Geoffrey and Angela had a common ancestor from whom her father and his
mother were descended. This person, in the reign of George III, was an
obscure country solicitor, who, through a combination of happy
inheritances, was able to aspire to and attain a marriage with an
heiress of good family. Their wealth, his eagerness for advancement, her
greater intelligence and more wily ambitions, signified power, and under
the wife's guidance they rose rapidly. He bought an old country estate,
a seat in Parliament, and, since his vote was unvaryingly at the
Government's disposal, an Irish peerage soon rewarded him. He cringed
and bullied his way to success; his wife schemed, coaxed and coquetted
in the extremest forms of the latter term, if contemporary scandals were
at all veracious.
Such an alliance was bound to prosper. Their wealth grew; their house in
London was a social centre; their sons all well-placed, their daughters
all well-married, inherited the father's heavy determination, the
mother's nimble and remorseless dexterity. An English peerage crowned
the edifice raised with such efforts, and the Earls of Glaston took
their place among the more tawdry great names of England. They never
distinguished the name, and after the first swift climb aspired to no
further heights. They were wealthy, worldly, weighty. They held what
they had, and held it firmly.
Angela's father was a lazy, well-mannered man; nothing further could be
said of him. Her mother had been pretentious, ambitious, and
sentimental. She had quarrelled with her husband to the verge of open
rupture; flirted with anybody of any importance to the verge of open
scandal, and written a flimsy political novel interesting only from its
thinly veiled personalities; she long posed as the typical _femme
incomprise_, and just before her death she became fervently religious.
Angela had scorned her mother, and had avoided her as much as possible,
finding in her later epochs grotesque echoes of her own sublimities. She
could never bear to look into the distorting mirror that her mother's
character seemed absurdly to hold up to her.
Geoffrey's strain of Bagley blood, on the other hand, had reached to no
such heights. His mother, descended from the first Lord Glaston, and
connected again, by various unimportant intermarriages, with the elder
branch, married a country parson, and her abilities had chafed against
all manner of restrictions.
The Rev. John Daunt had been a scholar, almost a saint, and all his
wife's tenacious worldliness had been unable to extract material success
from these baffling qualities. But Mrs. Daunt, in spite of her Bagley
blood, possessed the family characteristics in no petty or personal
forms. The strain, in passing through the two or three generations of
simple and dignified squires who had been her un-illustrious forbears,
had run itself dear of its more vulgar elements. Mrs. Daunt had been as
proud as she was eager. She would fight, but she would never cringe. She
lived first in the hope of seeing her gentle husband rise to high
places, and when, with not unkindly scorn, she realized his incapacity
for self-advancement, she transferred her passionate and patient hopes
to her son. For him she saved, slaved and battled. Geoffrey never
learned, until shortly after his father's death, that his own
opportunities were won not only by his mother's battlings, but by his
father's martyrdom.
John Daunt, in the midst of a life of service to God and man, found, in
a time of darkness and dismay, that his faith, in any orthodox sense,
had deserted him. His was not the mind that could combine Christian
ethics with a genial scepticism as to the Articles of the Church he
belonged to. With sad and tender dignity he opened his heart to his
wife. He accepted her amazed indignation. Mrs. Daunt would as little
have dreamed of questioning the Articles of the Christian faith as of
thinking about them--they were part of the ecclesiastical machinery that
one accepted as one accepted the other probably irrational bases of
life. He bowed before her scorn of his weakness; but he was not
prepared for her absolute refusal to further his intention of leaving
the Church.
How were they to live, pray? The Rev. John had hardly thought of that.
His own private income was barely sufficient for his lesser charities.
His wife owned a small property, and when the practical question was put
before him, he supposed that they could manage to live on that, and he
would find something to do.
"Find something to do? You? You will merely sink in the world, and we
will all sink with you. What of Geoffrey?" Mrs. Daunt's eyes flashed
fire as she asked this stinging question. Geoffrey was just entering the
University, the honours of Eton thick upon him. He wished to ruin their
child, then? The questions lashed him. He adored their child. She swept
on: He, forsooth, would seek downfall for some morbid whim when men of
ten times his significance managed to keep the peace between their
conscience and their vows. And Mrs. Daunt was too clever to use the lash
only; she turned to the ethical side of the question, the side on which
alone he had looked, with such self-tormenting indecision. His
influence; the love of his people for him; the light he held up among
them;--what difference did the lamp make that held the flame?--the
wrecking of others' faiths involved in his abandonment of a leaking
ship--she would not say that it did leak; but if it did, was it the
place of a captain to desert his crew because he could not see through
the storm? And he yielded, as much to his own self-doubt as to her;
yielded, and yet afterwards, in an undercurrent of anguish beneath the
flow of unchanged life, felt himself a traitor.
Mrs. Daunt one day, after the father's death, told her son of the
spiritual crisis that might have ruined his career, triumphant, though
very tender towards her husband's memory, in the strength that had saved
them all from his weakness.
Geoffrey, a silent, undemonstrative young man, grew white. "It shouldn't
have happened had I known," he said; "I could have made my way."
"Made your way, my dear child!" cried Mrs. Daunt, angry in a moment, and
yet more wounded than angered by this ingratitude. "Do your realize, I
wonder, what it cost us to make you?--cost me, rather, for I did it all.
Do you know how I have scraped and struggled? Do you know that every
stick and stave I possess is mortgaged? You might have made your way,
but it would not be the way you are in now. The height one starts from
determines the height one attains."
"No; only the time one takes to get there. I would rather have taken
longer. I will pay off the mortgages as soon as possible," said
Geoffrey.
He was ungrateful, though never unkind. Even now, after this shock, for
he had loved his father with the cold depth characteristic of him, he
regained in a moment the decorous kindness due to a mother who had done
an ugly thing for his sake; but he knew that it was decorous only.
Mrs. Daunt had never appealed for his tenderness, or worked for it; but
when Geoffrey, after a merely stop-gap reading for the Bar, entered
Parliament, and she saw all her desires for him realizing themselves, it
was the lack of tenderness that, though she was scarcely conscious of
it, poisoned all her happiness.
Living with him, laying the foundations of his effectiveness more
firmly, seeing him, young as he was, a man of power and repute, she
never recognized herself as a deeply loving mother, so absorbed were all
her energies in the rapacities of maternity; but when she died it was
with a dim yet bitter sense of failure; for Geoffrey had seen the
rapacities only.
Apart from this essential failure, Mrs. Daunt knew only one other.
The match she had hoped for between Geoffrey and his cousin Angela could
not be effected. She had not traced the causes of this failure further
than a mutual indifference, almost an antagonism.
Even as a boy Geoffrey had said, when she probed him once as to his
sentiments towards this significant young relative, "I don't like her.
She is an unpleasant girl, I think. I wish you wouldn't ask her here any
more."
Mrs. Daunt had hoped that ambition, if not affection, would overcome
this blunt, boyish aversion, for with Angela's fortune to back him,
Geoffrey's career was sure of utmost brilliancy; but neither motive
seemed forthcoming.
She died before seeing that Angela's affections were centred on Maurice
Wynne. She could hardly have suspected Angela of such folly, seeing
Maurice as a charming young nobody, a mere satellite of Geoffrey's, who
had known him at Oxford and Eton, travelled with him, and was devoted to
him, a devotion unresented by the mother, a charming relaxation in her
eyes towards the lesser man. Maurice was poor, indolent, distinguished
only by his air of distinction and a few trivial sallies into various
fields of art; he had no other claims. She could never have seen in him
the barrier to her hopes.
At present, three years after his mother's death, Geoffrey's position in
the House was conspicuous, if somewhat insecure. He was the foremost of
a group of clever young men, independent and given to exquisite
impertinence; but though the group was impertinent, their chief was
grave; he needed no small weapons. Insecurity did not menace his
constituency; his voters were completely under his thumb, and he let
them see that they were. He chaffed them loftily, never flattered them,
and showed an assurance that was completely contagious; the average man
became sheep-like before its conviction of leadership by right of real
supremacy.
The insecurity lay in his poverty. It had not yet pinched him. His small
income sufficed for the bread and butter of existence, and Lord Glaston,
the decorative director of various companies, was glad to lend a hand to
his brilliant young relative. Sagacious speculation, and even his
winnings at cards and at racing formed no inconsiderable part of his
resources. Towards these rather undignified methods of replenishment he
had an air of dignified indifference that was not at all assumed.
Ingrained in Geoffrey's nature was the sense that power was his, and
that money, the mere fuel of life, was a small matter upon which he
could always count. This inflexible young man had a perfect faith in his
own strength and in the plasticity of outward circumstance, a faith that
had been thoroughly justified, as such faiths usually are, by his
experience of life. He was ambitious, personally ambitious, yet the
personality was no mean one. He believed in his own significance and in
the beneficent ends that that significance, endued with power, could
attain. The might of his will mocked at the minor aims for which smaller
men might struggle. He intended to use the world for his own ends, and
held, with all the ethics of evolution to back him--though Geoffrey did
not appeal to these dubious sanctions--that in a great man's ends the
world also found its best.
He had no humanitarian ideals to weaken his self-regarding purposes. He
was highly sceptical as to the merits, or even the potentialities, of
humanity; recognized self-interest as its ruling motive, and was never
blinded by this motive's various disguises--idealistic, aesthetic, or
philanthropic. That the disguises often deceived their wearers he quite
owned; his kindness consisted in such cynical taking for granted; but he
was keen to see the eternal greedy animal under the fine apparel, and
tolerant towards the brother brute. He wished him well; thought it by
all means advisable that he should wear fine apparel and be dull of
sight; but his own gift of clear, dispassionate vision justified him, he
would have said, had he ever sought to justify himself, in feeling
towards the hoodwinked as towards tools that he could put to no better
use than in using them for his own interest and for his nation's
interest. He and his nation, on the whole, were fittest, and he intended
that each should survive to the best of its ability.
So far only outer circumstances had opposed him--and been walked
through. He knew no inner antagonists. He was neither sensitive nor
sentimental. His imagination pointed out pitfalls, but laid no snares
for him.
Cooly critical of women, they aroused no illusions in him. Their
feathers and furbelows in the way of feelings were often finer than the
masculine decorations; but he suspected the little animal underneath of
even meaner though more labyrinthine egotisms. Such a little animal,
most exquisitely furbelowed--he granted her good taste in spiritual
trappings--he considered Angela to be, and he was anxious that his
friend should profit by her trappings, material as well as spiritual.
Oddly enough, he had never applied the animal simile to Maurice; this
affection was boxed off, as it were, in a secure bit of heart, safely
out of reach of reason, though he and Maurice had little in common. Art
was Maurice's object; his attitude that of the spectator at the drama of
life. Geoffrey observed only that he might act; though not altogether
inappreciative, art was to him the decoration only of life, the
arabesque on the blade with which one fought; one might contemplate the
arabesque in moments of leisure.
Maurice did not fight beside him; but he was an affectionate troubadour,
who looked on at the combat and chanted it, often with friendly irony.
He was much like a dependent and devoted younger brother. Geoffrey did
not argue about him, and was fonder of him than of anything else in the
world. He was glad of the restful week after a fatiguing session, and
looked to see Maurice's future settled, the arabesque engraved upon a
good, solid blade of prosperity, before he left Trensome Hall.