This was the way in which she always treated him; and as he rather
sulkily continued his dinner he asked himself if it was "good enough."
If she were willing to be decent, he might possibly fall in love with
her, but he was not going to stand being treated like a schoolboy.
Elizabeth might go and hang herself.
She made no attempt to entice him out of the silence he was thus too
easily able to maintain for the rest of the meal.
But in the drawing-room after dinner, he found that the family as a
whole seemed inclined to put him on a new footing. Even Mrs Turner, who
had so far almost ignored him, came up and began to talk about the
gardens. She was a rather stout woman with something of her brother's
carelessness in the matter of dress, and Arthur had wondered how her
husband had ever managed to fall in love with her. To-night, however,
it occurred to him for the first time that she might in her youth have
been the very prototype of her niece Elizabeth.
They had only been talking for a few minutes when her brother joined
them. As usual, after dinner, his face was flushed and puffy--an effect
due, Arthur judged, to the food rather than to the wine he had taken.
"So you're thinking of joining the family party for a time, I hear?" he
began in a friendly voice.
"Well, I haven't decided anything yet," Arthur replied, and waited to
see if his uncle would echo his sister's and his daughter's "You will."
He did not. He was fidgeting with his cigar, the ash of which he had
dropped and smeared all over his dinner-jacket and waistcoat.
"Giving up the Canada idea, any way?" was his response.
"It was never more than an idea," Arthur said.
"Not a bad one, all the same," his uncle murmured, and then apparently
feeling that he was making a mess of what he had to say, he went on,
"However, it's not for me to advise you. I can't boast that I'm any
sort of example for you, eh, Catherine?"
Mrs Turner kept her eyes on the bead bag she was making, an occupation
that certainly necessitated close attention. "Don't you think, Joe ..."
she began, and then stopped, picking up a bead on the point of her
needle with a slightly exaggerated intentness.
"No, no, of course not," her brother said. "It was only that I thought,
as Arthur's uncle, he might care to know--to hear, that is...."
"Oh! rather. I should," Arthur put in, as the sentence failed to get
itself completed. "I should be very glad of your advice."
"I was only going to say," his uncle responded, "speaking from my own
experience, you know, that the life here, jolly enough as it is in many
ways, does not offer much scope for a young fellow with any ambition.
There's Hubert, for instance--he's--he's getting lazy--can't blame him;
got nothing much to do except play golf--but it's hardly the life one
would have chosen for him, eh?"
Arthur smiled. "But I'm not proposing to stay here _permanently_,
uncle," he said. "Six months or a year at the outside. I've been having
rather a strenuous time you see, and I thought a rest of sorts might do
me good."
Joe Kenyon and his sister exchanged a glance that Arthur could not
interpret; they might have been recalling some old and rather terrible
reminiscence.
"My father said that, did he?" Kenyon said. "Six months or a year at
the outside?"
Arthur nodded. He could not possibly tell them why that limit had been
assigned.
Mrs Turner sighed and returned to her niggling beads. He brother leaned
back in his chair and blew a cloud of smoke. Arthur longed to warn him
that the ash was again in danger of falling.
"I've been here over thirty years," his uncle remarked thoughtfully.
Arthur failed to see the relevance of this statement. "Have you
really?" he commented politely.
"And in the first instance," his uncle continued, "I came back on the
understanding that it was to be for twelve months, at the outside.
However," he went on more briskly, sitting up and incidentally
dropping another large instalment of cigar ash down his shirt front
and waistcoat, "that's nothing to do with you; nothing whatever, and I
shouldn't like you to be influenced by anything I've said. Your case is
entirely different in every way." He had the air of a man who has been
tempted into an indiscretion and wanted to cover it without delay.
"Oh, yes! obviously," Arthur agreed.
"You could hardly be called a relation of Mr Kenyon's, could you?" Mrs
Turner added, by way of giving point to her brother's retraction of his
instance.
"Oh! if I came here, it wouldn't be in any way as a relation," Arthur
explained. "I should come as a medical man for--for a certain purpose."
Enlightenment had come to him at last, he believed. These people were
jealous of his possible share in the Kenyon fortune. They, too, no
doubt knew of that untidy will and its projected supersession; and they
were afraid of his having too great an interest in it. They wanted
to get rid of him. All this talk of his uncle's had been designed to
prevent him from accepting the appointment that had been offered.
Arthur blushed with shame at the thought of their suspicion, the more
readily in that the anticipation of some legacy had been already in his
mind.
"As a matter of fact, I don't think I _shall_ stay on here," he said,
getting up. He felt that he could not tolerate the company of these two
Kenyons for another moment. They were like all rich people, mean and
grasping. They had lived in comfort all their lives and yet hated to
part with a single penny. What difference would a few thousands out of
the Kenyon fortune make to them?
He looked round for Turner, but he was not to be seen. And then he saw
that Eleanor had come in while he had been talking and was sitting
alone, reading, on the far side of the room. She looked up at the same
moment and let her book fall in her lap, with a gesture that was an
invitation to him to join her.
As he crossed the room he reflected that Eleanor at least would
give him an unprejudiced opinion. There was something honest and
straightforward about her. She was, for instance, utterly unlike
Elizabeth.
She rose to meet him, anticipating, it seemed, what he had to say, for
before he could speak the polite sentence with which he was prepared,
she said,--
"It's rather hot in here to-night, isn't it? Would you care to come out
into the garden?"
"Love to," Arthur responded eagerly.
He drew a deep breath of enjoyment as they came out into the open. It
was not yet ten o'clock, twilight still lingered in the garden, and
the air was sweet with the aftermath of the perfumes that lilac and
pinks and honeysuckle had been giving out so generously during the
day, and that were now being refined by the fresh, cool scents of the
night. To Arthur it seemed that in such a garden as this was attained
the ultimate triumph of the liaison between nature and cultivation.
Everything that grew here was the result of the sympathetic
collaboration between man and the wild, of art using the natural forces
of the world itself in the technique of its design. And the design
was a sketch of man's ideal for the perfected earth; the setting for
the more orderly, leisured life that he might live when the elemental
forces were subdued. After all, riches served a great purpose. Might it
not be said that old Mr Kenyon had made a worthy use of his wealth in
creating this garden?
"I suppose you want to ask my advice," the clear voice of Eleanor
broke in upon his meditations, recalling him rather unpleasantly to
the realisation that he had been five minutes before announcing his
intention of leaving this pleasance in order to take up the primitive
struggle with the wild. It was strange how different everything
appeared to him out here, away from the influences of that luxurious
house and its bored inhabitants. "Yes, I do," he said. "I very much
want your advice. Shall we go to that place where you found me with
Hubert the day I came? It's sort of shut in, gives one a feeling of
seclusion."
She assented quietly, and they descended the shallow steps of the upper
terrace in silence, and did not speak again until they were pacing the
rectangular lawn of the "cloister."
"Will you let me explain my case to you in the first instance?" Arthur
began, and then went on apologetically, "It is frightfully good of
you to listen to me at all. I don't know why you should. We've only
met once before practically. But you said one or two things on that
occasion, didn't you, that made me feel you understand better than any
of the others? I can't help guessing in a sort of way that they're
rather prejudiced against my accepting the appointment, and I feel that
you...."
"Why should they be prejudiced?" Eleanor broke in.
Arthur was embarrassed by that direct question. He saw, now, that he
had had no right to make any insinuation against the motives of the
family to which his companion belonged. For the moment he had been
tempted to regard her, also, as being an outsider.
"I didn't mean that," he said; "at least I only meant that they all
seem so bound up in a kind of clique, rather suspicious of strangers."
Within that enceinte of box hedges it was too dark now for him to see
her face, but the tone of her voice was appreciably colder as she
said:--
"And you want to join the clique?"
"No! I don't!" he protested with a touch of temper. "That's what they
all seem to think; and as a matter of rather brutal fact, that doesn't
tempt me in the very least. I wanted to explain to you, I thought
you'd understand, that the only thing that tempts me in the offer your
grandfather made me, was the prospect of a little rest and quiet. I
feel that I've earned it. I've had my youth stolen from me and I want
to get a little of it back--six months or a year isn't too much return
to ask surely? And when this miraculous opportunity drops out of the
skies, as it were, you want to deny it me. Why? I can understand the
others. They've got no imagination. They have always had everything
they want and they cannot see what this rest would mean for me. But I
thought, I don't know why, that you were different. I didn't expect you
to accuse me of wanting to join the clique."
She ignored his reference to herself; taking up a single sentence
in his speech by the half-whispered comment: "'They've always had
everything they want!' To any one from outside, I suppose they do seem
to have had everything."
He overlooked the possible implications of that. "Oh! well; you know
what I mean," he said impatiently; "everything that money can buy." He
was afraid that she was going, as he put it, to preach.
"But you've evidently made up your mind to stay and have your rest,"
she replied, going off at another angle. "I can't see why you should
bother to ask my advice."
"I haven't made up my mind," he asserted, "and I do want your advice.
I only thought you might as well know first just why it tempts me so
frightfully to stay."
"And there's Elizabeth," she put in, "you rather like her, don't you?"
"She's quite a jolly girl," Arthur replied coldly.
Jolly? he questioned that the moment he had spoken, but made no effort
to retract the adjective. He had an inclination to depreciate Elizabeth
now that he was with Eleanor, an inclination that he repressed as being
in bad taste, even a trifle vulgar. Nevertheless, he would have liked
to make it quite clear that he was not in love with Elizabeth.
When Eleanor spoke again, however, Elizabeth had fallen out of the
conversation. "I do see that it looks like hard lines on you," she said
more gently; "but as you want to know what I really think, I must tell
you. And all that I can say is," she paused, and there was a thrill of
passion in her voice as she concluded: "that if I were you I would get
away from here, now, at once, to-night...."
"But, why?" he protested, half amused at the fantastic suggestion of
his leaving Hartling that night. "There must be some reason, I mean,
for--well--such an extravagant remedy as that."
"I can't give you any reasons," she said.
He groaned with an intentional effect of exaggeration.
"Have you all got some terrible secret that you're hiding?" he asked.
"I assure you one really gets that impression. I had begun to wonder
whether perhaps Mr Kenyon was a dangerous lunatic or something, before
I saw him this evening. Now, I wonder if he's the only one of you
that's perfectly sane. Or is it just this beastly money of yours? Are
they afraid up at the house that I want some of it, because if they are
you can tell them that I don't. They all seem to think I'm cadging.
Hubert began it the first afternoon I was here. I tell you it's simply
incomprehensible to me--the whole attitude."
Eleanor did not appear to be in the least offended by this outbreak,
but her voice had a new note of agitation in it as she said,--
"Didn't my grandfather offer to do anything for you, when you were
talking this evening? Didn't he say anything to you about his will?"
Arthur was glad that she could not see the blush that again burnt
his face. "What made you ask that?" he said in what he congratulated
himself was a non-committal tone.
"I guessed," she replied quietly. "Was I right?"
"He did mention it," Arthur admitted.
"But that doesn't weigh with you?"
"Not a scrap; not the least little bit in the world."
"Bet it might presently."
"I don't think so."
"Think how you might feel in six months' time," she persisted; "after
living here in a sort of luxury, at the prospect of having to rough it
again, when by simply going on you might never have to bother about
money any more. Think of the temptation to take life easily, with the
probability of having quite enough money to live on when my grandfather
dies. And that would always seem to be a possibility only just ahead.
He'll be ninety-two in October, you know. Even if you did begin to want
work again for its own sake, you'd put off going because it would seem
silly to risk losing that legacy just for the sake of staying on for
another month or two. Can't you put yourself in that position and see
what a temptation it would be?"
Her speech had been delivered in a level, weary voice, the voice of
one who speaks out of experience rather than from the stimulus of
imagination; and for a moment Arthur was impressed by her earnestness.
She was, he supposed, in her modern way, what one called "pious." She
believed in the great gospels of work and self-sacrifice. She wanted to
save him from the snares of wealth as his own mother had once wanted to
save him from the snares of the devil. And just as he had always been
tender and forbearing with his mother when she had preached to him of
the dangers of the world, so now he must be tender to this preacher of
the new gospel of.... Perhaps she was a Socialist?
"Really, you needn't be afraid," he said gently. "There isn't the least
fear of that. As a matter of fact I'm too keen on adventure." (He had
told his mother in precisely the same way, he remembered, that he had
been too keen on his work to want to go to music-halls.) "Perhaps
that's why this offer attracts me so much. It'll be a sort of adventure
to stay here for a month or two--a sort of experience anyway. So,
honestly, Miss Kenyon, if that's all you've got against it, I don't
see why I shouldn't accept. I think, in any event, I shall tell your
grandfather that I couldn't pledge myself in any way; that I could only
agree, at the most, to stay for three months."
He heard her sigh deeply, and her reply when it came was unexpected.
"Oh, well," she said, "nothing that any of us could say is likely to
make the least difference. He means to have you. I'm going in now,
good-night."
She had slipped away into the darkness almost before he was aware of
her intention, and he was unable to find her again.
There were still many secrets in that garden which he had not explored,
and he caught no glimpse of her as he made his way back to the house.
He was annoyed. He wanted to cross-examine her, make her give him some
kind of explanation of her minatory attitude, and especially of that
last cryptic speech. What did she mean by saying, "He means to have
you?"
There was, certainly, a fairly obvious interpretation, namely that old
Mr Kenyon had set his mind on getting his own way in this matter of
having a resident medical attendant at Hartling--a perfectly reasonable
wish. But she had not meant that, or at least not in a reasonable way.
Was it possible that Eleanor also was poisoned by this degrading love
of wealth; that all this talk and admiration for work and independence
was nothing more than an assumption to hide her own fear of another
rival for her grandfather's testamentary favour? Indeed, was not that
the explanation of the pretended secret of Hartling? The explanation
was that there was no secret--unless it were that the whole Kenyon
family were vultures, crouched in a horrible group about this one aged
man; waiting gluttonously for his death in order to divide the spoil;
determined that their share should not be decreased by the addition of
a single new member to that gloating circle. That might be called a
secret; it was certainly a detestable fact that every one of them would
wish to hide.
Arthur straightened his back and lifted his chin with a gesture of
disgust, but he no longer felt any desire to leave Hartling. It had
come to him that he had an honourable purpose to serve by remaining:
he might be a true help and support to the aged head of the house.
Old Kenyon was so pitiably isolated from his family. He must always
be aware that he was marked down, that the circle of harpies was
forever closing more tightly about him, that the only interest that
his descendants took in him was in the search for symptoms of his
approaching death. He would surely welcome some one coming from the
outside, who would have no selfish object in view, who would give him
real sympathy and understanding.
Arthur felt a glow of self-satisfaction at the thought. He would make
it quite clear, of course, in the coming interview, that no question of
any legacy must complicate the arrangement. That should be absolutely
definite; and yet--it was just a whimsical fancy, and he shrugged his
shoulders--what fun it would be to cut out the rest of the family, to
be made one of the principal heirs and disappoint those ghastly birds
of prey! Their disappointment would be only momentary. He would take
the fortune solely in order to hand it back to them, but in doing that
what an admirable lesson he might read them; what contempt he might
show for the pitiful gaud of wealth. (He might possibly retain just
enough to give him a small--a very small independent income?)
Above all, he would like to show Eleanor how miserable a vice was this
love of money, begetting as it did every kind of sham, insincerity and
pretence. In her, at least, the vice could not be deep-seated, and she
would be worth saving. She would look back on the worship of riches
with horror once she were away from the influence of this house.
He paused on the terrace and looked up at the perpendicular lines of
the imitation Tudor facade, dim and impressive in the half-darkness.
Yet, the very house itself was a sham, an anachronism. The Tudors
had been autocrats and the principles of autocracy were out of date.
Even wealth was no longer the power it had once been. The rich were
threatened on every side, by taxation from above and the increasing
clamour and power of labour from below. They had lost prestige and
influence....
Arthur Woodroffe felt remarkably full of vigour that evening, confident
in the knowledge of his own abilities, and delightfully aware of his
glorious independence. When he reflected on the lives of the Kenyons he
at once despised and pitied them for their insane worship of wealth. He
thought of them as poor trammelled creatures, as vultures that had lost
the power of flight.