentally
at arm's length as a stranger to their caste. Of course, his own
restored self-confidence could account for much of this, but he clung to
the whimsical conceit that much was also due to the fact that he was the
man of the pheasants.
Sunday was bleak and stormy, and no one stirred out of the house. He was
alone again with the ladies at breakfast, and during the long day he was
much in their company. It was like no other day he had ever imagined to
himself.
On the morrow, in the morning train by which he returned alone to town,
his mind roved luxuriously among the fragrant memories of that day.
He had been so perfectly at home--and in such a home! There were some
things which came uppermost again and again--but of them all he dwelt
most fixedly upon the recollection of moving about in the greenhouses
and conservatories, with that tall, stately, fair Lady Cressage for his
guide, and watching her instead of the flowers that she pointed out. Of
what she had told him, not a syllable stuck in his mind, but the music
of the voice lingered in his ears.
“And she is old Kervick's daughter!” he said to himself more than once.