when homesick in far-off lands. Lordly oaks and beeches and sentimental
firs beshadowed the well-trimmed lawny spaces. The air played freely
round and about them, and the light was broad and soft. If you stepped
aside from the lawn and level avenues, you might lose yourself in
the pleasant woods, alive with the chatter of birds, in the midst of
fragrance and gloom. Water was not absent, and if you crossed the
deer-park, you could follow its lazy way to Fort Mary, where the earl
had a summer residence, aptly named by the French governess, ‘Le Petit
Trianon.’ Luffington liked the notion. It was all so artificial, so
costly, so preposterously pastoral, that his mind willingly went back
to Versailles, and the musked and scarlet-heeled century. The ground
was green velvet, unrelieved by as much as a daisy. It demanded Watteau
robes, and periwigged phrases and piping strains of Lulli and Rameau.
The boats were toys upon an artificial lake, and it was like hearing
of children’s games to learn of regattas held here every summer. The
idea of a Venetian fête was more appropriate to celebrate the birth of
the heir, and lords and ladies in rich Elizabethan disguises grouped
upon the velvet sward, upon the balcony of the ‘Trianon,’ or making
pictures of glitter and sharp shadow upon the breast of dark water in
the gleam of variously coloured lamps.
Luffington stopped to chat with a loutish fellow who was rolling the
ground down to the minute pier, and chopping off the heads of the
innocent daisies, along his path.
‘The notion of improvement is inseparably wedded to that of
destruction,’ Fred mused, as he placidly surveyed the process, and
dived his stick among the layers of massacred innocents. The thought
opened his lips, but the lout lent an uncomprehending ear to his
speech, shook his head as at obvious eccentricity of reflection,
and rolled on with his look of gross stupidity. This proceeding
disconcerted the traveller, who wanted to talk, and imbibe at the
founts of rustic wit. He glanced around, and spied a little boat
swaying among the rushes. Could he use it? The lout looked up
sideways, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and offered his
daughter as ferryman. At that moment Fred heard a thin unmusical sound,
like that of a string drawn flat:
‘Friends, I’ve lost my own true lover,
Tra la la la la la la.’
Through a clump of noble trees a little maid approached, not more
beautiful to the eye than was her flat, tuneless voice to the ear. She
assented without any eagerness to row him across the lake, and had
nothing more interesting to communicate than that Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy
was very fond of Fort Mary.
‘Decidedly I must see this fellow if I have to wait a month,’ thought
Fred, with a pardonable feeling of irritation.
On his way back, he hailed his friend among the flowers and bees, and
stood leaning over the gate to acquaint him with his intention to start
at once upon exploration of the neighbourhood. The Flemish priest stood
in the blaze of sunshine, and mopped his forehead repeatedly before
urging him to wait another day, when he would be able to offer the
advantage of his own trap and himself as guide.
‘I can’t go to-day,’ he said, with an air of importance. ‘Her ladyship
has appointed this afternoon to come and consult with me about the
schools.’
It was evident to Mr. Luffington, as he went off in search of lunch,
that after Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, the Countess of Harborough was the
figure of importance. The defection of his friend and the absence of
romance among the villagers turned him to misanthropy, and as, late in
the afternoon, fatigued after a long walk through the woods, he entered
the inn porch, he told himself emphatically that he would leave Fendon
on his way to the cathedral, and thence return to London.
He found the inn in a state of unwonted flurry, which was explained to
him by a telegram announcing the arrival of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy upon
the last train.
‘And I’ve the great man’s room,’ said Fred to himself, laughing, as he
set out for the priest’s cottage.
The dinner was good, the wine not execrable, the tobacco best of all;
and in excellent spirits, quite restored to his belief in men and
women, Fred started off alone for ‘St. George and the Dragon,’ under a
suspicion of moonlight just enough to send a quiver of silver through
the trees, and show the darkness of the road, but not enough to send
reason distraught down sentimental byways and insistently urge the
advantages of open air meditation. He reached his inn sane and safe,
and bethought himself of unanswered letters. Suddenly he was disturbed
in the glow of composition by the sound of swift steps on the stairs
and the ring of violent, angry speech.
‘A stranger in my room, Mrs. Matcham! Tut, tut. This is what I cannot
permit. Instantly order him to clear out.’
Luffington looked up inquiringly as the door opened with an aggressive
bang, and a queer attractive-looking fellow stood eyeing him
imperiously upon the threshold. He had imagined Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy
a respectable English gentleman, florid, prosperous, eminently
aristocratic. He was confronted with the reverse. Before him stood in
a threatening attitude, and frowning hideously, a man almost too dark
for English blood, too small and too vengefully passionate of feature
and expression. His hair, which curled, was of a dusty black, as if it
had lain in ashes. His lips were full and red, covered with the same
dust-hued shadow, and teeth so white, nostrils so fine and sharp, brows
so low and oddly beautiful, surely never belonged to the respectable
English race. His eyes were long, of a liquid blackness, through which
red and yellow flames leaped as in those of an untamed animal, and his
hands were brown and small, like the hands of a slender girl.
‘Do you hear, sir? This is my room,’ he cried.
There was a foreign richness in his voice that matched the quaint
exterior, and was equally in puzzling contrast with his pretensions
as an Englishman.... Luffington was convinced he had to do with some
adventurer over seas, and he curtly replied that for the present the
room was his. Mrs. Matcham, scared and anxious, shot him a glance of
prayer over the shoulder of her domineering customer.
But Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy was not to be silenced or turned out by the
superior airs of a strolling jackanapes. He paced the room in his
quick, light way, opened familiar drawers and presses, inquired after
missing objects, and never stopped in a running murmur upon the
impudence of travellers and the insolence of intruders.
‘May I point out that you are condemning yourself?’ Luffington dryly
remarked, as he watched him in wonder. ‘Intrusion can never be other
than insolent.’
‘Then why the devil are you sitting here, sir?’
‘For the simple reason that I slept here last night, and the room is
mine as long as I stay at this inn.’
‘Mrs. Matcham, you had no business to let this chamber when there are
others unoccupied in the house. You know I am liable to turn up at any
moment, and that I cannot sleep in any room but this.’
There was something so boyish in the tone of complaint, that Luffington
insensibly softened to the odd and ill-mannered creature, and smiled
broadly.
Mrs. Matcham was affirming the comforts of a back room, when he stopped
her shortly with a protest that this was information for Mr. Fitzroy,
whom the matter concerned.
‘I tell you, sir, I will not give up my room,’ shouted Mr. Malcolm
Fitzroy.
Luffington shrugged, and made a feint of resuming his writing, upon
which Mr. Fitzroy plumped down into an arm-chair, crossed his slim
legs savagely, and ordered the landlady to bring in his carpet bag,
and produce glasses and two bottles of his special port. Luffington
said nothing, but smiled as he continued to write, and took a sidelong
view of his strange enemy. The more he looked, the more he wondered at
the singular prestige of such a person in a place like Fendon. He had
not the appearance of a gentleman, was the reverse of imposing, and
according to the Flemish priest, was ‘just one of the poorest dogs in
Christendom.’
‘He pays Mrs. Matcham thirty shillings a week, and nobody else
anything, and he travels third class like myself,’ the priest added,
but Luffington thought that his air was that of a man who holds back
something.
‘Well, sir,’ said Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, as if he were pointing a cocked
pistol at an antagonist, ‘you have an opportunity of assuring yourself
that there is good port to be had in at least one inn in Great Britain.’
‘I am ready to accept the fact upon your statement, but I am no judge
of port. It’s a wine I never drink.’
‘Claret, I suppose? Abominable trash, but there’s good stuff of
that sort too, eh, Mrs. Matcham? Two bottles of one of their
castles--Lafitte, La rose--something in that way.’
He yapped out his words like the spoken barks of an angry terrier,
and poured himself out a glass of Harborough port, which he fondly
surveyed, then tasted with a beatific nod.
‘Nowhere to be had out of England. Bloodless foreigners go to the deuce
on their clarets. They’d be content to sit at home, and let their
neighbours’ wives alone if they drank port. But then you have to go to
an earl’s cellar for anything like this.’
‘Exactly,’ said Fred Luffington, now restored to good humour, and very
much amused by his extraordinary companion. ‘But as we all haven’t a
key to such cellars, it is safer to stick to the harmless grape-juice
than court gout with doctored port. I’m for the foreigners myself,
whatever their domestic sins may be. Port is as heavy as your climate,
your women, your literature.’
Mrs. Matcham, partly reassured, entered with two bottles and one of
those hideous green glasses described as claret glasses. This she
placed in front of Mr. Luffington, and taking a bottle from her hand,
Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy filled the unsightly chalice. Luffington drank his
wine appreciatively, pronounced it rare, and wandered off upon the
exciting topic of vintages. He no longer wondered at the prestige of a
man who could command such claret.
‘You’re a Londoner, I suppose--an impudent Cockney?’ said Mr. Fitzroy,
observing him as he put aside the green glass and stretched behind
for his toilet tumbler. ‘Right you are there, my friend. One of the
pleasures of good wine is to watch the play of light in its depths of
colour. It passes my imagination how such complacent ugliness as this
came to be manufactured.’ He took the glass in his fingers, stared at
it, shook his head and flung it into the grate.
‘Mrs. Matcham may object to such summary justice,’ laughed Luffington.
‘Mrs. Matcham object to any act of mine, sir? That would be a
revolution. I’ve only to say the word, and both Mrs. Matcham and John
Graham are ready to take you by the scruff of the neck and plant you
in the middle of the common.’
‘Instead, we sit pledging each other in the best of wines, and your
antecedent ill-humour is, I hope, carried off, once you have named a
continental Englishman, ‘Impudent Cockney’.’
Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy’s sombre eyes were instantly shot with mirth.
He smiled delightfully, and as he did so, looked less and less of
a Briton. It was the lovely roguish smile of a child that flashed
from wreathed lips and ran up like light to the broad brows arched
expressively. You would have forgiven him murder on the spot, much less
a rude speech. He dipped into his glass, and sipped vigour therefrom
for a fresh onslaught.
‘Ah, the continent! Generally means France, and France, of course,
means Paris, and Paris, by God, means every devilry under the sun.
Barricades, Bastilles, Julys, Septembers, baggy red breeches, Cockades,
Marseillaises, Communism, Atheism, in a word, hell’s own mischief.’
‘I commend your mental repertory, sir. It is a neat historical survey
extending over the past hundred years. We will say nothing of its
justice. When our aim is the saying of much in little, we must be
content to dispense with justice. But at least permit me to remark that
Paris does not mean the continent for me--very much the reverse.’
‘Then you ought to have sense enough to be drinking port instead of one
of your washy French castles,’ roared Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, attacking
his second bottle after he had thrust Fred’s second under his nose.
The night wore on, and the two men gradually grew to view one another
through the rosiest glamour. Luffington was ready to swear that his
companion was the most entertaining he had ever encountered, and Mr.
Malcolm Fitzroy, as he subsided into sleep upon his friend’s sofa, knew
not whether he was most satisfied in having gained his point about
the room--albeit Luffington enjoyed the bed--or in having made the
acquaintance of such a remarkably agreeable young fellow--no nonsense,
no cockloftiness, no French Atheism, or any other perverse ’isms for
that matter, he murmured as he wandered into the devious country of
dreams.
Early next morning Luffington walked down to the priest’s cottage,
to describe the night’s adventures to his friend. They paced the
garden pathway, Fred puffing a cigar, and both were enjoying a hearty
laugh over the story, when two figures stood upon the bright edge
of meadow that led into the deer-park. Clear and unshadowed in the
morning sunshine, it was as pleasant a picture as the eye of man could
desire, and to Fred, after his travels, all the pleasanter for being
so distinctly English. A fair, handsome lady, in a light tweed dress,
a broad-brimmed hat tied under her chin with long blue ribbons; from
her arm swung a long-legged child, short-skirted, with an Irish red
cloak blown out from her shoulders, upon the swell of which her long
bright hair flowed like a sunny streamer. The child was looking up with
an urgent charming expression, and talking with extreme vivacity. The
lady smiled down upon her, tapped her cheek, and carried her along at a
quick pace toward the cottage.
‘Her ladyship and her stepdaughter,’ said the priest. ‘It’s beautiful
to see how they love one another. If all mothers were like that
stepmother! But the wisest of us talk a deal of nonsense about women.
Isn’t she handsome?’
Luffington admitted that she was, in the strictly English way--somewhat
empty and expressionless, and feared that forty would find her fat.
The countess stopped at the gate, and chatted most affably. She gave
the priest a commission that postponed their projected excursion
till mid-day, and kindly invited Luffington to look over the Hall at
his leisure. The little girl offered to show him her collection of
butterflies, and then skipped away, with her blonde hair and red cloak
blown out sideway like a sail.
‘Has the Countess of Harborough no children of her own?’ asked
Luffington.
‘No; Lady Alice is the earl’s only child, and both he and the countess
adore her.’
The postponement of their excursion drove Luffington alone into the
solitary woods. But solitude among trees had no terrors for him;
enchantment sat upon his errant mind as fancy led him over dappled
sward and under the foliaged arches of mossy aisles. He came upon a
bridge, under which a slant of water chattered its foamy way over large
stones, and fell into sedate and scarce audible ripples between green
banks and a thick line of shrubs. The outer bank he followed in a
pastoral dream, to the accompaniment of a pretty consort of bird-song
and babbling stream. He discovered that it led straight to Fort Mary,
and here he sat on the edge of the pier, dangling his legs over the
lake, as he smoked and forgot the hours.
The ‘Trianon’ lay behind, and as he lifted a leg, and sprang upon the
gravel, he was conscious of the sound of a stifled sob carried, he
believed, from the trees edging the sward, which the lout had rolled
the day before. He stepped upon it, and he might have been walking on
plush. As he went, the sound of sobs grew heavier, and he could count
the checked breaths. He heard a man’s voice say softly: ‘My poor girl!
Mary, Mary, courage.’ There was no mistaking that gentle and soothing
voice, though he had heard it rasping and angry the night before. A
break in the column of trees showed him a picture, the very reverse of
the sweet domestic English picture that had charmed him a few hours ago.
The Countess of Harborough was weeping bitterly in Mr. Malcolm
Fitzroy’s arms.
II
Fred Luffington had once had the misfortune to see ‘an impossible
brute’ preferred to his elegant self by an old love of Antwerp, hence
he had long given up pondering the oddnesses of women’s love-fancies.
He was a gentleman as well, and kept that sharply incorrect picture to
himself. He met the countess again, and dropped his eyes, ashamed of
his knowledge. Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy he eyed with a droll smile, and the
more he looked at him, the more incomprehensible the matter appeared.
But he was good company, that Fred admitted heartily, and shook
his hand with a cordial hope of meeting him again, now that their
little difference was settled, and had led to such cheery results. He
counselled him to take to claret, and to himself remarked that his
domestic ethics seemed none the better for the drinking of port, which
evidently had not taught him to let his neighbour’s wife alone. He had
met Lord Harborough once crossing the Park, and perfectly understood
the countess’s sobs. That was all he did understand. He could fancy
himself sobbing if he were a woman condemned to live his days with that
hard-featured, red-haired little man, bearing himself so primly and so
distractingly respectable.
‘Yes, that explains her odd choice,’ said Luffington, turning his back
upon Fendon, after a last grasp of the Flemish priest’s hand. ‘There’s
a taint of disreputableness about the local hero, who looks as if he
had rolled so much in the dust in infancy, that neither soap nor brush
has been able to give him a respectable head ever since.’
Fred Luffington went abroad again, and forgot all about the Flemish
priest and the half revealed drama of Fendon. A couple of years later
he had engaged to meet some friends at Lugano and, travelling from
Basle, decided to leave the train at the entrance to the St. Gothard
tunnel, and walk over the mountain. The weather was glorious, and such
scenery is enough to make a saint of the biggest sinner. The flush of
roseate snows, whose white from very purity is driven to flame; the
crystal splendours above, the shadows of the valleys revealed in the
twisted gaps like flakes of blue cloud softening the sunny whiteness,
wooded depths and sparkling water, with the ineffable beauty of the
turquoise stillness of the grand lake below: combined to make even
the breathing of a worldly young man a prayer of thanksgiving. Fred
Luffington never could gaze on the Alps without feeling his sins drop
from him like a garment, and his soul stand out, naked and innocent
before the majesty of creation.
He had been walking since mid-day, with rests in craggy nooks, and now
at sundown it behoved him to look out for shelter. He waited until he
had seen the last effects of an Alpine sunset before branching into a
narrow wooded path, which he was informed led to a little village. At
the first châlet, he knocked for admittance, and a fat woman came to
the door, in a state of evident perturbation. Her face cleared when she
discovered that he spoke Italian.
‘There is a sick man here. We think he must be an Englishman, but we
do not understand him, and he neither knows French nor Italian. If the
gentleman would but look at him. The doctor says he will not recover,’
she burst out, without stopping for breath.
Luffington followed her upstairs, and entered a tolerably clean little
room, where the sick man lay, either asleep or unconscious. Luffington
stood, and looked at him long and musingly. Where ever had he seen that
thin, sharp, foreign face, the curls of dust-hued black, the oddly
beautiful brow and full lips? A small brown hand lay upon the coverlet,
and it sprang a gush of sympathy to his eyes. Suddenly the closed lids
opened and revealed eyes of the sombre dead blackness of the sloe,
without the red and yellow flames he now so vividly remembered. So
this was the end of that sorry drama of Fendon! Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy
was dying in a far-off Swiss village on the top of St. Gothard. And
the countess? Fred bent, and whispered his name, and begged to be used
as a friend. A gleam of recognition broke the dark blankness of the
dying man’s glance, and he made a feeble movement of his hand, which
Luffington caught and held in a gentle clasp. The sick man’s eyes
filled gratefully. He knew he was dying, and he was comforted by the
presence of Luffington.
All through the night Fred sat and nursed him. He was melted in
kindness and gratitude that this chance of redeeming some unworthy
hours had fallen to him. He held the dying man’s hand, listened to
his babble, and promised to destroy a packet of letters in a certain
ebony box, into which he was to place poor Fitzroy’s watch and pocket
book, and a copy of the _Spanish Gypsy_, the only book he possessed,
and deliver it into the hands of the Countess of Harborough. In the
presence of death, Fred could hear her name without any squeamishness.
‘Take from under my pillow a locket, and open it for me. I want to see
her face again.’
Fred did so, and could not help recognising the features of the
countess. He asked if Mr. Fitzroy had any other friends to whom he
could carry messages.
‘Friends? I have none,’ he said, in a toneless way, empty of all
bitterness or pain. ‘I neither sought friendship nor offered it. I have
loved but one being on this earth, and it has been my duty to stand
by and see her suffer, and now I must go, while she remains behind
unhappy, with none to comfort her. There is no comfort on earth for
miserable wives. When I think of them, I am wroth to hear men complain.
What do we know about pain compared with them? And yet they bear it.
The God that made them alone can explain how. But this last blow! How
will she bear that? Mary, Mary, my poor unhappy girl!’
He closed his eyes, and seemed to dose, then opened them, and clutched
Luffington’s fingers, like a startled child.
‘Don’t leave me,’ he breathed, through shut teeth. ‘It is so lonely
among strangers. Ah, if I were only back in my room in the ‘St. George
and the Dragon,’ with good Mrs. Matcham! Poor Mary! The worst of it
is, I have never been able to punch that rascal’s head. Never. For her
sake, I have had to “my Lord” him, when I wanted to be at his throat.
Well, I played the game gallantly. Nobody can deny that. It’s for her
now to continue it alone. The locket! Where’s the locket? Let it go
with me. It contains all I have loved on earth, and I’ll lie all the
quieter underground for having it with me.’
The dawn found him lifeless, and Luffington sitting with his stiff cold
hand clasped in his own. The locket, containing the likeness of the
Countess of Harborough and a thick twist of blonde hair, was buried,
along with the remains of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, in a little Alpine
churchyard.
* * * * *
One summer evening, the Flemish priest of Fendon was reading his
breviary in the garden, not so intent upon prayer that he had no eye
for his flower-beds, which he had just watered. He turned hastily
as the garden gate swung back, and recognised Fred Luffington, who
approached with an air of unwonted gravity. He carried a square parcel
under his arm.
‘My dear young friend,’ cried the enchanted priest, keeping, while he
spoke, a finger between the leaves of his breviary.
‘I have a painful commission for you. You must take this box at once
to the Countess of Harborough, and acquaint her with the news that Mr.
Malcolm Fitzroy is dead. I buried him in Switzerland a month ago.’
The priest shook his head sadly. He scrutinised Luffington’s features
sharply, and said--
‘Thank God, she knows that already--that is, the death. But I suspect
this box will open old wounds.’
‘Poor woman! Tell her Mr. Fitzroy sent this by a trusted friend. I
destroyed her letters. For her sake, I wish I were not in the secret,
but unhappily, by accident, I learnt it long before I found the poor
fellow dying in a Swiss châlet.’
‘Ah,’ muttered the priest, and felt for his pipe. ‘It’s unfortunate.
Not a soul but myself has known it for years--not even the earl, and
such a secret has cost me many an uncomfortable moment.’
Luffington cast a strange glance upon him. His words were inexplicable.
Known it for years! Secret unshared by the earl! Was the ground solid
beneath his feet, that a virtuous priest should contemplate the
likelihood of such a secret being shared with the earl?
‘It’s not to be feared I should betray a lady. God knows, I am no saint
myself, to blame anybody.’
‘I don’t blame her much myself. I deplore the need for duplicity, but
it was not her doing. They placed her in a false position. But while I
cannot but admire the tenacity of her affections and her loyalty to a
natural claim, I have ever been urging her to make a clean breast of
it to her husband. It was not her business to expiate the wrong of
others, but confession would have placed her and the unfortunate man
now in his grave upon a proper footing, and lent the dignity of candour
to their relations.’
Luffington felt mercilessly mystified. Even suppose the lovers not
altogether criminal, how could the earl’s recognition of their
irregular situation lend dignity to it? He spoke his perplexity, and
cast the good priest into a panic.