I
Up to the death of his wife, that is to say for fifty-six years, Sir
Hildebrand Oates held himself to be a very important and upright man,
whose life not only was unassailable by slander, but even through the
divine ordering of his being exempt from criticism. To the world and
to himself he represented the incarnation of British impeccability,
faultless from the little pink crown of his head to the tips of his
toes correctly pedicured and unstained by purples of retributive gout.
Except in church, where a conventional humility of attitude is imposed,
his mind was blandly _conscia recti_. No ghost of sins committed
disturbed his slumbers. He had committed no sin. He could tick off
the Ten Commandments one by one with a serene conscience. He objected
to profane swearing; he was a strict Sabbatarian; he had honoured his
father and his mother and had erected a monument over their grave which
added another fear of death to the beholder; he neither thieved nor
murdered, nor followed in the footsteps of Don Juan, nor in those of
his own infamous namesake; and being blessed in the world's goods,
coveted nothing possessed by his neighbour--not even his wife, for his
neighbours' wives could not compare in wifely meekness with his own.
In thought, too, he had not sinned. Never, so far as he remembered,
had he spoken a ribald word, never, indeed had he laughed at an
unsavoury jest. It may be questioned whether he had laughed at any
kind of joke whatsoever.
Sir Hildebrand stood for many things: for Public Morality; his name
appeared on the committees of all the societies for the suppression of
all the vices: for sound Liberalism and Incorruptible Government; he
had poured much of his fortune into the party coffers and, to his
astonishment, a gracious (and minister-harrassed) Sovereign had
conveyed recognition of his virtues in the form of a knighthood. For
the sacred rights of the people; as Justice of the Peace he sentenced
vagrants who slept in other people's barns to the severest penalties.
For Principle in private life; in spite of the rending of his own heart
and the agonized tears of his wife, he had cast off his undutiful
children, a son and a daughter who had been guilty of the sin of
disobedience and had run away taking their creaking destinies in their
own hands. For the Sanctity of Home Life; night and morning he read
prayers before the assembled household and dismissed any maidservant
who committed the impropriety of conversing with a villager of the
opposite sex. From youth up, his demeanour had been studiously grave
and punctiliously courteous. A man of birth and breeding, he made it
his ambition to be what he, with narrow definition, termed "a gentleman
of the old school"; but being of Whig lineage, he had sat in Parliament
as an hereditary Liberal and believed in Progressive Institutions.
It is difficult to give a flashlight picture of a human being at once
so simple and so complex. An ardent Pharisee may serve as an
epigrammatic characterisation. Hypocrite he was not. No miserable
sinner more convinced of his rectitude, more devoid of pretence, ever
walked the earth. Though his narrowness of view earned him but little
love from his fellow-humans, his singleness of purpose, aided by an
ample fortune, gained a measure of their respect. He lived
irreproachably up to his standards. In an age of general scepticism he
had unshakable faith. He believed intensely in himself. Now this
passionate certitude of infallibility found, as far as his life's drama
is concerned, its supreme expression in his relation to his wife, his
children, and his money.
He married young. His wife brought him a fortune for which he was sole
trustee, a couple of children, and a submissive obedience unparalleled
in the most correct of Moslem households. Eresby Manor, where they had
lived for thirty years, was her own individual property, and she drew
for pocket money some five hundred pounds a year. A timid, weak,
sentimental soul, she was daunted from the first few frosty days of
honeymoon by the inflexible personality of her husband. For thirty
years she passed in the world's eye for little else than his shadow.
"My dear, you must allow me to judge in such matters," he would say in
reply to mild remonstrance. And she deferred invariably to his
judgment. When his son Godfrey and his daughter Sybil went their
respective unfilial ways, it was enough for him to remark with cold
eyes and slight, expressive gesture:
"My dear, distressing as I know it is to you, their conduct has broken
my heart and I forbid the mention of their names in this house."
And the years passed and the perfect wife, though, in secret, she may
have mourned like Rachel for her children, obeyed the very letter of
her husband's law.
There remains the third vital point, to which I must refer, if I am to
make comprehensible the strange story of Sir Hildebrand Oates. It was
money--or, more explicitly, the diabolical caprice of finance--that
first shook Sir Hildebrand's faith, not, perhaps, in his own
infallibility, but in the harmonious co-operation of Divine Providence
and himself. For the four or five years preceding his wife's death his
unerring instinct in financial affairs failed him. Speculations that
promised indubitably the golden fruit of the Hesperides produced
nothing but Dead Sea apples. He lost enormous sums of money.
Irritability constricted both his brow and the old debonair "s" at the
end of his signature. And when the County Guarantee Investment Society
of which he was one of the original founders and directors called up
unpaid balance on shares, and even then hovered on the verge of
scandalous liquidation, Sir Hildebrand found himself racked with
indignant anxiety.
He was sitting at a paper-strewn table in his library, a decorous
library, a gentleman's library, lined from floor to ceiling with
bookcases filled with books that no gentleman's library should be
without, and trying to solve the eternal problem why two and two should
not make forty, when the butler entered announcing the doctor.
"Ah, Thompson, glad to see you. What is it? Have you looked at Lady
Oates? Been a bit queer for some days. These east winds. I hold them
responsible for half the sickness of the county."
He threw up an accusing hand. If the east wind had been a human
vagabond brought before Sir Hildebrand Oates, Justice of the Peace, it
would have whined itself into a Zephyr. Sir Hildebrand's eyes looked
blue and cold at offenders. From a stature of medium height he managed
to extract the dignity of six-foot-two. Beneath a very long and very
straight nose a grizzling moustache, dependent on the muscles of the
thin lips as to whether it should go up or down, symbolised, as it
were, the scales of justice. Sketches of accurately trimmed grey
whiskers also indicated the exact balance of his mind. But to show
that he was human and not impassionately divine, his thin hair once
black, now greenish, was parted low down on the left side and brought
straight over, leaving the little pink crown to which I have before
alluded. His complexion was florid, disavowing atrabiliar prejudice.
He had the long blunted chin of those secure of their destiny. He was
extraordinarily clean.
The doctor said abruptly: "It's nothing to do with east winds. It's
internal complications. I have to tell you she's very seriously ill."
A shadow of impatience passed over Sir Hildebrand's brow.
"Just like my wife," said he, "to fall ill, when I'm already half off
my head with worry."
"The County Guarantee----?"
Sir Hildebrand nodded. The misfortunes of the Society were public
property, and public too, within the fairly wide area of his
acquaintance, was the knowledge of the fact that Sir Hildebrand was
heavily involved therein. Too often had he vaunted the beneficent
prosperity of the concern to which he had given his august support. At
his own dinner-table men had dreaded the half-hour after the departure
of the ladies, and at his club men had fled from him as they flee from
the Baconian mythologist.
"It is a worry," the doctor admitted. "But financial preoccupations
must give way"--he looked Sir Hildebrand clear in the eyes--"must give
way before elementary questions of life and death."
"Death?" Sir Hildebrand regarded him blankly. How dare Death intrude
in so unmannerly a fashion across his threshold?
"I should have been called in weeks ago," said the doctor. "All I can
suggest now is that you should get Sir Almeric Home down from London.
I'll telephone at once, with your authority. An operation may save
her."
"By all means. But tell me--I had no idea--I wanted to send for you
last week, but she's so obstinate--said it was mere indigestion."
"You should have sent for me all the same."
"Anyhow," said Sir Hildebrand, "tell me the worst."
The doctor told him and departed. Sir Hildebrand walked up and down
his library, a man undeservedly stricken. The butler entered.
Pringle, the chauffeur, desired audience.
Admitted, the man plunged into woeful apology. He had been trying the
Mercédès on its return from an overhaul, and as he turned the corner by
Rushworth Farm a motor lorry had run into him and smashed his
head-lamps.
"I told you when I engaged you," said Sir Hildebrand, "that I allowed
no accidents."
"It's only the lamps. I was driving most careful. The driver of the
lorry owns himself in the wrong," pleaded the chauffeur.
"The merits or demerits of the case," replied Sir Hildebrand, "do not
interest me. It's an accident. I don't allow accidents. You take a
month's notice."
"Very well, Sir Hildebrand, but I do think it----"
"Enough," said Sir Hildebrand, dismissing him. "I have nothing more to
hear from you or to say to you."
Then, when he was alone again, Sir Hildebrand reflected that noble
resignation under misfortune was the part of a Christian gentleman, and
in chastened mood went upstairs to see his wife. And in the days that
followed, when Sir Almeric Home, summoned too late, had performed the
useless wonders of his magical craft and had gone, Sir Hildebrand, most
impeccable of husbands, visited the sick-room twice a day, making the
most correct enquiries, beseeching her to name desires capable of
fulfilment, and urbanely prophesying speedy return to health. At the
end of the second visit he bent down and kissed her on the forehead.
The ukase went forth to the servants' hall that no one should speak
above a whisper, for fear of disturbing her ladyship, and the gardeners
had orders to supply the sick-room with a daily profusion of flowers.
Mortal gentleman could show no greater solicitude for a sick wife--save
perhaps bring her a bunch of violets in his own hand. But with an
automatic supply of orchids, why should he think of so trumpery an
offering?
Lady Oates died. Sir Hildebrand accepted the stroke with Christian
resignation. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Yet his house
was desolate. He appreciated her virtues, which were many. He went
categorically through her attributes: A faithful wife, a worthy mother
of unworthy children, a capable manager, a submissive helpmate, a
country gentlewoman of the old school who provided supremely for her
husband's material comforts and never trespassed into the sphere of his
intellectual and other masculine activities. His grief at the loss of
his Eliza was sincere. The impending crash of the County Guarantee
Investment Society ceased to trouble him. His own fortune had
practically gone. Let it go. His dead wife's remained--sufficient to
maintain his position in the county. As Dr. Thompson had rightly said,
the vulgarities of finance must give way to the eternal sublimities of
death. His wife, with whom he had lived for thirty years in a conjugal
felicity unclouded save by the unforgivable sins of his children now
exiled through their own wilfulness to remote parts of the Empire, was
dead. The stupendous fact eclipsed all other facts in a fact-riveted
universe. Lady Oates who, after the way of women of limited outlook,
had always taken a great interest in funerals, had the funeral of her
life. The Bishop of the Diocese conducted the funeral service. The
County, headed by the old Duke of Dunster, his neighbour, followed her
to the grave.