A bachelor's an unfinished thing ... He wants somebody to listen to
his talk.--EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
Reader, do you know Barford, in Hampshire? If you don't, I can tell you
how to get to it. You take train from Victoria, and you get out at
Saundersfoot. There is nothing at Saundersfoot, except a wilderness of
lodgings and a tin station and a high wind. It need not detain an active
mind beyond the necessary moment of enquiring by which road it may be
most quickly left. I cannot tell you who Saunders was, nor why the
watering-place was called after his foot. But if you walk steadily away
from it for five miles inland, along the white chalky road between the
downs, you will arrive at the little village of Barford.
There is only one road, so you cannot miss your way. Little twisty lanes
fretted with sheep-tracks drop down into it now and then from the
broad-shouldered downs on either side, but take no notice of them. If
you persevere, you will in due course see the village of Barford lying
in front of you, which, at a little distance, looks as if it had been
carelessly swept into a crease between the downs, while a few cottages
and houses on the hillside seem to have adhered to the ground, and
remained stuck where they were when the sweeping took place.
After you have passed the pond and the post office, and before you reach
the school, you will see a lodge, and an old Italian iron gateway,
flanked by a set of white wooden knobs planted in the ground on either
side, held together by chains. The white knobs are apparently there in
order to upset carriages as they drive in or out. But very few carriages
have driven in or out during the last two years, except those of the
owner of Barford Manor, Wentworth Maine. Wentworth, since he inherited
the place from his uncle five years ago, had always led a somewhat
secluded life. But during the last two years, ever since his
half-brother, Michael, had been sentenced and imprisoned in Italy,
Wentworth had withdrawn himself even more from the society of his
neighbours. He continued to shoot and hunt, and to do his duties as a
magistrate and as a supporter of the Conservative party, but his thin,
refined face had a certain worn, pinched look, which spoke of long
tracts of solitary unhappiness. And the habit of solitude was growing on
him.
The old Manor House, standing in its high-walled gardens, its sunny low
rooms looking out across the down, seemed wrapped in an atmosphere of
ancient peace, which consorted as ill with the present impression of the
place as does old Gobelin tapestry with a careful modern patch upon its
surface. The patch, however, adroitly copied, is seen to be an
innovation.
The old house, which had known so much, had sheltered so much, had kept
counsel so long, seemed to resent the artificial peace that its present
owner had somewhat laboriously constructed round himself, within its
mellow, ivied walls.
There is a fictitious tranquillity which is always on the verge of being
broken, which depends largely on uninterrupted hours, on confidential,
velvet-shod servants, on a brooding dove in a cedar, on the absence of
the inharmonious or jarring elements which pervade daily life.
Such an imitation peace, coy as a fickle mistress, Wentworth cherished.
Was it worth all the trouble he took to preserve it, when the real thing
lay at his very door?
On this February morning, as he sat looking out across the down, white
in the pale sunshine, the current of his life ran low. He had returned
the night before from one of his periodical journeys to Italy to visit
Michael in his cell. He was tired with the clang and hurry of the long
journey, depressed almost to despair by the renewed realisation of his
brother's fate. Two years--close on two years, had Michael been in
prison.
In Wentworth's faithful heart that wound never healed. To-day it bled
afresh. He bit his lip, and his face quivered.
* * * * *
Wentworth was not as handsome as Michael, but, nevertheless, he was
distinctly good to look at, and the half-brothers, in spite of the
fifteen years' difference between their ages, bore a certain superficial
resemblance to each other. Wentworth was of middle height, lightly and
leanly built, with a high bridge on a rather thin nose, and with narrow,
clean grey eyes under light eyelashes. He looked as if he had been made
up of different shades of one colour. His light brown hair had a little
grey in it, his delicately cut face and nervous hands were both tanned,
by persistent exposure to all kinds of weather, to nearly the same
shade of indeterminate brown as his hair.
You could not look at Wentworth without seeing that he was a man who had
never even glanced at the ignoble side of life, for whose fastidious,
sensitive nature sensual lures had no attraction, a man who could not
lie, who could not stoop, whose mind was as clean as his hand, and, for
an Englishman, that is saying a good deal. He was manly in a physical
sense. He rode straight, he shot well. He could endure bodily strain
with indifference, though he was not robustly built. He was sane,
even-tempered, liable to petty resentments, mildly and resolutely
selfish, except where Michael was concerned, a conscientious and just
master--at least, just in intention--a patient and respectful son where
patience and respect had not been easy.
The strain of scholar and student in him was about evenly mixed with
that of the country gentleman. The result was a certain innate sense of
superiority which he was not in the least aware that he showed. He had
no idea that he was considered "fine," and "thinking a good deal of
himself," by the more bucolic of his country neighbours. No one could
say that Wentworth was childlike, but perhaps he was a little childish.
He certainly had a _naif_ and unshakable belief that the impressions he
had formed as to his own character were shared by others. He supposed it
was recognised by his neighbours that they had a thinker in their midst,
and always tacitly occupied the ground which he imagined had been
conceded to him on that account.
His mother, a beautiful, foolish, whimsical, hard-riding heiress, the
last of a long line, had married the youngest son--the one brilliant,
cultivated member--of a family as ancient, as uneducated, and as prosaic
as her own. Wentworth was the result of that union. His father had died
before his talents were fully recognised: that is to say, just when it
was beginning to be perceived that he was a genius only in his own
class, and that there were hordes of educated men in the middle classes
who could beat him at every point on his own ground, except in carriage
and appearance, and whom no one regarded as specially gifted. Still, in
his own county, among his own friends, and in a society where education
and culture eke out a precarious, interloping existence, and are
regarded with distrustful curiosity, Lord Wilfrid Maine lived and died,
and was mourned as a genius.
After many years of uneasy, imprudent widowhood, the widow of the great
man had made a disastrous second marriage, and had died at Michael's
birth.
No one had disputed with Wentworth over the possession of Michael.
Wentworth, a sedate, self-centred young man of three-and-twenty, of
independent means, mainly occupied in transcribing the nullity of his
days in a voluminous diary, had taken charge of him virtually from his
first holidays, during which Michael's father had achieved the somewhat
tedious task of drinking himself to death. Michael's father had
appointed Wentworth as his son's guardian. If it had been a jealous
affection on Wentworth's part, it had also been a deep one. And it had
been returned with a single-hearted devotion on Michael's part which had
gradually knit together the hearts of the older and the younger man, as
it seemed indissolubly. No one had come between them. Once or twice
Wentworth had become uneasy, suspicious of Michael's affection for his
tutor at Eton, distrustful of the intimacies Michael formed with boys,
and, later on, with men of his own age. Wentworth had nipped a few of
these incipient friendships in the bud. He vaguely felt that each case,
judged by its own merits, was undesirable. Some of these friendships he
had not been able to nip. These he ignored; among that number was
Michael's affection for his godfather, the Bishop of Lostford. Michael's
boyish passion for Fay, Wentworth had never divined. It had come about
during the last year of his great uncle's life at Barford, which was
within a few miles of Priesthope, Fay's home. Michael had spent many
weeks at Barford with the old man, who was devoted to him. Everyone had
expected that he would make Michael his heir, but when he died soon
afterwards, it was found he had left the place, in a will dated many
years back, to Wentworth. If Michael had never mentioned his first
painful contact with life to Wentworth, it was perhaps partly because he
instinctively felt that the confidence would be coldly received, partly
also because Michael was a man of few words, to whom speech had never
taken the shape of relief.
There had no doubt been wretched moments in Wentworth's devotion to
Michael, but nevertheless it had been the best thing so far in his
somewhat colourless existence, with its hesitating essays in other
directions, its half-hearted withdrawals, its pigeon-holed emotions. He
had not been half-hearted about Michael. It is perhaps natural that we
should love very deeply those who have had the power to release us
momentarily from the airless prison of our own egotism. How often it is
a child's hand which first opens that iron door, and draws us forth into
the sunshine! With Wentworth it had been so. The pure air of the
moorland, the scent of the heather and the sea seem indissolubly mingled
with the remembrance of those whom we have loved. For did we not in
their company walk abroad into a new world, breathe a new air, while
Self, the dingy turnkey, for once slept at his post?
One of the reasons of his devotion to Michael was that Michael's
character did not apparently or perceptibly alter. He was very much the
same person in his striped convict's blouse as he had been in his Eton
jacket. But it is doubtful whether Wentworth had ever realised of what
materials that character consisted. Wentworth was of those who never get
the best out of men and women, who never divine and meet, but only come
into surprised uncomfortable contact with their deeper emotions.
Michael's passion of service for Fay would have been a great shock to
Wentworth had he suspected it. It remained for the duke to perceive the
latent power in Michael, and to be taken instantly into his confidence
on the matter, while Wentworth, unwitting, had remained for life outside
his brother's mind.
Some men and women are half conscious that they are thus left out, are
companions only of "the outer court" of the lives of others. But
Wentworth never suspected this, partly because he regarded as friendship
a degree of intimacy which most men and all women regard as
acquaintanceship. He did not know there was anything more. Those from
whom others need much, learn perforce, whether they will or no, to what
heights, to what depths human nature can climb and--fall. But Wentworth
was not a person on whom others made large demands. But if his love for
Michael had been his one tangible happiness, it had become now his one
real pain.
Contrary to all his habits, he sat on, hour after hour, motionless,
inert, watching the cloud shadows pass across the down. He tried to
rouse himself. He told himself that he must settle back into his old
occupations. He must get forward with his history of Sussex, and write
up his diary. He must come to some decision about the allotment scheme
on his property in Saundersfoot. He must go over and help Colonel
Bellairs not to make a fool of himself about the disputed right of way
across his property where it joined Wentworth's own land. Colonel
Bellairs always bungled into business matters of the simplest nature as
a bumble bee bungles into a spider's web. For Colonel Bellairs to touch
business of any kind was immediately to become hopelessly and
inextricably involved in it, with much furious buzzing. His mere
presence entangled the plainest matter into a confused cocoon, with
himself struggling in the middle.
Wentworth must save the old autocrat from putting himself in the wrong,
when he was so plainly in the right. Wentworth must at any rate, if he
could do nothing else this morning, read his letters, which had
accumulated during his short absence.
Without moving from his chair he turned over, with a groan, the pile of
envelopes waiting for him at his elbow. Invitations, bills, tenants'
complaints, an unexpected dividend. It was all one to him. The Bishop
of Lostford--so his secretary wrote--accepted Wentworth's invitation to
dine and sleep at Barford that night, after holding a confirmation at
Saundersfoot. Wentworth had forgotten he had asked him. Very well, he
must remember to order a room to be got ready. That was all. A
subscription earnestly solicited by the daughter of a neighbouring
clergyman for a parish library. Why could he not be left in peace? Oh!
what was the use of anything--of life, health, money, intellect, if
existence was always to be like this, if every day was to be like this,
only like this? This weary, dry-as-dust grind, this making a handful of
bricks out of a cartload of straw, this distaste and fatigue, and sense
of being duped by satisfaction, which was only another form of
dissatisfaction, after all. What was the use of living exactly as you
liked, _if you did not like it?_ Oh, Michael! Michael! Michael! He
forgot that he had often been nearly as miserable as this when Michael
had been free and happy. Not quite, but nearly. Now he attributed the
whole of his recurrent wretchedness, which was largely temperamental, to
his distress about his brother's fate.
That wound, never healed, bled afresh. Who felt for him in his trouble?
Who, among all his friends, cared, or understood? No one. That was the
way of the world.
Fay's sweet, forlorn face, snowdrop pale under its long black veil, rose
suddenly before him, as he had seen it some weeks ago, when he had met
her walking in the woods near her father's house. She had gone back to
her old home after the duke's death. She, at least, had grieved for him
and Michael with an intensity which he had never forgotten. Even in her
widowed desolation she had remembered Michael, and always asked after
him when Wentworth went over to Priesthope. And Wentworth was often
there, for one reason or another. Michael, too, had asked after her, and
had sent her a message by his brother. Should he go over to-day and
deliver it in person? Among his letters was a scrawling, illegible note,
already several days old, from Colonel Bellairs, Fay's father, about the
right of way. The matter, it seemed, was more urgent than Wentworth had
realised. Any matter pertaining to Colonel Bellairs was always, in the
opinion of the latter, of momentous urgency.
Colonel Bellairs asked Wentworth to come over to luncheon the first day
he could, and to walk over the debatable ground with him.
Wentworth looked at his watch, started up and rang the bell, and ordered
his cob Conrad to be brought round at once.