The Duchess of Sunborough had not revisited her former home since she
left it after the death of her first husband. Sainty had paid one or two
duty visits to his grandmother on the rare occasions of his being in
London, sometimes with his mother, sometimes alone. He had always found
the duchess smiling and debonair, very civil and entirely indifferent, a
most mysterious personality, both in her strange spurious youthfulness
and her entire detachment from family ties. She returned on the present
occasion as cheerful, as amiable, and as unembarrassed as though she
were paying a first visit to some distant acquaintances, in a place that
was entirely new to her. She was accompanied by her husband, his eldest
son and daughter-in-law, Lord and Lady Rugby, and one of his younger
sons, Algernon Montgomery, a young officer in the Life Guards. The duke
was a well-preserved, clean-shaven, spick-and-span old gentleman, whom
people were fond of citing as a typical nobleman, and indeed among the
dukes he made a very creditable appearance. Had he been the senior
partner of some large commercial house he would have passed unobserved
in a crowd of equally respectable-looking contemporaries on any suburban
railway. In his youth he had been a gambler and a rake, and had made his
first wife (the mother of his children) thoroughly unhappy by his
devotion to many ladies, chief among whom had been his present duchess;
but having at seventy outgrown his taste for youthful pleasures, he was
spoken of as a pillar of the State and a model of all the virtues. In
the year of Belchamber’s majority, a Tory government, of which his grace
was an inconspicuous ornament, was busy making Great Britain what she
is among the nations. The Chamberses, as far as they had a political
creed, belonged, it is needless to say, to the same party. Lord Firth’s
family, on the other hand, had always been Whigs, and the old lord, as
well as the present one, had been a member of more than one Liberal
cabinet. It was Lady Susan in her younger days who had given vent to the
sentiment that she would as soon have married the footman as a
Conservative; but a recent cataclysm among the Liberals had driven this
ardent lady as well as her cooler brother into antagonism to their own
party, though they had not as yet been absorbed into the other. There
was a political flirtation going on between the duke and Lord Firth, who
found themselves in novel agreement as to the line their young relative
ought to take in politics. ‘When the Union is threatened, all minor
differences must be sunk,’ the duke said graciously; ‘when the ship has
sprung a leak, no matter what are our views of the way she should be
sailed, we must all take a hand at the pumps’; which made Claude call
his revered chief the ‘Pompier.’
The guests were assembled before dinner in the great saloon, which even
in August had a chilly suggestion of not being habitually used.
‘I hope,’ Lord Firth said, with an inviting side glance at his nephew,
‘that Belchamber will be able to help Hawley’s election. I don’t know
exactly what his views are----’ and here he paused long enough to give
Sainty an opportunity of making a profession of faith if he were so
minded. Nothing, however, was further from Sainty’s intention.
‘I think Mr. Hawley’s election quite safe,’ he said; ‘it is fifty years
since the county returned anything but a Conservative,’ and he moved
away to take Ned Parsons, who had arrived since the other guests had
gone to dress, and present him to Lady Charmington.
Sainty had been a little apprehensive how Ned would fit into the
picture. Parsons had grafted on to the slovenliness that was either
natural or affected at Cambridge a rather aggressive splendour; though
a rebel tuft waved defiance on his crown, and his shirt-front was a
little crumpled, his collar and tie were of the moment, his pumps were
new and glossy, and he wore a gardenia in his buttonhole. Lady
Charmington was talking to Lord and Lady Rugby. Lord Rugby was
explaining with tactful grace that it was lucky Sainty had been born in
the summer, otherwise he, as a M.F.H., could not possibly have been
present on the occasion. From Easter to the beginning of the cub-hunting
he was, so to speak, at leisure, and had nothing to do but talk of last
winter’s hunting. Lady Rugby, though also a keen sportswoman, was
capable of other forms of amusement, and said for her part she liked a
‘bit of season,’ but ‘poor Rug was so bored in London it was a terror to
see him.’ She was dressed with the uncompromising neatness affected by
hunting-ladies; her complexion had that bricky tint that results from
much exposure to the weather at the covert side, and fashion decreeing
undulation, her naturally straight brown hair was crimped into a series
of little ridges and furrows, whose hardness of outline and mathematical
regularity suggested corrugated iron. Somewhat to Sainty’s surprise, Ned
fell into easy conversation with this horsey person, rather suggesting,
though he did not actually say it, that he spent his life in the saddle.
But now the duchess appeared in all her glory, and dinner being
announced, Sainty offered his arm to his grandmother and headed the long
procession to the dining-hall.
‘Well, my dear boy,’ she began, when they were seated, ‘and how have you
been lately? You don’t look strong; you must take care of yourself. What
do you drink? you look as if you wanted red wine. My doctor has put me
upon whisky. I hate it, but he says I am _goutteuse_. They call
everything gout nowadays; too silly, isn’t it?’
‘I am sorry you haven’t been well, gr----’
Sainty paused, and ‘grandmother’ died in his throat. It seemed so
ludicrously inappropriate to this festive apparition at his side. He
glanced with quite a new tenderness to where old Lady Firth sat huddled
in shawls and then back to the lady on his right. Above the thick
frizzle of sherry-coloured chestnut that descended to the carefully
pencilled brows shone one of the duchess’s smaller tiaras--the great
Sunborough family crown was being kept for the ball on Thursday--the
little nose gleamed unnaturally white between the tired eyes heavily
rimmed with paint and the puffy cushions beneath them that merged into
the vivid carmine of the cheeks. The wrinkles under the chin were
gathered tightly into a great collar of diamonds and pearls sewn on a
broad black velvet. Below it the shoulders sloped away in their still
beautiful curves, displaying to the world with the indifference of long
habit their great expanse of lustreless pallor. The little of her
grace’s dress that was visible above the line of the table-cloth was of
a delicate peach colour embroidered in silver, and a huge bunch of
purple orchids cut with an almost brutal contrast against the excessive
whiteness of the flesh. She sat erect, placid, exhaling a faint
sweetness, not unlike the idol of some monstrous worship.
‘Do you like the smell of my _verveine_?’ she asked. ‘I think every
woman should have her own _parfum_. I have it sewn into all my
_corsages_. I never could bear strong coarse scents. My daughter has
rather brutalised herself, and is quite capable of using patchouli.
Horror!’
‘I’m afraid I don’t like scent at all,’ Sainty avowed penitently; ‘it
makes me feel rather sick always.’
‘And now, tell me who every one is,’ continued the duchess affably. ‘Who
is the champagne blonde with the iridescent perlage trimming next your
brother?’
‘That is Lady Eccleston,’ said Sainty.
‘Oh! of course, she has been at Sunborough House at parties; one sees
her everywhere. I ought to have remembered her’; and the duchess sent a
gracious smile towards Lady Eccleston. ‘And the pretty girl that Claude
is flirting with is her daughter--one can see the likeness. _Elle est
très bien, la jeune fille_; charming. Madame de Lissac I know: she is
_richissime_ and very generous; and your mother tells me she was your
governess once; that is very romantic. The black girls are not her
daughters, _n’est-ce pas_?’
‘Her step-daughters.’
‘Ah yes. And the men? Pryor I know; they say he is making money and will
get on. The pink boy is _encore_ a (what did you say?) Eccleston. They
resemble each other like peas, that family. And the untidy young man who
is amusing Aimée Winston so much? By the way, how came _she_ here? With
your Aunt Eva, of course. She is not a nice girl.’
The duchess delivered this condemnation with a most majestic air of
virtue. ‘I do not like a girl to be talked about,’ she continued;
‘afterwards, _je ne dis pas_; but before marriage a girl cannot be too
careful. She always succeeds with men, however. The duke declares she is
very clever; and one can see she is pleasing Mr.---- Who did you say he
was?’
‘He is a Cambridge friend of mine; his name is Parsons.’
‘He seems a nice fellow,’ Lady Rugby cut in from the other side of
Sainty. ‘I wonder if he is anything to do with the Leicestershire
Parsonses. My old uncle, Sir Tom Whittaker, who hunted the Scratchley
for years, married a widow, and one of her daughters married a Parsons.
I know it used to be a great joke in the family because he was a Parson,
don’t yer know.’
‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ Sainty answered; ‘you will have to ask him.’
Really, Ned was fitting in beautifully, and if only his relationship to
Lady Whittaker could be established, he felt he need trouble no more
about him.
The duchess yawned. ‘They are all charming, no doubt,’ she said; ‘but,
my dear boy, none of these people give much _éclat_ to your coming of
age. I felt you must have a few people whose names people would know,
just to put into the _Morning Post_. And your mother has lived so long
out of the world she knows no one--but no one. I believe she is angry
with me for insisting on the Dalsanies and Vere Deans; but I am used to
that; she has always been angry with me.’ This was getting on dangerous
ground.
‘It is very good of you to take an interest,’ Sainty said in his
stiffest manner; but the duchess did not in the least wish to be treated
as family; she thought it _was_ good of her.
‘Oh! _du tout_,’ she said suavely. ‘Besides, it was not all unselfish.
Ella Dalsany plays piquet with me, and Dalsany takes a very good hand in
the duke’s whist. I suppose,’ she added tentatively, ‘your mother would
not allow a baccarat?’
‘Good gracious!’ cried Sainty, much alarmed, ‘I don’t suppose there is a
card in the house.’
‘Oh, I always travel with my little box,’ said his grandmother. ‘But we
must respect the prejudices of the _châtelaine_; we will only play
whist.’ This was before the days of the tyranny of bridge.
The duchess glanced at Sir John Trafford, who was sitting at her right,
and seeing his attention engaged by the lady whom he had taken in, she
leaned a little towards her grandson, and sinking her voice
confidentially she murmured, ‘When I knew that your cousin here was
coming, I felt it was only kind to ask the Dalsanies; and if Ella had
her cavalier, then poor Dalsany must have _la belle comtesse_ to amuse
him; he couldn’t be left out in the cold, poor dear.’
‘Scandal, Hélo,’ Lady Rugby called out--(the duchess liked the younger
members of her family to call her by her Christian name). ‘When you have
on that expression, and I can’t hear what you say, I always know you are
taking away some one’s character.’
‘Whose character is the duchess taking away?’ asked Sir John; ‘not mine,
I hope’; and this struck her grace as so humorous that she almost
choked.
Sainty sat bewildered and vaguely pained. In the mouth of an old woman,
and that old woman his dead father’s mother, the playful innuendoes,
which to the duchess seemed only the ordinary small change of
dinner-table talk, struck him as signs of a monstrous depravity. He
glanced round the great room with its ceiling by La Guerre, and heavy
gilt decorations, and the rows of portraits by Vandyke and Lely, down
the long table with its lights and flowers and massive plate, at the two
rows of flushed, eagerly talking people stretching away on either hand,
and his heart failed him. He wondered sadly why Ned Parsons, who was one
of six children in a little shabby rectory, and the de Lissac girls,
whose grandfather was said to have been a rag and bone merchant, should
seem perfectly at home among all these splendours, while he, the founder
of the feast, the owner of the house, who had been born and bred in it,
felt so curiously ill at ease at the head of his own table. Arthur, just
fresh from school, was chattering away to Lady Eccleston and Nora de
Lissac, between whom he sat, with the ease and assurance of an old
London diner-out. It was neither birth, breeding, nor custom, then,
which made people feel at home in society. Whence came this horrible
sensation of being out of place? After all, these people, who together
produced such a dazzling effect of glittering festivity, were
individually nothing but relations, old friends, undergraduates,
schoolboys. His mother, his grandmother, his uncle Cor, his aunts, his
former governess, his cousins, his brother; he had sat down with each
and all of them to a score of meals without feeling like the lady in
_Comus_. He feared it was very snobbish of him to be so disagreeably
affected by dining in an unaccustomed room and with an unusual number of
guests. Perhaps it was the duchess, with her shocking old shoulders and
naughty hints, and the little scent bags sewn into her bodice, who
brought such a disturbing atmosphere of the great world into his life.
If so, how much worse was it going to be next day, when she would be
reinforced by these threatened strangers of her own undoubted fashion
and loose morality? The thought of all these guilty married people,
cynically invited ‘for’ each other, filled him with horror. No doubt he
exaggerated, and took the whole matter more tragically than the
circumstances warranted, but he was very young and very unsophisticated,
and things that were not right appeared to him terribly and
portentously wrong. He felt as though the home of his mother, of his own
innocent childhood, were being turned into a house of ill fame.
But Tuesday, if it brought this last brimming influx of unwelcome
strangers, brought with them one supreme compensation in the person of
Gerald Newby. Gerald, who was making a cross-country journey, was
arriving at a different station from the other guests, several miles in
an opposite direction, and Sainty decided to drive his own confidential
pony to meet his friend. His mother looked grave when she heard of it,
and asked if he did not think it would be more civil for him to be there
to receive the Dalsanies and Lady Deans. ‘Oh no, mother; the last person
they would care to see is their host,’ Sainty said. ‘You will be here,
and Uncle Cor has promised to be about; he knows them all. I shan’t be
missed.’
For once Sainty had his way, and drove off rejoicing in his escape. He
was generally nervous of driving alone, his lameness making him so
helpless in case of an accident; but to-day, that his conversation with
his friend might be quite free, he would not even take a groom with him.
He had so much to say to Gerald, so much which he could say to no one
else, that he wanted to pour it all out unchecked by fear of listening
ears. As he drove to the little roadside station in the shimmering heat
of the August afternoon, by great fields of waving corn, and under the
thick sleepy woods knee-deep in fern where he could hear the pheasants
scuttling and clucking, he felt a weight lifted off his heart; now at
last he would have some one to talk to, some one who understood. The
train was late, and the flies bothered the pony dreadfully, but at last
the long wait came to an end, and Newby, bronzed by foreign suns and
very cindery and dusty, emerged smiling from the station, and climbed
into the cart beside him.
‘Oh! you have come yourself,’ he said; ‘that was very kind. Where’s your
man?’
‘I came alone,’ Sainty answered; ‘I wanted to talk. I wanted you all to
myself, and your portmanteau must sit behind; there was no room for the
groom.’ Something in Gerald’s face made him add playfully, ‘Did you
expect a coach and four? Am I not receiving you with sufficient
ceremony?’
‘Oh, _me_!’ said Newby, with a little deprecating gesture of quite false
humility.
Sainty wanted to hear all that his friend had been doing, of the
countries he had visited, the walks he had taken, the peaks he had
climbed; but for once Newby did not seem to be inclined to talk about
himself. He leaned back, beaming lazily on the passing landscape.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘one may go where one will, to the grandest of
Swiss peaks, or the sunlight and flowers of Italy, but there is nothing
like this English country in the summer; it is so prosperous, so
established, at once homelike and ineffably high-bred, like the best of
our old landed aristocracy.’
‘O Lord!’ Sainty cried. ‘That same landed aristocracy is smothering
_me_. Wait till you see the awful specimens who have come together to
rejoice in a new recruit to their ranks.’ And he launched out into a
tirade, as enthusiastic young people will, on the barbarism of the
English upper classes, their want of education and refinement, their
inability to appreciate intellectual pleasures, their low standard of
morality, and, above all, their entire self-satisfaction and conviction
of their own perfect rightness.’
‘Look at the duke,’ he said; ‘there’s a man who owns the finest private
library in England. I don’t believe he knows even its chief treasures by
name. If it was sold to-morrow, and the shelves fronted with sham
book-backs, like the doors in the library at Belchamber, it wouldn’t
make the smallest difference to him. Rugby could keep his collection of
riding and driving-whips in them; I am told it is unique. He is a kind
of centaur; he can, and will, recount to you every run of last winter,
without omitting a fence or a ditch; but if you ask him the simplest
question about the history or archæology of the country he hunts over,
he will stare at you as if you were a madman. What have I in common with
such people? By what curious freak of nature have I been born among
them?’
‘Lord Rugby is the Duke of Sunborough’s eldest son, isn’t he?’ asked
Newby. ‘And the present duchess, if I’m not mistaken, is your
grandmother. I like to know who the people are that I’m going to meet.’
‘My grandmother!’ said Sainty tragically. ‘Well, she’s my father’s
mother, and I mustn’t say how she affects me; but oh! heavens, Gerald,
wait till you see her! And she has asked some other people, whom I don’t
even know, but who all seem to be in love with each other’s wives, and
to have to be asked to meet each other as you would engaged couples. It
sickens me, I tell you. It’s an atmosphere I can’t breathe.’
Somehow Newby, whom he had often heard give vent to sentiments of a
lofty and republican purity, and in whose mouth a favourite phrase was
‘the aristocracy of intellect,’ did not seem to enter as sympathetically
into his feelings as he had hoped. He continued smiling peacefully on
the prospect around him.
‘And where do you begin?’ he asked presently, a little inconsequently.
‘Where do I begin? How do you mean?’ Sainty stammered.
‘I mean your property, your land. When do we come to your boundary?’
‘Oh! the property,’ Sainty answered. ‘It’s pretty well all Belchamber
all the way, except just for a bit on the left of the road soon after we
started, where the Hawley woods cut in, in a sort of wedge.’
Gerald nodded placidly, as if the thought gave him pleasure.
‘I expect you’re tired after your journey, this hot weather,’ Sainty
said, finding his friend so languid. ‘Shall we shirk all the crowd, and
go and have some tea in the schoolroom when we get in?’
‘Whatever you say, my dear boy,’ Newby agreed. ‘I am entirely in your
hands.’
Sainty was aware of the slightest, most impalpable change in his
friend’s manner towards himself, just the faintest tinge of something
that might almost be called deferential in a person so naturally
authoritative as Newby; and this seemed to accentuate itself with every
acre of Chambers land across which they drove. It made him vaguely
uncomfortable; his denunciation of his peers seemed somehow to dwindle
and lose force in such an unfostering atmosphere. He had still a great
deal on his heart of which he longed to unburthen himself, but Gerald
was perversely interested in the size of the park and the number of
deer, and paid but a polite and perfunctory attention to his host’s
exposition of the sins of the British aristocracy. Later on, when they
joined the rest of the party, and Sainty, having been himself presented
to the newcomers, proceeded to perform the same office for Newby, he
noted with terror something that in any one else he would almost have
called obsequious in his friend’s attitude. He resolutely shut his eyes
to it; it was of course out of the question that a person of Newby’s
commanding intellect and noble independence of character could be in any
way affected by the mere baubles of wealth or rank in the people with
whom he came in contact. He wondered he could be so snobbish as to think
of such a thing, even to deny it; but he couldn’t help seeing that
Gerald’s manner to the duke and even his uncle Firth and Lord Dalsany
was not absolutely frank and unembarrassed.
‘He is trying to make himself agreeable for my sake,’ Sainty thought. ‘A
man whose whole life has been spent in a bracing atmosphere of noble
thought cannot feel _at home_ in the exhausted receiver that is called
“society”; but if he only knew how much better he appears with his own
natural manner, though it _is_ a little dictatorial, he would not try
and soften it even for the sake of being civil to my guests.’ What with
trying not to observe that Newby smiled and bowed too much, and not to
watch for indications of the good understanding at which his
grandmother had hinted as existing between certain members of the party,
Sainty spent an even more miserable evening than he had done the night
before.
When the duke and Lord Nonsuch had smoked their elderly cigars and gone
to bed, he succeeded in persuading Newby that he was tired, and leaving
the rest of the party listening to Lord Dalsany’s Irish stories, he
accompanied his friend to his room, bent on having out the rest of the
talk of which he had been defrauded in the afternoon.
‘It is awful, simply awful!’ he burst out, as he shut the door, ‘all
this horrible display and waste of money! I feel like Nero, sitting
through these long steamy dinners with too much to eat and too much to
drink, and thinking of the thousands of starving people who could be fed
for months on the money we waste on a meal.’
‘That is very good of you, my dear lad,’ Newby answered, stretching
himself luxuriously in the armchair which he wheeled up to the open
window, ‘but not at all what Nero would have felt.’
‘Don’t laugh at me, Gerald,’ Sainty said piteously. ‘I know it’s absurd
to rant and be highflown; but it nauseated me to hear Lady Deans talking
about these new clubs and restaurants and saying what a mercy it was to
have some place where one could get decent food. I thought of that woman
never spending less than a pound on her dinner, and thinking it was a
merit, while people were starving a few streets off. My bookseller told
me he wanted her to buy a six-shilling book the other day, and she said
she couldn’t afford it, she should get it from the library.’
‘That tall lady on your left with the black pearls was the Countess
Deans then, whom one hears so much about,’ said Newby. ‘I didn’t catch
her name when you introduced me, but I thought it was she from her
photographs, though they don’t do her justice.’
‘Grandmamma says she and Lord Dalsany are _au mieux_. Good God! what
does she mean? And that Lady Dalsany----Faugh! I can’t stir about this
dirt. Is this just their silly way of talking, or are they all really
people whom decent folk oughtn’t to ask into their houses?’
‘Oh, you exaggerate,’ said Gerald, waving his hand gently. ‘You have
lived the life of an anchorite. These Londoners have their shibboleths,
and understand each other; the badinage of a great city is not meant to
be taken literally,’
‘What _you_ must think of it all!’ cried Sainty affectionately. He had
an uneasy feeling that Newby was not as much horrified as he ought to
be. ‘I hoped,’ he went on, ‘that you might have found some congenial
companionship in my uncle; but Uncle Cor disappoints me. When he gets
with all these smart people, he seems to sink to their level. I can’t
make him out. Seeing him to-night you would never guess what real
convictions he has. I have looked up to him all my life, but this
evening he appeared frivolous and cynical; I could hardly believe it was
he talking.’
‘I thought Lord Firth charming,’ Gerald replied, with real conviction.
‘His talk seemed to me in just the right tone of easy playfulness for
light social intercourse, with ladies present. He was not in his place
in the House of Lords; nothing called for a profession of faith.’
‘And I hate all this Unionist business,’ Sainty continued. ‘I never
thought I should live to see Uncle Cor, who has always been a Liberal,
and from whom I imbibed all my own politics till I met you, making up to
that old Tory duke. They tried to get some expression of agreement out
of me last night, but I wouldn’t say what was expected of me. You know
I’m a Radical, and a Home Ruler.’
‘That is all very well for _me_,’ Gerald answered, ‘but, my dear child,
doesn’t it seem a little absurd in _your_ position? Oh, don’t mistake
me. I don’t want you to deny your convictions, but there are so many
things one believes without flourishing them in the face of the public.
You wouldn’t, for instance, care to tell your mother just how you feel
about the doctrines of revealed religion----’
Sainty drooped with discouragement. ‘It is true; it is hideously true,’
he said. ‘One is tied and bound with the chain of a hundred shams. Shall
I never be able to say what I really think? To-morrow, for instance,
nothing would content my mother but that the performances should begin
with a sort of thanksgiving service at Great Charmington. It is meant as
a solemn dedication of me. If I were really brave and honest, I should
refuse, but I think it would break my mother’s heart.’
‘You are quite right, quite right; and why _should_ you refuse? I am
sure you _do_ dedicate yourself to the principle of good which rules the
universe. What more do you mean, what more need you mean?’
‘My mother will take it as meaning much more, and I know that she does,
and so will Mrs. de Lissac and her dear old father; they will look on it
as giving in a solemn adherence to all their doctrines.’
‘You take things too seriously, my Sainty,’ said Gerald, with an
indulgent smile.
‘But it is you who have always exhorted me to take things seriously; I
have heard you inveigh a hundred times against the careless flippancy
that is the curse of our generation.’
‘Good heavens!’ said Newby, suppressing a yawn; ‘have I invented a
Frankenstein monster, who is going to turn and devour me?’
‘I don’t know you to-night, Gerald,’ Sainty said reproachfully. ‘You are
like my uncle; you seem changed somehow. Surely if there is ever a time
for serious thought and serious talk, it is the vigil of one’s
twenty-first birthday.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Newby solemnly. ‘Don’t think I minimise the importance of
all to-morrow means to you. You are coming into your kingdom, and must
rule it wisely and well; but I don’t want you to make your first
appearance in arms tilting at windmills, my dear fellow, and alienating
all the people who are your natural allies.’
‘I wanted to consult you,’ Sainty said, ‘about my speech to the tenants,
but you are tired and sleepy; it is a shame to keep you up.’
‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Newby politely, with the most transparent
effort at interest.
‘I was going to show you some heads I had put together, but I think I
won’t bother you; there is only just one thing I want to ask you. Ought
I to tell them what I really think and feel about things, about Home
Rule, for instance? Some sort of utterance will be expected of me about
politics, I feel sure.’
‘Your uncle was talking most sensibly to me after dinner about that very
thing. “My family,” he said, “have always been Liberals, but this is a
Conservative county, and the agricultural population is always
Conservative. I have had, as you know, to differ from the chiefs of my
own party. It is a painful position. Luckily for Belchamber, he has not
been required to make the choice that I have found so hard; he inherits
his politics as he inherits his estate, both, I flatter myself, the
better for a little enlightened handling by his mother and myself. He
will not be a worse statesman for having come under some Liberal
influences in his youth.” It struck me as admirable.’
‘Then you would have me be merely colourless, indulge in a few
platitudes, instead of saying what I think?’
‘What good could you effect by starting in to preach Radicalism to a
tentful of Conservative farmers merry with beef and ale, supported on
one side by a duke who is a member of a Tory government, and on the
other by a Unionist earl?’
Sainty sighed. ‘You know it is always fatally easy to me to hold my
tongue and let people think that I agree with them,’ he said bitterly;
‘courage has never been my strong point.’ He had looked to his friend
for counsel, for support, for the strength to tell the truth in the face
of all the world, the strength in which he felt himself so sadly
lacking. He left him baffled and discouraged, and all at sea as to what
he would do and say on the morrow.
As he passed down the long corridor of bedrooms, he saw the last door
before the staircase open noiselessly a very little way, as if some one
were looking out. When he came quite near to it, it was swiftly, but
still silently, closed again. The hinted scandals that had oppressed him
came crowding to his mind, thoughts of shameful, illicit things being
done in the great silent, dark house. He could not resist the curiosity
that made him lift his candle and read the name on the little ticket on
the door: it was Miss Winston’s.
Sainty and Arthur still kept the rooms they had occupied as boys, which,
with the old schoolroom and another that had once been the tutor’s and
was now Claude’s, formed a small pavilion adjoining the west wing, and
consequently at the opposite extremity of the house from the guest
chambers. To regain his own room he had to cross the whole great central
part, now black and quiet as the grave. Just as he reached the door that
shut off the family wing, he heard some one behind it. No doubt the
tapping of his stick had warned whoever it was of his approach, for as
he opened it he saw a figure swiftly vanish into the room on the right.
His first impulse was to pass on and take no notice; then it struck him
that it might be a thief, and with the sudden courage of nervous people
he went into the room holding his light high, and cried ‘Who’s there?’
He found himself face to face with his cousin. The stable clock struck
two at the moment.
‘Good heavens! Sainty,’ said Claude, with an uneasy laugh, ‘who expected
to find _you_ prowling about the house at this unearthly hour?’
‘I have been sitting up talking to Newby,’ Sainty said rather sternly.
‘What are _you_ doing dodging into rooms in the dark?’
‘We have only just left the smoking-room. I came in here to get a book
to take up to your friend Parsons; he said he should like to see it.’
‘Your candle is out; shall I give you a light?’ said Sainty.
‘So it is,’ said Claude; ‘the draught from the door, no doubt. How lucky
I met you. Good-night, dear old man.’
‘Good-night,’ said Sainty.