MR. JOHN AUDLEY
An hour later Basset was seated on one side of a wide hearth, on the
other John Audley faced him. The library in which they sat was the room
which Basset loved best in the world. It was a room of silence and
large spaces, and except where four windows, tall and narrow, broke one
wall, it was lined high with the companions of silence—books. The
ceiling was of black oak, adorned at the crossings of the joists and
beams with emblems, butterflies, and Stafford knots and the like, once
bright with color, and still soberly rich. A five-sided bay enlarged
each of the two inner corners of the room and broke the outlines. One
of these bays shrined a window, four-mullioned, the other a spiral
staircase. An air of comfort and stateliness pervaded the whole; here
the great scutcheon over the mantel, there the smaller coats on the
chair-backs blended their or and gules with the hues of old rugs and
the dun bindings of old folios. There were books on the four or five
tables, and books on the Cromwell chairs; and charts and deeds, antique
weapons and silver pieces, all the tools and toys of the antiquary, lay
broadcast. Against the door hung a blazoned pedigree of the Audleys of
Beaudelays. It was six feet long and dull with age.
But Basset, as he faced his companion, was not thinking of the room, or
of the pursuits with which it was connected in his mind, and which,
more than affection and habit, bound him to John Audley. He moved
restlessly in his chair, then stretched his legs to meet the glow of
the wood fire. “All the same,” he said, “I think you would have done
well to see her to-night, sir.”
“Pooh! pooh!” John Audley answered with lazy good humor. “Why? It
doesn’t matter what I think of her or she thinks of me. It’s what Peter
thinks of Mary and Mary thinks of Peter that matters. That’s what
matters!” He chuckled as he marked the other’s annoyance. “She is a
beauty, is she?”
“I didn’t say so.”
“But you think it. You don’t deceive me at this time of day. And
stand-off, is she? That’s for the marines and innocent young fellows
like you who think women angels. I’ll be bound that she’s her mother’s
daughter, and knows her value and will see that she fetches it! Trading
blood will out!”
To the eye that looked and glanced away John Audley, lolling in his
chair, in a quilted dressing-gown with silk facings, was a plump and
pleasant figure. His face was fresh-colored, and would have been comely
if the cheeks had not been a little pendulous. His hair was fine and
white and he wore it long, and his hands were shapely and well cared
for. As he said his last word he poured a little brandy into a glass
and filled it up with water. “Here’s to the wooing that’s not long
adoing!” he said, his eyes twinkling. He seemed to take a pleasure in
annoying the other.
He was so far successful that Basset swore softly. “It’s silly to talk
like that,” he said, “when I have hardly known the girl twenty-four
hours and have scarcely said ten times as many words to her.”
“But you’re going to say a good many more words to her!” Audley
retorted, grinning. “Sweet, pretty words, my boy! But there, there,” he
continued, veering between an elfish desire to tease and a desire
equally strong to bring the other to his way of thinking. “I’m only
joking. I know you’ll never let that devil have his way! You’ll never
leave the course open for _him!_ I know that. But there’s no hurry!
There’s no hurry. Though, lord, how I sweated when I read his letter! I
had never a wink of sleep the night after.”
“I don’t suppose that he’s given a thought to her in that way,” Basset
answered. “Why should he?”
John Audley leant forward, and his face underwent a remarkable change.
It became a pale, heavy mask, out of which his eyes gleamed, small and
malevolent. “Don’t talk like a fool!” he said harshly. “Of course he
means it. And if she’s fool enough all my plans, all my pains, all my
rights—and once you come to your senses and help me I shall have my
rights—all, all, all will go for nothing. For nothing!” He sank back in
his chair. “There! now you’ve excited me. You’ve excited me, and you
know that I can’t bear excitement!” His hand groped feebly for his
glass, and he raised it to his lips. He gasped once or twice. The color
came back to his face.
“I am sorry,” Basset said.
“Ay, ay. But be a good lad. Be a good lad. Make up your mind to help me
at the Great House.”
Basset shook his head.
“To help me, and twenty-four hours—only twenty-four hours, man—may make
all the difference! All the difference in the world to me.”
“I have told you my views about it,” Basset said doggedly. He shifted
uneasily in his chair. “I cannot do it, sir, and I won’t.”
John Audley groaned. “Well, well!” he answered. “I’ll say no more now.
I’ll say no more now. When you and she have made it up”—in vain Basset
shook his head—“you’ll see the question in another light. Ay, believe
me, you will. It’ll be your business then, and your interest, and
nothing venture, nothing win! You’ll see it differently. You’ll help
the old man to his rights then.”
Basset shrugged his shoulders, but thought it useless to protest. The
other sighed once or twice and was silent also. At length, “You never
told me that you had heard from her,” Basset said.
“That I’d——” John Audley broke off. “What is it, Toft?” he asked over
his shoulder.
A man-servant, tall, thin, lantern-jawed, had entered unseen. “I came
to see if you wanted anything more, sir?” he said.
“Nothing, nothing, Toft. Good-night!” He spoke impatiently, and he
watched the man out before he went on. Then, “Perhaps I heard from her,
perhaps I didn’t,” he said. “It’s some time ago. What of it?”
“She was in great distress when she wrote.”
John Audley raised his eyebrows. “What of it!” he repeated. “She was
that woman’s daughter. When Peter married a tradesman’s
daughter—married a——” He did not continue. His thoughts trickled away
into silence. The matter was not worthy of his attention.
But by and by he roused himself. “You’ve ridiculous scruples,” he said.
“Absurd scruples. But,” briskly, “there’s that much of good in this
girl that I think she’ll put an end to them. You must brighten up, my
lad, and spark it a little! You’re too grave.”
“Damn!” said Basset. “For God’s sake, don’t begin it all again. I’ve
told you that I’ve not the least intention——”
“She’ll see to that if she’s what I think her,” John Audley retorted
cheerfully. “If she’s her mother’s daughter! But very well, very well!
We’ll change the subject. I’ve been working at the Feathers—the
Prince’s Feathers.”
“Have you gone any farther?” Basset asked, forcing an interest which
would have been ready enough at another time.
“I might have, but I had a visitor.”
Visitors were rare at the Gatehouse, and Basset wondered. “Who was it?”
he asked.
“Bagenal the maltster from Riddsley. He came about some political
rubbish. Some trouble they are having with Mottisfont. D—n Mottisfont!
What do I care about him? They think he isn’t running straight—that
he’s going in for corn-law repeal. And Bagenal and the other fools
think that that will be the ruin of the town.”
“But Mottisfont is a Tory,” Basset objected.
“So is Peel. They are both in Bagenal’s bad books. Bagenal is sure that
Peel is going back to the cotton people he came from. Spinning Jenny
spinning round again!”
“I see.”
“I asked him,” Audley continued, rubbing his knees with sly enjoyment,
“what Stubbs the lawyer was doing about it. He’s the party manager. Why
didn’t he come to me?”
Basset smiled. “What did he say to that?”
“Hummed and hawed. At last he said that owing to Stubbs’s connection
with—you know who—it was thought that he was not the right person to
come to me. So I asked him what Stubbs’s employer was going to do about
it.”
“Ah!”
“He didn’t know what to say to that, the ass! Thought I should go the
other way, you see. So I told him”—John Audley laughed maliciously as
he spoke—“that, for the landed interest, the law had taken away my
land, and, for politics, I would not give a d—n for either party in a
country where men did not get their rights! Lord! how he looked!”
“Well, you didn’t hide your feelings.”
“Why should I?” John Audley asked cheerfully. “What will they do for
me? Nothing. Will they move a finger to right me? No. Then a plague on
both their houses!” He snapped his fingers in schoolboy fashion and
rose to his feet. He lit a candle, taking a light from the fire with a
spill. “I am going to bed now, Peter. Unless——” he paused, the
candlestick in his hand, and gazed fixedly at his companion. “Lord,
man, what we could do in two or three hours! In two or three hours.
This very night!”
“I’ve told you that I will have nothing to do with it!” Basset
repeated.
John Audley sighed, and removing his eyes, poked the wick of the candle
with the snuffers. “Well,” he said, “good-night. We must look to bright
eyes and red lips to convert you. What a man won’t do for another he
will do for himself, Peter. Good-night.”
Left alone, Basset stared fretfully at the fire. It was not the first
time by scores that John Audley had tried him and driven him almost
beyond bearing. But habit is a strong tie, and a common taste is a bond
even stronger. In this room, and from the elder man, Basset had learned
to trace a genealogy, to read a coat, to know a bar from a bend, to
discourse of badges and collars under the guidance of the learned
Anstie or the ingenious Le Neve. There he had spent hours flitting from
book to book and chart to chart in the pursuit, as thrilling while it
lasted as any fox-chase, of some family link, the origin of this, the
end of that, a thing of value only to those who sought it, but to them
all-important. He could recall many a day so spent while rain lashed
the tall mullioned windows or sunlight flooded the window-seat in the
bay; and these days had endeared to him every nook in the library from
the folio shelves in the shadowy corner under the staircase to the
cosey table near the hearth which was called “Mr. Basset’s,” and
enshrined in a long drawer a tree of the Bassets of Blore.
For he as well as Audley came of an ancient and shrunken stock. He also
could count among his forbears men who had fought at Blore Heath and
Towton, or had escaped by a neck from the ruin of the Gunpowder Plot.
So he had fallen early under the spell of the elder man’s pursuits,
and, still young, had learned from him to live in the past. Later the
romantic solitude of the Gatehouse, where he had spent more of the last
six years than in his own house at Blore, had confirmed him in the
habit.
Under the surface, however, the two men remained singularly unlike.
While a fixed idea had narrowed John Audley’s vision to the inhuman,
the younger man, under a dry and reserved exterior—he was shy, and his
undrained acres, his twelve hundred a year, poorly supported an ancient
name—was not only human, but in his way was something of an idealist.
He dreamed dreams, he had his secret aspirations, at times ambition of
the higher kind stirred in him, he planned plans and another life than
this. But always—this was a thing inbred in him—he put forward the
commonplace, as the cuttle-fish sheds ink, and hid nothing so shyly as
the visions which he had done nothing to make real. On those about him
he made no deep impression, though from one border of Staffordshire to
the other his birth won respect. Politics viewed as a game, and a
selfish game, had no attraction for him. Quarter Sessions and the Bench
struck no spark from him. At the Races and the County Ball richer men
outshone him. But given something to touch his heart and fire his
ambition, he had qualities. He might still show himself in another
light.
Something of this, for no reason that he could imagine, some feeling of
regret for past opportunities, passed through his mind as he sat
fretting over John Audley’s folly. But after a time he roused himself
and became aware that he was tired; and he rose and lit a candle. He
pushed back the smouldering logs and slowly and methodically he put out
the lights. He gave a last thought to John Audley. “There was always
one maggot in his head,” he muttered, “now there’s a second. What I
would not do to please him, he thinks I shall do to please another!
Well, he does not know her yet!”
He went to bed.