AN OLD FAMILY AND ITS HOME
Withington Chase was a fine old Jacobean mansion, which had been added
to from time to time as whim or necessity had dictated.
The walls of the original structure were composed of small red bricks,
relieved at frequent intervals, as far as the main frontage was
concerned, by fluted pilasters of white stone with Ionic capitals,
which, when seen from a little distance, had all the effect of marble.
However incongruous and out of keeping with the general scheme of the
house the various additions which had been patched on to it during the
course of the last two centuries might have seemed when they were crude
and new, Time’s chastening fingers had mellowed them to a certain
degree of beauty, so that in these latter days the general effect was
that of a harmonious and homogeneous whole.
Originally there had been a much older mansion, which, after having
been partially destroyed by fire, had been razed to the ground, all of
it save one sturdy fragment which, for some unknown reason, had been
allowed to stand.
This relic of a state of things long vanished was an octagonal tower,
about sixty feet in height, built of undressed blocks of grey stone,
held together by a mortar as hard as themselves. The interior of the
tower consisted of three small rooms, one above the other, with a
leaded roof surmounted by a breast-high parapet. Each of the rooms was
lighted by a couple of long narrow openings in the wall, which at one
time might have been glazed, but were so no longer. Of these rooms the
ground floor one alone was now put to any service, access to the
others, owing to the rotten state of the woodwork, being deemed a risk
not worth adventuring. The basement in question was used as a
receptacle for gardeners’ tools, and a general storage place for things
horticultural, which had been allowed to accumulate there for years.
As already stated, the tower had formed a part of the older mansion of
Withington Chase, although what the intention had been in building it,
and to what special purposes it had been put, nobody nowadays seemed to
know. There it was, however; and there—the elements being its only
enemies—it was likely to remain for some centuries to come. It was
about five or six hundred yards apart from the more modern mansion, the
space between the two being occupied by the belt of timber before
mentioned.
The main entrance to Withington Chase was approached by a broad
carriage-drive, which swept with a graceful curve from the lodge some
half a mile away. The park was well timbered, and contained a number of
grand old trees said to have been planted before the present mansion
was in existence. In front of the house, but intersected by the drive,
was a spacious expanse of closely-shaven lawn, to the right of which
was a small but choicely kept flower-garden, while on its left was a
shrubbery of tall clipped hedges and thick clumps of evergreens, among
the sheltered paths of which Sir Gilbert found it pleasant to take his
constitutional when the weather was too cold and raw to allow of his
walking elsewhere in the open air.
The master of Withington Chase was proud of his long descent, and that
not without reason.
He could trace back his pedigree on the male side in unbroken sequence
to the time of Henry IV. One head of the family had fought at
Agincourt, another had distinguished himself at Malplaquet; while
scions of the family, more than one could count on one’s fingers, had
fought and, in several cases, died for their king and country wherever
the British flag had penetrated. Quite a number of Clares had been in
Parliament from time to time, and if none of them had been noted for
his eloquence, or had risen to office, they had all possessed the
negative virtue of being staunch voters, men whose political opinions
could be relied upon never to stray beyond the hard and fast lines laid
down by their own party.
The present baronet had taken no share in public affairs, and had
declined more than once to allow himself to be nominated for a seat in
Parliament. An occasional appearance on the magisterial bench, which
grew still more occasional with advancing years, just sufficed to
remind his brother justices and the good folk of Mapleford, that Sir
Gilbert Clare of Withington Chase had not yet been gathered to his
ancestors in the family vault.
Sir Gilbert, at the age of five-and-twenty, had inherited an
impoverished estate, and, by consequence, a diminished revenue.
His father had been a man of fashion and a gamester, under the Regency,
and in the course of a few years of reckless expenditure had contrived
to undo the work of several generations of thrifty progenitors. This
was a state of things which the young baronet at once set himself to
remedy. The town house and its contents were sold to the highest
bidder; the Yorkshire property was let on lease to a wealthy
manufacturer; while the Withington establishment was cut down to the
lowest limits compatible with keeping up his station in the county.
Unfortunately for his worldly prospects—and he was the first to admit
the fact later on—Sir Gilbert had married about a year prior to his
father’s death, and, little likely as one would have deemed him, with
his cold temperament, to commit such an imprudence, had married for
love. His bride had come of a good family, but beyond a trifling dowry
of a few thousand pounds, had had nothing save a pretty face, and a
piquant manner to recommend her. Such as she was, however, she had
contrived to fascinate the haughty young heir of Withington Chase.
Alas! that it should have to be told, but in the course of a few brief
years after marriage the pretty face had become a memory of the past,
and the piquant manner had degenerated into the querulous repinings of
a semi-invalid; for Lady Clare was one of those women who find in a
naturally delicate constitution an ample excuse for shirking all the
active duties of life, and for coddling themselves into a state of
chronic invalidism, the chief features of which, in her case, seemed to
be reclining the day through on a couch, and being waited on, hand and
foot, by everyone about her.
Under these circumstances it was scarcely to be wondered at that, after
a time, Sir Gilbert’s home-life became intolerable to him. He was by
nature of a restless disposition, with a strong inclination for travel
and adventure, and by degrees his absences from the Chase grew longer,
till at length it came to pass that he would be away for several months
at a time.
It was during one of these absences that his wife died, greatly to his
surprise and relief. She had so coddled herself up for years, and had
made of herself such a hothouse plant, that a slight chill, too trivial
in the first instance to seem worth notice, had sufficed to carry her
off. She left behind her a son ten years old, the John Alexander Clare
to whom we have already been introduced.
Whatever might have been Lady Clare’s defects in other ways, she had
passionately loved her child.
Unfortunately, however, not content with loving him, she had done her
best to spoil him. This, Sir Gilbert’s frequent absences had allowed
her ample opportunities for doing. When he was at the Chase it was
tacitly understood between mother and son that matters were on a
different footing. At such times her ladyship curbed, in some measure,
the display of her affection, and Alec left off bird-nesting and
consorting with Martin Rigg, and attended assiduously at the rectory,
where the Rev. Bruce Amor was doing his best to ground him in the
humanities.
With his mother’s death everything was changed for Alec.
Whether Sir Gilbert had all along been aware of the way in which his
son was being spoiled, but had his own reasons for ignoring the fact,
or whether some meddler had made it his business to enlighten him, the
result was the same as far as the boy was concerned. In place of good,
easy-going Mr. Amor, he was now put under the charge of a tutor whose
reputation as a martinet had been his chief qualification in the eyes
of the baronet. Mr. Duggan’s instructions were to prepare the lad for a
public school and in the meantime, as Sir Gilbert expressed it, to
“break him in.”
And now for Alec began an experience which was all the harder to bear
by reason of what had gone before.
The new tutor was like a baleful shadow which dogged him wherever he
went. From the time he rose till the time he went to bed he could never
get rid of him for more than a few minutes at a time. It was a tyranny
which at length became almost unbearable and went far towards breaking
the lad’s all but indomitable spirit.
One day, when he had been only a few weeks at the Chase, Mr. Duggan,
with the view, perhaps, of keeping up his reputation as a martinet,
chose, by way of punishment for some trifling fault, to administer a
sound caning to his pupil. The lad took his punishment without a
murmur, but half an hour later, he was missing; nor, when search came
to be made, was he anywhere to be found.
Alec, however, was no great distance away.
Being nearly as active as a squirrel, he had climbed the bole of one of
the big old trees in the park, and there, for two days and nights—the
month being June—he lay perdu in his leafy shelter, being supplied with
food meanwhile by Martin Rigg, who was the only person in the secret of
his hiding-place. It was only his father’s threat, conveyed to him by
that faithful servitor, to send for Captain Darville’s bloodhounds and
so track him down, that induced him to give himself up.
For this freak he was sentenced to a week of bread-and-water in a
darkened room. Even so, he was not left wholly forlorn, food and
candles and books being surreptitiously conveyed to him from the
servants’ hall. But Mr. Duggan never laid hands on him again.
In due course this period of his life came to an end, and it was with
something of the feeling of a captive released after a long
imprisonment that he one day found himself on his way to Harrow, from
which place, in the natural sequence of things, he proceeded to
Cambridge.
All his life Alec had stood in awe of his father. It was a feeling
which, to some extent, had been fostered by his mother. To both of them
it had been as a load lifted off their lives when the baronet left home
on one of his excursions, and both had looked forward with dread to his
return. There had been no cordiality, no sympathy, no _rapprochement_
in any proper sense of the word, between father and son.
That, however, had been owing to no fault on the boy’s part, for Alec’s
was one of those bright, open dispositions which respond readily to
whatever kindly influences may be brought to bear on them. But Sir
Gilbert had no liking for children, or young people, and it was not in
his nature to make any exception even in the case of his own son. He
had kept himself aloof from him from the first, and with the lapse of
years the silent, passive breach between the two, if such it could be
termed, grew gradually wider and more impossible of being bridged over.
Many an hour’s heartache had the boy, more especially after his
mother’s death, but there was too large a tincture of family pride in
his composition to allow of even an inkling of what he felt to be
visible on the surface. More than once in after-life he said bitterly
to himself: “If when I was young, my father had treated me as other
fathers treat their sons, I should have been a different man from what
I am now.”
That might, or might not, have been the case.
It was while Alec was at Harrow that Sir Gilbert married again.
There was no question of sentiment mixed up with his second matrimonial
venture, as there had been with his first. It was the simple fact of
Miss Delmayne being possessed of a fortune of sixty thousand pounds in
her own right that led him to propose to her.
On her part, the lady, who had seen thirty summers, had no illusions.
She was perfectly aware for what reason she was being sought, but, all
the same, it seemed to her that she would have been very foolish to let
slip the chance of becoming Lady Clare, of Withington Chase.
She was a capable, managing woman, who allowed her husband to go and
come and do just as he liked, without any repining or questioning on
her part—a mode of procedure which just suited the baronet. On the
other hand, she tolerated no interference in domestic matters, or the
indoor management of the Chase. It may be accounted as a virtue in her
that she was no more inclined for an extravagant style of living than
was her husband. Still more did this become the case after her three
sons were born; indeed, for the sake of their future she began after a
time to develop a disposition which, in a person of her social
position, might almost be termed penurious.
Lady Clare’s special grievance, and it was one which debarred her from
seeking the sympathy of others—the one thorn in her pillow—was the
existence of her husband’s eldest son.
In that particular, if in no other, it seemed to her that Providence
had dealt hardly with her. No such person ought to have been born; or,
if that could not have been avoided, his sojourn in this vale of tears
should have been of the briefest. To her it seemed a monstrous thing
that anyone other than her own darling Randolph should be the legal
heir to his father’s title and estates. More especially hard did it
seem to her in view of the fact that a third of the dowry she had
brought her husband had gone to clear off certain old mortgages
contracted by the preceding baronet, and in so far, might be said to
have benefited the estate in perpetuity.
Yet, in the face of this, Randolph, at his father’s death, would only
be entitled to a younger son’s share of the baronet’s savings—provided
there should be any to divide—both the Hertfordshire and the Yorkshire
estates being strictly entailed. Her ladyship felt that she had indeed
just cause for repining.
She was coldly gracious to Alec, whenever that young man made his
appearance at the Chase, which, as time went on, became less frequently
than ever. He felt that he was not wanted at home, that he had now
become less to his father even than he had been before, and he knew
that his instincts did not deceive him when they told him that in her
ladyship he had an enemy whom no efforts on his part would avail to
conciliate.
It was as well, perhaps, for more reasons than one, that Lady Clare had
no knowledge of the considerable sums disbursed by the baronet from
time to time in liquidation of the debts contracted by his spendthrift
heir. In those matters Mr. Page, the family solicitor, was the only
person taken into Sir Gilbert’s confidence. It was a source of
gratification to her ladyship to know that father and son lived on
permanently bad terms with each other; and when, after that October
night which saw the heir banished from home, her husband told her that
Alec had gone abroad, and that they were not likely to be troubled with
him or his affairs again for a long time to come, she sincerely
rejoiced. Alec was wild and careless of his health, and reckless in
many ways. There was no knowing what might come to pass. It no longer
seemed to her the foolish daydream she had deemed it heretofore, that
she might, perhaps, live to hear her son addressed as Sir Randolph
Clare of Withington Chase.
It was well for her ladyship, as it is for all of us, that there was no
invisible hand to draw aside the curtain of the future and reveal to
her even a glimpse of what was to be.
Meanwhile, the real heir had unaccountably vanished from the haunts
which had known him, and was as one dead to that little world in which
he had been such a familiar figure. No word of him, or message of any
kind reached his whilom associates. A vague rumour got spread about,
originating no one seemed to know how or whence, that he had joined a
certain exploring expedition which just then was being a good deal
talked about; but it was a rumour which was never confirmed.
Men talked and wondered for a little while, and then presently he was
forgotten.