CRUMP FOLK GOING HOME
_THE MORNING POST says: “Messrs. Mills & Boon seem to have acquired a
monopoly in clever first Novels.” T.P.’s WEEKLY says: “Readers have
got into the habit of looking to the publications of Mills & Boon for
freshness, originality, and the novelty of surprise.”_
Mills & Boon’s New Novels
_Crown 8vo. 6s. each._
THE RED MIRAGE. I. A. R. WYLIE.
THE MAN FROM NOWHERE. VICTOR BRIDGES.
SMOKE BELLEW. JACK LONDON.
LILY MAGIC. MARY L. PENDERED.
THE GONDOLA. ROTHAY REYNOLDS.
CRUMP FOLK GOING HOME. CONSTANCE HOLME.
MALLORY’S TRYST. MRS. PHILIP CHAMPION DE CRESPIGNY.
THE SWASHBUCKLER. MRS. BAILLIE REYNOLDS.
BECAUSE OF JANE. J. E. BUCKROSE.
WILSAM. S. C. NETHERSOLE.
THE HIDDEN ROAD. JOAN SUTHERLAND.
PENELOPE’S DOORS. SOPHIE COLE.
THE RED COLONEL. GEORGE EDGAR.
THROUGH THE WINDOW. MARY E. MANN.
THE MARRIAGE OF EDWARD. LOUISE MACK.
MISS KING’S PROFESSION. E. M. CHANNON.
THE BRAT. MRS. H. H. PENROSE.
THE SPHINX IN THE LABYRINTH. MAUDE ANNESLEY.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF TIMOTHY. THOMAS COBB.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF ERMYN. HARRY JERMYN.
MIDDLEGROUND. The Author of “Mastering Flame.”
MARGARET AND THE DOCTOR. MRS. RANYARD WEST.
WITH DRUMS UNMUFFLED. L. A. BURGESS.
ONE WOMAN’S LIFE. ROBERT HERRICK.
EDWARD RACEDALE’S WILL. MARK HARDY.
CRUMP FOLK GOING
HOME
BY
CONSTANCE HOLME
“Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams”
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.
_Published 1913_
TO
MY FATHER AND MOTHER
CRUMP FOLK GOING HOME
CHAPTER I
The curse of the old place was upon it--sudden death.
The servants crept quietly, starting when the boards creaked, clutching
each other at shadows, and looking for ancestors at every turn.
Upstairs, mother and betrothed, doctor and lawyer, convoyed “Slinkin’”
Lyndesay to his latter end. The butler waited at the door, a curious
expression on his face, neither of sorrow nor indifference; possibly
the look of one assisting at an interesting experiment.
From the library, the only cheerful room at Crump, Christian de
Lyndesay looked down to the river and over the arch of the crumbling
bridge to the bay. A bitter, snarling wind had edged every hill and
headland, and the cold tide came up, hungry and gray. He shivered
suddenly. It was a thankless night to go out--where Slinkin’ Lyndesay
was going.
The evening drew on. A flight of rooks came over the park on the fling
of the wind, swept against the windows, sank, rose again, and was gone;
and the heir wondered, watching them as they swung towards the woods,
whether they carried the black soul of Slinkin’ Lyndesay with them.
Almost with the thought came the sound of movement overhead, and,
shortly after, steps on the shallow stairs. When they reached the hall
he recognised them. Nobody but the lawyer walked with one leg and ran
with the other. Then came the doctor, less certain of his dignity than
usual; after him, the faint, far-off whispering of silk; lastly, a
light, firm step, that told nothing. Christian looked longingly at the
French window.
The lawyer’s left leg walked in sedately, but was overrun by the
right, which almost rushed him into Christian’s arms. The left backed
promptly, and bumped him into the doctor, but he was too distracted
to apologise. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand, which he shuffled
continually like a pack of cards.
“Your step-brother is dead,” said the doctor, switching on the light
from the door, so that the oak panelling and the windows went black,
and Christian’s fair head stood out sharply like a young saint’s.
He was home barely a couple of hours ago from a long tour abroad, and
both doctor and lawyer looked at him curiously, standing as he was
on the threshold of a new and unexpected experience. He had not been
of much account hitherto, with the master of Crump scarcely turned
thirty; but now he was everything. It was astonishing how simple he
looked,--and how little one knew of him.
“I know,” Christian answered, thinking of the rooks, and stopped. Not
that it mattered, for the words reached neither of his companions.
Looking from one to the other, he beheld the fingering of a great
surprise. The face of the butler returned to him, and he wondered
suddenly what Slinkin’ Lyndesay’s death could have had to say to his
life.
The silk-whisper along the hall had something cruel in it, and again
he looked at the window. An old keeper, passing, halted and spoke, and
with a sense of relief he went out quickly into the bleak night. Doctor
and lawyer exchanged glances; the former shrugged his shoulders ever so
slightly; then their eyes went back to the door.
Alicia de Lyndesay came in very erect, very composed, her hands and
face very still. The day’s tragedy had not softened by one whit the set
line of her lips. You would never have guessed that she had laid her
heart as a broken flower is laid on the breast of the slinkin’ hound
upstairs.
The lawyer drew forward a chair, and the doctor surreptitiously pushed
a footstool, but neither looked at her for more than a second, and they
did not look at all at the girl who followed behind.
Deb entered with her head up, white but tranquil, in full command
of herself, to all appearance almost unstirred. The lawyer ventured
a chair in her direction also, and she took it with a brief word of
thanks, folding her hands and looking straight in front of her.
Mrs. Lyndesay touched the bell and ordered tea, and there was a
chilling pause, during which the two men stared uneasily at the carpet;
while before the mother’s hidden gaze was nothing but a slinkin’ hound
slipping away from her for ever.
“Where is Christian?” she asked at last, looking round. “They told
me he had arrived.” There was no need in her voice, only desire for
information.
“He was here a moment ago,” the doctor explained hurriedly. “Somebody
called him. I do not know where he went.”
She poured the tea with a steady hand.
“He does not care, of course. His brother was nothing to him alive.
Dead, his memory will be less than nothing. You will go home to-night,
Deborah, I suppose?”
The words framed more command than interrogation, but the girl’s quiet
assent was not in the very least submissively acquiescent. Deb might be
poor, might have lost everything she had hoped for in the world, but
she was a Lyndesay meeting Lyndesay upon equal terms, and the mistress
of Crump knew it.
“Christian will go with you. I will have him sent for,” she went on,
and, almost as if he had heard, Christian appeared in the doorway. He
shook hands with Deborah silently and rather shyly, for they had met
but seldom since they were children, and then, still without speaking,
laid a hand on his mother’s shoulder, and bent to kiss her. She started
violently when he touched her, twisting her head and staring up into
the fair, kind face so near her own with an expression that made the
onlookers catch their breath; and he withdrew his hand slowly, flushing
as he stood away from her.
“Sit down!” she said coldly. “We can dispense with that sort of thing,
you and I. Why were you not here to meet us?”
“Old Brathay called me,” he replied, taking a seat quietly, and handing
Deborah a plate which she refused with a gesture. “One of the puppies
is ill. I ought to have been here, of course. I am sorry.”
“I suppose you know your brother is dead?” she went on, in the same
lifeless tone. “You would not have cared to see him, I am aware, and he
did not ask for you. But before he died he gave us news of importance.”
“Of importance--to me,” Deb put in on her own account, with curious
ease. “We were to have been married this year, as I believe you know.
And now, it seems, he was married already.”
The elder men did look at her then--at the aloof face, and the
straight, slim figure with its loosely-clasped hands; and from her
to the rigid mother and Christian’s dropped eyes. It was said the
Lyndesays always wore a mask.
“That alters things,” Christian observed thoughtfully, with no sign of
perturbation in his quiet voice. “Slinker was always good at surprises.
I suppose hounds are probably some other chap’s, now?”
“You need not be afraid!” Mrs. Lyndesay broke in sharply. “He married
beneath him--one of those people who do not exist except in the eyes of
Government--but at least we are spared--_that!_”
“He married a horse-dealer’s daughter,” the lawyer explained
hastily and uncomfortably--“three years ago--a horse-dealer’s
daughter in Witham. The father has been dead some time, and since
she left her husband she has been living with a married sister
in Canada. Mr. Lyndesay did not offer us any explanation of his
extraordinary--proceedings.”
“I used to know quite a human sort of horse-dealer in Witham,” said
Christian. “Gave me rides when I was a youngster, and told me tales by
the hour--an interesting character, in his way. And I remember he had
an uncommonly nice daughter----” he checked apologetically--“it’s a
very wild night.”
Deb laughed queerly, and stood up, and Mrs. Lyndesay rang and ordered
the brougham.
The departing guest did not offer her hostess a hand.
“Good-bye,” she said. “You will be glad to say good-bye. You have never
been kind to me, and you will be pleased to be rid of me. We might have
been friends, perhaps, for Stanley’s sake, but it seems we are not to
have the chance. You need not be afraid that I shall ever trouble you
again, though I shall not go away, as no doubt you expect. The county
must get used to seeing me about as usual, and in time you will forget
that I still live at your gates.”
“Be thankful things are no worse!” Mrs. Lyndesay’s voice, grown
suddenly strident, arrested her at the door. “Be thankful you have
been spared what you deserve--you who would have married my son for
his property and his position, grasping at him with both hands, though
caring no more for him than for his shadow on the wall!”
After the shocked hush, lawyer and doctor stood up simultaneously,
saying “Madam!” in the same breath. It was a poor attempt, and she
ignored it.
“You never cared! He was Lyndesay of Crump to you--no more. Lyndesay of
Crump, with his money and his name and his fine old place. The man was
nothing to you--you miserable parasite on a proud old house! You would
have married Christian here on the same terms--isn’t that true? Answer
me! Can you deny it?”
Doctor and lawyer made a desperate bid for the French window, shocked
to the depths of their ceremonious souls, but in spite of their haste
they could not escape Deb’s voice, the voice of a prisoner at the bar.
“It is true!” she heard herself saying, facing the hard eyes of
Slinker’s mother; and then Christian slid a hand through her arm, and
drew her out.
“Old Brathay’s in the kitchen with the puppy, worrying the cook out of
her wits,” he informed her, as they crossed the hall. “Let’s get down
to Kilne as quick as we can. I’ve always heard that your father was no
end of a hand at hounds.”
Footmen hurried them into wraps. An obsequious butler all but lifted
them into the carriage. The lamps flashed a moment on the wide hall as
the smooth wheels bore them away. Deb cast one glance at the dark pile
of the house as they passed; then sat back, silent. Crump blinds had
dropped on more than a dead master.
“It’s an unforgiving sort of night!” Christian said dreamily from his
corner, as they rolled down the last of the avenue, the great trees
clashing overhead. “On nights like this I believe Westmorland breaks
her heart for some old sin of long ago. She beats at the heavens, and
they are brass. God does not hear. Brathay is like an old hen with
hounds, isn’t he?”
She sat up, trying to see his face in the pale light over the river.
“You must let me tell you,” she said quickly and tensely. “I spoke the
truth. I did not love your brother. But at least I loved no one else.
And he was good to me.”
Christian nodded comprehendingly.
“Slinker had his moments, I suppose,” he said. “The rest of the time he
was--Slinker. I’m glad he was good to you.”
They plunged into the shadow of the bridge, where other maddened giants
were at strife. The full tide had swung the river far up its banks, and
they could hear the weir above the shout of the wind. Deb leaned back,
a growing sense of quiet upon her. Christian’s was a presence that
asked nothing, took nothing, least of all sought for your miserable
hidden secrets. He accepted you as you were, and, in some utterly
unreasoned way, made you feel that he was glad of you. She rested a
little in his shadow.
The carriage stopped at the near end of the village, by a creepered
house backed by the hill and faced by the river, and Deb, in the road,
held out a firm hand.
“You’re not coming in,” she said decidedly. “Brathay knows a hundred
times more about hounds than father. This is good-bye between me and
Crump--you don’t need telling that. You want to pat me on the head,
and I won’t have it--not with all the best intentions in the world! So
say good-bye quickly, and go, for there’s quite sufficient anathema in
store for me, without Clark adding that I kept his horses out in the
rain.”
He dislodged her gently, and opened the gate. Then he took the hand he
had ignored.
“Of course I can’t come in if you won’t have me,” he said, “but you
shan’t always shut me out. Please remember me very kindly to Mr.
Lyndesay. And there’s no good-bye between Kilne and Crump, you know
that as well as I do.”
He dismissed the brougham at the turn to the stables, and walked up the
steep incline until the avenue had swallowed him whole. Above him the
knit branches rocked and wrestled as the wind tore at their crests. It
was pitch-dark under their swaying canopy. Now and then a sweep of rain
caught him in the face round some monster trunk. He stood still in the
narrow, sheathed road, looking up and thinking. How strange it was
that Slinker should be gone, and he himself in his place! It was hard
luck on Slinker, he thought, to have been cast out of life so soon and
so sharply by the stroke of a whirling slate--to have sped his soul on
a tempest-night such as this. Slinker was the sort to have crept out of
existence unnoticed, leaving the world uneasily doubtful that he might
not reappear at any moment. The countryside had not christened him
“Slinkin’” Lyndesay for nothing.
Apart, however, from this touch of half-satiric sympathy, he felt
little human sorrow for his half-brother. The bond between them had
generally been strained to the snapping-point of extreme dislike. He
had a hundred times more feeling for his young cousin, Lionel Lyndesay
of Arevar, a mile or two over the river, on the far side of Cantacute.
Slinker had been unbearable--always. Crump had meant nothing to him
but the money it stood for, and the pleasure that ran with the money.
He had often gloated over the amount certain fairy woods represented,
speculated lightly upon the price of certain farms that he was free to
sell. Christian looked through the dark to where Dockerneuk, he knew,
lay in the arm of the fell, and thought of the peril that had come so
near. It had been within an ace of sale, but it was saved now. Dixon of
Dockerneuk, at least, would be glad that Slinker was dead.
Yet the County--(always with a capital)--had approved of Slinker.
Slinker had always made a point of turning up at the right place in
the right suit with the right buttonhole. He knew what was due to his
position, so Christian had been told--often. Christian himself was
supposed to be deficient in this quality--so-called. Christian, home
from college, had been the friend of the farmers, made a name in the
wrestling-ring, played football and ridden at the shows. “Lakin’”
Lyndesay, they called him--the same clear-witted judges who had framed
their delicate sobriquet for his brother. Slinker had merely sat on
Grand Stands and distributed prizes, clapped hands and crooked an arm
for the principal lady present. No wonder the County had thought a lot
of Slinker! He had been so careful about his conduct--in public.
Theirs was a race with a shadow on it, cursed and foredoomed, proud
with age and old in pride. Their mother came of the Devonshire branch,
and had early married Egbert de Lyndesay of Crump, who had died two
years later, leaving William, his cousin and former heir, as guardian
of his six-weeks child. Within three years William had married the
widow, and then Christian was born.
Nominal owner for so long, William never had to face the humiliation of
deposition, for he died a few months before Stanley came of age, little
thinking that in ten years’ time the young man would have followed him
to the grave. But now Stanley, too, was gone, and Christian and his
mother were left in the old house to find what other mutual ground they
might.
She had always hated him, he reflected, almost unemotionally. The
situation was too old for new pain. As an affectionate child he had
broken his heart over her attitude, but in the end he had come to
accept it. Nor had his father shown much feeling towards him, either.
Occasionally he had looked at him with whimsical eyes, as if meditating
some advance, but his mother’s presence had always stultified any
growth of happy intimacy. He had been sent to school early, and
William Lyndesay, to whom life had given most things at second hand
except a certain bitter sense of humour, had been content to remain
outside his child’s heart, busying himself with ordering the estate
of his supplanter. Yes, they had all worn masks, Christian thought:
his father, smilingly impersonal and aloof; his mother, obstinately
and apparently unreasonably cruel; he, himself, puzzled and hurt
but finally acquiescent; while as for Slinker--he laughed rather
cynically--it would appear that Slinker had worn as many masks as a
troupe of mummers!
At last the wind was dropping. He sauntered up to the top of the avenue
and out by the top lodge beyond the trees, where a pale moon showed
him the land sinking in a vast, watery hollow and then rising again.
He thought suddenly of Deb, and wondered how she had ever come to
countenance Slinkin’ Lyndesay.
Deb was one of the Kilne Lyndesays--a branch more remote from the
parent stem than either that in Devonshire or at Arevar, but in many
ways closest of all. Kilne Lyndesays had been Crump stewards for
centuries, serving the fine estate from father to son with inherited
and increasing devotion, which found in Roger, the last of the list,
its most perfect expression and, alas! its culmination, also. For Roger
had no son to follow him; only a daughter, to whom the heritage could
not pass.
For forty years he had set all his brain, his energy and his love
to the prospering of Crump, and under his hands it had touched its
highest point of fortune. During Stanley’s long minority he had nursed
the estate like a tender, living thing, backed by William Lyndesay
in all he did, and handing it over at last with the mingled anguish
of pride and pain which only those know who have given themselves
whole-heartedly for what is not their own. He had wished to resign
at the time, but Mrs. Lyndesay had pressed him to remain in charge,
pleading Stanley’s youth and inexperience, and for two years longer
he had stayed at his post. But he took badly to the new position, and
the reaction of fulfilled work as well as the languor of old age was
upon him, so that the end of the two years found the Crump agency gone
from his branch for ever. The wrench had been cruel at first, but now
the peace of evening had reached him, and his mind dwelt chiefly in
the past. And at least the old home was left to him. That had been one
of Slinker’s few gracious acts in his short but singularly ungracious
life.
Sometime in his fifty-third year, Roger Lyndesay had withdrawn his
attention momentarily from the estate, and married a Morton from
Appleby, thrown by fate across his path on a visit, a quiet lady who
had drifted gently into Kilne, and almost as imperceptibly out of it
to her grave on the high fell-side. So Deb had been a lonely little
girl in a lonely house,--a rather fierce, intensely reserved little
girl, pure Lyndesay and no Morton whatever, a strange little girl who
loved the woods and the silent places, and rarely made friends with
anybody in her own station. She was bred in awe of Crump, and held
aloof from the Lyndesay boys in a mood that was half reverence and
half resentment, though for Lionel, to whom these sentiments did not
apply, she had her moments of kindly condescension. Her education
was represented by a series of battles royal with inadequate daily
governesses until she was thirteen, when her solitary Morton aunt
descended in wrath, and bore her south for five weary and interminable
years. She had come back at last, however, polished and finished, a
masked Lyndesay as much as any of them.
She had certainly been difficult to know, Christian reflected, looking
back upon the four years since her return, and his own college
vacations. He had really seen very little of her, considering the tie
between the two houses, and their near situation; and for the last
eighteen months he had been abroad, glad to escape from the atmosphere
of his home, yet tortured always by the Lyndesay longing for his own
soil.
He was in Japan when the news of the engagement reached him, and he had
written a couple of congratulatory notes, wondered a little, and let
the matter pass. It was fairly easy to understand, after all, whatever
you might think of Slinker. She was poor, probably ambitious, and
Lyndesay of Crump was the Catch of the County (always with capitals).
Any girl might have done it, he had thought--in Japan; but to-night he
had seen her with new eyes, and he wondered again. She had not looked
that sort of girl, he reflected--not in the least the sort of girl to
stand Slinker for a second after she had once really known him.
Of course it was easy for him to sneer, to call her in question. The
temptation was not lightly to be despised, a Lyndesay not lightly to
be said nay--if only it had been anybody but Slinker! Slinker’s face
rose before him with its pale-blue gaze, colourless hair and smooth,
guileless smile, and he frowned distressfully. Surely she must have
shut the eyes of her soul!
He strolled back through the trees in the faint light filtering on to
the muddy road at his feet. The striving arms were growing fitfully
still; the land seemed to be curling itself into sleep with a tired
sigh. He thought fancifully that his very passing had hushed it to
rest. It had risen in storm for the flight of Slinker’s spirit; for the
new master it had sunk into peace. He spread his hands over it in a
sort of benediction as he came out in front of the house. He would see
that it was cherished.
As he went up the steps, the first stroke of the passing bell came
to him across the desolate park and the troubled water, and he stood
bareheaded while it told its tale of death, each long pause between the
heavy notes fraught full with listening souls that had gone home on
the same music. He shivered a little as he turned at last to the empty
hall. His mother was upstairs--he did not need to ask where. The land
was glad of him, but he wanted a more human touch than that. The place
was so lonely and yet so full of ghosts! Even Slinker would have been
better than nothing. But Slinker was dead, and Christian was Lyndesay
of Crump. Looking up at the eyeless windows, he wondered how long it
would be before he came to lie where Slinker was lying, shot into
eternity by the family fate.