OF LAW AND NATURAL RIGHTS
Lynborough sat on the terrace which ran along the front of the Castle
and looked down, over Nab Grange, to the sea. With him were Leonard
Stabb and Roger Wilbraham. The latter was a rather short, slight man of
dark complexion; although a light weight he was very wiry and a fine
boxer. His intellectual gifts corresponded well with his physical
equipment; an acute ready mind was apt to deal with everyday problems
and pressing necessities; it had little turn either for speculation or
for fancy. He had dreams neither about the past, like Stabb, nor about
present things, like Lynborough. His was, in a word, the practical
spirit, and Lynborough could not have chosen a better right-hand man.
They were all smoking; a silence had rested long over the party. At last
Lynborough spoke.
“There’s always,” he said, “something seductive in looking at a house
when you know nothing about the people who live in it.”
“But I know a good deal about them,” Wilbraham interposed with a laugh.
“Coltson’s been pumping all the village, and I’ve had the benefit of
it.” Coltson was Lynborough’s own man, an old soldier who had been with
him nearly fifteen years and had accompanied him on all his travels and
excursions.
Lynborough paid no heed; he was not the man to be put off his
reflections by intrusive facts.
“The blank wall of a strange house is like the old green curtain at the
theatre. It may rise for you any moment and show you--what? Now what is
there at Nab Grange?”
“A lot of country bumpkins, I expect,” growled Stabb.
“No, no,” Wilbraham protested. “I’ll tell you, if you like----”
“What’s there?” Lynborough pursued. “I don’t know. You don’t know--no,
you don’t, Roger, and you probably wouldn’t even if you were inside. But
I like not knowing--I don’t want to know. We won’t visit at the Grange,
I think. We will just idealise it, Cromlech.” He cast his queer elusive
smile at his friend.
“Bosh!” said Stabb. “There’s sure to be a woman there--and I’ll be bound
she’ll call on you!”
“She’ll call on me? Why?”
“Because you’re a lord,” said Stabb, scorning any more personal form of
flattery.
“That fortuitous circumstance should, in my judgment, rather afford me
protection.”
“If you come to that, she’s somebody herself.” Wilbraham’s knowledge
would bubble out, for all the want of encouragement.
“Everybody’s somebody,” murmured Lynborough--“and it is a very odd
arrangement. Can’t be regarded as permanent, eh, Cromlech? Immortality
by merit seems a better idea. And by merit I mean originality. Well--I
sha’n’t know the Grange, but I like to look at it. The way I picture
her----”
“Picture whom?” asked Stabb.
“Why, the Lady of the Grange, to be sure----”
“Tut, tut, who’s thinking of the woman?--If there is a woman at all.”
“I am thinking of the woman, Cromlech, and I’ve a perfect right to think
of her. At least, if not of that woman, of a woman--whose like I’ve
never met.”
“She must be of an unusual type,” opined Stabb with a reflective smile.
“She is, Cromlech. Shall I describe her?”
“I expect you must.”
“Yes, at this moment--with the evening just this colour--and the Grange
down there--and the sea, Cromlech, so remarkably large, I’m afraid I
must. She is, of course, tall and slender; she has, of course, a
rippling laugh; her eyes are, of course, deep and dreamy, yet lighting
to a sparkle when one challenges. All this may be presupposed. It’s her
tint, Cromlech, her colour--that’s what’s in my mind to-night; that, you
will find, is her most distinguishing, her most wonderful
characteristic.”
“That’s just what the Vicar told Coltson! At least he said that the
Marchesa had a most extraordinary complexion.” Wilbraham had got
something out at last.
“Roger, you bring me back to earth. You substitute the Vicar’s
impression for my imagination. Is that kind?”
“It seems such a funny coincidence.”
“Supposing it to be a mere coincidence--no doubt! But I’ve always known
that I had to meet that complexion somewhere. If here--so much the
better!”
“I have a great doubt about that,” said Leonard Stabb.
“I can get it over, Cromlech! At least consider that.”
“But you’re not going to know her!” laughed Wilbraham.
“I shall probably see her as we walk down to bathe by Beach Path.”
A deferential voice spoke from behind his chair. “I beg your pardon, my
lord, but Beach Path is closed.” Coltson had brought Lynborough his
cigar-case and laid it down on a table by him as he communicated this
intelligence.
“Closed, Coltson?”
“Yes, my lord. There’s a padlock on the gate, and a--er--barricade of
furze. And the gardeners tell me they were warned off yesterday.”
“My gardeners warned off Beach Path?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“By whose orders?”
“Her Excellency’s, my lord.”
“That’s the Marchesa--Marchesa di San Servolo,” Wilbraham supplied.
“Yes, that’s the name, sir,” said Coltson respectfully.
“What about her complexion now, Ambrose?” chuckled Stabb.
“The Marchesa di San Servolo? Is that right, Coltson?”
“Perfectly correct, my lord. Italian, I understand, my lord.”
“Excellent, excellent! She has closed my Beach Path? I think I have
reflected enough for to-night. I’ll go in and write a letter.” He rose,
smiled upon Stabb, who himself was grinning broadly, and walked through
an open window into the house.
“Now you may see something happen,” said Leonard Stabb.
“What’s the matter? Is it a public path?” asked Wilbraham.
With a shrug Stabb denied all knowledge--and, probably, all interest.
Coltson, who had lingered behind his master, undertook to reply.
“Not exactly public, as I understand, sir. But the Castle has always
used it. Green--that’s the head gardener--tells me so, at least.”
“By legal right, do you mean?” Wilbraham had been called to the Bar,
although he had never practised. No situation gives rise to greater
confidence on legal problems.
“I don’t think you’ll find that his lordship will trouble much about
that, sir,” was Coltson’s answer, as he picked up the cigar-case again
and hurried into the library with it.
“What does the man mean by that?” asked Wilbraham scornfully. “It’s a
purely legal question--Lynborough must trouble about it.” He rose and
addressed Stabb somewhat as though that gentleman were the Court. “Not a
public right of way? We don’t argue that? Then it’s a case of dominant
and servient tenement--a right of way by user as of right, or by a lost
grant. That--or nothing!”
“I daresay,” muttered Stabb very absently.
“Then what does Coltson mean----?”
“Coltson knows Ambrose--you don’t. Ambrose will never go to law--but
he’ll go to bathe.”
“But she’ll go to law if he goes to bathe!” cried the lawyer.
Stabb blinked lazily, and seemed to loom enormous over his cigar. “I
daresay--if she’s got a good case,” said he. “Do you know, Wilbraham, I
don’t much care whether she does or not? But in regard to her
complexion----”
“What the devil does her complexion matter?” shouted Wilbraham.
“The human side of a thing always matters,” observed Leonard Stabb. “For
instance--pray sit down, Wilbraham--standing up and talking loud prove
nothing, if people would only believe it--the permanence of hierarchical
systems may be historically observed to bear a direct relation to the
emoluments.”
“Would you mind telling me your opinion on two points, Stabb? We can go
on with that argument of yours afterwards.”
“Say on, Wilbraham.”
“Is Lynborough in his right senses?”
“The point is doubtful.”
“Are you in yours?”
Stabb reflected. “I am sane--but very highly specialised,” was his
conclusion.
Wilbraham wrinkled his brow. “All the same, right of way or no right of
way is purely a legal question,” he persisted.
“I think you’re highly specialised too,” said Stabb. “But you’d better
keep quiet and see it through, you know. There may be some fun--it will
serve to amuse the Archdeacon when you write.” Wilbraham’s father was a
highly-esteemed dignitary of the order mentioned.
Lynborough came out again, smoking a cigar. His manner was noticeably
more alert: his brow was unclouded, his whole mien tranquil and placid.
“I’ve put it all right,” he observed. “I’ve written her a civil letter.
Will you men bathe to-morrow?”
They both assented to the proposition.
“Very well. We’ll start at eight. We may as well walk. By Beach Path
it’s only about half-a-mile.”
“But the path’s stopped, Ambrose,” Stabb objected.
“I’ve asked her to have the obstruction removed before eight o’clock,”
Lynborough explained.
“If it isn’t?” asked Roger Wilbraham.
“We have hands,” answered Lynborough, looking at his own very small
ones.
“Wilbraham wants to know why you don’t go to law, Ambrose.”
Lord Lynborough never shrank from explaining his views and convictions.
“The law disgusts me. So does my experience of it. You remember the
beer, Cromlech? Nobody ever acted more wisely or from better motives.
And if I made money--as I did, till the customers left off coming--why
not? I was unobtrusively doing good. Then Juanita’s affair! I acted as a
gentleman is bound to act. Result--a year’s imprisonment! I lay stress
on these personal experiences, but not too great stress. The law, Roger,
always considers what you have had and what you now have--never what you
ought to have. Take that path! It happens to be a fact that my
grandfather, and my father, and I have always used that path. That’s
important by law, I daresay----”
“Certainly, Lord Lynborough.”
“Just what would be important by law!” commented Lynborough. “And I have
made use of the fact in my letter to the Marchesa. But in my own mind I
stand on reason and natural right. Is it reasonable that I, living
half-a-mile from my bathing, should have to walk two miles to get to it?
Plainly not. Isn’t it the natural right of the owner of Scarsmoor to
have that path open through Nab Grange? Plainly yes. That, Roger,
although, as I say, not the shape in which I have put the matter before
the Marchesa--because she, being a woman, would be unappreciative of
pure reason--is really the way in which the question presents itself to
my mind--and, I’m sure, to Cromlech’s?”
“Not the least in the world to mine,” said Stabb. “However, Ambrose, the
young man thinks us both mad.”
“You do, Roger?” His smile persuaded to an affirmative reply.
“I’m afraid so, Lord Lynborough.”
“No ‘Lord’, if you love me! Why do you think me mad? Cromlech, of
course, is mad, so we needn’t bother about him.”
“You’re not--not practical,” stammered Roger.
“Oh, I don’t know, really I don’t know. You’ll see that I shall get that
path open. And in the end I did get that public-house closed. And
Juanita’s husband had to leave the country, owing to the heat of local
feeling--aroused entirely by me. Juanita stayed behind and, after due
formalities, married again most happily. I’m not altogether inclined to
call myself unpractical. Roger!” He turned quickly to his secretary.
“Your father’s what they call a High Churchman, isn’t he?”
“Yes--and so am I,” said Roger.
“He has his Church. He puts that above the State, doesn’t he? He
wouldn’t obey the State against the Church? He wouldn’t do what the
Church said was wrong because the State said it was right?”
“How could he? Of course he wouldn’t,” answered Roger.
“Well, I have my Church--inside here.” He touched his breast. “I stand
where your father does. Why am I more mad than the Archdeacon, Roger?”
“But there’s all the difference!”
“Of course there is,” said Stabb. “All the difference that there is
between being able to do it and not being able to do it--and I know of
none so profound.”
“There’s no difference at all,” declared Lynborough. “Therefore--as a
good son, no less than as a good friend--you will come and bathe with me
to-morrow?”
“Oh, I’ll come and bathe, by all means, Lynborough.”
“By all means! Well said, young man. By all means, that is, which are
becoming in opposing a lady. What precisely those may be we will
consider when we see the strength of her opposition.”
“That doesn’t sound so very unpractical, after all,” Stabb suggested to
Roger.
Lynborough took his stand before Stabb, hands in pockets, smiling down
at the bulk of his friend.
“O Cromlech, Haunter of Tombs,” he said, “Cromlech, Lover of Men long
Dead, there is a possible--indeed a probable--chance--there is a divine
hope--that Life may breathe here on this coast, that the blood may run
quick, that the world may move, that our old friend Fortune may smile,
and trick, and juggle, and favour us once more. This, Cromlech, to a man
who had determined to reform, who came home to assume--what was it? Oh
yes--responsibilities!--this is most extraordinary luck. Never shall it
be said that Ambrose Caverly, being harnessed and carrying a bow, turned
himself back in the day of battle!”
He swayed himself to and fro on his heels, and broke into merry
laughter.
“She’ll get the letter to-night, Cromlech. I’ve sent Coltson down with
it--he proceeds decorously by the highroad and the main approach. But
she’ll get it. Cromlech, will she read it with a beating heart? Will she
read it with a flushing cheek? And if so, Cromlech what, I ask you, will
be the particular shade of that particular flush?”
“Oh, the sweetness of the game!” said he.
Over Nab Grange the stars seemed to twinkle roguishly.