BELCHAMBER
BELCHAMBER
BY
HOWARD OVERING STURGIS
AUTHOR OF
‘TIM,’ ‘ALL THAT WAS POSSIBLE’
Westminster
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE
AND COMPANY, LTD.
1904
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
TO
WILLIAM HAYNES SMITH
CHAPTER I
Belchamber is one of the most beautiful places in England. The name, if
not the house, dates from days when Norman-French was the polite
language of our kings; the reigning monarch, some early Henry or Edward,
alighting for the night, as was the habit of reigning monarchs, at the
house of his vassal, and having been especially pleased with something
about the apartment prepared for his use, is said to have remarked in
high good humour, ‘_Pardie! tu as là une belle chambre_.’ Something of
old-world scandal hung about the legend (which in its authorised form is
just a little bare and dull for the nucleus round which gathered the
fortunes of a noble family), tales of frail beauty not insensible to a
royal lover, of feudal complaisance, not to be more overtly acknowledged
than by this gracious allusion to the _belle chambre_, from which the
domain was to take its name.
The house, as the humblest tourist may see for himself on certain days
of the week, is an exquisite Jacobean structure borrowing largely from
the Renaissance palaces of Italy, yet with a certain solid British
homeliness about it, that specially fits it for its surroundings, the
green undulations of an English park. The view from the front is
sufficiently extended, and behind it, the various Dutch and Italian
gardens are interspersed with water-works and statues like a miniature
Versailles. Great oaks and ashes and Spanish chestnuts stand in the
park, and four large avenues of elms draw their straight lines across it
to the four points of the compass. The little river, which in the woods
and meadows is a natural shallow trout-stream with loosestrife and
ragged robin fringing its banks, is pressed in the gardens into many
curious uses--fountains and cascades, and oblong rectangular fish-ponds,
where old carp and goldfish circle in and out among the stalks of
foreign water-lilies sunk in hampers. The huge lawn behind the house is
shaded by cedars of Lebanon, that are such a characteristic feature of
Restoration places, and there is one that disputes with the famous tree
at Addington, and I dare say with half a dozen others, the doubtful
glory of being the oldest cedar in England.
Of the thousands of acres of which the property consists, the farms and
manorial rights, the livings in the gift of the owner, it is not
necessary that I should give a catalogue; it is not the business of the
novelist to value for probate, but if possible to convey a vague but
imposing impression of wealth and position. Suffice it that the Lord of
Belchamber is ground-landlord of the greater part of three large
parishes, and that in the county of his residence alone no less than
three beneficed clergymen sit in their comfortable rectories by the
grace of a sickly young man of no very definite religious beliefs,
without counting his lordship’s domestic chaplain, who ministers to the
spiritual needs of a small army of in-and out-door servants and their
families in the little tame church that is, so to speak, tethered on the
lawn.
Belchamber has suffered but little at the hands of restorers; the family
have always taken a sort of lazy pride in the beautiful house, which
luckily seldom rose to the point of desiring to improve it. The third
marquis, to be sure, had some formidable projects for remodelling the
building, of which the plans remain in a great Italian cabinet in the
hall; but his two favourite pursuits combined to save his home, for he
lost so much money at cards that even he drew back before the large
expense involved, and while he still hesitated, a bad fall out hunting
cut short his building projects with his life. That was more than a
hundred years ago, when gambling and unpaid debts were indispensable
parts of the ideal of a gentleman.
If Charles James, third Marquis and eighth Earl of Belchamber, lost
large sums at the club gaming-tables when he came up to the House of
Lords, and died as he had lived, in the hunting-field, his successor,
George Frederick Augustus, the fourth marquis, in no way fell short of
his respected parent’s example. He played as high, drank as deep, and
rode as hard as his father, while he imported into his excesses just
that flavour of vulgarity which the bucks of the Regency copied so
successfully from their master and pattern. He kept two packs of hounds,
and several establishments in addition to his acknowledged and
legitimate residence; and if he did not break his own neck, he at least
broke his wife’s heart, not to mention such unconsidered trifles as his
word, and a large quantity of beautiful old china, when in liquor.
Belchamber saw him but little; he preferred London and Brighton, and one
of his smaller places which was in a better hunting-country; and here
once more the very vices of its owners seemed to conduce to the
preservation of the beautiful house and its treasures. The books, the
celebrated Vandykes, and the painted ceilings suffered somewhat from
want of fires; but neglect has never been so fatal to works of art as
attention, and if the pictures cracked and faded a little, at least they
were not burnt, or repainted, or buried under a deposit of
coachbuilder’s varnish.
To the poor lady, who was occasionally brought from the seclusion of her
lord’s hunting-quarters to be exhibited at a drawing-room in the family
emeralds and diamonds, a son and heir was born, who received in common
with so many of the children of that date the names of Arthur Wellesley.
This was the fifth marquis and tenth earl, and the grandfather of the
hero of this book. Marquis Arthur differed from his father and
grandfather only in his mode of getting rid of money. If he played less,
he made up for it by losing large sums on the turf, and by a generally
luxurious and extravagant style of living. He was a notorious beauty,
and had a straight nose, and an immense bushy pair of whiskers, which
were fatal to the peace of mind of great numbers of the fair sex; he was
inordinately vain, and a woman had only to tell him she was in love with
him, and that she had never seen a man with such small feet, to get
anything she wanted out of him. He frittered away more money over
bouquets and scent and ugly jewellery than his father and grandfather
had lost in their longest nights at Crockford’s. His triumphs over
female virtue were so numerous and notorious that many thought he would
never give a hostage to fortune in the shape of a wife of his own. But
when the nets of the fowler had been spread for many years in the sight
of this volatile bird of gay plumage, he surprised every one by bringing
home a bride from across the Channel.
If report said true, this beautiful young woman revenged the wrongs of
her sex, and of many husbands, most thoroughly on her whiskered lord,
who was not her master. At first it was impossible to Lord Charmington
(as he then was) to believe that any woman he honoured with his
affection could fail to be madly in love with him; then as the
conviction grew upon him (and ideas came to him slowly), there were
furious scenes of recrimination, anger, and jealousy on his side, and
cold contempt and indifference on hers. More than once they were within
a short distance of the divorce court; but his vanity never could be
reconciled to the thought of appearing _coram populo_ in the character
which to him seemed always the most ludicrous and humiliating possible.
His wife soon discovered this weakness, and traded on it freely. If she
was not a very clever woman, he was a more than ordinarily stupid man,
so that he learned to dread her tongue almost as much as the ridicule
that must attach to him in case of a scandal. He also began to take a
certain pride in her position both in London and Paris. She was
certainly for many years one of the most conspicuous figures in the
society of both capitals; and if the more particular and old-fashioned
ladies held up their hands in horror at the stories told of her, she had
a large share in introducing a different standard of morals for the
younger set, in which she was always a leader. When no longer in her
first youth, she was one of the galaxy of beautiful women who adorned
the Second Empire, and though at the severer Court of St. James she was
less smiled upon, there were not wanting circles in the land of her
adoption hardly less august, and infinitely more congenial, where she
was not only received, but highly popular.
Through long years which converted her contemporaries into invalids or
grandmothers, in which her husband grew fat and coarse, and took to
drink and low company, in which children were born to her, two of whom
died in infancy, in which her eldest son and one daughter grew up and
married, in which her grandsons were born, and her son died, she
remained always ‘the beautiful Lady Belchamber,’ always in the world,
and of the world, immutably ‘gay,’ and fast, and frivolous, following
the same dreary round of fashionable existence year in and year out,
bedizened in jewels not always virtuously come by, dressed and
head-dressed in the latest mode, and absorbed in the newest craze or
pastime with women who might have been her daughters, and men who were
sometimes the sons of her early lovers. As her natural charms faded,
they were of course replaced by art; the raven locks that had been
admired by Louis Philippe at first only took on an inkier black, then
grew a little brown, and passed through dull burnished copper to a rich
golden red, while the cream-white skin grew more and more rosy in
sympathy. Gradually, as fashion artfully disarranged the hair of its
votaries, and the wig-makers’ art developed and improved, so much of her
ladyship’s elaborate coiffure came to be false, that it could be almost
any colour she chose without inconvenience, and was even known to vary
with her gowns.
As for her husband, the flattery of women being as the breath of his
nostrils, it was only natural that the older and less attractive he
became, the lower he went in the social scale in search of it. The poor
little feet that had stepped so nimbly on the hearts of many frail ones,
began to spread in the vain attempt to support the Silenus-like body,
and, cramped in tight boots, carried their tottering owner into very
queer byways indeed. The beautiful nose swelled and grew purple, the
Hyperean curls, much thinned at the temples, were still carefully oiled
and arranged, and with the famous whiskers became more hyacinthine in
hue with each advancing year. When I was a young man, this poor,
foolish, wicked old marquis was still strutting about Pall Mall, and
ogling the women, with a few other bucks of his own generation, padded,
laced, and dyed. I dare say there are bad old men still, but they are
bald, and have grey beards, and are somehow not so ridiculous as Lord
Belchamber and his peers were. He and his wife met but seldom, and
though he sometimes grew quite eloquent over the way she treated him, he
was not really unhappy; after all, he was leading just the same life he
always had, and if his companions were coarser and commoner, his taste
had coarsened too, and the dull, bloodshot eyes had lost their keenness
of vision and grown less critical. He outlived his son, and did not die
till after the Franco-Prussian war. Almost the only remark of a purely
sentimental nature he was ever known to make was on the subject of the
siege of Paris and the fall of the Empire. ‘Poor old Paris!’ he said.
‘I’ve had many a good time in Paris, though I did meet my wife there,
damn her! but I shouldn’t care to go there again, hanged if I should,
with everything so changed, and all that----’
We shall have nothing more to do with him in this work, except to bury
him, which, by and by, we will do with befitting pomp. Of direct
influence he never had the smallest on any living creature, but who
shall say what mysterious legacy of evil tendencies he may have
bequeathed to his descendants? The question of heredity is very
fashionable just now, but remains not a little obscure; and perhaps it
is safer in the interests of morality that we should not know too
exactly how little responsibility we have for our bad actions, and how
much we can shuffle off on to our grandfathers and grandmothers. Whether
it was the result of heredity or education, or a mixture of the two, the
children of such a couple did not start in life with the best chance of
being quiet, reputable people, and the two who survived the disorders of
infancy were left to bring themselves up very much as fortune willed.
Lady Eva was a very pretty girl who seldom saw her mother, left
entirely to French maids and governesses, and mainly educated on the
novels of that country, which she abstracted from her mother’s boudoir
and read on the sly, generally with the connivance of her instructress,
on condition that she passed them on to her. Lady Belchamber used
sometimes to see this official, when she thought of it, for five minutes
while her hair was being done.
‘Lady Eva se comporte bien?’
‘Parfaitement, ma’m la marquise.’
‘Qu’est-ce qu’elle apprend? voyons.’
‘Lady Eva étudie, en ce moment, comme géographie, l’Asie orientale, la
Chine, le Japon; comme histoire, le dix-septième siècle, les guerres de
Louis XIV., la guerre civile en Angleterre, la restauration de Charles
II.; comme langues, Italien, _I Promessi Sposi_, Allemand, la _Maria
Stuart_ de Schiller, Français, _Le Cid_ de Corneille; comme
mathématique----’
‘Assez, assez! ne faites pas trop étudier cette p’tite, vous en ferez un
bas bleu. Elle va bien?’
‘Parfaitement, milady. Désirez-vous voir Lady Eva?’
‘Pas ce soir; je n’ai pas le temps.’
Once, some one asked the little girl to give her mother a message. ‘I
will write to her,’ the child said, ‘it will be quicker.’ They were
living in the same house.
When in due course she was presented and made her appearance in the
world, she was very much admired. At nineteen she was engaged to two men
simultaneously, and got out of the difficulty by running away with a
third, a rather shady hanger-on of her father, called Captain Morland,
who not long afterwards had to disappear from society, owing to an
unfortunate difficulty that he experienced in confining himself to the
strict laws of the game, at cards. Thenceforth they lived mostly abroad,
and little was heard of them. Lady Belchamber, who was not an unkind
woman, used to write to her daughter sometimes, and send her old dresses
and hats; and the old lord, when on the continent, would have the
couple to live with him, and give them money. He had a sneaking kindness
for Morland, which he never quite got over, finding him a congenial
companion; and his son-in-law was very patient in listening to his
tender confidences. Lord Charmington, who was two years older than his
sister, had the better chance that comes to boys of being sent away to
school. Unfortunately for him, the one thing he did not inherit from his
parents was the naturally strong constitution that was common to them
both. Lady Belchamber, though herself a marvel of strength and vitality,
came of an extremely old family, of which the blood, enfeebled by much
marrying of cousins, had had time to run very thin indeed; and though
the Chambers stock was originally strong and healthy, the excesses of
the last three bearers of the title had not tended to the transmission
of a fine physique to their descendants.
From his childhood poor Charmington was a rickety, feeble lad, and more
than once came within a tittle of sharing the fate of his younger
brothers, instead of surviving to be the father of our hero, in which
case this book would never have been written. If he could have stayed
out his time at Eton, it might have done much for him, for he was not
without some naturally kindly qualities, though he was as stupid as an
owl, and never could learn to spell the simplest words. In those days
there existed no ruthless law of superannuation, and he might have
remained contentedly in fourth form till he was nineteen, had it not
been for his unfortunate health: he was always ill, and always having to
be taken away and sent to the seaside, or abroad, in the care of any one
who could be got to go and look after him. This employment fell as often
as not to his future brother-in-law, Captain Morland, than whom a worse
companion for a growing lad could hardly be found, and where he could
be, Morland found him, and introduced him to his charge. By the time he
was twenty, the lad was an accomplished little rip, gambler, and
spendthrift, and had materially impaired his already feeble
constitution. He was bought a commission in the household cavalry, but
at the end of a few years, having come to the end of everything--health,
money, credit, and the limits of his father’s patience--he was
thenceforward lost to the service of his country.
After a severe hæmorrhage of the lungs, he was ordered to winter abroad,
and by way of retrenching and building up his strength, he selected Nice
as a quiet inexpensive winter resort, with the chance of a little
congenial amusement, in the nearness of the tables at Monte Carlo. Here
he found his sister and her husband (whose little trouble at the club
had befallen the year before) hanging on to the fringe of society. But
here, too, he encountered that veteran statesman, the Earl of Firth, who
with his wife and two daughters was recruiting his strength after his
retirement from public life at a villa in the neighbourhood. The
Morlands were established at Monaco, where the Firth party never set
foot, so Charmington had no difficulty in keeping his disreputable
brother-in-law out of sight of his new acquaintances. He began to
frequent the villa of the old Scottish peer with quite surprising
assiduity. Just what there was in either Lady Sarah Pagley or her
surroundings to attract a man like Charmington will always remain a
mystery. Perhaps the jaded, invalid young man found something of the
home atmosphere he had never known among these prosy folk; perhaps the
blameless dulness of their lives was rather restful to him; or it may be
that he took refuge with them from Morland’s incessant appeals for the
money of which he himself was so sorely in need. It has been suggested
that he paid court to Lady Sarah from mercenary motives, but to a man of
his tastes and traditions her modest £15,000 would have seemed a very
trifling price to receive for the surrender of his liberty; and if a
rich marriage had been his object, there were wealthier maidens
scattered along the Mediterranean shore, who would not have despised the
suit of a marquis’s only son. He himself explained his choice to a
wondering friend by saying that she was the woman most unlike his mother
that he had ever met.
With mere carnal charms the Ladies Pagley were somewhat scantily
equipped. They were both fairly well-grown young women, healthy and
vigorous; Lady Sarah, as she was the elder, was also slightly the taller
of the two. Both wore their smooth brown hair divided in the centre and
brushed plainly down behind their ears, a fashion from which Sarah has
never departed to this day. Both were badly dressed, and either, in
whatever part of the world she was met, would unhesitatingly be
pronounced to hail from the British Isles, by people who had never seen
an Englishwoman before. Sarah was religious, Susan political, each
following the bent of one parent, for Lord Firth had been a member of
several Cabinets, and divided his time between nursing his gout and
studying blue-books, whereas Lady Firth dosed her body with quack
medicines and her soul with evangelical theology. But the old lord had
the ingratitude to prefer the daughter who reflected her mother’s
tastes. ‘They are both dour women to tackle, my daughters,’ he would
say; ‘but Sally’s not unkindly in matters where religion is not in
question, whereas Susie has no bowels, none at all.’ Lady Susan was a
great talker, and loved argument for its own sake; but Lady Sarah was
reserved, silent, and really very shy for all the grimness of her
aspect. If it did not seem profane to think of beauty in connection with
either of them, who considered it so little, I should say that Susan was
the prettier of the two, having a better complexion than her sister, and
hair of a brighter, redder shade of brown.
There never were two girls more predestined by nature for old maids, or
better fitted to meet the cold world single-handed; and yet they both
married, and married what is called ‘well,’ while many of their fairer
and more eager sisters were left ungathered on the stem. Susan was led
to the altar by a West Country baronet and M.P., Sir Charles Trafford,
while Sarah, to every one’s surprise, became in due time Lady
Charmington. If it will remain a puzzle what drew her husband to her, it
is still more insoluble what attraction she found in him. Old Lady
Firth, for all her piety and her sermons, was not above a little
worldly gratification that her plain elder daughter at seven-and-twenty
should marry the heir to a marquisate and a historic house; but I
honestly think Lady Sarah was little swayed by these considerations. She
may have felt a thrill at the thought of the power her position would
one day put into her hands, but for its own sake she valued that
position very lightly. Perhaps poor Char’s weakness appealed to her
strength, and his wretched state of health stirred that pity that was so
carefully concealed in her proud heart. Perhaps her missionary zeal
awoke at the thought of plucking from the fire a brand that was already
little more than an ember. No doubt both these feelings worked for him,
but I am inclined to think that his most potent advocate was the fact
that he was the first man who had ever made love to her. No woman hears
those magic accents for the first time unmoved, and if she has reached
Lady Sarah’s age without the faintest breath from the wing of Romance,
the effect of them is not thereby lessened. Be that as it may, this sick
dissipated boy, who was three years her junior, and whose past life had
been made up of everything of which she most disapproved, succeeded
where a better man might have been very likely to fail, and they were
married with great splendour during the ensuing season in London, the
occasion being one of the few on which her husband’s parents were ever
seen together in public. Lord Firth and his son, Lord Corstorphine,
looked very sulky at the wedding, but Lady Firth was all tears and
benedictions, and old Belchamber, after much champagne at the breakfast,
became quite maudlin over the consideration of his son’s respectable
connections. ‘It’ll be the making of Char,’ he hiccoughed into the ear
of the sympathetic Lady Firth. ‘Ah, if I’d had such a chance, now! if
I’d married a different kind of woman, she might have done anything with
me----’ The lady with whom he had just been celebrating his silver
wedding was radiant in sky-blue silk and white lace flounces and a Paris
bonnet all Marabout feathers and humming-birds. ‘I don’t envy Char,’ she
wrote to her daughter, who did not come over for the wedding. ‘_Dieu!_
what people those Firths! _Heureusement_, they won’t want to see much of
_me_.’
Very likely Lord Belchamber was right, and Sarah might have made
something out of the unlikely material she had taken-in hand. Her
influence over Charmington was enormous, and he both loved and feared
her. She nursed him, ruled him, and generally watched over him,
protecting him alike from the scorn of her kinsfolk and the bad
influence of his own; she rigorously kept both wine and money from him,
doling them out in infinitesimal doses. If she allowed no questioning of
her authority, she accomplished the miracle of awakening some
glimmerings of self-respect in him, and she bolstered up his shattered
constitution so that he lived four years with her, during which she bore
him two sons; but his lungs were too seriously affected for the
imperfect science of the sixties to heal, and in spite of all her care
he did not live to be thirty, dying, as has already been said, while
that elderly Adonis, his father, was still figuratively wearing the
family coronet.