One day it struck me that I had never seen Hammerton, the magnificent
Hampshire home of the Gascoynes. It was the most important of the
half-dozen places that went with the title, and I wondered that so far
curiosity had not impelled me to visit any of them.
I made up my mind to see them all, beginning with Hammerton; and so,
one exquisite day in June, I got on my bicycle early in the morning
and rode out of London. The bicycle probably strikes a jarring note in
the telling, but I have no doubt that their emblazoned chariots,
caparisoned horses, and luxurious barges, were to my great prototypes
as little romantic.
As I rode along the level Roman road, the only figure in sight, I felt
a great exhilaration. I was the adventurer setting forth, the hero of
the story going to claim his own. The towers of Hammerton rose ever
like a mirage on the horizon, and once or twice I was obliged to check
myself, so far had my fancy roamed. I reflected seriously that my
plans, if romantic in the after telling, should be practical in
execution, and that it must be left to the poet and dramatist to mould
them to poetic fancy. I doubted not that I should at least achieve a
name worthy of their notice. Romance, however, was my master, as it
must ever be of the imaginative. She is the mistress of the secret
ways, and the touch of her finger-tips is superior to the very lips of
my Lady Commonplace.
I breakfasted at a wayside inn, my table set in a garden which was a
melody of roses, while beyond, on fields and pasture-land, the growing
sun drank up the morning mists. By the time I was on the road again
the day had become tropical and I was fain to ride easily.
I had chosen, for an excellent reason, apart from a human weakness for
fair weather, a fine day and a Saturday. Hammerton was a noted show
place and on such a day there was likely to be a considerable number
of visitors, and I should most probably not be noticed by the person
whose duty it was to take the visiting parties round.
Hammerton lay some way from the main road and some thirty-five miles
from London. I struck off into narrow lanes where the trees arched
overhead and the sun streaming through their branches made lacework of
the shadows beneath. An intense stillness lay about these bypaths, and
it was but rarely I passed anyone. Here and there I saw little patches
of red, violet, or white in front of me which when I overtook them
turned out to be cottagers’ children, and invariably there was a
thatched dwelling near nestling by the road. I was too entirely town
bred to be able to identify the countless species of birds that piped
and warbled as I rode among them.
At last, after having descended a steep lane where the ground was so
broken as to make riding impossible, I began to ascend, and finally
emerged on the brow of a hill and on to another high road. Some three
miles off, crowning another hill which was a mixture of rock and grass
land, stood Hammerton Castle, lordly and feudal. At the foot of the
hill on which it was built a river wound its way through the
pasture-land, and, about its base, nestling beneath its shadow as if
for protection, clustered the little township of Hammerton, red-roofed
and mellow. I looked at my watch. It was barely twelve o’clock, so I
went into an adjacent field and lay down in the grass, amidst
buttercups and daisies, and from the shadow of a great elm surveyed
the home of my ancestors at leisure.
It was indeed a noble dwelling. The glamour of a great past was about
it. Its majestic proportions and lordly turrets told of traditions
which were little less than royal.
It was from these walls that a Gascoyne had flung defiance at King
John, following it by so stout a defence that that amiable monarch had
been compelled to pass on gnashing his teeth, only to meet his
rebellious Barons at Runnymede.
A Gascoyne had held Hammerton for Edward of York. It had been a
favourite with Queen Elizabeth, whose condescension had impoverished a
couple of generations. Later, it had stood a siege from one of
Cromwell’s generals, and so stubborn had been the defence that the
only military tyrant England has ever known hastened to its reduction,
and was after all compelled to grant an honourable capitulation. Even
now as I lay and dreamed in the morning sunlight I could see the
shattered garrison emerging from those gates, drums beating, colours
flying, while the Puritans, who never had a chivalrous word for their
foes, looked sourly on.
I lay gazing over the intervening landscape at the castle till well on
into the afternoon. I wove it and its surroundings into one day dream
after another.
It was four o’clock when I arrived at the main entrance and stood with
a small group of excursionists waiting for a guide. The great gates
opened on to level lawns, and, large as the castle looked from
without, I was amazed at the space of ground its circular and
battlemented walls enclosed, even though it was broken up by
buildings, some of them quite modern. I stepped after the guide with a
distinct feeling of pride in the knowledge that even if far removed I
was in the line of succession to all this magnificence. There was
among us the usual historical authority who kept on stopping the guide
to ask him some irrelevant question. The latter, however, had a very
effectual manner of dealing with such tactics, and always began the
particular description he was engaged on all over again. We were shown
the spot where Lord Gascoyne, hero of the memorable defence against
Cromwell, fell mortally wounded. In the banqueting hall there was a
superb collection of armour, which included a coat of mail worn by
Richard, the Lion Heart, and the sword used by Henry at Agincourt. It
was the picture gallery, however, which interested me most, and I had
barely scanned half a dozen Lelys, Reynolds and Gainsboroughs, before
I saw how entirely my mother had been a Gascoyne.
She might have sat for the portrait of the celebrated Anne, Countess
of Gascoyne, whose picture occupied the post of honour. My mother had
possessed the same curiously deep blue eyes. The nose, just a little
too large, was identical, as were the oval of the face and the turn of
the head. I lingered behind the others to look at this picture more
closely, and when finally I tore myself away I found the guide droning
over the description of the most remarkable portrait in the gallery.
It was true that most of the Gascoynes were dark, but Ethel, the sixth
Earl, was more like a Southern Italian than an Englishman. The name
sounded curious as belonging to a man. He must have had singularly
fine eyes, and yet the painter, with rare perception, had painted them
half closed. To have done otherwise would have been obviously wrong.
There was not a feature or a point in the portrait which did not
suggest subtlety. Since that day I have often sat and gazed at the
picture. It has a fascination for me which never palls. I intended to
have had my own hung by the side of it. Indeed, I have left orders for
a portrait to be done.
In common with most people who walk their way in secret he had
apparently a love of green, for though the picture is slightly
disturbed by a note of scarlet, in this again the artist showed rare
judgment. He had rightly felt that the composition, to be
characteristic, required it. The figure in the picture wears emerald
earrings, and his sword, belt, and boots are embroidered with jewels.
The guide book tells us that he secured the title by treachery. He was
more than suspected of poisoning his eldest brother, and was known to
have killed in a duel another brother who stood between himself and
the earldom. He spent, so the guide told us, a great deal of his life
in Italy, where his doings were reported to have been of unfathomable
infamy. Late in life, long after the period of the emerald earrings,
he returned to Hammerton, and if his youth had been prodigal he
compensated for it by a penurious old age. He shut himself up in a
tower and left the remainder of the castle to go to rack and ruin. He
had one companion, reputed to be an Italian magician. The countryside
told awful tales of the secret rites and horrors practised by these
two, and the guide-book mentioned a village maiden spirited away by
supernatural means and compelled to bear them company against her
will. True, another chronicler of the time confidently asserted that
the self-same maiden was afterwards seen in a neighbouring town in
very undesirable company, but this latter historian was a Gascoyne and
obviously biassed.
I was in dread lest a most extraordinary coincidence should strike the
guide or the excursionists. I at once noted the great likeness between
the portrait and myself. The features were Jewish and so were mine.
This was the more curious because in this respect we had no common
ancestor. He must have been about my build and height, and the eyes
seemed to meet mine with a slightly mocking smile of recognition and a
subtle under-glance of sympathy.
I do not know whether the picture is all I fancy it to be, or whether
my imagination, fired by its likeness to myself, gives it its
atmosphere, but to me it is extraordinarily suggestive. Whenever I
look upon it the life of this exquisite passes through my brain like a
painted procession. He was obviously one of those born to the worship
of beautiful apparitions, and his life had been passed at the extremes
of joy and bitterness which that apparently exoteric, but in reality
deeply esoteric, cult involves. It was a face that could never have
known the lethargy of mediocrity. When his spirit slumbered it must
have been the sleep of satiety. I am glad I never saw a picture of him
in old age. That face, stained with the vices of an intoxicating youth
and torn by the humiliation and agonies of middle and old age, could
not have been pleasant. I am convinced that there were no
looking-glasses in that solitary tower where he and his mysterious
friend died and were only found when the rats had half eaten them.
But to me the great point was that he was impatient of dullness, and
had stretched out his hand to take what he wanted. The guide-book said
he was without natural affection. How little the world understands
men! As if an egotist of character might not slay the mother he loved
for a dear purpose.
Morally, Ethel, Earl Gascoyne, was a matricide, the family chronicles
deponing that his mother had died of grief at his crimes. He could not
have been entirely destitute of natural affection, for he was
apparently overwhelmed with sorrow at her death, as the inscription on
the stately tomb which he erected to her memory in Hammerton chapel
indicated.
I wandered after the gaping, chattering group hardly hearing what was
said. How was it that I was so like this Gascoyne who was so
singularly unlike his kinsmen, and who had put into practice the
dreams I had dreamt? He had been right. Hammerton had been worth
risking something for.
We visited the lonely tower where he was supposed to have spent the
haunted evening of his days in searching for the elixir of life, and
where the rats had left him a hideous, obscene corpse. The trippers
seemed infected by the gloom of the story, for in silence they tramped
through the spacious, echoing, upper chamber, where he was reputed to
have studied the stars, and to have sold himself to the Evil One.
This old man who found it so difficult to die—he was nearly a hundred
when the end came—spent his last years in a debauch of mystical
speculation, remaining interesting to the end.
As we crossed the grassy lawn on our way out a carriage and pair drove
in through the great gates. It in were seated a young man and woman of
a surprising distinction of appearance. The young man was dark, but
not as Ethel, Earl Gascoyne, had been dark. The hair, eyes and
moustache were dark brown. The face itself was almost feminine in its
delicacy of colouring. The flush of the cheeks and the redness of the
lips might have been envied by a young girl. The suggestion of
effeminacy, however, was negatived by the iron determination of the
mouth. I don’t think I have ever seen so firm a face which did not
suggest obstinacy. The eyes were keen, and looked out from beneath the
finely pencilled eyebrows with a winning expression of kindliness. The
face, however, was too sensitive to be designated by so stodgy an
expression as good-natured.
The guide touched his cap, and turning to the group who stood waiting,
said impressively: “That is his lordship.”
The excursionists gaped after the carriage as if my lord and my lady
were a show.
I rode back to London in the cool of a perfect summer evening thinking
deeply. I had seen enough of the world to be quite sure that luck or
capital were the only two things which could bring wealth while a man
was still young enough to enjoy it. The first could in the nature of
things only come to one man in a thousand, and the chances of a stroke
of luck really worth having were even more remote. As for capital, I
had none, nor was there the least probability of my obtaining any.
Therefore, unless I was content to work hard to make some other man
rich I must step out of the conventional path.
I was unknown to all my aristocratic relatives. Should mine be the
unseen hand which was to remove them from my path? And if so, was such
a thing possible without risks disproportionate to the gain? It was a
stupendous enterprise. The career of a murderer was not to be
undertaken lightly and without reflection. The more I thought about
it, however, the more convinced I became that I should decide on
making a struggle for the Gascoyne title and the Gascoyne millions.
After all, the family was nothing to me. The member of it to whom I
had appealed for assistance had refused even to see me, and should I
persist in my design this would have been as well.
From the study of poisoners I proceeded to the study of poisons, and
in this way I spent the remainder of the summer.