Priscilla’s father had a piece of news for her when they met at supper
that night--the _menage_ at the farm involved tea at six and supper at
half-past nine.
“That young Wingfield, the grandson of the old man, has come to live
at the Manor,” he said. “I heard all about it from Mr. Hickman to-day.
Hickman is not his solicitor, but he knows all about it. A young scamp
who will simply walk through that fine property which has been nursed
for him by the trustees all these years.”
“I think you told us that the old man hoped that by preventing him from
inheriting the property until he was twenty-seven he would give him
a chance of gaining some sense to enable him to work it properly,”
remarked Priscilla.
“That was the old man’s notion; but I don’t suppose it will prove to
have been worth anything. It’s usually the case that an ill-conditioned
puppy turns out an ill-conditioned dog. The young man is a wild young
ass, kicking up his heels at all authority. He was turned out of Oxford
in his third year. They couldn’t stand his ways any longer.”
“That must have happened several years ago if he is twenty-seven now. I
wonder what he has been doing in the meantime.”
“Wild--he has been very wild, I hear; knocking about the world--India,
Australia, the South Sea Islands, with America to follow. He has been
doing no good anywhere. He has no head, you see; his father had no head
either--allowed himself to be imposed on right and left. The old man had
to pay his debts half-a-dozen times over before he died. The boy
seems ready to follow in his father’s footsteps. It’s very sad. Twelve
thousand a year at the least.”
“But are there not some farms still unlet?”
“There are three; but that would only make a difference of a thousand
a year. I’m not sure that Dunning did his best in the matter of the big
farm--Birchknowle. But the trustees thought no end of Dunning, and you
may be sure that when they couldn’t see through him the young man won’t
either. Dunning is a muddler if ever there was one. Wouldn’t allow
Brigstock the year’s rent that he wanted when he was going in for
market gardening. A man could make a fortune off a market garden at
Birchknowle, since they brought the branch line there--a fortune. I told
Dunning so; and I told Brigstock the same. And so they’ve lost a couple
of thousand pounds to the estate when the year’s rent that Brigstock
looked for only came to three hundred! Dunning’s a muddler.”
“I wonder will young Mr. Wingfield find that out for himself?”
Mr. Wadhurst looked up from his plate with a very grim smile.
“He’s not the sort to find things out for himself--he has no head, I
tell you,” he replied. “Ducks and drakes--that’s the sort of game that
will be played by the young ass until every penny’s gone.”
“It’s a pretty large poultry bill that will absorb twelve thousand a
year, to say nothing of the accumulations,” said Priscilla.
“Poultry bill? Pheasants, do you mean?” he said.
“Ducks and drakes--that was what you mentioned,” said she.
He shook his head in reproof of his daughter’s levity.
“When a young spendthrift makes spending the business of his life you
may trust him to run through a million in a month. I wonder if he’ll
ever find out about the pheasants. Dunning did pretty well out of the
pheasants.”
“Perhaps he put down all that he made by them--put it down to the credit
side of the estate,” she suggested; and again he smiled that grim
smile of his--the smile of the shrewd man who is conscious of his own
shrewdness.
“If he was doing that he wouldn’t have taken the trouble to bind Jenkins
over to secrecy,” said the farmer.
“But you found out all about it in spite of Jenkins being bound over,”
said she.
He smiled less grimly, accepting her compliment, and then rose from the
table, having finished his supper, and went into the room that he used
as his office. His business methods were admirable. For over thirty
years he had spent an hour in his office every night before going to
bed. This space out of every day was small, but it was quite enough to
enable him to know exactly how he stood financially from one week to
another. His system was admirable; but it had helped to kill his wife.
When Priscilla went to her own room and looked out upon that May night
of pale starlight and clear sky she could not help feeling that an
element of interest had come into her life, beyond any that had ever
been associated with it. Here was a man who represented an estate of
twelve thousand pounds a year, and the question was, “What is to be the
result of his entering into possession of this splendid property? Is he
to turn it to good account, or to dissipate it like the young fools of
whom I have heard so much lately?”
Here there was a question of real interest beyond any that had ever
risen above the somewhat restricted horizon of her life. What were all
the questions that her father had to decide in connection with his
farm compared with this? What were all the questions connected with the
social life of Framsby, or even Birchleigh--proud of its ten thousand
inhabitants--compared with this?
Was he a fool--the fool that her father believed him to be, forming his
conclusion on the reports made to him by Mr. Hickman, the solicitor, at
Framsby--the fool who, according to the proverb, is quickly parted from
his money?
This was the question the answer to which was bound to influence the
answer that should be given to the other question.
She could not bring herself to think of him as a fool. To be sure it
could not be denied that his attitude in relation to certain matters was
not at all that which the majority of people would think justifiable;
and in the eyes of most persons, her father included, this fact was in
itself strong presumptive evidence that he was inclined to be a young
fool. A man who declines to fall into line with the prejudices and the
conventionalities of the majority of his elders is looked on as a bit
of a fool. Yes; unless he succeeds in becoming a leader of thought, in
which case he becomes a hero, though as a rule he has been dead some
time before this happens. Priscilla knew a good deal in a general way of
the history of the world, and the men who made history, in action and by
putting their thoughts on paper; but she could not remember one of these
who had not begun life by being looked on as a bit of a fool.
Now, of all the institutions that have existed for the conservation
of the conventional, Oxford University is the most notorious; and yet
people were ready to call that undergraduate, Mr. Wingfield, a
giddy young fool because he had refused to accede to one of the most
cherished--one of the least worthily cherished--of its conventions!
Putting the matter in this way, she felt that she had every right to
decline to accept the judgment of such people.
But what about his own confession to her? Had he not confessed quite
frankly to her that he had no brains?
He certainly had done so; but what did this prove except that he had
brains? It is only the empty-headed man who thinks that he is largely
endowed with brains. She could recall several little things that Jack
Wingfield had done--she left out of consideration altogether the things
that he had said--which convinced her that he had some ability, and that
he possessed something of the supreme gift of understanding how to make
people do what he wanted them to do. If he had failed to exercise
this valuable endowment of his upon the authorities at Oxford, he had
succeeded in doing so upon the two young women who had paid him that
remarkable visit on the day of his arrival at his home. By the exercise
of extraordinary tact he had induced them to take lunch with him, and to
sit with him afterwards in his drawing-room. If any one had said to her
the day before this happened, “You will go boldly into a strange house,
and you will there meet a young man whom you have never seen before; he
will ask you to remain to lunch before you have even heard his name, or
he yours, and you will accept his invitation without feeling--you
who have been to a ‘finishing school’--that you have done anything
_outre_”--if any one had said this to her she would at once have denied
the possibility of such an incident taking place. And yet it had taken
place, and the tact shown by the young man had made it seem quite an
ordinary matter.
Did not this show that he possessed the supreme talent of knowing how
to deal with people--how to persuade them that the unique was the
usual--nay, the inevitable?
And then, what about their coming together on the road? How had he, a
man whom she had seen but once before, and that in no regular way--how
had he succeeded in getting her to confess to him that--that--well, all
that she had confessed?
She really could not understand how it was that she had been led to
confide in this young Mr. Wingfield what she had not even confided to
her one dear friend, Rosa Caffyn: it must only have been by the
exercise on his part of an extraordinary ability--more than ability,
intuition--that he had drawn from her that confession. And would any one
succeed in persuading her, after this, that Jack Wingfield was a bit of
a fool?
And what an effect her stroll and chat with him had had upon her! She
had been, as she told him (more confession), plunged into the black
depths of despondency; and yet within five minutes, owing to his
sympathetic attitude--owing to her feeling that he understood her and
sympathized with her and applauded her boldness in standing out against
her father’s prejudices in carrying out that form of hypocrisy known
as mourning--she had been drawn out of the depths and made to feel that
there might yet be a place for her in the world.
The result of her consideration of the whole of this question--the most
interesting that had ever come within her ken--was to make her feel
that she would like to have it in her power to do something for that
man--something important--something that would make people see that
he was not the brainless spendthrift which so many people, on quite
insufficient evidence, assumed him to be.
She was perfectly well aware of the fact that she was not in love with
him, and she felt that she understood him so well that she could not
be mistaken in perceiving that neither was he in love with her. She had
always been an observant girl, and she had had several opportunities
of diagnosing--of subjecting to the interpretation of her mental
spectroscope, so to speak--the various phases incidental to the progress
of the phenomena of falling in love. She had never actually been in
love herself, but several men had been in love with her, and with the
exception of her music master at that finishing school, whose methods
were very pronounced, all her incipient lovers had behaved alike, and
she could see no difference between the way their love affected them
and the way it affected some of the living things of the farm. The
ingratiating tones of voice, the alternate little shynesses and
boldnesses, the irritation at the approach of any others of the same
sex, and the overweening desire to appear at their best before the
object of their worship--all these foolish, pretty ways incidental to
the condition known as being in love, she had observed in her incipient
lovers, in common with other animals; and her observance of them enabled
her to be always on her guard.
But he showed no sign of being even momentarily under such an influence
as suggested its presence in some of the ways she knew so well. She
felt that he was not in love with her, and she was glad that he was not.
There is no such breaking up of friendship as love, and she felt
that one suggestion of love on his part--one glance of love’s
admiration--would have been enough to prevent her from looking forward
to a hard-and-fast friendship with this young man of great interests
in life. He had treated her all along in exactly the right spirit of
companionship. There had not been a false note in their interchange of
words. Their sympathies were alike, and their sense of humour. But she
had noticed that there had been a certain lack of enthusiasm in the tone
of his voice when referring to some matters upon which she would have
been disposed to speak with warmth; there was the shrug of a man who has
seen a good deal, in some of the things that he had said; and she had
felt that his experiences, whatever they had been, had tended to make
him too tolerant, and toleration she had good reason to believe was
mostly the result of laziness. He was the sort of man who underrated his
own powers, and was therefore disinclined to be active in the exercise
of such ability as he possessed.
And then this farseeing young woman perceived that his grandfather had
made a mistake in his over-anxiety to avoid one. If Jack Wingfield had
entered upon possession of his property when he was six years younger
he might have set about its management with enthusiasm, but in the
interregnum to which he was forced to submit he had lost (she believed)
something of the sanguine nature of the very young, which often causes
them to do better work than they feel inclined ever to set their hand to
later on.
But then she reflected that, however tolerant he had shown himself to
be in talking of things in general, he had been as warm as she could
possibly have wished in his criticism of the “best set” in Framsby and
the empty arrogance of its leaders. Possibly it was her recollection of
this fact that caused her to feel that she had never yet met a man on
whose behalf she would do all that it was possible for her to do--it was
with regret that she reflected upon how little it was in her power to do
for him. She hoped that he would before long show the people around him
who thought him a fool, that he was very far removed from being a
fool. She did not stop to think if her anxiety on his behalf might not
possibly have its origin in the feeling that if he proved himself
too sapient he could hardly be guilty of the folly of striking up a
friendship with her.
She sat for a long time at her open window, breathing the sweet scents
of that May night, and feeling better satisfied with the world than she
had felt since she had last sat at that window, trying to realize the
idea that the man who held her in bondage was dead. At that time all her
thoughts had been of the past; but now they were all of the future.
The idea of a sincere and far-reaching friendship with a man was very
pleasing to her. It took away from her the sense of isolation. She
recalled many cases of which she had read of the admirable operation
of a true friendship between a man and a woman, and why might it not be
possible, after all, for her to help the man of whom she was thinking
in some way by which his interests in the world might be appreciably
advanced?
The thought of this possibility was much more agreeable to her _amour
propre_ than any thought of the possibility of his loving her would have
been upon this particular night.
And all the joy of the silver summer night was about her as she sat
there. Her own garden was just beneath her window, and in its borders
the groups of old-fashioned spring flowers could be dimly seen through
the silver-shot air. From the meadow at the foot of the Downs came the
barking of a dog, and the sound was faintly answered from the shepherd’s
hut higher up. There was the occasional lowing of one of the herd of
Jerseys, only a short time sent out to the grass and not yet used to the
change. Every now and again a bat flapped between her face and the sheen
of the sky, and gave her the impression of the hand of some ghostly
figure making a grasp at something close to her. At rarer intervals a
still more spectral thing swooped by, and its passage was followed by
the squeal of a rat, and later by a “tu-whit-tu-whoo” of the barn owl.
She leant out of the window so that she could see the dark, many-folded
cloud spreading itself abroad halfway across the valley through which
the Wadron wandered. That cloud represented the trees of Overdean Manor.
The Manor House was hidden by the summer boskage of the Park, so that
she saw nothing of it--not even a light in one of the windows.
She drew back into her room and, after another interval of thought,
unfastened the clasps of her clothes and let them slip down to her feet;
she had already loosened the coils of her hair, and now, by a shake of
her head, her white shoulders and the exquisite full curves of
roseate flesh were deluged with a thousand little cascades flowing and
overflowing with the unevenness of a torrent on which a fitful moon is
shining. She began her task of brushing, and went on with it for five
minutes until her arms began to ache. Then she wove her plaits, and
in crossing the room to get her nightdress she caught a glimpse of her
figure passing the tall looking-glass. The glimpse did not interest her
in the least. She did not cast a second glance at the glass. She slipped
her nightdress over her head, blew out her candles, and went into bed.
No, she was not in the least in love with the man of whom she had been
thinking.