Helen’s brief visit to the country proved to be a rather severe
ordeal. It began with a lonely five-mile drive from the station in an
antiquated brougham. And, on arrival at Wyndham about six o’clock on
Saturday evening, a general state of tension was not made less when she
found that John in obedience to doctor’s orders was keeping his bed,
and that his mother had mounted guard over him.
Lady Elizabeth was a dragon “of the old school”; at least, that was the
effect she contrived to make upon Helen in the course of their first
evening together. A masterful dame of seventy, wonderfully active in
spite of growing infirmity, it was clear to the guest, by the time she
had spent ten minutes with her fiancé’s mother, that she would have a
head full of feudal ideas to contend with. For the mistress of Wyndham,
beyond a doubt, was a survival of another age. And to the modern mind
of an American it was an age of considerably less enlightenment.
John, for one thing, was her ewe lamb. And she had no thought of
surrendering him lightly. Far from approving his politics or his
revolutionary coquettings with “new ideas,” of all things the most
deadly in his mother’s opinion, she seemed to regard him still as only
fit for the nursery. He knew little about life, he knew even less about
women.
In their first quarter of an hour together over the drawing-room
teacups Helen was amused, irritated, surprised, confounded by the calm
assumptions of Lady Elizabeth Endor. All her standards of life and
conduct were based on a rather remote past. John, who had humor enough
to make due allowance for the old lady’s antique flavor, had done his
best to prepare Helen for a shock; all the same, a lively sense of the
comic was needed in Helen herself to make tolerable that first evening
at Wyndham.
Not the least trying circumstance was Lady Elizabeth’s complete and
resolute charge of the patient. If he were able to get a good night’s
rest and his cut and bruised head became no worse, he might be allowed
“up” for a short time on the morrow. Meanwhile, no one, not even his
affianced, must venture to disturb the peace of his chamber.
Helen liked not the ukase but she had to submit. She had also to
submit to dressing for dinner in a fireless but moldily magnificent
bedroom. Moldy magnificence seemed, in fact, to be the note of that
cheerless house. It even extended to the dinner itself. Long before
that function was through, Helen felt that it was the most depressing
and unsatisfying meal she had ever eaten.
Behind the old lady’s chair was a solemn pontiff in the form of a
butler: a lord in waiting to a lady in waiting to Good Queen Victoria.
A lovely bit of mahogany was before them; wonderful old silver, fine
napery and divers articles of “bigotry and virtue” that excited Helen’s
cupidity, lay all around; and yet the whole scheme had such an air of
historical solidity that it might have come from Madame Tussaud’s, the
Wallace Collection, or the Ark.
The fare was so scant that Helen would have had qualms about taking a
full share had not her hostess appeared to subsist on hot water and
dry toast. Moreover, it was ill cooked, sauceless, uninspired; and
although claret was offered with an air that conferred the monarchy of
all vintages upon it, the guest regretted that she had not been content
with a humble but safe alternative in the form of barley water.
So much for the meal. As for the spirit which informed it, Helen soon
found that it was hopeless for a mere “American newspaper person” of no
particular social credentials, to penetrate the _chevaux de frise_ of
Lady Elizabeth’s class consciousness. To begin with, judging by a stray
remark the old woman let fall, it seemed a source of mild surprise
to find that “an American” was not necessarily “a nigger” and that
“a newspaper person” was not necessarily “a printer.” All the same,
when the best had been said and every allowance made for the march of
progress for any woman to be actively engaged in earning her own living
was to place her in the governess category if not actually to consign
her to the lower depths with Mossop the butler, and his highly trained
subordinates, Charles and John.
Had Helen been less troubled in spirit, a keen sense of humor would
have been frankly charmed by this almost perfect specimen from the
backwoods. John himself always alluded to his mother as “a genuine
Die-hard.” It was her austere, yet not altogether unenlightened
feudalism, he declared, that had made England the country it was.
Cherishing her as he did, and the wonderful old island of which she
was the flesh and the bone, he certainly claimed for her many fine
qualities. She was honest, she was wise in her own generation, she was
fearless, she had a downright way of expressing herself, and according
to her lights, she was just. All the same, her limitations were many
and they were abrupt.
Charm, beauty, information, wit, Helen had her share of these and
she used them modestly, but so far as John’s mother was concerned,
they made no impact. From his early days at Eton she had mapped out
a matrimonial career for her only surviving son. Money he would need
and money he should have, even if he must go outside his own class to
look for it. No doubt some well-born heiress would come along--Lady
Elizabeth might despair of the country but she was an invincible
optimist in all matters relating to herself and family--she had heard,
in fact, of a nice young heiress in the next county, and John, although
his “radicalism” annoyed her deeply, being his mother’s son had merely
to cast the handkerchief.
Poor Helen was to learn in the course of the evening that it would not
be with the consent of her hostess if she ever became Mrs. John Endor.
The wind was not tempered to the shorn lamb. John simply couldn’t
afford to marry under ten thousand a year; he had a little, only a very
little, of his own, and Wyndham was one of those ramshackle old places,
although good of its kind, that was really so expensive to keep up.
John’s destiny, so to speak, was cut and dried--let there be no doubt
on that score--although his politics, his general outlook, his “isms”
were crosses for his mother’s old age. Indeed, the attitude of Lady
Elizabeth to her distinguished son was that of an entirely responsible
barndoor hen who, by a whim of the gods, has hatched a peacock. The
ideas in which he trafficked were so much colored moonshine, for which
she had simply no use at all. She was greatly surprised that Eton and
Oxford had failed to knock such pernicious nonsense out of him. _Ne
sutor ultra crepidam_ was the motto she believed in. Old as she was,
and rather too infirm to wield a stick with the vigor of her prime--the
irony of the matter was, that a Spartan parent had always bestowed
great pains upon his youth!--she did not despair, even now, of seeing
this renegade back in the fold.
At any rate, the renegade’s mother was fain to inform the edified Helen
that the knock on the head he had received the previous day from the
Hellington miners would do him all the good in the world. “A gentleman
has no right to go among the rabble. They have no more use for him,
than he should have for them. I hope they’ve hit him hard enough,
that’s all.”
Even Helen, a woman of the world, hardly knew whether to be shocked
or amused by this downrightness. She compromised by being both. And
greatly daring, she ventured presently to take up cudgels for her
stricken hero.
Was it possible Lady Elizabeth didn’t realize that one day John might
become Prime Minister?
The Die-hard would be surprised at nothing, but in times like these it
was little enough to any one’s credit to become Prime Minister.
Helen, a little staggered, yet secretly charmed, did her best to
develop the subject, but the old lady would have none of it. Abhorring
John’s ideas, she refused to take their owner seriously. The truth was
she had never quite got over the shock of his flaunting a red necktie
at Christ Church and being called in consequence “Comrade” Endor.
At the back of Lady Elizabeth’s mind, no doubt, lay the hard fact that
this Miss Sholto was not the least fantastic of “Comrade” Endor’s
“isms.” She had no right to be there, and Helen was quick to penetrate
to that cold truth. On occasion, however, she could be mischievous,
and by the end of a trying meal she had decided that the only fun that
evening was likely to provide would consist in drawing the old lady out.
She fell back, therefore, on tracing relationships. In Helen’s opinion,
it was a poor game at best, but it served at least to keep the ball
of conversation rolling in the drawing room. Lady Elizabeth’s tree
was immensely distinguished; she was the second daughter of no less a
personage than the fourth Duke of Bridport.
“My father,” said Lady Elizabeth, “had the name of a very clever man.
But his own class never forgave him for introducing what was called The
People’s Charter in the House of Lords. He certainly thought too much
of the workingman, gave him free education, cheap beer, and so on. My
father’s weakness for the masses made him innumerable enemies. People
called him Brother Bridport or the Mad Duke. When he left the Tories
and went over to Gladstone, even his lifelong friends turned against
him, the dear Queen among them.”
“So that was why he was called the Mad Duke!” said Helen. The deadly
phrase used by Saul Hartz recurred to her vividly: _madness in the
mother’s family_. Was it possible that the charge was based merely on
the reputation of the fourth duke of Bridport? Helen felt a weight
lifted suddenly from her mind. And yet, if this theory was sound, it
was one rag the more torn from the reputation of a man whom she had
implicitly trusted.
“I sometimes think,” Lady Elizabeth went on, “that my unfortunate boy
gets his eccentricity from his grandfather. All the rest of the family
were so sensible. I can hear my Uncle Edmund saying to my father,
‘Robert, the world is a good enough place as it is, if only fools
like you will let it be.’ A shrewd man Uncle Edmund. ‘You’ll put the
workingman on top, and then you’ll be happy,’ he used to say. If Uncle
Edmund could have had his way he would have hanged poor papa at Hyde
Park Corner. And that is how I feel about that wretched boy upstairs.”
Helen was hard set to keep her gravity. But she was just equal to
the task. Moreover, with those sinister words of Saul Hartz still
in her ears, there was yet a private end to gain. “Your mother’s
people”--of malice prepense she paused; it was so important to frame an
innocent-seeming question in just the right way--“were much too wise, I
suppose, to give away their own?”
“Dear me, yes,” was the emphatic answer. “Canny Scotch folk who knew
better than to give away anything.”
“Due in part, no doubt,” said Helen, “to living in a poor country where
there may not be much to give. But I am perhaps a bit sensitive on the
subject, because you see I happen to have Scotch blood myself.”
The trap was laid with skill and masked with cunning. At any rate
Lady Elizabeth walked right in. “My mother’s mother was a Sholto of
Bannocksyde.” The proud old woman had an entirely misleading air of
stating a fact of really very little importance.
Helen, too, could be adept with the pride that knows how to ape
humility. She was content to offer a little mild surprise, and that
was all. Everything, so far, was according to plan. She was quite
aware that John’s great grandmother was a Sholto of Bannocksyde, but
Lady Elizabeth was not aware that the Sholtos of Virginia were a cadet
branch of the same ancient line. With becoming modesty, Helen now
revealed this interesting fact.
Lady Elizabeth proceeded at once to “sit up and take notice.” It was as
if her guest had suddenly “come alive.” Helen could not resist a smile.
A strange land, this England! her impious thought.
“Tell me, my dear,” A new note had entered the raven voice of the old
Die-hard. “Tell me, did your people go over with Columbus?”
“I forget the year Columbus sailed,” said Helen demurely. “We went
over, I believe, in 1680.”
“Burke will tell us,” said Lady Elizabeth with simple faith.
On that point, Burke was hardly so clear as John’s mother expected.
Helen was able to convince her, all the same, that in the year 1680
her fathers had settled in Virginia, and that her own parents were
still living on the banks of Rose River in a house which had been built
by the original pioneer, Douglas Graeme Sholto.